FERGUSON: Well, covenant theology is really simply put a kind of basic understanding of the
whole Bible story and a description of the way in which God relates to his creation and to humanity.
So for example, I think one way into this is in Romans 1, when Paul describes the sinfulness of
man, he describes him as a covenant breaker. And this implies that right from the very beginning
of creation, the relationship between God and man has been a covenant one in which God commits
himself to be himself to man, gives certain promises to man. And because of those promises,
because of the character of God, he calls man to respond to him in faith and obedience.
And when you grasp that principle, you see... I think you see a couple of
things. One is that all the way through the Bible, there runs a theme of the two ways.
You find it, for example, at the beginning of the Pslams. There are two ways for men and
women to respond to God. That is the way of the righteous and that is the way of the unrighteous,
the way of faith and the way of disobedience. When you come to the teaching of the gospels,
Jesus says there are two ways. There's the way of faith. There's the way of disobedience. So all the
word covenant is not always used, it's the under governing principle of the whole. You might say
that it's the reality that explains everything. And we know that in that first relationship,
God promised so much to Adam and that Adam and Eva rebelled against him and broke that covenant. And
that God therefore came in with promises that were new in order to restore fallen humanity.
And the story of the Bible from that point onwards is simply a story of a series of covenants that
God makes with his people that all belong to the same theme of fulfilling the covenant promise of
Genesis 3:15, and more and more shows how this covenant promise will be fulfilled.
So that, for example, when God made the covenant with Abraham, Abraham knew that in his seed,
somewhere in his line, someone would come in whom all the nations would be blessed,
but he didn't know all that much more about how this was going to happen.
In Moses' day, Moses learned that there would be a prophet so that the one who would fulfill
the covenant would be a prophet. He was given all these regulations that were pictures of the way
in which God's promise would be fulfilled. When David's covenant was made, David learned that one
of his descendants would be the fulfillment of the promise when Isaiah prophesied about the suffering
servant, when Daniel had his vision of the son of man. All of this is building up the picture
of how this covenant is to be fulfilled. And so eventually in the New Testament,
we come to the evening before Jesus crucifixion in which he summarizes his own ministry,
by saying to now the 11 disciples who are faithful to him, this is the blood of the covenant.
And this is a fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy that God would make a new covenant.
And Jesus speaks about the shedding of his blood as the way in which that covenant is brought to
fruition. So that when we come to trust in Jesus, we know Jesus as our covenant Lord and savior,
and we are called therefore to respond to him in faith and obedience. And at the end of the
day in the book of Revelation, we see how this is all fulfilled in the way in which God, right
at the end, says, "I will be a father to you. And you will be my son," which is actually what
Adam was created to be a right at the beginning. And so the whole storyline of the Bible is the
story. It's not the only thing, but it is the under guarding structure that unites the whole,
makes sense of the whole. And also I think enables us to see how it is that all Testament
believers were saved, justified in the same way New Testament believers are saved and justified,
although they didn't have the fullness of God's revelation that we do. And this is why for us,
covenant theology is such an important insight into how to understand the scriptures.