Quotes about Covenant

His point is that the cross has liberated people from sin, so that they can be God-reflecting, image-bearing, working models of divine covenant faithfulness in action.

The "covenant of vocation"—Israel's vocation to be the light of the world—was fulfilled.

What God was doing through the Torah, in Israel, was to gather "Sin" together into one place, so that it could then be condemned.

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of "penal substitution," this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a "works contract," not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of "going to heaven," but of God's vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence:

have argued that the early Christian view of Jesus's death was focused on Passover and hence on the Exodus story, now to be experienced as the new liberating event that was also the great one-off "sin-forgiving" event. Though the language here is unique to this passage, the outline meaning—Passover and atonement, in fulfillment of the covenant and to forgive sins and cleanse from impurity—is the same.

One central biblical term to refer both to the divine covenant faithfulness and to the status of the covenant member is tsedaqah, in Greek dikaiosyn?, regularly (if potentially misleadingly) translated into English as "righteousness" or "justice.

God's covenant with Abraham and through Israel for the world was there precisely in order to deal with sin, as "the Jew" in 2:17—20 knows and claims.

the multiple angry assaults on the "traditional family" are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the "covenantal family" of the Bible into the hated "hierarchical family" of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others. Still

There are striking examples of the same thing in our own day. For example, the multiple angry assaults on the "traditional family" are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the "covenantal family" of the Bible into the hated "hierarchical family" of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others.

You and I never could have started at the fall of Adam and Eve and used reason to predict the coming of Jesus and his death on the cross. Old Testament believers knew that God was going to deal with sin and give new life to his people because God told them that this was what he was going to do. But they did not know that the death of the Son of God would be the means by which this would happen.

Neither the Ten Commandments nor the great commandment is revelatory if separated from the divine covenant with Israel or from the presence of the Kingdom of God in the Christ. These commandments were meant and should be taken as interpretations of a new reality, not as orders directed against the old reality. They are descriptions and not laws. ~ vol. 1, p.125

In short, a nation in covenant with God is assured peace, prosperity and power. In sharp contrast, look at what befalls the nation that abandons the covenant.