The Good News of Covenants: God is Relational

Covenants are good news.

No, really.

When you hear the word covenant, what is your reaction? Do you think of fakeness? Do you think of cold unfeeling rules? Or do you think of life-giving relationship? Do you think of faithfulness and loving security?

At its core, a covenant is simply a relationship between two parties where both parties have made promises about how the relationship will work.

Covenants are hard for our modern American sensibilities. Especially the younger generations tend to value authenticity above all else. This is one of the reasons that most modern Christians reject God's sovereignty in salvation (i.e. Calvinism and the Doctrines of Grace), because it feels inauthentic for God to "force" sinners to love him. Similarly, we tend to think that friendships or romantic relationships that are intentional are inauthentic. After all, friendships and romance should be spontaneous and not forced, right? Should we not follow our feelings so that we are true to who we are and what we want? Because of this, it is no surprise that the only covenant left in our culture, marriage, has often lost its covenantal language. Many weddings today replace the traditional marriage vows with creative personalized love poems. For many today, the biggest sin one can commit is being fake.

However, God has no problem relating to his people in covenants. In fact, understanding covenants allows us to further plunge the riches of God's glorious character. Covenants allow God to 1) make huge everlasting promises to his people and 2) teach his people how to enter into his love by loving him back.

God does not use covenants because he enjoys making rules for the sake of rules. He uses them because he is a God of faithfulness and consistency. Unlike us, God does not value spontaneity; he values faithfulness to his relationships. He values consistency. He values keeping his covenant no matter the turbulent changing unsettling circumstances of this world. God cannot lie; God cannot change; God cannot betray. What a Rock he is (Psalm 18:2).

This faithful nature of his translates to his image bearers too. The first five books of the Bible were called the Law in Jesus' day, but that name is a little misleading, as the Law of Moses is not given to God's people until the second half of Exodus. Imagine if the Bible began, not with Genesis, but with the Ten Commandments in Exodus. The law would be the overarching lens through which to view the Christian life. But it's not the beginning of the Bible. Genesis is. And Genesis is a book about God's relational perseverance with a people that disobey him (Genesis 3:21), doubt him (Genesis 16:2), forget about him (Genesis 34:30). Therefore, we actually view the law through the lens of Genesis: God is a relational God, whose law exists primarily to deepen and define his relationship with his people. Remember how Jesus sums up the whole law:

And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." (Matthew 22:37)

God gives his law to call his people into relationship with him. And like himself, he calls them to the same faithful consistency.

The pinnacle of God's relationship with his people is that he sent his Son to mend the relationship that we broke. We turned our backs on our loving Father, and he pursued us anyway. Jesus became a man both to reveal to us our Father (John 1:18), and to die to forgive us for our infidelity (Romans 5:1).

Let us therefore be encouraged to approach our Heavenly Father who sent his only Son to rescue us from our betrayal and bring us back into an everlasting love relationship with him. Amen!