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About Jesus Steve Sweetman The
Concept Of Covenant
A couple of years ago my
friend attended the first weekly gathering for worship leaders in our
city. The lady in charge
opened the meeting by presenting a written covenant that needed to be
signed by each participant
if he or she wished to return the next week.
My friend kindly suggested that making such covenants between
Christians wasn’t necessarily New Testament thinking. Despite
his explanation, the covenant was passed around for all to sign.
My friend who has more worship leading experience in our city
than most didn’t sign and therefore didn’t return. Two other friends of mine
were scolded by a pastor when they moved from his church group to
another. According to this
pastor, my friends were breaking covenant with him and those in the
church. The pastor believed that once people joined his church they were
entering into a covenant relationship with him and those in the group.
So when my friends left, it was clear to him that they were
breaking this covenant. I can’t possibly give
proper attention to this subject as I’d like in one short chapter, so
I’ll just give some highlights. I
first heard of covenant teaching in the Shepherding Movement of the
1970’s, although it’s not exclusive to shepherding.
You can find variations of “covenant making” throughout the
ecclesiastical maze, and throughout church history.
The simplest definition
of the word “covenant” is
“a contract or an agreement between two or more people”.
Examples of covenants today would be a marriage covenant or a
mortgage contract. The Old Testament’s
concept of covenant, and especially so in Judaism, can be briefly summed
up this way. Two people
would come together and make an agreement with each other.
The agreement would have various stipulations.
Each person was responsible to live up to these stipulations or
else suffer the stated penalties. The
covenant was then confirmed by a ceremonial ritual that often included a
blood sacrifice. Those who believe we
should be making similar covenants today, that is, excluding the blood
part, often point to David and Jonathan’s covenant as an example for
us to follow. (1 Samuel 20) Yet
to suggest that we should make covenants with one another because David
and Jonathan chose to do so is poor Biblical interpretation. There’s
no hint in Scripture that their choice in this matter is the Biblical
mandate for New Testament Christians. It was simply something that they
wanted to do as individuals. If
two people feel the necessity to make such an agreement today, that’s
their personal choice. It’s
not the Biblical norm for the rest of us to follow.
All theologians include
the Abrahamic Covenant of Genesis 15 in their discussion on this
subject, and they should because it’s important to New Testament
teaching. Yet if you look
closely you’ll see that God did not make a covenant with Abraham.
God set forth the stipulations of the covenant and performed the
sacrificial ritual with Himself after
he put Abraham to sleep. God
agreed with Himself, not with Abraham, to bless Abraham.
Abraham’s part in the covenant was to give himself to God and
believe that God would do as He stated in His covenant. The apostle Paul tells us
the Abrahamic Covenant is prophetic of the New Covenant that God made in
Jesus. (Galatians chapter 3
and 4, and Romans chapter 4) So
concerning the New Covenant, like the Abrahamic Covenant, God made the
New Covenant of salvation with Himself, not with us. He
agreed with Himself to bless us with salvation.
Our part in this covenant is to give ourselves to Jesus and
believe what God stated in His New Covenant would be so.
We, like Abraham only have to enter into this pre-existing
covenant that God confirmed with Himself through the ceremonial ritual
that was confirmed in the shedding of Jesus’ blood. If
we believe, we reap the benefits of the New Covenant, and if not, the
penalties stipulated in the covenant would come into effect. So
in short, God covenanted with Himself and not with us.
We do not make a covenant with God.
We simply enter into His covenant that already exists.
Therefore, there’s only
one covenant found in the New Testament for Christians, and that’s the
New Covenant. Once we enter God’s pre-existing covenant, we are joined
in covenantal relationships with Him and with all Christians, past,
present, and future. I
picture this covenant as a circle that we enter when we first give our
lives to Jesus. The only way
to break this covenant is to relocate ourselves outside the covenantal
circle. Simply moving from
one church group to another within the circle isn’t breaking covenant
because there’s no such covenant to break. The New Testament
doesn’t teach that we make special pacts with any fellow believer
other than the marriage covenant. If
we really understood this, we wouldn’t be making personal or corporate
church covenants that make us exclusive and separate from others within
the circle. We’d also
understand that as long as people are within the boundaries of God’s
New Covenant circle, they belong to God and to us, no matter what church
group they’re associated with, and no matter how they think concerning
secondary Biblical doctrines. Our
inability to understand this has brought much division in the church.
This results in the ecclesiastical maze that presently exists, and also
confuses the rest of the world.
Over the years I’ve
often heard the term “covenant love” spoken by various people as if
“covenant love” was something different than plain old love.
On one occasion in the 1990’s a pastor from out of town spoke
to some of us in a small gathering.
His topic was “covenant love”.
After he was finished speaking he allowed for some discussion.
That opened the door for me to kindly suggest to him that the
term “covenant love” could not be found in the Bible.
Beyond that, you can’t find the concept that suggests a special
kind of exclusive love between certain people based on some kind of
special covenant. The
Biblical concept of love is simple.
God loves us, and with His love we love everyone that crosses our
path at any given time. This pastor didn’t really know how to respond
to my assertion, and I’m not sure he really wanted to anyway.
That’s usually the way it is when
you merely accept the latest Christian fad without serious thought and
study. The fact is, there is
only one covenant taught in the New Testament, and that’s God’s New
Covenant that all Christians have entered into.
Because of this we are to love all our brothers and sisters in
Christ. We have no choice in
the matter. I understand
that practically speaking one can’t love all Christians with the same
intensity, but we can love those who may be in our presence at any given
moment, no matter who they are. Such
love isn’t based on an exclusive covenantal relationship, and
there’s no real need to put the word “covenant” in front of the
word “love”. It’s
simply God’s love expressed by us in meaningful and selfless actions. That’s
it. And let me suggest one
last thing, if there are no selfless actions associated with the love
you claim to have, there’s no love.
The degree to which such actions are demonstrated is the degree
to which you love, as seen in the book of James.
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