Introduction & Overview

Hebrews 8: 7-13

The Great Covenant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Max A Forsythe

Introduction: Twice in the last week I was traveling in the rain on the I270 Racetrack.  Both times, when the rain got really serious, I was in a center lane and all of a sudden the lines that define the lanes became very difficult to see.  As quickly as possible I pulled over to the first lane where I could see the white line along the edge!

At least in the two lane country roads where I live, the yellow centerline is easy to see and the grass denotes the right hand edge of the highway.  Years ago when the white lines on the right hand side of the road were first painted; I asked a law enforcement officer why the new decorations were being painted in place.  He pointed out that they came from the American South-west where they helped identify the road edge in case of rain and snow.  The rain part I understand and accept, but the snow must be a form of rural legend that has yet to be urbanized!  At least where I live, a healthy snow can make all of the lines disappear for weeks on end!

I say all of this to illustrate my methodology for seeking the essential truths in the book of Deuteronomy.  On the right side of my computer will be our Westminster Confession of Faith to define the system of theology that we understand the old and new Covenants of Scripture to contain.  And of course on the left or center edge of our studies will be the Scriptures themselves to keep us from crossing over and running head on into the Sovereign God whose will and purpose we would understand.  Both of these documents plus the mappings of solid commentators will limit our imagination, creativity and all those too human temptations to make more or less of scriptures than we should.

Temptations there are aplenty in the study and proclamation of God’s precious and holy word!  Martin Luther told a story of a drunk who fell off the right hand side of his horse, got back on and promptly fell off on the left hand side.  Francis Schaeffer, speaking in a similar vein suggested that maintaining correct theology was a lot like walking along the spine of a low mountain range.  One step too far on either side of the trail and down you could fall.

Heresies very often compliment each other, both being in opposition to a central truth all too easily distorted either way, to the right or to the left.  Our study of the book of Deuteronomy is one that is especially fraught with temptations.  On the one hand, we may get the cart before the horse and obey the law as a means of gaining brownie points in heaven at the least!  At the worst, too many people go further and fall into the works-righteousness trap.

On the other hand, far too much of the evangelical church pays only lip service to the commandments and the commentary of the Old Covenant saints who lived a life pleasing to God in anticipation of the promised Messiah.  For many, the minimal expectations of being good, because it pleases the Lord is an all too heavy burden.  In the last ten years I have found it difficult indeed to tell any difference between pagan and Christian students.  National statistics also bear out the fact that temptations seem to be all too enjoyable to one and all.  Their parents do not seem to be doing too much better, given the sad state of affairs in this once fair land.  So, it would do us all well to study the covenantal context of Moses’ commentary on the Law of God, which is revealed excellently in the book of Deuteronomy.

Old Covenant Milieu:  For twenty-five years I have been using some notes that I took on Suzerain documents in Seminary.  One of the professors shared the research of G E Mendenhall’s seminal work “Covenant Forms in Israelite Tradition.”  For some reason I never forgot the content of that lecture and have outlined the story to illustrate the covenantal aspects of not only the ten commandments but also the United States Constitution for my students these many years.

Meredith G Kline gives an orthodox approval to that same concept and goes on to describe the covenantal standards at great length in his commentary on the Treaty of the Great King, as he titles the ancient book of Deuteronomy.

While the Reformers caught the covenantal aspect of the Old Testament, enough Christian scholars have insisted that Testament is a more proper term than Covenant to entitle the two great divisions of the biblical revelation.  The rediscovery of contemporary evidence in our time only strengthens the Covenantal Theology for which the Reformer’s were once well known.

Briefly, here is the story of the discovery of the Suzerain documents as I remember them from thirty years ago.  Several archaeologists were traveling through the French protectorate of Syria.  As they drove through the desert regions they wondered at the scattered random hills that caught their attention every few miles.  They were so curious at the phenomena that they arranged a dig into one of them.  They quickly discovered that these curious geological piles were truly artificial in nature and history.  What they stumbled onto were layer after layer of village levels.  Some of these Tells, as they were named were fourteen or more levels high!  Village after village had been built on the ruins of the ones underneath over the course of three or more millennia.

Within the last decade, the county seat of Bellefontaine was required by state highway standards to dig down to the bottom of the main highway at the south end of town.  Layer after layer of asphalt, brick, horse manure and gravel were dug out.  The roadway was three feet above the original level of the land.  That road was laid out only about 170 years ago.  I also understand that in some parts of London, England, the first story of some buildings is actually the second story of an original structure that dates back almost to Roman times!  You see, wherever humans live for a long period of time a lot of clutter, broken stone, refuse as well as trash and treasures tends to accumulate.

Now, in one of these ancient Tells in Syria, the archaeologists discovered the local courthouse records of an ancient king.  The filing cabinets of his time were large clay jars and in these jars were documents that you might find in any local courthouse here in the United States.  Property records, loans, insurance records and such.  But most surprising of all were the large number of Suzerain records between the king and the villages that he ruled.  This find has been duplicated many times over in other digs in the Middle East since then.  The legal outline of these Suzerain documents is six fold and to the point.

  1.                 A Preamble:                              noted the essential facts of who, what, when and where.

  2.                 Historical Prologue:                  here was recited the benefits of the king's rule.

  3.                 Stipulations:                              were the assorted legal requirements of taxes and services due.

  4.                 Ratification clause.                    established the continuing term of the agreement.

  5.                 Witnesses.                                  included the king, the peoples and the deities involved.

  6.                 Blessings and curses.                 were the good and bad things that could and would happen!

In my government courses over the years I have compared that outline to the essential documents of the American covenant.  Of course, there is a Preamble to the United States Constitution.  The Declaration of Independence easily serves as a Historical Prologue.  Then there are the several stipulations regarding the division of powers outlined as a Federal government.  Finally there was a ratification clause, which was fulfilled.  Signatures of those attesting to the document were attached.  And here is where the comparison breaks down; there are no blessings and curses unless you consider the various twenty-seven amendments as being good or bad in their addition over the last two hundred years!

Of course, the witnesses to the ancient documents included the deities of the king and the people.  It was easily presumed that the deity of the king was superior to those of the people and villages; otherwise there would be no king worthy of the name.  Now, we realize that the founding fathers were not divine!  However, given enough time we might fall into the same trap of the ancient Greeks who raised some heroic individuals to the level of demi-gods.

There is the apocryphal story of George Washington chopping down the Cherry Tree and then the legend of his having thrown a dollar across the Potomac River.  A feat that has not been duplicated by any baseball pitchers in our time.  Of course, as I always told my students, the difference between now and then is that the dollar used to go further!

Of course, the constitutional documents are secular in nature, and few there be in our day who would even admit the minimal suzerain nature of such covenantal legal contracts with binding expectations not only on the peasants, but also upon those who would style themselves elected princes!

Rousas John Rushdoony declares in his work The Institutes of Biblical Law that “Law is in every culture religious in origin.  Because law governs man and society, because it establishes and declares the meaning of justice and righteousness, law is inescapably religious, in that it establishes in practical fashion the ultimate concerns of a culture.”  Rush Limbaugh would certainly agree with that statement.  In the last few months I have heard Rush over and over complain that to the liberals - the political power to shape the laws and institutions of our government is indeed truly religious in principle!

But the serious flaw in our contemporary situation is that we do not share the religious beliefs of those who would govern a republic whose foundational documents and institutions once gave much more than a passing notice to the Old Covenant precepts.  Judge Blackstone, the greatest of the English commentators on the common laws of the English speaking world wrote these words in 1765:   "Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these.  There are, it is true, a great number of indifferent points, in which both the divine law and the natural leave a man at his own liberty; but which are found necessary for the benefit of society to be restrained within certain limits.”

Do you catch the obvious point that there are two realms of law?  The sometimes all too worldly common law and the spiritual covenant given by the hand of the Creator to His own people are separate and distinct entities!  St Augustine in his classic book the City of God goes into great detail for many hundreds of pages to make certain that we know there are two worlds, two worlds in conflict.  “In regard to mankind I have made a division.  On the one side are those who live according to man; on the other, those who live according to God.  And I have said that, in a deeper sense, we may speak of two cities or two human societies, the destiny of the one being an eternal kingdom under God while the doom of the other is eternal punishment along with the Devil,”  A page or two later he describes the heavenly city as “a shadow, as it were, of this eternal City has been cast on earth, a prophetic representation of something to come rather than a real presentation in time.”

What we may want to know at this point in time is how we see and relate to the heavenly city.  I had always been fascinated with the fictional story A Tale of Two Cities and I didn’t quite understand the theme underlying that strange worldly fiction.  Until I read in a history book that the only difference between the impact of industrialization upon England and France could be explained by the worldly commitment to “liberty, equality and fraternity” in France led to a revolutionary blood bath, while the Weslyan revival in England helped to transform society in a much more orderly fashion.  The final showdowns between the two countries took place at Waterloo in 1815, there the humanist Napoleon who believed that God was on the side of he who had the biggest battalions, was defeated by a smaller Allied Army within whom there had been a recent spiritual revival.

The great God of the covenants empowered His people to defeat, demote and destroy the forces of humanism for a time.  The Duke of Wellington was at least willing to admit that the battle was "a near run thing".  Now I know you get tired of me harping on this subject, but the disintegration of the Soviet power a short decade ago was completely unexpected and baring continued stupidity on the part of our leaders in sharing weapons technology with the Chinese - the only major source of worldly conflict remains in our own fair land.  Remember the election map from last fall.  I wasn't surprised to see the color of the map, which shared the obvious fact that our own cities are hot beds of humanism while the countryside is more traditional in orientation for a while yet!  Two cities in America - you bet!  The divisions are set in stone and we should pray that it will be the stone tablets of God Covenant that will triumph over the stoned realities of the New Agers and their worldly paganism.

New Covenant Continuum:  Whether we realize it or not the Covenant God continues to rule over His own people by means of the content of the Old Covenant.  Jesus Christ is simply the new administrator of the once revealed law that is imprinted in our hearts helping us to live a life pleasing to God.

We understand, of course, that there has been a series of covenants down through the Judeo-Christian history.  O Palmer Robertson recites, "the successive covenants made with Noah, Abraham, Moses and David [which] span the entirety of the Old Testament period."

The prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel revealed the context of Christ’s new administration.

“Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah - not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt.  My covenant, which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord.  But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord:  I will put My law in their minds and write in on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”  Jeremiah 31: 31-33

“Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them, and it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; I will establish them and multiply them, and I will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore.  My tabernacle also shall be with them, indeed I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”  Ezekiel 37: 26-27

O Palmer Robertson also observes “The new covenant is intended to be a blessing for all its participants, but truth about the new covenant must be kept in balance.  If a person goes too far in the direction of any of the various aspects of the new covenant it will create serious problems.”  ... 

“Balance must be found between continuity and newness in the relation of the old covenant to the new.  This last covenant is a new covenant.  All the freshness, the surprise, the exhilaration of a new toy or a new machine characterizes the covenant under which you live today.  But the new covenant is also attached to the old.  It represents continuity with the past as well as newness for the present.”  ...

“The new covenant must not be seen merely as a renewal of the old covenant.  The Qumran community of Jesus’ day understood the new covenant in this erroneous way. They expected a reinstatement of the old Mosaic laws as the sign of the arrival of the new covenant.  Some current thinking about the new covenant moves along similar lines.  some Christians expect in the near future a kingdom that will last for a thousand years in which the old Mosaic laws about sacrifice will be reinstituted.

But the newness of the new covenant must be appreciated more fully.  That old covenant is nullified, canceled and set aside.  It is replaced by the new.  At the same time, a balance must be kept.  As the summation of all God’s covenant dealings with fallen men the new covenant remains connected with the old.”

This tension between the new and the old is sometimes difficult to bear up under.  All too often we will fail in our comprehension and performance in one direction and than in the other.  A lot of what we need to learn in this series is how to look at Deuteronomy.

Contemporary Application:  Meredith Kline observes that we should understand the book of Deuteronomy as “not law, but covenant.  That must be affirmed when we are seeking a category comprehensive enough o do justice to this revelation in its totality.  ...  Such a covenant is a declaration of God’s lordship, consecrating a people to himself in a sovereignty dictated order of life.”

“The position to be advocated here is that Deuteronomy is a covenant renewal document which in its total structure exhibits the classic legal form of the suzerainty treaties of the Mosaic age.”

“One further pint of correspondence to the treaties may be mentioned in connection with the stipulations.  Deuteronomy’s repetition of the Decalogue and other earlier legislation, with such modifications as were required by Israel’s imminent change of environment from desert to city and town, accords with the suzerains’ practice of repeating but modernizing their demands when renewing covenants.”

“Deuteronomy begins precisely as the ancient treaties began: ‘These are the words of ...’  The Jewish custom of using the opening words of a book as its title turns out in the present case to be most felicitous for it serves to identify this book at once as a treaty document.”

Thus, we may conclude that our relationship to the Covenant of God should be of the same sort of patriotism that we feel for our own governmental documents.  The secular principles for which we stand as a nation, for which countless thousands have died on a hundred battlefields, are certainly worth fighting and dying for.  But how much more should we comprehend that we should love the Law of God even more!

In the early nineties, I was invited to give the baccalaureate speech to my oldest son’s graduating class.  While I did take a biblical text and speak to it, I did not hit the audience over the head with it.  As a result, those whose citizenship was in heaven understood completely what I was talking about.  While those whose citizenship was indefinite at that time remained clueless.  However, six week’s later the United States Supreme Court declared that what I had done was illegal! 

That was a great dividing line in my lifetime.  I have not been able to mouth the words to the pledge to the flag since then!  My allegiance has shifted totally to the higher law, the law of God.  And since then I more easily understand the words of the psalmists “How I love Thy Law!”  And to that law I would call your allegiance in the context of this series on The Great Covenant:  from the Father - through the Son - by the Spirit!  Amen.

Resources Used:

Copyright (C) 2001                             Christ Covenant Reformed (Presbyterian Church in America)

             03 June  2001                           Box 13926 - Columbus, Ohio 43213-8049

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