Matthew 22 wrote: 36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law? 37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment. 39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
After an understanding that there is only one true God, the foundation of the law is brotherly love for ones kinsmen. The society that arises upon this ethic is a lasting and cohesive society.
The children of Israel were put off in punishment, and Yahweh also said that He would bring them by a way which they knew not. One of the reasons for their punishment is clear in Amos: that they desired worldly goods and riches and came to despise their brethren. So we had a problem with Jewish materialism back then as well.
Yahweh does not use supernatural means to get His people to behave. That it church bullshit. If Yahweh operated in that manner, there would never have been any falling away. Rather, Yahweh uses worldly chastisement and tangible experience to punish His people to repentance. That is the over-arching theme of the Scripture (Jeremiah 30:11, Amos 3:2, Hebrews 12:8).
In all of the examples of Scripture, the Spirit of Yahweh only operates for good in men who are willing to submit themselves to God and who desire to do good.
Paul of Tarsus was addressing Romans who at one time had known God and His judgments, but who had fallen away. The Romans had come from the Trojans. They had a horrendous experience in the destruction of their cities in the Troad by the Greeks. With that experience, a large number of them went to Italy, where they built a society based upon the rule of law, which is an expression of care for one another. That was a very moral and upright society for many centuries, and rose to greatness. But it was in decline in the first century, for the same reasons ancient Israel went into decline. However Paul commended the Romans for their law-based society, which was an expression of the love they learned by the much earlier chastisement of Yahweh. That is an example for us, but Rome was far from perfect and it too became a part of the beast system.
The tangible historical experiences which the children of Israel suffer in their captivity, their nomadic wanderings, hunger, wars and other tribulations had prepared and are still preparing them for the acceptance of the gospel of Christ. Accepting the gospel, we accept His Law in a way that our fathers never did under the Old Covenant.
However we have still been in our time of punishment, and we have still been manipulated by those same nefarious forces of Jewish materialism and humanism which are described as Mystery Babylon. So while we as a people all understand the basic laws of Christ, we are still being tested, and will be tested, until we realize that only God can rule over us, and that we must repent. We must stop seeking the idols and governments of men.
Because the denominational churches do not see the historical Israel, they instead rely on esoteric explanations and magic. The effect of Jeremiah 31:33 has had many manifestations in history, but will not be perfected until Christ returns because only Christ can be King.