4 Understanding our Bibles

Three things support the full Christian life: salvation, worship and scripture. Scripture directs us how we may glorify and enjoy God forever. It does so by teaching us what we are to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of us.

In 2Timothy 3, Paul is saying to Timothy that you can make sense of the world because you know the Bible. You can understand what is happening because you understand God's revelation. Without scripture, God's explanation of history, we would be helpless to understand the movement of time.

There are four covenants in the Old Testament: Noah, Abraham, Moses and David.

1. God made a covenant with Noah to never again destroy the earth, even though "the intention of man's heart is evil."

2. God's covenant with Abraham is summarized like this: "I will be your God, and you will be my people. And I will dwell with you."

3. God makes another covenant with Moses and establishes national and ethnic Israel.

4. After the mosaic covenant, God made another covenant: the Davidic covenant. We find the substance of this covenant in 2Samuel 7. It provides a human king for the kingdom.

Ultimately, the greatest benefit of covenant theology is that because I belong to Christ, ALL of this is for me. I fit into this story of redemption. The God of Noah, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of David, He is my God. All those promises that God made are all yes and amen in Jesus. I belong to Him and I am heir to those promises as well.