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Everlasting Covenants

Understanding the Bible by Examining God’s Permanent Relationships with Individuals and Groups

A covenant is a bond or agreement between individuals that defines the relationship between the involved parties and their responsibilities to each other. The agreement might be unconditional, in which the responsibilities of one or both parties remain intact regardless of the other party’s fidelity. Or, if conditional or obligatory, one’s responsibilities might change depending on the other’s compliance with the terms of the agreement. The covenant could also be promissory, in that one party has simply committed themselves to an action relative to the other.

The study of God’s covenants is one of the essential keys to unlocking scripture. It serves as a road map to help sojourning Bible students know where they are with respect to God’s overall plan regardless of where they might have opened the scriptures in their quest to understand sacred history. For many people these days, the Bible is irrelevant. For others, it contains meaningful stories, poetry, prophecy, and directives that enlighten us and guide us back to our Creator. However, without a road map, we sometimes misinterpret the signs and directives along the way if we are unsure of exactly where we are on the journey.

Understanding God’s everlasting covenants helps the Bible student to know what God is doing at a particular time in history and with whom he is interacting. Without such, it is easy to misapply or misinterpret God’s statements, commands, or promises and rob ourselves of the plain and simple understanding of the text at hand. It can also cause us to take knowledge from later portions of scripture and read them back into earlier ones, ultimately skewing our interpretation of something that would otherwise be relatively simple.