Covenants and Promises, Pt. 1

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One of the most remarkable things about God is that he didn’t have to create us— and yet he did. He’s entirely self-sufficient, still he wants to be known by us. Pastor Nick Gatzke begins a brand-new series exploring how God relates to mankind. Discover what God’s Covenants and Promises teach us about God and us.

We begin a new series called From Old to New to You. And throughout the series, we’ll be looking at themes from the Bible, themes that begin in the Old Testament, that continue into the New Testament, and then explore what they mean for you today. Because we all know that as we read the Bible, sometimes we read the Old Testament and we have a hard time making the connection to how these things of God that he reveals to us that are for our good, how do they apply to us today? The distance of time between the Old Testament and today can make that difficult for us sometimes. Other times we look at the scripture and we see that with the coming of Jesus, God interacts with us in a different way. But how is it different?

And what does it mean that Jesus came for this particular way that God interacts with us or for that particular expression of God’s character and on down the line? And we know that things are different, but we might not know how. And so over the next number of weeks, we’ll look at what the Bible says about these different aspects of God and how he works in the Old Testament to the New Testament and what it means for you today. And so this series really is a short series in biblical theology. Biblical theology is just a way to express a belief or a theme about God that starts in the Old Testament and is woven throughout the whole Bible and has implication for you today.

And there are a number of biblical theological themes to explore. We’re going to explore just a handful of them. But when you explore the thread, or the storyline or the arc of scripture in this way. You begin to see the texture and the depth and the profundity of who this God is and what it means for him to interact with us. And so today we start in a fairly foundational place. We start on the topic of the promises and the covenants of God. thousands of promises that God makes in the Bible. And they’re harder to count than you might think. Some people estimate that there are as many as 5,000. One person has estimated there’s as many as 30,000 promises of God in the Bible. A man named Everett Storms, who’s a school teacher in Canada, made a detailed study of the promises of God. He figures that the notion of 30,000 promises is probably too many since there are just over 31,000 verses in the entire Bible. But during his 27th reading through the Bible, a task which took him about a year and a half, he came up with a grand total of 8,810 promises in the Bible. And of those promises, 7,487 of them are promises that are made by God, directed to humankind. Almost 7,500 promises.

Now, not all of these promises are of equal significance, and yet we know that the ones that provide a framework for us, the promises of God, are called covenants. A covenant is, as one theologian defines it, an unchangeable, divinely imposed legal agreement between God and man that stipulates the conditions of their relationship. Here’s another way to say it. A covenant is the promises made between God and humanity that defines the way they interact with each other.

God interacts with humanity through covenants and covenants include promises from God. They include blessings from God. They include a required response from men and women. And when there is the proper response, there’s blessing. And when there’s not the proper response, there is consequence. There are many covenants in the Bible, and it would be impossible for us to give a detailed account for all of them in one message. It’s certainly impossible to engage in almost the 7,000 promises of God in one message. Naturally, we are going to leave a lot of detail on the cutting room floor, but we’re going to go fast because there’s benefit for you to see the arc of Scripture as God relates to humanity. And as we see these covenants, think of it this way: this is God relating to us in a specific way. That’s the arc of scripture. Covenant number one is called the universal covenant.

Underlying the whole story of the Bible and underlying the whole experience of reality for humankind from the beginning until the end is the universal covenant. This covenant simply states that God is the Lord and the King of the earth.

God is the Lord and the King of the earth. Psalm 74, verses 12 through 21 says, “Yet God, my King, is of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth. You divided the sea by your might.

You broke the heads of the sea monsters on the water. You crushed the heads of the Leviathan. You gave him his food. For the creatures of the wilderness, you split open the springs and the brooks and you dried up ever-flowing streams. Yours is the day. Yours also is the night.

You have established the heavenly lights and the sun. You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth. You have made summer and winter. Remember this, O Lord.”

Psalm 95 says, “God and a great king above all gods.” Isaiah 66:1 says, “Thus says the Lord, heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool.”

God has been, currently is, and will be the Lord and the king of all of the earth.

This is a promise to you. This is also the baseline for all other types of interaction with God.

You are not approaching one who is a peer. You are certainly not approaching one who is less.

And if you think that this universal covenant sounds really basic and fundamental in its ways, in some ways it is. And in other ways, all you have to do is to look around the culture around you today. And you say, how many people prop themselves up as their own God?

How many people look at the lens of the framework of the world through the fact that they are the king of their experience? The universal covenant says God has been, is, and will be Lord and King over the universe. But how does God relate to us even more specifically than that? Well, we see that God makes another covenant very early on in the Bible, and he does so with the first humans, Adam and Eve. Remember, God does not relate to humans in a willy-nilly or unstructured sort of way. He relates to them through boundaries, just like we all relate to each other. with certain types of frameworks and agreements and boundaries. And the first covenant that God makes with humankind is what we call the covenant of Eden or the Edenic covenant. Some people call it the covenant of works. Some people call it the covenant of Adam or Adamic covenant. This is a covenant, a relationship between God and humanity that is unique because God relates to humans differently than he relates to all the rest of his creatures. He doesn’t relate to you the way he relates to animals. He doesn’t relate to people the way that he relates to plants or to the atmosphere. He relates to humans uniquely.

And in this covenant, he gives Adam and Eve blessing and promise and he sets upon them one stipulation. He says in Genesis 1:28, “God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply. And fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

What a blessing. Be fruitful and have dominion over the earth. A tremendous task, a wonderful promise that’s attached to that, that when you follow me in faith, these things will indeed happen. And there’s just one stipulation. The stipulation is found in chapter 2, verses 16 and 17. It says, “The Lord God commanded the man, saying, You shall surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you do, you shall surely die.” Now we know that Adam and Eve were blessed to be the ruling creatures of the earth. They were commissioned in some ways to be the vassal kings of God. They were called to trust God in faith that as he promised to them that they would do these things when they followed in faith, they would also be called to faith to trust that the stipulation of God was actually for their good and not for their ill.

But ultimately, even though they were tremendously blessed, they broke the covenant.

God upheld his side of this relationship. Adam and Eve did not hold up their side of the relationship. They ate of the tree. Sin entered the world. And the way that humans and God would interact would necessarily change. But even here at the very beginning, God is gracious. These humans would die, but they would not die for many hundreds of years. They would have children of their own, and then he promises to them that their work would be more difficult in the land, that childbearing would be more painful for them. But even then, God shows his grace because he promises in Genesis 3:15, that Eve’s offspring would crush the head of their enemy, Satan, and destroy him forever. Even at the very beginning of how God interacts with people, there’s a promise for Jesus. And that leads to the story of God and the story of people continuing to move from difficult but gracious to even worse but still gracious.

Because Sin spread throughout the human race like a wildfire. And people did what was right in their own eyes and they were wicked in their ways. They turned their back on God. God continued to hold up his side and the humans continued to walk away. And God’s wrath was stoked and the world became wicked. And so God decided to flood the earth in judgment. Now, in this judgment, God makes a covenant. And he did so with a man named Noah. He says to Noah, I will show you grace if you follow me in faith. And the way that you follow me in faith is by building an ark. I will preserve you and your family. I will save you from judgment.

Grace abounded even in the midst of wickedness and judgment. Humanity was saved through this covenant. God continued to relate to his creatures who had rebelled against him. God promised then to never judge the earth in this way again by way of flood. And that promise is given a reminder to us every single time that we see a rainbow. That’s the Noahic covenant. The next covenant that God makes, the next way that he chooses to express the boundaries of his relationship with people comes through Abraham. It’s called the Abrahamic Covenant. We see in Genesis 12 through 17, Abraham was an old man with a wife and no children. The covenant that God gives or makes with him is a covenant that sets him apart to bless him and to turn him into a great nation.

Like all of the covenants, God blesses, people are called to respond in faith, and that faith results in obedience. That is the call of God in this covenant as well.

And in this covenant, it’s unique. takes upon himself not only the opportunity to bless, but he also takes upon himself the requirement of the stipulation. God guarantees to Abraham that I will bless you and he guarantees to Abraham you will be faithful and meet the criteria of this covenant. That’s the way that God enacts this. And notice as I read a little bit from Genesis 12 and Genesis 17, notice all of the I wills that God says to Abraham.

Genesis 12 verses two and three, God says, “I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and to him who dishonors you, I will curse you. And in you, all of the families of the earth shall be blessed.” And again, notice all of the I wills in Genesis 17, 4-8.

God says, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer should your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful and I will make you into nations and kings shall come from you and I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout the generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojourners, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession and I will be their God.”

Now let’s make a couple of observation number one is that God promises to bless Abraham by making him a great nation and by blessing Abraham, there is an extension of blessing to all of the people of all of the world.

God will relate to people in this way forever.

This is an eternal covenant. The promise that God makes has the promise of blessing, but it also has the promise of land attached to it. This is a fulfillment that would not come for another 400 plus years, pointing that only God, no human force or will, would be able to enact this type of blessing. God initiated the blessing with Abraham.

Abraham didn’t do anything to earn God’s favor to be blessed in this way.

And like all of the covenants to this point, this covenant is unconditional in one sense and conditional in another. It’s unconditional in that God declares what he will do and then he takes the responsibility for his own purposes to bless the nations and do it. God is sovereign and he will do what he will do. It’s conditional in the sense that, although there is a general blessing to all of the nations, the greatest fulfillment of this blessing is applied to those who put faith in

God and trust him, and as a result, they obey. God is gracious, but he also demands obedience from those who are in covenant with him.

And lastly, I think it’s important to observe that the core statement of this covenant is really a statement that is very simple, but it’s quite profound. It’s the core really of all of the covenants of God. It’s the core of your relationship with God today.

It’s found in Genesis 17:7, when God says to Abraham, “I will be God to you and to your offspring after you.”

In the universal covenant, God said, I will be God, period.

In the Abrahamic covenant, God says, I will be your God.

What’s the difference? The difference means everything. For God, not to be a distant God, but to be God to you means that The Lord of the earth says he will provide for you. It means that the king of the universe will give just rule.

It means that the eternal God will guide and give and show might and strength and he will do so on behalf of those who are his people. This is a declaration that resounds throughout the whole Bible as God interacts with humanity. For those who put their faith in him, I will be your God and you will be my people. That is the core of all of the covenants.

It’s the core of how God relates to anybody who seeks to follow him. First we see that God is God.

But now God promises to be your God, especially for those who put their trust in him. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said that for those of you who feel like you are one of the teeming millions in the world, and though the world would have you to believe that you do not count and that you are but a speck in the mass of people, God says, I know you.

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This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.