“Betrayal of the Covenant”

Scripture: Ezekiel 16 (Selected)

The word that God had been giving Ezekiel had not been good. Condemnation, abandonment, frustration, finality – this was Israel and Judah’s future, and the more that every prophet shared with the people, the more they rejected their message. They would tie them, but the Lord would untie them; the people would try to muffle their words, and the Lord would give them a new voice and a new word. And it would continue to get even worse before it got better. Captivity for Israel would continue, and Judah’s fate was that they would soon join their brothers and sisters in a foreign land.

And yet, Yahweh was with them through it all. He prodded them, he chastised them, he left them to their own means, and even as they fell further and further into the morass of their own making, he continued to love them.
Why? Why would the Lord want to stay with such a miserable bunch? They had condemned themselves through their unholy actions and false worship; they had given up all hope in the God of their past and future; they had turned their backs on the only one who could save them; and still, God kept after them to come back. Why?

Read Ezekiel 16:1-8

In our text, God speaks of Israel’s birthright in him. The nation had been given no hope for a future, but Yahweh had seen great beauty in this life, and rescued her from certain death. This passage is an analogy of courtship that develops between a man and the love he has suddenly discovered in a young woman. In verse 8b we read “I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.” A covenant – a binding pledge – had been declared by God, and he would never break it. He had chosen Israel as his own, and as far as he was concerned, it would be forever.
In John’s Gospel, 15:16, Jesus tells his disciples “You did not choose me, I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.” But just who was the intended audience for these words - was it the 12 who followed him, or was he simply reaffirming the covenant that had been made to Israel thousands of years before?
Israel had been chosen as God’s own. There is nothing in Ezekiel 16 that could possibly be construed as God being chosen by Israel! The choice was God’s, and Israel had nothing to say about the arrangement. The relationship had been sanctified by God’s oath, and the people should have stood in awe at this incredible honor, but apparently, they didn’t. They were not only derelict in their call to live faithfully within Yahweh’s covenant, but they had failed to live up to the Lord’s call to bear good fruit, lasting fruit, righteous fruit!
So why did the Lord continue to try to get them to come back to him? Why not just cut them off?

Have you ever read the book of Hosea? Chapters 1&2 are about God’s call to the prophet to “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the LORD” (V. 2) Israel had prostituted herself with other nations and other gods, and the Lord would tell them over and over again that he was not about to let them go, regardless of what they did. In Hosea 3, the prophet is told to keep loving his adulterous wife, and to buy her back from her many lovers, and to take her back as his wife.
God would, one day, buy Israel back from the lovers she had taken to her side, and his love for the people would never die.

Christian theologian and speaker Jim Wallis writes about the plight of Christian faith today:
"We have forgotten we are God's people, and we have fallen into the worship of American gods. Now God's word to us is to return. Church historians may someday describe our period as the American captivity of the church. It is no less real than the Babylonian Captivity in the history of Israel. Trapped in our false worship, we no longer experience the freedom that is our birthright in Jesus Christ."
--Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 31.

Is our nation any better off than adulterous Israel? Captive to the bright lights and easy lifestyle of false faith? Blindly following the god of worldly mindlessness? Teetering on the brink of destruction? Worthy only of God’s condemnation and judgment? I think we are just about there, but the good news is that Jesus Christ will never give up on us! Even though the unfaithful continue to quietly slip away into the night, the light of Christ will continue to be a beacon, calling all of us back.

Read Ezekiel 16:59-63

Rev. Dr. James Wallace Hamilton wrote:
"Where there is no faith in the future, there is no power in the present."
--J. Wallace Hamilton

The chosen people had no faith in either the past or the future – how could they possibly have the power of faith now? Both Israel and Judah had broken the covenant that God had made on their behalf, and there was nothing that they could do to reestablish it. But even though it had been damaged beyond repair, the Lord tells the prophet to spread the word that a new covenant is being prepared – one that is everlasting, one that will shame the nations, one that will humiliate, one that will be made in a divine atonement for the sins of the world.

What? God’s beloved had completely turned away from him, had done everything that they could to ridicule the relationship that God had with them, had prostituted themselves with foreign gods, and yet the Lord was going to begin again with them? He was going to give them another chance? Didn’t he know that if they betrayed him once that they would most certainly betray him again?

Of course he did! But note what scripture says about this new covenant – it will be eternal and it will be based in atonement. So what would that mean for the nation?

First, it means that it will be unbreakable. The new covenant will be able to withstand any betrayal, any sin, any faithlessness, any foolishness, any failure on the part of the people, and it will never even bend, let alone break. Oh, some will deny the covenant, some will walk away from the covenant, but it will remain firm for both those who remain in it as well as those who choose to return to it.
And why will this covenant be stronger than the first? Because in the first one, it was the people had to pay the price for the failure, and human payment, human sacrifice, is never sufficient to heal a Godly break. The new one, therefore, would be established in Godly atonement – a Divine sacrifice that would establish it, a penalty that would be paid right at the beginning, with no requirement for any additional cost on the part of anyone.

But this wouldn’t make much sense to Israel and Judah. They had always been immersed in the need for sacrifice – continuous sacrifice, daily sacrifice, insufficient sacrifice – and now the payment, the compensation, the restoration will be made up front! But by who?
The prophets had spoken about this new covenant, the perfect atonement, for hundreds of years. The prophet Isaiah spoke of it in Isaiah 9:1-8, the prophet Micah spoke of it in Micah 2:12-13 and 4:1-5 and 5:1-5; the prophet Malachi spoke of it in Malachi 3:1-5 and 4:1-3, and there were others. But it would still be hundreds of years before the covenant would be put in place, and hundreds of years without another word from God on the subject.

By now, I hope that you’ve been able to put a name on this covenant – that of the most precious name in all of heaven and earth. Jesus would be that covenant and would become the one and only atonement that could anchor it for all time – unbreakable, unbending, eternal and perfect. The failure of the people of earth to give honor and glory to God – not only that of Israel and Judah – would be put right once and for all.
And the Lord tells Ezekiel to let the people know that when this new covenant is made, they will ultimately remember all that God has done for them, and they will be ashamed of their opposition to his ways, and they will be humiliated and humbled for all time.

But the people would still have to make the decision for themselves. The covenant will be in place, solid and unshakable, but humanity – each and every member of it – will have to do as Joshua said – ‘choose for themselves … whom they shall serve’. (Joshua 24:15)

Some would have us believe that our nation is Godless today. Well, I don’t agree with that statement. Ezekiel tells us that the Lord’s covenant – his promise to us – is everlasting and prepaid, and that it can never be taken from us. And if his promise is firm and sure, then Almighty God must be ready and must be willing to accept any commitment that we might make in his name. It isn’t that our nation, or our world, for that matter, is Godless – it’s just that many people today have yet to accept the love of Christ that stands ever ready to be the means of their salvation.

Have you accepted the covenant that has been made in the Blood of Christ? If not, will you do that today? The old covenant couldn’t stand, but when you claim the new one that is made in the name of Jesus, it will never fail.

Choose Christ for yourself this very day, and walk with him all the way to glory!