Covenants: Clarity, Ambiguity, and Faith (Part 3)

Read part 1 and part 2.

In the Bible there is always a correspondence between God’s words and His actions. You see it in the Creation narratives: “God said…and it was so.” You see it in the gospel: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” You see it in such mundane places as the curing of Naaman, or Jesus’ healing of Jairus’s daughter. When God says He is going to do something, you can bank on it. While there are places where God relents on judgment (especially after intercession), our faith depends upon the fixity of His meaning. God will do what He says He will do.

This is important on two fronts: first because God must be as good as His word or His character is in question. God’s attributes of veracity and immutability stand behind His promises. The second reason God must mean what He says is because God requires faith from us. Faith must “know” what it is that is to be believed. Faith cannot thrive where ambiguity is let in. Faith has to be able to separate truth from error, or we are wasting our time warning people against error. If the meaning is uncertain, doubt has a foothold.

This is where we left off last time. Covenants necessarily take up within themselves this notion of dis-ambiguity.

But in that case what is one to make of this?

Israel is called God’s son… Only later will the full import of this be apparent as the perfect Son of God comes to fulfill in his own life all God’s purposes for Israel.(Graeme Goldsworthy, According To Plan, 141)

This is the same writer who said, “God cannot go back on his [covenanted] word.” But sadly he doesn’t mean what one would think he means (that God will do what He has said He will do). Note here the equivocation on the word “son.” In the case of Israel it is a figure of speech. In the case of Jesus it is actually true. No wonder “the full import” was not known in OT times! Notice also that Goldsworthy thinks that “God’s purposes for Israel” (a Nation to whom land is covenanted—Gen. 15), are “fulfilled” in the life of Christ (a Person). According to the OT revelation, the Messiah was to “raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved ones of Israel” (Isa. 49:6), so that He “will make her wilderness like Eden” (Isa. 51:3; Ezek. 36:35), where, using covenant language, He has promised the Nation, “you will dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; you shall be my people, and I will be your God” (Ezek. 36:28; Amos 9:14-15). They have been led to expect God’s blessing on their restored land (Hos. 2:18; Isa. 11:6-10; Ezek. 34:25-27), and God Himself will “betroth you to me forever” (Hos. 2:19).

Since these are all covenanted promises, backed by the oath of God; and since covenants are reinforcements of clear speech which guarantee something, Goldsworthy’s explanation of how God is not going back on His word by fulfilling all this in Christ is a little hard to see. Actually, the explanation itself is filled with just the kind of ambiguities which covenants are supposed to eradicate.

No wonder then, we can be told that,

The semi-nomadic wanderings of Abraham and his descendants in Canaan did not serve God’s purposes of revelation fully enough. Throughout the Old Testament, possession of the land is presented as a shadow of the future reality of God’s people in his kingdom. (Ibid, 130-131)

And in which covenant of the Old Testament is one told this? Where are “the words of the covenant” which create this expectation? What is the expectation these covenants do create?

We must add here that the theological covenants of Reformed theology do not pass muster in this regard because they have nebulous specificity. Covenant theologians disagree regarding what each of these supposed covenants does. Since none of them are described in the Bible (they are inferred from viewing the two Testaments from a particular angle), they are in no sense on a par with the clearly defined covenants of Scripture.

According to Goldsworthy, the gospel event must be presupposed for the OT to be rightlyunderstood (76). But if the covenants which God made could not be rightly understood until afterJesus had died and gone back to heaven, and if by the words used they raised false expectations in God’s people in throughout the OT era, we would be forced to admit that God’s word, even under oath, apparently (in some theologies) is ambiguous, and that deliberately! Just what was an OT saint supposed to believe when reading the covenants?

One might not wish to go there, but I do not see a way out—apart, that is, from adopting ambiguous language.

More to come…