Our Bible is characterised by a two-fold division into what has become called known as the Old and New Testaments, which really means covenants. It is sometimes thought that the New Covenant took the place of the Old. This is not so! But neither does this mean that the so-called 'Old Covenant' still continues today!

are a number of covenants of God spoken of in Holy Scripture. The cohesive covenant under which most* Holy Scripture (so-called Old Testament) was formed was the Sinai covenant, but those same Scriptures tell us that this was only covenant number three. So in this summary let's start at the first:

The first mention in the Bible of God-making-a-Covenant concerns the safety of our world after Noah's Flood.

This Covenant was given to reassure and to guarantee the protection of four categories of life on this planet after it had suffered an unparalleled global devastation, and the rainbow was given as its sign or reminder to the human race. This Covenant was promised to Noah 120 years before it happened (Gen.6:3), at the time of God's announcement to Noah that "everything that is on the earth shall die" (Genesis 6:17-20).

By this covenant, commemorated in the book of Revelation in the appearance of the Cherubim of God around His Rainbowed Throne (Revelation 4:3, 7), life will be preserved upon this planet regardless of any factor in human behaviour or our cosmic environment.

The next Covenant of God in Holy Scripture concerns the Land of Palestine and the descendants of Abraham through his miracle child Isaac. The boundaries of this Land are given as – Euphrates river in the North, Wadi El Arish (river of Egypt) in the South, Gulf of Aqaba (Red Sea) in the East, and Mediterranean (sea of the Philistines) in the West.

This Covenant arose from Abraham's faith-filled obedience to God beyond his understanding and yet still needed to wait until the present residents of the Land deserved to loose it by their immoral practices.

The sign or reminder of this Covenant is the physical circumcision of every male child.

This Covenant is conditional on these same terms spelled out to Abraham and amplified in God's Sinai Covenant in which Abraham's descendants are told that they may not ever sell their rural land (outside urban areas) because only God holds title and they are simply tenants upon the land.

After 430 years in Egypt, in which the family of Jacob had become a nation, God led them out to meet with Him at Mount Sinai. In that encounter, God made a Covenant with them as a nation in which its terms and conditions were laid down.

This Covenant contained events and rituals which carried a significance beyond itself, in which God's mind was revealed concerning His way with all mankind. For this reason, Israel's obedience to this Covenant carried the potential that she become a nation of priests to all the rest of humanity.

The sign of this Covenant is the weekly Sabbath from all work (Exodus 31:16), and a seventh-year Sabbath rest for the Land (for the terms of this Covenant contained regulations specific to the Land promised to Abraham's descendants through Isaac and Jacob). The Covenant was represented in the two tablets of stone on which the hand of God had written its moral summary known as the Ten Commandments kept in a gold-clad wooden box known as the Ark of the Covenant.

The community created by this Covenant allowed the beginning of the written Word of God, which would now grow by God's revelation, even through Israel's disobedience, to express the character of God responsively to every variety of situation in history (Romans 3:1-3).

The grandson of Aaron took action when all those senior to himself were inundated by the circumstance of the plague destroying Israel (24,000 dead) for its unfaithfulness with Moabite gods and Midianite immorality. His decisive violent action stopped the judgment of God on his nation, and in honour of him God made a Covenant that his descendants would be the High Priests of Israel forever. This continued, except for a break during Eli's priesthood, after David became king over all Israel.

David's unconditional love for God from childhood leading to his desire to build an appropriate house for the Ark of Israel's Covenant results in God making a Covenant with him instead to make his house an everlasting royal dynasty (2 Sam.23:5; Ps.89:3-4). This covenant finds its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth, who was legally its heir through Joseph via Solomon son of David, and biologically through Mary via Nathan son of David.

modern Bible translations have confused a remarkable reality expressed in Revelation 13:8.

Although the structure of the original language favours the translations below, some versions such as Darby, ASV, BBE, CEV, EMTV, ERV, ESV, GNB, and MKJV have made the issue to be the non-recording of names in the book of life from the foundation of the world of the worshipers of Antichrist ('every one whose name hath not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that hath been slain' ASV). This tends to rob us of a special Biblical perspective.

    The better translations of this verse read –

Bible is telling us that the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ was done in God's mind from the beginning (as stated in 1 Peter 1:20 also). In other words, all sin ever forgiven by God in any age, from the beginning, has been only on the basis of Christ's anticipated atonement alone. His atoning sacrifice, commemorated by Christians at every Communion/Eucharist service, did not take the place of animal sacrifices, but animal sacrifices had simply pointed to the ultimate offering prepared from the beginning.

This was anticipated in God's prophetic judgment on the walking-serpent who seduced Eve: "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He will bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel" (Gen.3:15 LITV). The triumph of good over evil, righteousness over corruption, has always centred in the Christ of God as far as God is concerned.

When Jesus, before His sacrificial death, called it a New Covenant in His blood, it was because of its contrast to the Sinai Covenant by which His disciples had lived up to that time. So, Jesus in His last Passover Supper effectively says to them that this Sinai Covenant is now ending through its fulfillment in Him as the Lamb of God.

It is in this sense that, in Isaiah's prophecy, God says of Israel's Messiah "I will give You as a Covenant for the people, a Light for the nations" (Isa.42:6) and again "I will keep You and give You as a Covenant to the people" (Isa.49:8).

outward sign of this Eternal Covenant is believer's baptism (representing death to the old, and resurrection to the new) –

And the individual social sign is –

direct consequence of Christ's visible return in resurrection glory is that the public repentance of Israel's remnant (Zechariah 12:10; 13:8) brings them as a nation into the Eternal Covenant of God in Jesus Christ.

This Scripture is cited in Hebrews 10 as the application of what God fulfilled in Jesus Christ as a latter days national fulfillment.

"Then everyone who survives of all the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Booths. And if any of the families of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, there will be no rain on them." (Zechariah 14:16-17).

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The Election of Israel

The Christian Gospel

A Biblical Structure of History

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