The Covenant Goes Deeper Than You Think
The Valley Letter · Issue No. 2
I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. — Genesis 17:7
Notice that word: establish.
God does not say to Abraham, “I will create a covenant.” He says, “I will establish it.” The difference matters more than most readers realize. You establish something that already exists. You confirm what is already in place. When God says He will establish His covenant with Abraham, He is reaching back, back past Babel, past Noah, past the garden gates, to something He set in motion before Abraham ever drew a breath.
Most Christians treat the biblical covenants as a series of separate arrangements. God’s deal with Noah, then His deal with Abraham, then Moses, then David, then the new covenant in Christ. We put them in a list. We chart them in our study Bibles. And in doing so, we miss the central truth: these are not really separate covenants, but one covenant unfolding through history.
There is one covenant of grace. One. It runs like a river from Eden to the New Jerusalem, cutting its way through every age of redemptive history, fed by tributaries along the way, but just one river.
It begins where we least expect it. Not at Sinai, with thunder and smoke. Not even at Ur, when God first called Abram out of paganism. It begins in a garden, in the wreckage of the fall, when God addresses the serpent: “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” (Genesis 3:15). Theologians have long called this the protevangelium, the first mention of the gospel. Before God issued a single consequence to His rebellious creatures, He announced that He had a plan. A Deliverer was coming. The covenant of grace was born there.
Everything that follows is God keeping that promise, faithfully, with a steadfast and unchanging love toward those whom He appointed to everlasting life before the foundation of the world was laid.
He keeps and reminds us of that covenant through Abraham, Moses, and the dynasty of David. He deepens it through Jeremiah, who announced an age when the law would be written on hearts rather than stone, when God would say of His people, “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). And when the fullness of time arrived, Christ Jesus, the seed of the woman, the son of Abraham, the heir of David, went to a cross and ratified the new covenant in His own blood.
“I will be your God.” That is the covenant formula. It appears first in Genesis and last in Revelation. It is the beating heart of everything in between.
If you are truly in Christ, your salvation is not a recent development. It was not an afterthought when your life fell apart, nor a gift you somehow surprised out of God. The covenant that holds you is everlasting. That is the word God used with Abraham, and He has not changed His meaning. Before you knew to want it, God had promised it. Before the foundation of the world, He planned it. The covenant goes back that far.
That is not a complex doctrine for seminary students. That is the ground beneath your feet and the foundation of your assurance. We are a covenant people who worship the one true God of the covenant.
This spiritual valley we live in gets dark sometimes. Doubt comes and circumstances press. In those moments, it matters enormously whether you are standing on something you arranged with God last Tuesday, or something God established before the ages began.
Stand there. The covenant goes deeper than you think.
VOICE FROM THE PAST
Thomas Boston, A View of the Covenant of Grace (1734)
“He was the offended party, yet the motion for a covenant of peace comes from him; a certain indication of the goodwill of the whole glorious Trinity towards the recovery of lost sinners. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, beholding a lost world, his mercy seeks a vent, that it may be shown to the miserable; but justice stands in the way of the egress and building of mercy, without there be a covenant whereby it may be satisfied. Then says the Father, ‘The first covenant will not serve the purpose of mercy; there must be a new bargain: but the lost creatures have nothing left to contract for themselves; unless another take the burden upon him for them, there is no remedy in the case: they cannot choose such an one for themselves; I will make a choice for them, and make the covenant with my chosen.’”
A BOOK WORTH YOUR TIME
Original & Contemporary Versions of the Charleston Baptist Confession of Faith with Scripture References
H. Rondel Rumburg (Independently published, 2019)
If the covenant thread in this issue stirred something in you, this is where to go next. The Charleston Baptist Confession of Faith (1767) is the doctrinal foundation of the Reformed Baptist tradition in America, and embedded within it is a clear, confessional account of God’s covenant with man: what it is, what it demands, and how it holds. Rumburg presents the original text alongside a contemporary version for comparison, with every Scripture reference printed in full. It is a book to read slowly, a few articles at a time, and to return to often.
Order it on AbeBooks — $19.85
A WORD FROM JOEL
Years of active ministry teach you things seminary cannot.
One of them is this: people do not hold their theology when the pressure is on. Their theology holds them. Or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t hold, that theology was never biblically sound, or perhaps it was never really theirs to begin with. As I see it, there have always been two great problems in our local churches. We do not truly know the God of the Bible, nor do we know who we are before Him. Bible study is not for the weak-minded or the faint of heart. It takes work, and it holds little appeal for the lazy. I do not have all the answers. I am not supposed to. But I do know where every answer is found, in God’s holy Word. My responsibility is to point you to Christ, both the written Word and the living Word.
The covenant holds.
I have watched it hold men at the graveside of a wife. I have watched it hold women through marriages that nearly broke them. I have watched it hold young men and women who walked away from the faith of their fathers, only to be drawn back years later, sometimes decades later, by a grace that refused to let them go.
That is not sentiment. That is the everlasting covenant doing what it was designed to do.
We live in a valley here in Southwest Virginia, literally and spiritually. Mountain country, where the winters are long and the growing season short, where people have learned, generation after generation, that some things you cannot grow yourself. Some things can only be given.
The covenant is given to us by God, established and kept for us by Him. That is its glory.
I am glad you are here for Issue No. 2. There is much more to say, and, God willing, we will say it together. If this letter was a blessing to you, pass it along to someone who might be helped by it. As always, we desire your prayers for this ministry.
Soli Deo Gloria
— Joel Taylor
Abingdon, Virginia
