Covenant Class, Lesson 10-A

The Covenant Relationship Lesson Ten

The New Covenant:  After the Cross, Judaism could no longer remain the status quo.  The old Sinai covenant was inaugurated merely with the blood of animals.  Now the apostles insisted that the crucified Jesus was the Son of God, the long-awaited Anointed One (Messiah or Christ) and that the shedding of His blood inaugurated a new covenant!  If the claims were true, the Old would pale beside the New.

Faith and Cross:  These elements of the New Covenant link Christ and Christian, because the two elements are inseparably bound together in our life and His.  They are the very heart and essence of the New Covenant.  What is the extent of God’s love?  The Cross was a vivid demonstration that His love for us has absolutely no limit.  For God to first become flesh—remarkable already—and then to suffer inexpressible humiliation, shame, and then a death of the most extreme and gruesome pain simply allows no one the least room for doubt about the reach of God’s love.

 

And the Cross, with love, is a demonstration of faithfulness.  It is a measure of how much one partner will endure for another in order to remain “true” or
“faithful.”  Although Jesus is the “object” of our faith or belief, the Scriptures also say that Jesus has faith.  In other words, on the one hand we may say that we believe in, trust in, are faithful to, or are true to Jesus.  But, on the other hand, we may also say that He believes in us, trusts in us, is faithful to us, and is true to us.  In fact, our faith is built upon the model of His faith.  Just as we love, because He first loved us (1 John 4:19), it is also true that we have faithfulness because Jesus had it first. 

 

Faith and the Martyr:  This word “faith” was used in ancient times to describe the true heart of a martyr, someone willing to die for his/her faith (the apocryphal books of 1, 2, 3, and 4 Maccabees).  And faith has a broad range of meanings:  belief, trust, faithfulness, etc.  It is close in concept to patience, endurance, obedience, submission, and trust.  When one endures martyrdom for their faith, it can be said that they have embraced all possible meanings of the word.  Thus, “faith” became a sort of shorthand way to describe Jesus’ experience of the Cross.  There is found in the NT Scriptures several instances where the phrase commonly translated “faith in Jesus” might better be translated “the faith(fullness) of Jesus” (see Rom. 3:22, 26; Gal. 2:16—twice, 20, 3:22; Phil. 3:9)[1]

 

From Jesus’ Cross to Yours:  This same Cross-bearing definition of faithfulness was the means Jesus used to describe the response He insisted upon from followers who would join Him in covenant.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer declared the truth:  "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die."  Before His own crucifixion, Jesus declared: 

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.  What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?  Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?  If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels."  (Mark 8:34-38, see also Matt. 10:38, 16:24; Lk. 9:23, 14:27)

 

To take up a cross when Jesus spoke these words meant only one thing:  death.  However, the demand for cross-bearing is not (always) to be taken literally[2].  When Jesus died, He shed real blood.  When we die, it means we embrace the “relational dynamics” of dying.  That is, we surrender our will so thoroughly that:

1.     Our own life (and involvement in sin) comes to an end.

2.     The life of Jesus so takes over that the life we continue living can truly be said to be His.

Paul expressed these relational dynamics very clearly in two passages:

·        “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.  And He died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died and was raised for them” (2 Cor. 5:14-15).

·        “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by [the faithfulness of the Son of God][3], who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19-20).

That death is not necessarily literal when the believer takes up the cross is apparent because Jesus also challenged His followers to do this “daily” (Lk. 9:23).  Corresponding to this, Paul declared that in his own spiritual experience with Jesus:  “I die every day…” (1 Cor. 15:31).

 

Obligations of the New Covenant:  Jesus, by dying on the Cross, laid the foundation for a covenant relationship that—on both sides (His and ours)—was built upon a faithfulness so limitless that it reached even to the martyr’s cross.  He was crucified, so are we.  Imagine the resulting strength of the covenant bond that results from this two-sided, limitless self-sacrifice!  No security is so great as that created by the loving bonds of such a covenant!

 

Resurrection follows crucifixion!  God the Father witnessed the horrible execution of His totally faithful, obedient, and innocent Son.  He so appreciated the depth of Jesus’ love and faith that He brought the cross-broken body of Jesus to resurrection life!  Death simply had no power to hold down something that powerful, and death had to give Jesus back up, not just for return to the same life, but for entrance into a totally new quality of life.  This life was God-infused, Heavenly, immortal, and eternal—immune to death and sin and Devil. 

 

When we die with Christ, we also are resurrected.  So much of our self is gone and Jesus so takes control that the new life looks more like His than ours.  We retain our personhood, but the same person now begins to think and act as Jesus did.  Our “oneness” with Jesus is so complete that one passage may declare that we are “in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:17) and another declare that Christ is “in us” (Rom. 8:10; Col. 1:27).  This answers the pre-Cross prayer of our Lord:  “My prayer is not for them alone.  I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.  May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”  (John 17:20-21).

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[1] Other references to Jesus’ faith(fullness) include Eph. 3:12, 6:16; 1 Thess. 5:24; 1 Tim. 1:14; 2 Tim. 2:13; Heb. 2:17-3:6, 4:13; 10:23; James 2:1(?); Rev. 1:5, 2:13, 14:12.

[2] Peter is said in tradition to have suffered crucifixion, and in Rev. 2:10, Christians are admonished to “Be faithful, even to the point of death” which means willingness to accept the consequences of faith even including martyrdom.

[3] This is one of the places where “faith IN Jesus” is better translated “faith(fullness) OF Jesus”.