Covenants

(Continued excerpts from the book-in-progress. Read the series so far.)

Relationship

The covenant Lord comes to establish a relationship. This relationship is not yet predicated upon the finished work of Christ at Calvary, so the judicial element demands law. Still, it also entails the fact that the God of the Law is the God also of grace. If He were not, there would be no hope of relationship and the covenantal purposes of God would be reduced to futility.

The laws found in Exodus through to Deuteronomy are given, for the most part, to restrain Israel’s sin and to proclaim an ethics of human value, regardless of social status, and of the unity of communal life.¹ The commandments can be summed up in two: Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18.²

(Continued excerpts from the book-in-progress. Read the series so far.)

With the Book of Exodus we bid adieu to the Patriarchal period and are thrown into the misery of slavery and hopelessness. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are long dead. The covenant promise is all but a forlorn hope. Even Joseph’s eminence in Egypt has been forgotten; at least by those who matter. Genesis ends with a small tribe of “Israelites” leaving their homeland and descending in to Egypt.

Yet the first half of the Book of Exodus contains some of the most compelling narrative ever written. Exodus is a book about redemption. The redemption envisaged in the early chapters is predominantly a deliverance from servitude. Many who came through the waters were not saved spiritually, as the incident with the golden calf (Exod. 32) proved.

Read the series so far.

Read the series so far.

Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob (Part 1)

After Abraham

Having arrived at the crux of Abraham’s saga, which is the test of his faith as recorded in the twenty-second chapter, the story of Genesis moves to the death of Sarah and the purchase of a gravesite for her. Abraham bought the burial ground and the cave of Machpelah because although he had wealth, he was never a recipient of the land itself (cf. Gen. 37:1).

When the covenant was being solemnized God had told His servant he would go to his Fathers in peace, and his posterity would only claim the land after spending four hundred years in Egypt (Gen. 15:13-16, 18). This is the reason Abraham “waited for a city … whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10). He knew that he himself would not own the land of promise. Genesis 25:7-10 records Abraham’s death and burial.

Read the series so far.

Read the series so far.

Problems with the Promise & Fulfillment Motif?

John Sailhamer is a critic of the common evangelical dogma that teaches a “promise-fulfillment” way of looking at the two Testaments, because by setting things up that way, the almost irresistible temptation will be to interpret the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament, and in particular with the first coming of Christ culminating in the Gospel. Such an attitude threatens to turn the Old Testament, the Bible of Israel, and of Jesus and the Apostles, in to a book of colorful stories and sermon illustrations for New Testament preaching. ¹

This might sound very good. As a matter of fact it does sound good to very many evangelicals. So good in fact, that it has often been assumed by pious minds as a natural implication of having a New Testament. But the “promise–fulfillment” idea so frequently recommended cries out for a bit of careful examination. The received wisdom is that we don’t start by reading through the OT to find its meaning, but that we begin by reading the NT, with emphasis on Paul’s Gospel, and we then interpret the OT through our understanding of the NT, especially our understanding of the work of Christ. Essentially what is being urged on us is the hermeneutical priority of the NT. Without the interpretive mindset we have gained from the NT, so the thinking goes, we are not in a position to rightly understand the OT. Hence, the OT is to be interpreted, not on its own merits, but by the NT. An earlier quote from Goldsworthy again makes this clear:

Read the series so far.

Read the series so far.

Covenants & Promises

The seventeenth chapter of the Book of Genesis affords us an occasion to distinguish between a covenant and a promise. This difference is seldom noticed in the literature, but it deserves our attention since it shows up a tendency to take things for granted which we ought perhaps to be more discerning about.

Read Part 1.

The whole episode in Genesis 15 is highlighted by the time stamp in verse 18, “On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram.” Yahweh declares that He has already given the land to Abram’s descendants. Therefore, as we have said, the covenant serves to reinforce and amplify the plain and clear word of God.