The New Covenant: God’s Promise and Our Response

Posted on by Adrian Clark

“Has the Lord struck Israel as he struck her enemies? Has he punished her as he punished them? No, but he exiled Israel to call her to account. She was exiled from her land as though blown away in a storm from the east. The Lord did this to purge Israel’s wickedness, to take away all her sin. As a result, all the pagan altars will be crushed to dust. No Asherah pole or pagan shrine will be left standing.”
Isaiah 27:7-9 NLT

In these verses from Isaiah, it is interesting that he wrote about the exile in the past tense. Isaiah lived between 740 and 681 BC, and the exile from Israel took place in 722 BC, so he must have been referring to the exile of Israel’s inhabitants. Israel was the Northern kingdom in Isaiah’s lifetime. The inhabitants of Judah, where Isaiah lived, were exiled between 605 and 586 BC, after he had died. But Isaiah asked the question, “Has the Lord struck Israel as he struck her enemies?” The answer is, of course, in the negative, because Israel’s enemies were defeated and destroyed. Where is the Assyrian empire today? Or any of the other nations and empires that treated Israel so badly, such as the Moabites or the Philistines? But the Jews today are still a distinct national group, with their own country restored to them, at least in part. They may be scattered throughout the world, and about 280,000 live in the UK, half of them in London, but they are distinct in their identity as God’s people. That has never changed.

In the 8th Century BC, the peoples of Israel and Judah were guilty of idolatry, having fallen into sin, committing idolatry with the foreign gods of the surrounding nations. Why would they have ever wanted to abandon the God who brought them out of Egypt, the God who fed them with manna for forty years, the God who drove out the nations from the lands He had given them? The terms of the covenant God made with them were clear, yet they abandoned Him to follow foreign gods. 

When they entered the land of Canaan, the Israelites found a culture that integrated idolatry with everyday life, and they possibly felt safer being a part of that. Pagan religions used physical idols like statues and images, but God was invisible and intangible, something that perhaps challenged their imaginations. To continue to worship God, and Him alone, required a disciplined life and one that required obedience to His laws and ways. The Canaanite idols like Baal and Asherah promised control over rain, crops, and livestock, and the Israelites, transitioning to an agricultural lifestyle, found these direct promises appealing. Worship of these foreign gods provided sensory rituals, feasts, and festivals that offered immediate emotional or physical experiences. So, in all, we see a people whose morals lapsed into a state God couldn’t ignore forever. He gave them time to repent, and He sent prophets like Isaiah to warn the people of the consequences of their wickedness and sin, but to no avail.

But the Lord couldn’t destroy His people, as He did when He dealt with the people’s wickedness in the time of Noah. Although the Israelites failed to keep their side of the covenant that God had made with them, God never did, because He was, and is, faithful. We read in Deuteronomy 7:9, “Understand, therefore, that the Lord your God is indeed God. He is the faithful God who keeps his covenant for a thousand generations and lavishes his unfailing love on those who love him and obey his commands“. Has the “thousand generations” numerically been achieved? If a generation is forty years, then there is a long way to go, but this cannot be taken as an exact figure, because the meaning in this verse is that God’s patience is extensive, but not unlimited. There will come a day when, as in the days of Isaiah, His patience will run out, and judgment will follow. The following verses in Deuteronomy 7 were a clear warning to the Israelites, “But he does not hesitate to punish and destroy those who reject him. Therefore, you must obey all these commands, decrees, and regulations I am giving you today“. And that warning still hangs over the peoples of this world today.

The Israelites were punished for their sins by being exiled to a foreign land. The process involved the death of many, and with the remaining people, including those with particular skills or social standing, being taken to places like Babylon and the surrounding areas where they were involved in farming, or as craftsmen and merchants. God’s people have always been workers, and God has always granted them success, often much to the dismay of the societies in which they live; hence one reason for the antisemitism that is so rife. But in 538 BC the Israelites started to return from exile, but not all of them, because many had become absorbed into the societies where they settled, abandoning God forever. And so God purged His people of the sins that they had committed, leaving a nation, much reduced in numbers, but one that had chosen to follow the Lord.

We pilgrims are a people of the New Covenant. Jeremiah prophesised about this time coming in Jeremiah 31:31-33, ““The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord. “But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people””. Jesus fulfilled this Covenant, as we read in Luke 22:20, “After supper he took another cup of wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you”“. More clarity comes in Hebrews 9:15: “That is why he is the one who mediates a new covenant between God and people, so that all who are called can receive the eternal inheritance God has promised them. For Christ died to set them free from the penalty of the sins they had committed under that first covenant“.

Dear Father God. I don’t know how we pilgrims would have survived had we only had the Old Covenant available to us. We are so grateful for Jesus, who came to set us free from sin by taking onto Himself the punishment we deserved. Please forgive us for the times when we have followed the Israelites of old into modern-day idolatry, replacing You with our gadgets and things that we value so highly. You are the only God and it is You we praise today. Amen.

Foolish Counsel: Lessons from Isaiah 19

Posted on by Adrian Clark

“What fools are the officials of Zoan! Their best counsel to the king of Egypt is stupid and wrong. Will they still boast to Pharaoh of their wisdom? Will they dare brag about all their wise ancestors? Where are your wise counsellors, Pharaoh? Let them tell you what God plans, what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies is going to do to Egypt. The officials of Zoan are fools, and the officials of Memphis are deluded. The leaders of the people have led Egypt astray. The Lord has sent a spirit of foolishness on them, so all their suggestions are wrong. They cause Egypt to stagger like a drunk in his vomit. There is nothing Egypt can do. All are helpless— the head and the tail, the noble palm branch and the lowly reed.”
Isaiah 19:11-15 NLT

What we pilgrims know about the ancient nation of Egypt we obtain from the stories of Joseph and Moses. Joseph’s story commenced in Genesis 35, as the son of Jacob and Rachel. After some skulduggery by his brothers, he ended up in Egypt, initially as a slave of a senior military man in the Pharaoh’s army. From there, and via a prison sentence, Joseph became the first minister in Pharaoh’s government, an extremely important and powerful position. We read about the famine in that region, which extended as far as Canaan, and how Joseph saved the Egyptian people and his own family. The Israelites settled in Egypt, initially as shepherds, but they subsequently became slaves, building Pharaoh’s cities and tombs. It was during that period that Moses was born, and we all know the story of Moses and how he escaped the command of Pharaoh that all boys were to be killed at birth, a staple of children’s books of Bible stories. But the educated Moses got into trouble and was forced to run for his life to the land of Midian, where he married a daughter of the priest there. After about forty years of tending sheep, Moses came upon a burning bush, where God commissioned him to return to Egypt to lead God’s people out into the promised land. In the accounts of the conversations between Moses and Pharaoh, we find more background information that supports the verses we read today from Isaiah 19.

Isaiah’s prophecy refers to the foolish “official of Zoan”. Zoan was a major political and economic centre located in the northeastern Nile Delta region of Egypt. It served as a royal capital and a renowned seat of government, power, and ancient wisdom. So to call its officials “fools”, saying that “their best counsel to the king of Egypt is stupid and wrong”, indicated that there must have been wisdom available that was better than theirs. But of course there was, because God’s wisdom is perfect. James wrote, “But the wisdom from above is first of all pure. It is also peace-loving, gentle at all times, and willing to yield to others. It is full of mercy and the fruit of good deeds. It shows no favouritism and is always sincere” (James 3:17). But the officials in Zoan had no chance because their human wisdom was lacking, and because “the Lord [had] sent a spirit of foolishness on them, so all their suggestions [were] wrong”. 

Perhaps, as we pause at this point, we look at the decisions our own governments are making in the central and devolved regions of the UK. Regardless of politics and parties, decision-making sometimes looks foolish when we try to view it through the eyes of God and His ways. Sadly, that accusation even extends to our national Christian denominations, but in the end, history will be the judge. In Isaiah’s prophecy, we read, “The leaders of the people have led Egypt astray”, and perhaps the same accusation will be levelled at our governments with the benefit of hindsight.

But the central thrust of the verses before us today is that human wisdom has its limitations. Paul wrote, “As the Scriptures say, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent.” So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish” (1 Corinthians 1:19-20). Of course, Paul was referring to the Cross of Christ, considered foolish, offensive and nonsense by the Jews and the Greeks, “But to those called by God to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:24-25). But as we read on in the Isaiah 19 prophecy, we find that a day would come when the Egyptians would join with other enemies of God to worship Him, their foolishness replaced by the knowledge of the wisdom of the cross.

We pilgrims should know quite a bit about wisdom, because we need only open the pages of the Bible to find many references to God’s wisdom. For example, there is Proverbs 3:5-7, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. Don’t be impressed with your own wisdom. Instead, fear the Lord and turn away from evil”. Sound advice, because we know that as we stay close to God, we are assured of living our lives the way He desires for us. There is plenty of “foolish counsel” available in the world today, mostly because a moral compass is lacking. We look on as the debates between different ideologies rage on, bringing much heat but little light into the lives of our fellow citizens. We look on as wars and conflicts blight our planet, bringing misery to so many people. We look on as the various “faiths” each claim its own solution to mankind’s woes. But quietly in God’s corner, kneeling at His footstool, we find the wisdom we need to make our way on our journey to glory. His Word is the only true source of the wisdom we need to counter the foolishness of the godless people around us.

Dear Father God. It is only in You that we can find the words of eternal life and the Source of true wisdom. The world around us may scoff and ridicule, but as we stand firm, we will weather the storms of life, coming into Glory worshipping and praising our wonderful Saviour, Jesus. Amen.