Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath

by Malcolm Smith

  This reality is very hard for us to grasp. It is much easier for us to think of Him invisibly beside us. He is with us, but the weight of the New Testament simply states that He is in us and we are in Him. He is in me, in you, in us, in all that we do and all that we experience. In us He acts, feels our sorrows, and knows our joy.

  “For me to life is Christ” means that the experience I am going through at this moment, what I am doing, is being experienced and done by Jesus within me. It is He who is now punching the keys of this computer; it is He who is going to buy the groceries, going to the class. He has continual access to human life in and by us. Yet we are not passive robots but full participants in life, making true choices. This is the glorious mystery of the faith.

  The mathematics of the new covenant is one plus one equals one. He is one with us, experiencing the tiresome people we have to work with, for it is He working alongside them in us. He experiences the frustrating drivers in rush hour and the old ladies driving slowly on the way home from church. He laughs in your celebrations. He weeps at the graveside of your loved one, experiencing your loss. In you, He faces your temptations and pressures of life. He faces the opportunities and challenges of life, and in you He wills to accept them. And experiencing them in us, He is ever present to our inmost selves as the strength, the wisdom, and the ability to live in each situation. Our lives are not something we tell Him about in our nightly report to Him in prayer, for He has lived them in us second by second.

  This life is not the domain of the hermit, so spiritual as to be lived out in a monk’s cell. All the commands to love or to put away the works of the flesh are addressed to the mundane flow of life that we live in the home and at the job, surrounded by very ordinary people. It is around the dinner table that we put away anger and malice and put on love; it is on the job that in His strength within us we deal with envy and greed and magnify Him in our bodies. He listens and ministers at the coffee urn to hurting people.

  But we are not His glove puppets! We are not nonparticipating robots, the ultimate ventriloquist dolls. The glorified Jesus is in us, and our walk of faith is choosing to die to the desires of the flesh that seek to live independently of Him and fulfill the lie, and instead to helplessly draw on His strength within us.

  Chapter 14: The Summation of the Christian Life

  The Christian life may be summed as the consciousness that He lives within us, and we draw upon His infinite life in every situation we find ourselves in. This means that as we grow in Christ and become mature, we will have an increasing sense of our own weakness that we might no longer trust in ourselves and so proportionately live from His strength.

  Paul went through a time of pressure in which he learned this lesson of knowing his weakness that Christ may be his life and strength. He recorded it in the following passage:

  And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

  2 Corinthians 12:7-10

  We do not know for certain what the thorn in the flesh was. It would appear to me that he was speaking of the men who followed him, seeking to smear his name and distort the Gospel he preached, the men whom he had spoken of in the previous chapters. But for our study it really does not matter what it was. Our interest is in what he did with it. It certainly was a trying time; a messenger of Satan driving a stake into your side is no small trial!

  In prayer, he begged that God would take it away. The “three times” is a Hebrew way of saying “again and again.” But the prayer was answered in an unexpected way. It was not taken away, but became the situation in which Paul learned the reality of Christ living in him. The Scripture tells us, And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness” (verse 9).

  The Amplified Bible renders it, “My strength and power are made perfect (fulfilled and completed) and show themselves most effective in [your] weakness.”

  The trouble he was going through had drained him of all faith and expectancy of his own strength; the end of trust in him made him the perfect vehicle to express the strength of Christ.

  We find it hard to come to that place of acknowledged helplessness. We do not believe that we are weak! We believe that if we can try a little harder, we can please God. Our prayers rarely are expressions of total weakness; most of the time, they indicate that we want God to help us by strengthening our strength, to help us where we fall short. But Paul’s lesson makes it plain that His life can only be seen in and through us at the point of our utter weakness.

  The pressures that make us face our weakness can be looked upon as blessings; knowing our weakness apart from Him makes it easier to let His life flow through us, as Paul notes at the end of the passage: Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me (verse 9).

  He uses an expression here that is difficult to translate into English. The “resting upon me” is descriptive of being engulfed, out of sight inside something.1 The Amplified Bible renders it “may rest (yes, may pitch a tent over and dwell) upon me!”

  It would appear that that experience was a life-changing moment in his life. It is possible he was referring to this in Philippians 4:11-13:

  Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

  The words “I have learned” mean “I have been initiated into a secret,” and I believe he learned this when he went through whatever is being referred to in 2 Corinthians 12. Being brought to total weakness introduced him to the secret of handling every situation life may throw at him. He had learned the secret of being content in every situation of life.

  The word “content” means to be sufficient, to be possessed of sufficient strength, to be enough for a thing.2 It was the favorite word of the stoics, who believed a man should be able by the exercise of his own willpower to resist the effects of circumstances and to be at peace, undisturbed and unmoved, whatever may be happening around him.3 Paul was saying that he was initiated into true contentment, which did not arise from his own willpower or self-sufficiency but from Christ within him.

  He defined the secret that was really an expansion of what he had been taught. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” It is the word “strengthen” that is of interest to us. The word literally translated is “in-strengthened,” maybe better rendered “to infuse with strength” or even “invigorate.”4 He was saying that he could do and face anything in the strength of Christ that infused and invigorated his whole being. The Amplified Bible renders it, I am self-sufficient in Christ's sufficiency.

  I remember wrestling with these truths many years ago in England while sitting in a cafe over a cup of tea. I looked at my pot of tea and suddenly realized that the word “strengthen” was illustrated in the liquid in my cup. The British are rightly proud of the way they make tea! They preheat the full teapot, add a spoonful of tea to every cup and one to the pot, pour on scalding hot water, and wait while the tea fuses with the water. My grandmother would say that she was going to “fuse some tea.”

  As I stared at the teapot and my cup of tea I realized that I was not really drinking tea, for the leaves were at the bottom of the pot. I was drinking “tea-water”—the tasteless water that had been fused with the rich strength of the te
a and made available for me to enjoy. So I realized that in this covenant union with Christ, I do not become Him, any more than the water becomes the leaves, and He does not become me; yet He fuses my bland, empty life with His rich, eternal life that the world might taste of Him through my life. Without Him, my life would be zero.

  But again, note that in Philippians 4:11-13, Paul did not speak as a puppet. He was facing and feeling the ups and downs of life, and he was able to do whatever it took and be at perfect peace within it. But he recognized that he did what had to be done in the infused strength of Christ.

  The same idea is present in Colossians 1:11, in which Paul is praying for the believers to be ...strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy.

  The words he uses here for power are a study in themselves. The word “strengthen” is a form of dunamis,5 which means potential power, or innate ability. The phrase “all might” is another translation of the word dunamis, and the phrase “glorious power” is the word kratos,6 which describes the almighty power of God.

  “According to” could be translated as “in line with.” Let us suppose I want to get to my room on the sixth floor of a hotel. I get in the elevator, and it takes me up to my floor. When the floor of the elevator is level with the sixth floor, the door opens because the two floors are lined up to each other. At that point, it could be said that the floor of the elevator is according to the sixth floor of the hotel.

  Put all of this together, and it is saying that the “in-strengthening with all power” that we receive is “in line with the almighty power of God.” This is the covenant union we are speaking about!

  I’ve heard people say, “With such power within us, let us perform some miracles!” The verse goes on to tell us of the miracles that are accomplished by this power within us: for all patience and longsuffering with joy. The words “patience” and “longsuffering”7 describe patience toward circumstances and people. Christ Jesus is within us to live in and as us, bringing the almighty power of His life to everything and everyone we have to deal with in the unfolding of life.

  Praying for the Spirit’s Activity

  The Holy Spirit brings us to the covenant and makes us partakers of it, but our relationship to the Spirit must not stop there. He works in us continually to make every detail of the covenant a functional reality in our lives. The whole covenant is accomplished in Christ, and it is all ours as we are joined to Him. But we must ask confidently for what is ours, and confidently look to the Spirit to bring it to pass.

  With this in mind, we see that Paul’s prayers for the various congregations scattered around the Mediterranean were bold in asking for the fullness of the Spirit, that the goal of the covenant become a lived reality. Look at one of them that he prayed for the believers in Ephesus.

  That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

  Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

  Ephesians 3:16-21

  His prayer is staggering in its requests, all of which are based on the fact that the covenant has been made. The ideas of a functional union are realized as he prays for the strengthening power of the Spirit at the core of the believers’ being. He prays that they might know real union with Christ, that He might truly become the Self of their self. And then he takes them back to the source of it all, that they might know in their experience the unfathomable love of Christ.

  His prayer describes them as “rooted in...love,” drawing nourishment from it as a plant draws its life from the ground; as “grounded in love,” as a building in its foundation.

  The crescendo of his prayer is the heart of the covenant and what Christ has accomplished: that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (verse 19). The Amplified Bible translates this, a body wholly filled and flooded with God Himself! It describes the complete and ultimate union of the redeemed creature with God. It is the ultimate goal of the covenant; God became as we are that we might become as He is. It is echoed by John: ...because as He is, so are we in this world (1 John 4:17).

  How could such a prayer be answered? It is beyond our creature thoughts! Anticipating such a question, Paul ends with a doxology of praise to the God who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think—even more than he has just asked! Again, The Amplified Bible gives us the meaning of these words in the Greek language:

  ...is able to [carry out His purpose and] do superabundantly, far over and above all that we [dare] ask or think [infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams].

  Ephesians 3:20 AMP

  And how shall He accomplish this that is outside of the realm of our thoughts? According to the power that works in us (verse 20); that is, the power of the Holy Spirit. The language of the covenant is translated to our daily life and becomes our real world by the power of the Holy Spirit working in us.

  The Body of Christ

  The Spirit joins us to Him in a union that is described as the relationship of the human body to the head. Paul speaks of such a relationship as the final reality of the believer’s identity:

  For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit.

  Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually.

  1 Corinthians 12:13,27

  Paul is adamant: “you are the body of Christ”; he is not giving an illustration but stating that it is a parallel relationship; Christ is our Head and we the members of Him and of one another. As a believer, you are in Christ as surely as the hands that hold this book and the eyes that scan this page are in your body and part of you.

  Most of us define our Christian experience in terms of being forgiven, while the New Testament speaks of a forgiveness that cannot be separated from our being made one with Him. The two are one and never to be thought of as apart. Having declared the wonder of our total forgiveness in Romans 5, he goes on in Romans 6 to point out the utter impossibility of continuing in sin to glorify God’s continual forgiveness— because we are “in” Christ, “in” His death and resurrection.

  What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?

  Romans 6:1-3

  The head of the body is to be understood as more than the outer shape of the head with its eyes and mouth; he is speaking of the invisible brain within the head, from which the whole body receives its life. So Christ is our invisible Head in the heavens, and we are His visible body expressing His will on earth.

  The believer and Christ are one but not merged into an indistinct blob! The believer is not Christ, nor does Christ become the believer. He is the living, ascended, glorified Lord distinct from and objective to the believer, yet by the Holy Spirit’s dwelling in the believer the two become a functional one.

  The head and the body share the same history. Everything my head has experienced, so has my body; everywhere my head has been, so also my body. If my head is in England, so is my body; and if my head has passed from England to the U.S., so has my body—or I am in big trouble! The two are one in every way. We abide in Him; He is in us, and we are in Him.

  So Christ has died and in death has overcome sin, death, and the devil and now lives in the power of an endless life. We are literally joined to Him, and His history becomes our history.
His death is ours, so that Paul could say that he was crucified with Christ, even as His resurrection is ours and we walk in the power of that resurrection. We are alive to two worlds at the same time. We live in the heavenly realm while we are also alive in the physical world. We view our world from our union with Christ; we perceive our physical world through inner eyes that have been raised from the dead. We become partakers of the divine nature; we share His eternal life and become members of the Father’s family.

  The Head and the body—and each of the members of that body—share equally in the same state. If the Head is rich, so is the body. He does not enjoy such riches and live in the heavenly dimension while we live in poverty locked into the material world. All the blessings that He earned by His obedience are ours because we are in Him. We have been joined to His history; we share His death and resurrection and ascension.

  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ...and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.