1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our
Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word today is taken
from Psalm 105:8, and it’s entitled, “Remember
the Covenant,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
“I
before e except after c” is a memory helper people use to spell certain
words correctly. But it doesn’t always work! Here’s how the poem would sound
with only some of the exceptions: “I
before e except after c or when sounding like a as in neighbor or weigh and
except seize and seizure and also in leisure, weird, height, and either forfeit
or neither.” Someone did some counting and found 923 words that break the
rule and only about 44 that actually follow it.
That’s kind of fitting for today’s focus on God remembering his
covenant. Our text is Ps 105:8: “He
remembers his covenant forever, the word he commanded, for a thousand
generations.” We have rules for the way covenants and other legal contracts
are written. We try to apply those rules to God’s covenant, and they don’t fit.
God makes exceptions to the way he makes covenants . . . not for his benefit,
but for ours! God Remembers His Covenant So That All Generations Are Blessed Forever.
3.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember
things even when we write them down. But, how were God’s people in the Old
Testament supposed to remember the covenant? They didn’t have a copy. They
didn’t really have a copy of anything, not even a Bible. Since they didn’t have
copies of anything, they had to remember everything. The easiest covenant to
remember should have been Lev 26:12. God said, “And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my
people.” That should have been easy enough to remember. God will be God and
people will be people. But, the people weren’t content to be people. They
wanted to be God! They wanted to do things their way in spite of the warnings
God gave them. And sometimes, they weren’t even acting like people. They acted
more like animals in breaking the most basic of God’s covenants, breaking God’s
commandments. God had warned them about this in Deut 4:23–24: “Take care, lest you forget the covenant of
the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make a carved image, the form of
anything that the Lord your God has forbidden you. For the Lord your God is a
consuming fire, a jealous God.” Now, if they would have had pen and paper
to write these things down, the ink wouldn’t have even been dry before they
broke it. They made carved images and worshiped those idols. They looked at the
false gods of other people and copied them.
4.
According to their agreement, God,
the “consuming fire,” had every right
to destroy them. But just a few verses after the warning, we read this in Deut
4:31, “For the Lord your God is a
merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with
your fathers that he swore to them.” The people forgot the covenant, but
God remembered.
5.
Do you remember the Ten
Commandments? Most of us had to memorize them at one time. But is it a biblical
way of remembering? When we remember the commandments, do we take action and
keep them? Sometimes we try to justify ourselves and say, “I don’t have any other gods. I haven’t made an idol and worshiped it.
So, yes. I’ve kept the First Commandment.” But, we also had to learn in the
Small Catechism, “What does this mean?”
“We should fear, love, and trust in God
above all things.” It doesn’t take too much to show us our idols—things
that we fear more than God, love more than God, trust more than God. That’s
only one commandment. We can go right down the list and be convicted by every
one of them.
6.
But tonight’s topic is a bit
different. We’re talking about remembering covenants. Do you remember the
covenant? There’s a difference between covenants and commandments. Commandments
are for God to make and for us to keep. But we don’t. So, God makes a covenant,
and it seems as if it’s an agreement where we each keep our side of the deal.
But since we can’t, God makes an exception to the covenant-writing rule. God
remembers, and God does something about it.
God Remembers His Covenant So That
All Generations Are Blessed Forever.
7.
They didn’t have paper nor a notary
public in those days, so how were the people going to remember a covenant? They
say people remember things better when they use more of the senses: seeing, hearing, even smelling. So, it
seems that when a covenant was made, an animal was butchered and the pieces
were laid out on the ground. The two parties of the agreement would walk
together among those pieces. That impressed on their minds the stark fact for
each party: “May I be like this animal if
I break this covenant.” That’s memorable.
8.
Now, here’s where God’s exception to
the covenant-writing rule comes. We have this strange scene in Genesis 15 when
God made a covenant with Abram before his name got changed to Abraham. God had
Abram get the animal ready and set out the pieces. Remember the “i before e rule”? The rule… was that God and Abram would walk among the
pieces together so that they each would remember the covenant and consequences
of breaking it. But that’s not what happened. God made an exception to the
rule. Instead, “As the sun was going
down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell
upon him. . . . When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking
fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord
made a covenant with Abram” (Gen 15:12, 17–18). So, in this covenant, God
moved among the pieces of the animal while Abram slept. God did everything in
this covenant. So, it must follow that God would be the one who suffered the
consequences if the covenant was broken. Sure enough, Abram’s descendants broke
the covenant, and God suffered the consequences. God’s Son, Jesus, suffered the
consequences on the cross for Abram’s descendants breaking the covenant.
9.
When God appeared in the Old
Testament, it was a preview of his becoming a man. So, could it have been the
preincarnate Jesus who walked among the pieces just as it was the incarnate
Jesus who was later pierced for our transgressions? It makes sense. No one was
there to see that ritual and remember it, except God! Abram was there, but he
was in a deep sleep. So, what is the continuing reminder? The cross. God’s
only-begotten Son, Jesus, suffered and died on the cross for the breaking of
God’s Law.
10.
Even down to our generation, we see
the cross, remember and believe. God sees the cross and remembers and keeps his
covenant. Our part is sinning and being led to repentance. God’s part is
forgiving sins. Do you see why it’s so important that we understand that we who
are believers are heirs of Abraham? We were in the covenant. We were asleep,
like Abram. Our sleep was the sleep of sin. We broke that covenant too. Jesus
suffered the consequences. The main covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob had three parts. God would make of them a great nation, give them a land,
and bless all the people of the earth through them. Now, God has told us that
the great nation is really all who have the faith of Abraham, that is, the
Church. The land is the promised land of heaven. All the people on earth are blessed
through one of Abraham’s descendants, the Lord Jesus Christ.
11.
As Lutheran Christians, we use
the words “purely passive” to
describe our “deep sleep.” There’s
nothing we can do to help God or add to what God has done. God has done
everything in Christ. God has done everything on the cross. We’re passive. We
only receive. But, oh how much we receive! We’re blessed, and what a blessing
it is! We receive life on this earth, which is largely a good thing for us. We
receive all manner of spiritual blessings in Christ, which is a great thing for
us. We receive eternal life. And there aren’t even words that tell how
exceedingly great that is. God Remembers His Covenant So That All
Generations Are Blessed Forever.
12.
We talk a lot about generations. What
generation are you? Silent? Baby Boomer? Gen X? Millennial? A lot of church
leaders are trying to think of ways to get all those generations to remember
God and come to church. God remembers them all. Whatever generation we’re
called depends on when we were born. Reborn in Christ, we are the “Remembered Generation.” God has
remembered and done something about it. We are the “Blessed Generation.” Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all
understanding guard your heart and minds in Christ Jesus until life
everlasting. Amen.
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