Deuteronomy

The Conditional Covenant

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 98-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 98

Dictation Name: RR187BA98

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. This is the confidence that we have in Him that if we ask anything according to His will He heareth us. Having these promises let us draw near to the throne of grace with true hearts in full assurance of faith. My voice shalt thou hear in the morning oh Lord, in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee and will look up. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we give thanks unto Thee for all Thy mercies, Thy providential care and the certainty of Thy government. Grant oh Lord that day after day we refresh ourselves in Thy grace and mercy. Know that we are not our own but Thou hast made us for Thy purposes and not for ourselves. Teach us therefore so to walk that in all things and in every step we may seek Thy purpose, Thy glory and Thy service. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 26:16-19. The Conditional Covenant. Deuteronomy 26:16-19.

“This day the Lord thy God hath commanded thee to do these statutes and judgments: thou shalt therefore keep and do them with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.

17 Thou hast avouched the Lord this day to be thy God, and to walk in his ways, and to keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his judgments, and to hearken unto his voice:

18 And the Lord hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee, and that thou shouldest keep all his commandments;

19 And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the Lord thy God, as he hath spoken.”

Up until this point Moses has been giving a review of the law, now the covenant is to be renewed, the younger generation with God. The conditions of the covenant, curses and blessings will be dealt with in subsequent chapters, very thoroughly. Chapter twenty eight, one of the most important chapters in the Bible was once the chapter that the Bible was turned when an oath of office was taken by a president. Some commentators nowadays have little to say about these verses and they see them simply as a kind of conclusion to the statement of the law. But Anthony Philips is perceptive in calling attention to a very important fact, he said:

“The blessing remains conditional on Israel’s obedience.”

Israel’s sin was to assume that the blessings were unconditional and an inheritance and property. This is a transgression commonplace in various churches as well. More than a few nations and families highly blessed have also assumed that God’s blessing is a permanent property irrespective of what they do. It was amazing the other day to hear a statement on television by someone representing Israel that God had given them certain areas of land and they could not surrender it to anyone, that God had given that to them thousands of years ago. Of course he was not a believer but somehow there was an unconditional gift. Now that’s a very common error in our day, we will return to it. These verses are about the covenant, they presuppose the covenant. God in His grace and mercy gives to Israel His covenant and law. Covenant is another word for contract or treaty. Now when a covenant or contract or a treaty is between equals both parties have a hand in making it and that covenant contract or treaty is law from that point on.

However, if a superior makes a covenant with an inferior who has nothing they can give to him and what can man give to God, to add something to God, then it is both a covenant of law, God giving His law and a covenant of grace because in His grace He makes them His people. So God’s covenant throughout the Bible is both grace and law. The law is a gift of grace. The happy side of the law is that obedience leads to blessings whereas disobedience leads to curses. The sin of men and nations has been to treat God’s providential blessings as natural prerogatives, as an inheritance. To do so is to invite judgment. There is a repeated emphasis on the obligation to walk in His ways and to keep His statutes and His commandments and His judgments and to hearken unto His voice. Thou shouldst keep all His commandments. We are told moreover that this must be done with all thy heart and with all thy soul. We do not have here a demand for total obedience on pain of judgment but rather that our total direction be one of faithfulness to our covenant God. Last week we saw that there are two words for sin in the New Testament, anomia, anti-law, anti-God, lawlessness and hamartia, missing the mark, but you’re aiming at the mark. God does not give His covenant to the people as a device for punishing them but as the way of life and of blessing. This is made very clear in Deuteronomy 28 as we shall see in a few weeks. This is why we are called upon to reverence the covenant law. This is a term used by some commentators, to reverence the covenant law. We do not revere the laws of the state, at best we obey the laws of the state. The one is God’s law, expressing His nature, whereas statist law is often no more than the arbitrary will of the state. The promise to covenant obedience is that the people will be exulted by God.

In verse nineteen we see that God says and promises to the covenantal faithful people to make thee high above all nations which He hath made. This is a remarkable promise; it is a key to history. These words form the conclusion to the covenant or treaty, this is ancient legal language. God is [unknown] and Israel is the vassal. We forget that this country was established as a covenant country. The oath of office is an oath to affirm, to retain, to abide by the covenant of God, it’s in the constitution, but we’ve forgotten what it means. Every time a president takes that oath of office if he is faithless to God’s covenant he is invoking God’s judgment. God has blessed us, of course one can say ‘oh but they landed here on a very favorable site’ what about the Portuguese in Brazil, incredibly wealthy but where is it now? We have been blessed, we will be judged. The generation that left Egypt was faithless to the covenant law and perished in the wilderness, the younger generation now had the privilege of covenantal life. Wesley J. Hoppy says of verse nineteen and I quote:

“A national life lived in accord with divine law cannot help but reflect divine glory.”

Covenantal obligations are opportunities for the fullness of life and blessing. To view the law negatively as the antinomians do is to view life unfavorably or with hostility; for law is to life what our bones are to our ability to function. It provides structure. Deuteronomy 28 makes clear that the choice is between life and death. Many other texts such as Psalm 1 restate this same fact. The covenant makes very clear that grace and law are inseparable. Any faith which seeks either one or the other to the inclusion of either is not biblical but anti-biblical.

This text stresses also that the covenantal faith must be kept with all Thy heart and with all thy soul. The covenant law is not a way of salvation but it sets forth the life of the redeemed. To be in covenant with God means to be under His law. If we are not under His law we are not under His covenant nor in His grace. The fact of God’s covenant requires both grace and law. Antinomianism has insisted on the radical discontinuity between the New and the Old Testament. For example, almost two centuries Charles Simeon wrote and I quote:

“The Jewish covenant had in respect in a great measure to temporal blessings, the bestowment of which was suspended entirely on their performance of certain conditions whereas ours relates all together to spiritual blessings and though it has conditions as well as theirs it supplies strength for the performance of them and thereby secures from failure all those who cordially embrace it.” Unquote.

In other words, the Old Testament covenant had more blessings to it than the new and that’s absurd. It’s very hard to believe that those who champion this view really believe it. Simeon said, let me repeat, and many echo him, that in the new covenant ours are quote, ‘all together spiritual blessings’ unquote. God doesn’t bless anyone except spiritually? Why then do these antinomians pray constantly for all kinds of material blessings or for healing or for other like things? The covenant in its law require reciprocity. God tells Israel what He in His grace has done for them and what they must do for Him, that is obey His covenant law, to be His people. This reciprocity is tied to gratitude. We are to remember God’s mercies and to be all the more faithful. We must in humility as a covenant people see ourselves as simply the subjects of God’s grace, not the possessors of a special merit.

History is not a triumph of the self-willed but of the God-ordained and God can and does raise up His Assyrians in judgment on faithless peoples. The conditional character of the covenant and of God’s blessings must be stressed. A covenant is a treaty, a contract, there are penalties for breaking it. We live in a time when people insist on mindless universe in which man’s mind and will are the only intelligent force. The determination of history if that be truth then becomes a human decision which is exactly how people now see it. The universe or multiverse now being mindless supposedly there is now no force, no direction to history, only a brutal struggle for power. To deny God and His covenant is to strip life and history of purpose and meaning. But as against this ugly and blind struggle for power God’s covenantal dealings with men tell us that history is a treaty, a contract, made by God with men, an act of amazing grace and we are duty bound to respond to it with faithfulness. God’s contract means that all of history has meaning as does every life. As against meaningless chance we have total meaning. Our Lord tells us the very hairs of your head are all numbered, not a hair falls or a sparrow drops apart from our heavenly Father. Such a total meaning is beyond our ability to comprehend but it is essential to covenantalism because it insists on God’s radical involvement in history. If God’s government is so total that it extends to every hair on my head then His control of all things is absolute. For antinomianism to surrender this for its pious emotions is to truly a deadly loss.

We began by quoting Anthony Phillips that blessings in the bible are conditional upon obedience. Israel’s great sin was to believe that God’s covenant is unconditional and this is rapidly becoming the church’s sin also. God’s grace gives us salvation and blessings. If we assume this means an unconditional love from Him we misconstrue His word and this is so common! All over the country there are churchmen insisting that God’s love is unconditional which is a different thing from saying there is eternal security in our salvation. We are very plainly told in First Peter 4:17 that judgment must begin at the house of God, with the people of God. Again in Matthew 13:12 we are told by our Lord:

“For whosoever has to him shall be given and he shall have more abundance but whosoever hath not from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

The statement is repeated in Matthew 25:29, Mark 4:25, Luke 8:18 and Luke 19:26. Moreover, our Lord declares in Luke 12:48 very much the same:

“For unto whomsoever much is given of him shall be much required and to whom men have committed much of him they will ask the more.”

Israel had made a property and a possession out of God’s grace and love and now the church is doing the same. This is an invitation to judgment. We cannot take God’s grace and mercy for granted. God is not bound, we are, we are His creation, we have an obligation to serve Him, to love Him, to obey Him. To treat His love as unconditional so that we can go our way and do as we please is evil, and yet pastors such as the very prominent Bob Thune have insisted that once you’ve said yes to Jesus you can go out and commit adultery, kill, lie, steal, do anything you want and God is bound to save you. God bound and man free? That is blasphemy. Let us pray.

Thy word oh Lord is truth and Thy covenant is our anchor and our hope. Make us ever mindful that Thy covenant is a covenant of life and of blessing, that we have an obligation day by day to be Thy people, to obey Thee, to serve Thee, to rejoice in Thee, to know that Thou art God. That all things come from Thee and all things must be offered up unto Thee for we are Thine. Bless us in Thy service, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Why should the Israelis believe in God’s promise when they don’t believe in God?

[Rushdoony] That’s a good question and yet it comes again and again and of course the same error has in recent years become very prominent in the church as well. So that it becomes a matter of inheritance in some instances which cannot be taken away, a matter of race therefore it’s ineradicable and so on. And then God is bound, supposedly, which is thoroughly an error and a sin. We cannot bind God, God’s word binds us. Yes?

[Question] The inalienable right, the loss of inalienable rights.

[Rushdoony] The bible doesn’t talk about rights it talks about duties, duties to God and to man. Our obligations one to another. It does not tell us, for example, as against your neighbor these are your rights. What it says is Thou shalt love Thy neighbor as Thyself. And what does Paul tell us as well as other texts? Love is the fulfilling, putting into force, of the law. I may not like my neighbor but I have kept the law if I respect his right to life, I do not kill, I respect his home, I do not commit adultery, I respect his property, I do not steal, his reputation, I do not bear false witness and so on. I am showing love in action. We’ve reduced love to a feeling and one of the idiocies of that which I’ve encountered more than one is that men who brutally beat their wives and women who also brutally beat their husbands will insist but I love him.

Love is become a meaningless term in this context because it is a lawless kind of love which is not love. So that the bible never talks about rights it talks about duties. Our duty to our neighbors and his duty to us, and it is on that basis that the law legislates, that we all have obligations to one another and those obligations are what make life livable and life good. Any other questions or comments?

We’ve shifted you see, in terms of the idea of rights, life from duties and respect one for another to entitlements. And everybody sits back waiting for what is theirs. I very often when I have performed a marriage service ask the couple to read with me the vows they must take and to think about the words, I do promise in covenant before God and these witnesses to be thy loving and faithful wife or husband and so on and so forth. And what do the marriage vows do, you don’t promise a thing in terms of what I’m going to get but you promise everything to the other person. You’ve both promised to give but what the modern expectation in marriage is is of receiving and that’s why we’re in trouble. Because we’ve totally reversed the meaning of love. We’ve become passive, we are to be recipients, we have a right to receive it and that is alien to the whole temper of the bible. In every part of Christendom all the marriage ceremonies have that common characteristic however different the wording maybe. Each promises without asking for anything and that means they are both pledged before God to love, an outward ongoing thing. So you see we’ve reversed the whole meaning of that word, we’ve reversed the whole basis of life and we sit back and wait for our rights and for us to be loved even though we may be stinkers.

Well if there are no further comments let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Father, Thy word is truth and Thy word is a joy to us for we are hungry for life. We are hungry for Thy mercies, Thy blessings, we thank Thee that Thou hast made us Thine. Thou art so often good oh Lord to us who too often cannot be good not even to ourselves. How great Thou art oh Lord and we praise Thee. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.