A Concluding Charge

Deuteronomy 29: 1-29

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

Introduction:  In the history of Christ’s Church, there has always been a slight tension between the individual calling of the saints and the community consensus of the assembled church.  Either dynamic emphasis can lead to imperfections and problems of various kinds.  Of course, we must speak of a covenant community in every time and place – yet salvation is of and through the Lord of life alone!  While the convenient and historic groupings of the church cannot save or damn individuals, at the very least those churches who uphold either of the opposing propositions can attract specific audiences within specific organizations and congregations.

Certainly, we know the difference between the visible and the invisible church.  We also appreciate that many of the Lord’s elect are scattered throughout all of Christendom, even in some organizations that we may consider to be cultic, spiritually or theologically flawed and some even heretical, if not all of these at the same time!  While a biblical church can encourage the saints to grow in strength, knowledge and power – the church cannot save, nor always with any certainty determine who is or isn’t finally saved by grace alone.  By and large, the history of the church demonstrates the flawed human nature of the institutions that have, do and will witness to the world concerning our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The best we can do is to hold fast to the faith once given to the saints, neither adding nor taking away from the scriptural revelations.  Paul sets the best perspective for the theme that I am getting at today:  “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.  For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first born among many brethren.  Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.” (Romans 8: 28-30)

Old Covenant Milieu:  That process of salvation has been operative from the beginning of time through both Covenantal divisions of history.  Of course, we can always hope and pray for the best behavior of the Bride of Christ, the Church.  And to that end is the charge of Moses in this chapter aimed.

There are four essential divisions in this chapter for our consideration this morning.  In verses two to nine, the people are charged to learn how to perceive the Lord’s presence in their experience of life.  Next, in verses ten through thirteen, Moses focuses upon the “essence and meaning of the Israelites’ covenant relationship with God” as Dr Craigie outlines it.  Third, in verses fourteen to twenty-eight the spiritual perils of the future are outlined.  Finally, verse twenty-nine personalizes the redemptive promise for the sincere believer and their children.  Let us work through this four-point division earnestly and carefully.

Meredith Kline summarizes the first section of our text in these words:  “The mercy and the miracle of the deliverance from Egypt and the passage through the wilderness should have opened the eyes of this generation to the supreme wisdom of giving themselves in wholehearted love to so great and gracious a Lord.  But the simplest spiritual knowledge is beyond the perception of man the sinner except the Spirit of God grant him understanding as a sovereign gift of grace.”

What all of this means is that the people of Israel must learn how to perceive the gracious hand of God in the midst of living their lives before Him.  You have to have some age and experience to learn this lesson still.  Dr Craigie says it best:  “With the perspective of time, the Israelites could learn to see God’s presence in their past experience, but it required insight and perception.  God’s participation in the course of human events was not always in a dramatic form, such as miracle.”  And as we understand the observations of the revelation record, not all of those who came through the desert heard or saw anything unusual.

Yet, for the elect in Christ of every time, there grows a certain fondness for the kind and caring love of the Lord as we are enabled to see what He has done for us in times past.  There are several stories told of people who intended on being on the Titanic when it made its maiden voyage.  However, because of providential circumstances – they were kept on shore.  Highway accidents or not – sometimes encourage us to claim protecting guardian angels when it was the Lord’s purpose that we be spared or not according to His ongoing oversight of using us to and for His good pleasure and the working out of history.

To this end, Moses recites the beneficial history of the exodus and demonstrates the hand of the Lord in all their experiences.  See this and understand it so that you may be encouraged to persevere in obedience.

In the second group of verses (10-14), Moses invites every Israelite, small and great alike – to affirm the covenant by solemn oath.  Still to this day do new members of the covenant community make statements before the church affirming their beliefs and promise to live lives that affirm their beliefs.  These are all those who are counted as members of Christ’s Church.

Dr Brown shows the charge of Moses here as three fold in its present reality.  The Covenant has an “immediate, widespread and lasting appeal.”  Not only may the hearers look back and see what the Lord has done for them, they may enjoy the covenant blessings now and ever after.  All of the people may even benefit from living in a Covenant community.  One of the purposes of the law of God is to regulate life so that even those who are not called to eternal life may have some minimal enjoyment of all the good things of this life.  And sadly, whenever the Lord’s covenantal law is neglected it is those apparently without a hope in heaven who suffer in this life the most.  At least for those who belong to the Lord, there is the blessed hope of eternity even if their time on earth is less than ideal.  “All of this and heaven too” is an old saying for those who truly enjoy the promise of both lives.  But the common graces of living in peace and prosperity are too often denied by the trends, fashions and ideologies of time and place.  The Covenant community that upholds the law of God will be blessed indeed.

Just as Luke records in the book of Acts, “the promise is for you and your children”, so does the phrasing of verse fourteen indicate the promise of the covenant is:  “not with you alone” but also “ with him who is not here with us today.”  The Covenant community will stretch far into the future through many generations and for all eternity.   This is one reason that we should desire to give the next generation a sound foundation to build up the church of Christ after we are gone.

Just as the generation there with Moses had a special responsibility shared uniquely with the generation that knew and saw Jesus – so do we all in every time and place have the same responsibility to pass along what we know, what we believe and what has been seen and recorded that life in faith may continue and flourish as the Lord wills.

Our third section of verses (14-28), describe spiritual perils of the future.  Just as the people are reminded of the pagan religious society from which they have been delivered – so he admonishes them to never let those false religions gain a solid foothold in the land of promise.  Even as the Lord shall not spare the spiritually and morally deviant – neither should the Covenant people allow the corruption of their society, communities and revealed faith.

It took a thousand years for this point to sink in!  The faithless, the pagan, the apostate and all the rest were tolerated from time to time within the boundaries of Israel.  Saul, to his initial credit had harried and hunted the witchery crew from the land until his spiritual nature failed and he sought advise from such a creature pictured well by Shakespeare a thousand years and more in the future.  Macbeth, of course is the play where a man, his wife and a kingdom are lost because of occultic interests on the throne.

We have only to consider the decline of this once fair land in the last fifty years because of increasing tolerance.  Just this week, the Supreme Court encouraged the last publicly acknowledged set of deviants in what may be a landmark case sweeping away that last vestiges of definable sinful behavior in the Republic.  Who is safe any longer from perversity?  The social and legal revolution has been won in the name of absolute freedom for people to be all they want to be.  Protective restrictions for the objects of their ill-gotten passions are already being psychologically set aside.  Sensitivity training in many institutions are attempting to break down the last barriers of personal morality.

Of course, we must affirm that in all of these manifestations of wickedness – the church is shining the light of salvation more widely and brightly.  Not because of any inherent goodness of the saints, but by the power of the Holy Spirit to better reflect the cause of Christ before the world.

Woe to any culture, country or church that abandons the covenantal perspective.  The end of Israel is pointedly foretold in the verses before us, and so is the end of every society that follows in the train of their worldly experience.  You may think the land of promise in which we live could never fit the coarse descriptions of the text before us?  The early colonists, while appreciating the possibilities found the first years of living on the edge to be perilous indeed.  The pilgrims almost died from socialism as much as from lack of food.  There was a lost colony in the south, and not all of the new settlers prospered.  It is possible for well-meaning socialists to ruin the American dream.  After all, in the last century they took the best farmland in world and created a famine in a few short years.  I am describing the plains of the Ukraine where the topsoil is measured in feet, while our own here in America is measured in inches.

All of those who refuse our government and businesses access to our own natural resources are only hurrying along a day when a real energy crisis could suddenly end our way of life and prosperity.  Remember the deflated value of the American greenback retains that value only as long as consumers believe in it!  The Lord has many means to humble a nation; the history of Israel should confirm His providential ordering.

We should not leave this section without commenting upon the secret sins of any individuals whose very attitude towards sin undermines not only their own future, but that also that of country and church.  I am reminded of the most important and drastic decline in public service within my memory.  Time was, when the careers of public servants, especially teachers – was based upon their regular observable character in all their relationships within the community.

During World War Two, the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA) was organized to wage a secret political war behind enemy lines.  By the very nature of the deadly dangers, Donovan limited the recruitment of daring agents only to those whose religious character was attested for many years by the most stringent examination.  Protestant, Catholic or Jew – it didn’t matter, just so long as their convictions were absolutely unshakable.  According to the books that I have read – the OSS never had an American operative who turned against us.  Character counted!  After the war, when the various services were reorganized – the definitive recruitment agenda of that organization failed to measure up to liberalized union standards.

So too, were public teachers recruited, studied and rewarded in the vast majority of districts in this land until the early sixties.  I can still remember my dad bemoaning the fact that the state was mandating that smokers, drinkers, divorced, and unreligious people be given jobs around young children!  The teachers that I remember from my youth were not necessarily the brightest people I ever knew, but they were such a straight laced bunch of Christians that we could not help but be better children than we really wanted to be!

All of that and more has unfortunately been swept away in our time, and as a result we are realizing the same spiritual problems that plagued the people of Israel.

New Covenant Continuum:   Finally, we must look at the last and best verse in this chapter.  Deep things are spoken here:  “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”  This Old Covenant verse brings us back to the insight of Paul’s observation to the Romans, with which we began earlier. 

Here is the covenantal experience personalized.   Another way of translating this passage is to use the words “covered” and “uncovered”.  The implication is that it truly is the Lord who enables and allows us to know what we know.  And knowing the Lord, our children and we may thereby go on and gladly obey the Great Covenant, which is now administered by our Lord Jesus Christ.

We know for a fact that “not all of Israel was Israel” from the witness of the Apostle Paul.  The community of the Old Covenant Church was affected and afflicted by the failings of all those who found the law unfulfilling, tedious or even objectionable.  Freedom of expression has always been a revolutionary urge since the dawn of time.  And as first one and then more of the covenant community fell into sin – the more tolerable was the “church” until there was hardly any difference between the people of promise and their worldly counterparts.

Contemporary Application:  At the very least, by the time of the restoration – the people of Israel had finally put away the more obnoxious forms of idolatry and religious apostasy.  The prophets more and more began focusing on matters of the heart to prepare the way for the new kingdom of the Spirit, which was unfolded in and through the ministry of Christ.  The gospel of grace and mercy revealed in and through Him fulfilled completely the Old Covenant in every way, shape and form.

Today, the whole covenantal promise has been applied to the very hearts of believers instead of in any national covenant like that laid before the people of Israel.  However, there is still a covenant community with some solemn collective responsibilities.  That community is not well organized since the true church remains largely invisible to the unregenerate world.  However, whenever God’s people get serious about obeying God’s law and holding His people accountable for their actions – the world will take notice.

In our day and time, the ancient Catholic Church has an unparalleled opportunity for service and growth in this country.  Given all of the Media hype and the sudden meeting of American Cardinals in Rome – all that church needs to do is declare that any priest or employee of the church who violates God’s law in regards to the sexual sins, too widely before the public, will not only be fired but handed over to Satan if they remain unrepentant.   That newfound commitment to morality will lift every spiritual boat in this country and help undo the worst aspects of the last decade.  In addition, if that Church will run counter to the trends of the times and link the current problem with the presence of Sodomites within their organization – much good may be accomplished, if those unregenerate practioners are also expelled.

Much more in the area of church discipline needs to be accomplished in all of the churches that sincerely claim the Name of Christ.  Sadly are we learning in our culture that if the church does not take her covenantal obligations seriously, neither will the world at large!  Therefore, if we would see reformation and revival in our time – the Great Covenant must once again not only be an item for study but also a means of dividing the servants and members of the church from slavish sinners whose only purpose in infiltrating the church is to bring it down to contemporary acceptable worldly standards!

Will we accept the challenge of Moses to not only talk the talk, but also walk the serious walk of living in obedience to our Sovereign Lord?  Therein lies the future of the church in our day as in every age.  Amen.

Resources Used:   

Copyright (C) 2002                             Christ Covenant Reformed (Presbyterian Church in America)                                     

      21 April 2002                       Box 13926 - Columbus, Ohio 43213-8049

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