One question that’s often asked of by those new to a Presbyterian or Reformed church is, “What is covenant theology?” We certainly love it – it’s in our name here at Covenant of Grace! Yet “covenant” is a term that can lose its meaning simply through overuse. I went to college at Covenant College. There’s also a Covenant Seminary, we take covenant vows, have covenant children, and apparently there’s even a covenant coffee company, a covenant logistics company, and covenant banking. Like the child’s saying, “Don’t say my name, you’ll wear it out,” covenant can be lost on us and become little more than marketing for Reformed Christians.
This is a question that’s important because it answers how we read the Bible. Many Christians over the centuries have wrestled with these types of questions: what do we do with the Old Testament? Is the Bible just a book of rules? How does new relate to Old? How does law relate to faith or faith to law? Understanding covenant theology helps us answer the questions, but we have to begin with what a covenant is. I like to define a covenant as a sacred relationship, with benefits, conditions, and threats. The latter half of this definition has to be included just because of what we find in scripture surrounding covenants, but let’s not lose sight of what it ultimately is: a sacred relationship. I highlight this because over the years there have been some who have wanted to liken a covenant to a contract or agreement, and while there are certainly contractual elements to a covenant, that can take attention away from what it ultimately is. The closest human analogy to a covenant between God and man is marriage between one man and one woman. Yes, a marriage is also a contract, but that’s not the point – the relationship is the point. Nor does the contractual aspect or the prospect of having to take vows diminish the relational part of marriage. Ask any woman which she prefers, a man to tell her that they don’t need to conform to societal norms for marriage and they can just move in together because he loves her or a man who will go through the ceremony of standing in front of both their families and friends to take vows and contractually bind himself to her for life, and she will always choose the latter! The relationship with vows and conditions not only gives security you can rest in, but that’s the approach that’s far more romantic. So I want to use marriage to try to explain covenants. Marriage is a sacred relationship that binds two parties together as the two become one and which promises blessings, including lifelong companionship, intimacy, and the possibility of children.
Like a covenant, marriage includes conditions. There may be lots of things we want in marriage, but the most fundamental condition is lifelong faithfulness and exclusivity. Marriages may be wounded in other areas, but failure here violates the marriage and breaks the covenant. This condition is even stated in our vows: “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to cherish her, to have and to hold, in plenty and in want, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live?” Similarly, this is what God wants from us. He is a jealous God who wants his people from himself! In the covenant of works the condition was that our parents not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the test of whether or not they would have God as their God, or if they would seek to go their own way and be their own masters.
Like a covenant, marriage also includes threats, which is a concept that may surprise people to learn, but implicitly they are there (and not the “If you give that child dessert so help me” kind of statements). If the exclusivity of the marriage covenant is violated, not only is the covenant broken and there’s the threat of financial devastation, heartache, and in past generations, social stigma, but there’s even more. It would make a wedding awkward to state them, but one of the purposes of vows is to imply a threat: the judgment of God. When we make vows, we are invoking God to witness and bind us to our promises and implicitly to judge us if we break them. In taking wedding vows, we ask God to hold us accountable and bring us into judgment if we’re unfaithful. This is one aspect of covenants that was explicitly stated in the covenant of works, when God threatened, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17).
I’ll point out that I’m calling a covenant a sacred relationship because there are some human analogies that just don’t fit. A contract like a mortgage is certainly an agreement with benefits, conditions, and threats, but a mortgage isn’t about the relationship. A mortgage is a financial relationship so that a buyer can purchase a home and a business can make a profit. That relationship is ultimately about the transaction. However, when you get married, yes, there are benefits of the relationship that would fill pages, and we love them. Yet every married man or woman knows that such lists never do it justice because ultimately what you get is the relationship. When a young man asks a girl to marry him and she says yes, he’s overjoyed because what he gets is the girl!
Gloriously, this is how God chooses to relate to mankind: through covenants. There is first a covenant of works, where God requires perfect obedience and threatens death. Yet after the first man, Adam, failed, God did not leave us in ruin and misery. Instead, he inaugurated another covenant, what we call the covenant of grace. In this, the covenant of works is not abolished, but rather fulfilled, but this time through a mediator, the seed of the woman, God’s own son Jesus Christ. Jesus fulfills the covenant requirement of perfect obedience and the covenant curse of death, but now he graciously fulfills it on behalf of all whom he represents. To make it even more gracious, we are not partakers through our own efforts or works, but simply through faith, and even this too his gives us! God is so zealous that we be his covenant people, He even promises to fulfill the requirements for us as Ezekiel 36:26 says, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”
While marriage has wonderful benefits, a covenant with God has even more and better ones, like justification, when the perfect righteousness of of Jesus is imputed to us and we’re declared righteous in the sight of heaven! Then we we have the promises of life in that better country, where there’s no death, no crying, and no mourning and new, glorified bodies. Yet as wonderful as these are, these benefits are never the chief promise held in front of God’s covenant people; it’s always that we get to be with God. Adam used to walk with the LORD in the Garden of Eden and this is what God’s covenant is about and gets us back to: a relationship with God. This is why we love covenant theology and what it’s about, that we get God himself. This is the covenant promise that’s repeatedly held forth in scripture: I will be your God, you will be my people, and I will dwell in your midst. The one who accomplishes this goal is called none other than Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” This is what’s proclaimed from heaven as scripture closes and heaven comes down to Earth. “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.’” (Revelation 21:3).
So what is covenant theology? It’s a way to read scripture that focuses on what scripture focuses: the relationship that man lost with God and what God does to restore it because like a husband wants to be with his bride, God wants to be with his people.