Chapter 1: What is a covenant and why is it significant?
When God makes a promise, He fulfills it, and He does so in real time and space.
When Paul announces the gospel in his letters or the preachings in the book of Acts, they talk about how Jesus was born according to the Scriptures in the fullness of time, that God had prepared that throughout all of history. Everything in Old Testament history before the birth of Christ was moving towards that moment.
God makes promises throughout the Bible. His covenant with Abraham, for example, establishes the nation of Israel. His covenant with Moses brings about the law. And the new covenant, through Jesus, brings salvation to all who believe.
Chapter 2: How do Old Testament covenants shape redemptive history?
I'm glad you're joining us today for Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. God's fulfillment of covenants is critical to the message of both the Old and the New Testaments. So here's R.C. Sproul to continue his series, The Promise Keeper, The God of the Covenants.
In our first session, I mentioned to you that the basic role of the covenant is that it is the structure of God's revelation in history. And I've used this term more than once, the history of redemption or redemptive history, because history is the context in which God works out His plan of redemption.
And that idea became very controversial in the middle of the 20th century, again with higher critical scholars, chiefly in Germany, people like Rudolf Bultmann, who made a distinction between what he called Hausgeschichte, or salvation history, and history.
And what he meant by Haus Geschichte was something that took place not on the horizontal plane of world history, but something that took place above history in sort of some supra-temporal realm.
Bultmann, you know, embracing an existential form of philosophy, believed that salvation is not something that happens on this level, but it happens vertically, or what he said, punctiliously, , immediately and directly from above, sort of a mystical thing when a person has a crisis experience of faith. At the same time, he said that the Bible is filled with both mythology and real history.
But in order for the Bible to have any meaning for us today, it must be demythologized, to tear off the husk that holds that kernel of historical truth. And so anything that's smacked of the supernatural, like the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection, that sort of thing, belongs to the realm of myth, not to the realm of history. But that's okay.
See, because the whole point of that kind of existential thinking and theology that drove the German theologians in the 20th century was that salvation doesn't have to be rooted and grounded in history for it to be real. You can still have the Christ event, which is kind of an existential moment that people have, a moment of crisis and so on. But that is so far removed.
from the biblical concept of redemption. Oskar Kuhlmann, the Swiss theologian and New Testament scholar, wrote a trilogy of books in the middle of the 20th century concerned with this matter of redemptive history. His first book was called Christ and Time, Christus und der Zeit, Christ and Time, in which he examined the timeframe references of the Bible, like years, days, hours, and so on.
And his second book was on the person of Christ, the Christology of the New Testament. But his third book was entitled Salvation in History. which was a comprehensive rebuttal to Rudolf Bultmann, arguing that the Scripture itself sees God's revelation as inexorably tied and bound up with real history.
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Chapter 3: What role does the New Covenant play in salvation?
for the birth of Christ is placed in real history. And people like Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas and so on are real historical personages. The Pharaoh of Egypt, Cyrus and Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, those are all real historical figures. And what the Bible talks about is God's working in and through the normal plane of history.
Again, a distinction that Oskar Kuhlman made in his first book in the trilogy, Christ in Time. was the distinction between two different words for time in the Greek. One is the word chronos, and the word chronos is the ordinary Greek word that refers to the moment-by-moment passing of time. I have on my wrist what we commonly call a wristwatch, and the more technical term for it is a chronometer.
A chronometer is something that meters or measures chronos, that measures time, the simple passing of day to day, and we call this time of history. But the other word in the New Testament that can be translated time is the word kairos, and kairos has a special meaning. It has to do not simply with history, but with what we would call the historic.
Everything that ever happens in time is historical. But not everything that happens in time is historic. We use the term historic to refer to specific moments in time that are pregnant in their significance and meaning, because after that particular event, everything changes. And everything that happens before it, in a sense, leads up to it.
You think of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That was a historic moment in American history. It changed our culture forever. September 11, 2001 changed our national culture forever. It was a historic event, a historic moment.
But both of these moments that were historic, these kairotic events, take place not in some never-never land of existential Gnostic thinking, but actually in the plane of history. At the heart of the biblical announcement of the coming of the Messiah is the statement that Jesus came in the fullness of time. The fullness of time.
The word there is pleroma, and it's translated fullness, but it's the kind of fullness that indicates satiation. If I take my glass and I put it under the water faucet at home and I say I'm going to fill up this glass, if I filled it right up to the edge of the glass, that still wouldn't be pleroma.
I would have to leave the glass under the faucet so that the water is flowing over the top where it's at the bursting point. That's pleroma, fullness so full that there's not any more room for another ounce or another speck of anything to be added to it. And that's what the Bible says, in the plan of God, Christ came in the fullness of time.
And that whole idea is inseparably related to the gospel itself. that when Paul announces the gospel in his letters or the preachings in the book of Acts, they talk about how Jesus was born according to the Scriptures in the fullness of time, that God had prepared that throughout all of history.
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Chapter 4: How did historical criticism affect the understanding of salvation history?
Well, during the time of the writing of the Septuagint, lest the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews be lost to the Jewish people who were now speaking Greek, a team of seventy scholars, Jewish scholars, came together and translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.
And that's a very important event in the history of Judeo-Christianity because there we begin to see how the Old Testament concepts were rendered into the Greek language, a language that was not native to the people of the Old Covenant. And yet the New Testament is now written in Greek. And so having the Septuagint is almost like having a translating, code-breaking thing
because we can compare how the Jews translated their own Scriptures into Greek and then compared with how the New Testament writers used the same language. It's very important etymologically and so on. But in any case, one of the problems that the Jews who produced the Septuagint struggled with at the time of this translation is what Greek word can we use to render the Hebrew berit
into the Greek language because the problem was there wasn't any word that really matched the Hebrew term berit that is now translated by the English word covenant. Well, there were a couple of words that sort of competed, and the word that won the day was the Greek word diatheka.
which is how the Septuagint translates berit and how, for the most part, the etheka is used in the New Testament to translate the Hebrew concept of covenant. And this is where we get some of that confusion between Old Covenant and Old Testament, New Covenant and New Testament, because the primary word for testament seems to be at least, the word diatheka. But here's the problem.
A testament in the Greek culture, at least of that time, had a couple of things that made it significantly different from the Old Testament concept of covenant. The first thing was that in the Greek culture, a diatheka, a testament, was something that could be changed at any time. by the testator as long as the testator was still alive.
The person could make up his last will and testament and get ticked off at his heirs and write them out of their will. I tell this to my kids all the time. When they give me a hard time, you're out of the will. My son and I trade responsibilities for Pittsburgh Steeler games. On one week, I'm responsible for the Steelers to win. And then the next week, he's responsible for the Steelers to win.
And if the Steelers lose during his week, that's my customary response. There goes your inheritance, son. I mean, not much on the line here, just your inheritance. I've just written you out of the will. But we understand that, that that actually does happen, that people are disinherited. People are written out of people's will.
But when God makes a covenant with His people, He can punish them for covenant breaking, but He never, ever destroys the covenant promises that He makes. That's why baptism is so important in the life of the church, because baptism is the covenant sign of the New Testament.
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