Our Lord is Restoring the Covenant Structure of All Reality

 GOD IS LOVE!!

This simple statement from I John 4:8 and 16 is one of the most remarkable statements in all of scripture.  It is so simple that anyone can understand it and yet so profound that no one has yet plumbed its depths.

And we can say some important things based on this simple text.  We can say, for instance, that God is a Covenantal Being.  As the New Testament reveals the truth of the TRINITY, we discover that the three persons in the one God have been bound together in a “bond of love” from all eternity.  Without getting into detailed scripture study we can declare on the face of such passages as John 17 and I John 4:6-12 that this especially clear in the New Testament and plainly implied throughout scripture.

I want to make one overall application here of this grand truth. Because God is a Covenantal Being He has given Covenantal Shape to all reality.  That is, when God first created the Heavens and the earth He gave COVENANTAL SHAPE to everything he had made.  While it may seem strange to ascribe COVENANTAL features to the vast galaxies of the physical universe, reflecting for a moment on the fact that a COVENANTAL GOD made it compels us to confess that He surely must have imprinted his own nature even on this vast physical system which we call the universe.

Then when we learn from scripture that God created personal beings like men, angels, even demons, we discover those amazing dimensions of reality which must be recognized as Covenantal.  This is especially clear in the first two chapters of the Bible.  That first chapter reaches its climax in God’s creation of man “in the image of God”.  What a glorious wonder, that God would form such a creature, made in God’s own image and commissioned to carry out God-like functions.  We must conclude that a being made in God’s image must be a Covenantal Being and must have Covenantal Shape like God.  Of course the humanist culture of our day denies this, insisting that man has no more significance than animals, that we have only the Shape that evolution gives us. We are an accident of the evolutionary process, not a creation “in the image of God”.  There is good reason to regard this as empty talk from empty men.

And there is good reason to hurry on to the second chapter of the Bible, the very Word of God.  The COVENANTAL SHAPE of all life is convincingly demonstrated in this chapter.  After introducing the Sabbath in the first several verses, then proceeding to introduce Work in the next section, this 2^nd  chapter  of Genesis reaches its climax by introducing Marriage.  Surely all reasonable people recognize MARRIAGE as the key institution of human life! – a human institution that is covenantal to the core!!

 The vows everybody takes at marriage are so plainly COVENANTAL that nobody anywhere debates that fact.  Then we may observe that marriage remains the key figure of speech in scripture  to describe God’s relationship to us and our relationship to God.  Ephesians 5:22-33 states this with great clarity and we should recognize this passage as characteristic of the entire Bible.

There is so much more that we can say and should say on this subject.  I want to conclude this particular blog simply observing that our Risen Lord Jesus Christ is restoring us to His Image.  In His glorious Resurrection power he is restoring our COVENANTAL SHAPE.  Thank you, Lord.