Covenant Chat

The Bible is rife with covenant language and theology associated with it.  In truth, covenants are the manner with which the Lord relates to humanity, so to understand what is meant by covenant is to understand God and how He relates to us.  Therefore, this will be a brief discourse on the nature of covenants and the theological import thereof.

At the onset, covenants define relationships between a strong party and a weak party in terms of promises.  The strong party promises to the weak and the weak promises to the strong.  Theologically, the strong One is God and the weak is man.  To list the promises of God would take all the memory of the internet, but suffice to state that God promises provision, life, and presence, all boiling down to the density of love.  For humans, the promise is singular: faith.

The promises, from God, can be broken down into two categories: (1) blessings, and (2) curses.  Both are dependent upon mankind's fulfillment of their covenant obligation of faith.  If humans are faithful, they will be blessed; if humans are unfaithful, they will be cursed.  Unfortunately, the last century has seen an overemphasis on the promises of blessing to the neglect of the promises of curses.  The net effect of such a lopsided and misconceived notion of God's covenants is that faith has been thought of as either an optional perspective dependent upon the individual's whims, or faith has been reduced to a single event.

Scripture is a book of covenants, in which the various authors write of God relating to people through His fulfillment of promises, either in the form of blessings or, more prominently, in the form of curses.  The important thing is that God's covenant obligations are intertwined with humanity's obligations: if humans remain faithful to the covenant decrees they will be blessed, however, if humans are unfaithful  to the covenant decrees they will be cursed.  This may sound harsh, but either way God is proven just and faithful for He has committed Himself in covenant and has obligated Himself to relate in covenant ways.  But praise be to God that He has revealed His covenant requirements to humanity in His Word and through His Son!