Four Key Passages that Unify the Entire Bible - Part 2
I remember standing inside a hotel room holding a Bible placed by the Gideons in my hands. I was a kid, and the Bible was very old. It was a heavy, black, hardcover King James Version. To my young mind, it felt massive and almost unapproachable.
I know that I’m not the only person to ever have this thought about the Bible. Many have stared at the long table of contents, scanning the unfamiliar sounding names and titles, wondering how any of these books have something relatable to say to them.
I’m passionate about helping people have a very different experience when they pick up the Bible. I want them to feel a sense of excitement and anticipation for how God is going to speak to them.
In this blog series, I’ve been exploring one of the keys to transforming and clarifying your approach to reading the Bible–learning the zoomed out, big picture framework of the entire Story. Once we’re able to have a sense of the birds-eye view of the Bible, each individual part starts to make greater sense within the unified whole.
One of the ways that the Bible itself helps us to attain this type of birds-eye view of its story is through its various covenants. These oath-bound promises from God to specific people form something of a skeleton to the biblical story. We talked about what a covenant is in greater detail in the previous blog post. You can check it out HERE.
In that post, we covered two of those covenants: 1) God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, and 2) God’s covenant with Israel in Exodus 19. These two covenants begin to answer how God is going to redeem and restore humanity and the rest of creation.
In short, these two covenants build on one another to demonstrate God’s purpose in selecting one human family out of the many–the descendants of Abraham–to be the vehicle of His blessing to all the nations and families of the earth (Genesis 12). The descendants of Abraham, also known as the nation of Israel, are to live holy lives that are set apart so that they can bear witness to the surrounding nations about the character and identity of their God (Exodus 19).
This brings us to our next two covenants: God’s covenant with David and the New Covenant.
God’s covenant with David - 2 Samuel 7
Generations after the Exodus story takes place and Moses gives the people the terms of their covenant with God at Mount Sinai, God makes a series of promises to one of Israel’s kings–a man by the name of David. Remember, this nation is to be the vehicle of God’s blessing and redemption going out to all the nations of the earth.
Between Moses’ day and David’s day centuries later, Israel has gone through multiple cycles of rebellion and failure to live up to the terms of the covenant. How will the nations be blessed through Israel, God’s covenant partners, when they perpetually refuse to live in and receive God’s blessing themselves?
This is where the redemptive story of the Bible focuses on King David and his offspring. God speaks to David through his advisor, Nathan, and gives him a series of promises.
Here is the key text that contains what God promised to David: 2 Samuel 7:12-13
12 When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
Here are a few of the key promises:
God is going to raise up one of David’s offspring (singular) after he has died.
God is going to establish the kingdom of this offspring of David.
This son of David will build a house for God’s name.
And God will establish the throne of the offspring of David’s kingdom forever.
As you read the story of David’s son, Solomon, you begin to think that this promise from God must be talking about him. Solomon starts his reign with incredible wisdom, prosperity, and power. He even builds the temple–a house for God’s name. However, as you keep reading the story, not only does Solomon end his reign miserably, but Solomon’s son ends up fracturing the kingdom in two. Generations later, the Davidic kingdom of Judah will collapse when the Babylonians siege Jerusalem and take the people into exile.
In other words, the result of David’s sons, grandsons, and great grandsons’ leadership is nowhere near the eternal kingdom that God promised in 2 Samuel 7. What does this mean? Did God forsake his promise or take back His word?
As you keep reading through the Bible, other authors start to pick up on this tension and speak of a coming Son of David who will be anointed with the Spirit of the LORD and rule the nations (Isaiah 11:1). Echoes of God’s covenant with David reverberate throughout the psalms (for ex: Psalm 110) and the prophets (for ex: Ezekiel 34:23-24), creating a messianic expectation of a coming Son of David who will fulfill all of God’s promises in 2 Samuel 7.
This is incredibly significant to understanding the meaning of the very first verse in the New Testament:
“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1).
Matthew is doing more here than giving us an ancestry.com-type dna profile of Jesus. He’s identifying Jesus with the covenant promises that God made to both Abraham and David.
The New Covenant - Jeremiah 31
After the failures of Judah’s kings and the people are taken into exile in Babylon, God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah and promises to do a new work among His people. Here is the key text:
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
There is so much that can be said here so I’ll do my best to be succinct. Here’s a summary of what God is promising through Jeremiah:
God is going to make a new covenant with His people that will be different from the covenant He made with them at Sinai.
The people failed to keep the terms of the Sinai covenant (aka the law) repeatedly.
This new covenant will not be written on tablets of stone like the Sinai covenant, but on the hearts of God’s people.
God will deal with the sin of the people in a way that exceeds the way of the old covenant sacrificial system–he will forgive and remember their sin no more.
In essence, God is promising that He is going to do something new among His people to bring about His plan of redemption. The promises made to Abraham and David still hold. God has not given up on His plan to bless the nations through the descendants of Abraham and appoint a Son of David as an eternal king who will rule the nations with justice and righteousness. The New Covenant is a further revelation of how the LORD will accomplish those promises.
At Head and Heart Bible, we produced a course called “The Story of the Bible” that closely walks through how Jesus stepped into the currents of all these covenants and perfectly fulfilled them. In the course, we took our time to show how all of these covenants work together and how the New Testament authors present Jesus as the pinnacle of redemptive history. If you want to grow in your understanding of the unified story of the Bible, check out the course HERE.
For now, I’ll close with quoting Jesus on the night he was betrayed before being crucified. He was having supper with his disciples and he referenced Jeremiah 31.
19 And [Jesus] took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 20 And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood (Luke 22:19-20).
In this moment, Jesus is declaring that what Jeremiah promised centuries before, has arrived in Him. Forgiveness of sins and the law of God written on the hearts of His people was available “in his blood” that was about to be shed on the cross.
I hope that this exploration of these four covenants has helped you see the birds-eye view of the Bible. In fact, why don’t you pick up a Bible right now–a physical one, not the app. Hold it in your hands and take a look at the table of contents.
What are you looking at? It’s a story about a God who is faithful to His promises. He selected Abraham and his family to bring about blessing and redemption to all the nations of the earth. This flawed and imperfect nation is loved and pursued by a gracious God who raised up a descendent of David to establish the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus Christ, the Son of David, is the initiator of a New Covenant, where forgiveness of sins and transformation of the heart is made possible through His bloody death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead.
This is where you fit into the story. The blessing that Adam and Eve forfeited in the Garden of Eden, that God promised to Abraham, has made its way to you through Jesus Christ. This is Good News.
