Faith and Covenant: Trusting God's Promises

Some people that you know that are in this world that you wouldn't make a contract with? You know some that you wouldn't make a deal with? Okay. And their reason is they're dishonest? What other reasons? Irresponsible. So they might make it and intend to keep it, but just not have the self-discipline or control to carry through, carry out with it? What other reasons wouldn't you make a deal with somebody, a contract? They're liars. They don't tell the truth. Don't know them that well. I'm not sure. They have different priorities. I promise you to do this unless something else comes up, you know. Okay. In the Bible, God is dealing with people focused around the covenant. And sometimes we look at this covenant promise that God makes. He'll take care of them, help them, guide them in their lives and provide what they need and protect them and give them meaning and value in their lives. And He tells us in all the things He wants them to do with regard to the covenant. We have a tendency, and this is true for the Jews in the New Testament, to see the covenant as being based on works or effort or things that you do. But you see at the very heart of a contract or covenant is faith. Faith in the person that you're making the deal with. Well, you talked about different things that you'd look at. Well, I don't know this person very well. You're not sure they're responsible to be able to do what they say they're going to do. You don't know if they're honest. All of these things would cause a person to be hesitant. So when God gathers His people at Mount Sinai and He says, I want to make a covenant with you, a contract with you. And this is what I promise I'll do. I will provide for you. I'll guide you. I'll protect you. I'll make you a great nation. Here's what I want from you. I want you to do everything I tell you to do. The contract they could make with God because they trusted Him. And they knew He would be reliable with regard to that. God made the contract with Israel hoping that they would. But the contract that He made was not based on works, but based instead on faith. So all the way through from the Old Testament through today, God's dealing with us is based on our faith and trust in Him. Do I believe that if I follow your pattern, what you've told me is the right thing, that it will work out right? And so He talks about when they enter the land of promise, He says to them, here are all the things I said I would do for you. I'll drive out the people who are there. I'll give you this land. I'll give you a land that's flowing with milk and honey, the physical provisions, food, clothing, all the things that you need like that. Excuse me. And I will make you into a great nation, a nation of worldwide impact. So the people of Israel made that contract with God and He said He would keep it. But He also had a clause in there. If you don't, then there are consequences to that. Every contract that you make has those consequences. You buy a car and you say, I'll make the payments. They say, well, if you don't make the payments, here's what's going to happen. If you buy a house, they say, if you make the payments, here's what's going to happen. But if you don't make the payments, here's what's going to take place. In the covenant that God made with His people, there were the negative consequences for them to fail to trust Him and believe that what He said they should do was really the right thing. In the passage in Deuteronomy chapter 28, He is dealing with the consequences that are going to come to the people of Israel. Some of these earlier were consequences that were taking away the food, taking away their protection, taking away some of the guidance that He's going to give them. Now He's beginning to talk about how their failure to keep the covenant is going to bring about, would bring about the destruction of the entire nation. This is somewhat different in God's dealing with us. In the Old Testament, God is trying to build a community of believers. We call it the nation of Israel, but it's really the church, a community of people who completely trust God and are committed to live in obedience to Him. And so God's dealings with them were primarily at this stage with the whole community of faith. Here's what I'm going to make a promise to you. I'll give you the land, I'll give you all this provision as a nation, but I expect the whole nation to be faithful to this contract. In this one, He's talking about their failure to keep the contract and what He's going to do, beginning with the verse 49 in chapter 28. If you don't keep the covenant that you promised to keep, the Lord will bring a nation against you from far away. What He's talking about here is the whole nation will suffer. It's true that in the Old Testament, individuals kept the Ten Commandments. It's true that individuals made the covenant promise, but the promise encompassed the whole of the nation. So there was a way in which God acted differently in the Old Testament with regard to the whole community, and so He would see the nation as a whole. So if the majority of people in the nation had violated this contract, then the whole nation would suffer from it. And what He would do is, I'll bring strangers, people that you don't even know about. You might make contracts with all the people that are around you and they're your friends, but I'll bring people from a long way off against you. And if I have to, He said, I'll go to the ends of the earth. The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down a nation whose language you do not understand. A fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. In His description, He talks about several things that would make this a fearsome thing. First of all, they're strangers. You don't know them. It's not like your next-door neighbor, people in the country next to you. And God was going to find someone, no matter where it was. If He had to go to the ends of the earth, He would find someone. And when the time came, it would be as quick. Have you seen the pictures of an eagle that flies down to the water and catches a fish? Instantaneous. No chance for you to protect yourself. When I bring this judgment on you for breaking the contract or the covenant that I've made with you, it will be quick. You will see this take place. And then it will be a nation whose language you don't understand. Not people who have taken over your land, who have an entirely different background, culture, and language. Strangers who come in and take it all away from you. It's not like Israel captures Judah. Both of them are Jewish. This is going to be Gentiles, people you don't know. A fierce-looking nation without respect to old or pity for the young. They'll be people without moral concerns. There are people who try to live by moral concerns. But there are also people in the world who have no boundaries as to what they're willing to do. And we've seen some of this take place in the wars that are happening in our world now. How brutal. I think you maybe saw in North Korea how this young man has taken his uncle who helped him get started and who was a big part of his life and killed him. Because he was trying to gain power and control. That's something beyond what any of us would even imagine a person would do. There are people in the world like that, and I'll bring these people on you so that they don't have any qualms with what they do. The picture he's drawing is of vast destruction, powerful destruction, and painful destruction. They will devour, verse 51, they will devour the young of your livestock, the crops of your land, until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, no new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herd or lambs of your flock until you're ruined. Now, one of the things that God promised them was the land. And in the first section of this, he says, I'm going to take that away from you. There'll be someone come who will take your land over. Another promise that he made to them was provision. And when this is over, I'm going to take all of your provision away from you. You see, he's dealing with this covenant step by step. I'm going to erase the promises I've made to you because you have failed to keep your side of this contract. So, the second step is the crops that they have. Everything that they have will be taken over. They will lay siege to the cities throughout your land until the highest fortified walls in which you trust will fall down. And one of the things he made a promise about was, I will protect you. When the time comes and they enter your land and you're looking for my protection, it won't be there. In the story you've looked at on Sunday morning, the difference between Hezekiah when he came and laid the promises of God down before God and talked about the Assyrians being out there and how the multitudes were there. And in that moment, God, by His own power or something, we don't know what He did, 185,000 died that night. The next time they were surrounded by an enemy, the Babylonians, they were wicked people, not living in faith, and He withdrew His help and the nation fell. God's promise was for protection. And what he's saying is, if you don't keep your side of this contract, if you don't act in a way that's filled with faith, trusting me, then I'm going to not only remove the contract, I'm going to make sure that every element of it is erased. So, here is the nation. They will lay siege to the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will siege your cities throughout the land the Lord has given you. Everything will be erased, all the promises that God made to His people. Now, in reality, all that happened. The people of Israel did not keep the promises they made to God. Over and over, God waited a long, long time. He warned them. He tried everything He could to get them to recognize that their failure meant that He would not keep His side of the contract. And His promise was actually kept. In 2 Kings, chapter 17, verse 7, all this took place because Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt under the power of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. They worshiped other gods, followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them, as well as the practices which the kings of Israel had introduced. The Israelites secretly did things against the Lord their God that were not right. From watchtower to fortified cities, they built themselves high places in all their towns. By that, he means places to worship foreign gods. They set up sacred stones and Asherah poles, which were all to places of worship. And what he's really talking about here is they allowed someone other than God to direct their moral and everyday life. The Asherah poles were simply places they went to worship these gods, but these gods allowed them things that were contrary to what God said they should do. And what it's a sign of is their lack of trust that God could do what He said He would do. The Asherah poles were for fertility. Your crops will be good. Your animals will be good. And the high places were places where they prayed to the Baals, who was the God of rain. He's going to bring rain to us. They trusted Baal for rain. They trusted the goddess of the Asherah poles for fertility, for their crops themselves, and all the necessary things for life. All of these, God had promised He would do for them. But they failed to trust Him. See, the contract is violated when you lose trust in the other person. Let's say you sign a contract to buy a car, and you make payments on the car, and you find out that this car that was sold to you as a good car was actually a car that was in a flood and completely destroyed. And now you find the problems begin to come up. One of the first things you're going to do is talk to the people who sold you the car, and say, I'm going to quit paying on this car, because it was not what you told me it was going to be. God's arrangement with us reflects the same thing. When His people say, okay, we're no longer going to do our part of this agreement, then that clause comes in. This is the time, and this is the place. God did not act on this hastily. He waited over and over again, as the prophets said, if you don't change, destruction will come. And so the northern kingdom fell. Judah fell. And there's only two chapters later in the book of Kings that the southern kingdom fell. Chapter 24, Nebuchadnezzar came, and he surrounded the city of Jerusalem, and no longer was there anybody there who could say that they were faithful to God, and that nation fell too. All of a sudden, the church was destroyed, the people of God destroyed. When God comes in the New Testament to make a covenant with us, it's quite different. The contracts that are made in the New Testament are mostly focused on individuals, rather than corporate or group contracts. In the Old Testament, every year they would come for the reading of the law, and all the people of the nation would come, and the law would be read, and then they would say, do you promise to do this? And they would all say, yes, we will do everything God has said we should do. There was a corporate sense of commitment to God that was not necessarily like it is for us today. Verse 53 in chapter 28 of Deuteronomy, Because of the suffering that your enemy will afflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb. This suffering will come to you so bad that you will eat your own children. The terrible, horrible consequences of what they did. The flesh of sons and daughters, the Lord your God has given you. Was it that God wanted them to do that? No. The way war was done in the Old Testament was they would come to the city, surround it with an army, let no one in and no one out. They would cut off the water supply if they could, cut off all source of food, and starve the city until there was nothing left to eat, and people would give up. What God is saying is you're going to face a time in which the normal processes of war are going to come to you and they're going to be disastrous and horrible. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his brother, or his wife he loves, or his surviving children. The time is going to come whenever the hunger and the pain of not having anything to eat will cause you to not be interested in helping even the people closest to you. You find food, you're going to eat it. You have some left over, you're going to hide it, even so your wife won't find it, or your brother won't find it. The consequences are going to be horrific. God has warned them, this is the consequence that's going to come with your failing to keep your side of the contract. He will not give to one of them any flesh of his children that he is eating. A man finds a child has died, he hides the child and cooks the flesh for himself, and hides the rest of it even so the rest of the family can't eat it. Most horrific picture of deprived people. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemies will inflict on you during the siege of your cities. The most gentle and sensitive woman among you, so sensitive and gentle, that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot, will begrudge the husband she loves, her own son or daughter, the afterbirth from her womb, and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege, and in distress your enemy will inflict on you and your cities. God painted for the people of Israel before they went into the land the horrible consequences of what would come to them. Now in the New Testament, God deals with his people in a different way. He doesn't say, get your church together and as a corporate group, say we will obey everything you tell us to do. He instead addresses this to individuals, each of us, so that we make our personal commitment to Christ, and each of us is responsible for the personal commitment we make to him. Excuse me for that. So whenever Jesus is talking about what's going to happen to us, he talks about the fact that we fail to live this life, our lives collapse in the same way. When Jesus was talking about what would happen if a man builds his life on the rock, that is, if you trust the things that I say, and you live as I tell you to live, it doesn't matter what happens around you, your life will stand strong and firm. So he's talking about the promise of the covenant. If you follow my guidance and do what I tell you in the action you have, if you are faithful to do the things I've asked you to do, I'm going to provide for you, I'm going to protect you, and your life will stand for something, it will be significant. So that each of us then has this personal opportunity to make a promise to God. In the New Testament, he doesn't necessarily talk about being captured by enemies. He talks about instead how the things of life, when Jesus talked about the storms of life, they come and they strike us, hit us. And when those hit us, they overwhelm most people who haven't built their life, haven't lived in obedience to what God says, it destroys them. It's like their life was built on sand. But if you've built your life, if you've made the choices I want you to make, if you think the way I want you to think and make the choices I want you to make, it's like building a house on solid rock. No matter what happens, it's going to stand for you. Now, the promise of God individually given to us is the focus of what Jesus' ministry was. He had a problem because the Jewish people who were living by this Old Testament covenant saw themselves as still within this framework. Jesus was trying to address individuals to say what the Pharisees and Sadducees do is not going to curse you. You have an opportunity individually to say, I choose to follow Christ. I believe if I build my life on what he says that I will find the same promise that was made to the people of Israel in the Old Testament, but it will be made to me. So the covenant is individualized. Now, we find even whenever the church is gathered together that God deals with the New Testament church in a different way. For example, all the churches that Paul started, every one of them had problems. Some of the problems were pretty bad. You know, there's a story in Corinthians about sexual immorality, a story in Corinthians about the church gathering to have the Lord's supper and they got drunk, all kinds of stories of dysfunctional churches. But God does not bring through Paul to these churches a promise of destruction. In every one of his letters, even though he goes over the terrible things that are happening in those churches, he always holds up the promise that God is going to redeem his people. The sins of few or even of the majority do not cause God to say, I'm going to wipe this church out. Always what he held up was, if you will turn around your life, and if you will make the commitment you need to make, God will change you. There is always hope for your church. See, in the Old Testament, even though some people may have stayed faithful to God, they were caught up in the majority, so everyone found the same destruction. In the city of Jerusalem, whenever the city fell, if there were godly people, they starved too. It didn't matter about that. But in the New Testament, as Paul deals with the churches, each person individually has their own contract to make with God, so that there is always possibility for the individual, and the church always has that possibility. What he says to individuals, and this is sort of a parallel to the Old Testament, he says, if you do not accept me as the way, the truth, and the life, then you enter into eternity without me in hell. Now, you could read these Old Testament passages where it talks about the terrible consequences of disobedience, and where it talks about being deprived of food, being deprived of everything that you find valuable and useful. And this is really all wrapped up in hell. It's not lightened. It just says that what's happening, the promise of complete, total destruction, is given to the individual who refuses to follow Christ. It doesn't happen the day you sin. It doesn't happen the day you refuse Christ. God gives us all many, many opportunities to recognize that we're not living in obedience to him. What he wants is for us to trust him. Do you trust me to guide you in your financial matters? Do you trust me to guide you in your family matters? Do you trust me to guide you in the daily decisions that you make? So your trust in me will result in a changed lifestyle. And whenever he sees in the people in the churches, Paul writes, he says, all these things that you're doing, go to them and correct them. It's not going to destroy the church, but it's going to give you an opportunity to make a change. And even in the book of Revelation, whenever John is writing to the churches, only a couple of the churches does he indicate that their sin is going to cause their candle to be removed. He doesn't suggest in the New Testament that the church itself will be totally destroyed in the same fashion as he said Israel would be destroyed in the Old Testament. Because he recognizes that individuals have made this commitment to Christ, and in every church there are always some people who are faithful to God. He doesn't mean every church is going to last forever, but that every person in the church is not subject to the same consequence that comes from people who are disobedient. So what God is giving us a picture of in the Old Testament is actually true in the New. The only difference is, there he talks about the whole body of Christ, the whole body of God, the people of God, and saying to them, I will not tolerate you living a life not trusting me. Now this is our passion. If we believe that this is true, then we have to say to ourselves, is my life committed to live in obedience to God? Do I trust Him? Am I willing to say, I know what you want from me, and even though it doesn't seem right to me sometimes, and even though it's not like everybody else does, I choose to follow the pattern you give me. This is what faith in God really means, to trust Him. I think sometimes in our efforts to help people find God, we are not clear about what we're trying to say. So sometimes when people pray a prayer, say, Lord, I accept you as my Lord and Savior, they don't know what that means. And sometimes whenever they say that they want to be saved, it means that they want to avoid hell, but they are not committed to living in obedience to God. This is certainly not something we make very clear to people. And it's our obligation to help them understand what it means to enter into a life of trust. I trust you enough that I'm going to learn what you want me to do, and I'm going to put it in practice in my life. And as I learn what you want me to do, I'm going to find that not everyone around me believes this, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to find as I start this lifestyle, that not everything that you ask me to do I'm going to want to do, but I'm going to do it anyway. Why? Because I trust you. From the beginning of the Bible to today, God's relationship with us is built on one thing, trust in Him. And our trust in Him results in a lifestyle, thinking the way He thinks and acting the way He thinks. I say those two things together because our actions are the result of the way we think. If you think something is good, you do it. If you think it's bad, you avoid it. So when you say, I'm going to follow you, Christ, and you start hearing these things that He says to do, some of them are going to be difficult. So you have to say, I trust you more than my own judgment. What God is giving us from the very beginning of the Bible all the way to today is a clear indication, I will save those who trust me. And trusting me means that you understand what He's asking you to do, and you make a promise to live that way. You don't earn salvation by doing that, but your actions reflect the trust you have in God, like the contract. I sign a contract to buy a car. The guy says it's a good car. It only has 30,000 miles on it. I trust that that's true, and so I sign the contract, and I start making the payments. The trust is indicated by the fact we sign the contract and make the payments. And if you were to go out and ask somebody why they've signed that, they say, well, because I thought that that was right, and I thought that the car was a good buy, and it was a good deal for me. Our trust is indicated by what we do. I hear people say a lot, you know, well, I believe in God, but I don't think you have to do this or that. Well, you don't have to, but if you believe what God tells you, you will. If God says to you, this is not right, it's dangerous, it's destructive, and you keep on doing it, destruction comes. When people say, I believe God, but they point to something that the Bible says, and says, but I don't think you have to do that to be saved. You don't have to do that to be saved. But if you don't trust God enough to do that, you're not saved. That's the issue. And our churches are filled with people who know better, but don't do it. We ought to understand from the Bible that that spells condemnation. And the picture of hell can't be in any way seen as attractive. God tries from the very beginning to let us know what the road of unbelief has in store for us. And it's not only in this world, but it's forever. Would you bow your heads please for a moment? I want to ask you, if you have said to God, I believe you. I believe what you said. I believe what you did. I believe it enough that I'm willing to do in my life the things you say are right. I believe it enough to say, if I have a desire to do something that you've told me is not right, I'm going to turn away from it. Even though I want to. Even though everyone around me does it. Even though if I don't join my family and friends, they're going to turn against me. This is how much I trust you. If you've not made that promise to God, then what you find yourself doing is obeying a little bit, and then disobeying. Obeying a little bit, then disobeying. And I'll tell you what you find. You find good times and bad times. And it's never going to change for you until you get off the fence and say, there is no return, God. I promise you that I believe you. And I'll live as if I did. Now you're going to find friends and people around you who tell you they believe in God. But from all the evidence in their life, they don't do the things God says they should do. They don't think the way God says they should think. And you should begin to see in their life, trouble. Trouble comes when they make bad choices. Trouble comes because they seem to always not have enough. There's no provision for them. And they're always in difficulty. And their life just is like wandering around from one place to another. No direction. What you're in this world to do is to show them by your own life the difference. And to say, if you will give yourself to God, He will change your life. The picture of what happens to those that don't is ghastly. So Father, we are so thankful for your patience for all of us. Excuse me. You have been kind with us. You warn us. You give us opportunities. But we know that there is a time in which your patience runs out. What we ask for each of us is that we might faithfully promise you that we trust you. Trust you enough to shape our lives according to the way you want them to be shaped. We ask that our lives lived out before others would be a signal to them about how you keep your promises. In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.