The Biblical Covenants – God’s gracious program
The Biblical Covenants – God’s gracious program

Summary/Abstract: One of the many things the Bible tells us about God is that he made covenants with people. That is very important: after all, we are beneficiaries of the last and greatest ofthose covenants, which has been called “the New covenant” (Jer. 31:31).As theologians have sought to understand God’s covenants, they have found differentways of accounting for them or reconstructing them. As a result of their efforts(which disagree in significant ways) two major questions have arisen: (1) How manycovenants did God make; and (2) How do God’s covenants interrelate? Theologianshave proposed what may be called different “covenant schemes” to answer those questions.The schemes are all similar because for the most part it is clear in the Bible wheneverGod makes a covenant. So anyone who compares the most broadly accepted RomanCatholic, Orthodox and Protestant “covenant schemes” will find a great deal of overlapamong them. All will agree, for example, that God made covenants through Noah,Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. Nonetheless, there are also significant differencesamong the views that theologians have proposed.It is not the purpose of this paper to present those differences. To present them anddo justice to them would require a substantial book. It is rather our purpose to presentan alternative to the covenant schemes theologians have developed. The hope is thatwhat is proposed here can bring some modest illumination to what has been thoughtbefore. The proposal, then, comes de novo, and is based entirely on what the Bible tellsus of God’s covenants —if we add that we can now see the biblical idea of “covenant”as an ancient near eastern person could have seen it, thanks to what archaeology hasprovided for us.

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