Why Care About Covenants

Why should Christians care about covenants? They make up a very small proportion of the Bible, yet I would argue their importance is much greater than the meager amount of mention they receive. Why are they so important and why should Christians care about them this much? The answer is that the Biblical covenants mark the path of progression through the Old and New Testaments. To explain this, we need to talk about the way that the Old Testament and the New Testament are taught.

Within the church, we commonly teach the Old Testament and the New Testament in two very different ways. We teach the Old Testament as the age of Israel (and pre-Israel), where God has singled out Israel to be his chosen people. This often means that God is working in ways that are unique or otherwise limited in scope. For example, we do not expect that the story of the Tower of Babel is an instruction of what God will do every time people try to build a tall tower out of pride and hubris. The events surrounding the Tower of Babel were unique; they were something that God did once. Additionally, God interacts with Israel in a way that’s very different from the way he interacts with every other nation. His interactions with Israel are limited in scope. God did not expect ancient China to not eat pork just because he had commanded ancient Israel to not eat pork.

As an analogy, the way we teach the Old Testament is similar to how one would teach about rotary phones. For those of us too young to have experienced them firsthand, the existence of rotary phones is important to learn about if you want to understand where the phrase of “dialing a phone number” came from. However, it is unlikely that you will ever need to dial a number on a rotary phone in the modern day. Similarly, we teach the importance of knowing the Old Testament so that we can understand how we got to the New Testament, but treat much of it as otherwise not applicable today.

Despite the Old Testament being treated as ancient history, we don’t treat the nearly two thousand year old New Testament that way. We teach the New Testament as the age of the church, and so what applied two thousand years ago is seen as still applying today. While the events may have happened a long time ago, the teachings are evergreen. When a question arises pertaining to Christian living, we would sooner jump to one of Paul’s letters for advice than to Leviticus or Jeremiah.

I want to stress that this is not an overall poor way to teach the Old and New Testaments in general. It is certainly true that much of what is commanded within the Old Testament does not necessarily apply for Christians today. When we teach such a passage in the Old Testament, it is right to discuss how and why it differs from what Christians may do.

However, when this is taught repeatedly for many Old Testament passages, it can start to give the impression that the New Testament is merely a replacement for the Old Testament. It can seem like God decided to do things one way and then on a whim decided to do things another way. Maybe one starts to feel that God gets frustrated with things not working in the Old Testament and decides to make changes in the New Testament. Regardless of the reasoning, someone who hears the Old Testament taught this way can feel that it is quite disjointed from the New Testament.

One thing that is done to prevent this is to teach about the prophecies within the Old Testament that predict the coming of Jesus. This can start to connect the Old and New Testaments together, so that the Bible doesn’t feel like two separate books from different religions. Similarly, we can teach about the commands and events in the Old Testament that point forward to and are shadows of things within the New Testament. For example, the events of the Tower of Babel are taught to have been reversed in the events of Pentecost in Acts 2. Or how the sacrifices described in Leviticus are fulfilled in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.

These are all things that we ought to teach, and they go a long way towards showing the maturing Christian why the Old Testament is so important. But even if they accomplish their goal of making the Old Testament and New Testament feel more related, they also emphasize the ways in which the New Testament replaces things from the Old Testament. So, the feelings that God decided to cut his losses with things that didn’t work in the Old Testament and replace it with the New Testament can still remain.

The solution to this problem is the covenants. The covenants that God makes with various people or groups of people represent the culmination of God's activity throughout the Bible. Teaching these covenant promises gives Christians the big picture of how God has been advancing his plan of salvation. If we understand the Old Testament covenants, then it becomes clear that the New Testament is not a replacement of what God has been doing, but a continuation. The whole Bible is a single progressive story of how God has revealed himself to us and set in motion his plan to rescue us.

So why care about covenants? Because the Biblical covenants show how God has been working His plan to rescue us since the very beginning.