In this Bible and Business episode, Bill English unlocks covenants for us and applies them to our role as business owners. This is the third episode in a seven part series on the Theological Context for Business Owners. The slides can be downloaded from our downloads section on this web site. The companion video is here. The companion blog post is here.
[00:00:06.010] – Speaker 1
And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. I want to thank you for joining me today. We are in a series on the theological context for business ownership. And this is the third part of a seven-part series.
[00:00:21.340] – Speaker 1
And so today we’re going to be looking at covenants and covenant relationships with God. In the first video we discussed reigning with Christ, and in the last one we discussed the Divine Council. So in this episode we’re going to be look at covenants and our covenant relationship with God. All of this comes from the first chapter in my book, a Christian Theology of Business Ownership. These slides that you’re seeing today are available for download@bibleandbusiness.com in PDF format.
[00:00:56.360] – Speaker 1
And also out there you can find articles that I’ve written, some tools that are available for you free of charge. You can also join events every six weeks I have an online business owners meeting about the integration of faith and our roles as business owners. And you can also participate in some of our surveys. So I’ll invite you to head out to Bibleandbusiness.com and to take advantage of some of the resources out there. In addition, I’ll ask that you take time to subscribe to this channel here at YouTube.
[00:01:30.860] – Speaker 1
So let’s dive into covenants. What is a covenant? Well, first of all, a covenant is the voluntary participation in a relationship in which both parties agree to be faithful in fulfilling their responsibilities to the other party. Stewardships and covenants are intricately linked. You’ll find that when we get to chapter three in my book on stewardships, and I’m teaching my way through that chapter, you’ll find that I’ll be referring back to this episode quite often.
[00:02:02.890] – Speaker 1
So living out a covenantal relationship with God is a foretaste of how we will relate with Him in heaven. So our covenant relationship with God today is a foretaste for how we’re going to relate with God in heaven. Now, there are two parts to a covenant the promise and the administration. The promise can be onesided, for example, when God made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis twelve. Or the promise can be twosided.
[00:02:34.650] – Speaker 1
An example of that is God’s covenant with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai in Exodus. The administrative part of the covenant is how obedience and disobedience is enforced. How is obedience rewarded? How is disobedience managed within that covenant relationship? Those are very important parts of the overall covenant relationship.
[00:03:00.110] – Speaker 1
So let’s look at the covenant with Abraham in Genesis twelve, verses one through three. I’ll read this text for us now. The Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And here’s the covenant part. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing.
[00:03:26.400] – Speaker 1
I will bless those who will bless you and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So the terms that relate to Abraham are this he will become a great nation, he will be blessed, and he will have a great name. But the elements that are going to extend beyond Abraham’s life is that he will be a blessing to others. He will show favor, or God will show favor to those who show favor to Abraham, and God will show disfavor on those who show disfavor to Abraham.
[00:04:04.260] – Speaker 1
And all of the nations will be blessed. So this promise in this covenant is eternal in nature. It didn’t stop when Abraham died, and as we’ll see in a little bit, it didn’t stop when Jesus Christ came with the new covenant in the New Testament. Let’s look at the covenant with David in two, Samuel 7816. Here’s a portion of those verses.
[00:04:33.060] – Speaker 1
Thus says the Lord of hosts and this is God talking to David. I took you from the past year, from following the sheep, that you should be prints over My people Israel. And I will make for you a great name like the name of the great ones on earth. And I will appoint a place for My people Israel, and will plant them so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed. No.
[00:04:56.380] – Speaker 1
Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house when your days are fulfilled and when you lie down with your fathers. I will raise up your offspring after you who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before Me.
[00:05:30.460] – Speaker 1
Your throne shall be established forever. What we see here is that David has promised that his name would be great, that his offspring would succeed him to the throne, and that kings would descend from him, and the nation is promised the security of its own land. Now, the offspring there obviously is a foretelling of Jesus Christ. Now, Jeremiah also talks about a new covenant that God would make with Israel. And I’m going to read and this is mentioned in Isaiah and Jeremiah several times.
[00:06:07.840] – Speaker 1
I’m just going to read one passage from Jeremiah 23, verses five through six. Behold the days our coming declares the Lord, when I will raise up David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called. The Lord is our righteous.
[00:06:38.070] – Speaker 1
Jeremiah 23, verses five through six. What do we see here? The Jeremiah is affirming, the enduring nature of David’s line, what we would call the Davidic line, that the Abrahamic covenant has not changed. It is an eternal covenant and it is still in force. The Davidic covenant gives some definition as to how God will fulfill his covenant.
[00:07:02.070] – Speaker 1
He will always have a king on David’s throne that will be established forever, and it’s the throne that will be established forever as well as the king. And Jeremiah talks of a righteous branch, an obvious reference to Christ, which will find its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. So you might wonder, well, what about the new covenant in the, in the new testament? I thought the new covenant took away the old covenant, it replaced the old covenant, it replaced the old Testament and that kind of thing. Well, to my way of thinking, the Abrahamic and the David covenants are eternal in nature, and they endure not only through the new Testament period, but into eternity.
[00:07:45.960] – Speaker 1
So I find that the new covenant in the new Testament is really administrative in nature. It is not a replacement for the Abrahamic covenant. It doesn’t replace the promise. It replaces the administration. The whole old Testament law was the administration of the Abrahamic and consequently the Davidic covenants.
[00:08:07.390] – Speaker 1
How do we deal with disobedience within the covenant relationship to people or I’m sorry, to God? And so in the new Testament, Christ comes along and says, no longer will obedience be according to a law. It will be facilitated by a change in those who are viscerally transformed and included in the covenant. So because in the old Testament, the people had failed to receive the law into their hearts, it was always externalized in actions, keeping it externalized to their minds instead of in their hearts. They really didn’t have the intestinal or the internal fortitude to obey God.
[00:08:49.810] – Speaker 1
But this weakness is overcome by the advent of the holy Spirit coming and living within our lives. And I point to John 1423 for that. So this new heart, this transformed heart, this new nature that God gives us, will give us a responsive attitude to God’s laws. We’ll want to follow God’s laws, will desire to follow God’s laws, and we’ll desire to draw close to God. It is that internal change.
[00:09:21.030] – Speaker 1
It’s administrative in nature. It is not a change in the Abrahamic or the Davidic covenants. So if the new covenant is enforced today, if the Abrahamic covenants are enforced today, if the Davidic covenants are enforced today, which I believe they are, then Christianity is a covenantal religion, and obedience is a covenant. Obedience with God. We fulfill our part of the covenant with God because that’s what we are empowered to do through the power of the holy Spirit.
[00:09:55.810] – Speaker 1
The new covenant is an instrument of grace, but it is still a covenant. Faithfulness is expected by both parties, from both parties. So God should be able to expect faithfulness from us. And we know that we can expect faithfulness from god. Covenants are different than contracts.
[00:10:16.630] – Speaker 1
And I want to make this I want to make this distinction here. We live in a contractual society in America, not a covenantal society. And here are some differences between covenants and contracts. Covenants emphasize your relational obligations, whereas contracts emphasize the individual rights of the parties within the contract. Covenants assert power through faithfulness, whereas in contracts we assert power by asserting our individual rights.
[00:10:47.140] – Speaker 1
Faithfulness in covenants is sacred. It is sacred to be faithful. In contracts, the preservation of the rights is sacred. The preservation of the terms of the agreement are sacred. In covenants we are other focused.
[00:11:03.360] – Speaker 1
We’re always focused on the other’s needs. In contracts we are selffocused. Am I getting what I’m supposed to have out of this deal? In covenants we internalize our responsibilities. But with contracts those responsibilities are externalized and they’re thought of as duties, a duty to perform rather than a responsibility to perform for the other party.
[00:11:28.330] – Speaker 1
And finally, covenants are really relational in nature, whereas contracts are transactional in nature. There’s a lot of Christians who live with a transactional view of their relationship with Christ. They really view the work of the Holy Spirit as being something that helps them sin less and maybe be a better person or a more gooder person, if I can put it that way. And they view their righteousness not as something that was imputed to them by the work that Jesus Christ did on the cross, but rather really a summation of good works versus bad works, righteous acts versus sin. And if I have enough righteous acts, then I must be doing well.
[00:12:12.190] – Speaker 1
And that is a transactional view of our relationship with God. We think that if we sin, God gets mad at us, and if we don’t sin and if we act righteously, God is happy with us. That again is a transactional view of Christianity. What I want to emphasize here is that God is faithful to us. One John, one nine.
[00:12:35.100] – Speaker 1
If we confess our sins, he is what he is faithful and just to forgive our sins. And then he’s faithful to go on and cleanse us from all unrighteousness, not only the sins that we confess, but the sins that we didn’t confess. God is faithful to us and we should view our relationship with Him as one in which we are faithful to Him. We are faithful in obeying his commands. We are faithful in getting to know Him.
[00:13:01.270] – Speaker 1
We are faithful in loving Him. We are faithful in centering our lives on Him, tethering to Him our lives. In other words, the phrase is coming to my mind is the organizing principle. We make Jesus Christ the organizing principle of our lives. That is faithfulness to God.
[00:13:21.360] – Speaker 1
And as we are faithful to Him, he is always, of course, faithful to us. So because God wants an intimate relationship with his people, he forms the basis of his redemptive plan on covenants, not on transactions. God is not interested in transactions. Hence his covenant with Abraham, with David, and with us is a call to a deep, lasting relationship of responsibilities, mutual love, ongoing presence and faithfulness. Our response is one of love and faithfulness to Him, demonstrated in our perseverance in the face of temptations and persecutions.
[00:14:03.250] – Speaker 1
And we’re going to be dealing with perseverance in the next episode. Now, how do these covenants relate to our roles as business owners? How does that happen? Well, in our roles as owners, our first responsibility is to fulfill our responsibilities to God. This means that we view ourselves not as owners, but as stewards.
[00:14:25.500] – Speaker 1
Stewards of what he owns. So we stop thinking in American business terms, ownership terms, and we start thinking in biblical covenantal terms. And the huge example that I’ll return to again and again and again as I walk us through my book, A Christian Theology of Business Ownership, is this we are not owners of our business. Those are God’s properties that he has entrusted to us. Even our skills and talents and abilities to lead companies, to start companies, to create new products, to gather a customer base, to grow our business.
[00:15:07.300] – Speaker 1
All of that, all of those talents, all of those gifts, everything about that is really because God has given those to us. And we’re going to see that in chapter three when we look at stewardship and how God gives us the ability to create wealth from deuteronomy eight. So the lessons that we have learned so far in this video series are really as follows in eternity we will reign with Christ on Earth. And in eternity we will not just reign with Christ, we will reign as part of God’s divine counsel. And lastly, today we learned that we serve God within a covenantal relationship.
[00:15:49.610] – Speaker 1
So listen, I want to thank you today for joining me. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. Next time we get together, we’ll be looking at the concept of perseverance as another element in the theological context for business ownership. I hope you have a great day. Take care.
[00:16:26.140] – Speaker 1
Thank you.