The various divine covenants are “the covenants of the promise” (Eph 2:12). The covenant concept runs throughout Scripture. It frames God’s creational process, structures his dealings with man, and, most importantly for this book’s thesis, insures his divine program’s success in history. This program is not about the defeat of Christ’s redemptive work in history. [...]
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The covenantal foundation of eschatological hope encourages our anticipating God’s historical blessings in time and on earth. The biblical worldview concerns itself with the material world, the here and now. We see Christianity’s interest in the material here and now in God’s creating the earth and man’s body as material entities, and all “very good” [...]
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Due to Scripture’s covenantal emphasis, man’s obligations are not fundamentally individualistic, but rather corporate. As we shall see in later chapters, this fits well with a postmillennial eschatology and its strong view of social responsibility. Here I will briefly outline the case for covenantalism’s societal obligations. God purposefully creates man as an organic, unified race. [...]
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We may trace Scripture’s unity through the unity of the covenants, which set forth the overarching Covenant of Grace. The heart of God’s “covenants of the promise” (diathekon tes epaggelias, Eph 2:12) is: “I will be your God and you will be My people.” This idea occurs many times in Scripture. God establishes his redemptive [...]
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We must even understand the world’s creation in terms of covenant. The creation account portrays a covenantal transaction, even though it does not employ the word “covenant” (berith). I argue this on three important bases. First, the “basic elements of a covenant are imbedded in the Genesis account,” even though the word is lacking. When [...]
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The Bible is very much a covenant document, as even a cursory reading demonstrates. The biblical words for “covenant” appear often in Scripture. The Hebrew berith occurs 285 times in the Old Testament, while the Greek word diatheke appears thirty times in the New Test-ament. Thus, we might well state that “the Biblical category which [...]
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In Scripture the covenant structures God’s relationship with man and exercises a dominant influence on the flow of redemptive history. It is, in fact, “one of the most important motifs in biblical theology.” Indeed, biblical theology shows that “redemption and eschatology are co-eval throughout biblical history.” We see this illustrated, for example, when the Lord [...]
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In Scripture the new heavens and new earth are already present in history — spiritually and covenantally. And the Isaiah 65:17ff passage is a key text for understanding this truth. This powerful passage reads: For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; / And the former things will not be remembered or come [...]
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The revelation regarding man as God’s image appears in the context of the Creation Mandate. This mandate occurs as the “swelling of jubilant song” at the accomplishment of God’s creative activity. God is now ready to pronounce his creation “very good” (Ge 1:31–2:2). One vital function of that image is man’s acting as ruler over [...]
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An important foundation stone for postmillennialism is the idea of “covenant.” Paul subsumes all the Old Testament covenants under one principle: gracious promise. When he writes to the Gentile Christians, he urges them to “remember that at that time you were… foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the [...]
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KINGDOM LEAVENThe Parable of the Leaven reads: "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid i...
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