Covenant

“I will not violate my covenant or alter the word that went forth from my lips.”

— Psalm 89:34 (ESV)

A covenant is a solemn, binding relationship one party establishes with another by promise and oath, in the ancient world sometimes sealed by cutting sacrificial animals in two. Scripture uses the word for agreements between people (1 Sam. 11:1; Josh. 9:6, 15) and, above all, for the covenants by which God binds himself to his creatures. Because the distance between Creator and creature could otherwise never be bridged, such a covenant is God’s own gracious condescension rather than a bargain between equals: he sets its terms, swears to keep them, and cannot violate his own word (Ps. 89:34).

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession open their own covenant chapters with nearly identical wording:

The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to him as their creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.¹

Westminster states the same point in only slightly different words, speaking of creatures’ “fruition of him as their blessedness and reward” rather than “the reward of life.”² Neither confession treats a covenant as a bargain struck between equal parties: God’s own condescension is what makes any covenant relationship between the infinite Creator and his finite creatures possible at all.

Biblical Basis

Etymology and the covenant ceremony

The Hebrew word for covenant, berith, likely comes from a root meaning “to cut,” recalling the ancient custom of cutting animals in two and passing between the pieces, so that the party taking the oath called the animals’ fate down on himself should he break faith (Gen. 15:9-10, 17; Jer. 34:18-19).³ When God covenants with Abraham in Genesis 15, “it is not really a compact but a pledge”: God alone passes between the pieces while Abraham sleeps, binding only himself to keep the promise.³ Such covenants are also sealed by oath: God “swears by himself” (Gen. 22:16) and “by his life” (Deut. 32:40) to show “the unchangeable character of his purpose” (Heb. 6:17).³

That same unbreakable, one-sided character may be why the Greek translators of the Septuagint rendered the Hebrew word not by the ordinary Greek word for a mutual compact, syntheke, but by diatheke, a word closer to “testament,” a disposition one party settles unilaterally.³ The New Testament continues that usage: diatheke occurs thirty-three times, almost always translated “covenant” for God’s dealings with Israel and “testament” for his dealings under the gospel, bearing the strict sense of a last will and testament in only one of those instances (Heb. 9:16-17).⁴

Unilateral and sovereignly imposed

Whether a given covenant is unilateral or bilateral cannot be read off the word itself; it depends on the standing of the two parties.³ Because God is sovereign, “the unilateral dimension comes to the fore” in his covenants with creatures: he is not a negotiating partner but the one who “imposes his ordinances” on those he covenants with.³ The obligations he lays on his covenant people, Israel’s call to keep his statutes after Sinai for example (Exod. 19:5-6; 24:3, 7), are not conditions for entering the covenant but “the rules of conduct for those who by grace had been incorporated into it” already.³

Scripture also uses “covenant” more broadly than for the covenant of grace alone. Four senses appear: a natural ordinance (Jer. 33:20), an unconditional promise (Gen. 9:11-12), a conditional promise (Isa. 1:19-20), and a dispensation or mode of administration (Heb. 8:6-9); the theological phrases “covenant of works” and “covenant of grace” both use the third sense, a promise suspended on conditions.⁵ A covenant in this sense has three essential elements: contracting parties, promises suspended on conditions, and a penalty for failing to meet them.⁵

The biblical covenants

Scripture records a sequence of such covenants. The Noahic covenant promises never again to destroy the earth by flood, a promise Genesis 9 underlines by repeating the word “covenant” three times and naming its sign, the rainbow, three times as well.⁶ The Abrahamic covenant (Gen. 15, 17) and the Davidic covenant (2 Sam. 7; Jer. 33:21-22; Ps. 89:3-4)⁴ both place their accent on God’s own unconditional promise, that he “will surely bring the covenant to pass,” and both are called “everlasting.”⁷ The Davidic covenant still carries real conditions alongside that promise: David’s own descendants could forfeit their place on the throne through disobedience, just as Saul had forfeited his kingship, yet the covenant remains “ultimately unconditional because God promised a king from the line of David to rule over the world,” a promise fulfilled in Christ.⁸ The Mosaic covenant, by contrast, written first “in a book” and then “upon tables of stone” (Ex. 24:7),⁴ places its own accent on the nation’s obligation to obey, highlighting Israel’s inability to keep it rather than an unconditional promise to bring it to pass.⁷ The New Covenant, inaugurated in Christ’s own blood (Luke 22:20), is Scripture’s own fulfillment of the old covenant and the ground of freedom from the law’s condemnation (Mark 14:24; Heb. 7:22; 9:15; 12:24).⁹

Objections and Responses

Calling Adam’s, Noah’s, or Abraham’s arrangement with God a “covenant” seems to stretch the word’s ordinary sense, since none of them negotiated its terms. A sovereignly imposed constitution can still rightly be called a covenant for three reasons: nothing suggests the party under it entered unwillingly (Adam was a holy being, and the arrangement was entirely to his advantage); “covenant” is simply the proper word for “a conditional promise made to a free agent”; and Scripture itself uses the word this way for other constitutions God imposed sovereignly, on Noah (Gen. 9:11-12) and Abraham (Gen. 17:1-21) alike, so that “if God could make covenants with fallen and guilty Noah… and with Abraham… why could he not make a covenant with unfallen Adam.”¹⁰

If God’s covenants come with obligations attached, faith and obedience, doesn’t that make them conditional contracts rather than free gifts? The obligations Scripture attaches to a covenant are not conditions for entering it but rules of conduct for those already brought into it by grace; the covenant of grace itself remains “unilateral, indissolubly grounded in the merciful promises of the sovereign God” rather than a bargain God might fail to keep.³

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 1. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 22, “The Covenant of Grace,” 367-369. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hodge, chap. 17, “The Covenant of Works,” 309. ↩ ↩²
Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), chap. 17, “Creation Care.” ↩
Micah John McCormick, “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 200. ↩ ↩²
Carol Man Fen Chen, “Biblical Covenants in the Old Testament: Unconditionality and Conditionality,” in A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 249. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩
Hodge, chap. 17, 310. ↩