Encouragement from a Friend

One of my friends here in Manila, Ochelle, is the husband of one of my wife's closest friends. Whenever we get together Ochelle and I wind up talking about the bible and theology for a long period of time and after this most recent one he encouraged me to write down thoughts on some of the things we discussed about theology and the bible.

So here is one that I've been thinking about for a while (and will keep thinking about for a while): Covenants.

I have been teaching through Genesis with the church youth in Manila and when coming across the account of the rainbow and the Noahic covenant I tried to think of how to boil down the idea of covenant into a simple idea. What I know of covenants is that it is a common Ancient Near Eastern practice which used certain forms to make a binding relationship between people. And when God makes a covenant he seems to often link the covenant promise with some physical reminder (e.g. Noahic covenant to not destroy the world uses the rainbow as its sign), and that physical sign seems to be linked very closely to the subject of the relationship. So with Noah, the reminder that God will not destroy the earth with a flood is linked to something seen while it is raining. When Abraham had a covenant that his progeny would become a great nation, it is the physical bit related to having kids that gets clipped.

However there seem to be some aspects of covenants that are overstated/misunderstood. Some people think of covenants as a special spiritual contract invented by God particularly for use in spiritual things. But that doesn't seem to be the case. In what we know of Ancient Near Eastern cultures around the time of Abraham, there was already well established customs of contractual relationships referred to as covenants, and many regular people throughout biblical history used covenants for non-spiritual agreements. Now the first time we come across the term is Genesis 6:18 where God is initiating the Noahic covenant. And we have very little historical evidence of anything that far back so it is difficult to say anything for certain about whether God created the covenant and people used it or whether people made covenants and God used it. But what we see elsewhere in the Bible is that God goes out of his way to communicate his intentions and character in culturally meaningful ways. God communicates to people in their own language and culture his character and plans; and in this appropriation of popular culture He changes it. So it seems most likely that God appropriated a common aspect of the culture and used it for His own purposes rather than the opposite since we have evidence for that and not for the other.

Related to this is what seems like an unnecessary enumeration of covenants, in which theologians call every significant relationship of God a covenant. Here Genesis 3:15 is called the adamic covenant despite the term covenant never being used of this divine statement. This follows a well-defined "curse" form and despite grace being seen in the midst of the curse, it doesn't somehow become a covenant because God is promising grace. An even greater reach is that some theologians refer to the triune relationship of God, in particular the hierarchy of the Trinity (the Father sends the Son who sends the Spirit) as a covenant.

So why should this matter? After all God's promises will come true, covenant or not? And God's chosen relational hierarchies will be upheld, covenant or not? So why should we care? Well, when you understand something as an organizing element to scripture and apply those expectations to passages and doctrines that are not naturally part of that concept you add ideas and focus to scriptures and doctrines that weren't intended to be emphasised by God. And that is a dangerous skew of scripture. It can cloud important meaning, or even add meaning that is not there and thus create bad interpretations.