Let us turn to our Bibles to Psalm 74. I did the entirety of the Psalm last week, and as you know, I occasionally drill in to the Psalms or various verses, as I’ll do in Ephesians in the morning, for example. So, Psalm 74 20.
Let us listen attentively to the Word of God. Psalm 74 20. Psalm 74 20.
Have respect to the covenant, let us pray. And in this short, simple sentence, God, may we see and understand the depth of His plea, and the breadth of, as we know, your ultimate answer through Christ Jesus, and what it means to be in covenant, and what the covenant is for us, the covenant of grace and mercy and the long-suffering through our Lord and Savior, and how, God, it’s all the more sweeter when we understand where we have fallen, and how we have broken the covenant of works in the person of our Father, Adam. Lord God, may we therefore learn that we can apply this plea, for that is certainly what it is, Lord, that we would cry out to you for the promises of the covenant, that you would have mercy and help upon us in our time of need, just as the psalmist here, because he too is in the same covenant, for it’s one Lord and one Saving and one Savior that is Jesus our Redeemer.
In your name alone we pray. Amen. The psalmist, while crying or pleading, it’s the plea of the psalmist, oh God, why have you cast us off, verse 1, it continues that theme through the remainder of the psalm, although moving towards more confidence in the deliverance that will come to him.
The psalmist, while crying out for help, seeing that his enemy was all around, indeed burning and destroying the Lord’s sanctuary of old, he makes several pleas and requests. He pleads for justice and that God would also stop the mouth of the wicked, but he also calls attention to the covenant here explicitly in verse 20, and I’ll remind you again, whenever he speaks of the Lord or Jehovah, capital L-O-R-D, all caps, he’s referring to the covenant-keeping God. I am that I am.
I’ve not forgotten the covenant given to my people of old, and so I’ve raised up Moses, and I’ve given this name that you would know, and it’s associated with the covenant, the covenant of mercy and compassion upon God’s people of old. That whenever he does that, he is pleading the covenant, and God’s name of the Lord is mentioned, like in verse 18. Remember that this, the enemy has reproached O Lord or O Jehovah.
But what does it mean in particular here, have respect unto the covenant? Specifically, is he demanding something of the Lord? Kind of sounds that way in English. What does that covenant have to do with the psalmist or the psalm? And lastly, what covenant is the writer speaking of? Of course, he is not demanding but pleading. The whole tenor of the psalm is such, the word respect here is the idea of regard or look to, right? Look back.
Speaking metaphorically, of course, God doesn’t have eyes, doesn’t have hands, but we speak of the Lord’s right hand. These are ways of pleading God’s help and strength in here. God, see what you have promised me.
Help me here. He’s asking the Lord to look or pay attention to the covenant. And since it is a metaphor, and God does not forget his word, nor does he have eyes to see, he’s obviously pleading the promises of the covenant.
God is, as you recall, forming and he formed the Jewish state of the Old Testament church and gave them special promises. God called out Abraham and before him Noah was saved and so was Adam. God was saving people before the Mosaic era is what we call it, the time of Moses.
And it’s the same saving. It’s not a different saving because it’s one God. Therefore, there’s only one way to him and that Jesus or the Messiah to come in the Old Testament and the Messiah who has already come, we who are 2000 years later.
And so God formed the church into a Jewish state, a Jewish form and gave them special promises that fit their special circumstances so far as they have things we don’t have to worry about anymore, like a special land and special clothing for their special priest and a special location called Jerusalem. We don’t need any of that anymore. They were temporary things to teach them because they were what? Children under a tutor as Galatians 4 reminds us.
We’ll get into that in just a little bit. I’m getting ahead of myself here. In particular, they had physical promises that God would be, as my old mentor liked to say, their nuclear bomb.
You don’t have to worry about having this huge army, David. God will take care of it. In a way, we don’t have that promise today anymore.
They’re coming after us. I want bombs, please. So there is a layer of promises, these physical promises in a way we don’t have them today anymore.
But the substance of the matter is God was with them. He formed the people of God and David is in this covenant. The mosaic covenant is what we call it.
That covenant does not stand in the zone as though it was a relationship that’s brand new, but rather presuppose and actually explicitly said, why am I gathering these people together? Because I remember the promises to Abraham that I gave to your father, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It mentions that several times, even through the book of Deuteronomy, the giving of the law itself. It was always rooted in the covenant of Abraham, which is to say, as we’ll learn, the covenant of grace.
And when he established the covenant with Adam as well, as we’ll see, based solely upon his mercies through the promise of the seed that developed over time and is expressed and explained through Abraham, Moses, David, and then we have it in its full maturation today. And then all these covenants, the Adamic covenant, the Noahic covenant, the mosaic, the Davidic, there is but one covenant actually, just unfolded in depth and power over time until the New Testament era. And finally, its completion in heaven.
So it’s one covenant progressively unfolded and explained in various forms through time because there’s one Lord. The psalmist here is pleading such a covenant. He’s pleading for the promises of the covenant of grace.
Although, of course, in the form of the mosaic era, so part of his pleading would be actual physical deliverance like David had and Jonathan had, where they literally had miracles and battles. But elsewhere, as we read in an earlier psalm, David is rejoicing that God trained him to fight. And we know God didn’t come down and actually spar with him.
What he’s saying is, providentially, you equipped me to be a fighter. And I learned how to fight from a young age. And he rejoiced in that.
And so this concern here is apparently, certainly physical. You know, the enemies are attacking the sanctuary, burning it down. We want to stop that.
But at the end of the day, it’s still ultimately spiritual because the covenant of Moses was also part of the covenant of grace, as we’ll see. And to learn about these things, we have to back up and learn about covenants, covenant of works, and then the covenant of grace. So you understand it’s all of a package.
Covenants
So the first point, covenants, covenants in general, an agreement between two or more persons. That’s the simplest definition. In general, it’s a formalized agreement.
Often we can speak of informal or implicit understandings. That’s what friends are. We have this kind of implicit way of doing things, and it’s not really formalized in any way, in any shape, form, until, of course, it gets bad enough that maybe you have to formalize it.
And we do that with business relationships. And we do that with other things. We’re going to, my mother-in-law recently moved, so she has to sign a contract, make it formal.
Obviously, I’m going to have to pay the bill, or they’re going to come after me. But even without the contract, a verbal word should be sufficient. It was in the old days.
So a covenant is more formalizing, it seems to me, often a pre-existing agreement, but not always. It could be a brand new thing that was never there before. But here are the constituent elements of a covenant.
You have to have a party, you have to have the agreement, and you have to have what the agreement entails, that is, what are the consequences of this stipulation, good or bad. We agree to do X, Y, Z, and then this will happen. I agree to pay you, and you’re going to give me something, and if I don’t pay you, I’m going to come after you.
So you have the party, parties, plural, those involved in the agreement, the stipulation or the agreement itself, what to do or not to do, and then the consequences of promise or reward therein. And as you know, we’ve all had covenants. Marriage is a covenant.
House, contracts, businesses, church membership is a covenant. We don’t typically call them covenants. We call them compacts, contracts, PACs, or in America we have a constitution.
That is a covenant. It’s also, interestingly enough, people forget about this, multi-generational. It’s not just that one generation.
It’s for the posterity as well. And so it is with all of God’s covenants. The covenants in particular, of course, God’s covenant with men, are never bilateral in the crass sense of, well, you know, I guess Adam’s just going to say no to God because they’re equals.
God sat down and said, let’s have an equal arrangement here. I’m using the international language of bilateral and unilateral to highlight that God volunteered to make a covenant with Adam and Eve or with us in Christ. That’s the covenant of grace.
And we are the other party, to be sure. And Adam wasn’t going to say no. So I like to use the word unilateral to highlight it’s unequal.
It’s not among equals. God is the superior. It’s sometimes described as a king-vassal relationship.
But nevertheless, still gracious because God volunteered. He didn’t have to make anything with Adam. I’m finishing.
I’m going through various research for the committee I’m on. And part of it is researching into what is the relationship between man and Adam, God and covenants before the fall and the like. And our forefathers like to emphasize God did not have to make a covenant of works with Adam at all.
That Adam was created was sufficient. He had to do whatever he was supposed to do, which would be, of course, the Ten Commandments in positive form because he hadn’t broken them yet. He would just honor God and do the right thing and take care of the garden and all that.
And without any expectation of reward. God didn’t have to give him anything. That he existed was sufficient that he should submit to God and follow him.
That’s hard for people to swallow. And the implications, therefore, is when God went above and beyond that and made a covenant of works that already began voluntarily. And God promised to give him something even more than what he has at the time.
He has eternal life with him. God’s economy, in other words, these covenants that he makes always have a gracious element. Now, in the pre-fall sense, that word grace we use, perhaps we could say goodness, is not the same idea because there’s no fall as such, right? Nobody fell.
There’s no sin. So, it’s not grace in that idea of unmerited favor because you’ve fallen, therefore, you don’t deserve anything. Even before we fell, we didn’t deserve anything.
Think about it. So, when we fell, we fell even further into the debt, as it were. And God had even less reason to do anything for us and, in fact, every reason to send us in hell.
Look at it that way. The whole thing is just, wow, this is absolutely incredible. God could have just stopped it all right then and there.
Adam, you failed. It’s over. But he didn’t.
He went even beyond that. The distance, the confession says, Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 7 on the covenants. Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 7, Paragraph 1, we read, the distance between God and the creature is so great, it’s infinite, that although reasonable creatures do owe Him obedience as their Creator, just full stop, yet they could never have any fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward.
They couldn’t go beyond that and have this great reward and have Him, fruition of Him as their blessedness, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part. God freely chose to give Adam more. There was no obligation on His part, which He has been pleased to express by way of covenants.
So we have the divine covenants in general and divine covenants in particular here. First of all, the covenant of redemption, which is the inter-Trinitarian covenant between the members of the Trinity to bring about creation, providence, and redemption from eternity past. It must necessarily follow, I preached a little bit about that in one of the Psalms, which had an indication of that covenant of redemption.
Covenant of Works
It’s the foundation of all the covenants. Secondly, in what we typically think of the other two covenants, the covenant of works, which is between God and Adam, as I’ll unpack a little bit here, was historically first, of course, right there at creation. God makes a covenant with Adam.
It’s still binding on everyone insofar as they have broken it in Adam. In Adam’s fall, we send all as the old Puritan saying went. That’s out of Romans 5. And the curse and the punishment therein are still there.
Do this and live is still hanging above their heads, and they have not done this. They are not only broken the contract. Guess what happens, right? You break the agreement.
Now you have the debt of breaking it. You didn’t pay off the bill, for example. You missed a few months.
And on top of that, you still have to keep paying. That hasn’t changed. You still have to be perfectly and perpetually perfect and personally perfect for the rest of your life.
So even if you can make up the debt, which is impossible with respect to infinite holiness and justice of God and his law and his honor, it requires an infinite person, Jesus Christ, his infinite glory. Even if you did that, you had to be perfect forever and forever. We can never do.
So again, it’s a double hole. That’s the covenant of works. And then the covenant of grace, which restored our relationship back to God the Father.
And that covenant is between God and man in Christ or the elect, more precisely in Christ. You have to have Christ. Christ is the head of his people.
And so Christ is there as our leader, the second Adam. Frees people from the curse and obligations of the covenant of works, the broken covenant of works. And that leads us to the broken covenant of works.
The covenant of works, the second point, man’s natural relationship, of course, already, as I mentioned before, is that there’s a great distance and he still had to obey God regardless. The classic text reminding us that the distance between us and God is so great that Adam and all his posterity, us as well, would have obeyed, had to obey the creator, even without a covenant, even without a promise. In Luke 17.10, we read of Jesus describing this, and which of you, he says, having a servant plowing or tending sheep will say to him when he has come in from the field, come at once and sit down and eat.
I just helped move Saturday, up and down and all those stairs. That’s hot work, especially when it was, what, 95 that day. Colorado’s gone crazy this summer.
But working on a field, on a farming field, tending sheep, plowing? Which of you, having a servant doing all this hard, sweaty work, will say to him when he’s coming in from the field, come at once and sit at my feet, but will you rather not say to him, prepare something for my supper and gird yourself up and serve me till I’ve eaten and drunk and afterwards you will eat and drink? You read that today, at least I did. What kind of a master is that? The guy’s sweating like a dog. He asked him to come back in and feed me.
Can he have a little breather, please? Not only does that show the great distance that we have today in our understanding of relationships in general, like that’s the master-slave relationship, and at the same time, the kind of blessing we have that we don’t have slaves per se, although we still have our own problems, but it’s also a mindset, because we’ve lost it, that makes a difference theologically. You see where this is going, I hope. He says he’s done all this work.
He comes back. Which of you are going to say this? The answer, of course, is nobody. No master would ever do that.
The master would say, you’re not done yet. Keep getting work. Feed me.
Feed me supper. He continues, does he thank the servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I think not, Jesus says. Verse 10, so likewise you, he applies it, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say we are unprofitable servants.
We have done what was our duty to do. We’ve only simply done what we’re called to do, and we cannot demand anything more of God. That’s a very humbling statement from Jesus.
That’s the context. Naturally, without a covenant, Adam would have done simply what he was supposed to do, and God could have said, do all this. It’s simply your job.
I created you. I equipped you to do it. Adam was perfect.
What did he have to complain about? But God went above and beyond that. God didn’t need to give a covenant. Again, Acts 17.24, God who made the world and everything in it, since he is the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, nor is he worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed anything, since he gives life to all and breath and all things.
Everything depends on him, in fact. So man’s natural state of existence was it was enough that God created him. He must obey full stop.
But he went beyond that. And thus the covenant of works, when seen from that perspective, has an element of goodness, kindness, or grace, whatever word we wish to use, that perhaps you had not thought about before. Because we hear works.
That’s not very enticing. Now, after the fall, I don’t want to go back to how obedient I am, how sincere my faith is, in fact, because we will still struggle if we have weak faith. Certainly not my works or anything else.
It’s never good enough. It’s just going to fall apart. But here, they’re already perfect, and God went one step further and made this covenant to promise them and to seal it.
God, the Creator, is a covenant-keeping God, was one part of the party, obviously. And the created man, as in the image of the covenant-keeping God, Adam, formerly and materially, was the head of the human race, as we know. And their posterity after them, as like begets like.
And the classic passages, we’ll talk about a little bit, but again, Romans 5 is that well-known one that describes us, through one man, sin came into the world, and by one man, blessing and salvation shall come. That is Jesus Christ, as I summarize 10 verses there. The stipulations and agreement from the party are, in general, tending and keeping the garden, that’s there explicitly in chapter 2, as those who are called to obey the Lord God.
And of course, the Ten Commandments, upon their heart, they’re made in the image of God, upright and holy, and that’s expressed clearly in the Ten Commandments. So, they must have had that as they implied and built upon their hearts. And then, not just natural laws, what’s described as when it’s not found in the Bible.
He didn’t have a Bible yet, but he knew right from wrong. That’s called natural law. Now, it’s fallen natural law, of course, so it’s effaced or wiped out a little bit, but not completely.
On top of that, general or natural law, excuse me, the Ten Commandments, is what they call a positive law. The natural law, put it this way, is the nature of it is murder, even unbelievers can figure it out, that’s kind of a bad thing. Even if they make exceptions for it, they know there’s a lot of places they don’t really have, well, I don’t want my dog being killed, I don’t want myself being killed, I don’t want my best friends being killed, just kill other people.
They know there’s something intuitively, by nature, wrong with it, but there’s nothing wrong with the tree per se, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The fruit was inherently wrong, eating wasn’t sinful, desiring food wasn’t wrong. It’s what they call a positive law built merely upon God’s good will.
He’s just like, God says, don’t do it. Murder, Adam can like, well, that kind of makes sense, but this, there’s no sense, it’s simply God’s will. I said don’t do it, are you going to do it or not? That’s the test.
We already know what he did. That’s the difference there, when God does this, so it’s, in addition to the Ten Commandments, is this special thing, you know, kids, don’t touch that. Why? Because I said so.
He’s going to follow me? No, it’s rooted to the ground, it’s not going to hurt you, nothing wrong with it, I said don’t touch it. And they touch it, and you’re like, okay, kid, comes a whooping. I know that happened to me, because it’s will versus will there, isn’t it? Will, Adam obeyed simply because God said obey.
That’s the covenant of works. That was the special test that he failed. And, of course, it was made with Adam and his posterity.
The consequences, as we know, you shall surely die if you eat it. God has made that very clear, but if we recall some of the teaching we had on understanding and applying the law of God, and there are eight principles of that, one of those principles are that which is a blessing implies a curse, and that which is a curse implies a blessing. God’s like, you’re going to get, you’re going to die.
And, of course, we know that death is ultimately eternal death, not just the body, and all the things that attend to it, decay and death and destruction around him, and sickness. And then the flip side of that, of course, is life, eternal life. And we have that elsewhere, again, in Romans 5 and elsewhere, where the contrast is with Christ, who got the eternal life that Adam could not get.
Other texts that speak of the covenant, so that’s from Genesis 2. You know the parties are there in Genesis 2. You know the negative restriction is there in Genesis 2, and by implication the positive, that is eternal life, he obeyed. And then natural law must be written on their hearts, because being made in the image of God means they were upright, holy, and just already. That’s how God made them.
And so those are the elements of the covenant. The consequences of the covenant, and the parties of the covenant. Where the elements of a covenant are, therefore there is a covenant.
And where there are the elements of godhood, like Christ does God things, he must be God. Same logic, it’s deductive. But we have text, Isaiah 24.5, the earth is also defiled under its inhabitants, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenants.
It’s describing, I believe, all of the lands, not just Israel, but all of the pagan lands and everything else around them as well. They have broken the everlasting covenant, which would of course be the Adamic covenant. Hosea 6.7 is a classic text, but they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant.
Straightforward. They, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant. You guys are following in Adam, your forefathers’ footsteps.
Hosea 6.7. Romans 5.12, I’ve read that a number of times in prior sermons, I won’t go through that, but Adam fell, we fell, Christ rose, we rose, he goes back and forth on that, emphasizing that point. And so the covenant of works, the importance here, is it’s the background of the entire Bible and of world history. Again, they have all the nations and the inhabitants thereof have broken the everlasting covenant, so therefore there is punishment and judgment upon the face of the earth because of this.
That’s why it’s significant. All men are guilty and have guilty consciences. The covenant of grace, however, changes that for His people.
Covenant of Grace
The need of a covenant, covenant of works broken, yet effectual insofar as the effects of it are guilt and pollution upon us and all the bad consequences that we know of, so we pray for one another, for our bodies, we feel it within ourselves. This is not natural, there’s something wrong here. Even unbelievers, the philosophers of old, they’re like, this isn’t, there’s something, something’s not right here.
And that’s what it is, because of this connection that we have with Adam, that connection, as with Christ, we know, we know Christ says, I have a covenant. He says, I’ve died for the covenant. This is the bread and blood of the covenant.
And Romans 5 makes those parallels so many times between him and Adam. Christ is our representative by covenant, Adam must have been our representative by covenant. It’s another argument for the covenant of works, although I’m talking about the covenant of grace here, and that covenant of grace is God delivering us by His Son.
And so we need another covenant to deliver us, otherwise we wouldn’t be here today. It’s the long and short of it. And so again, God volunteered to create a covenant here the second time so that we, who are His people, are saved and delivered.
The covenant of grace. And although I don’t, I’m not going to go into particulars here, the, again, the language of covenant is there explicitly in the New Testament, as well as the old, by the way, I’m not going to go through all those, maybe a little bit next week. But the parties are God and His Son, and we in Christ.
I said man in Christ to emphasize that, you know, those who repent and believe can be saved by, what, repenting of sin and believing in Christ and our union with Christ. But more properly and formally, it’s God and His Son and promising to the Son a people for Him. That language is there.
And Jesus lived and died for them, and He is their head and He is their Savior. What makes this confusing is that there are multiple covenants in the sense of God speaking to the forefathers. Noah comes to mind, Abraham especially, and God coming down saying, I’ve got this covenant, and He has this relationship with them.
And some people read it as though it’s a new thing every time. If that were the case, then you’d have Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, four different ways to get to God. So even if you don’t call it dispensationalism, it’s just that dispensationalism is the other way around, I guess.
It’s a lot of extra steps to get there. That’s what it is essentially. There’s only one way.
There’s never been one way, one Lord and one faith, although the outward forms have changed. And this is where the confusion comes in because we know of the Jewishness. Let me go through some of the texts here and explain a little more.
The Abrahamic covenant is related to us. The Mosaic and Davidic covenant are related to us. And so we can go to this psalm and plead to God the covenants of mercy and grace, not the special promises they had, to be sure, any more than we go to God and to Jerusalem and the temple.
All that’s done away with. That’s true. But the substance, they were called to believe in the Messiah, to come to trust and rest and rely upon Him and not their own good works.
Never, never, never. We have a growth of clarity, therefore, is one way to help explain this, this development of the one single covenant of grace. Genesis 3.15, I’ll put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed, and he shall bruise you on the head and you should bruise him on the heel.
The God is giving a promise and he’s got a party involved in this promise. And that’s Adam and Eve after they fell. So clearly this is something new.
And the consequences of this promise is there’s going to be deliverance from Satan. The implication of faith, though, I can imagine some people struggling with this. The God doesn’t say, well, you have to believe in this enmity, you know, the promised seed, if you don’t want to be part of Satan, who’s going to be bruised, but rather be part of the godly seed.
Faith has always had to have been there because God is a spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. And worshiping God in spirit necessitates faith. For Adam, before the fall, it wasn’t a saving faith because he hadn’t fallen yet, but it’s still, I believe, I trust, I rely upon.
After the fall, it’s, I rely upon Jesus all the more because I have fallen and I need that deliverance. So faith, I would argue, is there in Genesis 3.15. That’s the Adamic covenant, not the covenant of works, but the covenant given to him. That’s why he’s still alive.
God didn’t have to keep him alive. God gave a promise. There are parties and there are implied stipulations in the sense of what we have to do is believe and trust in Him.
And this unfolds over time. Abraham is given more information. Moses, as we know, the whole ceremonial system is designed to point to whom? Jesus, the Messiah to come, because it wasn’t about Jesus.
It was really about being Jewish. Now, the Jewishness was just a form, a temporary, as it were, a teenage stage, I suppose we can say, of them learning. That’s the language of Galatians 4 again.
I’ve got nowhere else to go to, I guess. I could find other verses, but that’s so clear. They were children under a tutor to teach them not to be so much into themselves, but to look to the Messiah to come and trust in Him.
But the evidence for the same salvation besides things like the theme of the seed, I’ve not gone through that, but you can go follow the theme of the seed through Genesis into the New Testament era. I picked up a Galatians, for example. But we have Ephesians.
I like Ephesians. I like Ephesians here in chapter 2 because it says so many words about one covenant, one people of God. That at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
He’s talking to the Gentiles. You Gentiles were without Christ. Well, that’s kind of… What? Where was Christ before? Well, if you understand Messiah, it’s the same religion.
And now Messiah has come. We’re looking back and no longer looking forward. It’s the same religion.
Being aliens or foreigners from the commonwealth of Israel. Well, yeah, because I’m Gentiles. No, he means the substance of it, which was, of course, Christ.
And strangers from the covenants of promise. So it’s another way of saying aliens and strangers. Covenants of promise.
And what’s interesting there, why I’m pointing at this, this is verse 12. Covenants, plural, of promise, singular. The covenant of grace had one promise.
Believe in the Messiah and you shall be saved. Either before the cross or after the cross. Time is irrelevant when it comes to God saving people.
But it’s multiple covenants expressing the same promise in different ways. Because God knows our weakness and how we need what repetition usually is the mother of learning individually and collectively. Covenants, plural, Adamic, Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic.
One promise, brothers and sisters. And he says, you Gentiles didn’t have any of that stuff. You were no hope and without God.
They were without God. Because the Jews, both in Mosaic time and before Mosaic time, they had the promises. They had God.
They had hope. Now they may not have believed. That’s true.
It’s no different today. People in churches aren’t believers. What’s the difference? The Jewish flavor as it were.
That’s the difference. Galatians 3.7 also points to one covenant of grace. One promise in particular.
Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham. Not those who are of the flesh. Not those who are circumcised as Paul says in Romans 2. Not all who are circumcised are the real Jews.
But are those who are circumcised in the flesh that is born again. Again, he’s arguing before Christ. Anybody in the Old Testament who actually believed in Jesus and were circumcised in their heart, that’s the real believer.
Never about the externality. Externality was but a tool to help. But of course they abused it.
Sacraments are a tool in the New Testament, brothers and sisters. And people abuse that all the time. It doesn’t change anything.
It’s just an outward form to help. People abuse it. Those who are of faith are the sons of Abraham.
And the scripture is foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith. Preach the gospel to Abraham. There are people who believe there’s a different gospel to Abraham than Paul preached.
I talked to one of them in a Bible study down at the campus many, many years ago. I just was floored. I was like, here you go.
He goes, well, that’s a different gospel. You say it that way and you’re like, they didn’t really believe that, did they? That’s what he told me. I don’t know what to tell you.
Clearly it wasn’t. It would break apart the whole point of Galatians. Those who are of faith are the sons of Abraham.
You are of faith, therefore what? You are the sons and daughters of Abraham. It’s a simple syllogism. And he continues on, and this I say that the law, and he means the Mosaic law, which was 430 years later, let’s go by the timeline, cannot annul the covenant was confirmed before by God in Christ, because it was never the point of the Mosaic law to annul that covenant to Abraham, but to enhance and help and redirect their faith and minds to Jesus.
Covenant of Grace for You
So the Mosaic covenant didn’t destroy it. It was actually part of it. The covenant of grace is for you, brothers and sisters.
You saw some of the evidence there in the New Testament and more. There’s more. But there’s covenants, plural, of one singular promise, and that those outside had no hope, no God until Christ in the New Testament era broke down that middle wall of partition and said, you don’t have to be Jewish anymore.
You can be a Gentile as long as you repent and believe, which was the case for the Jews as well. They just had to be Jewish and repent and believe. God changed that.
That’s the difference between substance, continuity, sameness, and form, the things on the outside that change. That changed before Moses. They didn’t have all those extra things before Moses.
Abraham simply had the olah, the hope-burned offering. That was it. And Moses comes along, boom, he has all this extra stuff.
So therefore there’s two different religions? No, it was the outward forms had changed because God knew they needed more instruction. These were ways of teaching them. Like kids are taught with picture books.
It’s literally the comparison. And we’ve grown beyond that now, or at least we should have. God’s like, you better, because that’s how I design it now.
It’s all gone away with, except again, very narrow confines and sacraments. And so as our confession says, under the law, it was administered by promises, under the law being the Mosaic economy. It was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the Paschal Lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people, the Jews, all for signifying or for showing, pointing to Christ to come.
It was a beautiful explosion of more actual knowledge and truth of the Messiah than Abraham had, believe it or not. Because all the sacrifices pointed different parts of the work of Christ. And so it’s the same in substance, the same promise, although a different covenant, an outward administration of that covenant.
We share the same salvation, the same Lord, the same deliverance, the same spirit, in fact. For those who are of the faith are the sons of Abraham. One Lord means one church, brothers and sisters, and salvation is union with Christ, and salvation is indeed union with Christ.
And union with Christ means to be the body of Christ, and the body of Christ is the church. Then Abraham and Moses were in the church, because they repented and believed as well. Hebrews tells us that.
The whole hall of faith is about that. Moses looked to Jesus. He believed in the Messiah to come.
If he believed in him, he’s unified with Christ. If he’s in union with Christ, he’s in the body of Christ, which is called the church. It’s just a Jewish form of the church.
That’s it. That’s the only difference. This psalm, therefore, is for you, as it was for Moses, although it came after Moses, for all believers.
The forms have changed. We don’t have to worry about the sanctuary anymore, praise be to God, or the priests and allusions to sacrifices. That’s true, although they can still learn things from those spiritual truths, I believe, and the Bible does in fact do that.
But it’s the same, and the psalm is for us. And if God supported David through war, he can support you through your personal conflicts. And if God was glorified through the big sins of the Old Testament saints, like David, God can be glorified through your limitations as well, brothers and sisters.
And you can plead with your Heavenly Father to regard the promises of the covenant as we have here in verse 20. This is what he’s doing. The same promise, although in older covenant form.
And he will watch over your soul, brothers and sisters. Rest in the comfort of God’s covenant. Stand in the courage of his promise.
The covenant given to Abraham, Moses, and David is a covenant given to you. Let us pray. Father, Lord, God Almighty, may this encourage us, I pray, to read the psalms again with newness of heart, and to realize that this is for us, and that we can have these same hopes and prayers and pleads.
Not just prophecies of the future, although a number of psalms do prophesy and point to Christ in the future, but the comfort that he gathers, and the way in which he gathers that comfort, which is to plead the covenant mercies. And in fact, we’re told in the book of Hebrews that we should come into the Holy of Holies with boldness. Not our own arrogant boldness, but the boldness of realizing that Christ has indeed saved us from our sins and wickedness, and he is here for us to deliver us into heaven.
May this be true for all of us, I pray, by the blood of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and the covenant of grace. Amen.