I still have a group of men meeting at the house every other Friday. We’re still working our way through the covenants and I am introducing them to Covenant Theology. So far it has been an interesting and enjoyable study.
We’ve worked through identifying and distinguishing what a covenant is and what it is not. We’ve looked at what is called the Covenant of Grace in Genesis 2 and the Covenant of Works of Genesis 3. This has set the framework for the rest of our time on the topic. My intent now is to work through the major covenants of the Bible to consider how they relate to each other and to the CoG/CoW.
For homework, I’ve asked them to be familiar with the covenants made with Abraham, Moses, David, and the New Covenant mentioned in Jeremiah. Not only should they be familiar with these covenants, but they should understand what purpose they had in redemptive history.
To help prepare and to satisfy a curiosity, I am reading Abraham, Israel, and the Nations as it is a work that focuses primarily on the covenants made with Abraham in Genesis 15 and 17. So far I am happy with this choice.
Below are some notes I found helpful which I want to preserve for later discussion:
As the next chapter will show, the majority of exegetes have started with the assumption that God established a single covenant between Abraham and himself. Consequently, the presence of a second chapter within the Abraham narrative announcing the establishment of a divine covenant with Abraham has usually been explained in one of three ways:
- Genesis 15 and 17 reflect two separate stages (stressing, respectively, divine and human responsibilities) in the ratification of a single covenant established between God and Abraham;
- Genesis 17 constitutes a divine reaffirmation or renewal of the covenant that was formally ratified in Genesis 15, yet ‘jeopardized’ by the behaviour of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 16;9
- Genesis 15 and 17 derive from different literary sources that have been incorporated into the final form of the book of Genesis;10 thus the idea of two distinct covenantal events has been introduced artificially by a redactor.