THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 10
The Covenant in more detail ( conclusion)
The concept of the Covenant first appeared in the life of Noah, a special man who didn’t give a hoot what others thought. He starts to build an oceangoing ship in the middle of the prairies. Noah, who did not know a rudder from an oar, who had never seen a ship or an ocean in his life, this fellow, a farmer, a wine grower who loved to imbibe of his own vintage, started to build a ship thousands of miles from any large water-body. Hilarious, really. Just something you expect from a wine-bibber. He became a tourist attraction and you should hear him thundering to the people: that if they did not turn to the Lord Creator and ask for forgiveness, and mend their ways, they would all drown. There’s where everybody burst out laughing: the punch line. Best show in town! And when it all happened, and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, Noah knew he had been right.
Both Abraham and Noah were exceptional people, men full of faith in God’s promises. All people have faith, but usually in finite things, such as science or money or their own sense of superiority. Because Noah believed in the God Creator, his family was chosen to make a new start in the world. To seal this special relationship God made a Covenant with him.
Basically this Covenant, as related in Genesis 9, is a Covenant with Creation. Six times in this short passage God repeats that the Covenant made here with Noah, is with every living creature and with the earth. In essence God says here: “People of the earth, I am the Creator. Here I now pledge to form a triad, a Covenant between three parties (1) The Earth, (2) You as my image bearers, and (3) Me, as the Head of the Covenant.”
“Remember,” God said, “the line of the Covenant is not vertical: first Me, then you, then the earth, with the earth not really in touch with Me. No, the earth, the trees, the rocks, the bees and buffaloes, all are my creatures, the works of my hands.”
Draw a triangle: put God on the top, and on the other two corners we, representing the human race, on one corner and the earth on the other one, with arrows both extending to and coming from each corner as we all are inter-dependent, because the Earth gives life to humans, but also receives input from them, while we are dependent on the earth, but can also enhance it, and God gives life to us and the earth and we give praise to God in return.
In other words, if we look after the earth and after ourselves and our fellow creatures, caring for the crocodiles in the jungle and our neighbors next door, then God will look after us.
This Covenant, said God to Noah, will endure throughout eternity. God, People, the Land: an inseparable Triad. To seal it all, God sent his Son, as the New Head of the New Covenant, Jesus, God’s Son, the heart of our religion.
Covenant. Some people call it the Blood Covenant, because in the old days a Covenant between people was always sealed with blood. Here is a Davidic example. In 1 Samuel 18 we read that David and Jonathan made a covenant. As a sign of the Covenant Jonathan, the then crown prince, took off his clothes and gave them to David. He also handed over his sword and other weapons, even more personal and valuable than clothes. And David did the same. They completely exchanged their personal belongings, as a sign and symbol that they now were one. They also did something else, not related in the Bible, but part of the general rule of personal Covenant. This ritual required an incision in their wrists. Both parties would then raise their wrists to heaven and let the blood mingle. In the incision they would rub dirt to leave a scar as a permanent sign of their mutual allegiance. They then would sit down, make a list of their possessions exchange those lists with the promise that whatever the one part owned would become the rightful property of the other. In order to seal all this they would walk in the figure of an 8 around two altars as a sign of eternity. Then the two parties to the covenant would eat a special Covenant meal, a lamb and unleavened bread, with each party bringing its own bread and offering it to the other.
They would do the same with wine, pouring the wine of the one person into the goblet of the other. Jesus, as Head of he Covenant, followed that very procedure: His blood flowed for us, His wounds are still visible as an eternal sign of the Covenant, an everlasting scar on the God of the Trinity, that whatever is God’s, is also ours. The Lord of Creation gave it all to us. He is the God of the Universe. He signed over the ownership of this cosmos to the people of the Covenant, those who confess Jesus to be their Lord, and pursue the welfare of the Kingdom.
What a comedy! The comedy is that through Christ, God and God’s people – you and I – come together, become equals. The comedy is that God shares His Infinity with our finite being. There is an unfathomable, even greater contrast between God and our selves and between, say, the Queen of England and us.
Yet God and we have become one in Jesus Christ. Look at the Lord Supper. There Jesus says the familiar words: “This is my body, given for you, and this cup is the New Covenant in my blood poured for you”: now not God, but Jesus is the party of the Covenant. God has ceded his place to the Son, and Jesus is now at the centre. Paul tells us to clothe ourselves with the cloak of righteousness, with the Lord Jesus Christ, and so become a new creation, for God has reconciled the cosmos to himself in Christ’s full-bodied Covenant language.
This shows that the Covenant idea is woven throughout the entire Bible. In essence the Bible is the Covenant story, culminating in the coming of the Kingdom. The covenant/Kingdom idea between God- Jesus- humanity, all of us men and women, and the earth, is therefore the real foundation for the meaning and purpose of creation. Creation is the visible basis of the Covenant, its ultimate realization. Creation is there because God in Jesus desires to enter into a Covenant with humanity. We, as human beings, exist because God continuously calls us to the Covenant. God makes us discover how we have to live as we more and more experience each day to live in the Covenant, in his Kingdom/creation.
All this is based on us being “created in God’s image and likeness,” which offers us the opportunity to live closer to God, and so more and more resemble Him, as men and women, as conscious persons, as we experience participating in the Covenant. The beauty of the Covenant is that it allows us to begin to fathom how God has revealed himself in creation, making us the visible representatives of the invisible God.
I base this on Colossians 1:15-20. There it says that Christ is the first-born of creation, which really means that He is the first human being, and in that capacity, as that perfect creature, he created ta panta, all things. That explains why we are his image, why we look like him, and also explains why we can be such smart, intelligent and clever people.
Jesus is the original human, the prototype of all human existence. God, in his plan of salvation, revealed himself fully in Jesus, who represents humanity for us and in this way completed creation and attained the perfect life in God.
We are created after the pattern of Christ. Through the Covenant we experience that likeness to God in a personal response of love. As Children of God, as his heirs, through the Covenant with God, we share our humanity with the Son, who is the Lord of all that exists, and through whom the universe was made. The entire creation is there because it is permanently willed in Christ by the Father.
All this sounds hard to understand. More simply put: God’s first act of creation was to replicate Himself as Jesus, the Christ, and, as the first human being, in that capacity, created all reality. In order to make us share in that act, he made, after the human race had fallen into sin, a covenant, a treaty of sorts, between Him, us and creation, so that the ultimate destination of creation, his Kingdom, the New Creation, would still come about.
And what happens when the Covenant is broken? Genesis 15 gives a vivid illustration of this. There it is related how God and Abraham covenanted. Abraham is asked to cut animals in two and both God, in the form of fire, and Abraham in person, pass through these severed animals. The cutting of these beasts illustrates that if the covenant is not kept the bodies of the parties concerned would be cut in half as punishment. Later when the Israelites abandoned the agreement, the 10 tribes were banished from the earth never to be heard from again. In essence the people of Israel were broken up for ever.
So the Covenant is for all who abide by its terms. They will, when Christ returns, share in his glorious Kingdom and continue to be active participants in the ongoing labor of love of beautifying the Kingdom, an assignment that will never cease, because Creation is Infinite as God is Infinite.