Covenantal Love

Bible Introduction (2m)

Ever been in a power cut? One where everything goes out, including the street lights?

Norfolk - September 2020.

Utter darkness. Couldn’t see hands in front of face.

No idea if we had candles in the house, or where.

But did have some power in our phones and their flashlights.

Could have used those.

But what if we’d kept our eyes closed?

Would have been no use at all.

We’d have still be in utter darkness.

When it comes to God’s love for us, God has revealed it all to us.

2 Corinthians 4:1-18 (Jan), Paul tells us that Satan would love it if we couldn’t see it. If were blind to it. He would rather us keep our eyes closed to it.

The devil cannot take from the soul the light of faith: he, however, removes the light of consideration; so that the soul may not reflect on what it believes. And as it is of no avail to open the eyes in the dark, so says St. Augustine, "it is of no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed." The eternal maxims, considered in the light of faith, are most clear; yet if we do not open the eyes of the mind by meditating on them, we live as if we were perfectly blind; and so precipitate ourselves into every vice.

Introduction (5m)

We need to remind ourselves that God loves us

We should constantly be asking the Lord to help us to grow in our capacity to understand God’s love. Why?

2 Corinthians 4:4 NLT

Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.

Satan blinds us from seeing the glory of God and the face of Jesus Christ

“Glory” is simply the radiance of his love. The Devil keeps us from seeing that!

R K Hughes tells the story of a member of his congregation who told how she had repeatedly explained the gospel to another woman who simply did not get it, though she apparently wanted to. So finally she said to the woman, “You have a veil over your heart. And you need to pray that God will remove it.” A few weeks later the woman called, elated, as she explained that she had gone to bed the night before perplexed, but when she awoke that morning everything was clear. The veil was gone forever. R K Hughes goes on to write: Nothing had been wrong with the gospel. The gospel had been veiled to the woman because it was veiled in her. The veil was in her heart and mind, not over the gospel. As Calvin put it, “the blindness of unbelievers in no way detracts from the clearness of the gospel, for the sun is no less resplendent because the blind do not perceive it.”

We can be blinded by the dark

This blindness is a spiritual issue:

2 Corinthians 4:6 NLT

For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.

It is God who has to speak light into our hearts. God has to open our "spiritual eyes" to enable us to see the glory of God. Only God can do that! No sermon can do that! No amount of Bible study. No amount of fellowship and discussing God’s love together and do that. All those things can be used by God to do that, but only God can reveal God.

We struggle to believe God's love. It is literally too good to be true. We always try to sabotage it with a “but”. We’re too weak to believe in God’s Scandalous Love. But he has the power to help us see it.

So, if you don’t get it, if the glory of God sounds like too much mystical jargon, if the gospel just doesn’t make sense to you, you need to ask God to remove the veil. If we can get just a glimpse of God’s Scandalous Love, then the logic of the gospel and the transforming glory of Christ will become the clear reality of our existence.

Explanation (5m)

We’re blinded by contract

The trouble is that the gospel that many of us have heard over the years isn't necessarily that beautiful. So, you may have heard the gospel told this way:

God created us and put us in the Garden of Eden. Then he decided to put us to the test. He put the tree in the middle of the garden and said to Adam and Eve, “don’t eat from that tree”. Just like the Marshmallow Test, we watched earlier.

And just like the Marshmallow Test, the temptation to eat from the tree was too much. We broke the rule, and God became angry with us. He's been angry with us ever since.

God then worked with the Israelites to try to fix this problem by giving them loads more rules. They couldn’t obey those rules either, so God became even more angry. Finally, having lost patience with us altogether, God sends Jesus into the world and then takes his anger out on Jesus instead and punishes Jesus so that he does not have to send us to hell.

And that's the "Good News". Does that sound familiar?

The problem with this version of the good news is that it’s a distortion. It doesn’t come close to capturing the beauty of the real Good News. Just think about it for a moment. Do you really need the power of the Holy Spirit to believe that version of the good news? I don’t think so. There’s nothing beautiful or scandalous about that version.

One of the reasons that has led to this distortion of the good news is we've lost the difference between a covenant and a contract. A covenant and a contract look similar but in fact, they’re very different. Many of you deal with both on a regular basis. So, the contract is something like an employment agreement, or an agreement to purchase a product like a house or a car. The covenant is like a marriage. Any contract you make is a deal. Any covenant, particularly in a covenant of agape love is not a deal it's a pledge.

Contracts deal with law. That's part of the deal you make with the other person. You say to the other person, "here are the rules which govern our deal". The covenant deals with love. The covenant is a pledge of love.

Contracts are always conditional. They have terms and if those terms are broken then the deal is off. A covenant of agape love is unconditional because it's about you pledging what you're going to be towards another person, not what you’re going to do for them or what they are going to do for you.

Every time I order something from Amazon, I enter into a contract. If what I’ve ordered doesn’t turn up or arrives damaged, then the deal is off. Amazon have to refund me my money.

On the other hand, over 22 years ago now, I made a covenant with Gail in marriage. I pledged myself to her, promising to be her husband for better or for worse.

The problem is, that society today sees almost everything in the world like a kind of contract. We see everything in contract terms rather than in terms of an agape love covenant.

And we’ve fallen into the same trap in the ways in which we look at the story of the Bible. So, if you look at Genesis 3, you see Adam and Eve in the Garden walking with God in the cool of the day. The Bible communicates to us that life as God intended it to be was about relaxing with God, in a state of innocence. You’re with God. You enjoy God and God enjoys you. The tree in the middle of the Garden wasn't a Marshmallow Test for Adam and Eve; it was God setting boundaries for human beings. God wanted us to be like him in terms of his character, but not in terms of our knowledge. That’s why the tree is called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. God was saying that it was his job to do the judging and our job to do the loving.

But then Satan turns up. The Bible calls him, “The Accuser”. He accuses God of being threatened by the prospect of Adam and Eve having the same wisdom as him. This is what tempts Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The problem is we have been eating from that tree ever since.

So often, we fall into the trap of compulsively judging ourselves. We’re always assessing ourselves. We are always measuring ourselves. We’re always trying to fix ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I have voice in my head that is always assessing me. We’re all self-aware to some extent or another, and it can be painful. That’s not how God originally designed us. That’s not innocence.

How do we escape this? Well unfortunately, for so many of us Satan manages to persuade us that the best way to escape these feelings is to turn on other people. We stand accused by the voice in our head and so we decide to deflect that accusation by accusing other people instead. So in the Eden story, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, Cain blames Abel and we’ve been blaming one another ever since. We become judgemental to ease the pain of our own accusation.

And worst of all, Satan often lulls us into the trap of judging God. Adam and Eve do it in Genesis. When God shows up after they’ve eaten from the tree, Adam and Eve hide from him because there’re afraid. The day before they were walking with God in the cool of the day, and yet today they are suddenly afraid of their walking companion. He hasn't changed, but they have. Now they have the knowledge of good and evil, they're assessing him, sizing him up and they see God as a monster, as a threat to them. They no longer see the true God.

We do the same. We turn the critical voice in our head into the voice of God. God becomes the judge who’s perpetually angry. He’s always watching us. He’s building a case against us for the dreaded Judgement Day we read about. And so, we end up fearing death. This is how the devil blinds us from seeing the glory of God. This is how he keeps us from seeing God’s love in the face of Jesus Christ.

Satan has managed to get us to see everything, including God’s Scandalous Love, in legal, contract terms. So, we assess everything. We're always evaluating. We’re always analysing. We’re always sizing things up: ourselves, others and worst of all, God. In this context, there's no place for agape love. There's no place for unconditional love.

We take this legal framework and interpret the story of Jesus’ atonement through that framework. We see God, the angry judge venting his wrath on Jesus so we don’t have to be sent to hell. And we may be thankful about that. But viewing it through that framework, it probably doesn't make us love God or want to be with him. That version of the good news is not going to turn your life upside down with passionate, radical love and adoration towards God.

We don't need the Holy Spirit to empower us to believe in this version of the story. It's simple really. It's just a contract that got fixed.

Application (5m)

God’s agape love is Plan A not Plan B

But the good news is not Plan B. It’s Plan A. God’s agape love covenant with us began before the creation of the world. God is love. God is agape love. From the beginning, God has wanted to become one with us so that we could become one with him. This was God’s plan before the creation of the world.

Jesus didn't come into the world to tweak a contract between God, and us to be Plan B. He has always been Plan A and he came to earth to fulfil a covenant of love. Jesus didn’t become a human and die because God was mad at us. Jesus became a human being and died because God was madly in love with us.

Jesus gave his life for us not to fix a contract, but to fulfil an eternal agape love covenant. He gave his life not to deflect the Father’s anger but to fulfil the Father’s covenant of love:

Hebrews 12:2 NLT

We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne.

You see? "Because of the joy awaiting him…" God didn't come to earth because he was mad. There was joy in his heart. He came with joy. Why? Because he’s madly in love with us and saw his coming to earth as the opportunity to win us back. Whatever it took to win us back. Why? Because he thinks we’re worth it.

The Antidote to our Blindness

What’s the antidote to our blindness to God’s love? It’s the lifting up of Christ. Paul knew first hand what it was like to be blinded to the truth. He’d been in the bonds of darkness, accusing Christians of all kinds of things before being blinded by the glory of Christ on the Damascus Road. But from his conversion onward, the light of Christ filled his existence.

The same can be true for us. The light of Christ can fill your existence. If you focus on Christ as the image of God, you can glimpse the radiance of the glory of God.

This radiance can shut out the deception of the Accuser in our brain who is always accusing us, always accusing others, always accusing God and always sabotaging the Good News.

Let’s take time to pray this week that the Holy Spirit will open our eyes to see and to experience the height and the depth and the width and the length of the love of God. Let’s ask the Lord to help us see that the cure for sin is not more rules and more threats but rather a transformation by God’s love. Let’s pray that we’ll be won over by God’s love for us. Pray that we’ll be united with God in his love.

And once God has given us a new revelation of his Good News, let’s spread it to others around us.

Next Steps

Video: The Light of the World

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