About Me

My photo
I am a pastor and a clinical psychotherapist. My life's passion is defining healthiness from a human perspective and paralleling it to the holiness of God, divine perspective. Shifting perspectives creates a paradigm that is alongside of rather than over and against. The parakalein of God and the paradoxes of humanity are redefined. Humanity is all about winning and yet we are losing ground everywhere. Divinity is all about letting go of the desire to win and the fear of loss. The Divine embraces the world with loving care regardless of anything.

Search This Blog

The God of Covenant Keeping Grace and Truth

Posted by Don Paine

God created the World and he made a covenant with his creation to watch over it, to care for it, to be present for it regardless of what happened to the creation, what the created choose to do or not do, and regardless of anything, everything would be by design for balance and interfacing and interloping within the created order of things.  God has always keeps this covenant with Creation.

Later, God made a covenant with Melchizedek and established the order of Faith in perpetuating Faith, Life and Love in the world.

Later, God established a covenant with Abraham and Sarah, who paid tithes to Melchizedek, and his descendants through Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah/Rachel, the twelve tribes of Israel where the new covenant people.  This did not nullify the previous covenants with creation, Humanity, or Melchizedek, it simply established another covenant relationship underscoring that God is a God of Covenant making not covenant breaking.

In the Book of Malachi where God presents the case for Israel and about their perpetual and persistent disobedience and indifference to the God of Grace, Truth, and Covenant.  Go declared that he would turn his heart toward all his children, the original covenant with humanity, and reframe a covenant of grace and truth through the messiah, the anointed one.  He was anointed to model the very thing missing in Israel: Humility, Honor and Honesty.  Truth and Grace Honor and humility would lead him to the cross and provide a model for all followers to embrace that same road less traveled.  IN Malachi when God speaks about hating divorce it was his hatred of the hurt and pain and suffering brought about when a covenant relationship was broken.  At the same time it made it clear that no covenant is ever broken as a covenant is always in force.  When scripture in Mark 10 speaks about divorce and the casual nature of Mosaic teaching on Divorce.  Jesus responds that this was because of the hardness of Moses people hearts and that no covenant can be broken and that the children of the covenant as well as the wife need to be cared for as part of the duty of the covenant maker.  Our society has was governing child care and spousal support but this was not true in Jesus day.  Jesus was simply saying "honoring a covenant is serious business always and even if for adultery a divorce is permissible the responsibility to maintain the caring covenant is inherent in the covenant itself.

God never stops loving humanity, the Jewish nation, each one of us.  God choses a bride of covenant of grace.  The Hebrews knew a Covenant based on Law and Grace.The "time of the Gentiles" begins with Jesus earthly ministry but is catapulted into prominence trough the death and resurrection and the persecution to follow of the church.  God made a new covenant based on his sacrificial blood and broken body, that invited all those who were hungry or thirty to come and drink freely from the water of Christ that waters the seeds of faith in all people.
Again this New Covenant, symbolized in the communion service and meal did not make the previous covenants null and void but simply offered a new and more heart oriented transformative experience of God's grace for all who would be open to that experience.


0 comments:

Post a Comment