Meditation on Isaiah
55:3b
I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
My faithful love
promised to David.
A covenant
is a solemn promise that binds God and his people together and is usually
initiated by God.[1] Often in the
Old Testament, it involved cutting an animal in half and one or both parties
walking between the pieces. This bloody
ritual bound the two parties together in a legal agreement that displayed the
horrific reality if they failed to keep the agreement: namely, they would end
up like the animals. This is what took
place with Abraham in Genesis 15. Only
there, God treaded the path between the carcasses and endangered only himself. We watch him initiate covenants with his
people as early as Noah. God set the
rainbow in the sky for Noah, his family and all generations to see so that they
would know God would never again flood the earth. “Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and
remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every
kind on the earth” (Genesis 9:16). God
made a covenant and bound himself with Abraham (Genesis 15) and renewed it with
Isaac and Jacob. When the Lord gave
Moses the Law, he established it as a covenant between him and his people.
God
initiates the covenant and thus binds himself to his people.
The Lord
made a covenant with David during his reign.
The shepherd boy turned king desired to build God a house, a
temple. This is a noble thought and
through the prophet Nathan, God established a covenant with David and his
family line: “The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a
house for you…I will raise up your offspring to succeed you…and I will
establish his kingdom…my love will never be taken away from him” (2 Samuel
7:11, 15). This is God’s covenant to
David, his solemn promise.
This verse
in Isaiah follows on the heels of God’s invitation to come to him. Why?
Why should we come to him? Yes,
God desires to satisfy us fully. But
there is more. He also desires to make
‘an everlasting covenant’ with us, the solemn promise of his love to
David. Let’s unpack this a little bit
more.
We read in 2 Samuel 7:15 that God’s
love will never be taken away from David’s descendants, those who sit on his
throne. Although David died several
hundred years earlier then the writing of this prophecy, God bestows his love
upon David’s descendants. When Gabriel
appears to Mary several hundred years after the writing of this prophecy, he
announces Jesus’ role. “He will be
great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he
will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (Luke
132-33). Perhaps this love is alluded
to when God twice declares it to His Son while he is on earth, namely at his
baptism and the Mount of Transfiguration.
So if Jesus is the descendant of
David and God bestows his love on him, what does this have to do with us? Everything and much more!
When we believe Jesus, his death
for our sins and his resurrection, we are united to him: “For if we have been
united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a
resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
Paul uses the marriage imagery to magnify this point. “For this reason a
man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two
will become one flesh.’ This is a
profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32). This is bonding indeed!
The covenant stipulation, the
‘legal requirements’ if you will, is solely based on God’s ‘faithful love
promised to David.’ In other words,
when we believe in Jesus, we enter in, share in and partake of the same covenant
love promised to David and his descendants, climaxing in Jesus and given to
those who follow him. This covenant is
ours through the Son of David, Jesus the Messiah, and is sealed by his gruesome
death. As he said hours before he was
crucified, “Drink from it, all of you.
This is my blood of the covenant poured out for many for the forgiveness
of sins” (Matthew 26:27-28).
Whether
Paul alluded to this covenant love in Romans 8 or not, it certainly is God’s
promised love towards us.
Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?…For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In the
everlasting covenant, sealed by Jesus’ blood and ratified by the empty tomb, we
are secure in God’s love. God will not
turn his back on us because of his covenant towards us in his Son. He loves us deeply and is committed wholly
to us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).
[1] I do not
wish to delve into the topic of covenants here and have merely simplified what
a covenant is. Wayne Grudem defines a
covenant as “an unchangeable, divinely imposed legal agreement between God and
man that stipulates the conditions of their relationship.” Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology.
Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1994. 515.
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