About 3 minutes to read
One Story, Two Testaments
Covenant Theology
God has always dealt with his people by covenant. Learn the covenants and the Bible stops feeling like a pile of disconnected stories.
Before creation, in eternity, the persons of the Trinity agreed on redemption. The Father gave a people to the Son, the Son agreed to obey and suffer for them, and the Spirit agreed to apply that work to them. Reformed writers call this the covenant of redemption. It is the reason Jesus speaks so often about those the Father has given him.
In the garden God dealt with Adam in a covenant of works. Perfect obedience, and life. Disobedience, and death. Adam stood there not only for himself but for all who would come from him. He failed, and the ruin spread to every one of us.
God did not walk away. He made a second covenant, the covenant of grace, and he made it at cost to himself.
Man by his fall having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.
Westminster Confession of Faith 7.3
Here is the part that changes your reading. There are not two ways of salvation in the Bible, law for the old and grace for the new. There is one covenant of grace administered in two ways. Under the old administration it came through promise, sacrifice, priesthood and shadow. Under the new it comes with the substance itself, Christ crucified and risen, preached to the nations. Abraham was justified by faith exactly as you are. The difference is that he looked forward and you look back.
And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Galatians 3:29 (KJV)
So when you open Leviticus, you are not reading a foreign religion. You are watching God teach his people, in blood and smoke and careful ritual, what sin costs and what a substitute is for. When you read the prophets, you are hearing a covenant Lord pleading with a covenant people. And when you reach the Supper, you hear Jesus say the cup is the new covenant in his blood, and the whole Old Testament leans forward into that sentence.