R.C. Sproul

and people say it begins at Pentecost, or it begins here, it begins there.

I'm persuaded that the new covenant begins in the upper room the night before Jesus' death when He changes the significance of the Passover and declares the making of a new covenant in His blood, which covenant is then ratified the next day on the cross.

And so I think that's when the

period of redemptive history that we call the New Covenant really begins with that work of Christ.

However, you see the confusion, because in our most ordinary use of language, when we talk about Old Testament and New Testament, we're not talking about two covenants.

We're talking about two books, the Old Testament Scriptures and the New Testament Scriptures.

And so we're talking about two segments of the biblical canon.

one that we call the Old Testament, the other one the New Testament.

And in that sense, the use of the word has nothing to do with the concept of testament or will.

But when we talk about New Covenant and Old Covenant, as I say, we're not speaking exactly synonymously with the concept of testament.

Now one other thing before I stop that I hope will incite you to come for the third lecture is that the Old Covenant period of redemption does not cover

the whole history of the Old Testament, because the Old Covenant doesn't start until the fall.

The old covenant, when we refer to the old covenant, we're referring to what God promised after the fall.

So now we have to make more distinctions, and we distinguish between what we call the covenant of creation and the covenant of redemption, and we'll explore those distinctions in our next session.

God has made promises to His people, and He has kept those promises.

We only can exist in the family of God and in the church because our God is a God who keeps covenant.

Our God is a God who is a covenant keeper where we are all covenant breakers.

God never breaks His promise.

Today we're going to focus on the covenants of the Bible.

Now sometimes historic reform theology is nicknamed covenant theology.