Hebrews 9:16-17

‘For where a covenant-testament (diatheke) is, there must of necessity be the death of him that made it. For a testament is of force where there has been death, for it never avails while he who made it is alive.’

Thus having brought out that the new covenant was, as far as God is concerned, a ‘covenant-testament’ he stresses again that it was more than a covenant. It was an unconditional God-to-man covenant (diatheke), with God the Benefactor and man the beneficiary, because it referred to what God had covenanted to bring about, and it was a testament (diatheke) because from the very beginning its bringing about was, in God’s purposes, linked to the death of the Covenantor. Such a covenant testament thus necessarily involves the death of the One Who made it, without which it could not come into force.

The further implication here is that God has in the covenant given all things to His Son (John 3:35; John 13:3; John 16:15; John 17:10), Who has therefore become the covenantor as well as the mediator, and that He must die in order for the covenant to come into force because of the special nature of the covenant as a covenant-testament.

This revelation could be expressed in this way because word used for ‘covenant’ in the New Testament (diatheke) regularly means ‘a will’ in popular Greek usage, but was used in LXX to translate God’s ‘covenant’ (berith) with His prospective people. This situation arose because the usual Greek word for covenant (suntheke) rather referred to a covenant between equals, while God’s covenant (diatheke) with His people, was like a will in that it was that of a benefactor to a beneficiary and was initiated solely by God.

However, it was not just a play on the meaning of a word for such a covenant was recognised as regularly accompanied by the symbolised death of one or both of the parties involved, and where a death was not mentioned it would certainly be somewhere in the background (as he will now illustrate). Its fulfilment was totally dependent on His intention that man should benefit through a death (just as a will was an expression of intention). And in this case, because God is unchangeable and the covenant unconditional, it was a binding intention.

So the writer has taken advantage of this dual usage in order to point out that in fact the requirement for a death implicit in the word diatheke emphasises the fact that the new covenant is not only a covenant but a covenant-will, which will be brought into force through death. This is not just clever manoeuvring, a trite play on words. It can be likened to this precisely because it was always God’s necessary intention on making the covenant (the old having been broken) that it would be actioned through death, the death of His own Son through Whom the inheritance was to be passed on. This thus made it a will (but not only a will, for, apart from a deathbed will, a will is revocable), as well as a covenant.

The stress here is thus on what God’s intention in making the new covenant was from the beginning. It was always His direct intention that the fulfilment of the covenant should be dependent on the death of His appointed Benefactor. Thus it was from the beginning also a special kind of covenant, a covenant-will. The making of the covenant and its being actioned was always in God’s eyes linked to a death, the death of His Son.

He illuminates this further by arguing that where there is a will it is the intention that it will not be enforceable while the testator is alive. So in this case too the application of this solemn covenant-will, made by God, can only take place through Christ’s necessary death, solemnising the covenant and bringing it into effect, making it ‘of force’. The change in illustration is valid in this case because of the intention of the covenantor. It was He Who in His eternal purposes tied His covenant to a death, because He knew that without it the fulfilment could not take place. And that is what is being indicated here.

It would lose its force with an ordinary will-maker who does not choose to die and can withdraw his will. There the will is not a covenant but simply a prospective ‘covenant’. So this case is more like the case of a man who has chosen that he will die or is on the point of death and has made his will accordingly knowing it to be irrevocable. It is a covenant-will. In choosing to make a covenant with man He always recognised that the consequence must be His own death in His Son. It was a covenant of blood.