Malachi 2:5

"My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him that he might fear; and he feared me and stood in awe of my name."

"My covenant was with him ..." Note the past tense. God here speaks of the Levitical covenant as a thing of the past, not merely because it was inaugurated in a time past, but because it was already terminated by the Levitical priests who had wantonly broken it and rejected it. A similar use of the past tense occurs in Paul's reference to the Law of Moses, "The Law WAS our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ" (Galatians 3:23, KJV).

Everything in the Bible, as well as all that is in this chapter and in this paragraph clearly indicates that what "this commandment," which God gave in the place of Levi's covenant means is the final termination of that covenant, on the basis of the people's having repudiated it. Many current scholars deny this, but they do not deny it from what is stated here, but from prior theological considerations. Baldwin, for example, stressed that, "God had sworn never to break his covenant (Leviticus 26:44; Judges 2:1, etc.) ... God's covenants were as certain to be fulfilled as the laws of nature ... (there is) a positive assertion throughout the Old Testament that God would never break his word."[7]

All such general conclusions are based upon a false view to the effect that if God cancelled a covenant because of the people's violation of it, it would, in some unexplainable sense, be God's "breaking his word." Nothing could be more erroneous. One should re-read the last three chapters of Deuteronomy, in which it is boldly and clearly declared that all of God's covenant blessings of Israel were contingent, absolutely, upon Israel's maintaining a faithful and obedient attitude. This passage shows that the same applied to the Levitical covenant, as indeed it does to all covenants, even including the covenant of salvation in Jesus Christ!