We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

God as Covenant Keeper
Covenant lies at the heart of the biblical understand of God’s relationship to the world. Simply put, a covenant stands in contrast to a contract where parties enter into a quid pro quo arrangement. With a contract an agreement is made to protect oneself. With a covenant, one commits oneself with promises to another for the sake of the other. This concept of covenant is nothing less than the bridge between the Trinity ad intra and the self-communication of the Trinity ad extra. Scott Swain argues that all of God’s communication is “covenantal self-communication.” It is “by means of covenant…[that] God binds himself to creation in a relationship of sovereign care and commitment and binds creation to himself in a relationship of obedient service.” “By his covenantal word, God creates, redeems, and consummates the world.” [1]
The concept of covenant permeates, and largely structures, the entire biblical narrative. One could say that the rich variety of linguistic forms found in Scripture are all ultimately put in service to one thing: covenant. Kevin Vanhoozer concurs when he notes that “[c]ovenanting is both the substance and the form of God’s characteristic communicative action.”[2] All Scripture must therefore be understood as covenantal discourse. God authorizes agents to speak for him, and “[b]y means of his prophets and apostolic word, God binds himself to his people and his people to himself.”[3] In accordance with this, our reading of Scripture must also be understood as a Spirit-led covenantal activity.
The covenantal self-communication of the triune God culminates, and is fulfilled in, Jesus Christ. In Christ, Paul says, all of God’s promises are “Yes” (2 Cor. 1:20). Nothing is more crucial for a proper understanding of biblical revelation than appreciating the centrality of covenant and understanding Christ as the exhaustive “Yes” of this covenant. And Christ is the “Yes” of this covenant between God and humanity both from the side of God and from the side of humanity.
By becoming the first and only faithful human covenant partner while yet suffering the deserved punishment for all of us who have been unfaithful, Jesus becomes our new representative—our new “Adam” (1 Cor 15:45). When we place covenantal trust in him and pledge our covenant fidelity to him—when we exercise “faith”—we are incorporated into Christ and pronounced “righteous,” which in covenantal terms means we are put in a right relationship with God because we are made participants of Christ’s right-relatedness.
At the same time, in the process of fulfilling the covenant from the human side, Jesus also fulfilled the covenant from God’s side, for Jesus is not only human; he’s the human who is the eternal Word made flesh (Jn 1:14). Hence, in humbling himself to become a human, in living a life of perfect, other-oriented love, and especially by choosing to suffer the death-consequences of our covenant-breaking, Jesus demonstrated God’s loving faithfulness as our covenant partner (Rom. 5:8).
Jesus is thus the definitive “Yes” of both God and humanity within the new covenant that was inaugurated with his self-sacrificial death and was confirmed by his resurrection from the dead. And the fact God is the ultimate keeper of the covenant through the cross becomes the framework within which our thinking about all of God’s self-communication and activity in the world must take place. The meaning, purpose and character of every aspect of God’s covenantal activity must be understood in light of this culminating point.
[1] Swain, Trinity, Revelation and Reading: A Theological Introduction to the Bible and its Interpretation, 6-7, 4, 19, 32.
[2] Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 301.
[3] Swain, 40.
Photo via Visualhunt.com
Category: General
Tags: Covenant, Salvation, Trinity
Topics: Attributes and Character
Related Reading

Isn’t the Gospel of John unreliable compared to the Synoptic Gospels?
Question: The Jesus Legend persuaded me that the Gospels are generally reliable. But I remain very skeptical of the reliability of the Gospel of John. It was written long after the Synoptics, and its view of Jesus barely resembles that of the Synoptics. The main reason this skepticism of John’s Gospel is significant is that…

Podcast: Did Jesus Experience Genuine God-Forsakenness? (parts 1 and 2)
Greg discusses Jesus’ experience of God-Forsakenness, and looks at possible implications for the perfection of the trinity. Part One: http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0178.mp3 Part Two: http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0179.mp3

The Full Meaning of Salvation
Many view salvation as a legal transaction, which means that it’s a mere acquittal from the consequences of sin. While forgiveness of our sin is certainly involved, the NT view of salvation goes far beyond this when it proclaims that Jesus came to save his people from their sins (Mt. 1:23)—not merely the consequences of those sins. In fact,…

Why Are We So Mired in Violence?
In his marvelous little book entitled The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis envisioned hell as a realm in which people are forever moving farther away from one another. Hell is the ultimate, cosmic, suburban sprawl! It seems to me that Western civilization is diving headlong into Lewis’ hell, and we’re being pulled there by the…

Do You Have Enough Faith?
What does it actually mean to have faith? This is a topic I address at length in Benefit of the Doubt, but this post provides a very basic answer to this question. To appropriately understand the New Testament’s teaching on faith, we need to understand faith within the context of our marriage-like covenant with God…

Podcast: What Causes Personal Transformation?
In this episode Greg talks about the important role of imagination in our prayer life and in our thought life. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0005.mp3