Designer Covenants

It is spiritual and socially dangerous to question all the covenants that crowd our lives. God is, at the heart of his self revelation a covenant declaring God.

This is an aspect we share with God. Even in our most mundane activities we make covenants. If you write a check, you are establishing a covenant relationship between yourself and the person to whom the check is written. A bill itself is covenant. The electric company tells me that I owe $200 for the amount of electricity I used for a month and at the rate I agree to pay per unit of electricity. So on the basis of that covenant (the bill) I issue another covenant (the check). The check is only as valid as is the solvency of my checking account with a bank, yet another covenant. I trust you can see how pervasive are the covenants in our lives.

To risk tredium, one more example. Should I request an appoint to meet with you and at certain time, on a certain day, at a certain location. You agree to these arrangements and we put the notation of this covenant on in our datebook. This arrangement could be months before we meet. Many times someone,subsequently, requests to meet with you or me at that same time on that appointed day. We may find their company and their business more pleasant, more profitable, or more important to us, but, “we are committed” and we will honor that commitment – that covenant. I may try to renegotiate our covenant. I could appeal to you to release me from our covenant. You might graciously agree to alter our original covenant. That would be an act of kindness on your part and I would deeply appreciate your act of grace. It may be that you refuse to change it because you are convinced that we "really need to meet" because it is good for our relationship. I might be disappointed at your rigidity and fail to understand just how important that covenant is to our relationship.

There are many covenants put in place by God as part of His created order. Each are important to our relationship with Him. There is God's promise to provide for our physical need of food on the condition of human labor or, rarely, by community benevolence. Adam plants a garden to grow the editable plants God created for our pleasure and sustenance. God determines that a lone man is bad for human creation. So God creates another gender in order for the couple to pro-create a human species. He also creates a couple for the purpose of heterosexual intimacy. Every generation the man leaves his natal home to take a wife and together establish a new home. This is God’s covenant with all humanity for Sexual Union. (By the way, the Church itself is the bride of Christ who is our covering and protector.)

 Our Creator understands that we need food on the condition of work and sexual intimacy on the basis of creates yet another covenant. This is a kind of derivative covenant (a kind of sub-covenant) between a man and woman. They live out the Divine covenant through a human covenant of marriage.

The Divine covenants of work and sexual intimacy never change. Some dirivations that  humans devise by our wickedness can and do pervert the Divine intention of the foundational covenant. Divorce is one of those human dirivative covenants where two persons, because of the hardeness of their hearts and, I would say, because of the coldness of their love subverts the Original Covenant of Marriage and Sexual Union.

Many societies have redesigned the covenant of marriage and sexuality. Some have considered the heterosexual element of the original covenant as negotiable. In the original innocence of our first parents the covenants were sound and uncorrupted. When the primordial couple exercised their full human freedom; they altered the original terms of the covenant of marriage and the covenant of work. They, and subsequently we, became sophisticated and determined to do and be what was right in our own eyes.

It, in fact, made us haters of God, it is said, that even God regretted having created the human race. So much so, He ends the lives of all humanity but leaves, by mysterious election, a remnant of eight persons, headed by Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives. Their behavior following the abatement of the waters gives clear evidence that this nascent humanity bore the seeds of corruption, the original rebellion.

Once again, human creation became so pervasively self governed and godlike that all humans were hopelessly corrupted. God, in his mercy, confused the language of human creation and scattered them throughout the world. This communication breakdown created mutual suspicion and lack of understanding. This brought conflict and war between the varied language groups. Even this state did not stop the idolatry, nor the profound rebellion. If anything, it made it worse.

For reasons known only to God, He institutes a new covenant with Abraham. It is mongistic covenant; that is, not one conditioned on human merit. It is entered not by our efforts but by a faith provided by God himself. This covenant with Abraham comes to full flower on the cross of Jesus Christ. The redemption of lost humanity does not assure perfect obedience nor even does it domesticate human rebellion. It rather “breaks the powers of canceled sins, and sets our spirit’s free.” To be saved is to be touched by Adamic innocence (perhaps, better, the Second Adamic rightousness, the Christlike innocence). We return to the garden relationship with a God who walks in the garden in cool of the day.

Homosexuality is rooted in our sophistication, while heterosexuality in our original innocence. Homosexuality, if yielded to, leads us away from the garden and directly toward the to the flood of destruction, the tower of Babel and ultimately eternal  estrangement from our Creator.  Marriage, which is inherently heterosexual does not save us - neither does divorce or homosexuality inherrently damn us. Only the finished work of Christ can save us or, if rejected, damn us. Marriage is, instead a sign of faithfulness to that original covenant from God to an innocent humanity. “It is do good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a sexual companion” They shall be “for flesh one.”

Marriage is but one of a matrix of covenants between God and humankind as well as between a man and a woman. Homosexuality has no covenantal undergirding. In fact, homosexuality is rooted in covenant breaking. It is because they turn away from God to worship and serve themselves that God gave them over to destructive pattern of sinful domesticity. Homosexual marriage is inherently wrong.

The true Church is about garden life. The false church is about the Tower of Babel. The recent “accomplishments of homosexual justice” of the Presbyterian Church (USA) serve to confirm its commitment to primordial confusion. This denomination of the visible Church (of which I am an unwilling part) are covenant breakers