This post is a summary of the first session of a teaching day entitled "Israel, The Bible And You". In order to understand fully how both Israel and we as gentiles fit into God's plans and purposes we have to understand how God has used covenants in Bible history.

The major covenants in the Bible are the "way-points" in God's plan for mankind. They mark major points of change or advancement in God's revelation to us and His dealings with us. 

The most important mark of each is the carrying out of a blood sacrifice. These are the major covenants we will look at, each named after the man whom God used as the main instrument to introduce it.

You can read the Bible references to see that each of these covenants involved a blood sacrifice - except one! That was the covenant God made with David promising a royal lineage down to the Messiah. This didn't need a sacrifice as it took place within the Mosaic covenant and simply identified one family line from God's people to be the line tht would produce the Messiah (Jesus).

So there is one word that is key in understanding why all of these covenants are valid and relevant to us today. It's this Hebrew word...

It's pronounced "Olam" and has the general meaning of "eternal" or "everlasting". Applied to the covenants, it says clearly that from inception each one is valid until the end of history/the end of the age/the last days etc.

And here you can see the specific references that use the word "olam" to clarify that this covenant lasts forever. As we'll see next, this has major implications for how we look at these way-points in God's plans!

So with that in mind. let's see how they fit together in Bible history. Each has a historical start-point and all of them continue to the "end of the age". Here we've used Revelation 20:11 as an end-point and Genesis 3 as the start-point, after which the covenants were needed to progress God's plans of salvation.

Looking at the Bible in this way we can see that each covenant builds on the one before and - most importantly - each one continues to "eternity". Just think what would happen if the covenant with Noah had ended in, say, 1920. None of us would be here because God had decided to bring all life on earth to an end. So it is vital that all of these covenants lasts to the end of history.

But the major implication of this for a common view of the Bible is this. Many believe that the "old covenant" through Moses has come to an end now that the "new covenant" through Jesus is in place. For Jews who choose not to believe in Jesus and stick to Moses' covenant, well - tough luck, you no longer have a covenant relationship with God. As we will see in coming posts, this is not the case and God has far from finished with the people of Israel!

So lastly, here is how the five major covenants build on each other...

And the lesson from all this is?

GOD'S WORD IS SURE!

He has bound Himself to His word to us by solemn covenants sealed in blood!

TRUST HIM!

The next post in this series is "What is the new covenant?"