Dennis Tuuri

# Covenant Marriage and Covenant Membership

The sermon text today spans a section of Nehemiah. We’re going to read first of all Nehemiah chapter 9:32 through 10:1 and then we’ll skip down in chapter 10 past the list and we’ll get then to the rest of chapter 10 in the book of Nehemiah. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Okay. Nehemiah chapter 9 beginning at verse 32. “Now therefore our God, the great, the mighty and awesome God who keeps covenant and mercy. Do not let all the trouble seem small before you that has come upon us—our kings and our princes, our priests and our prophets, our fathers and all your people from the days of the kings of Assyria unto this day. However, you are just in all that has befallen us. For you have dealt faithfully, but we have dealt wickedly. Neither our kings nor our princes, our priests, nor our fathers have kept your law, nor heeded your commandments and your testimonies, with which you testified against them.

For they have not served you in their kingdom, or in the many good things that you gave them, or in the large and rich land which you set before them. Nor did they turn from their wicked works. Here we are servants today. And the land that you gave to our fathers to eat the fruit and its bounty—here we are servants in it. And it yields much increase to the kings you have set over us because of our sins. Also, they have dominion over our bodies and our cattle at their pleasure. And we are in great distress.

And because of all this, we make a sure covenant and write it—our leaders, our Levites, and our princes seal it. Now, those who placed their seal on the document were Nehemiah, the governor, the son of Hachaliah, and Zedekiah.”

Now, skipping down to verse 28 of chapter 10. “Nehemiah 10:28-39. Now, the rest of the people, the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, the Nethinim, and all those who had separated themselves from the peoples of the lands of the law of God, their wives, their sons and their daughters, everyone who had knowledge and understanding, those joined with their brethren, their nobles, and entered into a curse and an oath to walk in God’s law, which was given by Moses, the servant of God, and to observe and do all the commandments of the Lord, our God, and his ordinances and his statutes. We would not give our daughters as wives to the peoples of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons. If the peoples of the land brought wares or any grain to sell on the Sabbath day, we would not buy it from them on the Sabbath or on a holy day, and we would forgo the seventh year’s produce and the exacting of every debt.

Also, we made ordinances for ourselves to exact from ourselves yearly one-third of a shekel for the service of the house of our God. For the showbread, for the regular grain offering, for the regular burnt offering of the Sabbaths, the new moons and the set feasts, for the holy things, for the sin offerings to make atonement for Israel, and all the work of the house of our God. We cast lots among the priests and Levites and the people, for bringing the wood offering into the house of our God, according to our fathers’ houses at the appointed times year by year to burn on the altar of the Lord our God as it is written in the law.

And we made ordinances to bring the first fruits of our ground and the first fruits of all fruit of our trees year by year to the house of the Lord to bring the firstborn of our sons and our cattle as it is written in the law and the firstborn of our herds and our flocks to the house of our God to the priests who minister in the house of our God to bring the first fruits of our dough, our offerings, the fruit from all kinds of trees, the new wine and oil to the priests to the storerooms of the house of our God, and to bring the tithes of our land to the Levites.

For the Levites should receive the tithes in all our farming communities. And the priest, the descendant of Aaron, shall be with the Levites when the Levites receive tithes. And the Levites shall bring up a tenth of the tithes to the house of our God to the rooms of the storehouse. For the children of Israel and the children of Levi shall bring the offering of the grain, the new wine and the oil to the storerooms where the articles of the sanctuary are where the priests who minister and the gatekeepers and the singers are. And we will not neglect the house of our God.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this text. We thank you for the tremendous import it has to our times in which we live. And we confess before you that indeed we have lost much of our freedom in this land and much of this land is turned against you and your son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and his word, the scriptures. Bless us, Lord God, as we seek to reform our nation to bring it back to obedience to you and to a joyful submission to King Jesus in the power of the Spirit. To that end, Lord God, bless this text. Help us to understand it. Help me, Father, to be clear in my presentation of it, and may it change and transform our lives in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

—

In the movie No Country for Old Men, the sheriff has received a gift from his father and he has this dream about this at the end of the movie and he has misplaced the gift somehow in his dream. The sheriff represents law, righteousness, and justice, and the evil person in the film, Chigur, represents of course evil and sin and unrighteousness. By the end of the movie the sheriff has retired from the scene. He just doesn’t get it anymore and he can’t combat what he doesn’t understand. And he retires, but Chigur does not. He limps off, animal-like, into his next period of malevolence, whatever that might be in the movie.

The sheriff retires and he has lost the gift that was given to him by his father. And he’s lost without it. And the culture is lost without it as well because it’s law and order. It’s righteousness and justice in the land. The movie is bleak. The movie has no evidence of the Holy Spirit in it in the sense that there is no music, no soundtrack. By the way, the soundtrack for No Country for Old Men—you’re going to get nothing that was played in the movie because there isn’t any music. Now, that’s a picture of the absence of the Holy Spirit.

Thirty years ago, the text that we just read was quite important to Reformation Covenant Church. In fact, it had much to do with our name and the decision to name our church what we did: Reformation. We need a reformation building upon the work of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. We need reformation covenant because we had become aware of the fact that unlike most of the churches we were coming out of, the Bible placed a lot of stress on the idea, the notion, the practicality of covenant making.

And God is identified as he is in today’s text as the God who keeps covenant. We’re made in his image. We’re supposed to be people—men and women, boys and girls—that keep our word, that keep covenant, that bind ourselves to things and people and God, and then keep those bonds because we recognized thirty years ago that as the people in Nehemiah’s age came out of a period of great judgment from God and God had graciously delivered them, they needed to rebuild. They needed to reconstruct. They needed to build culture back.

And they saw very importantly at the base of that culture the scriptures, the word of God. And that word is a covenant word to us. And they recognized based on that covenant that they were responsible for—given to their fathers long before them. They recognized their responsibilities by that covenant and that they had failed them dramatically. And because of that, the troubles that came upon them were there. I hope we recognize the same thing we did thirty years ago. The men and women that started this church recognized that our problem is not a president who is lawless or a constitution that’s rubber or a socialistic mindset. Our problem is the conditions of the church of Jesus Christ where judgment starts, that produces all these downstream effects.

Praise God it produces them, because God is using those things to chastise his people and to bring us back and to repent and to embrace his word and his covenant once more. And to be people that aren’t a bunch of ball bearings rolling around that the state can collect at will, but people who recognize they’re leaves on a tree. They’re connected to other people.

The culture today is lying to us because it wants us to think of ourselves as totally individualistic and that’s simply not the truth. We’re inevitably tied to one another. We came out of a church, right? So church is a group of people who have covenanted together and worship God. And it’s out of that church on the Lord’s day that flows reformation into the week and reconstruction and reformation. So that’s why we chose the name we did. This text was quite important to us. It was a model to us. And if you look at the covenant, which we’ll look at in just a bit, you’ll see aspects of that covenant that are reflected in our church covenant.

Right now, of course, there’s differences. This was a national covenant taking. This was a movement across all the people that had come back to the land under Nehemiah. But we were trying to affect such a thing in our little vineyard so that other churches would do that as well and we’d have a reformation in this country based upon the ideas and practicalities of covenant and church. So that’s who we were.

Now we’re thirty years on. We’ve got adult children now and we’ve got kids and we don’t know what they’re going to do. We don’t—we do with some of them, but succession is a tricky deal. Will they be like Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men and kind of lost the gift somewhere and they didn’t even know they lost it? Well, I’m convinced that if they lose this text, an understanding of this text and the significance of this text, they will have lost the gift and we will move not in terms of restoration and reformation but will continue to move in this country in terms of decline, and where the modern Jesus is completely rejected by the culture because it seems so anemic and it is—it’s not tied to the Jesus of the scriptures.

So, you know, we came out of one of the early books that was produced in Tyler, Texas was a book called The Failure of the American Baptist Culture. Yeah, a scandalous title, but without trying to be pejorative, right? Without trying to stick anybody in the eye or poke a stick in somebody’s eye, there are some realities that need to be talked about in terms of what we began as a church doing. And this text is rather key to them.

You know, the Baptist culture produced in America—and now I’m not saying this is necessarily tied to Baptist theology, although I think in some points it absolutely is—but the culture in which we find ourselves, the American Baptist culture, is one that stresses to a fault individualism versus covenant. Okay. The individual is everything and the covenantal units that society has built are nothing. And the first institution to fall in that string of dominoes was the church of Jesus Christ.

Now, if you’re a civil governor and you’ve got all kinds of covenantal groups that protect the people and the liberty of people involved in those covenants, what do you want? You want those covenants destroyed. You don’t want any competition for the civil state. You don’t want the church. You don’t want a free businessman. And you don’t want a family. And where are we at thirty years on? All those things are under devastating attack. And we’re losing every one of them.

You know, the idea of what family is now is astonishing to a guy who’s in his 60s. It’s got nothing to do with what the Bible says about family. So the Baptist culture has stressed individualism and because of that it’s produced what we have. Why do we have socialistic tendencies in the government? Because we have radical individualism in the churches and in the communities in which we live. And so all the levels of government that were to protect people and actually to serve them and to serve the kingdom are being diminished and broken down so that all you have left is the individual who thinks he’s free as a bird and the civil state with the NSA and everything else looking over everything you’re doing and pulling you out of culture whenever it wants to.

Now, that’s where we’ve ended up. And it’s the result of radical individualism as opposed to this text that says we’re not babies. We’re leaves on a tree. We’re connected to one another. We were connected in our sin. We’re connected in our repentance. And we’re connected as a group of people who agree to support one another and hold each other accountable.

Individualism, decisional regeneration is part of that mix with the Baptist culture. You know, salvation is a matter of individual decisional regeneration as opposed to God claiming our children from the womb on. Now, there is a relationship between seeing people not as full people until they become of the age where they can make these decisions and the radical loss of rights of children in the womb, young people, etc. There’s a relationship to that, okay? As opposed to the idea that salvation is found in a covenant relationship with God. Baptism unites somebody to the church of Jesus Christ, to the body of Jesus. That’s what the Bible says.

And so, the church fathers, among others, say there’s no salvation outside of the church normally. Right now, that’s not denying individual faith and what happens in the context of your relationship, but it puts it not in a completely ultimate individualistic view. It puts it in the context again of Nehemiah, of groups. God working in people, God working through covenants.

So, you know, we tried to combat this stuff thirty years ago and we ended up—this text became quite important to us. And so, I want to talk about this today. Now, originally, the way the outline works is, you know, I wanted to talk about marriage. This was originally scheduled for last week and we’re coming up to Valentine’s Day. And so marriage is a covenant. And then secondly, God marries his people by way of covenant. There’s this relationship between marriage and the covenants that God makes with his people. And then third, to talk then on the basis of that about church membership and explain what it is we believe and what we do here. That’s kind of the general gist of where we’re going here in terms of the movement. And we’ll go through the first couple of points fairly quickly, but I wanted to begin with this idea.

Two other distinctives of the American Baptist culture I think that we could articulate are problems for what’s happened in our country and tied to its decline. One is democracy. And now that flows straight out of individualism, right? I mean, the idea that instead of representation—representational government is what covenants are about. If we had read the list of the signers of this covenant, you wouldn’t have found Ezra’s name. Didn’t he take the covenant? Well, yeah, he did. He was of the family of Sariah. And so, when we read Sariah, we’re actually reading all the family that descends from Sariah, both presently at the time and then those that would follow as well.

And so, God’s covenants are representational. He makes them with representatives of groups, okay? Not just individuals. It has individual implications, but they’re representational. And this country knew that two hundred years ago. And in our founding, we had a representational government because that’s the way God is. We’re made in God’s image, right? God’s a covenant keeper. We should be covenant makers and keepers. And this country knew that. And so, this country understood the implications of what we might call covenant theology for government and for representational government.

But as we moved away from that into a Baptist culture of strong individualism, we moved into a view of democracy. Right? Rushdoony had an article years ago called “The Heresy of Democracy.” It’s cited twice in Tim Keller’s book as being a horrible thing, but if you read it, it’s not at all what it might sound like to you. But Rushdoony saw this relationship between this radical individualistic democratic movement and the decline of our culture.

One final thing to poke another stick in somebody’s eye is that our Baptist culture—now our Baptist heritage didn’t do this. Much of the Baptist heritage in this country came out of the Reformation, but our Baptist culture became one in the churches where grace and law were torn apart. Right? Well, you see all this is implicit. You get grace versus law. And so we don’t have judgments, we don’t have determinations, we don’t have legal systems. We just have, you know, things kind of sliding around in the church. And then we wonder why we can’t get justice in the courts.

You know, judgment begins with the house of God. We played fast and loose with the scriptures before we ended up with a rubber constitution. We had a rubber Bible. Okay? And the rubber constitution is the judgment of God to tell us, hey, if you think your documents are going to stand when my document doesn’t stand, forget it. I’m not going to let that happen. If you think you’re going to get more freedom by breaking covenant with me, guess what? You’re going to have a tyrant. You’re going to have somebody who says, “Well, the law says fifty people defines a business,” but I’m going to say one hundred people defines a business, willy-nilly.

Now, that’s where we’re at. And I think that’s why we’re there. Law versus grace, that dichotomy. As opposed to the Bible, which tells us that God’s law is a gracious document. It’s never given to save us. It’s given after he redeems us. Even this covenant retaking in Nehemiah—when does it happen? It happens after God redeems them and brings them back out of exile, right? They go back and that’s when they retake the covenant. That’s when God reasserts the laws and commandments, etc.

So those are some of the factors. Let me briefly deal with the text. The text begins with an assertion, with an address of what they’re going to do to God, right? And did you notice what it says about this God: “the great, the mighty, and awesome God who keeps covenant and mercy.”

So, God is identified as the God who keeps covenant. Now, this is not unusual. But one last point in the introduction I failed to note before we get to this—cohabitation and membership. So, I was at the pastors’ meeting last week and Steve Stevens was there and there were representations of what the marriage policy is going to do this next year in Oregon. We’re going to do date night challenge. Focus on the Family will be involved. Big stuff going on. That’s all great stuff. And they also mentioned that in your churches cohabitation is a problem and you really need to work on that and you need to tell kids why that’s a bad thing to do.

Cohabitation is a growing problem, right? I mean, we currently have a person under suspension because they’re cohabiting. Well, I would suggest to you that when church membership became just living together instead of being accountable to leaders and leaders knowing who they were supposed to pastor and people being held accountable to a group of people that are designated as taking a vow to support one another and engage in community together—when churches started living together, that happened long before the marriage covenant was being washed away. And now people are living together, you know, outside of marriage. There’s a relationship to this stuff. There’s an inevitable downhill sort of slide that’s happening. And it’s because the central truths of Nehemiah 9 and 10 and what the scriptures tell us about God and who we are being denied.

We’re made in the image of God. We’re to make covenants and we’re to keep covenants. We’re to keep our word. Psalm 15 said, “That’s an entrance requirement. He who swears to his own hurt.” Right? Well, the easy way out of that for all of you, if you want to come to church every Sunday and not feel bad, is you just don’t do any swearing. Just don’t give your word to anybody, right? No, that’s not right. Psalm 15 clearly indicates that you are expected to give your word to people and to keep your word when you give it, right? It anticipates covenant making as an essential part of who you are. And then it says in light of that, keep your covenants. Right? Okay.

So that’s who we are. Now, God is identified here as the God who keeps covenant. Let me just read a few other verses where this same truth is said.

Genesis 17:9. God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you throughout the generations.” So that’s God telling us to keep his covenant, and it’s to keep your covenant throughout the generations. It’s a perpetual obligation being placed upon the future generations of those that would come from Abraham. So there, God tells us to keep our covenant.

Deuteronomy 7:9. “Therefore, know that the Lord your God, he is God. Who is this God? The faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love him and keep his commandments.” Right? That’s Deuteronomy 7. And of course that same similar sort of wording is found in the Ten Commandments itself, which are ten, not nine. You know, one of the things that Nehemiah’s generation said was, “We’re not doing too good with the Lord’s day, the Sabbath, in their time. Let’s make a covenant to do something about that. And that’s what we did in our covenant, too. We did the same thing because they knew there were ten commandments, not nine.

I think it is just a weird thing that the church in America, the American Baptist culture, wants to fight like crazy to put up the Ten Commandments and then they don’t want to do one of those commandments. What is it? Some sort of historical artifact we’re fighting over apparently. I don’t know. Well, the point is here that God is a God who keeps covenant to generations, right? These covenants have perpetuity. Without every individual deciding, getting to some sort of place, being united to the body of Christ in membership—is he now supposed to, when he turns adult age, decide whether he wants to be part of the body of Christ or not? What is that? Do we want them outside of Christ? Outside of membership in the church? I don’t think so.

So, God is the one who keeps covenant and he keeps it for generations.

First Kings 8—and he said, “Lord God of Israel, there is no God in heaven above or on earth like you, you who keep your covenant and mercy with your servants who walk before you with all their hearts.” So the address to God is again that God is the God who keeps covenant. Means he makes and keeps them, but he keeps covenant.

Second Kings 23—then the king commanded all the people saying, “Keep the Passover to the Lord your God that is written in the book of the covenant.” So he’s telling them there to keep covenant as it was written in the book of the covenant that far preceded whatever they were doing.

Second Chronicles 6:14. And he said, “Lord God of Israel, there is no God in heaven or on earth like you who keeps your covenant and mercy with your servants who walk before you with all your hearts.”

I mean, I could go on, but the scriptures—one of the central identifications, who is God? Why are we here? Who are we worshiping? How does he transform us to be like him? What are his communicable attributes? Who is he? Well, over and over again. One of the central aspects of who God is in the scriptures: he’s the God that makes and keeps covenants. And how are we to be his image bearers? Swear to your own hurt, make and keep covenants. It’s that simple. So covenant making is essential to the character of God. And it’s essential to the identification of who God’s people are supposed to be.

So God is this God who keeps covenant, and we in response to that are to keep covenant as well.

Let me read one more text before we talk about marriage. Hebrews 10:29. This is on your handouts. I had to look it up again after I made this handout a week or so ago. I had to look it up again last night. Why did I put that on there? Do you know what it is? Do you know why I put it on there? Listen.

“Of how much worse punishment do you suppose will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing and insulted the Spirit of grace?”

I thought, “Why did I put that in my outline?” I mean, great text. Why did I? Well, you know what Hebrews is doing is it’s comparing two things going on, right? It’s comparing Sinai and Zion. And he says, “Hey, you don’t come to Sinai. You now come to Zion in the new covenant. But don’t think it’s an easy place to be.” And so he says, you know, God is really—if you think he got upset because you trampled that blood of the covenant underfoot at Sinai, think how much worse it’s going to be when you trample the blood of Jesus Christ underfoot.

Now, my point is that there’s a relationship. You know, why does it say “the blood of the covenant” here? What is that all about? Why is it saying that? Because what the scriptures say, and we’ll turn to a few references here in a couple of minutes, God married his people at Sinai. That’s what’s going on in Exodus 19-24. We’ll see some evidence for that. But I think that’s what’s happening. And the way that covenant was entered into, part of one of the ways it was entered into, was the sprinkling of blood, okay, at Sinai.

And so the blood was sprinkled. The people entered into covenant with God. They said, “Yes, you’re our master. You’re our husband. You’re our God. We’ll do what you want us to do.” And so they ended up doing that. Right? So that’s a marriage covenant that God entered into with his people. And what he’s telling us, this side of the cross now, that we go to Zion to worship, not Sinai, right? He’s comparing the blood of the covenant—that blood of the covenant at Sinai was a picture of the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross for us.

So the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross for us is tied to the taking of covenant. That’s the point I’m trying to make here. Hebrews 10:29 makes a simple connection which, because we don’t know our Bibles that well or because we’re part of the American Baptist culture and we think New Testament, we don’t always think Old Testament antecedents to these verses. But we don’t put it together. But if we think about it, “blood of the covenant”—got a couple of mountains involved. Oh yeah. Yeah. He’s talking about that covenant thing back in Exodus 19 through 24. And he’s making a connection between those two events. And so we’re in covenant with God is the point. It’s called the new covenant. Jesus, you know, says, “This is the new covenant in his what? In his blood.” Right? It ties it back there again to our identification of who we are as the descendants of those and participators in those who are involved in covenant with God.

Now covenant is the nature of marriage itself. And I’m not going to spend much time here, but very quickly—you know, we in fact let’s not spend any time on it, but I’ll say a couple of things here. One, you’ve seen these verses before when I preached on marriage last year. There are two sermons online that talk about marriage as a covenant. And this is, you know, sort of basic stuff with the church throughout the ages, but for us, it’s kind of, you know, it’s not always obvious to us. So, I’ve given you the scripture references to demonstrate to you that I’m not just making it up. Marriage is absolutely a covenant in God’s sight that people enter into.

And so, the importance of that, the significance of that for those of you that are married is that as you celebrate Valentine’s Day, you know what you were doing hopefully was the fulfilling of keeping your word to your husband or to your wife. You know, marriage isn’t supposed to be a day like it is today with most couples about how much I love you today. That’s not the point of marriage. The point of marriage is the covenant is to promise “I’m going to love you tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next year and the next year and the next decade.” It’s a promise of future love. And it creates a mature love, not just a romantic, moment-to-moment love. Yeah, you want that going on, but it moves that into an ethical kind of love for another person that you make a lifelong commitment to.

So important, right? So marriage being a covenant isn’t just a throwaway line here. It’s to say that again, here with the loss of the idea of covenant in the broader evangelical church for the last century, we have lost the idea of marriage and it doesn’t make sense anymore and we don’t know how to defend it. We don’t know how to talk about it with people that cohabitate or the people that want to have a same-sex person or multiple people or whatever it is. We don’t know how to talk about it anymore because we still see marriage as primarily a romantic deal as opposed to a covenantal deal. Okay? So that’s why it’s on here. It’s another area of loss. It’s another area of loss of the covenant.

And so there are verses there. I hope you look them up at some point. But remember last year we talked about an article that Tim Keller cites in his book on marriage by a guy named C.S. Lewis—I think—and it’s online you can look it up. It’s called “The Power of Promising.” And the significance of promising—covenant making, we would say—the power of covenant making, and he specifically talks about it in terms of marriage but also in terms of who we are as people. Covenant making takes us beyond the exigencies of the moment and it makes our identity not tied to how we feel or how things are going today but rather to a series of commitments we’ve entered into. Covenants that define who we are. We are what we’ve promised to be in the future. Very significant point. So, his article is online. I would encourage you to read it. But hopefully in your marriages you know you understand that the basis for a godly marriage is covenant, is covenant.

And this is because marriage is this emblem of what God does with his people, right?

And so the next part of the outline is about that. It’s how God marries his people at Sinai. Now I know that, you know, it’s interesting. You don’t—it’s a little difficult if you want to look this up quickly on the internet to see Sinai being a marriage ceremony. But you know, all you got to do—in fact, if you search for it, depending on your search terms, what you’ll probably come up with, at least pretty early on, is a hit to RCC Sunday school curriculum. I don’t remember Doug. Is Doug here? Is he downstairs? I don’t remember who wrote it. I think maybe Doug did. Whoever wrote it did a good job. And it talks about, you know, there’s a section in that Sunday school curriculum about Sinai and how God wed his people.

Here’s a text: Jeremiah 31:32. And those of you—your Bible’s pretty good. You know that follows Jeremiah 31:31. And that’s about and you know that 31:31 is about the new covenant—the covenant that I’ll make with them in the future days. And you know, I’ll take out the heart of stone, the Ten Commandments, and I’ll give you the heart of flesh, the person of Jesus.

Verse 32 says, “Not according to the covenant I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord.”

So what he’s saying here in Jeremiah, he’s saying, “Well, you know, I made that covenant with you and of course that was a marriage covenant and I became your husband. You know that, right?” And it’s like they’re supposed to know that. We’re supposed to know that. It’s not supposed to be difficult for us to see that our relationship is—and so see again here. So we’re New Testament. We read about, you know, the church is the bride of Christ, and oh, that’s nice, a nice analogy for marriage, and we don’t see the Old Testament antecedents for all of this. And then it’s tied to covenant again, the idea of covenant.

And when the people in Nehemiah retake covenant, they’re redoing, they’re reenacting what had begun when God first wed them. It’s like taking their vows again. Right? People do that sometimes on Valentine’s Day. They redo their vows. Well, that’s kind of what they’re doing. And involved in Nehemiah is a confession of sin and then some specific elements that they vow to do, because these are things they fell short on. So, it’s sort of like—it’s sort of like if you—well, if you would have this last week, but if you decide at some point to retake your marriage covenant, your vows themselves, I would recommend doing it like Nehemiah. In other words, doing it—include not just your original vows, but include some sort of statement of confession to each other about how you’ve fallen short on your vows and some sort of specific ways that you want to do better. Right?

So, I guess I sort of did that. I gave my wife a—well, I told some of you I got a tattoo for Valentine’s Day. Okay, pastor. What? Yeah, it’s I didn’t want everybody to—no, I didn’t actually put one on my body, but I bought a bear, a Vermont teddy bear for my wife and it’s got a little tattoo and you can put a person’s name on it. So, I gave her this bear that says “Chrissy” on it. And you know, Song of Songs, that’s what it talks about, right? “I’ll engrave you on my arm or whatever it is.” It’s a promise of future love and it kind of shows that kind of thing.

And in a way, for me—and I didn’t do a good job of this, so Christine will tell you I’m lying up here, but I’m not. In my own mind, which would have been good to articulate to her. So, I sent with the bear, it’s a “Right to Bear Hugs” bear. So, I sent with the bear a note saying, “When you want a hug, give me this bear, right? And then I’ll give you a hug.” And that’s a way for me to say, “I haven’t been huggy enough with my wife. I haven’t been responsive enough to her and I want to do better.”

Well, when you retake vows, that’s kind of the thing here. And in Nehemiah, what did they talk about? Well, they said number one, they said our marriages, right? We’re not going to marry the people of the land. That wasn’t a racial statement or an ethnic statement. That was a religious statement. They said, you know, we’ve let our kids intermarry with foreigners who don’t believe in Yahweh. We’re not going to do that anymore. And this is a big problem earlier in Nehemiah and Ezra about divorces and what do we do now? They’re married to pagans, blah blah. And so they explicitly say, you know, why is that in there? Well, because it was a problem they were having.

Plus, covenant taking is tied to marriage vows. Back in Exodus 19, and the retaking of it. And so marriage is one of the significant things. So what do we have in our church covenant? You know, on behalf of your posterity, you agree not to have them, not to, you know, give them in marriage to people outside of the faith. It’s in our covenant. Why? Because in our day and age, that’s a huge problem, right? The church has not held to this position for the last hundred years. Well, when you’re twenty or twenty-one or eighteen or maybe it’s fifteen today, I don’t know. Can’t keep up. But whatever it is. Well, then you can just go off marry whoever you want and it’s ridiculous for you to think I got anything to do with that or that the faith does, right?

So, we said this is a contemporary problem to us. It was a contemporary problem in Nehemiah chapter 10. And because of that, they said we’re not going to do that. We’re going to make a covenant here. Now, they made a covenant as a group of people, right? So, if one of them starts to not do what the covenant said, they’re going to get yelled at, and they’re particularly going to get yelled at or gently talked to—kinder, nicer, gentler, you know—they’re particularly talked to because they said it was because of these sins that we’re the slaves in this country now. Yeah, we’re back, but man, we’re not in charge. We’re the tail, not the head, right? That’s not what God wants because God wants his representatives to, you know, produce the flow and overview and the ethos of a culture.

So, not only is it just a violation of the covenant, it’s a violation of the covenant that will bring God’s judgment upon us and keep us in servitude. Okay? So that’s what they did.

So, when you retake covenant, this is—so, again, the context here, in case you’ve lost it, Nehemiah is kind of like redoing the vows from Exodus 19. Jeremiah 31:32 says that in Exodus at Sinai, God became their husband. It’s what it refers to. And then we have a lot of other verses—I think on your outline where God says he’s their husband and he actually divorces them at one point in time. He says they’re his wife. And this happened at Sinai.

And so covenant, this covenant that was made, the blood of the covenant at Sinai, you know, brought them into this marriage relationship with God. And in Nehemiah, they recognized they’ve been kind of a faithless wife. And so God has brought judgments. And so when this church started thirty years ago, we said, “Well, you know, the church has been kind of faithless. God’s bringing judgments and we need to retake covenant and we need to look at those same things that they talked about in Nehemiah. We want to rebuild the walls. We want to rebuild the culture. We’re reconstructionists. We want to build again the culture around us. We want God to be honored in the context of every part of our lives. We want to rebuild.

And if we look at a time in history when God’s people did that, it was Nehemiah. And they did it in part by retaking, rethinking their idea of who they are in terms of covenants. They took them seriously and they entered into them again. And so thirty years ago, we did that. Okay, that’s what we were doing. And when you redo it, you look at specific areas.

What else did they talk about? Well, they talked about the Sabbath. And they talked specifically about buying and selling. Now, is there a relationship between that and our church covenant? Duh. Right. “Oh, that’s where you guys got that goofy idea. You know, good people, lots of good people disagree with us on that. That’s okay. We didn’t establish our covenant and say this is what everybody else has to be like. We said as best as we know this is the gift that God has given to us that we don’t want our children to forget so that Chigur, antichrist with no music, takes over our culture.

As best as we understand that, this is it and we want to continue to have conversations about it. But the point is they said their time, okay—their life, their families, were important. Their time is important and a cycle of time that establishes the priority of King Jesus is important to us.

And then the third thing they said was the tithe is important, right? The tithe is support of Levitical ministries. If you look at the times of reconstruction in the Old Testament—Nehemiah, Hezekiah, whoever—there are times when the covenant takes place and as a result tithing happens again so that Levites can stop working second, third, fourth jobs and get back to the work of ministering in the church through prayer and worship and studying the scriptures and teaching them. And they did that here in what I just read from Nehemiah, the tithe.

And then finally, they’re not going to neglect the house of God. Okay? So, they got, you know, an allotment. And what it means to us today, I don’t know, but I can talk about that, but that’s not the point of today’s sermon. But the point of the sermon is that one of the critical fourth elements of what they saw as necessary to build a godly culture was to not forsake the house of God. Okay. And so we have the same thing and we have this repeated in Hebrews, right? “Don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves together.” And so that’s in our church covenant.

We got marriage, we got tithe, we’ve got the Lord’s day, we’ve got, you know, the significance of not buying and selling, ordering our time and our culture around that. All from the book of Nehemiah. Now, we could have it wrong. You know, let’s talk. Give me push back. Give the elders push back if you will. But I want you to understand, you know, what we saw as we began to build this church and the vision I’m trying to recast—I guess—you know, the vision that we had thirty years ago. And you know, if we need to make adjustments, great. But you know the last thing I want to see is a series of Tommy Lee Joneses growing up in this church. Not bad people, but kind of lost the gift somewhere along the line. They don’t see the difference between a, you know, kind of a Baptist approach to things and a covenantal approach. They don’t know what covenant theology means. They don’t know the significance of covenants. And they kind of lose the gift.

Not because they’re bad people. Tommy Lee Jones was a good guy in the movie. And he quits the field. He quits the field at the end of that because he lost the gift.

So this is a recasting of the vision. And you teenagers, you younger than teenagers, you twenty-somethings, don’t tell me you don’t understand the sermon. Don’t want to hear it unless you’re actually going to tell me and say, “What did it mean, pastor?” We can have that conversation, right? We can have that conversation, but don’t make me hear it third-hand, please.

I’m the only—this is the only church I know of that gives you the opportunity to say, “I didn’t understand a word you said today, pastor,” in the Q&A time. Now, I know it’s embarrassing. We can think of other venues, you know, for teens to do that kind of stuff, but I’m saying this not to say you got to sit here for another half hour after a two-hour service, but I’m saying it to tell you what our heart is here. Our heart is if we haven’t communicated clearly, we want you to ask us questions. If you don’t know what this means in terms of your life, let’s talk about it and your parents should know, right? You can at least talk to them about it.

So, so this is what we’re trying to do is to sort of recast the vision and the relationship of covenant taking to marriage.

I have other scriptures. I’m not going to read them right now, but if you look up those scriptures under Roman numeral II on your handout, you’ll see the references again to God having wed his people. And all of a sudden, hopefully for you, all of a sudden, we come to the marriage supper of the Lamb. This looks a little different. This looks like it didn’t start two thousand years ago. It started three or four thousand years ago, right? This has roots and the roots inform what we’re doing today. Okay? And hopefully you’re making those connections.

Third, so church membership. You know, so we need to give an apologetic now for church membership. What I just gave you all was an apologetic for church membership. But let me give you some other points along the way.

Hebrews 13. Now in Hebrews, chapter 13 is in the fifth section of the book where it talks about how you live heavenly reality in an earthly state. Okay. So by 13, the doctrinal stuff has come. It’s been established. The centrality of Christ in the middle of the book, and now it’s saying how you live this out. Very practical stuff.

And Hebrews 13:7-17 are a complete section. It’s got bookends to it. Right now listen what it says:

“Remember those who rule over you who have spoken the word of God to you whose faith follow.”

Okay. So that’s verse 7. And then down in 17 of Hebrews 13, we read something that sounds the same:

“Obey those who rule over you and be submissive for they watch out for your souls and those who as those who must give account. Let them do so with joy and not with grief for that would be unprofitable for you, right?”

For you. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means first of all that there’s a tremendous significance to membership in a local church with known rulers in terms of how we live out a heavenly life in our earthly walk. First of all, it says that because it’s got a whole section here with bookends about your relationship to those who rule over you.

And then, and maybe the first one’s dealing with the rulers in the past and maybe the last one’s rulers in the future. Not sure. It doesn’t matter all that much. But here’s the question: Who are you supposed to follow? Whose faith are you supposed to follow? Whose rule are you supposed to submit to? Do you know?

Well, you know, if you’re going to this church today and that church tomorrow and this church some other time and you’re going to a church where they don’t know who you are, they wouldn’t—they could if I call up the pastor of that church, they won’t know your name. They have no idea. I guess it’s a little—to me it seems a little obvious that you’re going to have a hard time following and submitting to their rule and they’re going to have a hard time knowing who they’re going to be held accountable to God for.

Look, I’m a pastor. This verse means a ton to me. I’m held accountable to God for some of you. Which ones? I better know. If I’m accountable for everybody, I’m accountable for nobody. I can’t be accountable for everybody. But I can be accountable for a select group of people who are identified by membership. And how do we do membership? We do it by means of covenant. That’s what I’ve been trying to say for the last forty-five minutes. That’s who they are and I know who I’m supposed to then watch over and guard.

Now, the New Testament has various references like this. They’re on your handout, right? But it’s kind of an obvious thing once you start to point it out, right? I mean, if you’re going to have people you’re accountable for, you got to know who they are. And if you’re going to be, if you have a calling to submit to particular people, particular rulers, you have to know who your rulers are. It has to be delineated. It can’t be liquid. These verses cannot be followed if it’s liquid.

Now, there’s other verses as well.

First Peter 5:2. “Shepherd the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by compulsion, but willing. Not for dishonest gain, but eagerly.”

So again, I’ve got an obligation. Chris W. and Doug H. have obligations to shepherd a particular flock. And notice that it’s a flock. Not all the individuals. I mean, you do it individually, but it’s also to be seen as a flock. There’s a particular flock here, right? There’s a flock at RCC. And those are the ones that were called to shepherd. Those are the ones that God’s going to hold us accountable for.

And without church membership, we’ve got no way to know who those people are week to week. And when the youth of this church go out and go to other churches, who are they accountable to? Who’s pastoring them or overseeing them? See, we don’t know.

Well, I’m not going to go through all these verses because I want to at least talk very briefly about our membership document that’s on page two of what you have before you. We’ll look at this briefly and then we’re done.

And you know, I’ve heard over the years, “It’s confusing. We don’t understand who are members, who are not members.” Well, this is from our constitution. This is what we believe. This is our practice. Now, we’re revising it. And if you want to suggest changes, that’s great. We’re more than willing to hear a conversation about it. In fact, we’re going to demand conversation as soon as we finish our current draft. We’re revising a ton of this ourselves. So, we’re not necessarily happy with all of it, but right now this is how it works.

A. Membership in RCC is defined in the constitution in Section III, part A, and it says when people become members here, those that are with them become members as well. It says any of those older family members under the covenantal household—spouse and/or children living at home—who, in the determination of the elders, lack a credible profession, they’re not brought into membership. But the children of people that covenant into membership here are held to be part of the covenant. Why do we do that? Because in Nehemiah and in Exodus 19 and in every other retaking of the covenant that God does with his people, it has obligations not just for them, but for their kids as well.

Book of Acts, right? About three thousand people are added to the rolls. They’re added to a list. Their names are put down. They could be counted. And right before it says that, it says, “For the promises unto you and your children.” Right? So, the children are seen as part of the members of the church.

We repeat this nearly every baptism that we do here. And so membership is defined here. And then look at the very end, point number three. I might have it in bold italics. “Children born to or adopted by member parents will automatically be enrolled as members.” That’s pretty clear. I think you’re a member here. Your children will be enrolled as members soon as they’re born, baptized, whatever it is. Okay. So that’s what it says.

Now if we drop down to the constitution in terms of termination of membership, how do you get out of that obligation? Well, you know, it says that they can be removed by transfer of letter. So, you’re going to go to Mars Hill. We’ll transfer you to that church’s membership. No problem. Or B, a letter of dismissal. Mars Hill won’t take me as a member yet. Their membership class is full. It’s going to be a year. Okay, that’s okay. We’ll dismiss you to their pastoral care if that’s where you’re going to be going to church from now on. And we’ll contact the pastor. We’ll say, “Hey, we’re going to send them over for your pastoral care or maybe they don’t accept a transfer from us. That’s fine. No problem. We’ll dismiss you to those particular guys. If it’s a trinitarian church, you’re not going to get any grief from us. Okay. So, that’s another way to do it. Dismissal.

Three. We can’t find a guy, right? Alex P. is a member here. Haven’t seen him for a year and a half. He’s in Michigan. Can’t really get in touch with them anymore. We’re probably going to erase them from the roll. So, that’s a third option if we just don’t know where somebody is.

Four. Members shall be removed at their death. Well, that’s—some people say, “Ah, the only way out of membership is death.” Well, it is one way out. But really, you don’t. That’s actually a transfer, too. We’ll meet you in heaven on that one.

So, so those are what it is. And now, you know, I hope you see the value of this. The value is that we take our obligations here quite seriously. And you teens, we care for you. We care enough to not let you just go drifting off into the ether, bouncing from church to church without following up and telling you at some point, “Hey, you know, if you’re going to be going to another church, that’s great. But those are the leaders you need to follow. Those are the rulers you need to submit to. And those rulers need to know you’re part of the flock that they’re going to be held accountable to God for. We need to do that. Okay?”

You know, it’s interesting that Hebrews section, those two bookends, if you look at it later today, that section in Hebrews 13:7-17—Jesus is at the center. There are two different centers in that text, but Jesus the same yesterday, today, and forever. And then Jesus outside of the gate. Jesus is represented to you by the pastors of the church. He’s the great pastor. We’re the undershepherds, right? And so Jesus is going to care for you.

And if you’re going from one particular congregation to another congregation, we need to make note of that somehow. We need to let that pastor know he’s accountable for you now. We’re not anymore. And you need to know those are the elders I need to submit to. And those are the people—that’s the church that are going to hold me accountable to keep covenant with God. Okay, that’s what this text is meant to reveal to us today. The significance of covenants and the significance of them in terms of our life itself.

Now hopefully that’s kind of recast the vision a bit of how we got to where we are. Our desire that the children of our church get the gift. We think essential to the gift that we’re trying to pass on is a sense that we want the church yes to be a hospital, but we also see the church as an armory.

What does it say in Psalm 78? “The children of Ephraim being armed turned back in the day of battle. They did not keep the covenant of God nor his law and they forgot his works.”

Children, we have armed you with a powerful heritage here. Here we’ve given you a great gift and if you just sort of slide into your life without kind of thinking about that gift, and if us as parents don’t do a good job of helping you understand the gift, the significance that we place upon covenants as image bearers of God, upon reformation based upon covenantal arrangements, rebuilding our culture covenant by covenant and in a way that’s going to be honoring and pleasing to God—if we fail to give you that gift or if you don’t understand it, ask away.

And parents, ask your children: Do they understand the gift? Do they understand the significance of covenants in the life of a church and particularly the centrality of covenants in our very salvation and as a result the centrality in the name of our church as well?

May the Lord God bless the next generation. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for today. Thank you for the people in the time of Nehemiah. Thank you for the model that they serve to us. I pray, Father, that we have applied it correctly and help us to see any errors of application that we might have. Thank you, Father, for push back we receive from people. It matures us and help us, in the context of that, to continue to mature as a church, to continue to be a reformed church continually reforming.

Bless us, Lord God, as we seek to arm our children with the covenant and your law. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.