What is the difference between a covenant and a contract?

It is right that we should first of all think about the establishment of the old covenant. So it is called in the epistle to the Hebrews where the writer says, quoting from Jeremiah, chapter 31, which we have read, "In that He says, A new covenant, He has made the first old. Now that which decays and waxes old is ready to vanish away" Hebrews 8:13. We shall learn best by contrasting the details of the new covenant with the details of the old covenant. I think we get help as to the idea of a covenant by thinking of the modern word "contract". First of all in the Old Testament the idea of a covenant is primarily the idea of a contract, in which there are two parties who put their seal to an agreement and understanding. In the later Scriptures there is another idea attached to the word covenant, and that is the idea of the last will and covenant, or testament. There is only one party to the last will and testament; he sets his seal to what is his will, and that is a real picture of the passage from the first covenant (which has now become old and is ready to vanish away) to the new covenant in which there is life and blessing and righteousness in a risen Christ.

The law of contract is one of the most ancient kinds of law, and in the primitive world of which the book of Exodus speaks, there was a very firmly established custom of making a contract. The Hebrew word to make a covenant is, straightforwardly, to cut a covenant. The kind of ritual by which a covenant, any covenant at all between men (or as in this case between God and man), was made, involved taking an animal and cutting it in two. The parties to the contract then passed between the pieces, and thus the covenant was sealed with blood. The covenant was cut and established. This is exactly what happened in the 15th chapter of Genesis. In that chapter in which there occurs the familiar passage, "He (Abram) believed in the LORD; and He counted it to him for righteousness", we read the mysterious story of how Abram took, at the command of God, beasts and birds and cut them in pieces. Then until the going down of the sun he guarded them and drove away the evil birds of the air, and when the sun went down a burning lamp passed between the pieces. There was only one individual Who passed between those pieces; it was God making a covenant in which He unconditionally promised His blessing to Abram, and the contract made was therefore, long before, on the pattern of the NEW covenant. We read in the 34th chapter of Jeremiah almost the exact words which describe this ritual, but applied this time to the OLD covenant. It says that all the children of Israel "passed between the parts thereof" and by this we understand that something like what I have referred to must have taken place in the 24th chapter of Exodus. The first covenant was cut and you will remember that Moses speaks of the book of the covenant, and the blood of the covenant, and in a later chapter he refers to the tables of the covenant. There was the book of the covenant and there was the blood of the covenant, and the blood of those pieces established and sealed the covenant.

Then in answer to the reading of the book of the covenant the people replied. "All that the LORD has said will we do". On God's side there was the promise of blessing, of entrance into the promised land, that they should be His people. On their side of the contract was, "All that the LORD has said will we do". And the terms of that contract were written in ink in a book, and they were also written with the finger of God in the tables of stone. But, alas, we read in Jeremiah 31:32, "Which My covenant they brake". That covenant immediately broke down, for at the very moment that Moses brought it down from the mountain they were found breaking its commands and worshipping a false god. In other words, so long as that covenant was a covenant in which God made promises which were conditional upon His people's obedience, then it must certainly break down. How sad would be our condition today, how little would we be able to sing with certainty and assurance and speak of our faith as soundly established, if all depended upon our fulfilling the contract and having to say. "All that the LORD has said we will do". It broke down immediately because the people could not fulfil their part of the contract. And yet God allowed this thing to work out during all the testing period of the Old Testament. I suppose it is true to say that the old covenant was never entered upon in its purity; it immediately broke down. Immediately there began to be fresh promises of the glorious future in which God would give His blessing upon a new ground altogether, and that is the ground of unconditional promise.

This alludes to Romans 8:4. The believer walking in the Spirit fulfils those things the law righteously required of man. This is spoken of as “a covenant,” and these righteous requirements are alluded to as “the obligations of the contract entered into.” This far-fetched idea is derived from an attempt to make the giving of the law in Exodus a type of the believer taking up certain obligations before God as a fruit of being redeemed; and of this “type” Romans 8:4 is supposed to be the “anti- type.” This once accepted, you advance to the transference of the word “covenant” from the “type” to the “antitype;” you transmute the word “covenant” into a “contract,” and further you proceed to contemplate “covenant affections” and “family affections,” and to differentiate between them; and in result instead of a pyramid of truth broad-based on the Scriptures of Truth, you have a pyramid of fancy, precariously poised upon a very slender apex. But not only have you thus travelled into regions of fanciful and extravagant ideas, but of very serious and fundamental error. What is this contract as to which the New Testament is silent? A covenant involves two parties, as Galatians 3 tells us. A contract involves penalties for its breach. 2 Corinthians 3:6-18 sweeps away all these unsteady theories. Obligations there are, resting upon the believer as the result of grace bestowed, yet even so they do not stand upon a legal or covenant basis. Christianity is not a system of obligation ending in death and condemnation, but the positive ministration of righteousness and of the Spirit.

And as to His "covenant," it was one of unmingled grace. It proposed no condition — it made no demands — it put no yoke on the neck — no burden on the shoulder. When "the God of glory appeared to Abraham," in Ur of the Chaldees, He certainly did not address him in such words as, "thou shalt do this," and "thou shalt not do that." Ah! no; such language was not according to the heart of God. It suits Him far better to place "a fair mitre" upon a sinner's head, than to "put a yoke upon his neck." His word to Abraham was, "I WILL GIVE." The land of Canaan was not to be purchased by man's doings, but to be given by God's grace. Thus it stood; and, in the opening of the book of Exodus, we see God coming down in grace to make good His promise to Abraham's seed. The condition in which He found that seed made no difference, inasmuch as the blood of the lamb furnished Him with a perfectly righteous ground on which to make good His promise. He evidently had not promised the land of Canaan to Abraham's seed on the ground of ought that He foresaw in them, for this would have totally destroyed the real nature of a promise. It would have made it a compact and not a promise; "but God gave it to Abraham by promise," and not by compact. (Read Gal. 3)

A covenant in the scriptural sense of the term does not always mean an agreement between two parties; it may be that, or it may not. In Genesis 15 we get an account of a covenant made with Abram, to which there was only one party. It was of the nature of a promise made by God to Abram. A mediator always supposes two parties, but a covenant does not. I speak of the use of these terms in scripture. A covenant is a disposition on the part of God. It is well to get out of the mind the idea of an agreement between two parties. In a sense there were two parties to the old covenant given at Sinai. There, though the terms were proposed by God, I think Israel might not have accepted them. They might have thrown themselves upon the grace and mercy of God in the acknowledgment of their own rebellious nature, and I am sure the blessed God would have gone on with them upon the ground on which He had already intervened for them when they were slaves to Pharaoh; and the law never would have been presented to them as the demand of God; but instead of owning the evil disposition of their natural hearts, and fearing to put themselves under obligation to merit blessing by the fulfilment of their responsibilities, they confidently say, "All that Jehovah has said will we do and be obedient."

A covenant is an agreement, pact or contract made between two parties in order to formally bind them to a commitment made at a particular time. In the affairs of men, some persons—familiar as they are with human nature—are predisposed to putting every possible transaction on a formal contractual basis in order to ensure subsequent legal recourse should a breach of the agreement occur. Others have a preference to undertake matters on the basis of a “gentlemen's agreement”—relying rather on the good will of the parties involved, often with disastrous consequences.

Covenant in no way implies two parties, but the contrary, i.e., in divine things; a mediator does, but there is an object of the covenant, assurance of blessing, and the circumstances of this object may require the interposition of a mediator, righteously to obtain for, qualify, and sustain them. Christ is properly the object of the Abrahamic covenant, but then, for the Church to come in, being guilty, there must be a mediator with God for that; they are brought into the covenant through a mediator, but the covenant is not made with, or properly for them.

5 A covenant is a disposition of God, secured by His binding or obliging Himself; this - man being a sinner - must be by the meritorious death of the Covenanter. In the case of a man's covenant, it seems to me it was conventionally brought to the same point - the authority of God being interposed, and the covenanter bound in this by the same sanction, quod nota.

A covenant does not always suppose two parties. In Galatians it is only one. A covenant means any term on which God takes me into relation to Himself. The argument in Galatians is: a mediator is not of one; but God is one. Now the law was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator, and if you have a mediator, you must have two parties. But here you have only one. So now all depends on the sovereignty of God only, and therefore it is infallible.

But now we come to the question of the old and new covenants: there is one thing always implied in the covenant of the law, and that was a condition. A covenant is an agreement between two parties upon certain conditions being fulfilled. A man promises to do certain things if the other person will fulfil his engagements. That is the covenant of the law. God promises to bless His people if they on their part will obey the law. Look, for instance, at this eleventh chapter of Jeremiah. I would suggest that you read it at your leisure. In the 2nd verse, "Hear ye the words of this covenant, and speak unto the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem" etc., (vers. 1-4); you will find throughout the entire chapter that it is a reminder of the first covenant, of God's promises to Israel in connection with it, and of their promises to fulfil His commandments. I need hardly refer you to the engagement which Israel entered into at Sinai, and how Moses took the blood of that covenant and sprinkled it upon the book where the laws were written, and upon the people, and upon everything, and called God and man to witness that the covenant had been sealed by blood; and we need look onward but a few steps in Israel's history, to the apostasy of the golden calf, to see how they broke the first conditions of blessing under that covenant.

It could hardly be said that the old covenant of law was established upon promises at all, though there were certain promises connected with it. It was established rather upon a bargain, in which Israel undertook in all things to obey, and God guaranteed certain blessings conditional upon their obedience. The bargain was hardly concluded before it was broken by Israel making the golden calf. The fact that the new covenant is established upon promises, that those promises are God's, and that they are better than anything proposed under the law, at once differentiates it sharply from the old. To gain some idea of these better promises you must read the latter part of our chapter, which is quoted from the passage in Jeremiah 31 — where the new covenant itself is promised — verses 31 to 34. God's "I will," is the characteristic feature of it. All is a question of what God is going to do, and of what consequently Israel is going to be and have.

To these, then, let us turn. Can anything be plainer than their reference to a will in order to illustrate the death of our Lord? "For where a testament is, there must of necessity be the death of the testator." This is sufficiently evident. Were "covenant" said it would not even be true. Where men make a covenant, is it in the least necessary that either of the contracting parties should die? Jacob and Laban made a covenant between them; but did it at all demand, in order to its validity, that Jacob or Laban should die? If either had died, there would rather have been an end of it so far. But when he who makes a testament dies, then only can the children, or others to whom he has devised his property, receive the benefit by virtue of the will. "Where a testament (or will) is, there must of necessity be the death of the testator, for a testament is of force after men are dead." In wills only, and not in covenants, is such a necessity universally found. A man makes a will, but it does not come into force so long as he lives — only when he dies. On this hinges the apostolic illustration, which is as apt as it is undeniably evident. The effect of a will is only after the death of the testator. Perhaps something may be contingent upon the death of another; as a man leaves to his children upon the death of his wife. But in any case death must intervene, if any are immediately concerned in the property. It is only after one or more are dead that the living heirs inherit. "Otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth." Nothing can be more telling or simple. In the case of a covenant, is there anything of the kind? A covenant comes into force while people are alive. Take Jacob and Laban, where neither was called to die. Take an earlier covenant, where God makes one between Himself and the earth, as revealed to Noah.

I am aware that some try to slip in the death of sacrifices here; but the word means not a covenanting victim, but a "testator"; and all efforts are vain to upset or change the idea. It is the death of the person who made the testament. It is not necessary to insist on more than the principle generally, but if the application be pressed personally, how does this apply to the Lord? Very exactly indeed; for the Lord became a man in order that He might die, to give us (a vast deal more, but also) an everlasting inheritance. He that had spoken at Sinai is the selfsame One that came to die. The figure, therefore, of a testator applies in all its force. He was pleased thus to die, although One who in His divine nature could not die. He therefore deigned, in the infiniteness of His grace, to partake of blood and flesh that He might die. Therefore, nothing can be simpler, nothing more certain, than His death, in virtue of which we inherit the richest blessing evermore.