God’s Covenant and Man’s Opposition

God’s Covenant and Man’s Opposition

Definition of Covenant:

A covenant is a solemn agreement between 2 or more persons or groups to do or not to do a certain thing.

God binds himself to his WORD and reinforces his commitment to it by entering into contractual relationships with man. These contracts are called covenants. Through covenant, God binds himself to his word to do what he has promised and since God doesn’t lie, what he promises will come to pass (Romans 3:4) We see God stating this is scriptures such as Ezekiel 12:25:

‘For I am the Lord; I will speak and and the word that I shall speak shall come to pass…...’

So, God SPEAKS…….

then He ACTS

God MAKES COVENANTS ……..

and He FULFILS them

Those in covenant with God have a legal right to call on God to do what he has promised. Our faith is thus not based on wish or hope but on the legal basis of covenant. In primitive societies individuals or tribes often bound themselves by blood covenant. To violate it would be result in the penalty of death. By committing to such a covenant, the parties were stating that they were committed even to the point of death.

Within God’s specific plan for mankind’s redemption, there are at least 6 covenants, the first being mentioned in Genesis 3:15:

The Adamic Covenant: ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel’.

Man’s Opposition:

Serpent Seed theology (the strange idea that Satan mated with Eve and she gave birth to Cain! Gnostic theology teaching that God is a ‘demi-urge’ and actually hateful. Modern satanism, or Freemasonry,where satan is the ‘light bearer’, and more powerful. The rise of the occult.

The Noahide Covenant: Is given in Genesis 9:9-17 where God promises Noah and his descendants that he will never again destroy the Earth with a flood and gives the rainbow to remind him of the covenant (verses 15-16).

Man’s Opposition :

Many Christians today claim a lot of Genesis as being allegorical and deny a literal 6 day creation and a worldwide flood. How few people today recognise the rainbow as having the connotation given here in the Bible. Most people would associate the rainbow with either the NHS or worse still LGBTQ issues and ‘gay pride’.

On the day several years ago when they legalised gay ‘marriage’ in Ireland, the LGBTQ people had organised a celebratory march during which there was a heavy rain shower followed by sunshine and a rainbow, and the crowd was seen cheering and clapping, presumably believing that God was giving a sign of his approval!

The Abrahamic Covenant:

Is detailed in Genesis 12:1-3;7 Gen 15 and Gen 17:1-21. This covenant was with one man and his descendants and was everlasting (Genesis 17:7). Verse 7 states: I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

It had 5 specific promises:

An eternal inheritance specifically for Abraham’s physical descendants through Isaac and Jacob (Gen 21:12)—-the land of Canaan (Genesis 12:7, 15:18 and 35:12)
To make Abraham’s name great (Genesis 12:2)
To give him many heirs (Genesis 22:17, 32:12)
To bless him and to make him a blessing to the whole world (Genesis 12:3 and 28:14).
To bless those who blessed him (Genesis 12:1-30 and his descendants through Isaac (Genesis 21:12) and to curse those who cursed him and his descendants.

Because God’s covenant with Abraham is everlasting, the land of Canaan (Promised Land) remains the EVERLASTING POSSESSION of Abraham’s descendants through Isaac and Jacob.

Genesis 17:7-8 And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.

By establishing this covenant, God made its tenets apply to all the nations of the world. It was established supernaturally on the basis of God’s promise by ELECTION and Abraham’s FAITH (Genesis 15:6), and later on circumcision (Genesis 17:9-14) was given as the token of the covenant, with penalties for non compliance (A case of being cut off for not being cut off!!).

Years later God again confirmed the covenant after he found Abraham faithful by him being willing to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22:12).

As we can see, this Abrahamic covenant actually mirrors our faith as New Testament believers in that faith gives us righteousness (as it did Abraham); spiritual circumcision of the heart (not physical as with Abraham) denotes sanctification, followed by full surrender (Romans 12:1), which in Abraham’s case was attested to by his willingness to sacrifice Isaac.

It is important to note that since the covenant was not established on the obedience of Abraham’s descendants, it is not revoked by their disobedience. This is stated in Jeremiah 31: 31-37.

31 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah:

32 Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord:

33 But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

34 And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

35 Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The Lord of hosts is his name:

36 If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever.

37 Thus saith the Lord; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord.

This is also confirmed in the New Testament in Romans 11:28-29 where Paul writes: ‘Concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election, they are beloved for the sake of the Fathers (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable’.

The New Living Translation renders this as: ‘Many of the people of Israel are enemies of the Good News, and this benefits you Gentiles. Yet, they are still the people he loves, because he chose their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For God’s gifts and his call can never be withdrawn.

Paul further states in Romans 15:8:

‘For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to CONFIRM THE PROMISES given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.’

The NLT says: ‘Remember that Christ came as a servant to the Jews to show that God is true to the promises he made to their ancestors’. What about using that line in Jewish evangelism?

Man’s Opposition:

So, we can see how false and misplaced Replacement Theology (RT) within Christendom is, which holds that the church replaces Israel and that the New Testament replaces all the previous covenants God made with the children of Israel, whereas the truth is that the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants still stand, and that the Abrahamic Covenant is actually the bridge to the New Covenant. RT has no scriptural foundation, rather the opposite.

The New Covenant fulfils the Mosaic one

(as stated by Jesus in Matthew 5:17)

‘think not that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets, I did not come to destroy but to fulfil’, but does not remove its moral requirements; in fact the New Covenant amplifies and deepens them (see Jesus’ words about adultery).

If Replacement Theology is correct, then God CANNOT BE TRUSTED; his word is NOT TO BE RELIED UPON and the BASIS of OUR FAITH IS VOID

Though the nations of the world today may not recognise this covenant, as we have seen it has never been revoked and God has and will engineer history to see that it is fulfilled. God will bless those who honour the covenant today, and curse those who curse it (ask Nasrallah, Haniyeh and Sinwar). The spill-over blessings promised to the Gentiles in that covenant have come upon the whole world through Jesus who is descended from Abraham see Matthew 1:1,17).

This is why Paul writes so firmly and sternly to the Galatians as in Galatians 3: verse 2

‘This only would I learn of you, as we would psay in Ireland….”Tell me this and tell me no more” Received ye the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by the hearing of faith’?

and then 10-14:

Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the Law (of keeping all of them); being a curse for us; for it is written ‘cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’, that THE BLESSINGS OF ABRAHAM might come on the Gentiles through faith in Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith’.

If the covenant with Abraham has ceased to exist, how can we claim the blessings that accompany it? If the part of the covenant that deals with Gentile blessings still stands, then the other part which deals with the ancestral blessings of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must also stand. The Jews of Jesus’ day claimed to be Abraham’s seed (John 8:33-39), yet Jesus disowned them.

Christians who embrace Replacement Theology find themselves in the same camp. They claim allegiance to ‘believing Abraham’, but by being anti-Semitic they become the enemy of his direct lineage, and effectively make God out to be a liar.

It is ironic too that Replacement Theology has been embraced by Roman Catholicism, yet Mary the mother of Jesus (whom Catholics venerate almost to the point of deity) in her ‘Magnificat’ prayer in Luke 1 (after the announcement that she was to be the mother of Jesus) states:

‘He has (holpen) helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, TO ABRAHAM AND HIS SEED FOREVER ’. (Luke 1:54-55).

She obviously saw the coming of her son as God’s intervention to fulfil his promises made by covenant to Abraham.

DAVIDIC COVENANT : Is described in 2 Samuel 7: 12-14, 16:

‘And when thy says shall be fulfilled and thou shall sleep with thy fathers, I will set up they seed after thee which shall proceed out of they bowels, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I shall establish the throne of his kingdom for ever’.

This was obviously not just referring to David’s natural progeny, but to Jesus. We know this from Luke 1:31-33 where Gabriel announces to Mary that her son:

‘Will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord will give to him the throne of his father David and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom there will be no end’.

In Psalm 89 this prophecy now being fulfilled is referred to as a covenant: (see verse 3:

I have made a COVENANT with my chosen

I have sworn unto David my servant

Thy seed will I establish for ever

And build up thy throne to all generations.