BUILDING

UNDERSTANDING:

WHAT THE BIBLE IS

ALL ABOUT
by Rev. Don Bryant

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It is a great irony that the Bible is the best selling book of all times, but for so many who
own a copy it is the least read. One survey indicates that only 12% of the people who said they
believe the Bible actually read it everyday; 34% read it once a week, and 42% read it only once in
a great while.
What could explain this? Maybe you have heard comments like the following:
The Bible is such a big book. Reading it seems daunting, especially when so few
barely find the time to scan the daily newspaper. The average American reads only one book a
year. The Bible on the desk in front of me has over 1500 pages. For many people, beginning,
finishing and understanding a book of 1500 pages is a never before attempted feat. Its just
intimidating. But is that a sufficient reason for not reading it? Surely not. Surprisingly to most,
the Bible can be read in 80 hours total, or only 15 minutes a day for a year.
I just dont understand what I read. People may have a favorite verse here and
there. But for them the Bible is a book filled with customs, laws, history, people and unfamiliar
ideas. Getting the story line straight and the themes clear so that the different parts fit is difficult.
Many have jumped in and made a promise that they would read it through, but they have given
up in quiet frustration - quiet because people generally dont shout out that they have stopped
really trying to read their Bible.
The words are too unfamiliar. I cant even pronounce some of them. The Bible
most people own and try to read is an English translation of the Bible called the King James
Version. It is over 400 years old. While the King James Version remains a classic translation of
the Hebrew and Greek languages in which the Bible was originally written, word usage and
grammar have changed significantly since it was first published. Todays reader can find such
word choices and style a challenge, to say the least. Today there are over large number newer
translations of the Bible from which the reader to choose. The Bible translation for this booklet is
the English Standard Version.
People use the Bible to defend all kinds of things. Who really knows what it
means? It is true. People have quoted the Bible to support acts that are despicable and
universally condemned. It has been used to support slavery, cruelty to women, religious wars and
even outright torture to convert people to the faith. This has made the Bible an object of
suspicion to many.
But for many the chief reason that the Bible remains a closed book is that they do not
understand the basic message and story line. It just seems to be a mix of personalities, stories,
and teachings that cannot be put together. Without knowing the structure and flow of the biblical
story, Bible reading becomes sort of pot luck, a hit and miss thing, filled with long genealogies,
chapters of temple ritual, bloody war, and miracles that to the modern mind seem like fairy tales.
Finding a reason to read it just escapes many people. Except for the fact that it continues to be
the most published book in the world and preached across the globe each Sunday! What could
account for this? Surely it is because Jesus of Nazareth, its central figure, dominates the
landscape of world history. We live in a Jesus haunted world, as one has put it.

The sad result is that too many leave the Bible unread and depend upon one sermon a
week for their Bible knowledge, along with an occasional Christian radio program, cd, or
Christian book. Are you one of those? I wrote this brochure to help you move past this barrier.
While God has provided the church with able teachers, they can never substitute for the absence
of your own systematic and careful meditation on Gods Word. It is your capacity to mine its
riches that will in large measure determine the level of your spiritual life. God speaks your
language! You can read His Word and know the very mind of God!
Even if you are a skeptic, the Bible is a basic fact of western civilization. Any person who
considers himself educated should have a working familiarity with any book that is at the center
of the cultural formation of the western world. Its content explains much of what we take for
granted our laws and judicial system, the sciences, medicine, the arts, literature, civil rights,
eradication of slavery, the free enterprise economy, and the phenomenal number of charitable
organizations that are part of the DNA of the western world. Of course, the Bible itself is not a
western book. It impacts the nations of the world. Christianity is the first global religion and
today continues its amazing growth, even as it did in the ancient world.

Laying The Foundation:

Unity of the Bible
Lets start with laying a foundation as we build toward an understanding of Gods Word
to us. An overview of the Bible will get you ready for your journey into understanding.
ONE THEME. The focus of the Bible is God becoming King. The Genesis story tells
how our first parents in alliance with the Evil One rebelled against the sovereign majesty of God.
The kingdom of righteousness and peace was destroyed and Gods beneficent lordship over the
earth rejected. The Bible is the story, the long, twisting, turning, dramatic and surprising story, of
how God came back to his throne through the fulfillment of his promises to Israel, there to reign
again. In reality, God is always and forever a King, and no one can challenge his place or
authority. But in a world of free will and human choice, Gods place has been challenged and his
purposes seemingly overthrown. God may be challenged but he is up to it. He will not win back
his kingdom through brute force and authority but through mercy and love that reaches to the
heart of men and brings them back into a covenanted love relationship with their true Lord. He
will do this through a single saving hero whom God promised would rescue us from the
destructive power and consequences of sin. That Savior is called the Messiah.1 Jesus of Nazareth
is that hero, and he begins his public ministry at age 30 with the words, "The time is fulfilled, and
the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel." (Mar 1:15) In Jesus, the
Kingdom has become present and operative, though not yet in all of its glory. All who belong to
God operate in Kingdom realities, Kingdom values, Kingdom provisions. In Christ, the night is
turning to day. "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you."(Eph
5:14) He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful among you.(2Co 13:3) At the same

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time the church prays, Our Lord, come!(1Co 16:22) All the while, the church waits faithfully
and patiently for that glory which shall appear.But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits,
then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the
kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he
must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is
death. (1Co 15:23-26)
ONE STORY. Though the Bible was written over a period of 1600 years by 44 different
authors, it tells one story. The Apostle Paul, the author of thirteen of the 29 books in the New
Testament, put it this way.
Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong [a reference to the first
man, Adam] and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did
it right [Christ] and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble,
he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong;
one man said yes to God and put many in the right. (Romans 5, The Message
translation). 2
It is the story of our creation, fall into sin and misery, and the promise of a single
Deliverer who would succeed where we have failed and give to us all a new beginning.
That story is told in two parts. Any Bible you pick up is divided into two sections, the
Old Testament and one the New Testament. The Old Testament covers the time of creation, the
fall of our race into sin, the promise of a Deliverer and the preparation for His coming through
Gods choice of Israel as the carrier of the message of a Kingdom of restoration that is to come.
The New Testament covers the coming of that Deliverer, who the New Testament writers assert
is Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ (or Messiah), and describes the work of deliverance he
performed. Through him the Kingdom of God comes. This is the Gospel, the Good News. The
Good News, or Gospel, is not how one gets saved. The message is that God has become King
and the earth is now released from the power of the Evil One. How one enters the kingdom is
part of that message but not the whole of it.
Many see the Gospel as essentially a message of how the sinner can be forgiven of his sin
and go to heaven when he dies, the plan of salvation. It is something purely private, purely
personal. In this conception of the Gospel the story of Israel and Kingdom and the fact that Jesus
was a Jew are stripped from the story. The robust Kingdom of God message of the Bible is more
than about getting saved. In fact, the message of the Kingdom is about something more
objective and of larger proportions. It concerns the enthronement of God in the person of Jesus as
Lord over the earth.2a The reality is that the normal message of salvation preached in most
churches is not found in the form so commonly used in the Gospels at all. Is it not strange that
the typical preaching about how to go to heaven when you die is hardly referred to in the Gospels
at all, the very stories that focus on the birth, life and death of Jesus. How could that be? This
alone suggests to us that the typical framing of the Gospel as we preach it is not as rooted as
much as we suppose in the Jesus story. The struggle here is trying to wedge the Plan of Salvation
as we have framed it into the kingdom vision, something Jesus does not do quite the way many

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would like him to have done. Perhaps the form of our Gospel presentations is taken not so much
from the Bible as we read it as the way we have shaped it in order to call for decisions from those
to whom we preach. In other words, the Gospel we preach, while true, might not be the actual
Good News Jesus proclaimed. If one studies the sermons of the Apostles in the Book of Acts,
one looks in vain for the usual Gospel proclamation as Evangelicals know it, but there is a lot
about Jesus as the completion of the story of Israel. Go back and read those sermons and ask
yourself why the Gospel was preached in this way. Acts 2:14 39; Acts 3:12 26; Acts 4:8 12;
Acts 10:34 43, with 11:4 18; Acts 13:16 4;1 Acts 14:15 17; Acts 17:22 31. These are
classic examples of first-century evangelism.
This second part of the Bible includes Jesus miraculous birth, his sinless life, sacrificial
death, resurrection and ascension to heaven with a promise that he will come again at the end of
history to establish the fullness of his glorious and gracious reign, a reign that has now begun
through Jesus ascension to heavens throne. Until then he will send his Spirit to guide this new
Israel into all truth and sustain it under all temptation and persecution. The New Testament
moves on to describe the growth of the fledgling church through the preaching and leadership of
the Apostles, those appointed by Jesus to represent him and to proclaim the message of salvation
through Jesus name. The historical period which the Bible reports ends in circa 64 CE.3
Following this period of time we look to extrabiblical sources to give information concerning the
growth of the church from a fledgling group of discouraged disciples to becoming the major
religion of the Roman Empire is the 300s CE.
ONE BOOK: The Bible is a library of sorts, since it contains 66 different books. But
because it has one theme and one story with all of its parts in agreement, the 66 writings are
considered to be one book. (The word Bible simply means book). What can explain this
amazing degree of unity in the midst of all the variety of personalities, cultures, customs,
experiences, and times? Simply this: God is its ultimate author. He inspired various writers to
so communicate the story of redemption that they faithfully rendered both story and message.
Behind and beneath the Bible, above and beyond the Bible, is the God of the Bible. It was
produced by one Mind though written out by many hands. God used the unique personalities,
experiences, and gifts of the individual authors, but he so carefully superintended the process that
the outcome of their writing was an accurate expression of Gods message to us. Jesus himself
expressed this confidence in the Old Testament, esteeming it to be Gods very word. That is why
Christians often call the Bible the Word of God. Two words characterize the Christian view of
the Bible: inspired and infallible. As BB Warfield has written, The Bible says equals God says.
ONE PURPOSE. The Bible was written so that Christ, who is its central figure, may be
understood by you and then believed upon as your Deliverer from sin and its consequences. It is
not primarily a history book, though it is historical. It is not essentially a book of philosophy,
though it contains the best and truest of ideas. It is not a book of good advice, though it contains
the highest and holiest of counsels.
The Bibles ultimate value is personal. It is the story of a personal God, who came to us
in a personal way through Christ, to accomplish a personal salvation which he personally offers
to you. To read the Bible is to be addressed by the living God who desires that no one should

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perish. It is a living Book. Its words jump from the page and connect with matters of the heart.
It is the medicine we must have, the road we must take, the life we must receive.

The Building Blocks:

Some Basic Information about the Books of the
Bible
With the foundation in place, you can begin to construct your understanding of the Bible
through knowledge of each of its 66 books and their place in the larger story. Though the theme,
story and purpose of the Bible are singular, they are recounted in a variety of styles and types of
writing. A quick overview of the 66 books will frame in the building for you, as it were.
1. The Old Testament contains 39 different books.4
They are organized in the following way.5
Books of the Law - 5
These are the first five books of the Bible Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy. They are called the Law because they contain one of the more
significant features of the Bible, the giving of the Law (including the Ten
Commandments) to the Jewish people. Moses is the traditional author of these books,
and they cover the creation of the world, the fall of our first parents into sin, Gods
judgment of the entire world through a flood and the confusion of languages, the
forming of the nation called Israel as Gods special instrument for preserving true
knowledge of himself, and the rescue of Israel from bondage in Egypt, called The
Exodus. At this point it would not hurt to look at Cecil B. DeMilles production, The
Ten Commandments. The film is a fairly faithful rendering of the biblical story.
Historical Books - 12
These books follow immediately after the Books of the Law and cover the story of
Israel after their entrance into the land God promised (modern day Palestine) after the
Exodus from Egypt. This portion includes Israels establishment as a nation, exile
from that land 800 years later for their disobedience to God, and finally her return to
the land after 70 years of captivity in Babylon. Following Israels return, the Temple
is rebuilt and the land resettled. Then the curtain falls on Old Testament history.
Christ is born 400 years later. There is no book in the Bible that covers this 400
hundred year period, though there are many extrabiblical books that do, some of which
are in the section attached to the Roman Catholic Bible, called the Apocrypha. The
historical books include (in the order of their appearance in the Bible): Joshua,
Judges, Ruth, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1& 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah and
Esther.
Books of the Prophets - 17

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God regularly sent His messengers to Israel to guide them into blessing and to warn
them of the consequences of moving away from true worship and love of the living
God. These 17 books cover their ministry. They can be grouped in different ways but
one of the more common is the following
Prophets who spoke Gods Word before the Exile of Israel to Babylon, warning
Israel of coming judgment if they would not turn to God:
Obadiah, Joel, Jonah, Amos, Hosea, Michah, Isaiah, Nahum, Jeremiah,
Lamentations, Zephaniah, and Habakkuk
Prophets who spoke Gods Word during the Exile:
Ezekiel and Daniel
Prophets who spoke Gods Word after the Exile:
Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi
Each book has a message appropriate for Israels time and situation, revealing spiritual
principles that still instruct us today.
The Writings - 8
This division of the Old Testament is contained in its own section of the Hebrew Bible
actually titled The Writings. This is an apt description of this section of the Bible
because the books there are not of just one type. There is history, prophecy, and
poetry. While we are not sure why these particular books were originally grouped
together in this way, it seems that they all fit into a category often called wisdom
literature, a common literary form in the Ancient Near East. They are writings that are
geared toward insight, understanding the meaning behind the observable events of
history. Here one would think especially of a book like Job, the famous sufferer. This
book takes on the issue of making sense of affliction. Thereafter each book seems to
have its own particular project. For instance, the Song of Solomon explores the
mystery of love, the Book of Daniel probes the mysteries of what the future holds in
store and the Psalms speak of the most mysterious of all phenomena, the relationship
between the human soul and God.
The writings contain the following books: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon,
Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther.
The Old Testament leads us up to 400 years before the coming of Christ. Israel,
formerly a glorious kingdom flowing with milk and honey as the Bible puts it, had
become a small, struggling nation under the domination of foreign powers - first
Babylon, then the Medes and the Persians, followed by Greece and finally Rome. It
was only a shadow of what it had been before under the kingship of David (circa 1000
BC) and his son Solomon. Now a weak nation subject to the will of the superpowers
of its day, Israel began to long in a new way for Gods promised Deliverer.

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Unfortunately, some began to lose sight of the spiritual work that was most needed and
focused on a political, economic, and military restoration. When Gods Deliverer
came to Israel as the true King, the Bible records that He was overlooked, for, as he
taught, his kingdom was not of this world. (John 18:36) In fact, He even ended up
being crucified as a troublemaker and disturber of the peace. The King had come but
his kingdom of justice and love offered to the humble and the poor in spirit was
rejected. (John 1:11.12)
But some had eyes to see and understood that the Messiah who would come would not
be a famous soldier, economist, or political figure. He would come as a humble
servant who would die upon a cross to pay the penalty for sins and bestow. The New
Testament records this story.

2. The New Testament contains 27 books

These are books written by the apostles, the immediate band of disciples appointed by
Christ himself to follow him and witness to His life, words, and works. There are
several exceptions to this Lukes and Marks Gospels, the Book of Hebrews, the
Book of James and the Book of Jude. In the case of the Gospel accounts, both Luke
and Mark bore the stamp of apostolic authenticity since they were near associates of
the Apostles and had direct access to the information they possessed, writing during
the lifetime of the Apostles themselves, and therefore subject to correction or concern
about irregularity of their work. In the case of Hebrews, there is no certainty of its
author. Traditionally it has been attributed to the Apostle Paul, but most conservative
biblical scholars are skeptical of that claim. The suggestions vary. What we do know is
that Hebrews was early on accepted by the church as Holy Scripture even as then there
was some doubt as to its author. The James of the Book of James was not the Apostle
James referred to in the Gospels but the brother of our Lord and leader of the
Jerusalem church. (James the Apostle and brother of John had become one of the first
martyrs and was soon off the stage of early church history). Jude was also the brother
of Jesus and of James. So even in the cases where there was not direct apostolicity,
there was undoubted nearness to the sources of genuine witness to Christ and an
acceptance by the church of their message as inspired by the Holy Spirit.
Gospels - 4
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the four Gospels, which are essentially
eyewitness accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, whom the writers
believed to be the Messiah. These are not strictly speaking biographies. They contain
historical accounts but their purpose was more than historical. They were written to
inform and persuade. In this sense they are what we would call tracts. Why are there
four and not only one? The fact is that Christ can be seen and understood from many
different angles and with varying points of interest, all along being in agreement with
the basic outline of his life and the significance of his ministry. While no other
eyewitness and authoritative accounts of Jesus are extant today, there are indications of

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many such accounts circulating in the ancient near east. But it is these four that won
the confidence of the first and second generation Christians and which were ultimately
affirmed as authoritative carriers of the story of Jesus.6

History - 1
This is the Book of Acts. It records the history of the church from the time of Christs
resurrection to about 30 years later when the Good News of Christ had been preached
and believed upon throughout the Roman Empire, reaching to and going beyond Rome
itself.

Epistles - 21
The various churches the Apostles had started were the primary recipient of these
letters, with instructions on how to order their life together as Christ-followers and
with further teachings about Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote thirteen of these letters.
The remaining eight are called the General Epistles, because they are written by
various apostles to Christians everywhere irrespective of the church to which they may
belong.
Pauls letters were probably written in the following order. I use the word probably
because in some cases there is no definite way to date the exact time and occasion of
writing. 1 & 2 Thessalonians , Galatians, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians,
Colossians, Philemon, Philippians, 1 Timothy, Titus, 2 Timothy.
The order of the General Epistles is: Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, 1 & 2 & 3 John,
and Jude
Prophecy - 1
This is the final book in the Bible, titled The Revelation, written by John, who also
authored the fourth Gospel and three of the General Epistles. Through visions and
imagery the work of God in human history is revealed in its true meaning and the
completion of His work at the end of time is foretold. In style, it is grouped with a
genre of writing of that time known as apocalyptic literature. Using images, symbols,
numbers, visions, mixed with historical allusions, apocalyptic books spoke of the end
of the world in the great cosmic conflict that lies behind all history, the battle between
God and the Devil. Some have tried to give to each detail a definite historical reference
point as if in Revelation there is a point by point description of traceable events in
history as we know it. Such schemes, always tried and always falling short of their
mark, leave the essential point out Gods mysterious ways are beyond human
knowing but what we do know is that God is victor and that his appointed Messiah
will be fully enthroned at the end of human history. There are apocalyptic books in the
Old Testament, which compare to Revelation, most notably Ezekiel, Daniel and
portions of Zechariah, and which provide John some of his key imagery. Church
tradition is that Revelation is not only the final book in the collected books of the New

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Testament but also the last written. John, the last of the Apostles, wrote his work in the
mid-90s. John died in exile, the only Apostle that we know did not die a martyrs
death, though he did die a prisoner on account of the word of God and the testimony
of Jesus. (Revelations 1:9)

The Mortar: The Covenants

Remember history classes in high school? An unending lists of dates,

persons, and events! It all got rather boring and tedious. Ever since just the word history
triggers in many a rather unpleasant sensation and memories of cramming a cascade of numbers
for exams. Unfortunately, that is how some people respond to a study of the Bible. It covers
1600 years of history and it, too, has a rather imposing parade of kings, prophets, countries,
personalities, and events. That is as you would expect it would be, since the Bible is a study of
Gods acts in history. This alone makes the Bible unlike many holy books of other world
religions, which seem to aloof from history and more focused on ideas rather than Gods
historical interventions. But what is the story line? What is the theme that holds all this together,
like mortar holds together the bricks of a building? If you do not get the big picture of the plot
and how it develops, then you can easily lose your way.
This is made the more difficult because the books of the Bible as we now have them are not in a
completely chronological order. There is a rough time sequence to the placing of the books. but
from time to time a book will be placed in such a way that the story line is not completely clear.
For instance, after the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which tell of the rebuilding of Jerusalem and
the temple after Israel returned from her captivity in Babylon, there follows the Book of Job and
then of Psalms, Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon. These are The Writings, as mentioned
above. They may have history in them but their primary character is that of poetry, song, and
meditative insight. These are then followed by books of the various prophets, which belong to
differing historical periods outlined in the historical books.
I have already noted that the Bible has one theme, develops one story, and that the story comes to
us in two parts, the old and new testaments. It is in that word testament that we can begin to
get a grasp of the story and how it develops.
Testament is another word for covenant.7 When you read the Bible in large portions and with
an eye for basic themes, the concept of covenant begins to loom quite large. The Bible is a story
about covenants, or agreements, that God made with people. And many Bible students have
seen in covenants the key theme that unlocks the meaning of the biblical story and weaves all of
its varied elements into one story.

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What is a covenant? It is a solemn agreement unto the death that binds two parties to each
other in a permanent relationship, with specific promises, claims, and obligations on both sides.
Marriage is a type of covenant, an agreement into which a man and woman enter. It turns a man
into a husband and a woman into a wife. It makes the two one. They belong to each other, in the
best sense of belonging. The marriage covenant is a rather exact picture of what God is about in
the Bible. He created us for himself, that He might be our God and we might be His people. But
in sin our race violated this sacred relationship and chose to go it alone. We chose to say no to
God, with all of the miserable consequences that flow from fleeing from him. Christians do not
gloss over the real suffering of the world through glib positive thinking techniques or utopian
dreams. Page after page of the Bible explores and plumbs the depths of affliction and despair and
note that when God visited our planet in the person of Jesus he did not float above our pain but
suffered our humiliations and shame, ending up in the painful and shameful death of a
crucifixion.
The story of the Bible is the story of Gods faithfulness to His original covenant promise
even though we have failed.8 He will be faithful to his design to have a people for his own
possession as well as to be possessed by them, upon whom he could bestow all of his goodness
and from whom he would receive love and worship. Again and again the careful reader will note
the recurring phrase, I will be their God and they will be my people. (Genesis 17:8; Exodus
29:45; Jeremiah 31:3; Ezekiel 11:20; Zechariah 8:8; 2 Corinthians 6:16; Hebrews 10:8;
Revelations 21:3) This is the Immanuel Principle. Immanuel means God with us. Not God
over us. Not God ruling us. These are undoubtedly true. But God in the midst of us! Personal,
present, available, relational. Indeed, when the Messiah is prophecied, he is called Immanuel.
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a
son, and shall call his name Immanuel.(Isa 7:14) It is in his nature and design to reveal himself
and enter into intimacy. God is not an it, but has the characteristics of personality. It is just at
this point that God as trinity, the three-personed God (not three gods but one God in three
persons), is so essential. God is not a lone, solitary, and unconscious it. If God has the
attributes of personality, it would be hard to imagine a God with no one to love, no one to whom
to speak, no one to receive love from for an eternity. This would not be a heaven but a hell. The
doctrine of the trinity turns hell into heaven and shows our God to be a fullness that is inclusive
of loving. The trinity is not a throw away doctrine that has no real essential role to play in
Christian theology. Many object that the word trinity is not found in the Bible. True. But, of
course, the issue is not whether or not the actual word is used but whether or not the reality that
the word depicts is there. And so it is! More about that later.
The Bible is the story of God being true to his own character in seeking a relationship
with us. The Bible is not the story of mans pursuit of God, but of Gods pursuit of us. It is the
retelling of all that he has done to reclaim a lost race. It is the story of a patient, wise, and never
despairing spouse who will restore lost love. That the structure of covenant frames the story of
the Bible says something about the nature of God. The Apostle John puts it succinctly. God is
love. (1 John 4:8) God has the right of universal rule. He has complete authority. All power is
his. He is an unquestioned sovereign who owes to no one an account. And yet the final reality of
the world, behind all that we see and do not see is that God loves. True, some turn from that love
and refuse him. True, God judges evil and the wicked will not stand on the day when the books

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are opened. True, God has allowed suffering and pain to exist in consequence of our sin. But
"God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not
perish but have eternal life. (Joh 3:16) Jesus is the tears of God who in sympathy with the
human condition enters our night and our cold and drains evil of its final force. His love will
make all things new.
The Bible describes a series of covenants that God made with key people throughout
history. Each covenant introduces new elements into Gods relationship with us and contributes
its part to the final and complete covenant that God put into effect through Jesus Christ, called
the New Covenant. Each covenant is organically related to the ones that precede it, building on
their features and adding new elements that further Gods purposes. The acorn developing into
an oak is certainly a good picture of how the covenants relate to each other.
There are five clear stages in the story of the Bible, five covenants God made with
people at distinct points in history that furthered his purposes and prepared people for the final
covenant through Christ. These five covenants form the background and themes of the Bible.
What follows are the descriptions and divisions of the covenants.

THE COVENANT OF CREATION

The Bible opens up with a Covenant. It is described for us in the first three chapters of
the first book of the Bible, Genesis, a word that simply means beginning. Though the word
covenant is not used, the elements of a covenant are there, and a covenant is referred to in Hosea
6:7. It has often been called the Covenant of Creation. Its focal point is Gods design to bring us
into being by an act of his will and pleasure with the purpose of fellowship with us. We were
created in his image, the Bible teaches, with the capacity to know God in a conscious way and
respond to him in love and commitment. As images of God, we were given God-like abilities for
rule and management of our world, all to be done with a willingness to exercise these capacities
in dependence on the word and wisdom of God. Note that humans are created in the image of
God. We are not the product of blind evolutionary forces, though certainly evolutionary
development rightly understood has some explanatory power in understanding our biology. But
we are not mere bodies raised to a higher form of consciousness. The Bible insists that we exist
by the design and creative act of God, a design that includes not just the physical but also the
invisible but real aspects of human personality, the soul.
The Genesis story reveals that God gave to us in our primordial condition an
opportunity to declare our commitment to him in a specific way.9 Having made us in his
image, after his likeness and bestowing upon us the caretaking of creation (read Genesis 1 and 2),
He planted a tree in the middle of the garden and of this tree alone he insisted that our first
parents should not eat its fruit. (And, no, we do not know if it was an apple tree, as folklore
would have it). Of all that we do not understand about the nature of this tree, described as the
Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil, we do know that our parents refused to tie themselves
to the bare word of God but struck out on their own wisdom. They did eat of that tree and broke

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faith with God, because it seemed good in their eyes. And as God had said, in the day that
you eat of it, you shall die.
In this step away from God, our parents had an ally and more than an ally. The Bible
reports that Adam and Eve were tempted of the Devil. Genesis 3:1 introduces us to this original
rebel, howbeit in the guise of a serpent. Evils origin did not begin with a human choice but a
spiritual force. For the biblical writers the existence of a primordial spirit being who fell away
from the Lord of glory out of pride and with purpose to unseat the very person of the deity is as
real as the existence of God himself. Modern man in his secularism and self-confidence may
question the existence of a Devil, but human consciousness constantly gives witness to an
awareness of a force, a power set against the good that seems to be beyond human, a power
which we can feel knocking on our door asking to be let in. We are witnesses to evils which defy
a merely human explanation. We look over the field of human history and ask of the sufferings,
the turmoils, the pillage and the misery, how can these things be? Can human choice alone
explain the immensity of this evil beyond imagining? No, declares the Bible. Humans are indeed
complicit but they are also assisted in doing the unimaginably horrible. It takes a Devil to explain
the black of its blackness. While the person of the Devil makes a cameo appearance at the
beginning of history in the Garden of Eden, for most of the rest of the Old Testament he recedes
from view, while in the New Testament, at the new beginning ignited by Christ, he appears
again, flushed out as it were from behind the scenery of history to once for all declare himself
unalterably opposed to the good. At the end of the biblical story, the Devil is put away forever.
But there is some way to go before then!
The principle and power of sin and death entered into our race at that moment, and we
fell away from our original state of nearness to God. This is the Bibles explanation for what
went wrong and what is wrong in and with the world. Whatever may be true of us, the universal
consensus is that we do not work right. We are broken. Yes, wonderful and beyond explaining is
the phenomenon of humanity the extraordinary landscape of loving, caring, creating, toiling,
enduring, imagining, singing, painting, shaping, building. But also dying, hating, forsaking,
killing, broken, ever thirsty and never quenched. Made in the image of God but earthy and
capable of great destruction. No one escapes the blight and no one has the cure. Ever since that
time our race has known the power of death. Ever since that moment all who are born are born
with a nature prone to refuse God. And we live in a world that groans under the power of sin.
Do you not see it? Does not your own spirit rise up and ask for a cure? Who of us lives with the
conviction that the way we are is the way we should be or is all that we can be?
When our first parents entered into an alliance with the Evil One, the world as the
Kingdom of God became instead the rule of the prince of the power of the air. (Ephesians 2:2)
In John 14:30 the Devil is called the ruler of this world. The whole world lies under his power.
(1 John 5:19) The great project God undertakes, the project told in the Bible, is to once again
become King of this world. Thus, when Jesus appears, his message, consonant with the story line
of Sacred Scripture is, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand..." (Mar 1:15). In
Jesus life, ministry, death and resurrection that kingdom which is not of this world begins and is
now becoming to be until the glory of Gods reign covers the earth.

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Of course, there is a sense in which God is always King. God is God. He reigns. He is not
thwarted in his plans or confused in his aims. Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he
pleases. (Psa 115:3) But the God who reigns will not just brutally assert his power and reign
with authority over the world. His reign is one of love. His desire is not mere authority, which he
already possesses, but a kingdom that rules in hearts. The love lost in the betrayal of Adam and
Eve must be won in a way that accords with the principles of love, the free giving of hearts to the
Lord. This is not the project of a moment but the striving of overcoming evil with good, time and
again, until the adulterous spouse returns home to love and be loved. The story of the Old
Testament and New Testament is that story.
Behind the ins and outs of the Old Testament story, places, people, episodes, tragedies,
miracles, laws, temple, etc., is the sometimes unspoken but always present project of a new
kingdom coming and finally come. Indeed, in the most famous prayer of the Bible and the
church, is the repeated request, they kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven.

THE COVENANT OF RE-CREATION

The Covenant with Adam
The penalty of sin was death and all that leads to death-shame, dishonor and alienation
from one another and the very earth from which we were made. The Bible describes Gods
delivering of the judgment this way:
The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you
above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust
you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and
between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall
bruise his heel." To the woman he said, "I will surely multiply your pain in
childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your
husband, and he shall rule over you." And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened
to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You
shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the
days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the
plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the
ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
(Gen 3:14-19)
Gods Word had now come true-sin brings death. But Gods heart of love and grace are
also true. Our sin is not the final word. God wills to overcome death and restore. Even as he had
made covenant with Adam and Eve, who broke the covenant, God introduces a new arrangement
which will bring life, an eternal and abundant life. If that first arrangement was the Covenant of

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Creation, let us call this the Covenant of Re-creation. In these words the story restarts, and the
setback becomes the background for the story of love and rescue.
In these verses we find the story line of the Bible. These are Gods words, first, to the
Devil, then to the woman and finally to the man, the unholy trinity, if you will, who were allies in
disobedience, seeking to claim for themselves the right to determine what is good and what is
evil. This is the very nature of sin independence from God, bringing into question his authority
to define the good, the true and the beautiful. Gods words here are the words that will become
true and determine the rest of history, its goal and its themes.
To the Evil One God says,I will make you and the woman enemies to each other. Your
descendants and her descendants will be enemies. One of her descendants will crush your head,
and you will bite his heel.10 (translation mine) This covenant in effect covers the rest of the
Bible, since all covenants that follow carry out its design and purpose - to recover us from the
bondage to sin and death and restore us to fellowship with God.
In this verse God promises to send a single Deliverer who will be powerful enough to win
back the love and loyalty Adam and Eve had forsaken. This Deliverer will be one of her
descendants, referring to the woman. In other words, Gods Savior would be born of a woman.
God would become one of us - touching us, speaking to us, entering into our condition and
identifying with us. This is no less than a prediction of the coming of Gods special sent one (the
anointed one, the meaning of the word Messiah), to face off with the power of sin and to free
us forever from the grip of a fallen world.
Note that Genesis 3:15 also says that you (meaning the Devil) will bite his (the
Deliverers) heel. This is a prediction that our rescue would be gained only at the cost of the
suffering of the one who would come and deliver us. Many Bible students see this as a foretelling
of the suffering and death of the Christ upon the cross. He would die, but ultimately would live,
the wound fatal but not final. What would at first seem like a final defeat would be in the last
analysis a bite on the heel. Instead, the power of sin and death is forever destroyed.
Reread Genesis 3:15 again. This verse not only predicts the coming of a Deliverer. It
also lets us in on another element that will be very much a part of the human story recorded in the
Bible. There will be two basic kinds of people that will be on the earth until Gods work is
complete.
First, there are those who remain allied with the principle of evil, and are, therefore, part
of the kingdom of the Great Opponent of God, the Devil. These reject God and count his person
and his laws as burdens to be cast off. But there is a second group, those who are described as
belonging to the woman. They are the ones who believe in the promise of Gods help that will
come through the woman, a Savior who will be born into our race. These will choose to believe
in Gods promise and seek to rely upon God for their life. The rest of the Bible recounts story
after story of these two groups and the conflict that will surely always be between them. Behind
all the war and strife and pain that we find in the Old Testament is this prediction that there can
be no true peace among people until they say yes to God. The true alienation that exists between

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people is not essentially economic, racial, political, social, or any number of other factors or their
absence. True peace among us is a result of and flows out from a relationship with God. When
people are right with God, believing and obeying him, they are right with each other. When
people say no to God, they not only turn away from him but will also turn against others. The
alienation from God spills over into the world of relationships.
This covenant is a covenant made in grace. That is, it is unmerited. This is another
major theme in the Bible. Adam and Eve did not deserve this promise of life after their
disobedience. And neither do we. But God took the initiative and offered a way of restoration.
The Bible is the story of grace. It is never the story of people getting better through some
program of moral self-improvement. Left to their own resources, people will always fall short of
Gods standard. But God is rich in mercy.
The Covenant of Re-Creation is developed in five distinct phases that cover the rest of
biblical history. Remember that each phase develops the design of the Covenant of Re-Creation
found in the basic theme statement in Genesis 3:15.

I have included an illustration11 that will give a picture of the development of the history
of Gods salvation, or, as it is often called, redemptive history.

There are several points this graph illustrates:

1. Each successive covenant expands on what has come before and is expanded by those
covenants that follow.

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2. Each covenant makes a unique contribution to the development of Gods plan to save
us. There is something in each covenant that was not there before and is carried forward
into the new covenantal arrangements to come
3. The Covenant of Re-Creation (symbolized by the arc of dotted lines) fulfills the
original purposes of the Covenant of Creation (which is symbolized by the solid outside
lines). God completes what he started. In the Covenant of Re-Creation, which was made
after mans fall into sin, God doesnt switch into plan B, diminishing what he had
begun to do. Nor do we now get Gods second best. What God meant to do originally he
accomplishes through his wisdom and power. Indeed, the Bible indicates that God in
grace bestows more than if our race had never fallen into sin and misery. This is the
whole burden of the argument of the Book of Hebrews with its repeated phrase, how
much more. (See Hebrews 3:3; 6:9; 7:19,22; 8:6; 9:11,14,23; 10:34; 11:16,40; 12:9)
4. Each successive covenant will increasingly and more clearly point to Christ. The
person and work of Christ who establishes a New Covenant intrudes into each previous
covenant administration, pointing to the salvation that is yet to come. This is certainly
more obvious when you look back on the whole Biblical story than would be the case
looking forward in time. But the careful student of the Bible will find more and more
evidence of the coming Christ as the story develops. Jesus himself confirmed that the
Bible has this as its primary focus in these words to his disciples. You find it hard to
believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. Wasnt it clearly predicted by the
prophets that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things [a reference to his death
by crucifixion] before entering into his time of glory? (Luke 24:25,26) A Messiah who
would come and deliver us at great cost to himself was already predicted in Genesis 3:15.
The rest of Scripture simply makes that theme more and more clear. The Christ to come is
revealed in prophecy, promise symbols and types. By types I mean that events, persons,
and rituals all image a shadow form of the greater reality which is yet to come. In this
sense, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David are types of the true Savior who will someday
come onto the scene as the real thing. From Christ they draw their meaning and to Christ
they point. Israel crossing the Red Sea through water on dry ground was a type of the
salvation Christ offers. The arrival of Israel in the Promised Land was a type of that
heaven to which Christ takes his own. This kind of interpretation of the biblical text is
made possible and not a mere interpretive gimmick based upon the reality that God is the
architect of history and binds it all into a single plan. With this unity one would expect
continuity and reciprocity between various episodes that are distanced in time but still one
story because they all are developing one theme. Theologians call this the analogy of
faith. Any part of the Bible is analogous, or like, any other part in the sense that there is
an overarching unity that relates all the various aspects into one unified whole.

THE COVENANT WITH NOAH

The Covenant of Preservation

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After God initiates his plan of rescue, the Bible tells the dismal story of deepening sin in
Genesis 6-11. This is not as one would have expected. It seems that Gods offer of grace and
forgiveness would have humbled us. Thankful for another chance, hearts would naturally draw
near to a kind and saving God. But people did not turn around. They grew worse. So worse that
the Bible says God decided to judge the world and begin all over again.
The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every
intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD
was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So
the LORD said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the
land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am
sorry that I have made them." (Gen 6:5-7)
The biblical story indicates that Adam and Eve had received the promise of a new
beginning with faith. The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all
living.(Gen 3:20) Though death would surely come, in the midst of the judgment Adam
believed in the promise that new life that would come through the seed of the woman and so calls
his wife Eve. Life and not death would the final outcome. In casting these first parents out of the
Garden, God clothed them in animals skins, clothing them with the death of another. This is a
type of the death that would one day fully set them free from sin, not the death of an animal but
the sacrificial death of Gods own Son. (John 3:16)
The sin that came into the world had in its nature to increase, for immediately following
the creation of Adam and Eve and their fall, we have the account of the first murder, the
deathblow given to Abel by his brother Cain.12 This was not just murder, but murder of a darker
kind, family against family. All indications were that the death that had now entered our race
would itself not die easily. Of human history at that time Moses writes,
The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every
intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD
was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So
the LORD said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the
land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am
sorry that I have made them." (Gen 6:5-7)
God had promised a re-creation, a new beginning, but all that was beginning were new
waves of evil. Nothing is better but only grows worse with time. It seems that God must act, for
evil can reach a tipping point from where there is no return. The human race moved to that point
but encountered the holiness and judgment of God. He simply stopped it through judgment. The
spiritual law the Apostle Paul recounts in Galatians 6:7 was as true in the Old Testament as in the
new. Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.
(Galatians 6:7)
But stopping sin with judgment is not the end of the story. The way in which God will
ultimately stop sin is through salvation from judgment. It is the way of love, grace and mercy.

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Moses reports that God, having rebooted his creation with a covenant of re-creation, now takes
that next step to move his purposes further with a new agreement with a man named Noah.
Genesis 6:8 says that Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. He was a righteous man,
blameless in his generation and he walked with God. Gods grace was sufficient to establish in
the life of at least one man a God-loyal love. And that is all that God needed to build a new
world. And he did.
Here is a theme we will find again and again in the story of redemption one man. The
Bible is a story of Gods covenants with one man at a time who stood in the gap, a Noah, an
Abraham, a Moses, a David and the Christ himself. All of these one man moments take the
history of redemption to a new height, though all fall short of being that single deliverer God had
promised in Genesis 3:15, all except that final solitary life, Jesus of Nazareth who by his life,
death and a resurrection that proved evil had finally been overcome and the kingdom come with
irreversible power. But one family he would spare - Noah, his wife, his three sons and their
wives.
Thus we have the famous story of the catastrophic flood that destroyed the earth and
which Noah escaped by believing Gods word and building the ark. On the other side of the
flood, God established a covenant with Noah whereby God promised that he never again would
destroy the earth by water. In other words, God promised that he would preserve the earth until
his plan of deliverance would be perfectly fulfilled. This covenant promises Gods patience until
full salvation was completed. In Genesis 8:21-9:17 this new arrangement is laid out in more
detail:
1. Never again would God judge the world through a flood. The seasons would continue
to cycle and the earth would produce its harvests and life preserved. Though evil will
remain and grow worse, yet God had sent a warning of a final judgment, sufficient to
mark upon human consciousness that God is not unmoved by our evil. Still, his merciful
purposes will not be overcome by judgment before salvation has come.
2. God gave mankind the flesh of animals for food. On this side of Noah there is
indication of a fundamental reordering of our natural life. Rain begins to water the earth
for the first time, and now our food is taken from the animal world.
3. Capital punishment is initiated as a principle of justice. Whoever sheds blood will have
his own blood shed. This is the embryonic form of government and its power to establish
sufficient justice for human life to continue. Human government is a tool in the hand of
God to order society and be a check against unrestrained evil that would lead human
civilization back to a state of tooth and claw nature. Some may have fantasies of a
return to a world without governmental power, a utopian world of unfettered freedom, but
the worldview of the Bible is under no illusion as to the nature of nature. In common
grace God uses governmental authority to check the lower parts of our nature. Dont think
that lower nature is there? Try to buy milk and eggs at a grocery store before a hurricane!
We see in a clearer way the outlines of a definite kingdom, a sphere in which God
regulates the life of a people, a life that has boundaries, laws, and provisions. Where sin reigns,
disorder of every kind grows. But in the midst of evils increase, God acts to halt its unchecked

20
growth. Without this gracious intervention, human society would disintegrate and the good that
God wills to do in his saving works would be impossible. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans
13:1-5,
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no
authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by
GodTherefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed,
and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good
conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then
do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for
your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain.
For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the
wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath
but also for the sake of conscience. (Rom 13:1-5)
The people of God in the Bible have always had a high view of that common grace given by
God, which is government. Paul writes to remind Christians to be submissive to rulers and
authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work(Tit 3:1) Only God is King, but the
church does not have the power of the sword to restrain evil, a lesson it has sadly forgotten or
ignored from time to time. It is the role of government to set the boundaries of justice,
imperfectly for sure, but even so, anarchy is restrained and the world does not return to a
wilderness. In this world the church does not replace government but is salt and light.
God sets a covenant sign in the heavens that he will preserve the earth until his plan for the
salvation of the peoples is completed. That sign is a bow set in the heavens. (Genesis 9:12-17)
We call this a rainbow. The image, however, is of a bow. Its significance? While we think of
rainbows as a sign of beauty, the true meaning is an instrument of death. Bows were means of
hunting and of war. But this bow set in the sky is not pointed toward us in judgment but toward
the God in heaven. Many students of the Bible see this as a continued sign of the prophecy given
in Genesis 3:15 that the Messiah to come would submit to the pain of a wound in order to fulfill
his mission of redemption. The arrow is aimed at God! And indeed, as will be found out in each
covenant to come, there is a symbol of the to the death loyalty of God to his promise, even to
the death of his one and only Son upon the cross who would pay the penalty for the covenant we
have broken. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live
to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (1Pe 2:24)
The period of time covered by Genesis 1 through 11 is not datable. This age is what may be
called pre-history, the time before any extant human documentation. The oldest historical records
are approximately 3000 BCE in the land of Sumer, present day Iraq. Beyond this time there no
extant literature that reliably constructs historical sequence. There are artifacts that with carbon
dating and archaeological investigation provide us with some framing of episodes in human
civilization. Of course, there are oral traditions preserved in our earliest writings of such times,
but there are no objective means of verification. Many people have attempted to set a date to the
events of Genesis 1-11, but serious doubts remain as to the validity of any one system of arriving
at specifics. Famously Bishop Ussher of 16th century England locked down the date of creation to

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Sunday, 23 October 4004 BCE! It is best to remain skeptical of all dating attempts. But soon
everything changes with Gods call of Abraham, a solitary Iraqi figure of around 2000 BCE.

COVENANT WITH ABRAHAM

The Covenant of Promise
With Gods call to Abraham the history of redemption moves into a second and
increasingly specific covenantal arrangement. There are two unique things about this new
covenant development recorded in Genesis 12. One, it is with Abraham that the story of the Bible
first connects with datable human history. Abraham lived 2000 years before Christ. Two, up to
the time of Abraham we have the biblical record of Gods dealings with the whole of our race,
but with Abraham Gods dealings narrow down to a single individual and his descendants after
him, the nation Israel. God does not abandon his purpose of love for the whole world. But he
chooses to work through a specific group of people through whom true knowledge of himself
would be preserved and through whom the Deliverer would come to save the world.
Gods specific words in establishing a covenant with Abraham are these:
The LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your
father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great
nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a
blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse,
and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Gen 12:1-3)
In the Abraham story the kingdom theme begins to take a more definite shape in time and
space. The Kingdom of God enters human history in such a way that it can be said, right here,
right now, God is at work bringing his promises to pass. The fulfillment of these promises of the
restored rule of God traced in the Bible to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. These are
the people set apart by the plan of God to bring to the world the full salvation that was promised
to our primordial parents. The rest of the Old Testament is the story of Gods dealings with the
Jews.
Gods choice of Abraham and his descendants was not because they were the best and the
brightest of all peoples but merely because it pleased the Lord to graciously elect and choose
them for this purpose.
"For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has
chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who
are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any
other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the
fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath
that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty
hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king

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of Egypt. Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who
keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his
commandments, to a thousand generations,
(Deu 7:6-9)
God promises to Abraham13 three things:
he will give him a place;
he will make of him a nation;
through him all the earth will be blessed.
The place? God was calling Abraham to leave that area of the world now known as Iraq
and to go to a country that God would show him, a place we now identify as the land of
Palestine, or Israel, then known as the land of Canaan. What this suggests to us is that Abraham
before the call was a worshiper of pagan gods. He did not belong to a people characterized by
true worship, nor do we have any indication that Abraham was a man of a certain character or
religious quality. All that we know is that God called him and that is when his story began.
Time and again this will be a theme in the history of salvation. God graciously reaches down,
chooses a man and then disciplines him to be that special messenger through whom the Good
News can be faithfully proclaimed. The reality is that God chooses those whom the world passes
by. For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly
standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish
in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God
chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things
that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. (1Co 1:26-29) When God
much later in the story chooses David to be King over Israel, he reminds the prophet Samuel who
had been sent to search out Gods chosen King, But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look on
his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees
not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart." (1Sa
16:7) world. Gods Kingdom is not of this world but is of a different kind, not ordered by the
standards of a fallen and needy world but according to truth.
The first step in following the call of God is always a leaving - stepping away from the
old and the no longer useful into the new and the eternal. The Bible calls this repentance, turning
around from where we are to head in the direction to which God directs us. It does not mean
always knowing the way that God will lead, but it does always mean following the voice of God
and walking by faith. Abraham is the premier biblical example of one who follows, as Martin
Luther put it, the bare, naked and unsupported Word of God.
The nation? To Abraham we trace the beginnings of the Jewish people. While Abraham
was a single individual called to a specific land in which he was only a pilgrim, eventually
through his descendants God would bring into being a nation state in the ancient world to whom
he would reveal his laws, statutes and promises. There God would be worshiped in truth and his
glory exalted among the peoples. Israel would be a great nation, large in number and prosperous.

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Abraham is tested at this point, for he marries a woman who is barren. There could be no
descendants in any way that was humanly impossible. This is the very thing God seeks to teach.
When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on
the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so
he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're
going to have a big family, Abraham!" Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence
and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child."
Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe
around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the
promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on
what he had said. That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by
trusting God to set him right." Rom 4:18-22 (The Message)
The blessing? God would make of Abraham a blessing. Blessed to be a blessing. God
chose Abraham and covenanted to increase him so that blessings could come to the nations.
Neither Abraham nor Israel were chosen for themselves alone. And what would that blessing be?
Through him would come the Deliverer who would be the Savior of the nations, Jesus of
Nazareth, the Christ. Many people either do not know or do not duly consider that Jesus was a
Jew. This is not a casual ethnic identity. Jesus himself said, You worship what you do not know;
we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. (Joh 4:22)
In this covenant arrangement, we see highlighted one other thing that characterizes the
way God will give his salvation. It says in Genesis 15:6, Abraham believed the Lord. And the
Lord accepted Abrahams faith, and that faith made him right with God. Abraham illustrates
the way that people are made right with God. It is through faith alone in Gods promises apart
from works. In the book of Romans the Apostle Paul highlights the principle of faith that plays
such a prominent role in the story of Abraham as the key to understanding Gods plan for setting
people right with himself.
If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly
have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abrahamstory. What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing
for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of
trying to be right on his own." If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you
deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too
big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it--you
could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked--well, that
trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.
Rom 4:2-5 (The Message)
What makes the promises a reality is entering into what God does for us, not by a
stringent program of moral rule keeping. No one gets right with God that way, because we all
fall short. When people quit trusting in their own ability, believe God for his provision and
commit their lives to service to him, they will really live. The person who is right with God is

24
made right through trust. The Apostle Paul backs this up with a quote from the prophet
Habakkuk. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The
righteous shall live by faith." (Rom 1:17) This certainly has to be one of the most significant
truths developed in the covenant with Abraham, and is subsequently seen as the core of the
Biblical teaching about our relationship with God. It certainly was there in Adams renewed
relationship with God as he named his wife Eve, mother of the living, even in the face of the
death that came as a consequence of sin. And in the story of Noah the story of patient faith comes
to the fore as Noah builds an ark on dry ground and waits for a predicted flood while jeered and
scorned by the people. But Abraham is offered to us as preeminently the man of faith and in such
a way that he is called the father of faith by the Apostle Paul. (Romans 4:16)
Each of the other covenants has a sign of an oath sworn. So does this covenant, the sign
of circumcision. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your
offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall be circumcised in the
flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. (Gen 17:1011) Circumcision is an oath signed in blood, a life and death commitment to keep covenant
loyalty. Abrahams very body is marked by the covenant. But God also bears the sign of the
covenant.
But he said, "O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?" He said to
him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram
three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon." And he brought him all these,
cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the
birds in half. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove
them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold,
dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the LORD said to Abram, "Know
for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and
will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will
bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out
with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you
shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth
generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." When the sun had
gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed
between these pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram,
saying, "To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great
river, the river Euphrates. (Gen 15:8-18)
This making of covenant is rooted in an ancient near eastern practice of loyalty oaths
between sovereigns and peoples whom they had conquered. Having stipulated covenant
regulations and rewards, the victorious king and the conquered king would divide an animal with
a trench between the pieces filled with the animals blood. The kings would then walk between
the split parts saying, may it be to me as this animal if I do not fulfill the terms of the covenant
made this day. (The Hebrew word for covenant is berit, meaning to cut; therefore, covenants
are said to be cut rather than made). The conquering king promises rewards to the conquered
king if he remains faithful. The conquered king can be assured of fidelity and blessings if he
fulfills his part of the agreement. Note, however, in Abrahams vision, that only God (symbolized

25
by the flaming torch) passes through the pieces. Surely this means that God himself will
guarantee the permanence of the covenant, even to the point of taking upon himself the just
penalty of death on the occasion of the conquered kings failure to live up to his covenant duties.
Does this not point to the Messiah who would die on the cross, not for his own sins but as a
sacrifice for the sins of the world?
This is why the covenant made with Abraham is characterized as the Covenant of Promise. It
is pure grace, guaranteed at the cost of Gods own life. Abraham could not improve upon it, add
to it, or in any way certify it. It was all Gods doing, all Gods loving, all Gods giving. The
kingdom of God would not be a kingdom man could build through his own skill and
righteousness. Sheer gift. It is no wonder that Abraham becomes the model for the New
Covenant realities that Jesus Chris ushers in 2,000 years later.

COVENANT WITH MOSES

The Covenant of Law
The period from Abraham to Moses is called the Patriarchal Period, the time of the
fathers. It is the time when the focus is on the immediate descendants of Abraham and their
families: Abrahams son Issac, grandson Jacob (who is renamed Israel by God and after whom
the nation will be named), and Jacobs twelve sons. These twelve sons will form the tribes of
what will become the Israelite nation. It is during the time of Abrahams grandson Jacob that a
famine strikes the land of Palestine, and Jacob and his twelve sons go to the land of Egypt for
food. In time they end up as slaves to the Egyptians and for 400 years live there in bondage.
Israels history stalemated. Where were the promises of a special land and the special
blessing Israel was to be? God moved to establish a covenant with a man named Moses, a Jewish
exile who had fled from the land of Egypt and now shepherding flocks in the wilderness of the
Sinai peninsula. It was through Moses that Israel would be delivered out of Egypt and be
established as a nation, complete with rulers, a constitution and a homeland, the three essentials
of a nation building. They would be transformed from a loose confederation of clans into a
kingdom that takes its place among the nations of the world. By the time of Moses, Israel
numbered some two million people. They are on their way to becoming the great nation that God
promised in the covenant made with Abraham.
Moses is THE towering figure in the Older Testament. Moses and Jesus are the two
chief figures in the Bible and represent promise made and fulfillment granted. (See Hebrews 3:16) Moses was really a type of the Christ who was to come.
Observe these parallels:
Moses, like Jesus, was a lawgiver, delivering to Israel Gods Ten
Commandments;

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Moses, like Jesus, was a prophet, speaking Gods Word to the people;
Moses, like Jesus, was a deliverer, rescuing the people from bondage;
Moses, like Jesus, was a mediator, bridging the gap between God and the people;
Moses, like Jesus, was a pioneer who led the people to a new land - Moses led
them to Palestine, but Jesus leads us to heaven.
As Abraham chiefly represented the principle of promise in making people right with
God, Moses illustrated the principle of obedience as the primary character of Gods people.
Through Moses God made plain to the people the priority of holiness. You shall be holy for I
am holy, God said to the people through Moses. It is during this covenant arrangement that we
find pointed emphasis on the place of Gods righteous character and the necessary purity of
Gods people. To come near God and experience the benefits of his presence means
commitment to his righteousness. And thus this covenant with Moses is characterized as the
Covenant of Law.
It is also during this covenant period with Moses that there is a shift in focus of a sort.
Previous to the time of Moses there was a distinct emphasis on Gods plan for the world and the
salvation of all, even with the Abrahamic narrowing to a specific family, for even then the very
covenant had an eye to the blessings of the nations. But with the Mosaic covenant there is an
almost exclusive focus upon one people. This is as we would expect it to be, for the emphasis of
this period is on holiness, which is separation from the world and being set apart for God. Gods
universal purpose of salvation is not lost from view. But front and center is his design that the
people whom he would save be holy and consecrated for holy use.
We could say that the development of the history of salvation is like a tree. The root
system is the covenants made with Adam, Noah and Abraham with their emphasis on Gods big
and broad purpose of saving all. Then for a time that purpose flows through the narrow channels
of Israel during the time of Moses and King David, until it flowers in the coming of Christ who
brings salvation to the nations.

Time of
Christ

Covenants
with
Moses & David

Covenants
with
Abraham &

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Noah
For a time there is a narrowing of Gods saving stream so that the scouring of Gods saving
purposes would go deep and run fast and clear.
The covenant that God makes with Moses is recorded in Exodus 3. There God appears to
Moses (circa 1500 BCE) through a burning bush while he was tending his flock. God revealed
that he had heard the cry of his people groaning in slavery and in remembrance of the covenant
with Abraham was now choosing to send Moses back to Egypt to lead his people to the land of
Canaan from which they had come 400 years before. It will be Moses task to free the slaves,
guide them to Promised Land, and organize the Jews into a nation exclusively set apart for the
true worship of God. To Moses will be given Gods Law, the framing of ritual worship complete
with temple14, priests and sacrifices and life under the direct guidance of the Lord their God. In
temple worship, complete with its sacrifices, Israel will learn the lesson, without the shedding of
blood there is no forgiveness of sins. (Heb 9:22) Sin incurs a penalty. No man transgresses
Gods law freely. As the Ezekiel puts it, the soul that sins shall die. (Ezekiel 18:20)
There are several things to note about this covenant arrangement with Moses. First, to
Moses God reveals his special covenant name. Then Moses said to God, "If I come to the people
of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is
his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM." And he said, "Say this to the
people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" (Exo 3:13-14, my translation) Gods name is in
Hebrew a single word, the first person singular of the verb to be, I am. God has been
previously designated Elohim, meaning god. This is god in the generic sense of the term. It is a
general all purpose designation for the deity. But when he cuts a covenant with Moses he reveals
that special name by which he is to be called. Old Testament scholars translate this word as
Yahweh, what the Hebrew would sound like.
The Jewish people, out of reverence for the name and in obedience to the second command
prohibiting taking the name of the Lord in vain, fenced in the law and ruled out pronouncing
the name altogether. When they copied Hebrew manuscripts, they would not write the name
Yahweh. Instead they would take the vowel sounds of Yahweh and combine them with the
consonants of the word Adonai, meaning lord. The combination together would yield the new
word Jehovah. For some this is a favorite name for God, but, as you can see, it is a constructed
name and is not a name for God in the Bible.
The covenant name for God, Yahweh, reveals the deep character of the God whom Israel
was called to worship and who Christians praise. A god-in-general will not do! The true God
of heaven and earth is of a certain nature with specific characteristics. The I AM name points
to Gods aseity, that God is self-sufficient, needing nothing outside of himself to be who he truly
is and to do what he desires to do. He has no origins and is obligated to no one. This is much
different than eastern religions where the world is a manifestation of a god and in some sense
necessary to its god. The world and god are one, a pantheistic worldview. God is not personal but
an it, a life force, a consciousness of some kind. It does not answer prayer, intervene in history,
create or extinguish, judge or save. It has no will, desires, words or loves. Salvation in the eastern

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mind is simply accepting through an enlightened mind the processes of the universe with an
equanimity and confidence that the universe does what the universe does.
The God of Israel and of the Christian is a God who is distinct from creation and does not
stand in relationship toward it as one of need. God created the world not out of himself but ex
nihilo, out of nothing by the mere power of his word. AW Tozer in his book, Knowledge of the
Holy, writes, Almighty God, just because He is almighty, needs no support. The picture of a
nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we
look at the popular conception of God, that is precisely what we see.Twentieth Century
Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy,
not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God. But the truth is that God is not
greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist. That we do exist is altogether of
God's free determination, not by our dessert nor by divine necessity. Well said. God is eternal,
unchangeable, and inescapable. Surely no one is to put no other gods before him.
This God has in and of himself the right of rule, and rule he does. The most obvious
characteristic of the Mosaic covenant is the externalization and extent of the Law. The peak of
this period was the revelation of the Ten Words, the Ten Commandments. These summary words
stand for the entire structure of the law code revealed to Moses in Exodus 20-31, as well as in the
Book of Leviticus often labeled the holiness code. Careful ritual, specific purification codes
surrounding temple worship, marriage, work and community relationships all create a heightened
awareness that the God worshiped is without sin and that no darkness can dwell in his presence.
The holiness of God and our personal accountability to him for deeds done in the flesh are at the
root of the Judeo-Christian tradition. For I am the LORD who brought you up out of the land of
Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy." (Lev 11:45)
A second thing to note is that this lifting up of holiness is not in contrast to the Covenant of
Promise given through Abraham. It is the promise that overarches the whole and sustains the
work of salvation. But the holiness of the Mosaic legislation highlights that the salvation of the
Lord is a saving from sin, of which believers are to repent and then put on the new life that God
graciously bestows on all who believe. (Colossians 3:12ff) The institution of the Passover meal
was a memorial to be remembered in Israel, assuring Israel that God will provide a sacrifice for
sins. Israel took the blood of a sacrificed lamb and marked the doorposts of their homes in order
to spare them the judgment of God when the Angel of Death wrapped the Egyptian oppressors in
a cloak of judgment. This was THE night of their deliverance and a type of that greater sacrifice
which was yet to come through the suffering of the Servant of the Lord who would one day give
himself for the sins of the people. (See Isaiah 53) Indeed, Jesus is that Servant who is the Lamb
of God who takes away the sin of the world. (John 1:29) He will not only take away sin but also
impart to Gods people the spirit of holiness.
The Apostle Paul in the New Testament warned that the Law was not given as a means of
establishing our own righteousness and so earning the approval of God. The burden of the whole
of the Bible is the reality of human sin. The Law was given not only to reveal the true
righteousness that God desires, a good and necessary purpose, but also to make manifest that our
own righteousness falls short of the glory of God. What then shall we say? That the law is sin?

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By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not
have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." But sin, seizing an
opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart
from the law, sin lies dead. (Rom 7:7-8) A serious encounter with the Law will lead the sinner
to Christ as the only true Savior from sin. The Law condemns, not because it is a curse, but
because we encounter it as sinners. The Apostle Pauls encounter with the holiness of the Law
led him to groan, Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Rom
7:24)
In the New Covenant, to jump ahead for a moment, the law will be placed within the heart.
God will work an inside job. Instead of the Law code standing over us to condemn, it will be a
heart desire with strength given to obey. (Jeremiah 31:33) Instead of a heart of stone, we will be
given a heart of flesh. Instead of dread and a sense of condemnation with conscience constantly
accusing, there will be joy in the law of the Lord. In this life there will be no perfect obedience.
We will remain sinners even as we grow in conformity to the image of Christ. But the increase of
light and purity will delight the soul and gain for us a liberty heretofore unknown.
The tragedy of the Judaism of Pauls day is that it failed to realize the transitory character of
the Mosaic Covenant and that it would someday give way to New Covenant realities. Jesus
constantly confronted the legalism and strict observances of codified holiness that the Jews
developed in order to be right with God. They fenced the law, as it has commonly been referred
to. Surrounding each biblical prescriptive, they developed whole other layers of regulations to
ensure that they would not carelessness transgress. Soon the layers became equal to the core. By
Jesus time, the rather brief and focused codes of Mosaic legislation had evolved to a complex
system of ritual observances that tied burdens on the backs of the religiously sincere and made
religion a damning thing. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across
sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice
as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Mat 23:15)

COVENANT WITH DAVID

The Covenant of the Kingdom
Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt and up to the border of the Promised Land.
Joshua, Moses successor, brought them into the land of Canaan to settle there as their home.
During this period, 12 Judges the led the nation. Their stories are recorded in the Book of Judges.
This period of time (circa 1350 BCE.) covered Israels entrance into Canaan to the rise of Samuel
and Saul (mid-11th century), approximately 300 years.
These were individuals God raised up from time to time to bring Israel out of their
spiritual lethargy and rebellion against God and to deliver them from their enemies who had
gained strength over them by reason of Israels weakening through sin. Without a king or
spiritually focused center of leadership such as they had during the times of Moses and Joshua,

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Israel often forgot their loyalty oaths to Yahweh. The theme of Judges is the downward spiral of
Israels national and spiritual life into chaos and apostasy, showing the need for a godly king to
lead it (17:6; 21:25). Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. The cycle was predictable:
trouble, prayer to God for deliverance, Gods answer to prayer through sending judges to deliver
them, peace, forgetfulness of God, trouble, prayer, etc. This is not a repetition to which we are
totally foreign today. Times of peace and prosperity are every bit of a challenge, even more, than
affliction. We grow lazy and fail to realize how dependent we are on the daily provision of the
Lord. Those whom the Devil cannot cause to fall through pain can be ensnared in unbelief
through prosperity, like the parable of the rich man who built more barns to contain his wealth
and forgot that his very soul was to be called to account
The most famous of the Judges is Samson, the strong man whose power was in the length
of his hair. And then there is Gideon, whom God taught that deliverance came not through the
numbers of soldiers but the presence of God. Deborah was unique among the Judges, being the
lone woman, bringing to mind that the sin of Eve was not the last word in the plan of redemption.
Women would continue to be numbered among the faithful who would hear the voice of God and
offer to him all, even as Mary, the mother of our Lord, would one day do.
It is at this time that Israel begins to desire a King. Up to this moment there had never
been any king for Israel but God himself. God had spoken immediately to his people through
patriarchs and prophets, such as Moses. But in its desire to be like the nations surrounding them,
Israel asked of God for a human ruler. (1 Samuel 8) The immediate circumstance was the
disgrace of the prophet Samuels sons. It seems that among those whom God raised up as Judges
a stream of prophetic ministry and responsibility was sometimes bequeathed to their lineage. This
did not always lead to happy endings, for it is clear that righteousness is not passed on to
descendants but is a matter of each mans heart. In Samuels case his sons took bribes and
perverted justice. The people of Israel came to Samuel and asked him to appoint a king over
them. It seemed preferable to the apparent ruin into which they would fall given the spiritual
temper of the prophetic leadership of Samuels family. This sets the stage for a new
development in the Covenant of Re-creation, a stage that teaches Gods people a very
important lesson -- they will find that only God is a true King, able to lead, provide, and guard.
This alone is what sets them apart from all the peoples of the earth.
Samuel was displeased, but the Lord instructed him to go ahead and concede to their
request. And the LORD said to Samuel, Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you,
for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. According
to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day,
forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, obey their voice;
only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over
them." (1Sa 8:7-9) Samuel does warn them about the ways of earthly kings who will burden the
people with taxation, slave labor and self-enrichment. But the people refused the warning and
continued to cry out for a king.
God gave them their king. According to human standards, he was all that a nation could
desire in a sovereign. He was tall, handsome, and of a soldierly bearing. He would do for a first

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king! Yet this king named Saul lacked one thing essential. He proved to have no true heart for
God. Israel was not just another nation state. They were the chosen people, an instrument of the
Lord, a people through whom a Messiah would come and by whom the true knowledge of God
preserved and proclaimed. The choice of Saul struck at the heart of Israels mission. Though Saul
soon proved to be powerful in war, he was proud before God. His moment of choice is reported
in 1 Samuel 13. In the essential detail of whether or not he would patiently wait upon the Lord
and trust in him, Saul chose self-trust and impatience with the ways of God, and God stripped the
kingdom from him. Is this not simply just a replay of what had happened in the Garden of Eden?
Soon Saul would fall on the field of battle, and this time God would set before the people a true
deliverer and king, his servant David. As God says to Samuel in anointing the new king, The
LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the
heart." (1Sa 16:7)
David was a man after Gods own heart who would shepherd Israel faithfully and humble
himself before the Lord. And it was with David and his lineage that God establishes a covenant,
what we can call the Covenant of the Kingdom.
The covenant God now makes is, in these wordsfrom 2 Samuel 7:16. Your family and
your kingdom will continue always before me. Your throne will last forever. Under David, the
development of the covenant reached a climactic stage. The Old Testament story began with
Gods dealings with specific individuals like Adam and Noah and their offspring. It then
progressed to the extended clan of Abraham, continued to increase in scope with Moses and the
establishment of an identifiable nation, and now reached a climax through David in the
establishment of a never ending kingdom and the enthronement of a king from God. The New
Testament writers see in the promise of an everlasting kingdom to David a prediction of the reign
of Jesus Christ, Gods true King. Jesus is a descendant of the house of David. He is Davids true
greater Son, both a son of David but also Davids Lord. Mere earthly kings will all fall short of
their obligations and therefore forfeit, like Israels first king, Saul, true kingship. But a King will
come who will not fail. It says of Jesus in Romans 1:3,4, As a man, he was born from the
family of David. But through the Spirit of holiness he was appointed to be Gods Son with great
power by rising from the dead.
The prophet Isaiah predicts the coming of Gods great King in this way. A child has
been born to us; God has given a son to us. He will be responsible for leading the people. His
name will be Wonderful Counselor, Powerful God, Father Who Lives Forever, Prince of Peace.
Power and peace will be in his kingdom and will continue to grow forever. He will rule as king
on Davids throne and over Davids kingdom. (Isaiah 9:6,7) Note that the prophet looked ahead
and saw that Gods true Deliverer would be both man (born of the line of David) and God (His
name will be Powerful God). It is this that displays the essential uniqueness of Christ and the
mystery of the Kingdom. The Messiah is not God alone, appearing as a man. He is not man
alone, appearing as if a god. He is both! One person, with a divine and human nature. And this
is exactly what Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be and his disciples believed him to be.
Under David and his son Solomon, Israel enters an unprecedented time of prosperity.
The promises to Abraham had come true. Israel possessed a land, she had become a great nation,

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and through her the many were blessed as the news spread of Gods faithfulness and salvation to
the surrounding nations. Israel has rest from all her enemies. The kingdom expanded
significantly. There was glory and majesty in Israel as a time of peace arrived. Yet we know
from the rest of biblical history that all of this was but a type of the true spiritual kingdom that
Christ will establish in the hearts of people and which he will also establish forever when he
creates a new heaven and a new earth at the end of time. Davids kingdom was but a stop along
the way.
So during the time of David and for 500 years following (approximately 1050 to 586 BC),
we have the time of the kings. But as the story unfolds, it becomes abundantly clear that
Israel cannot hope in any mere earthly king. All fall short of the glory of God. None are able
by their power, wisdom, and righteousness to fully establish Gods kingdom. Like the seminal
figures before David Noah, Abraham, and Moses David is only a human king, a sinner like
all sinners. David at the height of the glory of his kingdom committed adultery and murdered to
cover up the affair. Even while God preserved his reign in covenant faithfulness, dark clouds
began to roll into Israels history once again. After the time of David and his son Solomon,(who
himself disregards the ways of the Lord and through his many wives turned his heart to other
gods) Israel fell into division. By Gods judgment the kingdom divided into a northern and
southern kingdom during the reign of Davids grandson, Rehoboam. The southern kingdom
continued the line of David. The northern kingdom was ruled by various kings who took the
throne by force and intrigue. There the true knowledge of God was displaced by idolatry. This
kingdom eventually came under the judgment of God and was conquered by Assyria in 722 BC.
Through a process of deportation and assimilation, the northern tribes disappeared from the face
of the earth. (All Jewish people today are descended from the southern kingdom composed of
the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, together called Judah, the larger of the two tribes).15
The southern tribes continued to be ruled by kings from the line of David, and, though
there are some good kings who rose to the throne, the spiritual trajectory was such a weak
goodness that evil reigned. In 586 BC they were conquered by Babylon as a judgment of God for
their sin. They were exiled to Babylon for a period of 70 years after which they returned to the
land, no longer to have a king. They were now a weak slave state under the domination of the
foreign superpowers of the day, under which they would remain until the nation of Israel was
destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
It is at this point that attention must be drawn to the ministry of the prophets in Israel for
the heyday of their ministry was during the time of the divided kingdom. The reason for this lay
in the essential contribution of the prophets which was to press Gods case against his people.
They are Gods prosecuting attorneys, putting Israel in the dock and examining them to uncover
the crimes of which they had become truly guilty.
In Israel there were three offices, the executive, legislative and judicial. (And now you
find where the American system of government comes from!!). The executive function was
fulfilled by the kings who were to carry out the laws of the Lord. See the job description of the
king in Deuteronomy 17:14-20.

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"When you come to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you
possess it and dwell in it and then say, 'I will set a king over me, like all the
nations that are around me,' you may indeed set a king over you whom the LORD
your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over
you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. Only he must
not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in
order to acquire many horses, since the LORD has said to you, 'You shall never
return that way again.' And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his
heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold. "And
when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a
copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, and
he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his
God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, that
his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside
from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may
continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel. (Deu 17:14-20)
Note that the kings job was to read the Law all the days of his life. The Law was Israels
constitution, its essential identity and marker. To forget the Law was to forsake who God called
them to be.
The second office was the legislative. This was the priesthood. They represented all the
people to God. They pleaded the cause of sinful humanity offering sacrifices and prayers that
God might be merciful to the people. For every high priest chosen from among men is
appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He can
deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness. Because of
this he is obligated to offer sacrifice for his own sins just as he does for those of the people.
(Heb 5:1-3) The Book of Hebrews contains extensive reflections on the ministry of the priest and
Christs greater priesthood.
It was in the shedding of animal blood as a sacrifice for sin that we find the preeminent
work of the priests. The more blood that was shed, the more it became clear that the blood of
bulls and goats could not take away sin. Animal life can be no substitute for human life.16 There
was an increasing and developing awareness that the sin issue must be dealt with more
completely.
For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the
true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are
continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise,
would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been
cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices
there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls
and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he
said, "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you
prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.

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Then I said, 'Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in
the scroll of the book.'" When he said above, "You have neither desired nor taken
pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings" (these
are offered according to the law), then he added, "Behold, I have come to do your
will." He does away with the first in order to establish the second. (Heb 10:1-9)

The third office was that of the judicial, those who gave the final word on the Law of
God. In our time, this is the court system. In Israel, this was the prophet. When you think of,
prophet, think law court. They were individuals directly raised up by God (in contrast to the
lineal nature of the kingship and the priesthood) to prosecute Gods case against his people as
lawbreakers. Their word was the final word. The courtroom analogy is best seen in the prophetic
book, Malachi. Note the give and take of the courtroom in the testimony of the prophet.
"I have loved you," says the LORD. But you say, How have you loved us? Is not
Esau Jacob's brother? declares the LORD. Yet I have loved Jacob. (Mal 1:2)
But you profane it[Gods name] when you say that the Lord's table is polluted,
and its fruit, that is, its food may be despised. But you say, 'What a weariness this
is,' and you snort at it, says the LORD of hosts. You bring what has been taken by
violence or is lame or sick, and this you bring as your offering! Shall I accept that
from your hand? says the LORD. (Mal 1:12-13)
You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, How have we
wearied him? By saying, Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the
LORD, and he delights in them. Or by asking, Where is the God of justice?
(Mal 2:17)
The prophet stands preeminently as the man of God, one who has direct access to the
divine throne room, was anointed with the Holy Spirit, and sent to proclaim Gods Word to the
nations. Moses exercised the prophetic ministry and yet he declared, Would that all the LORD's
people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!" (Num 11:29) Of course, this
is exactly what would happen in the New Covenant.
"'And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on
all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men
shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male
servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they
shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the
earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to
darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and
magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name
of the Lord shall be saved.' (Act 2:17-21)
The prophetic ministry was seen in Abraham, who was called a prophet, as were Moses
and then Samuel. But during the time of Israels kings the prophets increased in number and
presence in the redemptive story. During the time of the United Monarchy of the first three kings

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of Israel, there was the ministry of Elijah, Elisha, Nathan and some few others. But with the time
of the Divided Monarchy, prophets multiplied and from this period came most of the prophetic
books of the Bible. They called Israel to repent and return to the Lord. But as it became clear that
Israel would not turn, the prophets increasingly began to cast their eye to the horizon of the future
when God would establish with Israel a New Covenant that will heal Israels backsliding once
and for all.
"Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new
covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant
that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring
them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their
husband, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the
house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within
them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be
my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother,
saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the
greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember
their sin no more." (Jer 31:31-34)
Their eyes turned toward an eternal Kingdom whose glory will fill not only Israel but, in
keeping with the Abrahamic promise, bless all nations, even to the ends of the earth. While some
of the prophets made explicit prophesies of future events, like Daniel, most simply took Israel to
court and called for repentance. And it was not just Israel they prosecuted. Some of the prophets
ministered to the Gentile nations, such as Jonah, highlighting that the fact that Gods purposes
continue to be universal and not shut up to any one people.
What of Gods promises? The glory of the Davidic reign was gone. The Temple, rebuilt
when Israel returned to the land after the Babylonian captivity, was inglorious. There was no
sense that God dwelled there. The religion of Israel turned into routine, weakness, and a
deadening sense that such it would always be. The last prophet, Malachi, had spoken, and now
there was no fresh word from the Lord. All was quiet. Israel may have returned from a physical
exile in Babylon, but there was a greater exile still experienced. For 400 years there will be no
anointed spokesman for Yahweh, and Israel, situated as it was between the great empires of the
ancient world, became a bit player in a larger geo-political game. Israel began to groan, not as
literal slaves as they were during the time of slavery in Egypt, but as a lost people with no future,
no judges, no prophets, no king and no religious awakening and quickening.
But God is at work! He has not forgotten or abandoned what he swore to David (and to
Moses, Abraham, Noah and Adam). At just the right time, the true Son of God is born to Mary,
who is of the house of David. Though he does not appear to be a king according to earthly
definitions, he is Gods true Savior and Lord. He is Kingdom come. This Kingdom, however,
will not be a kingdom as men count kingdoms, numbering soldiers, horses, chariots, cities,
territories and earthly riches.

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THE NEW COVENANT

The Covenant of Consummation
All of the covenants described so far can be grouped together as the old covenants, or, as
they are called, the Old Covenant. The New Covenant established through Christ is so different,
so complete, so effective that, though it grows out of the old covenants and completes what they
began, it can be said to stand alone as one of a kind. It is new! Not just new in terms of time.
But new as a quality. Something is different in this kingdom that is present in no other kingdom.
After the work of Christ there will be no need for another covenant. The Old Covenant only
dramatized human failure and regression. At every point where God moved to fulfill his
promise, his people failed to respond. God had to move in judgment. But with Christ we have
Gods final word. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory,
glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him,
and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before me, because he
was before me.'") And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. (Joh 1:14-16)
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in
these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through
whom also he created the world. (Heb 1:1-2)
What explains that record of failure? Simply this: peoples hearts remained unchanged.
The law and rule of God were a reality that, under the Old covenants, never changed the heart.
The problem was not the covenants. It was the people of the covenant. For he finds fault with
them when he says: Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new
covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. (Heb 8:8) If God was ever to
have a people who would be fully and finally and forever His, He must establish a covenant
arrangement that would effectively give them a new heart of love for God and love for his law.
This is the burden of the Book of Hebrews, especially chapter eight.
This is just what the prophets predicted that God would some day do.
Look, the time is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new
covenant with the people of IsraelIt will not be like the covenant I made with
their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt. I was a
husband to them, but they broke that agreement. This is the agreement I will
make with the people of Israel at that time. I will put my teachings in their
minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my
people. People will no longer have to teach their neighbors and relatives to know
the Lord, because all people will know me, from the least to the most important. I
will forgive them for the wicked things they did, and I will not remember their sins
anymore. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
The Old Testament prophets concluded that a more radical and deeper work would yet
have to be done, and only then would there be a true reconciliation of man and God. The earlier
prophets spoke in hope of present repentance but increasingly as time went on, particularly with

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the prophet Isaiah, who ministered approximately 260 years after the great and godly King
David. It was Isaiah who prophesied a judgment that the nation Israel would no longer be able to
shake. Her sins were too many and too deep.
The New Covenant is that deeper work. It is a heart work. It will not be a matter of laws
and regulations and an external form of religion, but of deeper love and of a changed heart. God
would do this through Christ.
In Christ, God did two things to bring this newer and forever covenant to pass.
First, Christ, as a man who was without sin, fulfilled perfectly the
obligations of the covenant relationship with God. All had failed - Adam, Noah,
Abraham, Moses, David. Though God used them and covered them by His grace,
it was clear that they were still fallen men who could never be Gods ultimate and
final Deliverer. They were sinners like everyone else. But Christ as a man was
not a sinner. He gave to God a life of perfect righteousness, and in fulfilling all
that God requires, receives all that God had promised in the covenant. No other
person fully received all that God had promised because all were sinners.
Two, Christ paid the price for where we have fallen short. By sin we not
only forfeit the blessings God would have given. We come under the active
judgment of God as law breakers. If I am ever to be received by God, then the
penalty due to my sin must be paid. Through Christ, the penalty was paid. By his
death on the cross, Christ paid to God what I owed because of my sin. By a life I
could not live and by a death I could not die, I can now have a life I could not earn
- all through Christ.
For those who align themselves with Christ, who are in union with him, who are in
Christ, they can receive fully all that God wants to give. The Bible calls this eternal life.
In Jesus the Kingdom of God Has Come
The story of Jesus is framed by the New Testament as the coming of the Kingdom of
God, or, as Matthews Gospel calls it, the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus came into Galilee,
proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at
hand; repent and believe in the gospel." (Mar 1:14,15) His message is called the word of the
kingdom. (Mattew 13:19)
The form of the expression Kingdom of God does not just refer to the New Covenant
ministry of Jesus. It refers to the whole of the biblical revelation. When Jesus began his ministry
in Nazareth reading a passage from Isaiah the prophet (Isaiah 61), which speaks of the year of the
Lord, the culmination of Gods work of setting the captives free, Jesus said to his listening
audience, Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. (Luke 4:21) The Kingdom
of God had come. It was now present.

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Jesus demonstrated in his life and ministry that Gods Kingdom among men was present.
This is the meaning of the Gospels in their presentation of the Gospel. The great change the
Kingdom of God brought is that the Devil, the one who had deceived our first parents and allied
with them in the overthrow of his rule, was cast out. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast
out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. (Mat 12:28) But if it is by the finger
of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. (Luk 11:20) Jesus
by his dunamis, his power, has bound the strong man. But no one can enter a strong man's
house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder
his house. (Mar 3:27) In the ministry that Jesus began and committed to his disciples he
witnesses, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. (Luk 10:17-18)
This power over the Evil One is not a mere invisible influence of some vague new
morality but an actual force that even is capable of reversing the curse that reigns over the
physical world. Note Jesus working of many miracles. Then a demon-oppressed man who was
blind and mute was brought to him, and he healed him, so that the man spoke and saw. And all
the people were amazed, and said, Can this be the Son of David? (Mat 12:22-23) The Gospel
accounts are supernatural throughout the miracle birth of Jesus, the turning of water into wine,
the feeding of the 5,000 with only five loaves and two fish, walking on water, the healing of the
sick, the raising of the dead, etc. The Kingdom of God is not simply an increase of peace among
men, an ethical renewal in world affairs and the cessation of war. The Kingdom of God is not
merely personal, reduced to the private experience of accepting Jesus into your heart. (Though I
affirm this description as a true experience of salvation, per Revelation 3:20) It is an actual
sphere of power in which God demonstrates his authority to make hearts, bodies, and the earth
itself new.
This Kingdom had been foretold in the Old Testament. The phrase Kingdom of God is
not found as such in its 39 books, but all the elements of kingdom are there, as previously
explained. Perhaps the most exalted view of the coming Kingdom of God is described in Daniel
7.
"As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his
clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne
was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came
out from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times
ten thousand stood before himI saw in the night visions, and behold, with the
clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of
Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory
and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his
dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom
one that shall not be destroyed. (Dan 7:9-14)
Jesus favorite designation of himself was the son of man, and in the background of his
usage of this title was the exalted picture of this single figure to whom the Ancient of Days, God
the Father, committed all dominion. Jesus said continually of himself I have come.(Matthew
10:34,35; Luke 5:32; 12:51; John 5:43; John 6:38; 12:27; John 18:37) This is as if he was not

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just born; he intended to be born. This is a plan fulfilled, a forecast come to pass. Jesus was not
just the one who came but was the Coming One. This is his place in universal world order.
There is no doubt that Matthew and Mark, and to a lesser, but still significant extent Luke
and John, are telling the story of Jesus in such a way as to evoke Daniel 7. The phrase son of
man does not, by itself, mean messiah in pre-Christian Judaism, but the narrative, even in
visionary symbol, of an individual who represents Gods holy people lent itself easily and
naturally to the messianic meaning. Jesus is the one who fulfills the promise given to King
David that his kingdom would be an everlasting kingdom and that it would never be without a
descendant to sit on the throne.17 The Apostle Peter preached in these terms after Jesus had
resurrected from the grave and ascended to heaven. "Brothers, I may say to you with confidence
about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.
Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would
set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the
Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. (Act 2:29-31)
David was but a man, sinful at that, and his throne could not be an everlasting kingdom. David
knew that God spoke of another king when he promised an everlasting dominion. Jesus was that
other king, according to the Apostles.
Interestingly enough, Jesus continually told those to whom he ministered not to proclaim
that he was Gods sent one. Why would this be? He had not yet fulfilled all that the king must yet
do to usher in the fullness of the age to come. For Jesus was not only a king but as well the
Suffering Servant of the Lord who had come to do the will of the Father, to sacrifice his life for
sins. The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for
many." (Mat 20:28) It was the remission of sins that centered the Messiahs ministry. And when
Jesus was raised from the dead in vindication that his perfect sacrifice for sin was judged
acceptable by the Father, kingdom work is now to proclaim to the ends of the earth that salvation
has come. And then the end shall come! Kingdom come at last in all of its fullness.
The mystery of the Kingdom is that it is both now and not yet, present in Jesus and yet
still to come.
But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who
belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the
Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must
reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be
destroyed is death. For God has put all things in subjection under his feet. But
when it says, all things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is excepted who
put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then
the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection
under him, that God may be all in all. (1Co 15:23-28)
The Christian lives in the now of Kingdom Come and yet prays, thy kingdom come.
Jesus is God becoming King again. To the mass of men it is invisible and inconsequential. And
yet for those who have eyes to see, this is the very center of the story now being shaped on earth

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and which aims the trajectory of history. In the parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31) the
kingdom of God is like the smallest of all seeds but mysteriously becomes a tree large enough for
birds to nest in its branches. It appears weak. It does not occupy the centers of political, economic
or political power. The newspapers have no headlines marked Kingdom of God. But wait! Can
you hear it coming? Can you cuff the ear and hear the whisper of it? Can you feel the earth
vibrate with the steps of the Almighty? Can you sense the change in atmosphere? Lift up your
eyes to the heavens and read the signs of the times. They are changing.
George Ladd in his book, A Theology of the New Testament, gives this illustration.18

For the Christian his life is in the kingdom. The age to come, many ancient Jews
believed, would arrive one day to bring Gods justice, peace, and healing to the world as it
groaned and toiled within the present age. You can see Paul, for instance, referring to this idea
in Galatians 1: 4, where he speaks of Jesus giving himself for our sins to rescue us from the
present evil age. In other words, Jesus has inaugurated, ushered in, the age to come. But there
is no sense that this age to come is eternal in the sense of being outside space, time, and
matter. Far from it. The ancient Jews were creational monotheists. For them, Gods great future
purpose was not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included,
from its present state of corruption and decay.19 In this sense what is normally consider eternal
life in the sense of a life in heaven beyond earth is, in fact, the life of the age to come. The
biblical invitation is not the invite to go heaven but the present challenge of heaven coming to
earth.
Life with the King in residence is not careful rule keeping but a more robust
righteousness that rules over the powers of this present evil age that are rooted in our mortal
condition, a true peace that leads to peace, and abiding joy that brings to the soul a buoyancy that
darkness cannot weight down. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking
but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. (Rom 14:17) As CS Lewis writes,
Joy is the flag flown from the castle of the heart when the king is in residence. This kind of life
was described by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. It is not a casual life, though
it may be care-free. Within it there are the most of intense hungers and longings and the fiercest
facings of indwelling sin. There is the deepest of humiliations and the strongest updrafts of the
Spirits force. There is the simplest of prayers and the most honest facing of trying to be our own
answers. Forgiveness is the path, marked and lighted for travel, but it winds through the
landscape of scarring realities. Human desiring is celebrated, for it leads to a treasure whose map

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is not of the earth, but the very ability to desire may lead to destruction. This is not a small, still,
private sphere of personal retreat. The Kingdom of God shakes the earth so that what cannot be
shaken will remain. (Hebrews 12:27)
The kingdom comes as a gift. "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure
to give you the kingdom. (Luke 12:32) God came to seek us while we are yet turning away to
carve out our own kingdom having it all our way, everything fitting into our plans - people,
things, and the pieces of the universe that we can get our hands on. Wanting, wanting, wanting.
Practically everything that goes on in the world--wanting your own way, wanting everything
for yourself, wanting to appear important--has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you
from him. The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out--but whoever does
what God wants is set for eternity. (1Jn 2:16-17) We are busy building the kingdom of man,
like the building of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 10. The Bible is not the story of man gaining
God as he has gained so many other things. It is the story of God seeking man, of laying a
treasure in a field in order for it to be discovered. (Matthew 13:34) Its great bestowal is the
remission of sins (Matthew 1:21; Luke 1:76) through free forgiveness. How else could it come to
us, sinners as we are? Ours is to repent and believe. Jesus said it, Repent, for kingdom of God is
near.
Gods rule is coming true again, as it was in the Garden before the entrance of sin. This is
the Gospel, the Good News. The Gospel is not solely or even essentially receiving Jesus into
your heart as personal savior. It is about a change in the state of affairs. The Gospel is the story of
Jesus of Nazareth told as the climax of the long story of Israel, which in turn is the story of how
the one true God is rescuing the world. Justification by faith alone is not the Gospel. One can
hardly find any instances of this category in the whole of the four Gospels, and this alone should
make one wary of how encompassing this one phenomenon is to be made to the Gospel, as true
as it is. Note how the Apostle Paul describes the Gospel:
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you
received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to
the word I preached to you--unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as
of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in
accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the
third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then
to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time,
most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to
James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared
also to me.Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father
after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until
he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
For "God has put all things in subjection under his feet." But when it says, "all
things are put in subjection," it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in
subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself
will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God
may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 24-28)

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There is no Plan of Salvation here, as has been popularly designated. There is no

particular theory of the atonement. There is no say this prayer and your sins will be forgiven and
heaven will be your home here. And yet this is called the Gospel by many. No, the Good News
is the story of what Jesus did according to the Scriptures. In other words, what Jesus did in
fulfillment of the not yet completed story of Israel in the Old Testament. You have but to read the
story of Israel, beginning with Abraham through Moses and on to King David and then the words
of the prophets, to get the sense that the story is not yet done. Israel, which had been designated a
kingdom of priests to mediate the knowledge of God to the world and through whom God said
his kingdom would come, is left at the end of the Old Testament as a humiliated vassal state on
the outskirts of empire with no king, no clear presence of the glory of God that had once filled
the first temple, and no visible hope for anything to be different. By the time of Jesus, 400 years
after the last of Israels prophets, Malachi, things only look more hopeless. The one question that
Israel had to ask at that point in history is: where is the kingdom promised to David? Where is
the kingdom spoken of in Psalm 72:18,19, Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone
does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with
his glory! Amen and Amen!
Those closest to Jesus thought Israels story was now coming to its big moment: Marys
Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55, Zechariahs Benedictus in 1:67-79, and John the Baptists preaching
of messianic repentance in 3:1-18. Jesus is Kingdom Come. Origen called Jesus absolute
kingdom, or autobasaleia, that is, the very kingdom in person. Jesus, as Scot McKnight so
astutely observes, nominated himself for Israels president. If Jesus as Messiah and Lord is the
answer proposed by the Gospels, then one must ask, what is the problem the Gospels are asking?
It is: Who is this worlds rightful Lord? Jesus is that one.
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set
themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against
his Anointed, saying, "Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords
from us." He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, "As
for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill." I will tell of the decree: The
LORD said to me, "You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I
will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's
vessel." Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve
the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry,
and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who
take refuge in him. (Psa 2:1-12)
There is only one kind of response turn around. Things have changed once for all.
History is going in a different way altogether. The old ways will no longer do. Seek first the
kingdom of God. (Matthew 6:33) One day what is becoming true now will be wholly true. "You,
Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your
hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like a robe you

43
will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will
have no end." (Heb 1:10-12)
The Good News is simply the story of Jesus. Telling Good News is telling the story of
Jesus. Yes, within this story is the story of remission of sin and faith and free justification. But
these are told within the larger story of all things becoming new through the Jewish Messiah who
by his resurrection from the dead and ascension to heaven has been enthroned as the King. This
very story will show all other stories to be shallow. This story alone takes up into itself all other
stories and enables men and women to imagine that world as coming to be real which had been
only been told in fairy tales they lived happily ever after. This is the story we have wanted to
be true. The Gospel is all of our myths becoming true, to use a theme from GK Chestertons, The
Everlasting Man.
It is important to realize that the church is not the kingdom of God. It is in the kingdom of
God. The church does not create the kingdom. The kingdom creates the church. The church is not
in charge of the kingdom but the custodian of the kingdom. The message of the church is not
join the church but come into the kingdom of God. The church is an instrument of the
kingdom, not its control center. The kingdom is that sphere over which God fully reigns where
his will is done. It can never be equated with a particular congregation, nation, political party or
ideology. Our plans, goals and programs do not make the kingdom appear. The king present is
kingdom come.20
The New Covenant section of the Bible tells what Christ accomplished for us and how we
may experience those benefits personally. This New Covenant period is the time when Christ
continues to call out from the world a new people - forming them from every tribe, tongue, and
nation. When that work is completed, Christ will return to earth and gather His people. Then the
old earth will pass away and God will create a new heavens and a new earth where his people
will dwell fully happy forever. Those who refuse His salvation, and who continue to say No to
God, will be forever banished from Gods presence. And it is with this note that the Bible ends
in the final chapters of the final book of the Bible, The Revelation.
Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be
his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe
every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or
pain, for the old order of things has passed away. Revelations 21:3,4
The Immanuel Principle is no longer a holograph seen in the DNA of each covenant, just
beyond earths grasp and so easily escaping us. It is no longer seen from a distance only. In the
New Covenant Gods original design in the Covenant of Creation is fulfilled God has a people
for himself and upon whom he can bestow the fullness of his goodness. Kingdom come!

So we have the foundation, the building blocks, and the mortar that build the story we sat out
to tellthe story the Bible tells. This is the real story behind history. Behind all the accounts of

44
civilizations, wars, economics, kings, queens, and princes; behind all the stories of famous
personalities and confidence in human progress; behind all the multi-volume accounts of human
strivings is Gods single great work -- bringing a people to himself through his sent Deliverer.
Everything else is peripheral to this story. Everything else serves this story.
All this energy issues from Christ: God raised him from death and set him on a
throne in deep heaven, in charge of running the universe, everything from
galaxies to governments, no name and no power exempt from his rule. And not
just for the time being, but forever. He is in charge of it all, has the final word on
everything. At the center of all this, Christ rules the church. The church, you see,
is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church. The church is
Christ's body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his
presence. (Eph 1:20-23)
The story behind the story is Gods pursuit of you and His work on your behalf so that you
may know him and come into His everlasting kingdom. The newspapers may never carry the
rest of the story. And it may seem that the rush and push of buying and selling and going and
coming are the things that make the world go round. But those with eyes to see know that there
is a deeper plot, a larger drama, and a grander meaning to it all. God has sent a Savior. And
historys meaning comes down to a single question, What will you do with Jesus Christ?

NOTES
1

The word messiah is an English form of the Hebrew messiach. When the Hebrew word is
carried over into the Greek language in which the New Testament was written, it becomes
Christos, or in English, Christ. The Savior to come will be The Christ. He will set all things right
again - fully, finally, forever.
2

All Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version, except when otherwise noted.

2a

I am indebted to Scot McKnight and his book The King Jesus Gospel for clarifying the nature
of the Gospel.
3

I use the current standard for dating. CE is the abbreviation for the Common Era. This is the
time from Christ onwards. BCE is the abbreviation for Before the Common Era. The most
common designations have been BC, Before Christ, and AD, Anno Domini, a Latin phrase
meaning In the Year of the Lord. Even in a religious book I choose to use the current standard for
academic papers and writing. Some might see the CE and BCE schema as an attempt to
deChristianize history. Perhaps there is some of that, but I have no argument for dating history
according to an explicitly religious reference. Once way or the other, Christ lies behind dating in
such a way that the world that comes after him is substantially different, so different that it marks
time itself.

45
4

The Protestant version of the Old Testament has 39 books. It is made up of the 39 books of the
Hebrew language Bible, the one used by Jesus and recognized by Jewish tradition as the Word of
God. To this collection the Roman Catholic Church added these others: Baruch; 1 and 2
Maccabees; Tobit; Judith; Ecclesiasticus; the Wisdom of Sirach; the Wisdom of Solomon; and
additional materials were also appended to the biblical books Esther and Daniel. These writings
were added at the time the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the third century BCE.
Many of the Jewish people had dispersed from the land of Israel and could no longer speak or
read Hebrew. In order to preserve knowledge of the Bible, it was translated into the lingua franca
of the world at that time, Greek. It was called The Septuagint, meaning 70, a reference to the
legendary story that 70 Jewish scholars each independently translated the Hebrew into Greek
with the result of an exact replica of each others work. The Septuagint version is often the
version quoted by New Testament authors who address Greek-speaking audiences but in no case
do they quote theApocrypha. The Jews of Alexandria Egypt who edited the Septuagint possessed
what they considered to be a collection of sacred literature which they attached to the Old
Testament. These became known as the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha added to the Greek version
of the Septuagint were only in a general way accounted as books suitable for church reading, and
thus as a middle class between canonical and strictly apocryphal (pseudonymous) writings. And
justly; for those books, while they have great historical value, and fill the gap between the Old
Testament and the New, all originated after the cessation of prophecy, and they cannot therefore
be regarded as inspired, nor are they ever cited by Christ or the apostles" (Philip Shcaff, History
of the Christian Church, book 3, chapter 9) The books of the Apocrypha generally recount the
history of the Jewish people between the last prophet Malachi (mid 400s BCE) and the birth of
the Messiah. In this they are valuable and worthy to be read. Some early church fathers
considered them sacred scripture, notably Augustine of Hippo. They were canonized by the
Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1546, but Protestants of the Reformation
period rejected them as authoritatively inspired. The Apocrypha make no substantial contribution
to Christian theology, though they may be cited in support of the Roman Catholic doctrines of
purgatory, the immaculate conception of May, as well as the concept of a treasury of merit.
5

The order of the Old Testament in our English Bible is different from the ordering in the
Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is ordered in three sections: the Law, the Prophets and the
Writing. These are often called the Tanakh. The T stands for Torah, the Law. The N stands
for the Prophets, in Hebrew called the Neviim. The K stands for the Writings, the Ketuvim.
The order of the books of the Bible is not inspired and is merely a matter of grouping like books
with like books. Each book stands on its own. In the Hebrew Bible certain books that in our
Bibles are divided into two different books were considered one book: 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings,
1&2 Chronicles, Ezra & Nehemiah, and counts the 12 minor prophets as a single book.
Therefore, there are 24 books in the Hebrew Bible. The story of how it came to be that certain
books came to be included in the Bible is a fascinating one. We have more access to this story
when it comes to the compilation of the New Testament books simply because it is more recent.
6

A commonly heard opinion is that the four Gospels included in the New Testament were not
the only Gospels floating around in the early church. The ones we have are the ones, it is by some
supposed, that later church leaders schemed to include and then to exclude all others, indeed,

46
eradicating all others. The reason for this is to be found in their desire to include only those
accounts that cemented that version of the Jesus story that would keep the church hierarchy in
power. This is one of the core theses of the famous work of Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code. Ben
Witherington, noted Evangelical New Testament scholar responds. [Dan Browns book
characters assert]the canonical Gospels are not the earliest Gospels, instead the suppressed
Gnostic ones (such as the Gospel of Philip, or of Mary) are. This claim is made more than once
by the books protagonists, Teabing and Langdon, who are both portrayed as scholars, and thus
as credible witnesses on these matters. They also claim that the four canonical Gospels were
selected from among some 80 early gospels, the rest of which were suppressed. In fact there were
less than half that many documents that might rightly be called gospels (texts telling the story of
Jesus life). Among the 35 or so extant noncanonical gospels are two Gnostic gospels that Dan
Brown depends on most heavily in rewriting Jesus life: the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of
Mary. There is no credible evidence that either of these existed before late in the second century
A.D. Indeed many scholars think they come from the third century A.D. By contrast, no scholars
that I know, whatever their theological persuasion, think that the canonical Gospels are from any
later than the last half of the first century or (in the case of the Gospel of John) the first few years
of the second century A.D. Our earliest extant gospel fragment is a portion of a papyrus of John
18 dating to the early second century A.D. (http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/reviews/the-davinci-code/) It is simply not true that the Gnostic Gospels were suppressed prior to the formation
of the canon: They just were not recognized as authoritative either by the eastern or western
church. Lack of recognition is not the same as suppression.
7

The traditional names of the two parts of the Bible are the Old Testament and the New
Testament. These names are editorial features of the Bible and are not inspired. Most Bible
students agree that the more appropriate names would be the Old Covenant and the New
Covenant. The King James Versions usual translation of the word translated as covenant in
the English Standard Version and other contemporary English versions is testament. Covenant
and testament are two very different concepts. Both have to do with death, but in a covenant
death stands at the beginning of covenant inauguration, symbolizing the bond created is unto
death. In the case of a testament, death stands at the end of a relationship between the two
parties, actualizing an inheritance upon the death of the testator, a death that is supposed and
natural, as in all last wills and testaments. But a pledge to the death in a covenant anticipates a
possible breach of covenant stipulations, which would required death of the party in violation.
Christ died a covenant death, not because he was the violator of its terms, but because the other
party transgressed the covenant and was therefore liable to death. Christ died for the covenantbreaker, a debt that he himself did not owe. A last will and testament has no place for a death in
substitution. So, it with covenants that we have to do in Scripture, but the weight of tradition
deems that the language of testament designates the two portions of the Bible.
8

We must be careful to recognize that when God makes a covenant with man, this is not a
covenant between two equal partners, a mutual contract. The covenant which God makes with
his people is unilateral. He dictates the terms and provisions. There is no bartering, no
bargaining. The covenants we find in the Old Testament take as their pattern the ancient near east
suzerainty treaty. In particular the Abrahamic covenant evidences this pattern, though we find
elements in all biblical covenants. It was the practice that when one king conquered another, the

47
more powerful of the two, he would devise a covenantal relationship with his new vassal
kingdom. Rather than destroying the conquered foe, the suzerain would promise to sustain his
subjects and bless them on the condition of their submission to the new rule. These treaties
followed a predetermined pattern of the following elements:
Preamble: Identifies the parties involved in the treaty
Prologue: Lists the deeds already performed by the Suzerain on behalf of the vassal
Stipulations: Terms to be upheld by the vassal for the life of the treaty
Provision for annual public reading: A copy of the treaty was to be read aloud annually in the
vassal state for the purpose of renewal
Divine witness to the treaty: These usually include the deities of both the Suzerain and the
vassal
Blessings if the stipulations of the treaty are upheld and curses if the stipulations are not
upheld
Sacrificial Meal: Both parties would share a meal to show their participation in the treaty
These are the exact elements that one finds in the biblical covenants. In fact, Meredith Kline
makes the case that not only do we have the exact elements of this covenantal pattern but that the
very structure of the Books of the Law, written by Moses, takes the suzerain treaty model. For
instance, in Exodus 20: 2 we have the identification of the parties followed the Prologues which
enumerates deeds which the suzerain has performed for his vassals with an emphasis on his
benevolent goodness. Then follows the stipulations of the treaty in Exodus 20:3-17. When these
responsibilities are enumerated, there is then a directive for the annual public reading of the
covenant to the people. This is missing in the Exodus account but is taken note of elsewhere. In
Deuteronomy 18:18 the vassal king is instructed to write for himself a copy of the law, and that
he should read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God. In other
words, the rehearsing of the terms of the relationship are always to be near at hand. Witnesses are
then called upon to validate the making of the covenant. I call heaven and earth to witness
against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. (Deu 30:19) It
is these witnesses that the prophets call to the witness stand in their prosecution of Israel. Then
there is a final statement of blessings if the treaty obligations are kept and cursings if they are
transgressed, followed by a covenant meal. It is such a meal that Christ eats with his disciples at
the Last Supper when he establishes his new covenant. At such a meal the animal that had been
slain as a sign of the oath unto death would be eaten. Christ is that one who would be slain, not
for his transgressions but for the sins of those he called into the rule of his kingdom.
9

Were Adam and Eve real historical figures? The natural reading of the text indicates so. Some
have posited that the first three chapters of Genesis, which tell the story of creation, the first male
and female and their fall into sin and misery, is a mythological way to tell the story of our
beginnings. On this reading of the account, the historical accuracy of the details would not be the
point. The point would be that God is the creator, men and women owe their being to his creative
work, and that they chose traitorous disobedience over loyal love. In this view, such details as a
literal first couple, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as well as the Tree of Life, a talking
serpent and an actual paradise are all mere accoutrements that fill out the story and make it
memorable. The problem with this explanation is that the rest of Genesis and the following four
books, traditionally understood as authored by Moses (circa 1550 BCE), read like history and are
meant to be taken as such. Jesus himself treated Adam and Eve as historical figures. (Matthew

48
19:3-6) The Apostle Paul framed a theological argument in Romans 5 that requires Adam to be a
historical figure. The real question is whether or not there is room in the Genesis story for a
history that is actual but not in full continuity with our own. Could it have happened that way? If
the answer is a clear and distinct no based on naturalistic assumptions about our world, then the
Genesis account cannot a priori be accurate. One must be very careful about making this kind of
assertion. History as we know it is based on the naturalistic assumption of cause and effect. To
know certainly that Genesis does not fit into this pattern one must also be certain that the cause
and effects of that time are as our own. Could it not be true that the ancient world was
substantially different than our own with physical laws in operation that varied from our own
experience of the world. The Bible itself indicates that such was the case, as, for instance, in the
absence of rain for the watering of vegetation. However, the ultimate question remains: can God
reveal to humans a story, which fantastic as it might appear, is true and beyond knowing except
God telling it to us? If those telling the story are in every other sense sane, credible, and
trustworthy and do not live on the zany side of the street, then at least we must stop and think.
For now this mere hint of a possible answer will have to do.
10

It is clear that God is not addressing simply an animal but the reality which the animal
represents, the Devil behind the plot. The immediate response of many to this passage is a
question: would you have me believe that there is such a thing as a talking snake? Isnt this just
proof that the Bible is filled with myths? Many students of the Bible respond to this in several
ways. First, who is to say how the world was in its beginnings? Is there a complete continuity
between the natural world as we know it and the world as it was? The Bible itself indicates the
world of physical laws was dramatically different in the beginning than it is now. In Genesis
2:5,6 the indication is given that rainfall was not then a phenomenon. The earth was watered by
underground springs. Second, a talking serpent is not asserted to be a natural phenomenon even
at that time. Perhaps it was a one of a kind event that in and of itself gave credence to the
suggestions of the serpent to Adam and Eve. This would take a miracle, a suspension of the laws
of nature. This, of course, would be no more miraculous than other supernatural events recorded
in the Bible, including the virgin birth of Christ, his walking on water and turning water into
wine and that greatest of all events, the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. If miracles are by
definition excluded as possible, then a talking serpent based on todays natural laws could not
have happened. Third, even the casual reader understands that the focus of the story is not a
talking snake but a speaking Devil. The existence and presence of an evil power who possesses
personality and intention is assumed in the Bible without any attempt to defend the proposition,
any more than the Bible attempts to demonstrate the existence of God.
11

This illustration is taken from Palmer Robertsons The Christ of the Covenants, p.62. Dr.
Robertsons writings and class lectures at Westminster Theological Seminary inform the
essential outline used to structure this booklet, though I assume responsibility for wording,
overall presentation and the absence or presence of materials not his own.
12

Since Cain and Abel were the sons of Adam and Eve, and following Abels murder, Cain took
a wife and moved east of Eden, the question comes up again and again where did Cains wife
come from? Was she his sister? The immediate reaction is how weird is that! This brings up a
host of questions, too numerous to follow up in this short piece. I hope it suffices to reply that the

49
Genesis account is not meant to give us genealogical answers to all the questions that we can
throw at it, especially with the recognition of the assertion already made that indications are that
this ancient world was substantially different than our own, though with continuity. Many Bible
students have suggested that Adam and Eve were representatives of a people then already in
existence but for whom our first parents stood in some kind of symbolic relationship. This would
answer the question of why there were others from whom Cain could choose a wife, but the
possible explanation cannot stand alone without answering a whole other group of questions that
gather around it.
13

The question surely arises about the nature of God in such a verse as this. One cannot escape
the impression that God did not have the foresight to see what would go wrong nor power to
reverse it. What kind of God could this be? Surely not the God of the Bible! By definition this
kind of being could not be God and not by any account worthy of worship. The conclusion must
be that what we have here is a manner of speaking. Bible students call it anthropomorphism,
describing God according to human categories. In other places in the Bible he is spoken of as
having hands, feet and eyes, even when the Bible itself asserts that God is a spirit and does not
have a body like a man. God, in order to be God, must know all things, things possible and things
actual, past, present and future. In this sense God cannot be surprised nor regret what he himself
planned to do. What must be meant is that the state of affairs caused to arise within God those
feelings which in us would be labeled regret, a sorrow for conditions which one according to
goodness would in his own nature desire to be otherwise. We intuitively grasp what this means,
though the challenge to a complete logical consistency is readily admitted. Also note that at the
root of this description of God is the human condition of freedom and Gods response to it. If all
was determined in the sense meant by some, there could be no regret in God, no anger, no
sorrow, etc., for all that is happening is simply what God meant to happen. How could God regret
what God has done? The most immediately available explanation of such an episode as this is
that mans fall into sin, and deepening sin, at that, is not in what theologians call the decretive
will of God, that will of God, which decreed that certain things must happen. It was in Gods
permissive will, those decisions of men that God does not desire but which God foresaw and
permitted. Otherwise, God would be responsible for the existence of evil in his plan, its existence
being caused by his desire to have it exist. This is a boundary marker we should not cross, as
confounding as the rational explanation might be. God is fully good in all ways and does not hide
within himself the desire for moral darkness to exist.
11
At this point in the story Abraham is called Abram, a name meaning exalted father. He will
later be renamed Abraham by God in Genesis 17, which signifies father of multitudes.
14

The Temple would first be a tabernacle as Israel moved through the wilderness and settled into
the Promised Land. This was a movable tent that was also called the Tent of Meeting, the place
where God came down and dwelt among the children of Israel. The plans for construction of the
Tabernacle are rehearsed for Moses in Exodus 25ff.
15

The lost tribes of Israel continue to play a role in theological speculation. Some claim that the
British and American peoples are the lost tribes of Israel and therefore heirs of the promises of
God and of a latter day restoration of the Kingdom. It is these western peoples who are the true

50
Israel. One finds in Mormonism not so much explicit British Israelism, as it has been called, but
the sympathetic belief that the true people of God are found in the New World.
16

In our own time many are questioning the very morality of an atoning death. They look at the
Christian story with the sacrificed Son of God on the cross and charge child abuse. Is it not even
a transgression of the Law to offer ones own son for death? Is this not murder? Additionally, the
very idea of one dying for another has been charged as immoral. It is the soul that sins that must
die. To offer payment in the place of the transgressor is to strike at the heart of a moral code.
These are not light accusations and the charges must be taken seriously. But there is no doubt that
the Bible teaches that Jesus died as a sacrifice for the sins of others and not for his own, that this
death was a penal substitution, and that this death atoned for sin so that we can freely and without
cost enter into the Kingdom of God and its abundant life. Someone will ask, does this not mean
people can sin and just get away with it? Well, yes and no. That all sin is without doubt. That the
judgment for sin is death is without debt. On these two premises alone there is no release from
the debt of sin, for sin requires a penalty no man can finally pay in such a way as to exhaust his
debt. End of story. Gods holiness and justice are not to be trifled with. Evil cannot enter into his
presence. Nada, no mas, never. For the one who objects as above, I ask what is your solution to
problem is sins committed? Is it your expectation that evil goes unpunished, unrecognized,
ignored? That God just overlooks it? Is this a more moral way of dealing with sin? I think not. If
there a doorway, it might lie in a different direction. That different direction is the Jesus solution.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you
on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin,
so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2Co 5:20-21) Jesus, the one without
sin, bore the penalty due sin in his flesh, the ebbing out of his life force through the shedding of
his blood, so that sins could be put away. See Isaiah 53:4-6; Romans 3:25-26; 8:3,4; Galatians
3:13; Ephesians 5:2; Philippians 3:9; 1 Peter 2:24; 3:18; 1 John 2:1,2.
17

The promise to David has been interpreted by a school of thought called dispensationalism to
mean that God has promised to national Israel that the Davidic kingdom will be restored and that
the original promise to Abraham that his descendants would possess a land is an irrevocable
commitment, yet to be completely fulfilled. According to their schema, Christ will return at some
point to rapture his church from the earth, (not the second coming of Christ but a secret coming)
which will be followed by seven years of tribulation upon the earth, during which time there will
be a national conversion of Jews to Jesus as the true Messiah, the Messiah they had rejected at
his first coming. After seven years, the second coming of Christ occurs followed by a 1,000 year
reign upon the earth, during which time the Davidic kingdom will be restored and the Temple
rebuilt. Israel will have its literal fulfillment. At the end of the millennium Satan, who had been
bound during this age of peace, will be loosed to do his worse and gather those nations still in
unbelief to do battle with Christ and his people at Armageddon. The Devil will be defeated and
cast into Hell forever along with his demonic allies, followed by the final resurrection of all the
dead unto judgment. Those whose names are not found in the Book of Life are cast into outer
darkness. Those who are children of the Lamb of God will dwell blessedly with him forever in a
new heavens and a new earth. This version of the end of time is imaginatively retold in a series of
novels titled Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

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Dispensationalism is a uniqure form of premillenialism. In the history of biblical
interpretation there have been three basic views of how to interpret biblical texts that refer to the
end of times. There are those who believe that Christ will return before, and thus pre, the
millennium, a reign that will last for a literal 1,000 years upon the earth. Others interpret the
Bible to mean that Christ will come after, and thus post, the millennium. In this case the
millennium is not a literal 1,000 years but a symbolic number that represents a final golden age
ushered in by the spread and influence of the Gospel. This millennial age will be climaxed by a
final rebellion of the Devil, which the Messiah will crush in his second coming. The third model
for understanding the Bibles teaching on final things is amillenialism. The prefix a- means no
or without. Literally the word would mean no millennium. But amillenialism does not teach that
there is no literal reign of Christ. It teaches that Christ reigns with his church in heaven and upon
the earth during the time between his first and second coming. It sees the church as the
fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham and David. In the church age, of which we are
presently in, the church is the true Israel of God. (Galatians 6:16) What happens to enthnic
Israel? Most scholars of whichever of the three positions they hold anticipate a national spiritual
revival of Israel as the Apostle Paul seems to describe in Roman 9-11. This pamphlet is too brief
to enter into the debate with any hope of establishing one position as having the most explanatory
power. All three models have been held during church history with able biblical expositors on all
sides. No one side predominates when it comes to faithful teachers in the church. My own
position is amillenial.
18

George Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, p. 68

19

NT Wright, How God Became King, p.44.

20

This is a great divide between the Roman Catholic version of the Kingdom of God and that
held by traditional Protestantism. Not only does the RC church explicitly identify the Pope as the
visible representative of Christ on earth, it also posits that this individual has the authority of the
keys. (Matthew 16:17-19) Protestants reject that interpretation of the biblical texts which make
Peter and his successors the authoritative leaders of the church and are decidedly uncomfortable
equating Christs spiritual kingdom with one institutional expression and one hierarchy. Christs
kingdom is not of this world.

Recommended Resources
Bruce, FF, The Canon of Scripture, InterVarsity Press
Chesterton, GK, The Everlasting Man, Empire Books. Chesterton tells the story of human history
from the perspective of Jesus as the Messiah come. Writing in a time when social Darwinism
was rampant, Chesterton instead argued that the idea that society has been steadily progressing
from a state of primitivism and barbarity towards civilization is simply and flatly inaccurate.
History examined closely evidences hope for an answer from heaven itself. Jesus is that answer.
McKnight, Scot, The King Jesus Gospel, Zondervan

52

Mears, Henrietta, What the Bible Is All About, Regal. While this booklet bears some resemblance
to Mears title, the substance is significantly different, though both stand in the orthodox
Christian tradition.
Metzger, Bruce, New Testament: Its Background and Growth, James Clark & Co.
Packer, JI, Knowing God, InterVarsity Press. This is the best of the best on the nature and
character of the God of the Bible.
Piper, John, Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die, Crossway. The sacrificial death of Jesus for
sinners is the center of the biblical story. Pipers description of the manifold aspects of this death
to end all death is a classic.
Robertson, Palmer, The Christ of the Covenants, Presbyterian and Reformed
Robertson, Palmer, The Israel of God, Presbyterian and Reformed
Sproul, RC, Dust to Glory, video series produced by Ligonier Ministries
Sproul, RC, What's in the Bible: A One-Volume Guidebook to God's Word, Thomas Nelson. This
is the best popular one volume introduction to the story of the Bible and a basic description of
each of its 66 books.
Stott, John, Basic Christianity, InterVarsity Press. Stott is one of the premier Evangelical
thinkers of the 20th century. This succinct statement of the essentials of salvation is a favorite
across denominational lines.
Stott, John, The Cross of Christ, InterVarsity Press.
Tozer, AW, The Knowledge of the Holy, HarperOne.
Wenham, John. Christ and the Bible, Wipf & Stock Publishers
Wood, Leon The History of Israel, Zondervan. Woods work has stood the test of many years of
use and still remains a trusted resource in telling Israels Old Testament story. I recommend it
highly.
Wright, NT, How God Became King, HarperOne
Zondervan, Zondervan Handbook to the Bible. This one volume handbook has it all an
introduction to the archaeology, history, figures and themes of the Bible along with a book-bybook commentary. I use this for my college Bible Intro classes and students mark it as an
accessible resource for those who are new to the world of the Bible.

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Various Bible reading plans are available at www.youversion.com which also has an app for
smartphones.