As discussed previously, God has made a unilateral covenant with his people. He alone has made a promise, and he alone will be the promise keeper. And, as Duguid explains, he alone has the authority to set the terms of the covenant.
What does it mean when we say our relationship with God is based on a covenant? In the first place, it means that we cannot set the terms of our relationship with God. the terms of the covenant are not negotiable.
Imagine the weaker king in an ancient covenant saying to the great king, “Fine. Let’s do a deal here, but I want to be in charge in this relationship. I want to say what you can do and what you can be like—and don’t come making demands of me.” It’s absurd, isn’t it? He would have found his head on a pole and his limbs distributed to the four corners of the empire before you could say, “Assyria rules, okay!” Yet many people think that they can strike their own bargains with God. They say, “I like to think of God as . . .”—as if they can decide what God will be like. They want to pick and choose what they will believe and what they will do—and they certainly don’t want a God who makes too many demands on them. “My God isn’t like that,” they will tell you. In other words, they don’t want a God who is God.
The real question, however, is not what you would like God to be like God to be like, but what he is really like. And he has revealed himself as the God who has made a covenant with his people. When the great king comes and offers to establish a covenant with you, you really have only two choices: you can accept the covenant relationship on his terms and receive its benefits, or you can refuse it and face the consequences.
Many people approach religion as if they were interviewing God for a job, the position of “personal deity in my life.” “I want to find a philosophy that works for me,” they say. But if God is really who he claims to be, Almighty God, then that is what he is, whether the idea “works for you” or not. You can interview idols and ideologies, but the God who created the universe offers you only two choices: surrender on his terms of face the consequences.—Iain Duguid, Living in the Gap Between Promise and Reality: The Gospel According to Abraham (P&R, 1999), 75.
I believe that most of the controversial doctrines of Scripture are disputed only because men and women want some control over whom and how they will worship. They hear a doctrine that challenges autonomy, and reason thusly: if a, then b; b is unacceptable, therefore a must be false. But God has no interest in conforming to our opinion of what is right and acceptable. He is Lord; we are not. Our opinions must conform to the truth that is, the truth that our Sovereign has declared. When we get our view of God straight, we will cease protesting against the truths revealed in Scripture.
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Posted in: Iain Duguid · Old Testament Gospel · The Gospel According to Abraham · Theology Proper
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