Biblical Covenants Part 1

On the night that Jesus kept that Passover, that we commemorate every time we keep the Passover. We go through what he did. He told the disciples that he was instituting a new covenant. A covenant, a new agreement between God and those that he was calling to make this agreement with. A few months ago, I suggested everybody take some time to read the New Covenant booklet, because this is important in us understanding what it means to be a covenant people. Now, this booklet spends a lot of time explaining why the New Covenant doesn't do away with all the laws of God. What I want to do is take a couple sermons and give an overview of the concept of covenants in the Bible and why this is so important. You are here because God says, I wish to make a covenant with you. Every person here is here because and some of you are participating in the covenant and some of you are working towards participating in the covenant, but you're here because of that. Because God said, I want to make a covenant with you. It's a very personal thing.

When we look at the word covenant, especially in Hebrew and what it means in the Scripture, a covenant was a legal agreement, a binding legal agreement in which parties entered into an agreement where there were promises and obligations, promises and obligations on both sides. Now think about that. God looks at us and He looks at you and says, you, I want to make an agreement with you.

Understand we don't make an agreement with God. God says, I wish to make an agreement with you. If He doesn't do that, we don't even know there's an agreement that we can make. Every covenant in the Bible is initiated by the grace of God. God says, I'm going to pick you. Now He picks different people at different times to do different things, but it is something initiated by Him.

You know, when you buy a house, you enter into a covenant, right? So there's a house that you want to buy. These people want to sell the house. You go, you sit down, you negotiate. They want this much of a down payment. You say, no, before we do this, you have to fix the roof. They agree to fix the roof. Then you say, well, I'd also like a new, you know, updated kitchen. They say, no, we're not going to update the kitchen, but we'll take $5,000 off the price.

You go back and forth. You end up with a down payment and you sign documents that thick, which no one knows what's in those documents. I think we give away our firstborn children. I'm not sure. No one knows what's in those documents. God says, I want to make an agreement with you and there's nothing to sign. It's agreement between you and him, but it is from him. It is not an agreement between equals.

There is nothing in the concept of the covenants of the Bible that this is somehow a negotiation between two equals. You see, you're not buying the house. We're all bums on the street, drug addicts, have nothing to give society, our lives are wasted, we're filthy and we're starving, and a person who's the richest person on earth, who owns this giant mansion, comes and says, you want to live with me?

See, you're not buying the house. We're being invited to the house. Would you like to come live with me? I will make you certain promises, I'll do certain things, and you have certain obligations. But you didn't start the negotiations. You and I didn't start the relationship.

That's not what happens. God starts the relationship. And we're just the bums on the street. They say, well, that's a harsh thing to say. To understand what's happening here, that's the closest analogy I could come up with, and that's even a weak one, because we have no way out of where we are. We're stuck unless God does something. Now many times these covenants that God makes, and there's a whole lot of them in the Bible, there is some kind of thing that happens that confirms the covenant.

In the Old Testament, it's usually a sacrifice, a blood sacrifice. An animal is slain, and now there's an agreement. Now not always, but there is some form of sign that happens in many of them. Some of them, the people just say, okay. Now there's, I know people say, how barbaric those people were in the Old Testament to kill a little animal.

I want you to think about something. God is initiating your covenant as the creator of the universe. All the animals are His. He's the one who commands the sacrifice. It's His animals that are being sacrificed. This is how He does things. He wants you to understand, He wants us all to understand the enormity of what it means to be the bum on the street and come into a relationship with the owner of the universe, and have the owner of the universe say, I want to make an agreement with you.

I want you to come live in my house to be with me. They also many times contain something, a sign that the weaker party has to show. They have to do something as a sign that they are participating in that covenant. Now there is, I have a handout back on the table for those of you who like, some people like to get into the details of things.

Here's a list of 10 covenants that are in the Bible. We're going to try to look at about three of them today. They start with the covenant God made with Adam and Eve. I've given you all this. You're living in my house, and it's all good. Just don't do this. Don't make this decision, and everything is going to be good. So the marriage covenant is part of that too. He makes Adam. He makes Eve. And they are together to be a couple. That's the marriage covenant that we do today. It goes clear back to that covenant. And of course, they didn't do, they broke the covenant, right?

So what happened? They got kicked out. God made a different covenant with Adam and Eve. He said, oh now you're kicked out of Eden, and now you're going to spend all you and your progeny and your generations after you are going to live in an absolute mess under Satan's rule. And then He promises, but someday I will save you. That's what Genesis 3.15 is all about. Someday I'll come along and fix this.

So that part of that covenant we're living in still. Humanity separated from God with a promise that He'll fix it someday. There's a covenant God made with Noah that He was going to destroy humanity because of their evil, just evilness that was part of them. And He says, but I'll save you and your family. Go build an ark.

Build an ark. He didn't get to say, can I build just like a little fishing boat? There's no negotiations here. Go build it, and here's how big it has to be, and all these things you have to do, and then He loads it up with animals. Under the flood, God makes another covenant with Abraham. And He even says, now this is what's interesting because this covenant, part of it's still going on today, He says, and you shall make governments. He gives it, He doesn't say make governments, but He says, you have the power to take human life if they commit murder. That's the power of government.

He gave humanity the authority that if someone commits a premeditated evil murder, society has the authority, a governmental authority to take that person's life. People don't think about that. That's actually part of a covenant God made with the descendants of Noah. The descendants of Noah were still trapped in Satan's world, still part of that covenant. He makes the Abrahamic covenant with Abraham.

This changes everything. With Abraham, he now directly begins the process of reconciling humanity to him. The Abrahamic covenant, there had to be a sacrifice to confirm it. Interesting how God does that. We'll talk about it in a minute. And there has to be a sign that the weaker party has agreed, and the sign was circumcision. Abraham and all of the males in his family and all the ones who were his descendants had to be circumcised. They were now participants in the covenant that God made with Abraham. They were part of the covenant. And that was the sign that they were part of the covenant. There's the sign I, or the old covenant.

We'll go through that a little bit. That's when God took Abraham's descendants, took them out into the wilderness, got them out of slavery, and said, I'm going to make an agreement with you folks. It's interesting that he made the agreement after he did all these miracles so they could see who he was. Now that you know who I am, now that you know I am the person who owns the universe, and you were slaves, you were the bums on the streets, I'm going to make a covenant with you. God revealed Himself to them.

God has been revealing Himself to you. If you're here and you're not part of the covenant yet, you believe this way, you're moving this way, maybe you're a younger person, you say, yeah, I can get this. That's God reaching you and saying, I wish to make a covenant with you. It's very personal. But you're part of all these covenants. This way that God has worked with humanity throughout from Adam and Eve to now is through these agreements He makes. And most of humanity isn't part of those agreements yet. There's always a promise for all of humanity, always a promise of the future.

There's the Sabbath covenant God made with Israel. He said, this is a sign between you and me. There's another covenant. It's called the Promised Land covenant. It's really a God renewed the covenant with Israel when they went into the Promised Land after the forty years of wandering. So He renews that covenant. It's really not a new covenant, it is a reiterating of that covenant. And there's something He says to them.

Let's go to Deuteronomy 30. Because this helps you begin to understand how these covenants all fit together. God's doing something. The owner of the universe is doing something. And He's always involving human beings. He's always involving human beings. So let's look at Deuteronomy 30 and let's go to… Now that's not where I want to go because I'm in Numbers. Numbers 30 has nothing to do with what we're talking about today just in case you're wondering. Now these people are gathered to go into the Promised Land.

Their fathers and their grandfathers and their mothers and their grandmothers had died in the wilderness for forty years. Some of them could remember His children and teens. They remembered watching the Red Sea open. They remembered that God had said, I'm making a covenant with you. They remembered the Passover. They remembered that they had to be circumcised because the sign of the Old Covenant or the Sinai Covenant was the same as the Abrahamic Covenant.

All your males have to be circumcised. You say, well why all the males? The concept was that the family unit came into this covenant together. New Testament's a little different but when we get to this next week you'll see there are some similarities. In other words, each person of the family must participate in the covenant, including the wives. They have to take a sign. But here it was just the men. The men had a sign and the family followed along. They were part of the covenant. They're about to go into the Promised Land. How exciting is this?

They knew what happened. Many of them had seen, well as children, many of them had memories of being eight years old and having everybody so sad as they moved away from the Promised Land when they were young. And then he tells them this, verse 1, Now it shall come to pass when all these things come upon you. This is after two chapters, well in English Bibles, two chapters, all these sayings about here's the blessings you'll receive for obeying me and here's the blessings you'll receive for not obeying me. Here are the blessings you'll receive from being part of the covenant and here's the blessings or the cursings you'll receive for not being part of the covenant.

And then he says, And when this has all happened, the blessings and the cursings and all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, you shall call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God drives you. Before they even go into the Promised Land, this generation is told, sooner or later you people will fail. Maybe not your generation, but along the line they will fail in this covenant and I will drive them out of the land.

They weren't even in the land yet. I will drive them out because they're not going to keep the covenant. But when that happens, I will bring them back. And you shall return to the Lord your God and obey His voice according all that I have commanded you today, you and your children with all your heart and with all your soul. He said, There will come a time when as a people you will return to me in the covenant, the agreement I made to you, that the Lord your God will bring you back from captivity and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you.

And if any of you are driven to the farthest parts under heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you and from there He will bring you. Then the Lord your God will bring you to the land which your fathers possessed and you shall possess and He will prosper you and multiply you more than your fathers. It's interesting. He's talking to the fathers and saying, there will come a time when your descendants will receive more than you are because of how I'm going to interact with them. And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all that you may live.

There will come a time when there will be a different kind of circumcision and I will gather your descendants back to me, God says. And in this agreement I make, you are circumcised in the flesh. They will be circumcised in the heart. That is one of the first hints that a new covenant was going to have to happen. A new covenant was going to come along. That something was going to change in the people in this covenant that's different than what was happening with them then.

We also have the Davidic covenant in which God makes certain promises to David about how He's going to fix this mess and then you have the new covenant. The new covenant is prophesied in many places in the Old Testament. God kept telling them all these covenants lead to one last covenant. One last covenant. Next time we'll really get into the concept of the new covenant and what it is and why, no, the new covenant doesn't do away with things like the Sabbath. But it is much greater in scope than any of the other covenants because under this covenant you get to live in the owner's house forever.

That's the huge difference. It's not a temporary covenant. It is a covenant forever. Now, let's look a minute and think about the Abrahamic covenant. I'm covering a lot of ground, but it was either that or do ten sermons because they're just so much to cover. So if we can get an overview, an overview, that we understand how these things fit, we will understand the covenant God is making with you and what it really means and the privilege that God gives us as bums on the street. The privilege as bums on the street to participate in this covenant. The Abrahamic covenant, God comes to Abraham and makes him a promise.

Genesis 12. Genesis 12. So we're going to run through a number of scriptures here. Verse 1. Now the Lord said to Abram, Get out of your country from your family, from your father's house to a land that will show you, and I will make you a great nation. I will bless you, make your name great. You shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Now this is interesting. The greater party of this covenant comes to the weaker party of the covenant and says, Leave your house, leave everything you have, and go to a place where I'm going to take to go. Now he couldn't go to Google Maps and figure out where this was.

You know, how far is this? How do I get there? Now there would have been trade routes, so he could have gone to people who traded throughout the Middle East and found some map, somewhere of some... but you know, how many... well, they wouldn't have measured in miles. How far is it, right? How long will it take? What will I need? And so the greater party in this covenant comes to the weaker party and says, I just want you to give up everything and go where I tell you to. And Abraham doesn't. This begins the covenant relationship between God and Abraham.

A covenant relationship which you and I are blessed today because, and you all the families of the earth shall be blessed, Paul says in the New Testament that that blessing is through Jesus Christ who brought a new covenant. So even Abraham's covenant isn't fulfilled entirely because Christ came to take the next step in blessing all the nations of the earth.

God then eventually told Abraham, now this agreement is going to be finalized. We're going to confirm it. So if you go to chapter 15, so there's a confirmation.

And let's just start at verse 1 here. After these things, there were a number of things that happened in Abraham's life as God continued to work with him in this relationship that was forming, this covenant relationship. After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision and saying, do not be afraid, Abraham. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward. I am your reward. I am the one who owns the mansion. I am the one who has everything.

Of course, I just asked you to give up what you did have. You know, it's like asking the man on the street, okay, you have a water bottle someone gave you, a few scraps of bread, and the rags you have on. Okay, leave the bread in the water bottle and let's go.

Because I'm going to give you something. And that's what Abraham did. But Abraham said, oh Lord, what will you give me, seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eleazar of Damascus. He promised him that through him all nations would be blessed and he had no children.

The person who his inheritance went to, remember this is a tribal system. He's the head of a tribe.

He's in charge of a tribe. He has family in that tribe. He has people who come and join the tribe, become tribal members. He has what we would consider slaves, a little different relationship back then. You came in and you became part of the tribe. When you became a slave, you were part of the tribe. And he's saying, you know who's in charge of my, who is my inheritor? It's Eleazar, the chief of my slaves, because he's the head person in the tribe. So when I go, he gets it. I don't understand. How is that for me? I don't understand the promise that you've made.

Then Abraham said, look, you have given me no offspring. Indeed, one born in my house is my heir. Or, indeed, one born in my house is my heir. In other words, he was born there in the house of Eleazar. But he wasn't of his seed. He wasn't of Abraham's family. He was extra family outside the family. Then he brought him outside and said, look toward the heaven and count the stars if you're able to number them. He said, so shall your descendants be. And he believed in the Lord and he accounted it to him for righteousness. The result was that there was a sacrifice given, a sacrifice now that Abraham gave that confirmed this covenant. They had agreed Abraham had been following. He'd been doing what he was supposed to do. And he says, okay, now we will confirm the covenant. And he confirms it.

In chapter 17, he tells Abraham, okay, now you have to have a sign so that everyone will know that you are my descendant, that you are the one that I'm working through, that you are, we have a covenant. Abraham and his family are special on the earth.

So all of them had to be circumcised. And so they were circumcised. So they had, now this relationship had formed, a covenant relationship had formed. Abraham responded, God gave him more. Abraham responded, God gave him more. Abraham believed, he's justified.

Then the covenant is made. And then he's told, here's the sign.

And so that became the sign of the covenant. All his children were told. All the males in our family were circumcised because that shows that we are in a special covenant with God.

So then you have Abraham's descendants taken out, he had become a huge number of people, taken out of their slavery into the Sinai. And now God is going to make a covenant with them. This is just, once more, a step, next step in the Abrahamic covenant. But it is a distinct covenant. It's called the Old Covenant in the New Testament. Many times it's called the Sinai covenant. So let's go to Exodus 19. I know usually I try not to have this many scriptures in one sermon, but we have to put the pieces of the puzzle together here without getting too bogged in details. Exodus 19. Verse 1.

In the third month, after the children of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on the same day they came to the wilderness of Sinai. For they had departed from Rephidim and come to the wilderness of Sinai and camped in the wilderness so Israel camped before the mountain.

Okay. And God comes down to that mountain, right? God comes down to the mountain and they can see the presence of God. The top of the mountain is on fire, the smoke.

It's shaking. They even hear a voice. And Moses went up to God, verse 3, and the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying, You shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the children of Israel, You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you out on eagle's wings and brought you to myself. You can tell them they were nothing more than derelicts on the street, owned by other people, no lives of their own, no freedom, nothing. And remind them I destroyed the greatest empire in the world at the time to bring you to this point because I want to make a covenant with you. We think, wow, but I want you to stop a minute. When we get to the new covenant, God is doing this in your life. He's bringing you to a point where He reveals I want to make an agreement with you. And so it says, verse 5, Now therefore if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to me above all people, for all the earth is mine, and you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. And these are the words which you shall speak to the children of Israel. This is what the Sinai covenant was all about. That God was going to make those people a special people. And the core of that covenant contained the basic laws for humanity, the most basic laws that God gave for humanity, the Ten Commandments. They were written on two tables of stone and put into the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant, as it's called. This is an agreement you're making with God.

These ten things are the core of what you do in your life. And now you put into the Ark of the Covenant. Now, He would give them a lot of other instructions. They would get written down in the book of the covenant. Eventually, Genesis is part of Torah. If you separate Genesis from those first five books, you can't understand Exodus. So Genesis, Exodus, Linux, Numbers, Deuteronomy, all becomes very important in this. And there's all these judgments, all these things that get written down. And those first five books of the Bible are inspired by God, and they're there for us today.

I find it interesting that there are numerous Protestant denominations that say, yes, we believe in the Ten Commandments.

It's just that the fourth was in your heart.

I remember asking a man one time who said that, so thou shalt not commit murder.

What if you just do it in your heart?

Well, you just love. I said, so if a man murders his wife, has he not broken the law of God? He said, yeah, but it doesn't matter. If he loved his wife, it doesn't matter. I said, that's insanity. I didn't say that. I just thought it.

I just said, okay, I can't even know how to, how is murder your wife love?

I have no context for that, and I have no biblical context for that.

Sort of ended our conversation. But didn't, because the next day he came up to me and said, you know, I see where you're coming from. I think you're a very sincere man. You just don't understand love. Thank you. I'm glad I was sincere.

Now, when we look at Exodus and the Vatican's Numbers and Deuteronomy, there are a lot of laws in there. 613, according to the rabbis, they break it down into specific laws.

The oral law was added later, but that's a whole other subject, because that wasn't part of any covenant. The oral law was added by the Jews. It was never part of the covenant God made with them. But you have all these laws. But when you start looking at them, they're broken down into all kind of categories. I mean, in Exodus alone, there are whole chapters of laws of how to build the tabernacle, down to what the priests were supposed to wear, and those are listed as laws. They are instructions from God. You have moral laws. You only have to keep the Ten Commandments. Well, Genesis 2, because this is part of the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, the Vatican, Numbers, and Deuteronomy contain moral laws that apply to all people at all times. They also have other things like ceremonial laws for Levitical priesthood. There are hundreds of ceremonial laws for the Levitical priesthood. There are civil laws that apply to a nation. One of the laws in the Old Testament is, if a person commits murder, everybody in the community is supposed to go out after a trial.

There had to be a trial. There was the concept that there had to be a just trial. You had to have two or three witnesses. You know, there was all these things that had to happen. Guess what happened? Everybody in the community went out and stunned them. We don't do that in the church.

That part of that covenant we don't keep, right? There are some laws there. We don't stone people. Now, someone commits murder in the church, we do cast them out, right? You can't be in this church.

Now, if they repent, you have another problem. But I say problem. How do you bring back a person who's committed murder? Well, Scripture had to deal with that. It's called the Apostle Paul.

He didn't do it himself, but he condoned other people's doing it. So, that's another story.

But we don't have the authority to stone somebody. There was health and agricultural laws.

What's very interesting, if you go through the first five books of the Bible, there's case law.

You know, English law and American law is based on case law. How is this judgment, or how is this law judged in the past? So, you go to court and they come out with all these different cases, and they argue how it was… There's actually case law. You want to do something interesting. Look at all the places in the Exodus, the Leviticus Numbers, and Deuteronomy that talks about stealing or theft, robbery. There's different penalties depending upon the crime.

It's case law. Okay, what do we do here? Okay, that's a little different. So, there's a different penalty to that one. So, there's different penalties depending upon the case, the situation.

Theft was wrong no matter what, and there had to be a penalty. It's the severity of the penalty that sometimes is different. The law is a law. So, you'll find case law in there, too. That's why there's certain parts of the… Like Deuteronomy, it's like… Here's a whole collection of just almost every verse is a different law. What's going on? There are probably cases that they're dealing with. You see Moses go to God sometimes and say, I don't want to do. You said that all the land would be passed on through the sons. I have a situation here where there's a whole bunch of daughters and no sons. Who gets the land?

And God said, well, that's pretty easy. The daughters do. You know, they're the descendants.

Oh, good. So, now it's a law. And he wrote it down as a law.

So, what you see is a remarkable document where God is working with a physical nation and how to be a physical nation that represents Him. And in that is all this moral truth, but there's also laws that are very specific. And we'll have to… That's what we get in the New Covenant. People say, well, why do people keep the Sabbath and the Holy Days and don't eat pork? That's all part of the Old Covenant. Yes. But they supersede the Old Covenant.

There are parts of the Old Covenant that still apply. Why don't we wear tassels? It's a command. We have to explain why.

We have to be able to explain why we do some things and not others.

But we have to get through this and get to the Old Covenant.

So, you have the entire Levitical priesthood. And once again, this sign of circumcision. But I want to show you something about circumcision. Let's go to Exodus 12, because this is going to become really important in the New Covenant.

Here, God is giving them instructions about the Passover.

So they're going to keep the Passover. And he says in verse 48, And when a stranger dwells with you, and wants to keep the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it. He shall be as a native of the land, for no uncircumcised person shall eat it. One law shall be for the native-born and for the stranger who dwells among you. Non-Israelites were invited to become part of this covenant, as long as they came into the worship of God. In other words, as long as they agreed to the covenant and took on the sign of the covenant, they could participate.

The covenant made with Israel was open to anyone. This is why Solomon talks about when he built the temple. It was for people to come from all over the world to worship God. Remember, Israel wasn't scattered yet. Israel was still there. And he said, I want people from all over the world to come here and worship God. Here we have a non-Israelite, or a Gentile, as it would be referenced in places in the Old Testament. A Gentile can become part of the covenant. They just have to agree to the covenant, and then they have to be circumcised. The male is in the family, then the whole family is part of the covenant. When you go through the Old Testament, you'll find there are many of the mighty soldiers of David who were in Israelites. You're going to find all through their history, there were all kinds of different peoples who came into Israel and became part of the covenant.

This is important when we get to the New Testament and the New Covenant, and what God is doing with the New Covenant. You have that divinic covenant that's very important too, and I just want to mention that as we sort of wrap it up here. Second Samuel.

Because God makes a covenant with David.

Second Samuel 7.

So keep reading the New Covenant booklet, but as you do, you may start to think about, wow, it's just not the Old Covenant, New Covenant. It's the whole biblical story is in these agreements that God makes with individuals. How incredible that is for God to do that in anyone's life, because He's the one who initiates it. We have no power to do it, or no even understanding to do it.

But also the gravity of what it means to make an agreement with God, and how important that is.

But in 2 Samuel 7 verse 4, Nathan the prophet is given a message from God to go tell David certain things.

I find it very interesting, the relationship between the prophets, the priest, and the king.

We think of David, while he had total power, actually he did not. The prophets were sent by God to tell him, hey, you need to repent, you committed adultery with a woman.

Poor Nathan. He had to go over to him, but God, what if He kills me?

He's not going to kill you, Nathan. You go tell him.

And then the priest, too. He did not have power over the priest. They had their authority inside the temple. He says, Go tell my servant David, thus says the Lord, would you build a house for me to dwell in?

David wanted so much to build a temple to God, which was a good thing, that God wasn't going to let him. For I have not dwelled in a house since the time that I brought the children of Israel up from Egypt, even to this day, but have moved about in a tent and in a tabernacle.

A tabernacle still existed at this time. It had to be repaired over the years. It's probably not the same. I don't know unless God kept all that same material there. But there was still a tabernacle, a still, an ark of the covenant. Wherever I have moved about with all the children of Israel, have I ever spoken a word to anyone from the tribes of Israel whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, Why have you not built me a house of cedar? Now therefore, thus shall you say to my servant David, Thus is the Lord of hosts, I took you from the sheepfold from following the sheep to be ruled over my people over Israel. And I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you, and made you a great name like the name of all the great men on the earth. Moreover, I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may draw on a place of their own and move no more. Nor shall the sons of wickedness oppress them any more as previously. Since there has come a time when Israel will no longer be oppressed, and I will live among them. Since the time that I commanded judges to be over my people Israel, and have caused you to rest from all your enemies, also the Lord tells you that He will make you a house. He's going to build them a house. And when your days are fulfilled, and you rest with your fathers, I will set up your seed after you. He will come from your body, and I will establish His kingdom. And He shall build a house for my name, and will establish the throne of His kingdom forevermore. Now, He's going to take your son, and He's going to build a temple. And I will establish the throne of His kingdom forevermore. He's telling David something very important here. Solomon gets to build me a temple. Someday there will be a house. But your kingship, your lineage will go on forever.

Establish the throne of His kingdom. Solomon was the greatest king.

He ruled over all of Israel without a civil war.

He, under his kingship, Israel became one of the great nations of the Middle East.

At His death, upon His death, it collapsed and fell apart. But not, this is forevermore.

Not just for the time of your son, but forevermore. To understand that, there's a lot of scriptures we'll go to, but we'll just finish with one. Isaiah 9.

The Davidic covenant isn't completed yet.

All these things I've been talking about that aren't completed yet all become part of the new covenant. Isaiah 9, verse 6, we know this, it was probably read at the Feast of Tabernacles, almost every Feast of Tabernacles I've ever been to. This gets read.

For unto us a child is born, and to us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. This is an application we know in the New Testament to Jesus Christ.

The government is going to be upon him forever. We do know that he gives the government to the Father. He gives it to him in 1 Corinthians 15, and the Father comes to earth.

But he then, God will through Christ, rule forever. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. Upon the throne of David and over his kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

In the lineage of David, Jesus, of course, his mother, is from the lineage of David. Not his father, his mother, from the lineage of David. That divinity covenant, and I just read a little piece of it there when we went through what he says to him in Samuel, is carried out through the new covenant. That a descendant of David was going to rule over God's kingdom forever. It was a promise he made to him that he wouldn't get in his lifetime. Another place he said, you can't build a temple to me, you're too bloody of a man. You were too violent, David.

You can't build a house to me, a tabernacle, a temple to me, you can't. You're too bloody of a man, but your son will. And that lineage is going to go on and on and on. All these different covenants that God makes were all steps, all moving towards the new covenant. All of them have elements that continue into the new covenant. And then the new covenant takes this to God's final complete plan. So next time, we will be covering more of the covenant concepts, but we will be covering the basics of the new covenant.