What Is a Covenant?
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What does the Bible mean when it calls Israel a “faithless bride”?
Israel, as we know, there at the foot of Sinai, was a faithless bride. She broke her covenant. And so, God sent his son, Jesus, and Christ entered into this covenantal marriage with his bride to redeem us, to redeem his church.
If you've been studying God's Word for any length of time, you've probably heard the word covenant before. But what exactly are covenants? And how important are they for understanding the narrative of Scripture? Welcome to Renewing Your Mind this Monday. I'm your weekday host, Dave Terrio, and we'll be thinking about these and other questions this week with our featured teacher, Dr. J. V. Fesco. All this week we'll hear messages from Signed, Sealed, Delivered, Dr. Fesco's teaching series on covenant theology. Historically, covenant theology has been a crucial component of Reformed teaching. So if you'd like to study this topic further, you can get the e-book edition of J.V. Fesco's Introduction to Reformed Covenant Theology when you donate today.
You'll also receive lifetime access to the digital messages and study guide with your donation. Call us at 800-435-4343 or make your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. Here's Dr. Fesco with his first message from the series, What is a Covenant?
The Bible closes with a beautiful picture of the marriage supper of the Lamb. We read in Revelation 19, verse 7, "...let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come." We see the bride decked in fine linen, bright and pure, according to Revelation 19, verse 8, and John's angelic guide tells him that all who are invited to the supper are blessed. While it may not immediately strike us as such, this is a passage that is steeped in the doctrine of the covenant. When the prophet Malachi, for example, rebuked his fellow Israelites for their lax attitude towards marriage, he reminded them that marriage is a covenant, and so here this tells us that our marriage to Christ is ultimately a covenant.
We can say that marriage is simply another way of saying covenant. The covenant marriage is something that runs all throughout scripture, and I think it also gives us a window into God's covenantal marriage to us, to his people. Adam and Eve, for example, were husband and wife, but their sin introduced death, it introduced conflict, as well as introduced evil into the world. God promised, though, that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, And the seed of the woman, of course, is Jesus, whom Paul identifies in 1 Corinthians 15.45 as the last Adam, which this implicitly tells us that if Jesus is the last Adam, well, then the Church is the last Eve. And if the first Adam failed to obey God, then the last Adam is going to come to obey his father and to lay down his life for his bride, to redeem her, to save her.
And so, God traces the line of the covenant across Israel's history, a line that slowly unveils his plan to redeem his people. God, for example, entered into a covenant with his people Israel at Mount Sinai. And he signaled that marital love is a way back to the blessings of Eden, a truth that we can say is celebrated in the book, The Song of Songs. And in fact, first century Jewish rabbis called the Song of Songs, the Holy of Holies of the Old Testament. The song we can say is a commentary on paradise lost and recovered. But Israel, as we know, there at the foot of Sinai was a faithless bride. She broke her covenant. She was, according to the prophet Hosea, a wife of whoredom. And so God sent his son, Jesus, who, as Paul says in Ephesians 5, 25, he loved the church and gave himself up for her.
that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish." And so, Christ entered into this covenantal marriage with his bride to redeem us, to redeem his church. Now, I think we could say about the doctrine of the covenants in the scriptures that we could say it's a bit like Claude Monet's Impressionist painting, Water Lilies, if you've ever seen that painting.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does the Bible mean when it calls Israel a “faithless bride”?
0:00–6:45
2
How does Dr. Fesko define a covenant in Scripture?
6:45–13:46
3
Why are oaths, laws, and animal sacrifices common features of biblical covenants?
13:46–18:42
4
What is the covenant of redemption among the Trinity?
18:42–22:10
5
How do the covenant of works and the covenant of grace differ?
22:10–23:56
6
What role do signs—like the rainbow and circumcision—play in God’s covenants?
23:56–25:28
7
How do human‑to‑human covenants (friendship, marriage, servant) illustrate biblical covenant themes?
25:28–26:13