Systematic Theology – Covenant

Covenant Salvation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 22-22

Genre: Speech

Track: 22 of 22

Dictation Name: 22 Covenant Salvation

Location/Venue:

Year:

Our subject in this session is Covenant Salvation. In Jeremiah 34:12-22 we read:

“Therefore the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying,

13 Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel; I made a covenant with your fathers in the day that I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondmen, saying,

14 At the end of seven years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew, which hath been sold unto thee; and when he hath served thee six years, thou shalt let him go free from thee: but your fathers hearkened not unto me, neither inclined their ear.

15 And ye were now turned, and had done right in my sight, in proclaiming liberty every man to his neighbour; and ye had made a covenant before me in the house which is called by my name:

16 But ye turned and polluted my name, and caused every man his servant, and every man his handmaid, whom he had set at liberty at their pleasure, to return, and brought them into subjection, to be unto you for servants and for handmaids.

17 Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbour: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

18 And I will give the men that have transgressed my covenant, which have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made before me, when they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof,

19 The princes of Judah, and the princes of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, and the priests, and all the people of the land, which passed between the parts of the calf;

20 I will even give them into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of them that seek their life: and their dead bodies shall be for meat unto the fowls of the heaven, and to the beasts of the earth.

21 And Zedekiah king of Judah and his princes will I give into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of them that seek their life, and into the hand of the king of Babylon's army, which are gone up from you.

22 Behold, I will command, saith the Lord, and cause them to return to this city; and they shall fight against it, and take it, and burn it with fire: and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation without an inhabitant.”

The purpose of the covenant is to reveal God’s grace and salvation. The covenant is of grace and of law and its purpose is to save. God binds Himself to redeem His people out of all their troubles if they are faithful. The covenant God creates all the conditions of life and the covenant law governs them all. Whether a man is faithful or faithless will determine His relationship to God and the covenant. Whether he will be blessed or whether he will be cursed. God’s covenant with Noah as with Adam embraces all men and creatures and is an everlasting covenant. The word of God to Jeremiah which we just read makes clear all men have the freedom to be cursed or blessed. That’s the extent of man’s relationship to God. Choose ye this day who you will serve, choose the way wherein ye shall walk, the way of blessing or the way of curses. The message in this case is directed in particular to Judah. It had been a time of crisis, the armies of Babylon had been at the gates, they had left temporarily it turned out. In fear of the judgment of God when Jeremiah had preached they had gone through a pseudo-revival. One of the things that Jeremiah indicted them for was making slaves out of their fellow believers. In the bible, slavery is not a permanent condition, a slave was generally what we would call a bond-servant. He was someone who to make restitution or to work off debt was in service to someone for a maximum of six years but what had developed as the monarchy developed was permanent bondage for all such. They would not be released.

And so Jeremiah said the judgment of God is upon you because in addition to all your other sins you’ve enslaved your fellow believers or ostensibly fellow believers. Let us remember that even a foreigner who was bought as a slave had always the option of freedom if he converted. So that there was very little in the way of permanent slavery ever possible. Jeremiah reminds them that when a covenant was made the covenant animal that was sacrificed, the calf or the lamb, was cut in half and each half laid on one side. The covenant parties then walked through between these two to indicate so may I be judged and slain and cut asunder and destroyed if I am faithless to the covenant. You remember also that in Genesis 13:10-12 a great horror came over Abraham as God made the covenant with him and he saw the vultures descending upon the parted sacrificial animals. Because he saw there the judgment that would come upon all who were covenant breakers. God refers precisely to that and He said you passed between the parts of the calf which was cut in twain and because you have been faithless I will give you into the hands of your enemies, to the hands of those who seek your life and your dead bodies will be as meat unto the fowls of the heaven and unto the beasts of the earth. So He reminds them of the judgment that falls upon covenant breakers. Such a death in antiquity especially seemed to men to be the ultimate indignity, a horror and yet this was to be their judgment.

The force of these words might come through a little better in some of the modern translations, John Bright in his commentary renders Jeremiah 34:17:

“You have not obeyed me by proclaiming emancipation each to his brother and each to his neighbor so believe me I am going to proclaim your emancipation, Yahweh’s word, your emancipation to the sword, to disease and starvation.”

James Moffat rendered the same verse thus:

“Therefore the eternal declares since you haven’t obeyed me and proclaimed freedom each to his brother and fellow I now proclaim you free, free to fall under the sword, pestilence and famine.”

You get the point. God says you have a freedom, a freedom to be blessed and a freedom to be cursed and how you respond to the covenant will determine which you shall have. God regards every man as either covenant keeper or covenant breaker and He especially regards all who are ostensible covenant keepers as particularly worthy of judgment. This is why we are told in the New Testament judgment begins at the house of God, why? Because it is there that there should be the most faithfulness, the greatest sense of responsibility and therefore the judgment is the greatest. And this is why the judgment upon Jerusalem which had the temple of God and the greatest knowledge of Him was judged so severely. The statement made by our Lord was that there shall never be a judgment to equal this in all history. And anyone who has read an account of the siege and fall of Jerusalem will certainly know that there’s never been a disaster in history to equal that. Covenant salvation, covenant reprobation. Consider our own position as a country. We have come to regard as did the people just before Judea fell to Babylon the forms of the covenant as merely meaningless forms without any content, traditions.

We forget, for example, and we dealt with this significance of the oath you will recall some time back for an hour, the meaning of an oath is covenantal. When an oath of office was included in the constitution it meant far more than any statement concerning God would have meant. Because the significance of an oath was not unknown there, all knew what an oath meant, it meant that the bible was open to Deuteronomy 28 and an official of state from the President on down took an oath of office with his hand upon that bible whereby he invoked upon himself and upon the country the blessings for obedience and the curses of that chapter for disobedience. We still have an oath of office, its meaning has not changed in the sight of God. Thus the alternatives are the blessing and the cursing, temporal and eternal. There is no neutrality. As John Moffat said, a covenant that yields its blessing to all indiscriminately cannot be broken or kept. The covenant therefore offers salvation or reprobation. Those are the alternatives. And God’s covenant salvation requires the obedience of faith, the response of faith, faithfulness. When God says as He often does in the Bible, that He is our God, He requires us to be His people. Moreover, in the Bible, election is a responsibility rather than a privilege. It is a calling, not a subsidy and the same is true of salvation. Salvation is deliverance from judgment into blessing and service. It is not, in other words, a gift for picnic use but for battle use. The sad fact is that some of the popular presentations of the doctrine of salvation are extremely individualistic.

I’m saved and therefore I’ve got fire and life insurance so I’m going to heaven. No sense of the responsibility, personal and corporate, as a member of Christ’s kingdom. An individualistic doctrine of salvation offers salvation as an option for man to choose, try it you’ll like it, not as the sovereign grace of God. It offers salvation as an asset which man can acquire or reject. The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts the whole fact of man’s fall and redemption in a covenant context. It says in the question and answers, numbers 16-20:

“Did all mankind fall in Adam's first transgression?

A. The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression.

Into what estate did the fall bring mankind?

A. The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery.

Wherein consists the sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell?

A. The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell consists in the guilt of Adam's first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin; together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it.

What is the misery of that estate whereinto man fell?

A. All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever.

Did God leave all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and misery?

A. God having, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a redeemer.”

Now you notice the emphasis there, it is on the corporate-ness of man, in Adam and in Christ. And the fact that as an individual he shares in a corporate responsibility with Adam if he is in Adam and in Christ if he is in Christ, so that he moves in terms of a realm and in obedience to a king. You may recall the first primer in this country began with the alphabet and after the letter A ‘in Adam’s fall, we sinned all’ and right on through what that alphabet as a child learned it taught that child that the covenant is a reality, that he belongs to a corporate humanity that is under the curse or a corporate humanity that is under the blessing. But today our problem is a moral anarchy in which every man feels he is in a world all by himself, that he has no share in the world around him and that he can go through life and through the world as along a table at a potluck or a smorgasbord, picking and choosing out of life what he wants. Nothing mandatory and commanding about it. And it is this moral anarchism that is creating such very great problems for modern man because he sees no responsibility for society as a whole. And this is true of man as an individual and man as he is organized into schools and colleges and guilds and associations, professional and otherwise, unions and corporations. He simply magnifies His moral anarchism and hence we have a problem. But God created man a covenant creature, inescapably so, and man moves therefore in either the world of blessings or of curses, a world of reprobation or of salvation. Man is a religious creature, not a political animal and he is a covenant creature because God so ordained it.

Man must see himself therefore as a covenant creature. Are there any questions now? Well if there are no questions let us bow our heads in prayer as we conclude our meeting tonight.

Lord it has been good for us to be here. We thank Thee that Thy word is truth and Thy way is justice and light. Give us grace day by day to be faithful unto Thee, to rejoice in Thy providence and to be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ our Lord. Give unto all traveling mercies on their homeward way, a blessed night’s rest and joy in Thy service always, in Jesus’ name, Amen.