Covenant Theology

I’ll be the first to confess that I don’t get it.

I mean, I kind of get it at a really superficial level. God had a deal with Adam & Eve. They got to live, with Him, in the Garden of Eden so long as they refrained from eating the one fruit that God told them not to eat.

But they rebelled against God, or broke the covenant and sin was unleashed on the world.

I get it that God promised Noah that he’d never flood the world again to rid it of sin. The rainbow is the sign of God’s promise to Noah. I never really thought of that as a covenant because Noah didn’t have to promise anything in return. But apparently I’m missing something there.

Then there’s Moses. I understood God to have given Moses the Law that His people were to live by. I get it, at least in a naive way, that this was a covenant.

And I get it, at least superficially, that Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection to save us from our sins represents a new covenant with God, who so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him will have everlasting life.

But I’ve been attending a Bible study of Galatians that got really, really deep into the weeds of covenant theology and I’m totally lost. I couldn’t help but suspect that there are other views in addition to the one that’s being taught, and thanks to the Internet it wasn’t hard to discover that differences of opinion on this subject are one of the things that has fragmented the Body of Christ into different denominations of Christianity who all think that each other is getting it wrong.

It all makes my head hurt. No, it more makes my soul hurt. I just want to be a follower of Jesus. I don’t want to have to figure out which of all these complicated theological theories the Bible really means in order to be able to accept Jesus’s sacrifice for my salvation.

I want to love Jesus. I want to be a vessel for God’s will. I want to be able to bring the great News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to others who need to hear it.

I don’t believe that Jesus taught that everyone who thirsts for a personal relationship with God needs to be a theologian.

One of the things I’ve learned by now is that when I start feeling totally overwhelmed by theological questions what I need to do is spend less time reading and talking and thinking about God and more time with God.