The Covenant, the Condition and the Witness

Exodus 19.1-9

The notion of covenant is absolutely crucial to understanding the story of the Bible. The funny thing is, people find this notion difficult sometimes, but it’s an idea we actually understand quite well, and encounter almost every day.

There are many different types of covenant, but we’re going to focus on two different types today.

The first is what’s called a promissory covenant, or what I’ll call an unconditional covenant (which I find clearer). Take, for example, take a marriage. Loanne and I celebrated our twenty-first wedding anniversary last week—last Sunday, actually. On April 28, 2003, we stood face-to-face on a beach in Florida, and as we held hands and looked into each other’s eyes, we both made promises to one another. There were absolutely no conditions to these promises—we didn’t say, “I will love you, cherish you, honor you, and remain faithful to you…until I get tired of you, in which case I’m out.” No—we said, “For as long as we both shall live.” That’s it. No conditions. I’ll be your husband, for the rest of my life  or the rest of yours.

This is the kind of covenant God gave to Abraham. He told him that he would make him the father of many nations, that through his descendants all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and that he would give the land of Canaan to his descendants as their land. He didn’t say to Abraham, “If you do X, then I’ll do Y.” He just said, “This is what I’m going to do.”

That’s one kind of covenant: an unconditional covenant.

The second kind is of course a conditional covenant. This is the kind of covenant you have with your employer. When you started working for your employer, you signed a contract with them, stating that you would fulfill the tasks for which they mandated you, and if you do that, the employer in return will pay you a salary. I do this, you do this in return. If one of us doesn’t do it, well then, the covenant’s off. If you don’t show up to work for weeks on end, the contract is void and you lose your job. If your employer doesn’t pay you, same thing—you may need to take them to court to make it official, but that’s what happens.

So we have a conditional covenant and an unconditional covenant.

The Covenant

In today’s text, God spells out the covenant he is going to establish with his people. He’s delivered them out of slavery in Egypt, he’s provided for them and protected them in the desert, and today they arrive at Mount Sinai, the mountain on which God will give them instructions on how they should live. He’s going to tell Moses (who will then communicate it to the people) what kind of agreement, what kind of covenant, God is going to establish with them, and it’s a conditional covenant, like the work contract we talked about a minute ago.

But, as these things often go, it’s actually more complex, and more beautiful, than that.

V. 1:

On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. 2 They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, 3 while Moses went up to God. The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: 4 ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”

So let’s just look at the covenant itself real quickly. First we see a condition God gives to Israel—v. 5: if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant… That’s the condition: obey God’s voice, keep his covenant.

What exactly are they supposed to obey? The laws that God will soon give to Moses.

Next, we see a commitment from God—a promise of what he will do if Israel fulfills their commitment. V. 5 again: Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’

So God promises to give them two things if they respect the covenant. The first is love—you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine.

In other words, you already belong to me. Everything does. The entire world belongs to me. But if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, I will attach to you a particular sort of love: God’s affections will be directed to Israel in a different way.

The second thing God promises to give them is a mission. He says in v. 6: you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Remember what we saw a couple of weeks ago: God’s goal for his people is that they be representatives to the world, who show the foreign nations around them the nature of God’s character and will. They will be holy as he is holy, and the world will see what his holiness looks like.

So we have a condition for Israel—obey my voice, keep my covenant—and a promise from God: you will be my treasured possession on earth, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Now of course this is still early; they don’t yet have the law, so they’re not entirely sure what they’re getting in to. Even so, the people respond with a commitment of their own, that they will do what God has told them to do. V. 7:

7 So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. 8 All the people answered together and said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.”

The Condition

That’s basically what this covenant looks like. But there’s a problem. Not a problem for God or for his plan, but rather for the people.

A few minutes ago, I mentioned God’s covenant with Abraham—how it was an unconditional covenant. Now, God is going to speak to Abraham’s descendants, the people of Israel, about the covenant he’s going to make with them. It would be easy to assume that since God had made this unconditional covenant with Abraham, he’d do the same thing with his descendants. But that’s not what he does.

He puts a condition on the covenant. They will be his treasured possession, if they obey his voice and keep his covenant.

On the one hand, this condition is necessary. It’s necessary because of the mission God gives them, to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. God’s people are meant to be, in a sense, the guarantors of God’s reputation on earth. That meant that whenever a foreign nation would observe the people of Israel, it was God they would be seeing.

One thing we see throughout the Bible is that God’s ultimate goal in everything he does is his glory: it is to show the world what he is really like. (That’s what the word “glory” means in the Bible: it is everything God is, made visible for all to see.) God’s desire that the world see his glory is not arrogant or selfish: it is a gift he gives to his creation, because seeing his glory, contemplating it, observing it, living in it, is the only thing that will satisfy us throughout eternity.

So this mission God gives to Israel, to carry his reputation to the nations, is huge. It is a massive gift—again, nothing will make God’s people happier than being like God—but it’s daunting as well. If they are going to represent him in the world, they have to be like him.

The problem is, they won’t be able to do it. God’s about to give them a lot of laws that will go into great detail about things as mundane as the type of fabrics they had to use in certain circumstances, how to deal with mold in their tents. The point of all this super-strict mundanity is that God’s character is exacting—he is perfect…and if he is perfect, and his people are to represent him on earth, his people should be perfect as well. (Jesus reiterated that same point a long time later, when he told his disciples, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”, Matthew 5.48.)

It’s almost funny, what we see in v. 8, when Moses tells the people what God said and they respond, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.”

I want to say, Yeah, right—just wait a while and see how it goes.

The Witness

So here’s the question I can’t get away from: why did God do it this way? The mission God gives to his people makes the condition necessary—they have to be like him if they’re going to represent him—but in that case, what’s the point of any of this? God knew perfectly well they weren’t up to the task. So what good is the covenant if the people would always be unable to fulfill it?

I think the key to answering that question is found in two verses that might be easy to overlook.

The first is at the beginning of God’s discourse. God is speaking to Moses and he tells him what he should say to the people. But before he gives the terms of the covenant, this is what he says (v. 4):

You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.

He calls attention to what he did—how he brought them out of Egypt, and everything he did in order to get them out—and he says, “You yourselves have seen what I did.” You saw this. You remember. It’s not like someone else told you about it; you saw it for yourself.

The second verse is at the end of today’s passage, in v. 9.

9 And the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever.”

(When God wants the people to “believe Moses forever”, he means he will do these things so that the people will believe that the words Moses communicates to them in the law are indeed God’s words, not his own. The cloud on the mountain, and the voice they hear from the mountain, will validate the law Moses will transmit to them.)

So you see, it’s something similar. Here, God doesn’t call attention to something he has done, but to something he will do. He’s going to come to Moses in a thick cloud that the people can see, and they will hear when God is speaking to Moses. Just as they witnessed God’s power in delivering them from Egypt, they will also witness God’s power when God gives the law through Moses, and because of this, they will believe that the words he brings down from the mountain are really and truly the words of God, his law, his will.

What’s the point of this double mention of God’s power that Israel can see and hear?

These two verses serve almost as bookends to the covenant: they hold this passage together. God wants the people to remember his power in the past, to witness his power in the present, and to expect his power in the future, precisely because the task facing the Israelites is too great for them to handle. They can’t do it—but God doesn’t want them to believe in what they can do; he wants them to believe in what he can do.

This has always been the case, even with Abraham. All the way back in Genesis 15, Abraham was declared righteous because he believed that God could do the impossible.

This is one area of biblical theology that always boggled my mind; we need to think about it. God’s covenant with Israel, that comes with conditions, doesn’t cancel out his covenant with Abraham. It’s not like God made this promise to Abraham, then saw how Abraham’s descendants turned out, and said, “Actually… I’d probably better take out some insurance on this covenant, because they are not what I was expecting.” God doesn’t need an escape plan.

God’s conditional covenant with Israel doesn’t cancel out his unconditional covenant with Abraham. Rather, it reveals an aspect of God’s covenant with Abraham that perhaps wasn’t apparent until that point. And that is that this unconditional covenant with Abraham shouldn’t be possible. Not because God isn’t powerful, but rather because God is holy, and Abraham wasn’t. That’s the problem.

A covenant is a real, binding union between two parties. It really and truly unites them to one another. And the perfectly holy God making a binding, unifying covenant with an unholy person… Such a thing shouldn’t be possible.

God’s covenant with Israel underlines that reality, because very soon, as Israel starts trying to keep the covenant, they will show again and again that they can’t do it. They are sinful people, and he is a holy God: they’re not up to his level. Neither was Abraham.

And yet—what does God constantly say? I am the God who brought you out of Egypt. I am the God who brought you out of Egypt. You know what I can do. I can do this too.

The question is, how?

Israel would receive the first part of the answer in the law, because they would receive the rites and the sacrifices that would purify them, that would cleanse them of their sin. Their sin would be figuratively placed on an animal, and that animal would receive the penalty for that sin; the animal would be killed instead of the person.

Already, this was massive, because the condition of the covenant is that Israel obey God’s commands and keep his covenant—and in these rites and sacrifices, he makes provisions for Israel to remain united to him in the covenant even when they don’t obey him. Already, God proves himself more gracious than he needs to be.

This is why I hate the dichotomy people make sometimes—saying that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, and the God of the New Testament is a God of love; or, the old covenant (the Mosaic covenant) is a covenant of works, and the new covenant in Christ is a covenant of grace. It’s not true: the law God gives to the people at this point in time is a law of grace. God makes provisions for those times when Israel would not meet the conditions of the covenant, so that even in that case, the covenant might not be broken. This is unbelievable, undeserved grace.

So it’s easy to see how the people of Israel might look at these sacrifices God allows them to make, and to think that is the whole answer to the problem. God is holy, they aren’t, so they can make sacrifices to purify themselves when they sin, and the covenant is upheld. It’s easy to see how they might stop looking for something better still to come.

But needing to make sacrifices to be purified from sin is like putting a patch on a flat tire: it will hold for a while, but pretty soon you’ll need another one, and eventually you’ll need to replace the tire altogether. It’s the same thing here: God tells the people what to do when they sin—he gives them sacrifices to make in order to be forgiven. But they’re imperfect human beings; they’re going to sin again. Which means they’ll need to make another sacrifice.

And again, and again, and again, for the rest of their lives. It’s a solution, but it’s a temporary solution.

And pretty soon, God would begin reminding the people of that reality. He would send his prophets to tell the people of something better coming, that the sacrifices, rather than being the definitive solution to the problem, were more like training tools, to get the people ready for the permanent solution—a solution that was so unexpected that no one saw it coming.

Israel could never keep their side of the covenant. And no one could have predicted that God’s solution to this problem would be to keep Israel’s side of the covenant for them.

You saw what I did, he said, how I brought you out of Egypt; you heard what I said, you saw my presence on the mountain when I gave the law through Moses. This covenant was God’s doing; it was his plan, it was at his initiative, and he made the provision for it to be possible. So when it came time for the covenant to be perfectly fulfilled, that too would be God’s doing. You can’t keep my covenant, and I know that—I’ll keep it for you.

The Covenant Fulfilled

So let’s try to synthesize real quick.

We see three separate elements in this passage, three separate layers to the covenant.

We see God’s commitment to his people (v. 5b-6): “you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

We see God’s condition for meeting that commitment (v. 5a): if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant… (And later, as we saw earlier, he will provide the means for the people to remain united to him even when they don’t meet that condition, the sacrifices they’ll need to make.)

And we see God’s call to witness his power to bring the covenant to pass (v. 4, 9) “you yourselves have SEEN what I did to the Egyptians… I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may HEAR when I speak with you, and may also BELIEVE you—believe that the words you communicate to them are my words—forever.”

Every one of these elements is yet another brick laid in the road that would lead to Jesus Christ.

Actually, it’s bigger than that: every one of these elements is what we see when we look at Jesus Christ.

Jesus meets the condition of the covenant for God’s people. He obeys God’s voice and keeps his covenant, like the people could never do. He lives a perfectly sinless life in the place of God’s people.

And Jesus is the sacrifice for not meeting the condition. As God provided the sacrifices for his people to be temporarily cleansed of their sin, he provided the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice in Christ, who suffered the punishment we deserve for our sin, so that we might not be punished.

Next, Jesus is the means by which God keeps his commitment to his people. Through his sacrifice for us, and his perfect life given to us, he fulfilled the covenant for us—the “if you obey my voice” condition of the covenant is perfectly met, because Christ did it. And because Christ fulfilled the covenant for his people, God has made us his treasured possession, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Peter says in 1 Peter 2.9 (speaking to Christians):

9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

God has made good on his commitment to his people in the covenant, because Christ fulfilled the condition of the covenant.

And lastly, Jesus is what his people witness in order that they might believe. After his resurrection, he appeared to his disciples. He didn’t appear in a vision; he appeared physically. He said, “Touch my hands. Touch my side. See that it’s really me.” They witnessed him physically, and they transmitted their witness to us, in order that we might believe. And we have witnessed his presence in our own lives, from the moment he saved us, and every day since.

Conclusion: The Old and the New

Now I know there are some people here this morning who have come in limping. You’ve come in feeling weighed down with all the ways you’ve failed—the ways you’ve failed your friends or your family, the ways you’ve failed yourself, the ways you’ve failed God. You’ve come in barely able to concentrate on anything I’ve been saying this morning, much less think about what difference all of these things make in practice.

One thing people who feel like they’ve failed have in common is that they have this picture in their minds of what things would be like if they hadn’t failed. Maybe it’s vague, maybe it’s very clear, but one thing’s for sure: everything would be rosy if you had just managed to get it right.

So what ends up happening? You try to get it right. You work hard, under immense pressure, trying to do the right thing that will maybe repair some of the damage you’ve done, the right thing that will ease the pain you’ve caused someone else, the right thing that will bring you out of failure into success, the right thing that will finally get rid of that imaginary tattoo on your forehead you see every time you look in the mirror, the one that says, “You’re not good enough.”

And one hundred percent of the time, that thinking spills over into your relationship with God. You read the Bible and see his commandments and think, “Okay, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this,” because otherwise, one day God is surely going to wise up and realize you’re defective, and drop you.

But God doesn’t drop his people. From the beginning, he made the way for the Covenant to be kept.

The New Covenant isn’t a destruction of the Old; it’s a completion of the Old. Under the Old Covenant, God already provided the means to stay united to him when the people didn’t meet the condition to keep the covenant. The main difference between the Old Covenant and the New is that the New Covenant starts off already kept, because Christ kept God’s commands for us. The conditions of the covenant are met before it ever gets to us. Because of Christ’s finished work, we are, from the beginning, God’s treasured possession, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, and nothing can take that away from us. Not our mistakes, not our inadequacies, not our failures.

And that is what brings about our obedience. Because of who we are now—his beloved people—we believe, and we obey. Not the other way around. We believe, and we obey, because God is faithful. We don’t obey so that he will be faithful—we obey because he is. We don’t obey to get everything he’s promised us in Christ; we obey because we already have it.

Now of course, a lot of the time we forget this; we will often need to obey simply because it’s what God has commanded. We need discipline to persevere in obedience, because we forget the gospel really easily.

But in those moments when we don’t forget, in those moments when we are mindful of what Christ has done for us, and obey for that reason—in those moments, obedience isn’t like work; it’s like singing. It’s recognizing something that is true, and being so overwhelmed by it that it bubbles over into action. It’s doing what you want to do, because what you want is to act like the One who is good.

So he is calling us all this morning: see, and believe in, Christ’s finished work; remember we are a chosen people, that we may proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light; and obey because Christ has already listened to God’s voice, and kept his covenant.