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III. Salvation History: The Story the Bible Tells 

A. Salvation History and Covenants 

The first thing to know is that the Bible gives us history from God’s perspective. It shows us that all throughout time, God is working to bring us salvation. That’s why we say that the Bible gives us "salvation history."  

This salvation history, in turn, hinges upon the "covenants" that God makes with his people throughout the Bible. The great early Church Father, Irenaeus, recognized the need for studying salvation history in terms of the covenants: "Understanding ...consists in showing why there are a number of covenants with mankind and in teaching what is the character of those covenants" 

What is a covenant? Let’s start with what it’s not. A covenant is not a contract. 

Contracts are deals where two parties make a promise that involves some exchange of goods or services or property. Usually they seal their contract by giving their "word" - their name - in the form of their signature. 

When parties make a covenant, they swear oaths. Oaths are more than promises. Instead of swearing by their own name, they swear by the highest name, by the name of God. 

You know the formula from all the courtroom dramas, you’ve seen on TV: "Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" That’s an oath formula. You ask for God’s help to tell the truth ("so help me, God") and it’s implied that if you lie, you’re going to be punished by God. 

Covenants involve, not an exchange of property, but an exchange of persons. You don’t give somebody your services or goods when you swear a covenant oath - you swear to give them yourself. 

Marriage is a good example. It’s a covenant because in the exchange of vows, the woman gives herself to the man and the man gives himself to the woman. 

As we will see in the next lesson, when God says to Israel, "You will be my people and I will be your God," that’s a covenant. What’s happening is that Israel is swearing an oath to God - to live according to God’s law as His people, His children. In turn, God is swearing to be Israel’s God, its divine parent. There are blessings for keeping the covenant and curses for breaking it. 

In the ancient world, covenants made families. Even ancient treaty documents between nations used "father-son" imagery. Outsiders were "adopted" into a tribe through covenant oaths. So, when we study the Bible we need to see how the meaning of "covenant" is steeped in that ancient idea of family-making. 

The whole Bible can be outlined as a series of family-making covenants. 

That’s the "point" of the whole Bible story - how God, through these covenants, reveals more and more of Himself to his creatures and asks them to enter into a family relationship with Him. St. Paul sums up God’s intentions, this way: "As God said: ‘I will live with them and move among them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people.’....‘I will be a Father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me,’ says the Lord Almighty." (see 2 Corinthians 6:16-18). 

Throughout the salvation history told in the Bible God acts through His covenants to extend the Family of God. He starts small with just two people, Adam and Eve, and proceeds - through Noah, Abraham, Moses, David - until finally all nations are brought into the covenant through Jesus Christ. 

The plan from the beginning was to make all men and women into His sons and daughters through the covenants, which are all summed up in Jesus’ New Covenant, where God sends us "a Spirit of adoption, through which we can cry, Abba, ‘Father!’" (see Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:5; Ephesians 1:5).