Covenants
Preface
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
To sum up this book (and meditation) in one phrase: ignorance of covenants is ignorance of Christ. Recovering even a small portion of the depth of our understanding of the Sacred Covenants of the past will help us in understanding how to love our Lord and Savior in the present - specifically, how to live in the New and Everlasting Covenant of today. With that knowledge, we understand Christ's mission for his Church, including how God saves his people across the whole of humanity, across not only seas, but importantly, over centuries. And this will define our future. From the dawn of humanity until the last man, God saves. And in the sacred stories it is clear he saves through covenants. So, it stands to reason, the more we know about covenants, the more we know about salvation, which will lead us to Christ. And to know Christ is to walk the way of love.
But while the Son was with the Father from the beginning, the revelation of Christ was hidden in the stories of our spiritual fathers, in the ancient stories of the Old Covenants. But in case we are tempted to say the Old has past, the New has come; Christ himself warns us to treasure the treasures in our past. 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." And in another time, right before multiplying the five loaves and two fish for the five thousand, Saint John records Jesus's words "If you believe Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?"
What did Moses write? Well, Moses recorded the ancient stories of his forefathers, he wrote of the covenants of Old, the covenants of the patriarchs. Moses wrote for us about the covenant with humanity and how mankind broke that covenant and yet the promises God has in store for us as promised to us in a new Adam. Moses wrote for us about the renewal of the covenant through Noah and hinted at a better Noah to come. Moses wrote for us about the promises for the nations in the covenant with Abraham and an even greater father-son story to come. Moses wrote for us the story of freedom from slavery by the blood of the lamb, and the details regarding the birth of a new nation, hinting at an even greater people of God under a better Prophet. And Moses wrote instructions for how to receive the other prophets of God. And these are the prophets which spoke and wrote of a better covenant, a New and Everlasting covenant, an Eternal covenant with David's son, promising an even better and everlasting King than the ones they had known.
Yes, in Moses' writings and the other sacred scriptures we have the stories of the patriarchs, but also the covenants that were made through them. Ultimately, the story of God is a story of love for his family, his sons and daughters. And it starts not only in the very first stories Moses records for us, but continues through the work of all the prophets that came after Moses, continuing the record of God's promises and his covenants with his people through today and till the end of time.
For Christians, brought into the family of God via the cross of Christ, we would do well to look deeply into Old covenants to better understand the New. Because, separated not only by seas and centuries but also millennia, there is great value in meditating on the Old covenants and the lives of the mediators of those covenants. They were written to teach us about Christ. Saint Paul confirms there teaching aspect in his letter to the Corinthians, "these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of ages has come." Yes, the more we understand the Old, the more fully we live and love in the New.
And so, this book will chronicle the major covenants of salvation history, seeing them in the light of Christ, the eternal Son of the Father. We will see how what Saint Augustine said more than a millennium and a half ago is true today, “the New is in the Old concealed; the Old is the New revealed.” Or in Christ’s words, “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is New and what is Old." And whereas what Saint Jerome said is very true today, "Ignorance of Scriptures is ignorance of Christ", we agree wholeheartedly and say as well "Ignorance of Covenants is ignorance of Christ."