covenant

Introduction 

In selecting your gifts, one motivation you’ve probably found is the joy of giving a gift that is entirely unforgettable. Various holiday traditions are all aimed at creating joyful memories. You aim to make the sort of memories that will be recalled for years to come. Done rightly, these recollections reinforce the covenant ties of love and loyalty within a family. In this expression of covenant love, we see a faint echo of the steadfast love of God for His people. The gifts under the tree are reminders of the covenant which formed that family.

The Text 

And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Ghost, and prophesied, saying, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people, And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David; As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began: That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us; To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant; The oath which he sware to our father Abraham, That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.
Luke 1:67-75

Summary of the Text

Having been struck dumb due to his unbelief, Zacharias’ breaks forth in a prophetic hymn of praise (v67). He blesses God for visiting and redeeming His people (v68). The word visited is misleading to English ears, because it makes us think of an informal meeting. But biblical usage marks a more formal accounting or reckoning. God comes to gather up His wandering flock, and not leave one behind. When God visits His people, He does so for their redemption (Gen 50:24, Ex. 3:16, Rt. 1:6, Ps. 8:4). This redemption comes through raising up the Davidic horn (v69). This salvation was prophesied from the beginning by the holy prophets (v70-71). Furthermore, this deliverance from evil is only part of the splendor which this visitation of Jehovah’s Davidic horn of Salvation would bring about. The coming of the Messiah was also how God would make good on His ancient promise of mercy to His people, and how He would fulfill all of covenantal duties He had bound Himself to perform (v72). As he beholds the great drama unfolding around him, Zacharias declares it to be the fulfillment of God’s oath to Abraham (v73).

This oath of God promised two things. First, deliverance from evil. Secondly, true service unto God. Service with fearless faces. Service that is done in true holiness and righteousness. Service unto God for all our days (vv74-75). The Advent of Christ is described as God’s remembrance of His oath to not only rescue His people like a sheep out of the lion’s jaw, but to restore them to the glory of true servants of the Living God. This is how the WCF describes this liberation unto good works: “Yet notwithstanding, the persons of believers being accepted through Christ, their good works also are accepted in Him; not as though they were in this life wholly unblameable and unreproveable in God’s sight; but that He, looking upon them in His Son, is pleased to accept and reward that which is sincere, although accompanied with many weaknesses and imperfections.”

The Problem Christmas Solves

Christmas answers an ancient problem. How can the divine deal with the material world?  Do the deities even want to have anything to do with us mere mortals? Is this physical world, as many of the ancient pagans surmised, the junk drawer of the cosmos, while the deities reside in a spiritual realm untainted and unchained by the mortal bodies?

These words of Zacharias resound with a clear answer: the Almighty God was not impersonal. The old priest of Israel declares that God remembered. In these events, God was visiting His people. But His coming was not like the Arabic jinns, or Nordic fairies, or Greek godlings; merely to cause some mischief, or indulge in carnal amusements, or to knock some fear into those uppity mortals. He was not sitting in some upper sphere of the cosmos, simply contemplating ways to cause mischief for mortals in order to amuse Himself. He was not bored by the plight of humans. He was not indifferent. No. The God of Israel had come to visit Israel because He had bound Himself in covenant to Israel. It is described as a remembrance of His covenant duty.

When God Remembers

The heavens and earth were framed by the will and Word of God. He took the dark nothing and cut it apart with the brilliant glory of His Word of light. He laid hold of a watery world, and cut it into land and sea and sky. He grasped that glory light in His hand and formed sun, moon, and stars to rule over and provide instruction to the earthly inhabitants. Eventually, He took dust and breathed life into it, turning it into an image of Himself. That man was placed in a garden to rule over and provide instruction to all his descendants and the creatures under him.

God is not one amidst all the many creatures and beings within the Cosmos. He is the Being from which all other being comes from. Therefore, the fact of creation is a fact of God’s graciousness. But how can this Being who is thrice holy, who is unlike His Creation, make Himself intelligible to His creation? We can comprehend contracts and oaths between relative equals. But can seraphim strike up a business deal with amoebas? But seraphim are more akin to amoebas than they are to Jehovah. Solomon asked, “Would God, whom the heavens cannot contain, be pleased to dwell in a temple which the calloused hands of finite humans built?”

Contrary to both ancient and modern pagan thinking, God is not a mere life-force of the universe. He is Personal. He exists in triune delight between Father, Son, and Spirit. He is distinct from that which His hand has made, but He is not disinterested in it. The way which the wisdom of God ordained to bring about this fellowship between Himself and His creation was through covenant.

This was no covenant, however, between relative equals. The chasm between God and man, Creator and creature, is so vast that the only way for it to be crossed is if God does by means of a gracious covenant. The story of the OT is that of God cutting a covenant with man, man wandering from the duties of that covenant, but God remembering and renewing His covenant with man over and over again. So, Zacharias frames the Advent events rightly. Christ’s advent is God remembering. The covenant people had forgotten and perceived that God had forgotten, but God cannot lie.

God who Cannot Lie

As the book of Hebrews tells us: “Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us (Heb 6:17-18).” God had promised Adam that the entire earth would be his, incumbent on His obedience to the terms of the covenant (Cf. WCF Chapter VII).

Due to his sin, Adam was told he would return to the dust in death. Rather than ruling over the earth, man’s doom was descent into the earth’s dust. Here then is the glory of Christmas. Christ became the first human born who would not return into dust. Rather, He would live, die, rise again, and go on to rule over the earth for everlasting days. In all of this He is now able to fulfill the Father’s promises to bless the meek with an inheritance of the earth itself (Ps. 37:11).

The covenant of grace is not an escape pod from the earth. The covenant restores us to our Creator and His creation. This is why creation groans. It groans for the resurrection. The infant whose cries echoed in Bethlehem told this groaning earth that the resurrection was at hand. He made this earth good, and though through sin the curse has weighed heavy upon this world, He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.

When you pray, when you partake of the covenant meal, you are reminding the God who never forgets. He has promised and cannot lie. He has covenanted and has remembered His covenant. He has sworn and will not repent. In our prayers, by our faith, in this bready and bloody feast the saints remind God that He has promised to not only deliver us from evil but also to restore us to being real people. He does not begrudge us our creatureliness. Rather, He took our flesh Himself, that He might fulfill the terms of the covenant, take the judgement of the curses of the covenant upon Himself, and then give us who believe all the blessings of that covenant: forgiveness of sins and everlasting life. Christmas is the celebration of the God who remembered us by becoming one of us, that He might dwell in and with us for everlasting days.

Charge & Benediction

Make grand memories with your family to reinforce the covenant loyalties of your family. In doing so, you are imitating the greater covenant that God renewed to us here today. He does not forget His people, and so, do not forget your people.

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:20-21