Corporate Allegory
[A cornucopia - image above - is an allegory depicting productive abundance.]
Think about
a major company such as Telstra – Australia’s privatized (used-to-be-public)
Telco. For that company to operate in
Australia, it has to hold certain documents that validate its existence, its
plans and its business decisions. There
are also many national standards and regulations that companies have to comply
with, including any CSOs (Community Service Obligations) and a range of ‘Codes
of Conduct’ to guide the way it relates to its customers and the communities it
serves. The combination of all this
documentation could be referred to collectively as the Company’s ‘Covenant’ or
‘Testament’ with Australia. The
documents of its Covenant with Australia would be stored and administered by a
department or branch of the company.
Now imagine
that, at its last meeting, the Company Board voted unanimously to change the
way it relates to its customers and does business in Australia. The composition of the Board hasn’t changed
noticeably, but a good number of its Covenant documents will have to be
rewritten. Let’s assume for the moment
that the standards and regulations and CSOs have not changed, so essentially it
is only the internal documents that need to be rewritten.
Once the
documents are written and accepted, they will be adopted and, from that point,
this new Covenant determines how the company does business, how it treats its
workers and how it relates to its customers and its regulators. There may be some relevant staff changes; perhaps
a different section of the company will handle the administration or maybe the
current department or branch will be revamped to fit with the new
Covenant. And perhaps there’s a new
employee to speak up the new administration.
For the
sake of this exercise, imagine that one of the adjustments to how the company
is doing business is that, under the new Covenant, all fixed-line phone calls
within a calling-code region are free and all fixed-line STD calls anywhere
within Australia will be capped at 50c.
Same
company; same staff; same customers – just a new régime. Perhaps the company has decided to subsidise
Australians talking to each other on fixed-line phones from the increased
profits its new plans will generate elsewhere in the company. A whole lot of free stuff for the company’s
domestic customers!
The day
arrives, and the system is switched over.
What if some workers in the company don’t like the new terms and
conditions or the way the company has gone about applying its new Covenant? They decide to run a parallel system that
stays with the old terms and conditions and the old documents. Some of the customers, believing there is
something suspicious about the company giving away free stuff, want to stay
with the old terms and conditions. What
might happen? I and others call this
agenda ‘governing against government’ – or at least attempting to.
Apart from
the fact that such a scenario would be virtually impossible, the ramifications
of it would be horrendous. At the end of
the day, which Covenant with the Australian people will the Board support,
execute and administer? The new covenant
of course.
As
outrageous and stupendous as this scenario appears, something very similar is
what has occurred in relation to God and how people relate to Him.
Same God,
same angels; different Covenant, different ‘administration’ (read Ephesians
3). Paul evidently knew about it. Paul lived in and executed the terms and
conditions of the old Covenant until He was arrested and re-educated by
Jesus. Whammo! His name changes from Saul to Paul and he is
an entirely new man. He died to the old
Covenant and, through the freedom and generosity of the new terms and
conditions instituted by Jesus, was reborn into the new Covenant with its
documents and terms and conditions.
Unfortunately,
many people think God is way too generous in the documents and the terms and
conditions of His new Covenant with us, so they opt to stay with the old
ones. Unfortunately for them, God and
His servants have entirely moved to the new administration of the realm which
involves unbelievable generosity and forgiveness and grace. Perhaps the more studious ones have looked in
detail at both sets of documents and decided that the cost of committing to the
new Covenant is too great – surrender of yourself, body soul and spirit, to
God, without being completely convinced about the benefits involved: what’s
this ‘eternal life’, and ‘the power of an endless life’, and all this about
being sons of God, a kingdom of priests, reigning with Christ, the spotless
Bride of Christ?
The nett
result is that many, many people have decided to write their own documents for
the Covenant: in their version, they have all the benefits of the new Covenant
on the terms and conditions of the old.
Just like this
Company could not legally honour a spurious staff- or customer-generated
perversion of its covenant – and would
not honour it – so God cannot legally honour the spurious perversion of His
covenant. Either you try to relate to
God on the terms and conditions of the old covenant: the results of which may
or may not be success and riches in this life but death and separation from God
in the provisions He has established under His new covenant. Or you relate to God on the terms and
conditions of the new covenant, as outlined in its documents (what we know as
the New Testament): expressed simply (in the words of Jesus) as: ‘if you are my
disciple, the world will hate you as it hated me, but fear not, I have overcome
the world’.
As always,
we can learn a lot from the old documents, but the most important thing to
learn is that you don’t ever want to go back to relating to God on those terms
when He has prepared and opened a far better way. While God’s grace does not breach our
sovereign human will to choose, it remains true that ‘you reap what you so’: we
pay a very high price for spurning the new and struggling on endlessly, like a
mouse in a wheel, in the old.
Same God,
same ‘customers’; but the terms and conditions of the covenant by which God
relates to us humans has changed fundamentally and permanently because of the
life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the now-innate presence of
the Holy Spirit. Jesus Himself made it
abundantly clear that the old has gone and the new has come. For an example, read the story of an old
covenant enquirer in Luke 18:18-30. Then
read through Matthew chapters 5, 6 and 7.
“The old administration said this, but I say ...” is repeated many
times. [We’ll come to this a little
further on.] Then read the story of
Paul’s conversion in Acts 9, followed by his letter to the Galatians.
As an
introduction to the next section, here’s a useful website listing 32 points of
distinction between the old covenant and the new covenant in the matter of how
humans relate to God.
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