COVENANTS OF GOD (3)

“God raised him from the dead so that he will never be subject to decay. As God has said, ‘I will give you the holy and sure blessings promised to David‘” (Acts 13:14).

We are looking at the four major Old Testament covenants God made. The first was that with Noah after the flood. The rainbow is the symbol of this covenant. The second and probably most important is that with Abraham in which the Lord would bless all through his seed and promised to Abraham children, children who were to live holy lives, and who would receive the land promised. The third covenant was the Torah (instruction) known to us as the Law of Moses. The purpose of this covenant was to instruct Israel in how to live before God in a hostile world. Each covenant flows out of the previous one as God responds to the problems that sin brought into this world.

The fourth Old Testament covenant is the one God makes with David. The reason for this is found in the book of Judges. After Joshua dies, the people began to forget God and in the process adopted the practices of the nations around them. It was a roller coaster ride from deliverance to rebellion. The last of the judges is Samuel the prophet. The people come to him and ask for a king like the nations around them, something that upsets Samuel (1 Samuel 8). Several reasons caused this development. One, both Eli’s and Samuel’s sons were immoral and the people saw that the judges were not working right. Second was the threats that came outside of Israel by nations led by kings (1 Samuel 11) (1). While Samuel was upset with this development, God states that Israel has rejected Him from being their king, so God gives Samuel permission to anoint a king.

Saul becomes the first king of Israel but it is the king the nation wants and they learn a valuable lesson about power. Saul lets the power go to his head and rebels against God’s commands and is forsaken by God. God wanted a king after His own heart and chose David. David would do what is right in the eyes of the Lord, David would become the model to which all kings would be compared. “As for you, if you walk before me faithfully with integrity of heart and uprightness, as David your father did, and do all I command and observe my decrees and laws. I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father when I said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel’” (1 Kings 9:4-5). This promise is found in 2 Samuel 7 (2).

The Psalmist remembers the covenant with Abraham as seen in the king in Psalm 72. The Psalm begins with, “Endow the king with your justice, O God, the royal son with your righteousness” (verse 1). Then in verse 17 he says, “May his name endure forever, may it continue as long as the sun. Then all nations will be blessed through him, and they will call him blessed.” We see here that creation is called into witness of this covenant and then the repeat of the covenant with Abraham. We understand that in Jesus this is fulfilled.

The king was to lead the nation in justice and righteousness, in holy living in the presence of the Lord. However, that did not happen. When the nation split, the northern kingdom of ten tribes never had a faithful king and because of this were cut off from the land and sent into Assyrian captivity. The land is an important part of the covenant with Abraham and becomes an important aspect of life in Israel throughout its history (3). While the southern kingdom lasted another one hundred years, it too ignored the warnings of the prophets and in particular because of the sins of Manasseh, Judah is taken into Babylonian captivity in 586 B.C.

The covenants appear to be conditional in one sense because if the people or nation did not live as a holy people, they would be rejected and cast out from the land (see Deuteronomy 28-30). For the next six hundred years, there was no king on Israel’s throne. Even when they returned from captivity, no one became a king in the line of David. By the time we get to the first century A.D., Herod, was king in Jerusalem but he was not a Jew in David’s line. This would all change in Jesus Christ.

George B. Mearns

(1) In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was found a little more that came between the end of 1 Samuel 10 and the verse one of chapter 11 explaining the threat from Ammon. See especially footnotes in the TNIV and NRSV.

(2) We will look at the New Covenant and the throne, Lord willing next.

(3) Lord willing, we will explore this in a later article. A good book to read is that of Walter Bruggermann called The Land. It addresses the importance of land in the Old Testament though one could disagree with some of his conclusions in the last chapter.