This article is about the covenant of God and making covenants today. Swearing an oath and binding devotion is also discussed.

Source: The Monthly Record, 1993. 4 pages.

Deeds of Covenant – Another Kind

A lawful oath is a part of religious worship, wherein, upon just occasion, the person swearing solemnly calls God to witness what he asserts or promises; and to judge him according to the truth and falsehood of what he swears.

Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XXII

It is Wednesday evening in the General Assem­bly. A special Public Questions, Religion and Morals Report is being discussed. It deals with the prevailing sins of the nation, the Church's involve­ment in them and the measures the church needs to take to return to full faithfulness to God. It comes in the form of a confession of the Church's sin and a promise to fresh obedience.

You can sense the deep emotion as the Report is approved. The Moderator then leads the Assembly in prayer, after which the Commissioners remain standing. With great solem­nity the Moderator asks: "Is this the confession of your sin?" Unanimously, the Assembly replies: "Yes". The Moderator then puts an oath to the Assembly who repeat it after him: "We swear by almighty God, to commit ourselves by his grace to fuller obedience and to fulfill these meas­ures..." Then one by one the ministers and elders come forward to the Clerks' table and sign the document, as an expression of their commitment to fresh obedi­ence.

During the following weeks, this scene is repeated throughout the country as the people follow the lead of their elders in confessing sin and renewing their vows of allegiance to God.

Can you imagine it? No? But why not? This sort of solemn public promise and commitment is in line with the example of Scripture, and is appropriate for our present situation. It's even in line with the ancient Scottish tradition of covenanting.

Man's Covenant with God🔗

Especially in the Old Testament, God's covenant occupies a prominent place in the Bible. In God's act of covenanting, his solemn and binding promises are central. Thus to the whole of human­ity God promised:

I estab­lish my covenant with you: never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood.Genesis 9:11

To Abraham he said: "I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant ... to be your God and the God of your descen­dants after you."Genesis 17:7

The new covenant is similarly expressed in terms of solemn promise: "This is the covenant that I will make", says the Lord. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts."Jeremiah 31:33

But though God's solemn promises to man are mainly in mind when covenant is spoken of in the Old Testa­ment, we should not forget that from time to time the people of Israel expressed their obedience in terms of a covenant which they made with God.

A typical example is found in Ezra 10:3. The historical background is that most of the Jewish people have been scattered from their own land because of their disobedience, and parts of Palestine have been re­settled by foreign peoples. Thus God's people have become accustomed to min­gling with others and some have begun to lose the sense of being a distinctive people. When a large group of Jews returned from their exile in Babylon, many, especially of their leading figures, married foreign women. Thus God's explicit command is dis­obeyed, the distinctiveness of the chosen people under­mined and the purity of the holy seed threatened.

Influenced by Ezra's example, the people repent with confession and weeping and make a covenant with God. This covenant takes the form of a solemn com­mitment to action, a specific promise of obedience to put right what has been wrong. It is something public, done with particular solemnity, involving the swearing of an oath of obedience.

Nor was this covenanting with God an isolated inci­dent. Several times through­out their history, the Jewish people expressed their repen­tance by making such covenants. In covenanting, the people as a body bound themselves by solemn oath and promise to the obe­dience which had been lacking.

Thus under King Asa, they entered into a covenant "to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul" (2 Chron­icles 15:12). In Hezekiah's day, the covenant involved the priesthood particularly and a commitment to the sanctifying of themselves and the cleansing of God's temple (2 Chronicles 29:10).

We can say, therefore, with confidence that, in Old Testament days, the people of God found "just occa­sion" to include the solemn swearing of religious oaths as part of their worship of God. They thus called God to witness the truthfulness of the promises of obedience which they made.

Reformed Covenants🔗

Similar solemn swearing was the basis of many covenants which played their part in the development of the Scottish Church at the time of the Reformation and afterwards.

In 1557 several Scottish noblemen, including the Earls of Argyll, Glencairn and Morton, called God to witness their deed of covenant "to uproot Roman Catholic idolatry and to pro­mote the blessed Word of God". Another covenant, sworn by the Scottish Church at Perth in May 1559 had as its purpose "to des­troy and put away all things that dishonour God's name, so that God may be truly and purely worshipped".

The following year, at Leith, the reforming party again entered into a covenant which declared: "we together in general, and every one of us in special by himself, with our bodies, goods, friends, and all that we can do, shall set forward the Reformation of Religion according to God's Word".

After the Reformation, this practice of covenanting continued to occupy a prominent place. A National Covenant was drawn up and sworn to by the King, his household and the nation in 1580-81. This was renewed in 1596 and 1601. Later, that same National Covenant came to prominence in the battle between Presbyterian­ism and Episcopacy and was again subscribed, with much solemnity, in Greyfriars' Churchyard in Edinburgh on 1st March 1638.

The great public covenants in the Scottish Church came to their final expression in the Solemn League, which sought not only to renew commitment to the Reformed Faith but also "to bring the Churches of God in the three king­doms to the nearest conjunc­tion and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of Church govern­ment, directory for worship and catechising".

These occasions of covenant making are not simply part of our history; they contain the same elements as the Biblical Deeds of Covenant mentioned above. Swearing to the covenants was not a political act but a deeply moving spiritual exercise. They were not lightly accepted but represented the humble determination of those that entered into them. They gave expression to true spiritual life and did untold good in directing spiritual zeal and in rekindling devotion.

A minister of the time described the signing of a covenant at Lanark: "I may truly say that in all my life­time, excepting at the Kirk of Shotts (where he wit­nessed a great revival) I never saw such motions from the Spirit of God. All the people generally and most willingly concurred. I have seen more than a thou­sand persons all at once lift­ing up their hands, and the tears falling down from their eyes."

The Covenanting Tradition🔗

Especially in the smaller Presbyterian Churches that separated themselves from the Church of Scotland in the 18th century, this covenanting tradition lived on. In the Secession Church, every 20 or 30 years, or at a time of ecclesiastical crisis, the Covenants would be renewed. There would, of course, be long preparation involving instruction and fasting, pastoral work by the minister and examination by the Session.

On the appointed day, in the course of a service, the covenants would be read out, folks would stand and swear to them with raised right hand, and would then come forward and sign their commitment to God in the presence of the congrega­tion. These were times of great spiritual impact: "the result was usually a deeper-toned religious life, a revival of the work of grace in the congregation, and the strengthening of that high-toned religious principle for which Original Seceders have often been distin­guished".

Although we are focusing on public covenanting, the practice of making solemn formal promises of obe­dience to God lived on at a personal level. William Taylor was for 50 years a minister of the Secession Church. As a young man of 21, he made this personal covenant:

Falkirk, 26th October, 1780. This day, I, William Taylor, would essay in the strength of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the sight and more immediate presence of the heart-searching and rein-trying God, to dedicate myself and my services unto the Lord ... As youth is so prone to pride, ostentation, and vainglory, I would commit myself to Thee at this age in a particular manner, to be so sanctified and denied to myself and to the world, that humility may be promoted in my soul...

The old-fashioned turn of phrase should not obscure from us how specific, rele­vant and deeply felt this solemn covenanting with God was to the writer.

Something like this per­sonal covenanting with God was surely part of the devo­tional discipline of men like McCheyne. In a less formal way, it no doubt finds some place in the personal devo­tional lives of spiritually-minded people today. But public covenanting is gone.

Why Not Today?🔗

There are few, if any, churches today, who would deal with "Lawful Oaths and Vows" in an account of their beliefs. Yet there is such a chapter in the West­minster Confession of Faith. Why?

Well, we might say, cir­cumstances change; what was important in one age isn't important in another. The burning issues of one age which called forth Con­fessional comment are relegated to the background in another age when circum­stances bring new matters to the Church's attention. In this way, different areas of faith and practice are succes­sively explored. This development helps to account for a chapter of the Confession being out of date. In the mid-17th cen­tury religious oaths were in vogue; nowadays they are out of fashion.

But why are they out of fashion? And should they be, if they are indeed Bibli­cal? No doubt there are a variety of answers that could be given to the former ques­tion. These would mainly have to do with the general poverty of spiritual life that there is at present. Among the factors which I believe has led to the neglect of this sort of thing are these:

  • Firstly, there is little awareness of the benefit of corporate activity. Our piety has been individualised. Promises of obedience — if it is not presumptuous to make such! — are to be done in the secret place, between ourselves and our God. Even when we gather together, too often an individualistic spirit prevails: the relationship felt is entirely the vertical one that unites us to God not the horizontal one that enables us to benefit from the presence of our brothers and sisters. Even in what has become the must public act of commitment — participa­tion in the Lord's Supper — each person seems sunk in his or her own thoughts, oblivious to those around. Group psychology doesn't operate; the power of cor­porate activity is lost to us. This individualism is the opposite of that which led to public covenanting, and must be repented of.

  • Secondly, the place of the human will in the develop­ment of the Christian life has not been grasped. Even the initial acts of faith and repentance involve the will of man. God enables but he doesn't do these things for us. The human will is active: with his renewed will man decides.

But how little place the resolve to act has in our approach to obedience and service. We are happy to hear sermons that instruct the mind or stir the emo­tions. But we give little place to the need to move the will to action. We are like inani­mate boulders by the seaside. The tide washes over them twice a day and they remain unmoved. Only when a specially powerful tide sweeps over them are they stirred involuntarily from their position. We are content to let the Word of God wash over and around us, though it rarely changes our position. We do not see every sermon as leading to the question: what should I resolve to do in the light of this message? A misunder­standing of the nature of God's working on the human will leads to indeci­sion and lack of resolve in obedience and service. Until that misunderstanding is dealt with, the thought of making a public, corporate, specific commitment to obe­dience sounds presumptuous in the extreme.

Individualism and indeci­sion impede progress in many areas of spiritual experience. Not least, they are obstacles that stand in the way of our covenanting with God when "just occa­sion" presents itself.

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