The New Humanity. . .

THE NEW COVENANT

We have come to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant.—Heb. 12:24

In our series on the New Humanity there is no subject that gets to the heart of the matter as does the covenantal relationship. It is a neglected subject these days, perhaps because serious and difficult biblical study in our congregations is rarer than it once was. But our people have long been guilty of too narrow an approach to a study of the covenants, concerned as we have been to prove or disprove certain practices by showing that “today we are under the New Testament and not the Old Testament,” an emphasis that we might now well question.

In this study we propose to develop several areas of the subject, including:

1. God is a covenant-making God. His great acts in history have been covenantal, both in the case of nations and in the case of individuals. This means that God resolves to bless man in certain ways, that he promises to establish certain principles for man’s good, provided man will respond according to God’s will. But unlike covenants between men, God is the initiator, and he will bring to pass the terms of the covenant if man will only obey him.

2. The history of the covenants throughout the scriptures points to the one great event in the divine economy: the covenant that God makes with man through Jesus Christ. This is called new not only because of its superiority and that it supersedes all others, but because it is the culmination of all history. It is a covenant of grace and love, and is sealed by the Holy Spirit.

3. Covenantal relationship is fellowship between God and man. It is God’s way of entering into history and into the human heart, which is his sanctuary. The New Covenant is therefore the basis, the only basis, of Christian fellowship, just as the Old Covenant was the basis of God’s relationship with Israel.

4. The nature of any of God’s covenants with man has never been literary or scriptural. That is they have never been a book, a scroll, a page, or anything written on stone or clay. Writings have often resulted from covenantal relationship, though not always. But the covenant between God and man is not something written. It is rather that something written emerged as a result of a covenant. This is especially true of the scriptures of the Old Covenant and the scriptures of the New Covenant.

5. This means that the book we call the New Testament is not the New Covenant at all, nor is the Old Testament the Old Covenant. They are rather a collection of many different writings over a long period of time, all growing out of covenant relationships that had long existed.

6. It is characteristic of a covenant that it be sealed or that it have a sign, whether a covenant between people (such as a ring symbolizing a marital covenant) or a covenant ratified by God. We will show that just as God gave a sign in the case of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Israel, so he gave a sign for the New Covenant.

History of Covenants

Even though it is not explicitly stated, it seems that covenantal relationship began with Adam. In all his covenants with man God is the condescending party, and in the case of Adam there is the promise of continued life and well being, dependent only upon Adam’s faithfulness. Adam was to enjoy the garden in which God placed him, but it was understood that “You may eat of all the trees in the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die.”

This shows us the nature of a covenant, which is an agreement in which God takes the initiative in bestowing certain promises to man with the understanding that man will respond to his will. Adam was under covenant with God to honor his prohibitions and thus live forever in botanic bliss. When he violated the terms of the covenant, he was cast from the garden and the promise of continued life was nullified.

This is the force of the Hebrew term berith, which appears 279 times in the scriptures, and which is translated covenant 260 of those times. The Greek equivalent is diatheke, which appears 33 times in the New Covenant scriptures, and is translated either as covenant (20 times) or testament (13 times). But all these references are not to the covenants that God has entered into with man, for many of them point to various agreements between persons. In 1 Kings 20:34, for instance, we find King Ahab entering into a covenant with Benhadad, his Syrian antagonist. In 1 Sam. 18:3 Jonathan makes a covenant with David to love him as his own soul, and gives him his cloak and armor as a sign of the agreement. Gen. 21:27 tells of a covenant made between Abraham and Abimelech. In the New Covenant scriptures, however, all occurrences of diatheke are in reference to God’s covenants with his people.

The first explicit instance of a covenant in the scriptures is that between God and Noah. The Lord says to the patriarch: “I will establish my Covenant with you, and you must go on board the ark, yourself, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives along with you.” (Gen. 6:18) Other instructions follow, as terms of the covenant, and “Noah did this; he did all that God had ordered him.” Gen. 9:8 shows that this covenant included all mankind and even the plants and animals, for it embraced God’s promise that he would never again destroy the earth with water. This is one covenant, or part of a covenant, that has no conditions. God placed himself under covenantal obligation never again to destroy the earth by flooding it, irrespective of how corrupt man may become. God has placed a bow in the sky as a sign of this covenant.

Covenantal history takes on special significance in the story of Abraham, for it is made clear that God’s covenant with Abraham pointed far into the future, not only to the nation that was in the loins of the patriarch, but far beyond to the Christian era. Actually there were several facets to the Abrahamic covenant. There was the land promise. Once Lot had chosen his part and separated himself, Abraham was told to look at the vast expanses around him. The record says: “That day the Lord made a Covenant with Abram in these terms: ‘To your descendants I will give this land, from the wadi of Egypt to the Great River’” (Gen. 15:18). This land promise was repeated again and again, not only to Abraham, but to Isaac and Jacob as well.

Then there was the seed promise, the promise that through Abraham and his posterity all nations would someday be greatly blessed. The details are listed in Gen. 17, where the term covenant appears a dozen times. It is called “a perpetual covenant,” extending from generation to generation, and circumcision was to be its sign. In Gal. 3 Paul shows that this part of the Abrahamic covenant was in reference to the Christ who was to come, and he contends that those who are in Christ are actually of the seed of Abraham, heirs of the promise vouch-safed to the old patriarch long ago.

One interesting aspect of the covenant with Abraham was the ritual of passing between the halves of animals. In preparation for the giving of the covenant Abraham was to take a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon and cut them in half, and have them face each other with a path between. God and Abraham pass through the separated halves, thus ratifying the covenant. It was a ritual that may have had a long history even in that time, and it suggested that the kind of evil that had come upon the animals in the ritual would befall the party that violated the terms of the covenant. There are shades of this in Jer. 34:18, where the Lord says: “These men who have infringed my covenant, who have not observed the terms of the covenant made in my presence, I will treat these men like the calf they cut in two to pass between the parts of it.” God has always been faithful to keep his covenantal promises, such as in 2 Kings 12 where he resolves to bear with the Arameans, despite their evil against Israel, since they were descendants of Abraham, and “because of the covenant he had made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

God has always been faithful to his part of the bargain. It is man that has continually violated the covenantal agreement. One vivid description is Jeremiah’s view of Jerusalem in ruins, and he says: “When the hordes of the nations pass this city, they will say to each other: Why has the Lord treated such a great city like this? And the answer will be: Because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord their God to worship alien gods and serve them” (Jer. 22:8-9).

The covenant that God made with Moses at Sinai was not as personal as previous ones had been, for it was really with the newly-formed nation of Israel. As Moses put it: “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with us who are here, all living today” (Dt. 5:2). So this was a new covenant in that it was national and had to do with the preservation of a people for the accomplishment of God’s purposes in history. Yet it was destined to abrogation, for Israel would not keep it, thus losing their place as a theocracy and as a royal priesthood. In Jer. 31:32 one reason given for the coming of a new covenant was that Israel had broken the old one. And Ex. 19:5 makes it clear that the terms of the covenant were that God would make of Israel his very own nation, and that they would be “a kingdom of priests, a consecrated nation.” They in turn were to “obey my voice and hold fast to my covenant,” which they did not do and probably could not do. The royal priesthood could not be realized, therefore, until God should give a new covenant, sealed by the Holy Spirit.

Covenant and Fellowship

Fellowship with God is the basis of all these covenants. The oft-repeated phrase “I will be to them a God and they shall be to me a people” is the essence of God’s covenants with man. The reference in Heb. 12:24 suggests as much: We have come to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant. This is to say that it is by means of the covenant mediated by Jesus that fellowship is possible. The New Covenant is thus the ground of the New Humanity. Ezekiel 16:8 puts it this way: “I made a covenant with you and you became mine.” So it was with Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. Each was allowed to “share life with God,” which is the meaning of fellowship, by virtue of covenants. A covenant always made specific the terms of the fellowship, which is no less specific in the case of Jesus, who said: “This is my blood of the new covenant, which was shed for the remission of sins of many” (Matt. 26:28).

The scriptural term that best illustrates the essence of covenant apart from that word itself is calling. The term goes hand in hand with the idea of covenant throughout the scriptures, for in calling there must be a response if there is to be an agreement. Too, calling preserves what is distinctive in God’s covenants, which are not between equals as human covenants are. The caller is greater than the called. Paul’s insistence that we are to make our calling and election sure has covenantal overtones, for it is saying that God has called and it is up to us to respond. The patriarchs in their own order were called of God, called into covenantal relation, called to be God’s own. Thus “the call of Abraham” is closely akin to the idea of the Abrahamic covenant. We “come to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant” because we are called. “He who called you is to be trusted,” Paul tells the Thessalonians, “for he will do it.” This refers to his covenantal faithfulness. To that same congregation Paul says: “Through the Good News that we brought he called you to this so that you should share the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 2:14).

All this sheds light on 1 Cor. 1:9, which tells us how we become part of the fellowship in Christ: “It is God himself who called you to share in the life of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord; and God keeps faith.” Fellowship is the shared life to which we are called by the gospel. Or fellowship is that covenantal relationship that one sustains to Jesus by way of obeying him. This is why we equate the covenant which Jesus mediates with the gospel through which he calls us.

Nature of New Covenant

It is evident from the covenants that God has made with men that they point to a relationship between persons (“I shall be to them a God and they shall be to me a people”) rather than to any literary document; True, there are such references. as “tables of the covenant” (Dt. 9:11) “book of the covenant” (Ex. 20:22), and even “words of the covenant” (Ex. 34:28). All these refer to writing, including the ten commandments which were first inscribed on stone, written with the finger of God and called tables or tablets of the covenant. Even the multiplicity of legal regulations, outlined in Exodus 21-23, including such regulations as “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” are commandments growing out of the covenant made at Sinai. But none of these is the covenant itself.

The point becomes clearer in Ex. 24:4, where it says that “Moses put all the commands of the Lord into writing...” and so we have the stuff of which much of the old Bible is made. It shows that what Moses wrote resulted from the covenant previously given. Act 3:25, where reference is made to “sons of the covenant,” further clarifies the point. The covenant produced the sons, not the sons the covenant. And so the covenant produced “the book of the covenant” and the words of the covenant” in the same way.

The Mosaic covenant is then, strictly speaking, God’s agreement to make Israel his own people, his own nation, based upon their faithful response. And so out of the covenant grew a body of literature that explained and amplified the terms of the covenant.

So it is with the New Covenant. It is not a book or a collection of letters. The early Christians came to Jesus the mediator of the New Covenant long before any letters or accounts of Jesus’ life were written. If Jesus had come as soon as the Thessalonians supposed he would, there would never have been any “New Testament,” a term we can now see to be out of place. The New Covenant scriptures gradually emerged, and only then because of problems and exigencies that arose in the primitive congregations, and because folk like Luke were not satisfied with the fragmentary accounts that were being circulated.

It is conceivable, therefore, that there might have been no scriptures of the New Covenant for a long, long time; but it is hardly conceivable that there could have been no New Covenant. There were no scriptures that we know of that grew out of the covenants made with Adam, Noah, and Abraham; but they were covenants just the same. And the primitive saints were in covenantal relationship long before there were any scriptures, and many of them died without ever reading a word of what we wrongly call “the New Testament.” A covenanted people eventually produced some scriptures, to be sure, but these were not the covenant.

So it was with the early Christians as it was in the time of Moses. The New Covenant people produced the New Covenant scriptures. It wasn’t the scriptures that produced the people.

We are saying, then, that the New Covenant is the gospel of Christ, through which God calls us into the fellowship of his son, the mediator of the New Covenant. The scriptures enrich the fellowship of the saints, but the basis of the fellowship is the covenantal relationship which is in Christ. This is why we contend that fellowship cannot be based upon the vast expanses of doctrinal material, where there is obvious ground for disagreement. The shared life is realized when believers are one in Christ together, bound together and to God by the New Covenant. A covenant people are one in Christ even when there is a diversity of doctrinal interpretation, as there is bound to be.

Signs of the Covenants

We yet have not spoken specifically of the signs of the various covenants covered in this study, as we promised to do at the outset. But we did mention that the rainbow in the sky stands as a sign of the covenant God made with Noah and “all living things” that he would not again destroy the earth with water. And we pointed to circumcision as the sign of the covenant that God made with Abraham (Gen. 17:11). Ex. 31:16 tells us that the Sabbath was the sign of the covenant with Moses and Israel. Though there is no specific reference to the effect, we would say that the garden itself, with the power to sustain life continually, stood as a sign to Adam that God would be faithful to the covenant. When Adam broke his part of the agreement, he was removed from the garden, away from the symbol of assurance that was once his.

The New Covenant scriptures indicate that it is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian that is the sign of the New Covenant. Some might suppose immersion in water would be such a sign, but, unlike circumcision, immersion presents no outward indication—except for the few minutes that one is still wet! Nor does being immersed within itself indicate a changed life or a covenantal relationship. Immersion is the means of induction into Christ, once one believes and trusts in Jesus, but it is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that serves as “a perpetual sign” (typical with all covenants) of a New Covenant person.

It could be said that the New Covenant was ratified on the day of Pentecost, and it was at this time that the small community of believers were filled with the Holy Spirit. It was the Spirit that infused the New Humanity, and the new covenantal people were a Spirit-filled and Spirit-led community. And this was the sign Paul looked for in the disciples at Ephesus when he asked, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” The sign seemed to be missing. They were re-immersed and received the Spirit, and thus they had the sign of the New Covenant people. And so Paul writes in Eph. 1:14 where he speaks of those in Christ as being “sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.” It was the corporate seal! And is not this John’s point: “And this is how we can be sure that he dwells with us: we know it from the Spirit he has given us. (1 John 3:24) The same writer speaks of the anointing of God, which is a reference to the Spirit, and must mean something similar to “the sealing of the Holy Spirit” (1 John 2:27).

There are two places in the scriptures where a contrast is drawn between the Old and New Covenants, and in both references it is made clear that the substantial difference between the two is that one is of the Spirit and the other of the flesh. Galatians 4 presents an allegory in which Sarah and Hagar stand for the two covenants. Hagar, representing the covenant made at Sinai, is described as “she and her children are in slavery,” the reason being that justification depended on their own works and goodness. Sarah is the New Covenant and she stands for the freedom that is in Christ. So Paul lets the Galatians take their choice: freedom or slavery, but he urges “Refuse to be tied to the yoke of slavery again.” The way of freedom, he points out, is the way of the Spirit, which was not given at Sinai as he is in the New Jerusalem, which is our mother. So he goes on to say: “For to us, our hope of attaining that righteousness which we eagerly await is the work of the Spirit through faith.”

The other passage that offers such a contrast is that from which the initial verse was taken, Heb. 12:18-24. On the side of Sinai and the law is gloom, darkness, and fear, apt descriptions of many people’s religion. On the side of Mount Zion is the city of God, the New Jerusalem, the spirits of just men made perfect, millions of angels, and to Jesus—and here is the big difference. We have come to Jesus who is the mediator of a new covenant.

Perhaps that simplifies a subject that is complex. If we will come to Jesus, covenantal relations will take care of themselves. But is this what modern religionists really want? Jesus. Some of us have come to the church, or to doctrinal purity, or to the community of those who are right. To come to Jesus is something else. And that is the whole point of the New Covenant, of which he is the mediator.—the Editor