So this is the ultimate of a covenant with a group of people. At this point, they are still going to be human when they come back from the great Tribulation and the Day of the Lord. They are brought back to the land of Israel and the resurrected David is appointed to be their king, and they go through the covenant process again where they have to learn to abide by the covenant. And God says He will put His temple there, His sanctuary, and with this new group of Israelites He will do what He meant to do with Israel before. But this time, as we see from other scriptures, they will have the Spirit of God available and it will all go a lot better than the first time. So, the covenant of peace that is mentioned there in verse 26 between God and Israel establishes the bounds of the relationship.
God is very intelligent. When He gathers the people, He says, "Okay, we are going to sit down and craft this contract." It is not so much crafting as the lesser, the people of Israel, accepting what God says. That is exactly what happened at Sinai at the first time. But He is going to say, "Okay, this is the way it's going to be. This is David your king. And we are going to enforce this covenant and this is what you have to do. You have to keep My commandments, My statutes, and My judgments. You're going to have to come and do the things you need to do at My sanctuary, and that's going to be a sign then of our agreement that I've come to sanctify Israel and everybody will know, when looking from outside, all the nations will say, 'Hey, these are God's people.' Obviously, because He put His sanctuary in their midst." And they are the ones that have the contract with God that says that they do what He says, and they will be His people.
So this covenant of peace provides eternal stability and prosperity. Because of what the Israelites have just gone through, each side is now fully invested in the relationship. They come back weeping and say, we messed up and we want to do what is right now, so we are going to abide by the terms of the covenant. And so they will voluntarily, and entirely as well as they can, keep the terms of the agreement.
This is what God has prophesied; that it is going to take the worst years of their lives, the worst years of anybody's lives on the face of the earth, to finally pound it into the Israelites' heads that they need to follow God, but the ones that come out the other end are going to say, "We'll do it. We don't want to go through that again. We were dumb. We repent in dust and ashes."
So what we have here in this covenant is the establishment of peace, a condition of peace, a state of peace through the covenant, so that, what? What is the endgame here? What does God establish the covenant to do? Well, just like the covenant has always done, it is the environment, if you will, for spiritual growth and entry into the Kingdom of God. God wants His people to be righteous, and so He makes a covenant with them so that they can achieve those things with His help.
