by Andrew Kuyvenhoven

Strictly speaking the Bible isn’t a book about God and it’s not a book about people, but it’s a book that deals with a relationship between God and people. On the first couple of pages the two are together in the garden of communion. In the third chapter they break up. But on the last page of the book they are together again, and they live happily ever after.

We call this relationship between God and God’s people a covenant. It’s an agreement between two partners, a friendship, or a marriage. That covenant goes through a long history—like the covenants between the people whose names are listed in the back pages of The Banner because they have been married for 40, 50, 60, or even 65 years. These people are celebrating the day when he said for the first time, “I am your husband,” and she said, “I am your wife.”

God said, “I am your God,” and, “You are my people.” That’s the constitution of the covenant from Genesis 12 to Revelation 21, where the story ends with this: The dwelling of God is with people. . . . They will be his people, and God himself . . .will be their God. From then on God and his people live in the same house, and all the tears are wiped away.

The Clue and the Glue for Bible Reading

This one covenant of grace is the golden thread that runs throughout biblical history. The church should not allow this thread to slip out of its fingers.

Maybe there was a time when the word covenant (as in “our covenant people,” “our covenant God,” and “our covenant children”) was used too often by preachers and fund-raisers. But that’s no reason to let go of a biblical concept contained in one word that holds the whole Bible together.

The first thing newcomers to the Christian faith see when they hold a copy of the Bible is its division into two parts, an Old and a New Testament. C ovenant and Testament mean the same thing. Covenant and Testament have promises in common. Any Reformed Christian should be able to say why the one is called “old” and the other “new” and what the difference is between the two. Of course, the difference is Jesus, and he is the clue or the key to the Bible. The word covenant is the glue that keeps all of the history together.

In the times of Jesus and Paul, nobody doubted that the covenant with Abraham was still valid. The big question was, Who are the children of Abraham? After all, everyone wants those “blessings of Abraham,” that is, God’s friendship, favor, and protection. That’s why all Christians, Muslims, and Jews say, “Abraham is our father.” Together we represent 3 billion or so people, half the world’s population! But we cannot all be right because we contradict each other. Despite the fact that the children of Abraham and Sarah are now as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand at the beach, there is still a criterion by which people are included or excluded from God’s covenant. That criterion is Jesus, Son of Abraham, Son of David, and Son of God. Race and place are no longer important. God’s people are counted “in Christ”: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29).

One Covenant in Two Dispensations

That one covenant of grace goes through two dispensations, which Christians call “old” and “new.” By “Old Covenant” we don’t mean the covenant with Abraham—of course not. But we mean the covenant that was established with God’s people at Sinai. Moses was the middleman, or mediator, of this Old Covenant. Through him God gave Israel his laws and prescribed the way in which Israel should worship him. The Old Covenant, or Testament, was a temporary arrangement. All its rites and feasts and fasts were symbols of things to come. And all its “thou shalt nots” were preliminaries for the time when a New Covenant would set us free to love and do the Father’s will.

The New Covenant ended the Old. It did not discard the Old Covenant but started the New as the fulfillment of the Old. Just as a seed must grow to become a flower and a fruit, and just as a child must grow to maturity, so the New Covenant is what the Old was intended to become.

One book of the New Testament, Hebrews—addressed to Jewish Christians—has the pointed message that the New Covenant has now become a reality through our only Priest and Mediator, Jesus Christ. Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice on the cross was the never-to-be-repeated Atonement Day for all our sins. Praise God!

This New Covenant was predicted and foreshadowed in the Old Covenant—for example see Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Leviticus 16. The epistle to the Hebrews quotes these texts and explains that the prophecies have now been fulfilled; instead of the shadows, we now have the substance. And yet God’s people in the New Covenant have the sinful tendency to return to the immaturity of the Old Covenant. Even today ministers preach sermons that the rabbi could have given, and Christians put God in a temple of wood and stone instead of being God’s temple themselves.

The apostle Paul got very indignant about this backsliding. In that beautiful and difficult chapter about the riches of the New Covenant (2 Cor. 3), he describes the covenant of Sinai as a shadow land, before the glory of the Son was shining. Actually, a ray of the coming glory was already reflected on the face of Moses. But the people could not yet bear to look at it. Yet you and I are now growing from glory to glory. Without getting into the details of this reasoning, have a look at the contrasts Paul describes between the Old and New Covenant (see box).

The Reformed churches have long had a tendency to think of themselves as Old Testament Israel existing as God’s special people in a Gentile (“heathen”) world. James A. Michener wrote about our Reformed cousins in South Africa. He called his book The Covenant. The picture is probably overdrawn, but his Boers had never heard of the New Covenant through the blood and Spirit of Jesus. They lived and died as Israelites among Amalekites and Philistines. Christian communities that have migrated into a foreign (to them) environment will often regard themselves as Israel among the Gentiles. Then the grace of the covenant is confused with the bloodline of the immigrant community.

Living the New Covenant Life by the Power of the Spirit

Although most people know that the difference between the Old and the New Covenant is Jesus—that his death is the one atonement for our sins—there is another part to the New Covenant blessing that’s often omitted. We should mention not only the blood of Jesus (his death) but also the Spirit of Christ (his resurrection power).

When our Lord was exalted he poured out the Spirit as the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy about a new age. It was the fulfilled promise of a new Spirit in God’s people that would lead them to true obedience (for example, see John 7:37-39 and Acts 2:33 in fulfillment of Isa. 44, Jer. 31, Ezek. 37 and 47, and Joel 2).

Some people think and preach as if in the Old Testament period God was interested in obedience (works) but in the New Testament all is by grace and all we have to do is “believe.” They overlook that the whole purpose of God’s grace and our salvation is that we should be “God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (Eph. 2:10). These works of obedience are not an additional luxury but the proof of the pudding. Only when you believe can you obey. Only when you have a Lord can you boast of your Savior.

The most wonderful and powerful gift of God is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit’s presence in our lives makes us love as we have been loved. And love is the fulfillment of the law. When we render obedience to God by the Spirit of God’s Son, we give what we have first received. Grateful obedience by the power of God’s Spirit is the hallmark of New Covenant living.

Only One Covenant People

One of the modern heresies is the teaching that there are two valid covenants today between God and people. The one is established in Jesus’ blood with all who believe; the other is the enduring covenant with Israel—with everyone who is Jewish, however one would determine that.

This strange teaching is born either from a premillennial zeal or from a general guilt feeling that has possessed Christians since Hitler’s Holocaust. Christian preachers such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee believe in a second covenant out of a premillennial zeal. They talk about Jewish people as the privileged ones in God’s eyes, no matter what they do with God’s Messiah at the present time.

Last summer a Roman Catholic committee of bishops, meeting with American Jewish rabbis, issued a document in which they stated that the Jewish people are preparing for the kingdom of God as much as is the Roman Catholic Church. Therefore mission to Jews is unnecessary, said the bishops, because the Jewish people “also abide in covenant with God.” This committee of Catholic bishops is not alone. A number of Protestant denominations have said to the Jews, in effect, “Your way of salvation is as good as mine because you are an offspring of the people of Israel. You are not an object of our gospel preaching.”

I think that such a position, which allows a way of salvation that bypasses the sacrifice of Jesus, constitutes an insult to our Savior. Such teaching certainly opposes the view of the earliest Christians, who were all Jews.

Every Christian must love and respect every Jew, and we must never forget that we feed on a Jewish book, are saved by a Jewish Messiah (according to the flesh), and that all of us former Gentiles have Abraham the Hebrew as our pilgrim father. The Jews are a phenomenon forever, a reminder to all nations of the living God. But Jesus is the glory of Israel and the revelation of the true God to all the nations. Only in Christ are God’s people gathered and the unity of all nations restored.

(If you wish to study the details of this one-or-two-covenants question, read Jesus & Israel: One Covenant or Two? by David E. Holwerda; Eerdmans, 1995).

Covenant: Our Guide to Scripture and Context for Christian Living

The New Testament church of Christ is heading for big trouble when it forgets the big difference between the Old and the New Testaments. Then it falls back into legalism, the priesthood of the clergy, and the preaching not of Christ but of Boy Scout morality. Rather, the privilege of the New Testament is that the church of Christ lives and grows by the blood and the Spirit of Jesus.

The church also heads for trouble when it neglects the continuity of the Old and New Testaments. Then love replaces law instead of fulfilling its requirements, and the Spirit becomes a separate source of norms instead of the power of a new obedience.

Your and my Christian living is covenant living. That means living with God! I hope you know some model—someone who has really lived with God. Our God-relatedness (being covenantal) includes every aspect of our lives—our children too. (There is still a big difference between baptizing and dedicating children of believers. Perhaps that story needs to be spelled out once again.)

Finally, when Christian living is characterized as covenant living, it’s opposed to individualism. Every Christian must personally know his and her Savior, but nobody has a personal Savior. Christ is the head of the body, the shepherd of the flock, the firstborn of the household. What we have in Christ, we have as part of his body. Our distinguishing color and accent belongs to the people of God, or it is of our own making or clannish inheritance. God has only one covenant people in the whole wide world, and if we would all live as members of that people—always, everywhere—the world itself would be changed.