Covenantide

Tag: covenant

  • What Is a Covenant?

    What Is a Covenant?

    Reading Scripture Covenantally (Lesson 2)

    The previous lesson introduced the need to reading Scripture holistically highlighting how in Luke 24 our Lord Jesus Christ taught His disciples that all Scripture points to Himself.  We concluded that lesson by positing that the most organic and best way to see Christ in all of Scripture is covenant theology.  We will now begin to draw out what that means, looking first at how a covenantal reading brings the Old and New Testaments together, and then examining what a covenant is and how that structures our understanding of Scripture.

    The best place to see how God’s covenants bring Scripture together is in our Lord’s institution of the Last Supper.  Luke records that on the night on which He was betrayed, Jesus took some of the unleavened bread set aside earlier that evening and spoke to His disciples the words of institution: “And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.” And then, “This cup is the new testament [covenant] in my blood, which is shed for you[1]” (Luke 22:19-20). The words would have been freighted with meaning for his disciples, but to see this we need to look at the broader context of what was going on.

    Jesus’s disciples almost certainly were emotionally exhausted in the week prior to the Last Supper, having gone from excitement to euphoria to bewilderment.  Six days prior they were in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem, at the home of their friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus (John 12:1-8).  Weeks earlier, the disciples were amazed to see Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead.  Unlike other instances when Jesus raised people from the dead, Lazarus had not been dead only briefly; he had been dead and in the burial tomb for four days.  To raise him under such circumstances was a clear manifestation of divine power.  When the disciples had dinner with the family, however, it was as if Lazarus had never died.  He was a living miracle.  So grateful was his sister Mary that she opened a jar of expensive perfume and anointed Jesus’s feet with it, wiping them with her hair.  Lazarus’s resurrection confirmed what Peter confessed months earlier, that Jesus was the Messiah, that is, the Christ (Matt. 16:16).

    Jesus’s resurrection of Lazarus was the most recent—and perhaps most famous—episode that had garnered public attention.  As the Apostle John records, once Jesus’s presence in the town became known, many Jews wanted to come by the house, not only to glimpse Him but to see the resurrected Lazarus (John 12:9).  Unsurprisingly, when Jesus entered Jerusalem on the first day of the week, the throngs of people that massed in the city for the upcoming Feast of Unleavened Bread treated Him as a conquering king.  They praised Him as He rode in on a donkey like royalty prophesied of old (Matt. 21:5), and bowed before Him, spreading out their cloaks as a sign of homage (Matt. 21:8-11, Mark 11:8-10, Luke 19:36-38).  To many, He would have seemed to be the promised Messiah, now come to assume His rightful position of authority.

    This authority was reinforced on Tuesday of that week in His confrontation with the religious leaders in the Temple.  Jesus showed Himself to be shrewd and spoke with an authority that astonished the ordinary people and infuriated the leaders (Matt. 22:33).  It is no wonder, then, that the disciples had the sense they were fast approaching the moment when Jesus would finally fulfill the prophecies of old regarding the eschatological restoration of God’s people.

    This sense of expectation probably was behind the disciples’ comment as they exited the Temple that Tuesday afternoon regarding the beauty of the Temple.  This was not the casual comment of country rustics who were in the big city for the first time.  As adult Jewish men, the disciples almost certainly had been in Jerusalem before for observance of the national festivals and no doubt saw Herod’s Temple previously.  No, now the disciples expected they were approaching the time in which the Lord would begin His march to power, expel the Roman occupiers, overthrow Herod, and restore justice and righteousness to Israel.  They expected that as Jesus came into power, they too would come into power with Him.  Like the Maccabees nearly 200 years before, who had regained Israel’s independence in a revolt against the Greek Seleucids, Jesus’s disciples expected that when they came into power, they would restore true worship in the Temple.  Herod was a half-breed and not a true Jew—but he did build an impressive Temple, if only in a failed effort to ingratiate himself with the Jews.  In pointing out the beauty of the building to Jesus, the disciples indicated they expected to repeat the Maccabean pattern of restoring what they understood to be true Temple worship when they all came into power.

    And then Jesus told them the building would be destroyed, and no stone would be left upon stone (Matt. 24:2, Mark 13:2, Luke 19:44).

    The disciples had to have been shocked and confused.  Instead of returning immediately to Bethany, where they had been staying, Jesus and His disciples went just outside Jerusalem and rested on the Mount of Olives.  With the afternoon sun setting behind the Temple, Peter, Andrew, James and John privately approached Jesus and asked “…When shall these things be?  And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the age?” (Matt. 24:3, cf. Mark 13:4).  Their expectation and confusion was manifest.  They clearly thought Jesus was going to establish His kingdom imminently and render Final Judgment on the peoples, but His words brought that idea into doubt.  His answer, which we now call the Olivet Discourse, gives the sense that such a coming with power and glory was to be some time off.  How far off was not clear.  Despite Jesus’s words, the disciples a couple of days later still clung to the expectation they would soon come into glory, as evidenced by the argument they got into during the Passover meal over which of them was the greatest (Luke 22:24-30).  It is this sense that things were moving to a climax, that long-held hopes were finally to be fulfilled, which made that particular celebration of the Passover pregnant with anticipation.  And the covenant God had with His people was at the center of all these hopes.

    The Last Supper was a Passover Seder,[2] which Jesus long desired to share with His disciples (Luke 22:15).  Typically the head of household would serve as host during the dinner, and as host that evening Jesus led His disciples through the Paschal liturgy.  At its heart, the Passover Seder was the occasion to remember the preeminent event in all of Israel’s history: when the Lord delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt nearly a millennium and a half earlier.  The Lord chose Abraham to be the patriarch of the people He was dedicating to Himself, and confirmed by way of covenant His promises of making Abraham into a great nation and bringing His people into a land of their own (Gen. 12:1-3).  Those promises were the ground for the Exodus.  After the Exodus, the Lord made a covenant with the entire nation, first at Sinai (Exod. chs. 20-24), then again on the plains of Moab (the entire Book of Deuteronomy), just before the nation entered the Promised Land.  The covenant not only reconfirmed the promises to Abraham, but went into greater detail about what the Lord expected of His people who would reflect His image to the surrounding nations.  Indeed, it was in this “Mosaic” covenant that the Lord commanded the Passover be observed annually so the people would remember what their God did for them.  Israel was unique among the nations of the ancient Near East in that only she had a covenant with her God.  At the same time, in celebrating the Passover, however, it would have been impossible not to reflect as well on the nation’s long history of covenant-breaking.  As the Lord warned in Deuteronomy, the ultimate penalty for such disloyalty was the most traumatic event in Israel’s history: the division of the country into the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the eventual destruction of both, with the people deported first by the Assyrian Empire and then, over 130 years later, by the Babylonian Empire.

    Toward the close of the supper, Jesus filled and raised the third and penultimate cup, called the “Cup of Blessing.”  To this point in the evening, everything had preceded as had for centuries with the Passover celebration.  Then He did something unexpected: He took some of the unleavened bread set aside earlier that evening, and spoke to His disciples the words of institution noted earlier. The “New Covenant” that Jesus mentioned was originally prophesied by the prophet Jeremiah in Judah’s last days before the country was carried off into exile by the Babylonians (Jer. 31:31-34).  Since that time the promised New Covenant held out the hope that God would permanently restore His chosen people and be with them.  It was to complement the covenantal promise God made to David the King (2 Sam. 7), that the day would come in which his heir would establish his throne forever.  This New Covenant was to surpass the covenant renewal which had been done under Ezra and Nehemiah, when the nation reconstituted itself after returning from the Exile.  With His institution of the sacrament of His Supper, Jesus in effect told His disciples that the long-expected prophecy was to be fulfilled in His Person and in His Passion.  With this simple act, He instituted a symbol by which His disciples were to remember Him until His Second Advent at the end of time.  In continually reenacting this, His disciples not only would remind themselves that Jesus is the Messiah, they also would remind themselves of the Old and New Covenants.

    This reference to the covenant is recorded by all of the Synoptic Gospel writers, as well as by the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians where he too describes the institution of the Lord’s Supper.  The unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, describing to his Jewish readers the culmination of all things in Christ, also talks in chapters 8 and 9 of the epistle about the superiority of the New Covenant over the Old.  The concept of the covenant, then, reaches back to the earliest parts of biblical revelation, encompasses the high points of Old Testament history, and embodies the hopes of God’s people centered on Christ Jesus.  For this reason, it is fair to say that the covenantal motif permeates all Scripture.  It is the vehicle through which God’s redemptive purposes unfolded from beginning to end, and it parallels the progressive development of God’s relationship and presence with His people.

    To read the rest of the lesson, download it below

    Lesson 2 – What is a CovenantDownload

    [1] The Authorized Version (i.e., King James Version) and the New King James Version (NKJV) reflect the historic and received textual tradition, but most modern versions omit “new” in this verse, since two manuscripts do not have it.  There is notable manuscript support, however, for the word both here and in the parallel passages in Matt. 26:26-28, Mark 14:22-26, and 1 Cor. 11:23-25.

    [2] The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) give the impression that it was, while the Gospel of John gives a seemingly contrary impression, that the meal took place on the day before the Passover.  Alfred Edersheim, in his book, The Temple, Its Ministry and Services (Peabody MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 311-318, argues from a close examination of all the Gospels that the Last Supper was indeed a Passover Seder and there is not a contradiction between the Synoptics and the Gospel of John.  The description here follows Edersheim’s reconstruction, 180-196.

  • The Setting of Deuteronomy

    The Setting of Deuteronomy

    Deuteronomy 1:1-4

    These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab. 2 (There are eleven days’ journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadesh Barnea.) 3 And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the LORD had given him in commandment unto them; 4 After he had slain Sihon the king of the Amorites, which dwelt in Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, which dwelt at Astaroth in Edrei:  (Deut. 1:1-4)

    I. On the Plains of Moab (Deut. 1:1-3)

    The Book of Deuteronomy has an inauspicious beginning relative to the grand narrative it encapsulates: “These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab. 2 (There are eleven days’ journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadesh Barnea.) 3 And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses spake unto the children of Israel…” Even though modern archaeology has not identified all the locations listed in verse 1, the general vicinity is well-established as just north of the Dead Sea on the plateau of Moab in modern-day Jordan.  It is January 1406 BC, nearly forty years since the Lord their God led His people out of Egypt in the Exodus.  The people were poised to enter the Promised Land and would begin the conquest in a couple of months, on the fortieth anniversary of the Exodus (Josh. 5:10).

    In the Authorized Version (AV), verse two is punctuated as a parenthetical comment, but it brackets the redemptive history of the people of God described in the first four books of the Pentateuch.  According to the covenant He made with Abraham (Gen. 15:13-21), the Lord brought His people out of Egypt in the Exodus, to Horeb.  “Horeb” is an alternative term for Mount Sinai.  Sinai is where the Lord first called Moses to service in the encounter at the burning bush and where He led His people back to after the Exodus from Egypt.  It was at Sinai that the people faced the Lord with fear and trembling, who gave them His covenant for how they should live to reflect Him now that they had been saved.  It was at Sinai where they had almost been destroyed by that same God because of their apostasy with the Golden Calf.  It was at Sinai where Moses mediated for them and the Lord restored His covenantal relationship with after their sin.  And it was at Sinai where they then built the Tabernacle to Him.  The nation was at Sinai for just over a year, before the Lord commanded them to move out to the land which He promised their forefathers (Num. 10:11).

    Mount Seir is in the land of Edom, the descendants of Esau, Israel’s kin, which had already settled in the land which the Lord allotted to them.  The reference here in 1:2 is probably only to describe a common route of travel; the more significant reference is to Kadesh-barnea.  Kadesh-barnea was just south of the Negev, the southern part of the land of Canaan, and was to be the launching point for the conquest of Canaan.  It was from Kadesh-barnea that Moses sent the spies into the land, whose negative report about the people being giants and the land being fortified deterred the Israelites from following the Lord’s command to go up against it.  After Moses pronounced the Lord’s judgment on them for failing to trust Him, the people tried to invade the land in their own strength, only to be miserably routed.  Israel would stay at Kadesh-barnea for most of the next 38 years.  Moses’ sister Miriam would die there, his brother would die not far from there, and because of Moses’ own sin there of presumptuous against the Lord, the Lord declared that Moses himself would not be allowed to go into the land.  Kadesh-barnea and the vicinity around it was Israel’s wilderness wandering.

    II. The Words of the Mediator (1:1-3)

    “These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel… according unto all that the LORD had given him in commandment unto them” (Deut. 1:1, 3).  Thus begins Deuteronomy.  Like every other book of the Pentateuch except Exodus, Deuteronomy begins with words being spoken, but unlike those other books, Moses for the first time is identified as the one speaking, rather than God.  This fact is noteworthy in light of the structure of Deuteronomy.  Since Deuteronomy is written as a covenant, these opening verses are the preamble to the covenant.  Normally in ancient Near Eastern covenants the preamble is where the suzerain is introduced with his titles and honors.  Moses, however, is not the suzerain nor is he given any titles.  This fact highlights Moses’ role as Mediator of the covenant, the representative of the Lord speaking to the people and the representative of the people standing before God (1:3).

    At 120 years old, Moses was at the end of his life and was personally prohibited from entering the Promised Land (Deut. 1:37, 3:26, 4:21, 34:4) because he failed to honor the Lord before the people: instead of speaking the Lord’s word to give the people water, he assumed to himself the prerogative of the Lord alone, struck the rock and said he was giving them water (Num. 20:9-13).  The Lord’s Mediator was obligated to be obedient to the Lord’s command and speak the Lord’s words alone.  Moses failed to do that, and that cost him.

    No doubt, Moses feared for the Israelites’ future without him as they entered the Promised Land.  He had been with them since the Exodus in all the years of their wandering and knew too well just how stubborn and rebellious they were.  Indeed, the last of the generation which had come out of Egypt in the Exodus as adults had died off a year or two earlier (2:14-16), the result of the Lord’s judgment on them after they refused to trust Him to fight their battles in conquering the Land.  Moses almost certainly knew he was not indispensable, since it was the Lord alone who saved and sustained His people.  Nevertheless, he had been the mediator between the people and the Lord for more than forty years; with his impending death the people still needed a mediator.

    III. The Covenant and the Transition

    It is in this setting that Moses wrote the Book of Deuteronomy.  He wrote it, curiously enough, in the form of a covenant.  In the ancient Near East, a covenant was a treaty.  It bound two sovereigns together by oaths of mutual loyalty, with stipulations of obligation on one or both parties, was incentivized by blessings and curses, sealed by a formal ratification ceremony and enforced by the gods.  In most cases, a covenant was between a suzerain overlord and a vassal king and was the legal means by which the suzerain bound the vassal to himself and regulated their relationship.  At the time Moses wrote Deuteronomy, the ancient Near East was experiencing a heyday of diplomacy, yet interestingly, the biblical covenants were unique in that they are the only examples from antiquity in which a god made a covenant with his people.  There is a genuine basis then for the rhetorical question Moses asks in Deut. 4:8, “And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?”

    That the Lord would make a covenant with His people seems strange in light of the fact that covenants were basically treaties.  Making a treaty seems on first glance to be too formal, too distancing.  At the same time, it was on the basis of the God’s covenant with Abraham that He brought His people out from Egypt with great judgments, sustained them in the wilderness and, at this point in biblical revelation, was about to bring them into the Promised Land.  The formality of the covenant was the very basis for the people’s assurance that the Lord would indeed follow through on his promises in light of their sins.

    Covenants typically were made whenever there was a significant development in the relationship between the two parties; Moses’ approaching death and Israel’s pending entry into the Promised Land constituted just such developments.  Ancient kings would often use covenants with other kings—and even with their own people—to secure legal recognition for their heir apparent.  That is true in the case of Deuteronomy, insofar as Moses is transitioning leadership of the nation to Joshua, son of Nun.  Joshua had been one of the men who spied out the land forty years earlier, but unlike all the others (save Caleb), he faithfully trusted God to deliver the land to Israel.  In Deuteronomy, however, this is leadership succession with a twist:  the covenant is not focused on Joshua per se, but on God.  While Joshua would lead the people into the Land, Moses was pointing the people to their true leader, namely the Lord Himself.  It is the Lord who promised them the land, the Lord who delivered them from Egypt, the Lord who sustained them in the wilderness, and the Lord who was already fighting their battles in conquering the land.  This was Moses’ last act as Mediator.  Note that this does not diminish Joshua’s (subordinate) authority but establishes it: ancient Near Eastern covenants typically presumed the vassal would be exclusively loyal to his suzerain and if the people were loyal to the Lord, then they were to be loyal to Joshua as well.

    Although Moses transferred his leadership to Joshua, he transferred his mediatorial responsibilities to the covenant itself.  It is the covenant that would be the standard to which God’s people would be held, and in adhering to the covenant the people would be reflecting their Lord.  This was the second time in the Israel’s history the nation was poised to enter the land the Lord promised to their forefathers.  The first time was when the nation was at Sinai, and the Lord made a covenant with them there, that He would be their God and they would be His people (Exod. 6:7 cf. Exod. 19:3-6).  The covenant on the plateau of Moab reflected the evolution in the relationship between Lord and His people.  At Sinai, the Lord had just delivered His people from Egypt, and they had not yet sinned against Him.  Shortly thereafter, they sinned in disbelief and were condemned to judgment in the wilderness.  The covenant, then, was one of renewal, now with the succeeding generation and reflective of the need for the Lord to be direct with His people because of their past experience sins against Him.  It is this covenant, which extends and builds on Sinai, that was to become the constitutional foundation for God’s relationship with His people.

    IV. The Defeater of Sihon and Og (1:4)

    The Lord is not absent from this passage, and verse four describes Him as the defeater of Sihon and Og.  “Defeater of Sihon and Og” does not seem like a terribly impressive title, but it was significant for God’s people at that time.  While in the broad schema of things these were relatively minor kings, in the context of God’s relationship with His people the defeat of these kings showed the Israelites that God was fulfilling His covenants with their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to fight their battles and bring His people into the land He promised them.  This title alone would have been sufficient basis for them to trust Him and be obedient to Him.  It would have been a source of confidence and a token that He would fulfill His covenantal promises.  He who made the heavens and the earth and all that is in them could also completely defeat their enemies and overcome the challenges immediately before them.  They needed to know that.

    V. Anticipating Christ

    Moses was a Mediator between the Lord and His People.  What does this mean and why is it important?  We often think of a mediator as a middleman trying to broker a deal between two parties.  That is not what Moses did.  Rather, he sought to represent God to the people and to intercede with God on behalf of the people.  In this he spoke the Lord’s words to the people of Israel and lifted up their needs and cries to the Lord Himself.  At times, Moses interposed himself between God and Israel, mostly to protect the people from the fullness of God’s wrath toward their sins.  With Moses’s pending death, the mediatorial role that he had played in making God and His standard known to Israel was transferred, not to Joshua, but to the testimony of the Law.  In that regard, the one can say that Deuteronomy really is a kind of last will and testament of Moses.  The intercessory role Moses had during his life would be assumed in the remainder of the Old Testament by judges (in the Judges period) and later by the prophets.

    Moses foreshadowed the mediatorial role that Christ Jesus would ultimately assume.  The Father would send His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the very Word of God (John 1:1), to make God known to men and intercede on behalf of His people.  His intercession, however, goes beyond what Moses ever did: Christ actually died in place of His people on the cross of Calvary.  That is the only thing that would once and for all turn away—propitiate—the Father’s wrath toward His people’s sin.  With His resurrection from the dead, Christ’s intercessory work continues, as He lifts up the prayers of God’s people to the Father continually, because He is seated at the right hand of the Father.  It is important for us to understand that because Christ Himself is our Mediator, we do not need some other intermediary to intercede for us with God, whether deceased saints, angels, or even the Church; we can approach Christ directly.  In fact, to set any of these things up as a mediator between us and God would be to turn to them for that which only Christ Jesus can provide.  If Moses’s mediatorial role points to Christ, then His words in Deuteronomy also find their fulfillment in Christ.  In this light, reading Deuteronomy is not a mere historical exercise of looking at rules from God.  Rather it is in understanding the heart of our Lord, who has saved a people for Himself and expects this people to honor Him in how they are to live.   Moses’s readers were poised to enter the Promised Land, where they would find their rest in the God who would dwell among them.  For us, we are looking for a heavenly Promised Land, where we will find our rest in union with Christ and eternal communion with Him.