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WE DON’T talk a lot about Covenant in
our society. When I first heard about Covenants, I didn’t
understand the idea at all. Yet we do use the term,
and you probably only need reminding.
WHAT IS A COVENANT?
The most common use
is in marriage. We talk about the marriage Covenant,
and it is an important concept in our society.
Of course, it is possible
for a man and a woman to come together strictly on the
basis of attraction.
A young fellow met a
woman at my brother’s wedding. They went out together,
and enjoyed each other's company. They got engaged in
three weeks, were married after three months, and divorced
within two years.
They had attraction,
but they had no stickability. Marriage is no formula
for instant happiness. You can’t depend on anyone else
to make life go right..
The stark fact is that
marriage is mostly a long, straight country road
through flat sheep paddocks, but every now and then
there are a few minutes of breath-takingly beautiful
vista, and every few miles there is an unsealed stretch
which could rattle your teeth loose.
The start of the trip
is exciting, but that often only makes the rest seem
longer and flatter. Many couples crash on the smooth
flat stretches, even before they hit the rough dirt.
That is why we need
a marriage covenant. We take a stand. We draw a line
and say, “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in
health.”
Covenant is about a
love which goes beyond attraction, and beyond affection,
and says, “I’ll stick with this, no matter what.”
Of course, there are
situations where it is sensible or right to break that
relationship. Violence, abuse, threats — they can be
grounds for separation. But, in normal cases, marriage
is about two people determining before God, before each
other, and before a congregation, that they are in it
together for the long haul.
Marriage is a covenant
relationship. It might have faults, but it is not a
contract. I suspect that these popular marriage contracts
will ultimately fail, because they don’t fit what marriage
is really about. A covenant is quite different from
a contract.
We also use the word,
covenant, in property matters. Here, a stipulation is
added to the sale of land. If you buy land subject to,
say, a brick covenant, your purchase is conditional
upon your building only in brick on the site.
In a contract, in theory,
each party is equal. In a covenant, one party is more
powerful than the other.
So, if you want to rent
a property, you can tell the owner, “The "no pets"
clause in the contract is no good. I want it changed
to let me keep a cat.” You negotiate it with the owner.
In a covenant, the powerful
party says, “Here’s the condition. Build in brick, and
you and I will get on; use Fibro, and you are out!”
Even in marriage, God
is the powerful party who makes it a covenant. He sets
the conditions, and we obey — or pay the price.
COVENANTS IN HISTORY
Throughout history,
politics has been driven by covenants.
If one nation defeated
another nation, they “cut a covenant”. The victorious
king would bring the defeated king into a relationship.
So Egypt defeated most of the nations around it. But
it didn't make them all into provinces of Egypt. It
left the local king in charge. That king had to pay
an annual tribute to Egypt and had to pledge that he
wouldn’t wage war against Egypt or allow any sedition
against Egypt.
Often the defeated king
even had to agree to marriage between one of his daughters
and the victorious king. Big harems were not about love,
nor even about sex. They were proof the king had won
many wars. And, if the defeated king started war, his
daughter was there as a ransom.
Maybe you think by now
that covenants are generally pretty terrible things,
and they often were terrible. But not always. If your
nation was defeated by a stronger nation, and you were
paying tribute to the victorious king, you could also
call on that stronger king to defend you if anyone attacked
you, or if there was rebellion within your nation. It
was rare that a covenant only took and never gave.
And there were other
covenants. People bought and sold property using covenants.
Sometimes a kind of adoption took place under a covenant.
It might be one king defeating another king, but binding
himself to treat the defeated king like his own son.
Or imagine this situation.
You are the slave of a wealthy man. Through the years,
you have cared for his children, you have cooked his
meals, cleaned the house, and done all the accounts.
He is very pleased with you.
One day, he thinks,
“My slave has been faithful and good through all these
years. He will never return home now. I will bring my
good slave into my household as a family member. He
shall no longer be a slave.”
So your master cuts
a covenant between himself and you. He takes you into
his family. You still care and cook and clean and account,
but, as a family member, you can now sit at the table
and eat with everyone else. And, when your master dies,
you will have a share of the inheritance.
That was a better kind
of covenant!
GOD’S COVENANTS
If covenants were so
common, particularly in the Middle East, it’s not surprising
that God uses covenants in his dealings with us, because
his first known dealings with humanity were centred
on a little Middle Eastern tribe, sometimes known as
“the Habiru”.
When God drove Adam
and Eve from the Garden, he made them clothes from animal
skins. Even his curse was a curse tinged with grace,
a curse which still provided for sinners and gave them
his care.
And for God to provide
those skins, animals had to die. For God to bind Adam
and Eve to himself, for God to care for them even when
they ignored his word, blood had to be shed.
Another of God’s covenants
was made with Noah after the flood.
God says to Noah and
his family,
“...I establish my covenant with you: Never again will
all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never
again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
And God said, “This
is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and
you and every living creature with you, a covenant for
all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the
clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between
me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth
and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember
my covenant between me and you and all living creatures
of every kind. Never again will the waters become a
flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears
in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting
covenant between God and all living creatures of every
kind on the earth.”
Look at this again. God, the powerful one, initiates
the covenant and he binds himself by it. He knows that
every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.
Yet God guarantees not to destroy everyone by flood.
As the old song says,
God said, “Fire —
Not
flood — next time.”
Another of God’s covenants
is with Abraham. At that time, Abraham was known as
Abram. Abram means, “Great Father”, but Abraham means
“Father of many.” Abraham, was an old man and didn’t
yet have a child.
God came to him. God
told Abram to look up at the start in the sky. He said,
“Abram, your descendants will be so many that you’ll
have as little hope of counting them as you have of
counting the stars. And we read,
Abram
believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
God promised Abram that he
would give the land of Canaan to him and his descendants.
Abram wanted to know how he could be sure that this
would come to pass.
God told Abram to bring
some animals and birds. Abram killed them and placed
the halves of their bodies opposite each other. He waited
until evening. Then God came to Abram and God passed
between the sacrifices to bind himself in covenant to
Abram. Abram believed God: God, in return, bound himself
to honour Abram’s faith!
Here is God, the stronger
one, binding himself, pledging that he will perform
what he has promised!
By passing between those
dead animals, God said, “If I don’t do as I have promised,
may the same happen to me as happened to these animals.”
Repeatedly, we see God
taking the initiative, God binding himself, so that
he can be a blessing to his people.
At Mount Sinai, God
came to the Israelites as they fled Egypt and trekked
back to Palestine. Yes, he gave them the law. He had
expectations of them as his people. But he also bound
himself to be their God, to care for them, to protect
them, to provide for them in their weakness and failings.
Repeatedly God binds
himself to his people. Israel was the chosen people,
not because they deserved anything, but because a gracious
God chose them to bear his name before the world.
A FAILED COVENANT
Yet God’s gracious covenant
was insufficient. It did not meet the needs of the people.
The prophets saw it each time they looked. The people
observed the letter of the law, but their hearts were
far from God.
Many of the prophets
called Israel back to the old covenant. They said, “‘This
people honours me with their lips, but their hearts
are far from me,’ says the Lord.”
They said, “To obey
is better than sacrifice.”
But some, like Jeremiah,
looked beyond the covenant. He knew that people love
to look religious, and to perform the rituals, but that
they had no interest in God. So he said,
JER
31:31 “The time is coming,” declares the LORD,
“when I
will make a new covenant
with the house
of Israel
and
with the house of Judah.
[...]
JER 31:33 “This is the covenant I will
make with the house of Israel
after
that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my
law in their minds
and
write it on their hearts.
I will be their
God,
and
they will be my people..."
Jeremiah looks forward
to a time of a New Covenant, one written in people’s
minds and hearts, not just external commands which they
obey out of ignorance or fear. He looks forward to a
Covenant which will never fail.
OUR NEW COVENANT
The good news is that
that new covenant that Jeremiah foretold has been brought
into effect! God has acted once again for the good of
his people — and that includes you and me, if we accept
it, because
God loved the world so much
that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes
in him should not perish but have eternal life.
It goes beyond the Israelites,
and encompasses all who believe.
At the last supper,
Jesus told his disciples,
This cup is the new covenant
in my blood.
Jesus knew that his
death was the beginning of an entirely new relationship
between God and human kind. He was giving his life,
by his own free choice, so that he could be to us as
the sacrificial animals were to Abram and God so many
years before.
At the cross, God binds
himself forever to all who will take up his offer of
free grace.
What that means is that,
because of what Jesus did in dying on the cross, God
has sworn by God himself never to abandon or forsake
you and me, if we turn to him in simple, repentant faith.
One of the old Pentecostal
teachers — I think it was Don Basham — used an illustration
I rather liked. He spoke of the love God promises us,
the covenant love which sent his only begotten Son to
die for us.
He says that that love
is like a giant elastic band, and God places it around
himself and around you because he has promised to save
us and to keep us. Sometimes we will stretch that elastic
band almost to the breaking point, but that elastic
band is the covenant in which we live, the covenant
of hesed, the covenant of gracious and unending love.
But that band of love
never breaks. It always draws us back to the Father
who loves us and the Saviour who died for us. It is
a band built on the Holy Spirit himself, who is the
life blood of Jesus, flowing in the branches of the
vine.
On the cross, Jesus
suffered the cruellest of deaths. He gave himself in
total obedience to and unity with his heavenly Father.
When God the Father passed by that sacrifice,
he said to us all, “I bind myself to you: may this happen
to me if ever I abandon you.”
The marvel is, that
it did happen to him, and he will not leave us as orphans.
One of my favourite
verses is Romans 5: 8. It says,
God commends
his love to us in that, while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.
I like to reflect on
this. “God commends”: it is more than demonstration.
When you commend someone, you say, “This person is worthy
of your consideration.” And that’s what God does. He
says, “My love is worthy of your consideration.” The
God who could blast the entire universe into fragments
and make it start again, gets down on his knees and
invites you and me to
...taste and see that the Lord
is good.
There is no bullying
or coercion. There is no grand feelings or visions of
splendour. We see is a cross, where the Saviour bled
and died to enable and to initiate a new covenant where
“...they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the LORD.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
God gave all he had so that you and I could be in a
new relationship with him.
Will you believe him
today, and live?
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