Neh No.15 The Covenant of God

After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision saying, Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward. And Abram said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed, and lo, one born in mine house is mine heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came unto him saying, This shall not be thine heir, but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.

And he brought him forth abroad and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars if thou be able to number them. And he said unto him, So shall thy seed be. And he believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness.

And he said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees to give thee this land to inherit it. And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? And he said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. And he took unto him all these and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another, but the birds divided he not.

When the fowls came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away. And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and lo, and horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them, and they shall afflict them four hundred years.

And also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge, and afterward shall they come out with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace, thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.

And it came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates. Amen.

Now you might care to have your Bibles open at the Book of Nehemiah, and in a moment I shall be reading from some verses in the ninth chapter. We are moving towards the end of our series of studies in this book. Indeed, I aim to close down our meditations on this slender volume this evening.

And you may wonder why the haste towards the end of the last part of this book. Why not more reflections, more meditations on Nehemiah? Well, for this reason we shall be terminating today. The latter part of this book is largely given, as you probably know, to a listing of the various families who occupied Jerusalem and the hinterland around Jerusalem during the days of Nehemiah.

In the eleventh chapter, and going through to the twelfth chapter, reference is made to the dedication of the walls of Jerusalem and the great joy that broke out as a result. But I sort of stole ahead some while ago and made reference to all this when I preached to you an address on the concept of the joy of God. So as I have been sifting through the remaining passage of scripture for our studies during this week, it struck me, and I trust I have the leading of the spirit in making this deduction, that there are just two matters in particular to which we are to give attention.

The last of the two being the cost of discipleship, which comes out very, very forcibly in the final chapter, and sets a good platform for our baptismal service tonight. And the first of the remaining two issues is the idea of covenant, covenant and the redeemed community. Now, I've touched on it, but I've never developed it, and I want to take the twenty-five minutes or so that I've got this morning in showing you from the book of Nehemiah and from other related scriptures just how important is the concept of covenant in the redeemed community.

So I'm going to read to you from the final verses of Nehemiah 9, verse thirty-one, if you'll follow in your Bible, please. Nevertheless, for thy great mercy's sake thou didst not utterly consume them, nor forsake them, for thou art a gracious and merciful God, now therefore our God, the great, the mighty, and the terrible God, who keepest covenant and mercy. Let not all the trouble seem little before thee, that hath come upon us, on our kings, on our princes, and on our priests, and on our prophets, and on our fathers, and on all thy people, since the time of the kings of Assyria unto this day.

Howbeit thou art just in all that is brought upon us, for thou hast done right, that we have done wickedly. Verse thirty-eight, and because of all this we make a sure covenant, and write it, and our princes, Levites, and priests seal unto it. Now you will gather from these verses the context before and after the importance of covenant in this book of Nehemiah, but if your Bible knowledge is wider than this volume, you will appreciate the importance of covenant right from the book of Genesis and through to Revelation.

So I want to speak to you this morning about the fact of covenant, and then blessings from the covenant, then breaching the covenant, and finally, as time permits, renewing the covenant. The fact of covenant. Well, right at the commencement of the Bible, God declares that it is within his will to enter into a special relationship with ordinary men and women, and the word covenant is used to describe that action.

So one discovers Noah being accosted by God, and informed that he is to build an ark, and the Noahic covenant, as we shall be commenting on in a moment of soul's time, preserved the security of Noah and his family. Now, later on, you come to that remarkable chapter of Scripture in which God enters into a covenant with Abraham, and he declares that he has something special, something unique that he is going to accomplish, not only in Abraham's own generation, but throughout history, by this man, God enters into a covenant with Abraham. When you go into the remaining books of the Pentateuch, you find that God enacts a covenant with Israel by Moses.

A most splendid thing is this, where God discloses his law, his requirements upon the people, and extends the covenant that he has made primarily with Noah, and then with Abraham. Later on in the Old Testament, God enacts a further step in his covenantal dealings with mankind, and he speaks to David, and he predicts that one day, great David's greatest son shall be born, and the whole idea is added to covenant of the coming of a Messiah. And later on, when our Lord Jesus Christ comes to this world, he does so to enact the most splendid covenant of all.

Now, I have just gone through a resume of the main points of Bible teaching about covenant in the Old Testament and overlapped into the New. Sufficient has been said to underpin this in your understanding that the fact of covenant is at the centre of God's dealings with humankind. By a gracious show of mercy, which is the best definition I can give you of what covenant is, God relates to ordinary people.

And there are blessings, as I say, that attend the covenant for Noah. What were the blessings? Well, it's obvious. The world was to be flooded.

The whole of creation was to perish. But not Noah, not his sons, not their family, not a sample of the animal kingdom. Salvation, physical, was to attend Noah as the first blessing of that covenant.

And you remember, after the deluge, God revealed further to Noah that he would never—he covenanted this—he would never allow universal flooding to occur again. And the sign of the rainbow reminds us of God's ancient covenant with Noah, the man who was blessed by being spared through the deluge. As for Abraham, well, his covenants were three or fourfold.

God blessed Abraham by giving him a land, by giving him a son and heir, by giving him a people, and by saying that through him one day—and it was completely beyond the ken, the comprehension of Abraham, how it would come about—all the nations of the world would be blessed, would benefit from the life of Abraham. For Moses and the Israelites, well, the blessings were obvious. The Hebrews were to be God's peculiar people.

He would preserve them and lead them out of Egypt. He would maintain security as they pushed their way through the Sinai Peninsula. He would bring them back into the Promised Land.

He would establish them as a nation. But there were requirements, there were regulations attached to that covenant. As far as David was concerned, well, for him would be the honor of being an ancestor in the lineage of the Messiah that was to come.

And the blessings that attend the coming of the Messiah and the covenant that he enacted, well, with those we will deal in a moment or so. But again, the point has become obvious to you. The fact of the covenant is embedded throughout Scripture.

That blessings flow through the covenant also is seen in the Word of God. Now, it was these covenantal blessings that the Hebrew people had missed to some extent. They had missed to some extent during the time of Nehemiah's ministry in Jerusalem.

Now, why was that? Was it because the covenant, and here we come to the third aspect of our Bible teaching for this morning, was it because the covenant had been breached by God? Had he broken it? Had he failed to keep his part of the bargain? Not a bit. Look at this 32nd verse. Now therefore our God, the great, the mighty, and the terrible God, who keepeth covenant and mercy, and so forth.

And the whole of that preceding chapter just itemizes the faithfulness of God over against the inconsistency of the people. It was impossible for God to break his word. The 15th verse, for instance, of this chapter continues to catalogue the blessings that had come to the Hebrews as a result of their covenantal relationship.

Thou gavest them bread from heaven for their hunger, and broughtest forth water for them out of a rock for their thirst, and promised them that they should go in to possess the land which thou hast sworn to give them. But they and our fathers dealt proudly, and hardened their necks, and hearkened not to thy commandments, and refused to obey. Neither were mindful of thy wonders that thou didst among them, but hardened their necks.

But what did God do as a result of the inconsistency, the unfaithfulness of his people? Well, look again at the bottom part of the 17th verse. But thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and forsookest them not. So throughout the whole of this chapter you have in juxtaposition on one hand the fidelity of the God of the covenant, and on the other hand the infidelity, the unfaithfulness of people who had entered into covenantal obligations.

Let me give you another instance of this. Later in the chapter, the 18th verse, reference is made to the people rejecting God. Yes, when they had made them a molten calf, they said, this is thy God that brought thee up out of Egypt and had wrought great provocations.

Here was the unfaithfulness of the people. But on the other hand, what was God's response? According to most legal contracts, he could have broken up the whole thing. He could have torn the document, so to speak, into shreds.

But not this God. Rather, verse 19 says, yet thou in thy manifold mercies forsookest them not in the wilderness. And it goes on to itemize the blessings that nonetheless God gave to his people.

However, this couldn't continue. Not down the centuries of history. God would remain faithful, but the covenantal blessings that should have belonged to the Hebrews, those they forfeited.

And they got themselves into a mess. Economically, politically, and of course spiritually. Why had they been in exile? Well, because they had broken the covenant.

Why had they been under the power of heathen empires? Because they had broken the commandments that they had told Moses they would keep. So the great dilemma that the Jews find themselves in, in Persia and the remnant that are in Jerusalem, has come about because they on their part broke covenant. But God, in his infinite grace, retained his part of the bargain, so to speak.

They lived outside of covenantal blessings. And because of this, they were in trouble. Look again at the heart of the 32nd verse.

Let not all the trouble that we are in, O God, seem little before thee, that hath come upon us, on our kings, on our princes, on our priests, on our prophets, on our fathers, and on all the people since the time of the kings of Assyria unto this day. Why are they in such a mess? Because we have done wickedly. The tail part of verse 33.

On to verse 34. Neither have our kings, our princes, our priests, our fathers kept thy law, nor hearkened unto thy commandments and thy testimonies, wherewith thou didst testify against them. They realize their spiritual bankruptcy, their economic bankruptcy, has come about by them failing to maintain their part in that historic covenant enacted with Abraham and amplified by Moses and David.

Now, there is something else that's important for us to realize here. Not only does this scripture help us to appreciate the pivotal position that covenant has in the Old and the New Testament, and the blessings that accrue, and the forfeiting of blessings through breach of the covenant, but it goes on to show the last part of our meditation for this morning, how a repair of the covenant can come about. Look then at the 38th verse.

Because of all this, because of our spiritual dilemmas, because of our political problems, because of all that we have heard preached to us by Ezra and Nehemiah and Ezra's colleagues, we, the redeemed community in Jerusalem, want to repair the covenant. We want to renew it. As we have repaired the walls that surround this holy place, we want to renew the covenant which our forefathers made with you.

We want it to be written down, and our priests, our Levites, our priests will seal, our princes, our Levites, our priests will seal this covenant. Generations before, in Sinai, the Hebrews had responded to the covenant that God made with Moses, and you remember how blood was sprinkled upon the people to indicate that they were entering into a contractual obligation with God. Now here there is no blood sprinkled, but there is a very significant act that is made, seen.

They write their names, they sign their own names to the fact that they are they want to renew, that they want to repair the covenant. Not that God's broken it, but they had preached it time and time again and forfeited many blessings as a result. All right, you say.

So that was the case for the Jews in the Old Testament and in this book of Nehemiah. But what, in the name of common sense, has that got to do with me in the twentieth century? Well, to quote the AV language of the Apostle Paul, my friend, it has much every way to do with you. In what respect? Because, my friend, Jesus Christ has brought a covenant into this world which transcends every other covenant that God enacted with humanity.

That language is not exaggerated, it is indicated in the fact that the New Testament writers refer to this covenant as the everlasting covenant. It's the new covenant. Abraham, I said, went through a remarkable experience that we read together from the book of Genesis when God entered into covenant with him.

Do you remember what he did? He brought animal sacrifices and killed them and they were laid parallel, one against the other, with a pathway down the middle, laid on the land. And Abraham waited to see whether God would come and presence himself on that scene and really enter into a covenantal relationship. The hours went by.

The sun was hot and the corpses of the animals were being scorched and the ravens and vultures overhead were ready to pounce to devour the flesh and we got a picture of Abraham scaring them off, still wondering whether God will come and cut the covenant with him, enter into a contractual relationship with Abraham. The sun went down and there was darkness. Abraham fell into a trance and God revealed certain things to him and then Abraham saw something happen.

What? He saw a light, as it were, pass down the pathway between this animal sacrifice. God had come and revealed himself and the covenant was cut with Abraham. You say, why do I keep using that term cut? Well, the Hebrew berith associated with an adjective which is often used to describe covenant has this idea that when God enters into a relationship, a significant relationship with mankind, he cuts his way in.

So that sacrifice that Abraham has made is attended by the presence of God who walks to and fro, as it were, in the presence of or in the shape of a light that illuminates that whole scene. It must have been a mysterious, almost an eerie thing that Abraham experienced. Now listen.

When the Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross of Calvary, he made reference to all that was to happen on that Roman gibbet. Do you remember he anticipates his death some hours before as he took a cup and he said to the disciples, this cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for many for the remission of sin. When Jesus Christ died on the cross of Calvary, the covenant was cut.

His body was broken. His blood was shed. Does that darkness fell upon the scene although it was not night time? And you remember how later on, three days later, the Lord God Almighty raised the son in the power of an endless life demonstrating that he too had been in attendance at Calvary, that he had been present as that covenant had been enacted.

Central to the Christian gospel is the concept of covenant, and a believer trusts Jesus as Lord and Saviour, and blessings attend that commitment. Why did Jesus die? So that we, to quote the language of the Apostle Paul, who were strangers from the covenant of promise, might enter in and receive what? Receive forgiveness from sin. Have secured for us our eternal well-being.

Might enter into an experience of the fullness of the Spirit. Might know the companionship of our God down life's pathway as Enoch, who was in covenantal relationship with God, also knew. So many blessings, my friend, heap upon heap come our way because we are in a covenantal relationship with God through Jesus.

But it's possible to breach that covenant. It's possible to be saved and to live at the level of a pope instead of living at the level of a prince. It's possible to be spiritually in the same economic and political conditions as were the Jews at Jerusalem when they had broken the covenant.

And many are the Christian people in the 20th century, and perhaps were not completely exempt from this here in our congregation at the Tabernacle, who live almost at the point of spiritual bankruptcy. They're in the covenant, but the blessings of the covenant they do not receive as they should because their lifestyle is foreign to the way that Jesus would have them to live. And I'll be dealing with this a little more fully this evening.

And so what do we do when we find ourselves in default? When we find ourselves in a situation where we have the glorious opportunity of repairing the covenant, of renewing it. Now I emphasize in case you've misunderstood, it's not been broken by Jesus. All who come unto him, he saves.

But there are certain obligations on our part, the practice of holiness, the maintaining of spiritual disciplines, our attendance, the means of grace, the reading of the word of God, coming around this table. And when we are in default in these things, then spiritually I say we're impoverished. And you say to me, well look, I'm in that condition this morning, then what do I do? Well you take this lesson from covenant, my friend, and you don't just understand it intellectually, you act on it experimentally.

The Jews enacted the covenant again, they renewed the covenant again in the presence of Ezra and Nehemiah. And I tell you one of the things that I bless God for in this church is that each Lord's Day morning or once a month in the evening we come around this table. I would go so far as to say that if this church did not maintain a weekly communion I would not be pastor here.

Why? Because as a young fellow I remember back in the north of England it was the communion service that made the greatest impact on my life than any other worship meeting that I attended. It was Sunday by Sunday as that bread came round, as that wine came round, and as the words were repeated from the Apostle Paul's lips, let a man examine himself and so let him take of that bread and drink of that wine, that I renewed my allegiance to Jesus, that I asked for forgiveness for areas where I'd gone skew during the past few days. The renewal of covenant is vital in the redeemed community, and I tell you my dear friends, without being emotional or exaggerating this morning, that sometimes I break my heart over some of the folks who only come into the tabernacle on a Sunday evening and miss at least three communions per month, and sometimes four, on this basis that when we take the bread and we take the wine we also renew our oath.

The word oath is really the New Testament equivalent to the Old Testament covenant. I finish with this illustration. In the Roman Empire, when a legion was about to leave the capital and go to the frontiers, their responsibilities were spelt out for them by the commanding officer and one of the men would speak for the rest of the company and he would vow his allegiance to Caesar.

He would take what was known in the Latin tongue as the sacramentum, the oath, and after he had allowed this oath to pass from his lips he would be then made a fully fledged soldier in the army of Caesar and enabled for this new bout of conflict. And one by one every man in the legion would say these words, that goes for me too, that goes for me too, down the line, down the line, and the next, and the next, until the whole of the legion had acknowledged that they were fighting for Caesar and that the sacramental oath had been accepted by the commanding officer. When I take this little goblet, I shall be a moment, when I take this little goblet and I take this little tray with the bread, I think of Jesus and his death on the cross of Calvary and I am saying as I drink that wine and as I eat that bread, the death of Jesus on the cross has wrought my salvation and I pledge myself afresh in his service.

The death of Jesus brings me into a covenantal relationship with God and I reaffirm my part in the covenant and I repair any area in my life where I've broken down during the last seven days and I ask for God's forgiveness and for God's strengthening. The covenant, you see, we are to renew our part in the covenant as we break bread and as we drink wine together. This is what Jesus said, this is why he pleaded to do this in remembrance of me, not just for my benefit but for your benefit.

Covenant, my friend, is basic to the Old Testament and the New Testament. There are blessings that attend those who are in a covenantal relationship with God but that covenant can be breached and those blessings can be forfeited but bless God, praise the Lord, we can repair the breach this morning, we can get back into a covenantal relationship with God and know those blessings as we remember our Savior in the breaking of bread and in the drinking of wine. Thank God for the ability to renew covenant.

Amen. Now our Father, we ask that our Lord Jesus, that Great Shepherd of the sheep, the enactor of that new and everlasting covenant, that he may attend our lives with his presence and with his blessings, that our lifestyle may be so pleasing to him that there shall be nothing that we do that shall ever cause offense from this day onwards. We bless you for the mighty covenant which costs so much, which cut our Savior to the end that he bled and died.

We pray, O Father God, that we may live sacrificial lives too, bring honor and glory to others, that we may be strong in our Savior. So those who must go, may your presence be with them. Those of us who have the privilege of maintaining worship here and coming to its summit, then may Jesus be known in breaking bread and drinking wine.