The Covenant of Redemption

We are still on the covenant series. We've been on for the past few months, probably by now. The story of the Bible as shown in the covenant. We are along fairly well to the end of our series. Today we're talking about the covenant of redemption.

Last week, the new covenant where Jesus came and how He ensured this whole covenant of grace having started all the way back here was fulfilled and accomplished completely in Jesus through Jesus' obedience to the cross. And now we talk about something which we'll get to soon, but I also just wanted to indicate that there will be another, maybe an epilogue next week where we sort of just wrap things up and talk about a few elements of church practice that have been influenced by this. Why we do what we do in light of this story. And it's a fascinating understanding of why we do things in the church as we do them and tracing it back to this story. So I encourage you to attend next week and I hope that it will be useful for your understanding.

So far we've looked at the story of the Bible. We've seen that it's progressed from Adam and Eve and the covenant of works through to Noah, through to Abraham, moving on to Moses and so on. And we saw last week this great salvation story fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The covenant of grace fully satisfied by Jesus. Today, we look at what is called the covenant of redemption.

And although you'll see we've been working pretty much chronologically from the start of time and mankind, we today, when we talk about the covenant of redemption, actually step outside of the space time continuum. And we look at a covenant or an agreement that was made not between God and humanity as with all of these other ones, but within God Himself. An agreement, a covenant made between the Father, God the Father, and God the Son. We see this arrangement exemplified most fully in John chapter 17. So if you have your Bibles, let's turn to that.

John 17. This is a famous chapter in the gospel of John because it is this incredible prayer that Jesus prays the night before He goes to the cross. And we look at verse one. We start with verse one all the way through to verse five where Jesus, the night before going to the cross, prays these words. Verse one: when Jesus had spoken these words to the disciples, He lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come.

Glorify Your Son that the Son may glorify You. Since You have given Him authority over all flesh to give eternal life to all whom You have given Him. And this is eternal life: that they know You the only true God and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I glorified You on earth having accomplished the work that You gave me to do. And now, glorify me in Your own presence with the glory that I had with You before the world existed.

So far our reading. There are other passages that I could take to, but this is a great summary statement of this dialogue, of this decision that was made between God the Father and Jesus Christ, the Son of God about the salvation that was to take place. Remember we said and we have said all along that a covenant is a binding agreement between two parties based on conditions met. We actually see what the condition is here in John 17. What is the condition?

Well, Jesus says there was work for Him to do. That's a condition statement. He had to do something. He had to accomplish something. There was work that the Father gave Him to do.

The Father and the Son agreed to something that He must do on earth. And what is that something? What is that work? Well, in summary or in total, yes. In overview, it is to give eternal life.

This work that Jesus was to accomplish is to give eternal life to those the Father has chosen to save. Now with all covenants, we see that there's also a promise in this agreement. Remember, a promise of blessing rather. What is the promise of blessing here? Well, we see that is to glorify the Son.

That the Son may in turn glorify the Father. What would happen if this covenant agreement was achieved? It would bring glory to the Son. Jesus is saying now as He stands at the precipice of the cross, He is claiming His final reward. He is praying to the Father saying, I am here.

I am about to go through with this. Now God, glorify me that I may spend eternity in glory with You. And so last week, like I said, we saw how the covenant of grace, God's great plan of salvation is met and is accomplished with Jesus. We see that Jesus in the new covenant takes the grave, takes the death that Adam was meant to pay. He takes the guilt of Adam's brokenness from the covenant and Jesus absorbs the grime, the rebellion that came into our hearts because of sin and the fall.

And in taking the grave, the guilt and the grime, Jesus gives God's people instead resurrection instead of the grave, righteousness instead of guilt, and renewal. A renewing spirit instead of the grime of our lives. Now this is all based, what we saw last week, this is all based on the agreement. The covenant of redemption, the story really that God made with Himself in the Godhead trinity that He will come and make a way. This is the covenant of redemption that God makes between the Father, the Son, and we will also see the Holy Spirit.

But Jesus goes to the Father and says, I will save them. I will go for them. Now understanding this covenant story, understanding the significance of God who was involved in this way in the salvation of us, of mankind, understanding His character and we see so much of it in this story. It leads to some theological conclusions. It leads to some philosophical underpinnings about our existence and why we live and how we live as human beings.

If you've ever wondered why we call ourselves a Reformed church or a church that aligns itself to the Reformed traditions, it is largely based on this understanding and I'll flesh it out a little bit. Few theological emphases that come from understanding and believing in this story. Firstly, in this whole process, the covenant of redemption, we see unconditional love. Every Christian will talk about God's unconditional love, but if we understand this story and hold to this and believe that this is biblical, it is truly unconditional. God's salvation of us. One of the things that we align ourselves with or hold to is this idea that God elects.

God chooses His people to be saved. When we follow the covenant story, we see this as unconditional love. It means that there are absolutely no factors that make us considered worthy or unworthy of His salvation. Ephesians one, verses four to six makes this point so clear. God chose us, Paul says, in Him.

God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us. He made a future destiny available to us for adoption to Himself as sons through the agent of that, Jesus Christ. Why? According to the purpose of His will.

Why? Because He wanted it that way. With the result, the praise of His glorious grace with which He has blessed us in the Beloved. What we see in this unfolding covenant story, especially in that covenant arrangement between the Father and the Son, what we see in that covenant story is that God chooses who will become His sons and daughters out of His grace and love. This is what is called electional predestination and this happened not just before we were born, not while we were in our mum's womb, it was before the universe was born.

It was before time and space. Before the foundations of the earth, Paul writes. Long before the fall of Adam and Eve even. God knew and God made a plan. The apostle John, in the book of Revelation, he divides mankind into two categories of people.

Two. He says, those whose names were or are written in, before the foundations of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. Those two categories. Those whose names are in the book of life, written before the foundations of the earth, before the Lamb was slain and those who are not. And Jesus Himself tells His disciples, you did not choose me but I chose you.

You never chose me. I chose you. And He says, and I chose you to bear fruit. Then He preaches to the crowds in John chapter six and He says to them, no one has come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. This is why Jesus so often refers to the disciples in the gospel of John as those the Father has given me.

God's choosing of people. God's choosing of people. We have to understand then in this story of the covenant is entirely, entirely unconditional. It's not even five per cent us and ninety-five per cent God. It is one hundred per cent God.

Who of us existed before the foundations of the earth in order to warrant any condition, any amount of being good enough or to believe enough to be chosen by God? None of us existed before the foundations of the earth. There is therefore nothing special about any of us who are chosen. This is very humbling. We have not been chosen because of anything worthy in us, but purely, purely, purely by the grace of God according to His good pleasure.

Neither does God, as some Christians in other faith traditions say, neither does God look down the centuries and see and know somehow that they will choose Him and then somehow before the foundations of the earth, then choose them who might choose Him, if that knows. So His foreknowledge knows who's gonna choose and so He chooses them ahead of time. Because, okay, we can ignore the Bible's clear teaching on election even if we were to do that and we shift the ultimate decision of salvation from God to human beings having sovereignty to choose for ourselves, you must logically ask yourself this question: in what sense is God then really saving us? Are we not saving ourselves? All this does is put us in the mess of thinking that salvation might be a fragment of us and a lot of God.

Somehow by our own personal convictions in this line of thinking, we warrant God's choosing of us by having chosen Him ourselves. But if you follow the covenant story, you see how incapable we are of saving ourselves. You see just how needy humanity is. You see how much God gives the opportunity for His people to be faithful and they cannot be. They cannot be.

So election is the best news you will ever hear, friends. It is the absolute purest display of grace. It is not based on our works, even our decision making. Salvation is therefore by grace and by God alone. Hallelujah.

An entirely unconditional love has rescued us. It also means God's love is absolutely personal. God atones for His special people. The covenant shows us that, and we've already alluded to this, that the Father chooses real people. He chooses individuals.

He doesn't talk about, I mean, we hear in the Bible the word humanity or mankind being used, but God saves individuals. God saves real people and Jesus dies for individuals. The covenant message tells us this. Jesus says in John 10, verse 11, I am the good shepherd and the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. And the question we can ask and it is asked in various Christian circles, who does Jesus die for?

Who does Jesus die for? Is it all of mankind or is it for the elect? For those who God has chosen. Now again, if we go to the covenant story, who does Jesus have to die for in the story? Did Jesus die for every single person that has ever lived or has He died for those the Father has drawn to Himself?

When Jesus says He will lay down His life for His sheep, who are His sheep? Is it the world? Jesus explains the dynamic of this later in that chapter, the same chapter when He says, my sheep, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. My sheep follow me. Says I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.

My Father who has given them to me is greater than all and no one, no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. And again this is a very humbling thought but we are sheep. We are sheep. And these sheep are those who follow Jesus as the good shepherd. But we see that they are given to Jesus by the Father.

These sheep in turn receive eternal life from the good shepherd. And we see that in order to give eternal life, Jesus must lay down His life. So what does this mean? It means that Jesus' death cannot be an act of salvation for everyone, everywhere because the sheep who belong to the shepherd are those who become Christians. They are the same group that the Father has chosen.

They are the same group whose names are written in the book of life. They are the same people as those Jesus had to die for to take the curse of the broken covenant. Therefore, Jesus dies to take the curse for every single individual without exception. But those individuals make up the church. They are those who believe.

So when Jesus takes the punishment for sins, He takes the punishment for your sin, for my sin. He dies for me. He doesn't die for the world. Even though we say the world because we're part of it. He doesn't die for the concept of sin in general.

The love that sends Him to the cross is deeply personal for you and for me. It is far more moving therefore than a vague idea that Jesus died for a broken humanity somehow. We see that Jesus always wins and that when He died, He died in union with us. Not with the whole world, but for His sheep, His people whom the Father had given Him before the foundations of the earth. And He therefore really, He therefore actually saves them.

This is atonement. This is the penalty and the payment for sin. The sacrifice that was needed. It is therefore specific, this atonement, not general and therefore it is powerful and it is personal.

And then thirdly and lastly, we see that this story, this covenant of grace is unstoppable. God's love is unstoppable. God will and does renew His people. We see that the gospel message is a message of restoration, don't we? Adam and Eve fall.

Jesus becomes the second Adam that lives a perfectly obedient life. He becomes the second Adam in the way that Adam should have lived, but then He also pays the penalty that Adam should have paid. It is a full circle, but complete. It is a message of redemption, this Christian story. Now God the Father chooses the Christian believer before the world begins.

God the Son dies in union with them nearly two thousand years ago. Then on the day that the Christian believes the gospel, whether that is today for some of us or whether that has been in the past or will be in the future, the Holy Spirit grips you and makes you a part of this story. It is God, the Spirit then, who brings us from spiritual numbness, spiritual, it's worse than numbness, spiritual death, the Bible calls it, and brings us and resurrects us to spiritual life. In other words, it is the Spirit who enables us to believe in Jesus. And in believing, keep the covenant of grace.

In Romans 3:11, Paul tells us that no one seeks God. Remember, Romans 3 is so brutal. No one, not even one. We all like sheep have gone astray. He quotes Isaiah.

Each one of us has turned to His own way, but the Lord has laid on Him, Jesus Christ, the iniquity of us all. No one seeks God. Ephesians 2 puts it even harsher. You were dead in your transgressions. Dead in your sins in which you once walked.

If you've ever watched a zombie movie, I don't know if you have, or the Walking Dead series that's on TV, you were like those zombies. Physically moving, alive, you could say, but at the same time, dead. Spiritually dead, and dead people don't choose anything. If you watch these zombie movies, they can't help but be, you know, ravenous monsters that want to kill everyone. They can't have a mind and a soul of their own.

They are locked in to being dead. They don't choose anything. And a covenant story, the story of God's redemption shows how broken humanity is in one sense. Adam and Eve and Israel over and over show just how we couldn't be faithful to God and that God had to do something altogether different and altogether life changing. And this is applied through the Holy Spirit irresistibly in us.

If we were to choose God, if we were capable of choosing God, it would be like putting a potion of life on a counter next to a coffin and telling the corpse reach out and drink the potion. It is that impossible. Impossible. It doesn't matter how powerful that potion is. It doesn't matter how loudly you yell at the coffin.

It doesn't matter how close the coffin is to the potion. A corpse does not have any power in and of itself to reach out and take it. But Jesus Christ, the Bible says, sends the Spirit into the hearts of people to bring them back from death to life. John 6:63 says, it is the Spirit who gives life. The flesh is no help at all.

The words that I've spoken to you, Jesus says, are spirit and life. And so this makes God's salvation, God's love unstoppable because who can resist God? No one. God has no equal. Not even human will.

Not even human will is stronger than God. Now while the Bible continuously holds out the truth that salvation is based on faith and faith alone, God Himself is involved to ensure that we will fulfil the one and only condition of the covenant of grace which is faith. God ensures we have that faith. God makes us believe. It doesn't come in any other way to us.

It doesn't come our faith from our parents. Our faith doesn't come to us from our culture whether we're black or white or Asian. It doesn't come to us from our intelligence and being able to work out this story. God gives us the faith we need to receive salvation. Paul says this in this famous verse in Ephesians 2:8-9.

For by grace you have been saved and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. Not the results of works so that no one may boast. A decision that you could make yourself is works. The Holy Spirit loves us too much. The Holy Spirit has set His heart on us too deeply to let the decision to follow Christ rest in our hands.

His love is irresistible even by our dead and grimy hearts. And so when God through the Spirit comes to give us new life, it is unstoppable. It cannot be resisted. And so we see these several emphases that come out in our pronounced faith tradition. We see how God the Father chooses His people as king over everything.

Jesus, God must die for those that have walked away, that have broken this original deal with humanity. Jesus dies for them and for His sheep. Jesus and the Father, the Father sends the Holy Spirit to bring life and to give faith and He enters our hearts and we are made new. That's the timeline there: before eternity in time and space and now this is happening as we speak. In wrapping up this morning, there are two things that should remain with us leaving this place in light of all that we have discussed.

Two implications for understanding God's electing grace, God's particular and personal atonement of our lives, and the irresistible grace by which He draws us to Himself. Two implications. The first one is that we have a peace and an assurance of God, of God's love which is unshakable. If any part of my salvation was me, I could never be one hundred per cent sure that I'll be with my Father in heaven. I will spend my life worrying that I might drop the ball at some time.

But if salvation is by God and God alone, I can rest and be humbly confident that I will arrive safely in the kingdom of my God and by His side because God will get me there. Jesus tells us this Himself in John 6:37-39. All the Father gives me will come to me and whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. For I have come from heaven not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I should lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up on the last day. I shall lose none.

Someone may wonder, is it possible to lose your faith? Can a Christian lose their faith? And perhaps we've asked that with our siblings that have wandered away, our children, maybe even our spouses. Can a Christian lose their faith? But a biblical question for us to ponder is, can Jesus lose any of His sheep?

I will lose none of all the Father has given me. This is why it is so true what we read this morning at the start of worship where Paul says nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing. Not even my own spiritual flakiness. Now the second implication is how we worship.

We will worship God deeply. If we understand this, we will worship Him so deeply in all aspects of our lives, in our hearts and our minds and our lifestyles. One of the tests that the apostle Paul uses to discover whether someone is truly a Christian or not is to discover what they boast about, what they are proud of. If your faith is based on anything that allows you to say well done me, well done me, you believed enough, you acted in a good way enough, it's not a biblical faith.

It is not based on the biblical gospel. But if our salvation rests completely on Jesus, completely on His obedience to live and die for us, if it doesn't rest on our willingness, it is impossible to not be incredibly grateful for what He has done. It is impossible not to be grateful. This covenant story cannot help but turn us into worshippers who are lost in the magnificence, in the splendour, in the all encompassing miraculous nature of this story, of this great deliverance of us. If we had any say in our salvation, even a ratio of ninety-five per cent to five, we'd be sharing the glory of our salvation.

But if God chooses unconditionally, if Jesus dies personally and if the Holy Spirit moves irresistibly, then we have no option but to cry out, God, you have all the glory. So friends, let us do this. Let us do this with uninhibited joy this morning. For our Saviour lives. He has overcome all obstacles to save His precious people so that we may marvel and glorify our God who is so great.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this great salvation. How deep and how great and how wide and how high is this love of yours? Father, this morning as we receive these promises, I pray for each person here. I pray that this is true for them.

Even as they wrestle through these things. Lord, even as they may wrestle in the future about their faith and whether they love you or not, Father God, will you be faithful to them. And Father, may we this morning find in our hearts that warmth, that moving emotion that will direct us to accept this grace. Oh Lord Jesus, may every single person here this morning know you as their personal Saviour. And Father, if some of us aren't sure, God, will you work in their lives?

Will you give them understanding? Understanding? We pray for our sons and our daughters. We pray for our husbands and wives. We pray for our best mates, who either have never known you or have once said they knew you and now they live very far away from you.

Father, we know that if you are at work here, there is nothing that will stop you. And so all we can do this morning is to give them up to you again. Lord, will you save them? Will you draw them irresistibly to yourself? Will you pursue them with that relentless, urgent love that you have?

Will you work in us what is necessary to share, to talk about, to witness to them about what you've done in our lives? Will you develop in us such a grateful, joyful, worshipful heart that it will overflow and abound to them? Father, we thank you this morning that we belong to you, that you belong to us, and that you will lose none of us whom you have set your heart on. Thank you for this truth this morning again. In Jesus' name. Amen.