How's that for a promise?
This is essentially how God initiates his covenant relationship with Abraham.
If we want to move forward in our understanding of the Bible, we need to remember the significance of the covenant stories.
There are five over-arching stories in the Old Testament: Creation, Covenant, Exodus, Kingdom, and Exile. They are ultimately tragic stories full of irony and hope. They are very human stories retold by ancient Israel as there way to remember where they came from and where they were headed amidst national uncertainty and existential wandering.
The many stories that make up the Old Testament are about the God of Israel and the outworking of their covenant relationship. It's a stunning covenant - the Israelites believe that the God who created the marvelous, beautifully dangerous, life-sustaining and wonder-inducing universe had chosen them to be his special people. With the gloriousness and unfathomable power of this Creation God, Israel struggles to come to terms with the covenant that he initiates with them.
Like all covenants there are blessings for keeping it and curses for breaking it. The Old Testament is the stories of them continually breaking the covenant and God creatively compelling them to return to keeping it. God demonstrates his loyalty to this newly created nation - undeserved loving kindness and faithfulness to a people who forget, complain, rebel, deny, and abandon him in droves. It's real humanity and a real God interacting in the real Earth amongst real tribes. The stories are shocking at times and inspiring. Much like our stories today.
What is a covenant relationship?
“A covenant is a solemn formal commitment made by one party to another party to one another; its seriousness is normally undergirded by an oath or rite undertaken before God and or before other people. A covenant is thus a little like a contract, but the commitment is moral, not legal. A covenant involves something more like a personal relationship, but no ordinary relationship: it presupposes a level of commitment not required of most relationships, and it involves a formalizing of that commitment that shows we really mean it.” [John Goldingay]An obvious image of a covenant relationship is that of holy matrimony. The heart of marriage vows are moral commitments, not legal, though it is both. It's the binding together forever of two friends, though it will become unlike all other friendships. It has it's own symbols and public declarations to indicate the sincerity of those making the vows. It's a covenant that requires hard work to keep, which has it's blessings, and when broken has obvious curses.
But within that covenant relationship of marriage is a loyalty that transcends the keeping and breaking of the covenant. Repentance rebuilds trust and leads to re-keeping the covenant, which can lead to blessings that remove the curses. We see this promised in the Torah and throughout the Prophets.
In the Creation story we have the account of God making a covenant with Noah and all humanity to never respond to violence - no matter how vast and ugly the scale - with mass-scale extermination. The rainbow is a public sign of this vow. The creative God must now find other ways to subvert evil hearts and bring about peace in nonviolent ways.
The original covenant for Israel itself begins with Abraham in Genesis 12, 15 and 17. We have three successive stories where God introduces himself to Abraham, and their coming to terms with each other over what the promises and covenant will look like - not only now but in the far future.
The creative God picks a man from a moon-worshipping tribe and promises to make his descendants more numerous than the stars of the sky. This requires unbelievable faith. And some important questions from Abraham about how he and his aged and childless wife will give birth to a son, let alone a new nation. Secondly, they have no land, they have sojourned from Ur to Haran and have never been to Canaan - how and when will they settle into this promised land?
Covenant-encounters with God induce plenty of questions. And some doubt. And the scale of the promises are so grand that it's tempting to take matters into our own hands to help God out. Which lead to tragedy. The creative God is not thwarted by our bumbling faith, but there are consequences to our actions to which we must make the best of in our life.
It was the same with Jesus and his disciples. It took extraordinary trust for them to believe that he was of God and that his instructions and way of life would lead to a new exodus and God's kingdom on earth. When they took matters into their own hands, Jesus had to step in and intervene. And so it is with us today. We can barely believe that the way of Jesus is the best possible response to empire-evil and entrenched-injustice in our culture and economic systems.
Just as the covenant stories with Abraham increase the scope and understanding of the relationship requirements and promises of blessing, so it goes when God connects with Moses and the people of Israel. Prior to the Exodus God re-introduces himself and his covenant with Israel to Moses and to the descendants of Abraham in Egypt. They agree to the covenant and pledge to follow him out of slavery and into the promised land. The story is more complicated then that, as it always is, but they go along. The covenant is formally renewed in dramatic and public fashion at Mount Sinai, on the far edge of the wilderness.
It's here that God is covenanting - not just with a person like Abraham or Moses - but with a whole people, the twelve tribes of Israel and their families numbering in the thousands and thousands. At this encounter it's more then just promises of blessings and curses for keeping and breaking the covenant, but detailed instructions for the basics of life for this new nation so that they more clearly understand the covenant laws.
It starts with receiving the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, and from there and throughout Leviticus we learn more and more laws for ancient Israel for keeping the covenant with God and one another. Much of Leviticus includes laws for what to do when you break the covenant, for God understands the reality of humanity and their penchant for failure.
Reading further into the Old Testament stories we continually learn how often Israel breaks the covenant and God is forced to bring about the consequences of curses. It's clear that Israel is struggling to keep the covenant with God. Moses and Joshua try their best. The judges that follow get progressively worse.
Samuel the prophet is effective for a generation. But his leadership prompts the people to beg God for a real live king like all the other "real" nations and tribes around them. This is a rejection of God as sole king of Israel and a further deterioration of their trust and allegiance to Him. God assents to their requests though, and eventually strikes up a covenant relationship with David and his family, promising that someone from his family would always be king of Israel.
God is strained by this covenant, as the descendants of David descend into decadence over the centuries. Though God sends prophets to plead with the people to repent and keep the covenant, they end up declaring the coming doom due to the ongoing covenant-breaking. Injustice towards the poor and oppressed, the widows and orphans, the laborers and sick - all this increased the ire of the Lord.
He determined to initiate a new covenant with Israel, one that he introduced through the prophet Jeremiah. He declared that instead of inscribing his words on stone or parchment, he would put his laws into the hearts and minds of his people, drawing closer to them in order that they might keep the covenant and fulfill their destiny as a blessing to the world.
It's centuries though before Jesus of Nazareth walks the hills of Israel, recognized as a prophet who calls his people to repentance. Jesus is full of promises and hope: God's kingdom is coming, he will end the exile and bring forth a new exodus for all those who will turn away from covenant-breaking and recommit to keeping the covenant. Jesus affirms the centrality of love for God and neighbor as the heart of living out the new covenant. How far is God willing to go with helping his people keep the new covenant? Even when his people crucify Jesus, whispers of forgiveness and promises of his Spirit pour forth from his body. God is radically committed to helping anybody who wants to keep the covenant.
The covenant is attractive with its blessings and scary because of its curses. But the covenant-relationship is always initiated by God towards us, and it's about love and flourishing in community within this good yet corrupted world. There are natural consequences for breaking covenant with one another and with God - rarely are supernatural disasters needed to make a point. We create our own hell on earth through our disloyalty and immorality towards one another and God. But God in Christ through his Spirit is present everywhere at work to invite everyone into a covenant relationship.
To those that assent, they become part of a new covenant-people through whom God intends to bless the world. They are a blessing because of how they care for one another and their welcome of the stranger and their love for their enemy. They are a light to the nations for how laws can add to the flourishing of all instead of to the advantage of the powerful and the demise of the weak.
They become like priests who mediate between the world and God, connecting people to this covenant-inducing Creator of the universe. They mediate, not like a bureaucracy but rather as a picture of what God is like and capable of - his faithfulness and patience and creativity and wisdom. An example is worth a thousand words.
Covenant-stories originate in the Old Testament, but they explain the story of Jesus and the early church in the New Testament. The Gospel of Jesus is the proclamation and introduction of the new covenant through this king of Israel from Nazareth sent by God to atone for our sins and empower us to live by his Spirit as participants in the coming kingdom.
We are like kings in the way that Jesus was a king, using his royalty and power to heal and restore, connect and educate, welcome and send with good news. Jesus, and we in this new covenant-community, use power and knowledge to build people up and spread the way of love as a blessing. We are just as human as Abraham and Moses, David and Jeremiah and the people of Israel and Babylon and Rome. It is by grace that we can become kings and covenant-keepers, and this so that we can do the good works for which God has created us to be and do.
The corrupting idea today is that we enter into a primarily enter into a co-dependant relationship with God in order to be saved from hell for heaven. But this does not reflect the reality of the covenant-relationships that God initiated with Abraham or Jesus. The covenant-relationships are first about life now on this good-earth, about love of neighbor and stranger and enemy now. Covenant-relationship with God in Christ is about justice now, the humble awareness that we will be judged for our injustice now, and that it is only by grace that we can repent and make amends for our sins. The reward is not just later, but also now.
God has come to earth in Jesus and is always with us through the Spirit. The covenant-relationship is about this generation right now - and whatever rewards await us in the afterlife, they are directly connected to our love now. If we don't want God and his way of life now, we won't want it for eternity. But if we respond to God's grace and invitation to a covenant-relationship now, the rewards begins now and continues without end.
God's covenant-relationship with Israel was complicated and turbulent and reflected the real interaction between real humanity and a real God.
So it is with us, a real Jesus is really at work in this new covenant-people, redeeming us from our sins and reconciling all people to himself through us without forcing his will on anyone and patiently staying faithful to humanity despite our penchant for destroying creation and abusing one another.
Amidst this terrible tragedy is a new-covenant people who seek to move forward, bringing light and hope and faith and love into the world - themselves in need of it and willing to be an instrument of it.
The invitation continues to be put out there: Jesus is the new king welcoming all who want to be in a covenant-relationship with him for the good of the world and love of God.
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