The
Importance of Understanding the Biblical Covenants
Foreword
While
much of Christianity is a Mysterium Fidei, such as the Most Holy Trinity, all
the “mysteries” of it are believed because of the basic point historically
attested to, i.e. that Christ rose from the dead. THAT in turn is not something
one has to “accept” on “blind faith” but rather judge on the evidence. We have
two sources for this evidence.
First, St. Paul in 1 Corinthians details in the 15
chapter the men who saw the Risen Christ, and said so. He names names: Peter,
the Apostles, James “Brother of the Lord” and first bishop of Jerusalem, then
500 brethren, “most of who are still alive” when he wrote this epistle, about
55 A.D. (See here for details.) Then he writes that he himself, Paul (as Saul of Tarsus) met
Jesus (on the road to Damascus). The 500 is interesting, as that was the size
of the jury in Golden Age Athens when a man was on trial for his life (as with
Socrates). So the classically educated Paul is asserting he has evidence that
would pass muster in Periclean Athens! Also, he swears this is true, using a
specific formula “I give you what I have been given”, which was a “I solemnly
swear to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth…” mechanism. He uses it
again in the same Epistle in Chapter 11, in verse 25, where he ups it by
writing, about the Real Presence in the Most Holy Eucharist, no less: “I give
you what I was given by the Lord…”.
Second, the Holy Eucharist itself is a solemn
oath1: a blood oath on the Blood of God Himself, i.e. it is a
sacrament, the most important of them, and generations of Catholic and Orthodox
Christians have sworn, for 2,000 years now, on the Blood of God that Jesus was
seen alive after His Crucifixion. Who can imagine a more solemn oath than that!
Therefore, the number and nature of the witnesses, and the profoundly powerful
oath, give us great confidence indeed that Jesus rose from the dead.
And one
must realize that the Most Holy Eucharist is also the Seventh Covenant, the New
Covenant, that God established with his people.
Essential Covenant Explanation
The
whole of the Bible, and the whole of Christianity and Judaism (Islam rejects the
following) is founded on God, the Creator God, the Absolute Being of the great
philosophers (pagan, Jewish, Muslim, Christian), and not merely on His revelation to us, but His contractual
agreements/treaties He has made with us. God
makes Covenants, or treaties, contracts, with people! Islam absolutely
rejects this. “Allah’s hand is not chained”(by contract or oath) says Surah
5:64 (it even damns the Jews for saying Allah makes covenants!)
So the
whole of the Revelation, Old Testament and New, hangs on these Covenants, seven
of them. The first is when God blesses His creation and rests on the Seventh
Day, making it holy. If you read Genesis 1 and on into chapter 2, up to verse
4, where it says, “These are the generations of the Heavens and the Earth…”,
that info all fits perfectly onto a cuneiform clay tablet, and the verse 4 of
Chapter 2 is the signature line – God Himself has signed it, actually. In the
first half of Genesis, there are a number of these “These are the generations”
of Noah, and so on, whoever the previous chapter or two has been telling the
story of. The authors of the tablet are careful to sign each one, so you know
who told the story of the “generations” involved! This is called Toledoth
(“Generation”), and thus the Toledoth/Generations theory.
After
creation, God makes Covenants with Adam and Eve (Genesis 3), then Noah (Genesis
9), then Abraham (three separate but related ones, all considered to be counted
as 1 Covenant: see Genesis 15, 17, and 22), then with Moses in Exodus 19.
However, the Passover, enshrined in the Passover Seder, is the Old
Testament/Covenant’s contract-affirming oath-swearing Covenant-renewal action –
i.e. Jews are Jews when born of a Jewish woman, but become part of the Old
Covenant proper when circumcised and then participate in the Passover – so the
Passover is an essential part of this Mosaic Covenant, the central Covenant of
the Old Testament series of six Covenants. This Mosaic Covenant is the Covenant
that Christ replaces with the last Covenant, the Seventh, or more precisely fulfills in a final, astounding way via
His Body and Blood. As He says, “I
have come not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.” – Matt 5:17, using Himself as the new Pascal Lamb in the
Holy Eucharist. (Luke 22:20)
After
Moses, which is the Fifth Covenant counting from the very first one, God makes
a Sixth Covenant with David, one of His favorite people in all history. (1
Chronicles, 17) Notes that one needs to read the whole chapter; and 16 too; also
in chapter 15 they sacrifice the animals for this Covenant, as there is simply
NO worship of Yahweh without blood sacrifice: see Abel of Cain and Able; Noah’s and Abraham’s blood sacrifices, and of
course the Pascal Lamb in Moses’ worship – Christ is the final
blood-sacrifice of the Bible, the one fulfilling all the others, from Abel to
Himself.
Finally,
of course, we have Jesus of Nazareth’s sacrifice of Himself on the Cross, an
integral element of the Holy Eucharist institution (begun the night before) is
the means by which we are saved1. (Read the whole of the 6th
Chapter of St. John’s Gospel: Jesus clearly is not speaking metaphorically, as
Protestants claim.)
Therefore
the whole of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is hung on these Covenants.
They are its intellectual and spiritual framework, the map connecting all the
stories and the chart through the millennia of God’s interaction with us.
Neither
the Bible itself or Christianity (nor Judaism for that matter), make sense
until you understand this Covenantal Salvation History framework. And the
important thing to notice, next to God making business contracts with us to
begin with, is how God keeps expanding the reach of each covenant: He makes the
Second Covenant with a couple, a pair of people; the next one with a family
(Noah and his sons, etc.), then the next one with a tribe, Abraham (God changed
Abram’s name to “Abraham” meaning Great Father), then with a nation, the People
Israel under Moses’ command; and finally in the Old Testament, with King David,
that the Kingship of the KINGDOM (the Israelite nation is now a Kingdom) of
Israel shall never pass from David’s house – and finally the Seventh Covenant,
with which the specific Covenants of the Old Testament are now expanded one
final time, this time to ALL peoples EVERYWHERE, i.e. anyone who will accept
Joshua, Yehoshu'a, for Who He claimed to be: God Himself. (John 8:48-59)
Notes:
1.
The
Holy Eucharist as Blood Oath Sacrament is something most modern-day Catholics
are ignorant of. As they are ignorant of how Salvation works. God’s Incarnation
is central to our Salvation, and so much so we have to participate in that
Incarnation to be saved. We do that through the New Covenant, which is the
Blood Oath of the Holy Eucharist.
Basic Points
·
The Incarnation: Absolutely necessary and central to
salvation
·
God becomes a human person, Jesus / Yeshu'a (Yehoshu'a:
"Yahweh is salvation").
Why the Incarnation?
Why did God have to become man? To
make Infusion of Grace possible.
· God’s Incarnation
didn’t lower God so much as elevate human nature, in Christ,
enabling…
· "Theosis"
(Divinization) which by grace – not by nature – is our incorporation into
Christ, raising us up to participate in His Divinity (as St. Peter teaches in 2
Peter 1.4). Usually described in the Western Church as an Infusion of Grace,
our natures are changed. Protestantism teaches Imputation of Grace: God assigns grace to us but doesn’t actually
divinize or change our nature.
· St. Athanasius:
"For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and
[CCC 460]
· St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his
divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."
(Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]
· This teaching is
stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples:
· John 1:12 “But to all
who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of
God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the
will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation)
· 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation
has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4
might well put it best; see also Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27;
Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.
· Two Old Testament
examples: Isaiah 65:17; Ezekiel 36:25-26
·
Note: In general, Jesus seems to demand the impossible of
“ordinary” humans. In Matthew 5, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives
the Beatitudes, then says we are “salt of the earth” and “light of the world”,
discusses how He has come not to do
away with the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill
them. He discusses elevated behavior regarding anger, adultery, divorce, making
oaths and not retaliating (“turn the other cheek”) and love our enemies. He
ends with "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is
perfect." (5:48) That is something manifestly impossible for “normal”
human beings to do.
The Sacraments: Fulfilment of the Covenants
Salvation
“works” in us, as individuals through the sacraments, formal covenant oaths, by
which we partake of the nature of God, in Christ (God’s grace is infused in
us).
· Baptism removes
Original Sin, thus we’re free to…
· Receive Christ in the
Holy Eucharist…
And to keep this “New Creation” and grow in the Divine,
we have Confession, a sacrament of vital importance because it restores us to
our baptismal state.
Afterword:
What
About the Jews, the Original Keepers of the Covenants:
1. Once God makes a
treaty, a contract, a covenant, He never breaks it. God is the same today,
yesterday, and tomorrow. (Hebrews 13:8) Thus these Covenants are never
abrogated or cancelled. Yet how to think about the Jews, who reject Christ as
Messiah yet adhere to the first six Covenants?
2. Historically, there
were many Jews in Jesus time who fully accepted Him, as His Apostles did, and beyond
them many others, such as those Jews converted at Pentecost. Then again, many Jews
existed afterward who accepted Jesus as the Messiah, but not necessarily that He
was co-equal to God; that Trinitarian idea took a while to develop and be
formalized, something the Church did over some hundreds of years – though it must be understood that the very
earliest Christians understood Jesus to be saying He was God (John 10:30), and this
is the core idea necessary to the validity of His Sacrifice on the Cross and
His institution of the Holy Eucharist, the New Covenant. Thus the Gospels are
about two central ideas Jesus had: first, would people recognize Him for Who He
was, and second, that people treated one another with agapé, caritas,
the highest form of love. After many acts of caritas to Samaritans and Romans,
and after many parables such as the Good Samaritan, He Himself gave them the ultimate
and fundamental example of how to love.
3. Concurrently to those
Jews seeing Jesus as the Messiah, there were those who were Christians and who wanted
the gentiles, the non-Jews, to become Jewish in order to be Christians. These
were the Judaizers. They understood clearly that a split, a schism, between
Christians and Jews was imminent, and wanted to avoid it; however, they were
Saint Paul’s bête noire, and he lost his cool when he had to deal with them or
their teaching as it affected his churches. This led to complications 1500
years later: Luther and Protestantism focuses on the idea of Sola Fide, that God saves through faith
alone (faith understood as blind faith, an act of will, whether generated in
oneself or given by God, as Calvin insisted). But the Pauline passages
Protestants take as proof of this idea are all written by St. Paul when he was
discussing Judaizers. In Judaism, one HAD to be circumcised to be part of the
Covenant (then as now) and keep the kosher dietary laws, temple ritual, and so
on. This St. Paul rejected vehemently, and it was in that context he wrote
passages such as the famous Romans 3:28, the “verse that launched the Reformation”:
i.e. “For you are saved by faith and not works of the law.” At the Council of
Jerusalem, as recorded in Acts 15, the Judaizers’ ideas were formally rejected.
From that time on, the Jewish element of Christianity began to die out as the
two religions diverged from one another. Any Jewish Christian had to make the
decision of decisions, the choice of choices: stay or go: be a believer in
Christ and lose one’s Judaism, or keep the Jewish identity by cutting oneself
off from the increasingly gentile Church.
4. Yet in the Near
Eastern Semitic lands, strong traces of this early Semitic Christianity
survived, especially in the Syrian, Aramaic- (technically, Syriac) language
bishoprics. It was, I suspect, some strain of this Semitic Christianity, certainly
a fringe one that never accepted Jesus Christ as Son of God or the Holy
Trinity, that eventually gave birth to Islam, the central tenet of which is to
deny the Incarnation.
5. Therefore, in the
break with the Jews, the Church taught formally of one Covenant, the Mosaic one, that it was actually cancelled.
Abrogated. Taken off-line. Scuttled. Of course, one can also see each Covenant
as a fulfillment and enlargement of the ones preceding it, as Christ is the
fulfillment of God’s promise to Eve that a descendant of hers would crush the
dragon’s head, or that he’ll come in glory to end the world, not flood it again
(as the Covenant with Noah was). Metaphorically, the Covenants are like a line of bricks
in a wall: as each new one is made, the last of the old ones is no longer top
of the wall, yet it is still essential in its historical place for supporting
the wall’s later additions. For example, no one would think of “cancelling” Adam
and Eve’s Covenant, or Noah’s, or the Davidic Covenant, that the kingship of
Israel would pass for David’s House, for Joshua of Nazareth is a “Son of
David”.
6. So the Mosaic
Covenant is “cancelled” in the sense of being subsumed and then flowering into
the New Covenant, the sacrament of which is the Holy Eucharist. The Mosaic
Covenant is a typology of the Holy Eucharist, and one of the six Covenantal
foundations upon which the New Covenant stands.
7. Today, Jews consist
of many different groups and sects, of course, and they did so back in Jesus’
day; a large portion of Jews are “non-religious” as well. Yet none of them want
to hear this idea of Catholicism’s, that their central religious rite is
abrogated. But the Church is not being “kind” or “caring” by watering down the
truth; and whether one insists on the old “cancelled” language or “subsumed and
recreated in the Holy Eucharist,” participation in the Mosaic Covenant is simply
no longer efficacious for salvation, except as a pointer to the New Covenant.
(Jews would not consider “Messianic Jews” any longer Jewish; however, from a
Catholic/Orthodox perspective, Messianic Jews are evangelical Protestants who reject for the Historical Church’s understanding of the Sacraments.)
8. For Jews today, as of
old, the Absolute Being God, the God of the great philosophers and the God of
His revelation to them, is what He’s always been, their Tribal Deity. Non-Jew
gentiles are not Jews and cannot have God in His fullness because they’re not
part of the Abrahamic Covenant or the following two Covenants, though according
to long-standing (early Medieval) Jewish teaching, they can be “Righteous
Gentiles” if they keep the Noahidic (or Noachian or Noahide) Laws God gave to Noah
(Genesis 9:4-6). By following these laws given to Noah, then, those descendants
of Noah who are not part of the ensuing Abrahamic Covenant can attain Olam Haba
(עולם הבא), the world to come for the reward of the righteous.
