It is He who must write the law upon our hearts and minds, place His Spirit within us, and cause us to walk in His ways. We lay our weakness and the pull of the flesh before Him and say plainly, “This is Your work to draw me into Your ways.” The entire Christian life is lived out on the sure foundation of His faithfulness to His covenant word that He will do in us what He set out to do.
Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.
Philippians 1:6
God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
1 Corinthians 1:9
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:23
In covenant oath, God has taken it upon Himself to conform our entire persons to the image of the Lord Jesus, to write His law upon our hearts. Most of us at least act as if it were entirely on our shoulders: We have to attempt to achieve our sanctification, while God is the judge who grades our poor efforts.
Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.
1 Thessalonians 5:23,24
Our feelings about our salvation ride a roller coaster as temptations and trials whirl about us. The anchor that holds us steady is not faith in our willpower or the constancy of our feelings but His faithfulness, by which He has promised to save us.
No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.
1 Corinthians 10:13
Our shield in the day we battle with the powers of darkness is utter reliance upon His faithfulness. We are shielded by His resolve to save and keep us. If we were shielded by our resolves, our shield would be made of cardboard! However, we have invincible armor when we are sheltered behind the oath of God.
He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler.
Psalm 91:4
His faithfulness stands guard over us whether we are awake or asleep, keeping us from the powers of darkness. We walk without fear, knowing that He has sworn with covenant oath to keep us.
But the Lord is faithful, who will establish you and guard you from the evil one.
2 Thessalonians 3:3
Understanding the oath of God takes all of the pressure and tension out of life and introduces us into the rest of God. The whole burden of bringing the promises of the covenant to pass in our lives is upon God. Instead of laboring to exhaustion trying to please God, we live in the rest of faith in His faithfulness.
Chapter 10: Entering the Covenant
The covenant, above everything else, means union, the coming together of two parties to make a functional one. In the making of the old human covenants, the parties took each other’s name to indicate that they were united as one. But in the new covenant we do not merely take His name, but His Spirit actually joins us to Him and we are made truly one. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him (1 Corinthians 6:17). The miracle of the new birth, by which we pass from the death of sin into the eternal life of the new covenant, is to be understood as our being actually joined to Christ.
Union with Christ is not to be thought of as an advanced mystical experience, a higher life reserved for the elite, but the common experience of the whole body of believers. To become a Christian is to enter into Christ and partake of His life and be His vehicle of living on earth.
This is seen clearly in Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep recorded in Luke 15. In order to find the lost sheep, the shepherd went into the wilderness treading the same path as the sheep had trodden in its journey away from the shepherd. He entered into the wilderness where the sheep was and participated in its lost condition without his being lost. He came to where the sheep was and united the sheep to himself, wrapping it around his neck so that it might participate in his life and strength. The union of the shepherd with the sheep and the union of the sheep with the shepherd were the sheep’s salvation, the way out of the wilderness.
So Jesus is God coming to where we are, joining us in our lost condition without being lost Himself, taking to Himself our death and carrying us out in His resurrection. We now must be united to Him, partake of His life and strength, and be taken into intimate fellowship with Him and be where He is.
He merited the covenant as and for us; we must now be united to Him, and in Him inherit all that He gained for us. God does not give us the blessings of new covenant as isolated individuals selected for our worthiness or something that we have done. Nowhere does the Scripture say that any blessing or promise of the covenant is given to Malcolm based on his merits. Jesus, our representative Man, merited all the blessings of the covenant by His obedience. He was not earning them for Himself—He did not need them; He was earning them as and for each one of us. Therefore, every blessing is given to Him, and we receive them because we are “in” Him. We have been made “joint-heirs” with Him and so receive all the benefits of covenant as Him: If children, then heirs - heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ... (Romans 8:17).
How do we enter the covenant? All has been done as and for us in Christ, our representative Man. How do we become involved in the covenant commitment and the covenant promises that He has earned for us?
Peter quoted from the prophet Joel instruction on entering the covenant:
And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved...
Joel 2:32
In Bible times, the name of a person was understood to be a window to one’s true person, who one was, and one’s accomplishments. The name of the Lord is an expression that means the revelation God has given to us of who He is and what He has done. The Gospel is the Good News concerning who God is and what He has done in Christ.
To call on the name of the Lord means to invoke that revelation, asking Him to be to us who He has declared He is. He has revealed Himself in the Lord Jesus as the God of love, the covenant-making One. All that we can do is call on that revelation. God achieved the covenant, and our only action is to receive it in grateful faith. All we can do is to respond to the initiative of God’s love and believe on His covenant oath.
But the revelation of God comes with the inevitable revelation of who we are. Our response to the Good News of the covenant is in itself a response to our realizing our condition before God. We call on His name because we have come to see that we are in need of the covenant and are dead without Him.
Jesus said that He came to seek and to save the lost. If we have no sense of being lost, then we have no excitement that Jesus is the way out of our trackless wilderness. He also said that He did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. If we do not see ourselves as sinners, we have no interest in the mission of Jesus and do not see ourselves as part of it. His promises of total forgiveness are only of interest to those who know that they have sinned and are in need of divine forgiveness. Promises of forgiveness are of no interest to the person who has no consciousness of sin. That He would write His law on our hearts is of no interest to people who are unacquainted with their own helplessness to love God and walk in love with all people. The heart of the covenant calls us to union with Him; unless we desire such a relationship, at least to some degree, we will find the prospect boring and dismiss the offered covenant relationship with a yawn.
But it is unnatural for humankind to want God. Men love the darkness of the lie rather than the exposing light that is in God, and we would stay in the darkness hiding from the burning light of truth until we perished if left to ourselves. The awareness of our need and the first flickering desire to know God is awakened in our hearts by the
call of God reaching into our darkness.
He comes to us in the dead ends of life as we face the chaos of our lives apart from Him. He comes to us in the futility of our false religion that leaves us empty and lifeless. He calls to us when death seems very near. His voice is interpreted to us as longings, yearnings after the nameless God, or even longings after that which we cannot define with words.
It is God who initiates the covenant, and it is He who as the Shepherd calls into our wilderness, as He did to Adam, “Where are you?” Our first awareness of a need of God is actually our awakened desire to respond to God, who calls us to Himself. If we follow that light, we will be led to Him who is the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the covenant.
The Gospel is not only information about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In the proclaiming of the Gospel, Jesus, alive and glorified, actually comes to us and confronts us with His love by the Holy Spirit. The news of who He is and what He has done is also the presence of that One by the Spirit. In that announcement, He opens our eyes: We have a confrontation, a meeting, with the living Jesus. The preachers of the New Testament did not see themselves as talking about Jesus but proclaiming Him, the living One, actually present with them and in their words:
Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ to them. Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him.
Acts 8:5,35
For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ has not accomplished through me, in word and deed, to make the Gentiles obedient—in mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.
Romans 15:18,19
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
1 Corinthians 1:21,23,24; 2:1,2
In response to the proclaiming of the Gospel, whether in church, in an auditorium, or in a one-to-one conversation, the listener actually meets with Jesus, the love of God incarnate, resurrected and ascended, who has accomplished our salvation. In the proclaiming of the Gospel, the power of God is dynamically present, bringing salvation:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.
Romans 1:16
It is this power resident in the living Jesus, who comes to the lost in the preaching of the Gospel, that terrifies Satan, the god of this world. He works continually to blind the minds of unbelievers lest in Jesus, the Word of God, they should know the light of God’s glory and the calling forth to be united to His death and resurrection:
Whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 4:4-6
In Jesus’ coming to us in the words of the Gospel, we meet with the love of God reaching out to embrace us, the light of God revealing what He has done for us. In the Gospel, He brings to us the news that we have been included into Him, that He is the way out of the state of death, out from under the condemnation of the law. In Him, we meet with the oath and faithfulness of God, the covenant now accomplished.
We are not signing up to submit to a list of rules, but entering in to relationship with the Triune God in Christ Jesus. To accept the Gospel is to accept Him, submitting to Him as the only truth. In so doing, we renounce all of our attempts to find meaning to life, recognizing them to have been pathetic, shabby counterfeits to be turned from for what they truly are—sinful rebellion that sought to find the meaning of life independently of God.
Throughout the rest of our Christian life we will grow in the knowledge of the divine love, of who Jesus is and what He has done. When we first meet Him and submit to Him, we know very little of what we are doing. We are giving all we know of ourselves (which is very little) to all we know of Him (which is even less).
Faith does not believe about Jesus; it does not simply believe something is true—the devils believe in that fashion. Faith is trust, believing on rather than a believing in or about. It is the commitment to obey and bring our lives into conformity to the newly discovered truth.
To submit to Jesus in the Gospel demands that we turn away from all that we falsely believed to be the meaning and way to life. The word that describes this aspect of the Gospel is repentance, which means a radical change of mind.1 It is the realization that all of one’s life has been wrong because it has been lived from the wrong center. It is not repenting of a certain sin, but a change of mind about oneself, realizing that he or she is lost and does not know the way to life. It is a definite act in which one turns from what he or she thought was life, now recognizing it as death.
The real issue now, in fact, is not sin. The Jesus who comes to us in the Gospel has dealt with sin. The issue now is whether we will accept the divine amnesty, let Him send away our sins from us, and be reconciled to God. Will we turn from our self-sufficiency and submit to love? We are confronted with the love of God and the action of His love in Jesus, and the whole issue now is whether we will turn from our independence, our faith in the lie, and submit to the love of God and His gift of covenant in Jesus.
Many years ago before airports were ruled by the fear of terrorists and airlines were computerized, there were none of the checkpoints we have to go through today. It was a lot easier to get on a plane. I was flying from Los Angeles to New York, and some minutes after we had taken off, the captain welcomed us aboard and proceeded to tell us that the flight was headed to Phoenix, and we would be landing shortly. I was on the wrong flight! That meant everything was wrong. I had the wrong stewardess, the wrong seat, the wrong person in the seat next to me, the wrong snack—everything that I should have had was on another flight. I could not repent of being in the wrong seat, or of sitting next to the wrong passenger; they were part of a bigger package of wrong I had gotten myself into.
Repentance is the sickening realization that we are wrong because we are going in the wrong direction, with a wrong definition of life, with a wrong image of who we are and a distorted image of God, not knowing Him as love. The Gospel is the announcement that we can change planes in midair! We can abandon the way of the lie and receive forgiveness, be reconciled to God, and be made His child—or we can commit the ultimate sin, which is to refuse the covenant and entrench ourselves in our sin.
So the emphasis of repentance is not so much our turning from sin, though that is obviously there, but rather our turning to Jesus, the Son of God, in whom are the covenant and our salvation. To refuse Him is to perish.
He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.
John 3:36
That one act will be established and confirmed for the rest of our lives as we continually discover the futility of life lived independently of God. As we behold the love of God, we see with increasing clarity the horror and corruption of sin and live a life of turning from it.
When I first came to America from England, I came across the Atlantic on the SS France. It took a week, and about the third day out from Southampton, the captain
announced that we were running directly into Hurricane Donna and we would have to change our course. It took more than an hour to turn that great ship to its new course. I realized as I stood on the deck watching the turnaround take place that repentance, the changing of our life course, is the decision of a moment that will take a long time to work out.
Repentance is always joined to faith. Faith is the helpless submission of my total self to the news of the action of God’s love in Christ Jesus. To the extent of my understanding I say yes to the news that He has included us in the covenant through the journey of Jesus through death and resurrection as and for us.
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 14