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

by Malcolm Smith

  Abraham was called the friend of God. He was certainly not a hermit or recluse! Genesis portrays him as a desert sheik ruling over his tent kingdom, a rancher and astute businessman having 300 men in his employ. In raising his cattle, sheep, and camels and making his business deals, he was the friend of God walking through life learning to trust Him.

  Remember that this is His covenant promise and, therefore, is backed by the oath of God. This is not an add-on to life, an extra for the really enthusiastic, but the promise of the covenant ratified by the blood of God. He takes it upon Himself to bring us to know Him. This knowledge is given by the operation of the Holy Spirit and does, as we have seen, grow throughout our lives.

  “Then I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the LORD...”

  Jeremiah 24:7

  At that time Jesus answered and said, “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight.”

  Matthew 11:25,26

  The “wise and prudent” might be better understood as the “clever”; and the “babes” are the untaught, ignorant, unskilled, or even childish. Notice the two key points in the text: On the one hand, He has hidden from the clever; on the other hand, He has revealed to babes. The more we try to know God by stuffing our heads with religious facts, the further we are from knowing Him; conversely, to come to Him admitting our helplessness makes us candidates for His implementing the covenant promise.

  The old covenant had mediators: the priests, by whom the people approached God, and the prophets, through whom they heard from God.

  “No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

  Jeremiah 31:34

  In the new covenant, we do not have earthly mediators but know Him and approach Him directly.

  Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

  Hebrews 4:16

  In whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him.

  Ephesians 3:12

  In both of these texts, the words “boldly” and “boldness” are the same. These were strong words for the person who knew only the old covenant in which only in the representative high priest, and that but once a year, did a human enter the holiest of all. The meaning of the word “boldly” is very strong. It is to be filled with confidence and without fear; to come with freedom of speech. In England, we have an expression that sums up its meaning: “with a brass neck”!

  This does not mean we do not need instruction; He has set in the church pastors and teachers. But the teacher must be very aware of his or her total reliance upon the Spirit. The audience will not understand the teacher unless the Holy Spirit is applying the promises of the covenant. It is the work of God to cause His people to know Him. The teacher of truth has been taught of God, and the same Spirit is teaching those he or she now teaches. Both teacher and student must rely heavily on the Spirit to teach the heart. If teaching the Scripture is in the same category as teaching mathematics, then all we have is an amassing of facts, with the end result of being intellectually bloated. If the Spirit teaches, then we are enlightened in our hearts to be drawn into a closer friendship with God and further conformed to the image of the Son of God.

  This is knowledge of God that is not located in the head but in the heart. There is a feeling to this knowledge that is not the satisfaction of the head that comes from understanding a theological problem, but a direct and immediate knowing, an inner knowing which is independent of study or instruction by man that brings with it a certainty and familiarity with God. First John 5:10 describes it as the believer’s having the witness of the Spirit within.

  This, of course, is my biggest problem! I am a bookish chap; I love to study. I might even be addicted to sniffing the smell of a library! I ever return to this truth, knowing that I balance on the edge of losing the knowledge of Him in the knowledge about Him.

  I might add that this is not the theoretical knowledge that we may receive by attending Bible conferences or Sunday school, dependent on the communication and instruction of a person. It may well be given during such times of instruction, but it is different. Instruction, like personal Bible study, builds fact on fact; whereas this knowledge is an impartation of grace, arriving in the consciousness full-grown and convincing.

  Being or Doing

  Tragically, we have settled for a lot less than such covenant intimacy. In the parable of the lost son in Luke 15, Jesus described him making the decision to return to the vicinity of his old home because of the miserable state his sin had reduced him to. He could not imagine his father loving him and restoring him to the place of a beloved son in the home. He prepared his speech that outlined a business proposition in which he proposed that he would become as a hired servant in his father’s employ.

  “I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.”

  Luke 15:19

  A hired servant was what today we would call a temporary employee. Servants lived on the property and were looked after throughout the year, whether there was work to be done or not. Hired servants, on the other hand, were hired by the day when there was too much work for the servants to do, usually during the planting season or when the harvest was to be brought in. Early in the morning the rancher would go to the marketplace, where the unemployed would gather, and pick the men he needed, agree on fair pay for a day’s work, and take them back to the farm.

  When the lost son proposed that he be made a hired servant, it would be assumed that he would live away from the father’s property and join the unemployed in the early hours of the morning to be chosen by his father whenever he needed extra help. It described an arm’s-length relationship with his father and was the best he could imagine, considering his track record.

  Jesus then described the father as seeing the vagabond man when he was still a great way off from the farm. He recognized him as his son and ran to him, embraced him, held him close, and covered him with kisses. The amazed young man ambushed by love hardly knew what was happening to him. Incredibly, he was determined to go through with his speech asking for temporary employment a few times a year! But the father refused to let him finish his speech, cutting him off before he could make his proposal. The father did not want another employee! This man was his beloved son to be robed and shoed and ringed and celebrated with the fattened calf.

  In the mad frenzy of doing for God that passes as dedicated Christian living in many churches, we need to ask ourselves a question. Did we come to God to serve Him from a fearful distance or to be the object of His delight and to discover our true identity in His love?

  It would appear that in many cases the more involved in the church we become, the further away we go from the glorious calling that we were saved to pursue to its fullest potential. The higher we rise in leadership within the church, the more immersed we become in its business, in programs and promotion. The pastor of a large church on the West Coast in the U.S. confided in me, “I left everything to give myself to God and serve Him, but I realize today that I have become a booking agent for the best charismatic acts that are passing through town!” Another, having built the largest church building for miles around, on the night of the dedication sat white-faced and fearful in his office and said to me, “Is this it? Is this what I have given my life to? This building has meant my life for years, and now I am already bored with it.”

  The crying need of pastors, priests, and congregations is to realize that Christ died to bring us into an intimate covenant relationship with the Triune God. While we are in a frenzy of doing for Him, we are in grave danger of missing the whole point of the Gospel—which is being with Hi
m.

  We do not have to be in the ministry to face the same problems the young Brazilian pastor faced. How do you define your relationship to God? Is it to be likened to an employee answering to a master? Or is it a daily responding to His love, delighting in Him as dearest friend? Is it doing for Him or being in His love?

  He has many servants but few friends!

  The Spirit calls us, nudges us with those inner longings after the knowledge of God, but we must respond by positioning ourselves where the Spirit can bring us to know Him.

  Let us know, let us pursue the knowledge of the LORD. His going forth is established as the morning; He will come to us like the rain, like the latter and former rain to the earth.

  Hosea 6:3

  The word “pursue” is a strong word and would better be understood as “run after with zeal and excitement.” The prophet not only urges us to pursue such knowledge, but assures us that He will be found—as surely as the dawn breaks and the rains come in their season.

  It is significant that many of the prayers of Paul for his converts centered on this idea. He wanted them to move beyond an intellectual knowledge, a studying of a subject, a knowing about, to this knowledge of intimate experience. We can do no better than to take one of his requests and make it our life prayer:

  [That you may] know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

  Ephesians 3:19

  Afterword

  We have journeyed together through the wonders of the new covenant, and we are about to part company. But the question hangs, “What shall we now do?”

  We must understand the nature of the body of truth that we call the new covenant. The events it reports are rooted in history—the blood of God was shed as the clock was marking off minutes and hours—but it must never be approached as ancient history. The Gospel is God’s speaking to us right now, His words coming to us fresh from His mouth, as new as the day they were first spoken; the events are present to us in the fullness of the infinite power released the first second they took place.

  Because these words and events are the report of true history we can think about them, discuss them, and understand them at an intellectual level. But they are the announcement of the action of the living God; and we must go beyond objective debate and believe them, trusting our very lives to the Lord Jesus, who is the covenant.

  The Gospel of the new covenant is in the eternal present tense: In all its fullness it is, now. There is nothing to be added to it, and there is no cause to be achieved in me to make me worthy of it. It is a pure gift to be received now, this instant.

  We must be aware that this is life-threatening to the flesh, the false self. To say yes to the pure gift of God and receive it means that I am in the position of the helpless recipient in the hands of Another and no longer in control of my salvation or the living of the Christian life. Independence, self-sufficiency, and control of my salvation are the life energy of the flesh; to receive as a gift what cannot be earned and over which I have no control is certain death to the flesh.

  To realize that the new covenant, the free gift of God, is pressing upon us in this moment, complete in its fullness, waiting to be taken, is a flesh emergency! The moment we discover the awaiting gift, we are also aware of the energy of the false self urging us to flee from any response in this moment. It seeks to stop us on two fronts. First, it urges us, “Study more; you do not understand it yet—be worthy of receiving it by perfect knowledge!”

  Study, discussion, and debate that go on unendingly without having any effect on our lives and behavior is one of the first lines of defense of the flesh. Keep getting more knowledge, but do not receive the gift! Belief to such defensive flesh means believing about but does not include trusting or bringing life and behavior into alignment with what is now “believed.”

  Tragically, there are countless believers who study the truths of the Gospel as a hobby with no serious plan to implement it in their lives and behavior. Such information becomes an end in itself; it knows a matter simply in order to know; this is, in fact, nonsense knowing to be likened to 2 + 2 = 0! It is an activity of religious flesh void of divine life, without Holy Spirit enlightenment, and producing no love but instead fueling pride, argument, and division.

  Again and again in the New Testament, we are called to believe in the sense of trusting our entire person to the object of faith. Such belief moves from an intellectual exercise and becomes the energy of life. We study, think about, and discuss divine truth but with reverence, knowing that our study must be with the enlightenment of the Spirit and leading to further trust in Him.

  Who can study and come to know the love of God? The human brain is too small and limited to take in the infinite love of God! Such love can only be known through the Spirit’s revelation and in the leap of faith in which we trust ourselves to Him. So with every facet of the new covenant, we can only study up to a point and then commit ourselves to the living Lord of the covenant and let Him work it into us and transform our lives.

  The flesh has a second front to stop us from accepting the gift now; it will accept—but with conditions. It must have time to make itself ready with dedications, promises to be godlier and disciplined—all of which will be in place tomorrow or next week. In so doing, the flesh will have produced a cause for receiving the promises of the covenant by a process in which it is still very much in control, determining when we are ready and when we are worthy to receive the covenant.

  Religious flesh must stay in control at any cost. To confront the reality of the unconditional love of God that has given all in Christ means death to the flesh. The pharaoh of the Exodus walked through a carpet of croaking frogs, slept with their slimy bodies squatting on his bed, and endured their leaping across his royal table as he ate. It is amazing that when Moses announced that the plague was over and the frogs would leave whenever the pharaoh said so, he opted for the following day, not able to accept that the plague was now over and the frogs could leave that instant. Such immediate action left him without control over the situation and dependent in the hand of God. He preferred to share his bed with the living carpet of frogs for another night to prove that he was still in control and they would go when he said so!

  I once spent a weekend presenting these truths to a congregation, and the pastor brought the meetings to a close by calling the people to come forward and “pay the price” in order to receive the blessing I had spoken of! I had to gently correct him and assure the congregation that there was no price to pay, that the gift was without cause in them and without any process that they must pursue before they could receive!

  The response of faith to the gift of the covenant is to surrender, now, in this moment, giving all that we know of ourselves to all that we know of Him. We know little of ourselves and even less of Him, but as we surrender we shall know more. And surrender is not complicated but is in the yes breathed from the heart; yes with no promises, only giving thanks for His gift. In such a posture of receiving, we give room then for the Holy Spirit to work His miracles.

  We go on to define ourselves by the surrender to the truth that is contained in the covenant. The flesh will always define us by our past, but faith surrendering to Him defines us by the covenant gift. We see and call ourselves by who we are in the light of the gift of love:

  “I am limitlessly and unconditionally loved. Yes, I am!

  “I am now in covenant with God through the Lord Jesus. Yes, I am!

  “I have been included into Christ and am now alive in Him. Yes, I am!

  “The Spirit is within me, pouring out the love of God in my heart. Yes, He is!

  “My body is the dwelling of the Spirit. Yes, it is!”

  From such a posture, we shall go on to grow in grace and in the true knowledge of the Lord Jesus.

  Endnotes

  Chapter 2

  1 Vines Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, s.v. “new.”

  2 “Covenant an
d Creation: A Theology of Old Testament Covenants,” by W.J. Drumbrell, Paternoster Press, page 16.

  3 Webster’s Universal Encyclopedic Dictionary, 2002 Edition, Barnes and Noble; Webster’s New College Dictionary, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1995, s.v. “represent.”

  4 Webster’s Universal Encyclopedic Dictionary, 2002 Edition, Barnes and Noble, s.v. “contract.”

  5 Vines Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, s.v. “lovingkindness.”

  Chapter 3

  1 Vines Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, s.v. “live.”

  2 Vines Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, s.v. “life.”

  3 Vines Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, s.v. “sin.”