Contract or Covenant

 

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

—Hebrews 8:10

God doesn’t do contracts. Contracts, according to Webster’s Dictionary, are created by both parties and signed as legally binding agreements. Most often, love has nothing to do with a contract document. In fact generally speaking, people enter such contracts in order to prevent the other party from taking advantage of them.

God made a divine covenant with His dearly loved children in the Garden of Eden. He made Adam, and Adam’s race, care-givers of God’s new creation.

Later, as a result of sin, God made another covenant with man and with Satan. Throughout the Old Testament, God often visited His chosen and dearly loved people with covenants of one kind or another.

Humans have made covenants with each other, too. In her study of King David in 1 Samuel 18, ¹ Beth Moore shows how the relationship between Jonathan and David gives us a perfect picture of God’s new covenant with us. She points out that a Godly covenant has three parts:

1. a sign
   
   
2. a sacrifice
   
   
3. a spoken commitment
   
   

In the case of Jonathan, he signaled his covenant by giving David his robe, his tunic, his sword, his bow, and his belt. He sacrificed to David the very throne to which he was entitled as the son of then King Saul. And, Jonathan spoke his commitment in 1 Samuel 20:13:

If my father is inclined to harm you, may the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if I do not let you know and send you away safely. May the Lord be with you as he has been with my father.

Like God’s new covenant with us, the foundation for Jonathan’s covenant with David was based on his deep brotherly love for David. What a perfect picture of God’s covenant with us.

Beth Moore also points out that the covenant between Jonathan and David was not based on David’s love for Jonathan, but the other way around. The evidence of love flows from the one who initiated the covenant. ²

So it is with the covenant God has made with us through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. The evidence of God’s love for us flows to us through His covenant with us. This divine covenant cannot hold together by relying on our poor and imperfect love for God. The glue in this covenant comes to us because of God’s unfailing, undying, and eternal love for us.

God’s love for us, His covenantal love, should inspire us and move us ever closer to Him. We should faithfully and gratefully serve and love our God in response to His faithfulness shown to us through His covenant with us.

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1 Moore, Beth. Portraits of Devotion. Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Publishing Company, 2014. Pp. 29-30.

2 Ibid.