The Importance of Studying Covenantal Salvation History

Series of Covenants God Established Down Through the Ages

Now, what I propose to do is to simplify Old Testament covenantal salvation history by focusing upon the
sequence or series of covenants that God established down through the ages of the Old Testament
leading up to and climaxing with the coming of Christ. Now, you might not know all the names right off
the top of your head, but I think you'll recognize them.

We can first speak of a covenant with Adam. Pope John Paul II in one of his encyclicals Redemptor
Hominis underscores the fact that God established a creation, a covenant bond, with humanity, with A-
dam. Adam's name is not only the name of an individual, the founding father of the human race, but it's
also the Hebrew word for humanity, much like we use the word Washington to denote the founding
father of our country and the capitol of our country, as well.

So Adam is that name of the father and of the entire human family. The covenant that John Paul II
underscores (he also mentions this in April, 1986, for those who are keeping score) is in a sense the
foundational covenant from which all of the others in the Old Testament spring. The second covenant
that God establishes with the human family is with Noah and his household. The third covenant,
centuries and centuries later, is with the patriarch Abraham or Abram, as he was known then, initially,
before God changes his name. There Abraham was a chieftain over a tribal household that God was
willing to identify as his own and administer it through the covenant.

Then Abraham had a son Isaac, and Isaac had a son named Jacob and Jacob had twelve sons, who all in a
sense fathered large families which became the twelve tribes of Israel. Why Israel? Because God had
changed Jacob's name to Israel. So, the twelve sons of Israel became twelve tribes and formed under
Moses a national covenant.

At Mt. Sinai after the Exodus and the Passover, God established a covenant with Moses and Israel to
make them his people. Then the last covenant that we will focus upon in our overview this week will be
the Old Testament covenant with King David and his son Solomon because there, the nation of Israel was
granted by God a kind of power and prominence that was not just any old nation's possession. When
you become a kingdom, that means you rule over other nations. You make them vassals or colonies or
what-have-you. That's what God does when he establishes a covenant with David.
There we have the Old Testament covenants in sequence leading up to the coming of Christ. First with
Adam, second with Noah, third with Abraham, fourth with Moses and fifth with David. Then Jesus Christ
comes to establish the new covenant.

How to Understand Covenant

Now, there are various ways to understand covenant. Some people might use the word interchangeably
with contract as in 20th century American parlance. I'll say right from the outset: that is a misleading
usage. The difference between covenant and contract in the Old Testament and throughout scripture is
so profound; the difference could almost be highlighted by saying it's the difference between
prostitution; contract, and marriage; covenant. Or between slavery; having a slave and having a son.

Contractual relations usually exchange property, exchange goods and services whereas covenants
exchange persons. So when people enter into a covenant, they say, "I am yours and you are mine." So
God uses the covenant to enter into a relationship with those whom he created in his own image:
humanity and all human persons. I'll take it one step further and try to simplify it and make it practical.

Based on the scholarship of countless scholars over the decades, covenant can be properly understood, I
believe, to be a sacred family bond. In ancient Israel, there was no word for family. Somebody could
conclude, "Well, maybe for the ancient Hebrews family is not important." But you can't read very far in
the Old Testament before you realize that for them tribal bonds, kinship obligations, marriage and
parenthood and brotherhood -- all of these family relations are unbreakable bonds that God himself has
instituted. So, obviously for the ancient Hebrews, family was very important. But then why no word for
it?

I'm convinced and I'm arguing in a dissertation presently that "covenant" was that word, -- that when
you establish a covenant, you establish a family bond; and that when God covenants with humanity in
that series of Old Testament covenants, what he is doing is, He is fathering his people. He's fathering his
family. So in order to clarify and simplify why he did it, when he did in the Old Testament, we can think of
the first covenant with Adam as the marriage covenant. "He created man, male and female he created
them, and he blessed them and bid them be fruitful."

So he established humanity in a marital covenant and then, the second covenant is with Noah. Now,
when a covenant is made with Noah, it's made with Noah who is married, but he also has three sons
who are also married. Together they form in Hebrew what would be known as a "bethob" or a
household or a family. So our second pact will move from one holy Catholic marriage to one holy
Catholic family and then the third covenant with Abraham is made with the chieftain who, in a sense,
leads and rules over, what you would call in Hebrew, "mishbahah", or a tribe.
God's family now has moved from a marriage to become a household, to become a tribe made up of
many households and many, many marriages - - he had domestic servants by the hundreds under his
authority, we might not have realized that before. Then when the twelve tribes of Israel are covenanted
to God at Mt. Sinai under Moses, there you have a national family, one national family of God, made up
of twelve tribes, hundreds of households and presumably thousands of marriages. So, the structure of
the covenant is always familistic, domestic. God administers kinship relations and obligations through
the covenant. It's a blood bond. Ultimately the covenant he establishes with David is intent upon raising
Israel to the level where Israel can subjugate these other nations and force them, or in a sense, urge
them to come up to Jerusalem annually in order for the nations to learn the law of God, the wisdom that
God has given to King Solomon, the son of David.

In other words, God, through these covenants is doing his best to take that one human family which has
been broken apart by sin, which has been torn apart by violence and injustice; he is trying to reunify this
disunified human family we know as the human race. It's his family but it's broken by sin, and the
covenants are the means by which he reunites and reconciles it unto himself.

Now, having said that -- that's just like a bird's-eye view of what we want to accomplish because as we
finish the series out this week what I hope to highlight or underscore is the fact that when Jesus Christ
comes, he doesn't abolish and annihilate the Old Testament, what he does, he completes it and he
perfects it. How? By taking what was in David's time a national kingdom, by taking that national kingdom
and making it an international kingdom. The Greek word for international is "catholic" and that catholic
kingdom which is not political or military but rather spiritual, ecclesiastical, and sacramental is what we
know as the one, holy, Catholic or worldwide Church, the family of God, the Communion of Saints.

This is so key for us as Catholics because we need to see that God has blessed us by making us Catholics,
bringing us into his family, and giving us the grace so that we can be the tools and instruments that he
uses to reconcile all the entire human race to himself. Do we realize the privilege we have as Catholics?
Humanity has a corporate destiny: to become the one, unified family of God. The Catholic Church is the
sacramental organism, the sacramental family by which this will be accomplished supernaturally.

Natural human power is incapable, so the supernatural grace of Christ comes to form a new covenant, a
worldwide family in Christ's own flesh and blood. Vellanicole, a scholar who has done a work on Divine
Sonship, in his doctrinal dissertation said, "In the Israelite tradition, the covenant relation always had
something of the family about it." So important because what is it that unites family members? Flesh
and blood and a common name. So what is it that unites us in the Catholic family? The name we
received when we were baptized and reborn into the Catholic Church. We were baptized "in the name of
the Father, Son and Holy Spirit." The Trinity is the eternal and original family. We've got a Father and a
Son and those aren't our names that we threw onto the inscrutable, unknowable God. Those are the
names that God himself has revealed to us so that we might know what God is in himself, a family -- a
Father, a Son and Spirit whose name we receive when we are reborn and adopted and brought into
God's family in baptism.

Then in the Eucharist that family bond is perfected and strengthened because there we receive the flesh
and blood of the founding Father of this new family, this new covenant, Christ, the second Adam. Paul
calls him the second Adam because in his own flesh and blood he has formed a new human race, a new
human family which he feeds, nurtures and expands through the Eucharist. When we receive Eucharistic
Communion, do we look upon that as a family meal given to us by the very sacrifice of Christ in his own
flesh and blood, so that we can be bonded to God the Father, that we can become in a sense, adopted
members of the Trinity as our family, so that heaven can be our home?