Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro:

There are two main ways to get to vacation destination: the quicker way, down the highway, which allows you to travel at high speeds with minimal turns.

The downside, highways miss the beauty of the countryside.

The second way to travel is the backroads.

This way takes more time but you really capture the differing cultures and scenery along your journey.

Today, I want to take us on a scenic tour of the Scriptures.

It will get us to where we have been in Nehemiah 10 but I need to take you on some backroads to help all of us understand our destination of seeing Christ in all of the Scriptures.

Review:

Note what the Word has accomplished in them:

Re-established the neglected feasts

Praised the Lord and confessed their violations against the law

Recommit themselves to the covenant that was established with God.

In our text this afternoon, we are going to look at what is the best understanding of God’s covenant with his people and why the Jews in Nehemiah’s day would be re-committing themselves to it in our verses of study.

A PRIMER ON BIBLICAL COVENANTS

What is a covenant?

Simply put, a covenant is an agreement between two parties.

That agreement is often highlighted by one strong party with one weaker party.

For example, a person lending money is a stronger party lending money to the weaker or poorer one.

In the case of biblical covenants, the Lord is the stronger party of the covenant while Israel was the weaker party.

Covenants are not contracts like we understand them in the western world.

This distinction needs to be addressed so that we can understand what is being communicated through the biblical narrative.

The main difference between a contract and covenant is the issue of relationship.

Relationship is not a foundation of a contract, only the fulfillment of the obligation that is stated.

Elmer Martens,

The occasion for contract is largely the benefits that each party expects.

Thus for a satisfactory sum one party agrees to supply a specified quantity of some desired product for the other party.

The contract is characteristically thing-oriented.

The covenant is person-oriented and, theologically speaking, arises, not with benefits as the chief barter item, but out of a desire for a measure of intimacy

Therefore, when the Bible speaks about God cutting a covenant with certain persons, it is never about the benefits as much as it is about a relationship and the loyalty to that relationship.

If you pay your car payments on time per the terms of your lending contract, your personal relationship with a lender is not strengthened, only your fiscal one.

But if a covenant is arranged between two families, for the arrangement of a marriage, then loyalty and relationship is the primary purpose of that covenant.

To properly understand the symmetry and unity of the Bible, we must understand how the covenants that God made with mankind, who He created in his image, all form one unified whole point to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Covenants of the Bible are not these disjointed and unrelated agreements that God made with man.

Instead, they are, as Michael Horton states,

“the architectural structure that we believe the Scriptures themselves to yield.”

Therefore, I will define a Biblical covenant as the agreement made stemming from a relationship between God and man which involves:

Relationship

Responsibility

Ramifications

Reminder

I will argue that there are six covenants in the Bible that represent the work of redemption in the world.

These covenants are unique in their own ways and yet connected as they serve as tributaries that merge to form a large river of God’s faithful redemption that terminate in Jesus Christ.

If we look at the covenants at separate ideas and works of God, then we fail to see how God has been active throughout history bringing about one purpose of redemption that comes to fruition in His Son, Jesus Christ.

Those covenants are:

The Covenant with Creation

The Covenant with Adam

The Covenant with Noah

The Covenant with Israel

The Covenant with Abraham

The Covenant with Israel (Mosaic/Sinai)

The Covenant with David

The New Covenant

The Covenant with Creation through Adam and Noah:

Many scholars dispute that God made a covenant with creation through Adam because the Scriptures do not use the covenant language in Genesis account.

The first occurrence of the word “covenant” is not found in Scripture until we read it with Noah in Gen 6.

But if you look deeply at the covenants and you consider them as a whole unit all finding their fulfillment in Christ, then you can see how God’s covenant with creation does not begin with Noah, it begins with Adam.

I would like to explain the similarities

Language

We have to jump forward to covenant with Noah to see how this plays out.

In Gen 6:18, we read

Gen 6:18 “18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.”

The original HB states that God is establishing the covenant.

The HB language in this phrase is HEQIM BERIT.

HEQIM is to affirm or establish and BERIT is the word used consistently in the Bible for Covenant.

Let me say again that BERIT is not used in the HB language until Gen 6:18 with God’s covenant with Noah.

The literal wording of initiating a covenant is written in HB as KARAT BERIT which means to “cut a covenant.”

In the practice of covenant making, the cutting a covenant signified the cutting of an animal in two halves and the parties involved walking through those halves to signify the commitment being made.

The slain animal represented a promise that if the covenant was broken, the ramifications of the broken covenant would be a curse to all who fail it.

We see this practice of cutting a covenant in the story of Abraham

With Noah’s covenant with God, the verbage is establishing a covenant (heqim berit), not cutting a covenant (Karat berit).

This is significant because in Gen 15:18 when God enters into a covenant with Abram, we read:

The words used with Abraham in Gen 15 are Karat Berit as the covenant is made while later it is referred to as affirming the covenant in Gen 17 (heqim berit).

This is significant to the covenant with Noah because there does not seem to be a covenant cut with Noah, only one affirmed as previously existing.

The reason: God has already cut a covenant with Adam at Creation that is merely established again with Noah.

While the HB BERIT cannot be found in Gen 1-3 in the creation story, some scholars make the argument that God creating man in “his image” is actually the way in which God cuts a covenant with creation with man serving as the mediator of that covenant.

Therefore in all the covenants, starting with at creation, there is a representative head that serves as representative Adam of that Covenant, tying together the idea that all these Adams of previous covenants fail until the last Adam, who is Jesus Christ fulfills all the previous covenants perfectly.

This is why there was a need for a new covenant in Jesus Christ.

Look with me at the parallels that exist between the account of creation and the story of Noah with our covenant lenses applied:

Consider how creation language and the flood language are similar.

There is a language of God ordering the earth by his creative design, placing land here and water there.

Then he causes vegetation to grow to be sustenance and beauty and then making man to rule over that creation with dominion as God’s representative over all He made.

Noah also experiences a new creation in such a way that as the flood waters subside, as all was destroyed, vegetation is found, God reestablishes the creation He made and similiarly, God gives Noah, like a Adam, the command to fill the earth and rule over that creation.

Noah also experiences a new creation in such a way that as the flood waters subside, as all was destroyed, vegetation is found, God reestablishes the creation He made and similarly, God gives Noah, like a Adam, the command to fill the earth and rule over that creation.

Man is the divine image.

As servant king and son of God, mankind will mediate God’s rule to the creation in the context of a covenant relationship with God on the one hand and the earth on the other

Adam, took the role of son to God and was set over creation in a covenant relationship with him.

His role as servant king was to take what God had made a rule over it in a way that would bless all that God has created.

Notice finally from the language in Gen 9: 10-17

The Covenant with Creation involves God as Creator with Adam and later Noah as its Mediator/Son/King

But Adam rebelled from God’s purpose and plan for him.

Instead of loving God well and ruling well, he was unfaithful to his role in relationship with God.

Eating the forbidden fruit brought about a curse on both man, woman and beast so that we clearly understand a covenant was in place.

The final parties of the relationship are laid then not only just between God and man, but God, man and all of creation.

We read in Gen 9:8-16

Notice again the language Heqim Berit whereby God is establishing the covenant and not cutting or making a new one.

The establishing of the covenant made is with all creation, which started with Adam and continued with Noah:

Genesis 9:9–10 (ESV)

9 “Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark; it is for every beast of the earth.

Genesis 9:13 (ESV)

13 I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.