Covenants
1st Word
“I am writing these instructions to you so that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” – Saint Paul
One phrase sums up this book, “Ignorance of covenants is ignorance of Christ.” Understanding sacred covenants even just a little will help us greatly to love our Lord and Savior. Biblical covenants teach us many things, including how to live in the new and everlasting covenant, learn Christ's mission for the Church, and how God saves his people across the whole of humanity, across seas and centuries. From the dawn of humanity until the last man, God saves. And the sacred stories teach us God saves via covenants. So, the more we know about holy covenants, the more we know about salvation, and the more we will come to know Jesus, whose name literally means “God Saves.” To know Jesus is to abide in his commandments, which is to live by his covenant.
Yes, to know covenants is to know Jesus, and so we will do a deep dive into the holy covenants of our faith. While the Son was with the Father from the beginning, the revelation of Christ was hidden, awaiting the time for revealing. The old stories of our spiritual fathers disguised truths about Jesus, and now is the time for seeing Christ in the old covenants. That is what this book is about. The ancient stories of the old covenants veiled truths about the new covenant that we will uncover.
And in case we are tempted to say, “the Old has past, the New has come,” so there is no need to concern ourselves about the Old, Christ himself encourages us to treasure our past and see him in the old writings. Early in his Sermon on the Mount he says, "do not think I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them." In another place and time, right before multiplying the five loaves and two fish for the five thousand, Christ says, "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for Moses wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" In other words, listen to what Moses writes about Jesus and see how Christ fulfills the old covenants.
Yes, Moses wrote about the Jesus in the old covenants when he recorded the ancient stories of his forefathers. He wrote of Christ in the covenants God made with the heroes of the faith. Moses wrote for us about the covenant with mankind (‘Adam’) and how we broke that covenant yet hinted at the promises God has in store for us in a new Adam, one who would be faithful even unto death on a cross. Moses wrote for us about the renewal of the covenant through Noah (‘rest’) and hinted at a better Noah to come who offers a better salvation than even the one experienced at the time of the flood. Moses wrote for us about the promises for the nations in the covenant with Abraham (‘Father of Nations’) and an even greater father-son relationship to come. Moses wrote for us about the story of freedom from slavery by the blood of the lamb, hinting at an even greater redemption for the people of God with a better lamb under an even better Prophet than Moses. And Moses wrote instructions for how we are to receive the future and forthcoming prophets of God, many of whom described an even better covenant to come, a new and everlasting covenant, an eternal covenant promising a kingdom which never ends.
Yes, in Moses' writings as well as the other sacred scriptures we have the stories of the people of God and the covenants God made with them through his mediators. Ultimately, all these writings point to an overarching story, His Story, history, the love story about how the children of the Father become the spouse of the Son and a dwelling place for the Spirit. And this story starts not only in the very first stories Moses records for us, but continues all the way through the work of all the prophets and apostles of God, continuing the record of God's promises and holy covenants from the first man until the last man.
For Christians, brought into the family of God via the covenant with Christ, we would do well to look deeply into the Old Covenants of the past to better understand the New and Everlasting Covenant of today. Separated not only by seas but also centuries and cultures, there is great value in meditating on the Old Covenants and the mediators of those covenants. They were written down to teach us about Christ. The more we understand the Old, the more fully we live in the New. The New fulfills the Old.
And so, this book chronicles the major covenants of salvation history, seeing the Old Covenants in the light of Christ. We will see how what Saint Augustine said more than a millennium ago is true today, “the New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed.” We will also paraphrase Saint Jerome’s “ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ,” and we will say,