The Covenant (part 1 of 3)

So, you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you say. 

You have been saved. You celebrate being justified, forgiven, reclaimed, and transformed. You and God have an agreement about your life and future, you say. You believe this status is indicative of you, and you believe it strongly enough that you have hitched your hope to its star. 

But upon what basis do you believe? 

In other words, do you have a guarantee? Do you have a promise of some sort? Are you under contract with God—or do you have a covenant with Him? Does it matter? 

You bet it does! 

Contracts are powerful, legal instruments. For example: I purchased our home based upon a contract. So long as the contract is viable, the house is mine. By signing at the bottom of the page (and a few other places), I expressed intention to work with the mortgage company to secure our property. 

If either party to this contract decides our agreement needs to be modified—or even nullified—it can be done. It will be painful and costly, but it can be accomplished. This is the nature of a contract. 

Note: I did not enter into a covenant with the mortgage company. As a matter of fact, I only have a covenant with two people: my wife and God. And while both are covenant partners with me, they are different types of covenants. 

When I married Dianne, we entered into a marriage covenant, “…for better or worse, for richer or poorer…until death do us part.” I made a covenantal pledge to her and her to me. 

Even though the presiding minister declared a clear warning to anyone who might tamper with our covenant—“Now what God has joined together, let no man separate!”—many do so anyway. Divorce treats a marriage covenant as though it was a contract, and as we all recognize, the dissolution of a marriage covenant is catastrophic. 

To summarize to this point, if you are willing to pay the price, you can modify a contract. If you determine to do so, you can dissolve a marriage covenant, but the suffering of doing so is immeasurable. You can alter both a contract and a marriage covenant, but such is not the case with God’s covenant. 

So what? Why does this parsing of words between "covenant" and "contract" matter? That's next...and it is remarkable.

Resource options:  

To read about the blood covenant in depth, I highly recommend Malcolm Smith's, Power of the Blood Covenant.

In addition, I have dealt with the blood covenant in novel form in both No Mercy and Battle for the Round Tower.