🚂 This is entry 1 of the blogtrain The Covenants of God.

What is a covenant? A covenant is a solemn promise that establishes a relationship.

Our subject: The Bible tells us about several major covenants God has made. Our focus will be on them, including:

  1. Covenant of Redemption
  2. Covenant of Works
  3. Covenant of Grace
  4. Covenant of Common Grace
  5. Abrahamic Covenant
  6. Mosaic Covenant
  7. Davidic Covenant
  8. New Covenant

Our aim: The goal of this series is to learn what these covenants are, how they relate to each other, and what implications they have for our relationship with God and others. These questions define the field of study called Covenant Theology.

Why Covenant Theology Matters

Covenant Theology is Fundamental

Covenants are in the Bible a lot. The word covenant appears 319 times in the ESV, often in key verses.

But covenants matter even where there word isn’t explicitly used. That’s because God uses covenants as an internal structure for Scripture: understanding them is key for correctly understanding the Bible. William Tyndale urged:

“The right way, yea, and the only way, to understand the scripture unto salvation, is that we earnestly and above all things search for the profession of our baptism, or covenants made between God and us.”

When you read the Bible with a view to the covenants, you engage in “a way of reading the whole Bible that is itself part of the overall interpretation of the Bible that it undergirds,” as J. I. Packer put it.

New Testament scholar, S. M. Baugh, says it this way:

Other theologies display the structure of more parochial interests — for example, liberation theology or feminist theologies — but Covenant theology is an attempt to capture the theology of the whole of Scripture. Covenant, then, is not itself a locus (topic) of our theology like the Trinity, Christology, or justification. Rather, covenant is a main organizing principle of our theology and correlates with all — or nearly all — the loci.

Covenant Theology is for Wisdom

God uses covenants to provide direction and meaning to the movement of time: understanding them is key for correctly understanding the past, present, and future. For example, Jeremiah 31:31-32:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD.”

Covenant Theology is for Worship

Lastly, Covenants help us better understand God, our relationship with him, and our relationship with the world he has made. For example the following passages show the connection between covenant and community. See Hebrews 10:24-31; 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, 12:12–13:13; Ephesians 2:11–22, 4:1–16.

Covenant by Michael Horton is a brief article that quickly explains the basics.

Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored by Zach Keele and Michael Brown is the best introductory book on the subject. In this series, I mostly use their definitions for the covenants.

Covenant and Kingdom in the New Testament by S. M. Baugh is a lecture series that explains the connection between these two important biblical concepts.