Systematic Theology – Covenant

Messiahship, Covenant and Sovereignty

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 21-22

Genre: Speech

Track: 21 of 22

Dictation Name: 21 Messiahship, Covenant and Sovereignty

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us begin our meeting with prayer.

Oh Lord our God unto whom all things belong, who art the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, we come to Thee in these difficult times mindful that the government is upon Thy shoulders. Do Thou oh Lord raise up the men, raise up the warriors that we may contend with the powers of darkness and be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ our Lord. In His name we pray, Amen.

Tonight we conclude our series on The Doctrine of the Covenant, we shall begin a series on the theology of the state in our next session. No one bothers to consider the theology of the state which tells us something of the problem and the crisis within the church. Because God is the Lord, His word applies to every area of life and thought and the state, the school, the family, the individual, every sector of life has as much an obligation to be under God and faithful to His word as does the church. Our subject this evening in the first session is Messiahship, Covenant and Sovereignty. The doctrine of the covenant requires a Messiah. As we have seen to review very briefly, a covenant is a treaty. It is an agreement between two powers, the kind of covenant we have in the Bible is between a supreme power and a very inferior one, between God and man. It is therefore inescapably a covenant of grace, because it is not a covenant between equals. On the other hand a treaty or a covenant to use the more accurate term is a treaty of law, it binds both parties in terms of law.

So that the doctrine of the covenant is a doctrine of grace and a doctrine of law, the two are inseparable. We cannot have a covenant with God without law. We cannot have a covenant with God without grace being the key fact because we have nothing to offer to God except obedience, loyalty, whereas the basic nature of the covenant is a treaty of law. Now in a covenant of grace God and man are brought together and man binds himself to obey God’s covenant law. The covenant law has as its purpose that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Man failed to do this in Eden and outside of Eden so that man became a covenant breaker. The purpose of the Messiah was to save God’s covenant partner, man, because in a covenant both parties pledge to be faithful to the other unto death. To rescue one another. To put their whole life at the disposal and at the service of the other. Now God in Christ rescues man from the power of sin and death and demonstrates His willingness to die for His covenant partner even in His unfaithfulness. Thus Christ as the head of the covenant restores man into God’s grace and calling and empowers man to fulfill His calling. Jacob [unknown], some few years ago, in his book The Covenant , The Theology of Human Destiny said and I quote:

“Messiahship implies the realization of God’s reign upon earth. What the king of Israel was unable to accomplish, namely the establishment of Yahweh’s overlordship over the nations, is ultimately brought about by God’s anointed at the end of days. The messianic hope in the prophetic writings seems to be sustained by this kind of reasoning. If this is so then the psalms that have the kingship of God as their theme may be regarded as messianic psalms.” Unquote.

Our Hebrew term which we have as the word Messiah is a word meaning anointed. Anointing is an act of consecration into power and rule. Anointing on the human scene is from God into the service of God. Anointing was always accompanied by a cleansing and it meant dedication to a holy war. Anointing often conferred as with kings dominion. It also meant the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. Now God established the covenant with Adam and Eve and said they should exercise dominion and to subdue the earth. The Garden of Eden was a pilot project, where man was to learn obedience, to learn what it meant to exercise dominion and to develop the implications of subduing the earth and developing its potential under God. What existed there Christ by His coming says is to be restored and expanded to the whole earth and to be greater. Go ye therefore and disciple all nations teaching them all things that I have commanded you. The meek shall inherit the earth. They shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. In Isaiah repeatedly gives us the promises concerning the glory that is to be: the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. Thus when we look at these promise throughout scripture we see first of all that in Eden man dwelt at peace with animals, with all living things. With the triumph of the Messiah the curse begins to recede and each of us as we are brought unto the kingdom sees the receding of the curse in our lives and as we grow in holiness we move from the realm of curse to blessing. Man shall live we are told again and again in scripture in peace with the animals and the animals one with another. Isaiah 11:6-9 and 66:25 and other verses stress this theme. Then second we are told that man shall be in peace with other men.

Isaiah 2:1-4, Isaiah 44:1-8, Isaiah 65:17-24, Isaiah 11:9, and other like verses tell us that war shall cease, that God’s justice shall govern the whole earth and cover the earth. Then we are told in such texts as Amos 9:13, Isaiah 4:2 and Isaiah 32:15-20 and Isaiah 55:13, Psalm 72:16 that prosperity will accompany the triumph of the Messiah’s reign. And Revelations tell us the riches of the rebel nations will be brought into Messiah’s kingdom.

“And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.

27 And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life.”

John tells us in Revelations 21:26 echoing a constant emphasis of the Book of Isaiah. But the movement is not backwards to Eden but forward to the New Jerusalem. The curse is to disappear and the nations are to bring their glory into Christ’s realm and there is to be a permanence because the land, the new Adam is at the center. Christ came in terms of this covenant to renew it with a newly created people, recreated in His image. He came as the last Adam, Paul tells us, the new covenant man to create a new covenant people. He renewed the covenant in His own blood and hence it is an everlasting covenant. Even the Rabbis through the centuries recognized this and declared it was predicted by Jeremiah 31:31 that the new covenant would be permanent. Moses Maimonides, one of the great medieval Jewish thinkers, said that the two key aspects of the Messianic kingdom were the sovereignty of the Messiah and the rule of His law. There was a time when all churches fought for this. The key fact here for our present concern is His sovereignty.

God is the Lord which means God is the sovereign. The remarkable fact about the covenant is that it places God on both sides of the covenant. The covenant began with an unequal relationship, God and man. But God in His grace gives us God the Son so that now there is an everlasting covenant because Christ can never break it and all that are in Christ have an eternal security because of that fact. It is a covenant of equals between the father and the son and man’s place in that covenant is still all of grace but a marvelous one. As against the powers of sin and death we have the Lord who is the victory, who is the rock of ages¸ who is He against whom the gates of hell cannot prevail He tells us in Matthew 16:18 or more literally the gates of hell cannot hold out against Him and His true church. The covenant in Christ manifests Christ’s sovereignty on earth, it has therefore political implications. John Knox who is more a father of the United States than most people recognize or must scholars are ready to admit said concerning Scotland when He established Scotland as a covenant people and I quote:

“This is the league betwixt God and us: that He alone shall be our God and we shall be His people. He shall communicate with us of His grace and goodness. We shall serve Him in body and spirit. He shall be our safeguard from death and damnation. We shall seek to Him and shall fly from all strange gods.” Unquote.

Tyndale earlier had said and Knox agreed emphatically as did the puritans generally and I quote:

“God fulfills His promises to men on condition that man would endeavor to keep God’s law.” Unquote.

Thus in the person of Jesus Christ the covenant lord and the sovereign over all thing came to claim His realm.

The Book of Revelation gives us a view of history in terms of this. Even as the last seven plagues against Egypt in the day of Moses struck at Egypt alone and not at Israel in Goshen so the seven judgments of Revelation strike at the world of the ungodly to dispossess them from the earth to the end that the kingdoms of this world might become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ we are told. Therefore no realm can be withheld from Christ’s reign. A covenant is a total treaty, it has priority over everything else that a man is or that a man owns and over every other relationship. Now because throughout the centuries there was some recognition of the fact that treaties are covenants we have two very interesting facts. First the bible forbids us to have any treaties with ungodly nations or marriage which is a covenant with unbelievers. Then second, because of that lingering awareness of what a treaty or a covenant is, even in the United States Constitution treaties were given a preeminence over every other kind of law and this is why in terms of this for generations there was a fear of any entangling alliances.

It was a great warning of Washington’s farewell address. It was a religious principle for generations with the people of this country to be not unequally yoked with nations that were essentially humanistic. We have forgotten why that emphasis was there and what its meaning was. Theoretically to this day a treaty has priority over the constitution because a treaty like marriage is a radical bond. Even as in marriage two people come together forsaking all other and do vow and covenant before God and these witnesses to be together in sickness and health, richer and poorer, for better and for worse, so a treaty, a covenant, has priority over all other claims, it is a radical bond. Wherever in history covenant thinking has receded there too the doctrine of the sovereignty of the sovereign God has also receded because the covenant brings us face to face with the awareness of the total claims of God over us. That whether we are believers or unbelievers God by having established a covenant with the first Adam has a total claim over all mankind to claim what He again asserts to Noah. Every living creature, animals and men, are totally under the claims of God and His covenant. Are there any questions now on what we have been discussing?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] He created them, they gain life itself from Him, they live in His earth, He requires their obedience, He requires a tithe of them, He says you’re mine. The earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. So God judges believers and unbelievers alike because He has a total claim over them.

Any other questions? Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] That’s a good question, who n earth is designated to see that the unbeliever or the Christians, very few of them tithe, who on earth is designated to see that they do. There are some laws in the Bible for which God allows no punishment by man. And the law of the tithe is one of them because God says I will punish men and nations for this to Malachi. If God gave control over certain kinds of law to men it would give too much power to man and the state. So that some laws are not enforceable by men, God does the enforcing. The law of the tithe is one such law. God makes it clear He exacts His penalty but He will not allow anyone to take His preogrotive of control over the tithe. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it’s a very significant fact because when churches do they are saying we are the total kingdom of God. Some say it has to be the local church only which receives the tithe, they are therefore playing God because God leaves it to the conscience of every one of us as to what we shall give to. The interesting thing is that when the medieval church began to stipulate that the tithe had to go to the parish church it led to the reformation. Prior to that whenever the church became corrupt the faithful stopped tithing to the local church, they gave it to a group of reforming monks, a new order perhaps, very commonly a new order that was created and would preach in the street corners or create chapels in which to preach. And nothing led to a more readiness to change on the part of the local parish church then to see that suddenly their income melted away.

The wages of sin were pretty costly, you see. The result was that when the tithe was tied to the local church, your parish, and in more recent times attendance was tied to the parish church it was not a valid attendance at mass to go elsewhere, that led to the reformation, to an explosion, reform instead of staying within the church went outside. Well we’re seeing the same problem arise within many protestant churches. They are trying to exert a monopoly on the giving. You cannot give a tithe to anybody but your local church, it’s a very common refrain. It’s interesting how that the kind of article that is appearing in one church periodical after another is an attack on Para church organizations. A Para church organization is any kind of Christian agency other than the local church. It can be an independent mission board. It can be something like Dr. Lester Roloff’s activity, dealing with delinquents. It can be something like Chalcedon, anything that is performing a Christian mission but is not specifically a part of the established church order. They are attacking these. And they are taking the same route as the medieval church that the word of God has no place outside the control of the established church order. It’s a very serious situation. It is interesting that in the fifties and sixties and then into the seventies one the most common complaints I would hear and then sometimes they were intense emotional ones, against the Christian school movement was that it would take money away from the ministry of the church. Now of course that has all but disappeared. So there is growth in [laughs] in the established church. Any other questions or comments?

Well we shall take a break for a few minutes and then resume our session with our next subject: Covenant Salvation.