Love

Over the past three weeks, I’ve discussed the Advent themes of hope, peace, and joy and how they are related to and found throughout the promises and covenants of the Old Testament. I hope that you’re getting a feel for how consistent the purposes of God are. He does not change and he has always meant for us to hope in him as we find peace and joy in his presence, even in the midst of our fractured souls. 

For this last week, for there are only 4 weeks in Advent, I’m going to write about love. Now, this really could be an endless endeavor for St. John tells us that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). Who am I to plumb the depths of God’s character in a single essay? I won’t attempt it, but I will scratch the surface and paint a picture of the love of God, from beginning to end in the Scriptures, using the major Old Testament covenants as our guide. 

As before, I’ll ask you: why? Why do we need love? Aside from our fundamental need for God, being his creation, there is plenty of scientific and psychological research to back up the human need for love. Do a quick google search and tell me what you find. There are an infinite number of songs, poems, books, and stories about love. Even most stories that aren’t explicitly about love have a love story element to them. We all desire to love and be loved because it is what we were made for. If God is love and we are made by God, then we will naturally crave and need love. 

In theological circles, you’ll come across the idea of the simplicity of God. Briefly stated, this means that God is not complex or conflicted like you and I are. That is not to say that you can understand God, but rather to say that there is no contradiction in him. If God is love, then we can understand this to be fundamental to his nature and character. The Bible says a lot of things about God and describes many aspects of his character and personality, but “God is love” is one of the few clear statements about his essence. I think that makes it worth paying attention to. Further, St. Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians that love is greater than all the other virtues that one could posses. And, if you’ve ever been loved, you’ll know that godly love has the power to heal, restore, and connect all the pieces of your life. 

Just like the other themes of Advent that prepare us for the coming King, love is prominent in the Old Testament covenants and promises. In Genesis 3, God lovingly prepares clothing for Adam and Eve before they are banished from the Garden – much better clothing than they had made for themselves.  

When God chooses Noah and invites him to make an ark to save his family and all the creatures that dwell on land, he doesn’t pick him because he is particularly good or righteous. He picks him because of his grace – this is love in action. Finally, after the flood, God promises that he will never again destroy the earth, even though people are always going to be wicked. The fractures in the heart of humanity and the wickedness in the world grieved God so much that he chose to bring the flood, but he was equally grieved by the destruction. God loves that which he has made. 

Abraham, too, is chosen because of God’s grace, not because of his goodness. He lived in a land filled with idols and religions of all kinds when God called him. He was not a worshipper of God, but like Noah, God saw the capacity for faith in him and invited him to trust him. Because of God’s love, he chose to restore to Abraham and his family that which all humanity had lost in the garden with the seed of hope that one day it would be restored to us all. Finally, God stated in the covenant with Noah that he knew that humanity would continue to be wicked. This has not changed by the time we get to the Abrahamic covenant. So, because of God’s love for humanity and his unwillingness that his good plans for us should fail, he makes the covenant unilateral. The outcome of this promise is wholly dependent upon God himself – he will ensure that it comes to pass. Because he made us and he knows us and he won’t let anything get in the way of us dwelling with him again. 

When we look at the Mosaic covenant, we see God preparing his people to live with him. He teaches them how they should live and how they should respond when they make mistakes. He shows them how to care for the Tabernacle where he will dwell with them so that they can understand how holy and awesome he is. Like many good parents, God gives his children a chance, in this covenant, to see if they can live according to his standards of holiness on their own. Before the terms of the covenant are even fully given to them, we and they discover that they cannot. After the incident with the golden calf (Gn. 32), they know that are wholly unworthy to be with him. They know that they can never measure up. He knows it too. But his love and his mercy and his grace are enough to dwell with them anyway. 

I’ll come to the New covenant shortly, but I want to point out that the Mosaic covenant contains many laws about cleanliness and uncleanliness, about the things that make you unclean or unworthy to walk into God’s presence in the temple. Two of the most memorable things that make a person unclean are touching a dead body and touching someone with a skin disease. There are cleansing rites that people would undergo if they came into contact with a dead person or a person with a skin disease and then they would be clean again. Jesus Christ touched dead people and people with skin diseases, yet there is no record of his going to the temple to be cleansed. In fact, when Jesus touched unclean people they became clean. This is the power of his love working in us. 

In the Davidic covenant, there were both conditional and unconditional elements. I find it significant that one of the unconditional elements was that God would never stop loving David’s descendants. Even if they failed to uphold the conditional elements. Even if they engaged in idolatry and wickedness of every kind. Because they didn’t uphold the conditional elements and they did the worst things. Jesus’ family history is as sordid as any of ours. Yet God promises to keep on loving them. And he does. 

Now, back to the New covenant. As I’ve mentioned in this series before, things get clearer and clearer the closer that we get to Jesus. This is most profound with the topic of love. God himself was literally with his people in the person of Jesus. He “so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him would have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16). It is the love of God that motivates the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is all about his love that has existed from the beginning playing out the final stages of his rescue plan. 

To conclude, I want to take us back to Mount Sinai with the dark, thundering cloud and the newly-freed people of ancient Israel in the desert. They are coming to meet with their God that they have heard stories about and have seen perform miracles to free them from slavery and defeat the nation of Egypt. But they’ve never really met him. And when they see the cloud on the mountain, they are terrified. In the midst of all this, God gives Moses his law, but the people get impatient and worship a golden calf, as I mentioned above, then Moses has to go back to meet with God again. In that second meeting, Moses is frustrated with his role leading the people because they are difficult and he asks God to show him his glory. Bold. Even for Moses. But God complies and what he tells Moses is astounding: God tells Moses his name.  

And he passed in front of Moses proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” (Ex. 34:6-7a) 

This is who God is. It is this God who offers us hope in the darkness, peace in the chaos, joy after loss, and love to cover it all. We were made to dwell with him. 

At the beginning of all things, this was our inheritance. Advent and the Old Testament covenants have shown us that, when it was lost, this God came himself in the person of his son, Jesus, to recover for us what we could never regain ourselves. And now, just like King David’s sons, we can never escape his love. 

What a wonderful story. I hope this series has been meaningful for you and opened your eyes to new ways in which God is committed to your good from beginning to end. He’s always the same and his love never changes. Amen. 

Joy

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been using Old Testament promises and covenants to further illuminate the themes of Advent: hope, peace, joy, and love. This week, I’m writing about joy, but I’ll do a little recap first. 

Hope and peace have always been our story. We were made for peace and we need hope because we lost both when we rebelled against God at the beginning of all things. Yet, from this very first rebellion, God has been making a way to get us back to the garden of peace and giving us signposts of hope along the way. The promise of Genesis 3:15 and the major Old Testament covenants (Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic) give us an increasingly clearer picture of exactly what God means to do when he comes himself in the person of Jesus and institutes the New covenant. 

So, to joy. As before, we’ll start with a question: why do we need it? 

Do you know what two things you cannot do at the same time? Experience joy and fear. It’s really hard to feel isolated when you’re celebrating with someone else over just about anything. It is also really hard to be ashamed of yourself when you’re joyful. We need joy because we are afraid, isolated, and ashamed of ourselves. The reasons are as diverse as our experiences, but the antidote is the same: joy. And I’m not just talking about happiness, though that is part of it. I’m talking about satisfaction, completeness, and an overall sense of well-being. Joy is closely related to worship.  

Psalm 126 begins like this: 

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, ‘the LORD has done great things for them’, and we are filled with joy. 

Notice that this is a Psalm of restoration, meaning that something has been lost. In this case, it is likely that this Psalm was written after the return of the exiles from Babylon, after ancient Israel had become a curse because they broke the Mosaic covenant. They lost everything that God had given them because of their rebellious hearts, must like all of humanity had lost their first home with God in the garden. But God brought them back to their homeland and, for them, it was like a dream. This is meant to foreshadow what it will be like for all of humanity when the world is restored at the end of all things, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, let’s focus on Israel’s response to the restoration of their homeland - they worshipped.  

Joy, like peace and hope, does not come without pain. True joy like the Psalmist writes about here, comes only on the other side of loss. 

The difficult thing about our situation is that you and I have never known a life without a fractured heart and a broken world. We know, deep down, that something is missing and that things are not as they should be, but we cannot consistently articulate how we think they should be, much less how to fix them. Culture and circumstance keep changing our answers. Nevertheless, we have all lost something that was once good, even if we cannot understand the ultimate nature of our loss. We’ve all lost a beloved friend, family member, pet, or home. We’ve lost jobs, cars, toys, and even our minds. We all know loss and, thus, we all have the capacity for joy. 

Imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to regain the thing that you most deeply regret losing. For most of us it is probably a family member or friend. What would it feel like for them to walk through the door right now to be with you? You’d laugh and cry and I hope that you would praise God, as the ancient Israelites did. 

Joy is forged through pain and the proper response is worship. 

When Noah and his family step out of the giant boat that they had been living in (with literally every animal ever) for months, the first thing that they do is build an altar and worship God through sacrifice. I don’t know about you, but I, too, would have been ecstatic to get off that boat in those circumstances. They could walk on the ground again, as they were made to, and they were overjoyed. Their pain of losing the world that they knew and suffering on the boat resulted in joy when the ordeal was over. And they worshipped. Then God promised never to flood the whole earth ever again. 

When God made his covenant with Abraham, he promised him many, many children, even though he and his wife were quite old. First Abraham (Gn. 17:17), then Sarah (Gn. 18:12), laughed. And when their son was born, they named him Isaac (literally “Laughter”), the sound of joy. God also promises Abraham that every nation on the earth will be blessed through his family. At the end of the Bible, in St. John’s Revelation, there is a picture of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9). At the end of all things, every nation will joyfully worship God. 

When the people of ancient Israel escape slavery in Egypt, they stop for over a year at a place called Mt. Sinai and God is on the mountain in the form of a thundercloud. They’re scared because God is holy and they are not. (Ex. 19) Yet, he means to dwell with them and bless them with joy, if they keep his covenant. Later, as a part of both the Mosaic and Davidic covenants, King Solomon (David’s son), builds a temple and God’s presence literally descends on it and fills it with a cloud (1Kgs 8:10-11). A few generations of the ancient Israelites joyfully keep the Mosaic covenant and they experience the joy of blessing after the ordeal of slavery. 

Before his son Solomon builds the temple, King David brings the Ark of the (Mosaic) Covenant into Jerusalem with dancing, worship, and music. The King is so joyful that one of his wives criticizes him and he responds that he’ll go even further. The joy of the Lord cannot be contained – the Ark had been lost and without a home among God’s people and David rejoiced to bring it back. (2 Sam. 6) 

Finally, there is no greater joy in human history than was found on Easter Sunday. Jesus’ closest friends struggled to believe that he had risen from the dead – a few of them could not even recognize him (Lk 24:13-35; Jn 20:11-18). They had come to believe that he was the Son of God, meant to come and fulfill all the promises of the prophets and the covenants and the law. Yet, he died. Their joy when they realized that he was alive and that death, that greatest enemy of mankind, had been defeated is still echoing through the ages. It is our joy and in it we look forward to the restoration of the cosmos as described in St. John’s Revelation, chapters 21 and 22. The tree of life makes a triumphant return and waters flow from the throne of God and the entire earth comes to worship and rest at God’s great garden city. And that joy will never, ever end. 

Through the greatest sorrow, death, comes the greatest joy: eternal life with the one we were made for. While this theme may be harder to see than the others, God has meant to bring us joy since the beginning. We were made for joy, made for laughter, made for rest in the presence of our God.  

Through pain and loss, we find joy. Psalm 126 ends this way: 

Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them. 

Whatever you’ve lost, your pain is not purposeless. It will turn to joy and a garden will grow. 

Peace

Last week, I walked us through the major Old Testament promises and covenants with an eye towards hope. I told you that God’s message has always been hope for his people and that the entire Bible is a cohesive story of God’s love and faithfulness, despite his people’s rebellion. He made us to dwell with us and offers us hope that our end will be with him. 

The second week of Advent is about peace. Like last week, I will use 5 Biblical covenants and reference a promise in Genesis 3:15 to demonstrate that hope, peace, joy, and love are not new ideas that dawn with the coming of Christ – they have been our story all along. I keep coming back to the continuity of these themes and the Biblical story because I’ve known far too many Christians who have never heard this, much less believe it. When we isolate Biblical episodes and divorce the Old from the New Testament, we profoundly misunderstand God’s character and harmfully misinterpret his word. 

We’ll start in the same place as last time, with a question. Why do we need peace? It might seem like a silly question, but everyone seems to be seeking it and few are actually telling us why. Psychology Today reports that 73% of American adults are anxious about politics and 67% are anxious about the economy and climate change. You don’t need the statistics though – you see this in your own community if you have not experienced it in your own life.  

The article referenced above also mentions that the pace of modern life and our instant access to news and information contribute to our collective sense of overwhelm. Our circumstances in the 21st century might be unique, but the challenges are not. From ancient times, God has been encouraging his people not to be afraid, even when their circumstances told them otherwise (Is. 41:10, Ps. 23:4, Dt. 31:6, Phil 4:6-7, Is. 43:2). This fear of the unknown and uneasiness created by bad news is a common human experience. We crave peace because everything around us seems unsteady. 

Something that I want to clear up before we go any further is that peace is not merely the absence of conflict. It’s not just an empty calendar or a completed to-do list, though those can’t hurt. Too many of us have relationships that are free of conflict, but are about as warm as my deep freezer. Just because we’re not fighting does not mean that we are at peace with one another. Think about it this way: during times of war, we often hear politicians and humanitarians alike discussing a ceasefire. This is not peace. This is an absence of active conflict. The Biblical idea of peace is that everything is as it should be. A ceasefire is a step in the right direction, but it is a far cry from putting the countries, people, and relationships back together. 

Given that, I don’t think that I’m too far out of bounds to assert that none of us have really experienced peace for none of us are really as we should be. If I am not as I should be, why would I expect others and the world around me to be as they should be? We crave peace because we were made for it, yet we’ve never had it. 

At the beginning of all things, God made a garden that was filled with everything humans needed to thrive and flourish. He himself dwelt with them in this perfect, peaceful garden. But when humans rebelled against God, not only did they lose peace with God, they also lost peace with all of creation and each other.  

We crave peace because we were made for it, yet we’ve never had it. 

As we take another look at the major Biblical covenants, I want you to pay attention to how the garden peace that God means to restore to humanity is more clearly revealed the closer we get to Christ and the New covenant. 

In the covenant that God makes with Noah and his family after the flood that destroyed the world, we find peace when the rain stops. God relents and the waters recede. But this is more of a ceasefire than anything else. God takes it further. We find peace when he promises that, even though humanity is hopelessly wicked, he will never destroy the earth like this again. We find peace in this unconditional covenant because God himself will uphold it, no matter the cost to himself. Further, there is a reinstitution of the creation mandate to fill and steward the earth – another chance for humans to experience peace. (Genesis 9:1-17) 

In the Abrahamic covenant, God effectively promises to restore to Abraham’s descendants everything that humanity lost when we rebelled against him in the garden: a relationship with God, land (read: home), and God’s presence. Further, these blessings will not be just for Abraham’s family, but for everyone on the earth – all the nations of the world. (Genesis 17:1-8) 

In the Mosaic covenant, we start to see what a community of people who are living at peace could look like. Many of us get scared or bored when reading the seemingly endless lists of laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy, but they are worth your time if you’re wanting a glimpse of peace in this world. They set up the community to live at peace with one another in an imperfect world by encouraging justice and support for the poor, marginalized, and vulnerable. There are provisions for accidental harms and laws about proper restitution. A form of peace can be made through the sacrificial system, but it still falls short. The sacrifices serve to clarify how God is going to make the peace that he promises in the Noahic covenant. They clarify the cost of the promises of the Abrahamic covenant. Yet, this covenant is conditional. God does promise to give ancient Israel a home in the promised land, but they won’t keep it if they don’t follow his laws. He promises to dwell with them, but not if they worship other gods. He promises to be their God so that they can be his people, but not if they can’t treat each other with dignity. Does this mean that his promises in the Abrahamic covenant are null and void? Far from it. The Mosaic covenant not only clearly demonstrates the seriousness of our fractured state, but it also shows us that we are unable to fix it ourselves. This covenant is conditional and it is broken. God is beginning to reveal to his people that they must be saved by him alone – this is the heart of the covenant with Abraham that will come to fruition in Jesus. 

The Davidic covenant clarifies that the bringer of peace will be a kingly figure, descended from David’s royal line. Through the conditional elements of this covenant, we learn that the coming king will rule justly because peace requires justice. Think about how awful it feels to “keep the peace” (read: lack of conflict), at the price of injustice. As I mentioned above, there are provisions in God’s covenant with the nation of Israel (Mosaic) to restore peace through sacrifice and restitution. Keeping the peace at the price of injustice is not true peace and it’s not how the coming king will rule. God promises Solomon that, if he keeps the covenant, he will give him rest from war, an essential element to peace. However, if the king is ruling unjustly (read: breaking the covenant), then there will be war because the people already lack peace. War becomes a symptom and a sign of the lack of peace within the kingdom when the King doesn’t keep the covenant. As we look to Jesus, he brings us ultimate peace and rest from the fractures that plague and war both within and without us. 

Finally, St. Paul tells us that Jesus made “peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col 1:20). Jesus the King did not come to keep the peace or declare a ceasefire – he made peace. His heel was struck by the serpent in death, he took the hit from God’s bow pointing into the sky, he was brutalized and murdered like the animals in Abraham’s covenant, his blood flowed freely and alarmingly like the blood of the sacrifices mediated by Moses, and he rules with righteousness and justice as the true Davidic King. He made peace. And it was costly. 

Last week, I told you that hope has always been our story, but it is always born of suffering. Peace, too, has always been our story, but because of our rebellion and fractured state of our hearts, it, too, comes with the cost of suffering and pain. 

Through suffering and pain, hope and peace are born. As Advent reminds us to watch and wait for the coming of King Jesus, may we remember the cost of all that he brings. 

Hope

In the liturgical Church calendar, the weeks leading up to Christmas are called Advent. They teach us to mark the time with ancient Israel as they waited for the promised King who would restore their Kingdom and make them a blessing to the nations after they had lost everything. After just 3 kings, the united kingdom split into two and both had kings who worshipped anything but the Lord their God. Because of this, along with injustice, greed, and pride, they were in violation of the covenant they’d had with God from the time he freed them from slavery in Egypt. 

So, God let other nations take them into exile. This was common for kingdoms to do to defeated people groups in the ancient world, but it was especially devastating for ancient Israel because a key feature of their covenant with God and his promises to them was possession of their own land and kingdom from which they could bless the whole world. When they went into exile, they had neither king nor kingdom. 

After a short time of exile, about 70 years, God begins to bring the people back to their land, but they are no longer a sovereign nation. The royal line endures, but they no longer have a king. They rebuild the temple, but God’s presence does not descend on it in a cloud as it had done when the first temple was completed. 

Nevertheless, the prophets continued to promise that God would come and restore the temple and Jerusalem, the capital city. So, the people waited. They waited for over 400 years in hope – the first theme of Advent. We’ll cover peace, joy, and love in the coming weeks. 

The Old Testament can be an intimidating and confusing series of books. Not only are there a variety of literary styles, but there are also a variety of authors. Further, it is an ancient book written for an ancient people whose language we do not understand. Nonetheless, there are many major themes that help us trace the story and the purpose of the ancient text. For this focus on Advent themes, I’d like to look at the major Old Testament covenants and how they relate to them as well as how they tell a cohesive, continuous story of God’s character and heart that none of his precious children should perish (1 Pt. 3:9). 

First, there is the Noahic covenant that God makes with Noah and his sons and their wives after the flood. Then, there is the Abrahamic covenant that God makes with Abraham and confirms with his son Isaac and his son Jacob, who becomes the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Next, we have the Mosaic covenant between God and the 12 tribes of Israel after they are freed from slavery in Egypt. After that, God makes a covenant with David, the 2nd King of Israel and ancestor of Jesus. Finally, we’ll look at shadows of the New covenant, as they are seen in the Old Testament, established by Jesus after his death and resurrection. 

Now, to hope. Why do we need it? 

I don’t know about you, but I would not have survived my life thus far without hope. Our personal experiences can leave us wounded, disillusioned, and confused about others, the world, and ourselves. We need hope to make sense that, somehow, this all matters and that it will turn out good in the end. Our world can seem dark and bleak – I wouldn’t get up in the morning, most days, if I didn’t have hope that we can build a bright and lively world to counter all that darkness. The world is dark and bleak and our relationships and experiences disappoint us because, as GK Chesterton suggests, we are the problem. None of us are perfect in body, mind, or spirit. We’re born with literal and metaphorical fractures and cracks at the heart of our souls. And so, we can’t seem to get this humanity thing right. The world aches with us (Rm. 8:22). 

St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, tells is that “hope does not disappoint us” (Rm. 5:5). We love that. It makes us feel good. What doesn’t make us feel as good are his words before that: 

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Rm. 5:3-4, NIV) 

The prophet Habakkuk, who most likely prophesied during the last days before exile, told the people of Israel to take hold of hope and believe that God would keep his promises to restore Jerusalem, the kingship, and dwell with them again, even when it seemed impossible. He used the metaphor of a vine that is supposed to produce grapes for wine and told them to hope even though, “there are no grapes on the vines” (Hb 3:17). 

Abram, who would later be called Abraham, is promised a child. God tells him that he will give him more children than the stars in the sky, in fact. One problem: Abram and his wife are old enough to be great-grandparents. Yet, God tells him, repeatedly, to trust in him, to believe, to hope. And the promise is fulfilled: Isaac is born. 

Throughout the Scriptures, God invites his people to hope against impossible odds. Just from these three examples, we find invitations to hope for food when it looks like there will be none, trust in God’s promises when they are physically impossible, and trust that hope is a direct result of suffering. Our culture tends to characterize hope as this bright, sunshiny thing, but, Biblically speaking, it’s gritty. 

Before we trace the seeds of hope in the Old Testament covenants that God makes with his people, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the seeds of hope even before that, right after the first people break a covenant of sorts with God. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve have rebelled, God says to the Serpent, who led them into rebellion, 

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. (Gn. 3:15) 

Don’t miss this – it is critical for understanding everything that follows. From the moment of humanity’s first rebellion, when the fractures crackled and splintered to death in our souls, God gave a promise of hope. But not, please note, without suffering. The offspring of the Serpent, the enemy of our souls, would be defeated, but only through suffering. This is the foundation of hope. 

Many years later, humanity again rebels against God. This time, so severely that God decides that he must destroy them all from the Earth. But God, being God, has mercy on Noah and his family. Not because Noah is particularly good, but because he has the capacity to trust God and he does. Noah and his family are rescued through the flood and God promises that he won’t destroy humanity again, even though they will continue to rebel. This covenant, like the promise in Genesis 3:15 and some covenants to follow, is unconditional. This means that God will make sure that it happens, no matter what kind of rebellion humanity invents next. The sign of this covenant is a rainbow, pointed like a bow made for hunting, into the sky or heaven. This further signifies that God himself will ensure that humanity does not incur his wrath against rebellion and death any longer. 

I mentioned God’s promises to Abram, later Abraham, briefly above. The covenant that God makes with Abraham is also unconditional. This time, it is ratified by God passing through butchered animals as a firepot, all alone. In the ancient near east, the message would have been impossible to miss: God himself will uphold the covenant and will be slaughtered like the animals in order to do so. Another hopeful feature of this covenant is that Abraham’s descendants, literally “seed”, will bless the whole world. This is significant because “seed” is singular, referencing Christ. 

The Mosaic Covenant comes centuries later and it is the first conditional covenant that we have in the Bible, if you don’t want to count God’s initial promises and consequences as laid out for Adam and Eve. The terms of this covenant give us a hopeful glimpse of what a just, holy community where God dwells could look like. Who should we protect? Who should we elevate? What does it mean for God to dwell with us and how should we then live? The Mosaic Covenant answers these questions and many more. It gives us hope that God wants to live with his people, even in the midst of their fractured souls. But it is conditional – if the Israelites keep it, they will be blessed and be a blessing. If they don’t, they will be cursed and be a curse. They do not keep it. 

The Davidic Covenant has both conditional and unconditional elements to it. God promises that he will unconditionally never take his love away from David’s descendants, but he will conditionally maintain a strong and prosperous kingdom if the king rules justly and worships God alone. There is hope in this covenant as one of the unconditional elements is that a descendent of David will always sit on his throne. As the kings fail to uphold both the Davidic and Mosaic covenants, it looks like God won’t be able to make this happen. But the prophets reference this part of the covenant over and over again, pointing to the eternal King, Jesus, who will be a good and just king. 

Finally, like the Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic covenants, the New covenant involves blood. Even the promise of Genesis 3:15 is sealed in blood as God kills animals to make clothes for Adam and Eve before they leave the Garden. The story of the Old Testament makes clear that blood is necessary to heal the fractures and cracks in the soul of humanity. Thus, Jesus, God himself, is brutally murdered, shedding much blood, in order to inaugurate the New covenant that is better and more permanent than any that came before it. It is more unconditional because we could not break it if we tried. When all the other covenants are ratified, it is the blood of animals that is shed. The prophets repeatedly tell us and ancient Israel that this isn’t really what God wants, though, – he wants his people to “act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Further, in the Mosaic covenant, sin offerings were mostly for accidental or unintentional sins. If you murdered someone or intentionally acted with greed and dishonesty, the penalty was death – there was no forgiveness for these sins. But, thanks be to God, through Jesus’ blood, better and more precious than any animal’s, there is forgiveness for even the worst sins.  

Suffering leads to hope. It has been the same story all along. It is a bittersweet and poignant reality that to really have hope, we must really suffer. And yet, hope will not disappoint us. Habakkuk's grape vines will produce fruit. Abraham and Sarah will have a child. Israel will have a king who reigns with justice and mercy forever and ever and ever, Amen.  

Though God makes many promises and there are many covenants, the message is always the same: hope in God, oh people of the Earth, for he alone is “mighty to save” (Zeph. 3:17). Advent invites us to learn this each year, anew.