Scoring Covenants

I am the LORD your God, 

who brought you out of the land of Egypt, 

out of the house of slavery. 

(Exod 20:2)

By Stephen W. Hiemstra

If the Holy Spirit can be best found working in our lives in the midst of pain or a lengthy journey, then the many divine symbols and experiences in the Old Testament can be scored by how well they drew the people in and pointed them to God. A messiah—someone anointed with oil and displaying charismatic leadership—could certainly become a strong symbol and lengthy experience of divine presence, as could the temple in Jerusalem, but a messiah could also become a sacrilege and diversion from divine inspiration, like King Saul (1 Sam 9:2) or the fiery serpent that Moses made (Num 21:8-9). Given this criteria, the several Old Testament covenants stand out as especially important instruments of the Holy Spirit in the historical experience of Israel.

Weakness of Miracles, Signs, and Symbols

Miracles,⁠1 signs, and symbols require interpretation. Much like a Rorschach test, the nature of the interpretation offered is often more a reflection of presuppositions of the observer than the intent of the author or creator.

The Prophet Hosea (8:4) wrote:  “They made kings, but not through me. They set up princes, but I knew it not. With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction.” I found during my time as a hospital chaplain I observed that the majority of people admitted to the emergency department were there for preventable problems arising from poor lifestyle choices. If self-destruction is a theme in physical health, then how much more difficult is it to maintain good spiritual health? For such reasons, many of the Old Testament religious symbols had the potential to serve either to point to God or to become idols of fallen worship, like the fiery serpent fashioned by Moses (1 Kgs 18:4).⁠2

In the New Testament, Jesus himself experienced a Gethsemane moment just before his arrest: Knowing that he would be arrested and sent to the cross, will he turn to God accepting his fate or run away to save his own life? (Matt 26:39) Our daily responses to pain—turning to God or into the pain—form who we are, much like the Prophet Job’s relationship was strengthened by his experience of pain (Job 1:21). This is a opening for the Holy Spirit to form us. Still, the symbol or the pain is itself inherently ambiguous.

Covenants Reliably Point to God

While many miracles, signs, and symbols are inherently ambiguous, divine covenants invite one into a longterm relationship with God. The covenant provides objective boundaries and incentives to the relationship and because of the longterm nature of the covenantal relationship, the covenant allows the Holy Spirit ample opportunity to shape the faith of participants. While the New Covenant in Christ is qualitatively better than prior covenants (Jer 31:33), the formative nature of the special grace covenants is already present in the covenants with Moses and David (Niehaus 2014, 32).

Niehaus (2014, 37) outlines the form of a Hittite covenant:

“[A] covenant is an expression of God’s nature as a great suzerain who provides good things for his vassals, who imparts standards for their way of life, who will bless them for obedience and curse them for disobedience, and who is the eternal witness to these facts.”

Covenantal stipulations provide for both blessings and curses, as articulated in Deuteronomy 28 for the Mosaic covenant, much like an employment contract (Niehaus 2014, 36).

A suzerain is a “king of kings” or “Lord of Lords,” which today we might recognize as a super-power. A super-power, like the United States, provides for military and other assistance to allied nations within its domain. Allied nations have similar constitutional governance structures, trading treaties, and may offer space for military bases and ports of call to the super-power. Travel between the super-power and other nations in its domain is relatively easy so long as visitors abide by various laws and bureaucratic conventions. The chief difference between today’s treaties and a Hittite treaty is that a Hittite treaty is more inclusive of religious and lifestyle stipulations, and, of course, constitutional government replaces the role of a suzerain in the modern treaty.

The New Covenant in Christ

The Prophet Jeremiah anticipated the limitations of the Old Testament covenants in pointing people to God:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer. 31:31-33)

Jeremiah describes covenantal law as “I took them by the hand” which the people “broke.” In other words, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them drink.

The formational problem articulated by Jeremiah is not unlike the older brother’s hardened heart in Jesus’ Parable of the Two Brothers (or Prodigal Son), which is a New Testament coming of age story. The story begins with a father with two sons neither of whom loves his father. The younger son demands his inheritance, runs off, and squanders it. When he falls into destitution, he remembers his father, and returns home to beg his father to offer him a job. When his father forgives him, the older son is angry and resentful. The irony of this parable is that the younger and initially more outrageous son is the one who learns to love his father, something his older brother never does (Luke 15:11-31).

The qualitative superiority of the New Testament covenant in Christ arises precisely in permitting the Holy Spirit greater opportunity to form and inform our faith in God.

Footnotes

1 C.S. Lewis (1974, 5) defines the word, miracle: “to mean interference with nature by supernatural power.”

2 Schlossberg (1990, 6) defines idolatry as: “Any substitute of what is created for the creator.”

References

Lewis, C.S. 1974. Miracles: A Preliminary Study (Orig Pub 1960). New York: HarperCollins.

Niehaus, Jeffrey J. 2014. Biblical Theology: Volume 1: The Common Grace Covenants. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

Schlossberg, Herbert. 1990. Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture. Wheaton: Crossway Books.

Scoring Covenants

Also see:

The Face of God in the Parables
The Who Question
Preface to a Life in Tension
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Author site: http://www.StephenWHiemstra.net
Publisher site: http://www.T2Pneuma.com
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