In our first article, we learned that good Christians disagree about the people of Israel’s future in God’s plan. They do this because they understand the Bible’s “big story” very differently. In the second article, we sketched a premillennial understanding of the Bible’s “big story.” Now we turn to another issue: Why do good Christians read the Bible so differently? Why do they have a different “big story” idea of what the Bible teaches—one in which the people of Israel are now (in the new covenant era) basically irrelevant?
The problem is not that God communicates badly. It’s that good Christians read and interpret it very differently. So, here are six principles1 for understanding the Bible (and its “big story”) the right way. These six reasons are why many Christians believe there will be a 1,000-year millennium, and that the nation of Israel has a key role to play in God’s plan to bring in Paradise 2.0:
- Covenants are “episodes” of the Bible’s story.
- God means what he says.
- God speaks so we can understand him.
- God expects us to rely on his word.
- God does what he promises.
- God’s promises are clearly traceable throughout Scripture.
If we can understand these six rules, we can understand the Bible the right way. I will explain each reason in more detail, below.
1. Covenants are the key
God’s plan to re-gain paradise comes about through a series of covenant promises with Noah, Abraham, David, and the new covenant in Christ—these are the “episodes” in the story that lead to Jesus and Eden 2.0. Because these covenants are the key to understanding the Bible’s “big story,” we must know what these promises are and what they mean. We sketched these covenants and their promises in the previous article.
Some good Christians believe in a different set of alleged covenants which shape how they understand the Bible. These are the so-called (a) covenant of redemption, wherein Father and Son agreed together, before the world began, to rescue fallen humanity;2 (b) the covenant of works, “wherein life was promised to Adam; and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience,”3 and (c) the covenant of grace, which is God’s unfolding plan to rescue us from Satan and from ourselves through Jesus, by the power of the Spirit.4
But the problem is that these covenants are never mentioned in Scripture—nor are the oaths which should seal and guarantee them. They do not exist. True, these supposed “covenants” make logical sense and they (sometimes) speak of true things, but they have no explicit or implicit biblical basis as covenants. Reformed Bible teachers even struggle to agree with whom God makes his so-called “covenant of grace”—maybe because they have no Scripture which explicitly tells them!5
The truth is that when God makes a covenant, he doesn’t whisper or beat about the bush—he does not want misunderstanding. He likes to communicate clearly. The covenants which are clear and obvious are those God made with Noah and creation, with Abraham and the Isaac to Jacob (etc.) line, the covenant with Moses and the people of Israel, the covenant with David, and the new covenant in Christ. These are the covenants which shape the Bible’s story—the “episode list” which together tells us what “paradise regained” will look like by Revelation 21-22.
2. God means what he says
We believe that God means what he says in his covenant promises. The alternatives are that God is an incompetent communicator, or that he is being tricksy. Neither are true. Why else would Jesus repeatedly say: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mk 4:9)? He wants us to hear and listen. This would all be pointless if God doesn’t mean what he says.
So, God means what he says and he says what he means. He intends to communicate promises by covenant oaths and signs. God gave us Scripture in which he moved human authors to write those promises down. He gave these covenant oaths and signs to his audience so they would trust and rely on them.6
3. God speaks so we can understand him
We believe that God speaks so that his people can understand his covenant promises. When Bible teachers talk about “meaning,” we mean “communicative intent”7—God intends to communicate something, and he does it in Scripture. So, obviously, God wants us to clearly understand him. Faith requires plain sense.
Of course, some things in the Bible are clearer than others. But, by comparing Scripture to Scripture,8 and relying on the Holy Spirit in community with other believers, we can adequately understand what God says. The Bible is not a scrambled codebook which an elite caste of teachers must decrypt for us. The Bible “presents a clear enough message to anyone willing to read it.”9
4. God expects us to rely on his word
We believe that, because God means what he says and communicates clearly so we can understand him, he wants us to rely on his covenant promises. They mean what they say at face value—unless Scripture tells us differently.10 God speaks so that the average, ordinary believer can understand and rely on his word. This is what the covenant oath is for—to “solemnly swear” to us that he’ll do what he says! Likewise, the covenant “sign” is a visible declaration that vividly expresses the covenant promises to the believer. God uses the oath and the sign to confirm the promises to us, so we will rely on them. Why else are they there?
- The rainbow is the sign which confirms the covenant promises sealed by oath to Noah and creation (Gen 9:11). When we see the rainbow, we will know God remembers his promise (Gern 9:12-17). The rainbow is the guarantee we can rely on his word.
- Circumcision is the sign that confirms the oath God swore when he promised to give Abraham a people, a land, and to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen 15:18; 17:4-12). You can’t conjure up a more visible and permanent reminder that God wants us to trust him: “My covenant shall be in your flesh as an everlasting covenant” (Gen 17:13).
- God swore an oath to David that only makes sense if he meant David to rely on his promise: “Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam 7:16). The Lord compared his reliability with the moon and the sun’s permanence: “Once I have sworn by My holiness; I will not lie to David” (Ps 89:35-37).
- The Lord swore an oath to make a new covenant with the people of Israel—to write his law upon his people’s hearts and minds (Jer 31:33-34). He said this covenant was also for Gentiles, too (Isa 49:6). The Lord’s Supper is a covenant sign to impress upon us that Jesus died for us and will return (1 Cor 11:25).
God gives us the covenant oaths and signs so that we’d have faith in his promises. This requires God to (a) mean what he says, (b) to speak clearly so we can understand him, and (c) therefore we rely upon his promises.
When the angel Gabriel announced the Messiah’s conception to Mary, the conversation hinged on her understanding and relying upon the clear and face-value covenant promises to David: “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David; and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end” (Lk 1:32-33).
If God didn’t mean what he said through the prophet Nathan (1 Chr 17:1-15) and didn’t expect his people to understand and rely upon that covenant promise, then Gabriel wouldn’t have had any basis for a conversation with Mary! Instead, he assumes and expects that she knows what he’s talking about.
5. God does what he promises
We believe that, because God cannot lie and has carefully spoken so his people can understand and rely upon his promises, he will do what he says. “[I]t is hard to exercise faith in what is unclear or liable to change.”11 God expects his people to rely on these promises—to take them to the bank. These promises create expectations for the people with whom he makes them.12 We expect him to do what he says. This is why Mary sang that God had fulfilled his covenant promises “[j]ust as He spoke to our fathers, To Abraham and his descendants forever” (Lk 1:55).
6. God’s promises are clearly traceable throughout his story
The promises in each covenant episode build upon and are traceable to earlier episodes in a clear and continuous way—because God means what he says and says what he means. We can see and logically trace his promises throughout the story. For example: a Netflix show only makes sense if the individual episodes fit together into a logical, understandable, and traceable whole. Plot holes are annoying in a TV show; they don’t exist in God’s story. This is why covenant promises of a great nation + land + being a blessing mean what they say.
This is why have a different understanding of how that “big picture” comes together in the end. We believe that God’s covenant promises to Abraham (a great nation + in a land of their own + to be a blessing to the world) are not only signposts foreshadowing the “bigger fulfillment” of Jesus and paradise—they’re also more than that. They’re real promises “of a future that involved concrete earthly realities and was apparently so understood by the faithful of God’s people.”13 That future, between this present evil age and paradise, is the millennium.
If we can understand these six rules, we can understand the Bible the right way.
Notes
1 I am especially indebted to Paul Henebury, The Words of the Covenant, vol. 1 (Maitland: Xulon, 2021), 13-43. His discussion here about how to interpret the Bible clearly is the best I’ve ever read.
2 Louis Berkhof writes: “The Father required of the Son, who appeared in this covenant as the Surety and Head of His people, and as the last Adam, that He should make amends for the sin of Adam and of those whom the Father had given Him, and should do what Adam failed to do by keeping the law and thus securing eternal life for all His spiritual progeny” (Systematic, 269).
3 Westminster Confession of Faith, Art. 7.2. “The great promise of the covenant of works was the promise of eternal life … The condition was that of implicit and perfect obedience. The divine law can demand nothing less than that, and the positive command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, relating as it did, to a thing indifferent in itself, was clearly a test of pure obedience in the absolute sense of the word” (Berkhof, Systematic, 216).
4 See Westminster Confession, Art. 7.3, 7.4, 7.5.
5 John Gill declares the covenant of grace is between the Persons of the Trinity (Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, 214). A.A. Hodge outlines three different views about who the parties are to this alleged covenant (Outlines of Theology, XXII.3, [p. 369]). Robert Dabney says the covenant parties are Father and Son, with elect sinners as parties to it by way of Christ, their surety (Systematic Theology, 432-34). Louis Berkhof admits: “It is not easy to determine precisely who the second party is …” then suggests the parties are God and the elect sinner in Christ (Systematic, 273).
6 “[M]eaning is the communicative intention of the author, inscribed in the text, and addressed to the intended audience for the purposes of engagement” (Jeannine K. Brown, Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2021), 12; cp. 69-89).
7 Jeannine Brown writes that “Meaning is author-derived but textually communicated. Meaning can be helpfully understood as commutative contention.” While “meaning” is complicated, it can be determined. Brown likens “meaning” to a bounded sphere rather than a single point, and suggests that “interpretations can be weighed on the basis of their alignment and coherence with an author’s commutative intention” (Scripture as Communication, 70, 74-75, 77).
8 “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself; and therefore when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched by other places that speak more clearly” (1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, Article 1.9).
9 William Klein, Craig Blomberg, Robert L. Hubbard, Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 221.
10 John Gill, writing about the doctrine of the last things, declares: “It is a rule to be observed, that a literal sense is not to be departed from without necessity” (A Complete Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity, New Edition, vol. 2 (Tegg & Company, 1839), 261). Bernard Ramm writes that we ought to “interpret prophecy literally unless the implicit or explicit teaching of the New Testament suggests typological interpretation” (Protestant Biblical Interpretation, 3rd revised ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1970), 266).
11 Henebury, Words of the Covenant, 1:36.
12 Henebury, Words of the Covenant, 1:47.
13 Robert Saucy, The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993), 243.
Discussion
NewSolid
I appreciate the series. As a hermeneutical framework almost anyone can understand, it covers a lot of ground and also has the advantage of being intuitive.
A related question: lately I’ve been wondering about the value of calling doctrines by their names. Hermeneutics, theology proper, perspicuity, bibliology, eschatology. In the churches I grew up in, we didn’t exactly toss these around every Sunday, but when I got to college, they weren’t new to me either. But it seems unlikely that, in many churches today in our circles, people would recognize them.
But I’m not, I hope, a hopeless nostalgist (I’m told this is a real word)—because I wonder, does it matter if people in the pews know the names for these spheres of truth/disciplines of study? Maybe, maybe not. When you give something a name, you put a handle on it, and that makes it easier to work with in thought, conversation, teaching, etc. But if the handle is an awkward, multisyllabic thing, how well does it work as a handle? I’m talking about non-academics. Academics enjoy awkward, multisyllabic terms. (I also enjoy them, so it’s not just an academic thing.)
There’s also a segment in congregations that feel like things are being dumbed down for them too much. So there’s that.
I don’t know where the balance is. It probably depends on where you serve and what your audience is like.
But back to the series: without anything clunkier than ‘covenant,’ it nails down a lot of important framing for how believers should approach the Bible.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
NewTerms
I’ve sometimes called God’s covenants “official, sacred promises” during sermons, because I don’t think many people immediately “get” what a covenant is—even though they know the word. So, the “official, sacred promise” term is the best alternative I’ve come up with. I like it. It’s not very precise, but it communicates pretty easily.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
NewOn those names
Mark Twain's comment "Never use a ten dollar word when a fifty cent word will do." comes to mind for me. There is a legitimate place for technical jargon--using the word "exegesis" is easier for the initiated than its Webster's definition, for example--but there is a place as well where we simply do well to define what we're talking about.
Regarding the list, it's a good one, but my tendency would be to reorder it from the most basic premises--covenants flow really from Biblical and systematic theology, while "God means what He says" is one of the basic presuppositions that guide exegesis. But maybe that's just me.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
NewNames of things
I prefer to err on the side of giving people the names of things.
One advantage of ‘jargon’ is that the terms are distinct and more memorable. Nobody talks about ‘the eschaton’ or ‘eschatology’ in ordinary conversation. They are terms that carry a special context with them.
Listeners who are in the habit of well-ordered thinking will appreciate having the conceptual handles. They may be a small subset of the audience, but I really think feeding them well pays disproportionate dividends over the long haul.
And those who have no use for concept precision are just going to ignore that information. Granted, if I launch into a lengthy description of what this or that ‘ology’ is and is not, most are going to glaze over and tune out. So, as in all things communicative, brevity is the thing.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
NewMosaic Covenant?
Tyler, I notice the Mosaic Covenant is not in your diagram. I realize the article is basically dealing with principles, but I wonder how that fits into the scheme. The New Covenant replaces it, clearly, but is also connected to Abraham and David.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
NewFixed it
Don, I talked about the Mosaic covenant in the second article. But, to avoid confusion, I added it in here and changed the graphic to reflect it. I originally didn’t include it here because it doesn’t move the story forward as much as it established a rule of life for God’s people while under the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants. But, you were right that I should have mentioned it. So, I fixed it.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
NewActive covenants vs. superseded?
I know ‘superseded’ is a sensitive term, but I’m not talking about the church superseding Israel.
It’s fascinating to me look at the covenants in terms of which ones are still ‘in effect’ and which are not. Mosaic is special in that regard. Galatians is clear that Abrahamic continued through Mosaic and continues after it. Davidic: there is certainly no cancellation anywhere.
But Mosaic has come to an end. Superseded.
I wonder now—and maybe I already knew this but am not remembering at the moment—if there is biblical language relating the Abrahamic Covenant to the New Covenant? It seems like, in some ways, New is an expansion of the ‘faith’ aspect of the Abrahamic. (Does Paul mention or allude to ‘New’ in Galatians? Certainly provisions of it, but I wonder if he names it at all. I don’t recall seeing that.)
I don’t recall where, but I have the impression much has been written connecting/relating Abrahamic and New. But I’m curious now about what’s actually clear in Scripture on that.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Newthanks for the adjustment
Yeah, I realize that the story moves with the Abrahamic and Davidic Covenants. I think the confusion I'm having on this point is the realization that the Mosaic Covenant is not of the same sort as those covenants. In a way, it is what the New Covenant replaces, the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants remain "in force."
Anyway, I liked the article, just thinking about the relations between the covenants as you put them on a graphic
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3