The Centrality of God’s Covenant
Since we are created in the image of God, we cannot help but think systematically. That is, we relate one thing to another. As B. B. Warfield clarified in his 1895 essay “The Right of Systematic Theology,” confirming the thoughts of a certain Professor Woodrow Wilson—yes, the one who would one day be president of the United States of America—there is no such thing as a fact that goes uninterpreted or regarded in isolation from everything else. Warfield wrote:
The great facts that constitute Christianity are just as “naked” as any other facts, and are just as meaningless to us as any other facts, until they are not only perceived but understood, that is, until not only they themselves but their doctrinal significance is made known to us.
As Warfield went on to explain, any one thing is related to everything. This is the reflection of God’s Triune nature. God is three persons in one being—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Thus, unity and diversity hold together in God as the blessed Trinity. God’s trinitarian nature governs our knowing. We know everything that we know within a system of relationships, and this is reflected in how we learn. We learn by relating one reality to another. This is why analogies are the stock-in-trade of every good teacher. This relational reality to learning, then, is rooted in the way God relates to all things. The term that God uses in his written word that identifies how he relates to all things is covenant.
The Hebrew term berit is translated covenant, and appears over 300 times in the scriptures. It is the term and reality that structures the entire Bible. This is seen in that the term testament is the Latin translation of the term covenant. The term covenant first appears in Genesis 6:18 in the account of Noah and the flood. This leads some people to conclude that this is when God’s covenant began. If you are able to read Hebrew, however, the original language of the Old Testament, you recognize that God’s statement in Genesis 6:18 communicates that God is causing his covenant to continue with Noah. The Hebrew verb form that communicates what God is doing with his covenant makes this point. In fact, the verb form used in Genesis 6:18 regarding what God is doing with his covenant in relation to Noah raises the question as to when God’s covenant began. The short answer is: As soon as he created. We better understand this when we look at other Old Testament texts.
Deuteronomy 4:25-26; 30:15-20 and Jeremiah 33:20-26 in particular draw our attention to the truth that God’s covenant began the moment he created. Jeremiah 33:20-26 tells us that God has a covenant with the day and the night and the heavenly bodies. God gives expression to his covenant with creation in Genesis 6-9 in the account of Noah and the flood. Perhaps you will recall that after the flood is over God gives the covenant sign of the rainbow to Noah and to every living creature. It communicated, among other things, that the relationship that Noah and all mankind after him was in an unavoidable relationship with the entire creation that was represented in the relationship that all mankind had with non-human creatures. It is right for us to conclude that God’s covenant was with all creation, because no creatures life was disconnected from the life of the entire created order. Yet, this covenant did not begin with Noah, but rather the moment God created. Not only does Jeremiah 33:20-26 tell us of God’s covenant with the day and the night, but God had previously told the Israelites through Moses that God would call heaven and earth to testify against them if they violated his covenant. That seems a rather strange thing to do. What exactly were heaven and earth supposed to testify to? Answer: God’s covenant faithfulness.
Because God is three persons in one being—the Blessed Trinity—and creation itself is a living reality, we are right to affirm that God’s covenant relationship with all things is a living reality. This is simply to say that we ought to think of God’s relationship to us and everything as an organism. This is, arguably, the chief characteristic of Warfield’s thought—that he explained biblical Christianity as an organism. All of this more than hints at the point that the whole notion of covenant theology and systematic theology go together. Indeed, in recent years there have been a number of biblical scholars and theologians who have been working on demonstrating the union between the disciplines of biblical theology, which traces out the historical development of the primary storyline of Scripture with its unavoidable doctrines, and systematic theology, which considers how those same doctrines are related to and condition one another. Warfield, in a characteristic Old Princeton fashion, affirmed that we only think rightly about all of this when we see it as a living organism. Only as we acknowledge the organic characteristic of God’s covenant can we do full justice to the Scriptures, and the theology mandated by Scripture.
This organic motif or theme is not some artificial construct superimposed upon the biblical storyline. It not only is mandated by what has already been mentioned, but impresses itself upon us when we condition our thinking by the truth that Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, is the one who fulfills God’s covenant. Indeed, he is the covenant, as Isaiah 42:6-7 tells us! Jesus, himself, stated in Matthew 5:17-20 that he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. In other words, he came to fulfill the Old Covenant, to bring it to its intended purpose. The writer of Hebrews, in a most specific and explicit way, clarifies that the New Covenant promised in Jeremiah 31:31-34 is what Jesus has fulfilled. By labeling it “new” he was not affirming that it was something substantially different from God’s original covenant that is labeled “old.” Instead, we ought to think of the term “new” as affirming a “renewing” that brings about a new kind of administration of, and expression to, God’s covenant. Just as a living plant can bring forth new growth from the same root system that had originally brought forth growth that had eventually died off, so too has God in history brought about new realities to his covenant that are actually part of the same root system that gave expression to his covenant when he first brought it about at creation.
Part of what all this means is that we do serious injustice to Scripture when we fail to recognize the fundamental organic unity that marks it, the doctrines revealed in it and the historical events it explains. This is expressed by Jesus in Matthew 5:18 when he affirms that not the tiniest mark of the biblical writers would go unfulfilled. The New Covenant is the Old Covenant brought to its fulfillment. There is not a fundamental discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants but a fundamental continuity. None of this denies that there aren’t changes that take place throughout history to God’s covenant and his dealings with his creation, mankind as a whole and his saved covenant people. Of course there are changes, just as there are changes to a human being as he or she grows. Just as there are changes to a plant that grows. But such changes do not mandate that the organism itself becomes something entirely different from what it was originally. Just as all the DNA of a fully grown oak tree is in the acorn and yet the acorn resembles virtually no similarity to the fully grown oak, so too were all of the organic properties of God’s covenant present at the moment of his creating, even as they find their fullest expression in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The implications for all of this are massive. But we are dealing with the infinite and eternal Triune God. What else should we expect?
