“Covenant” is often glossed in popular-level exegetical contexts as something like a contract. This is obviously not the worst cultural translation, but like any translation it can create an illusion of parity in any number of subtle connotations. America is the realm of lex rex, or, in the immortal words of Saul Goodman, the “land of the free and the home of the lawsuit.” An understanding of covenant as contract risks constricting one’s understanding within the bounds of American legalistic culture, which can, in practice, reduce covenant to a technical, impersonal phenomenon.

There is a great deal about covenant that seems to be adequately apprehended by the word “contract,” but if the concepts were identical the word covenant would be obsolete. Contracts are at least adjacent to covenants within the higher-level category of relationships. Both examples demonstrate within this broader frame that all relationships require rules insofar as every relation is a definition (viz. the many woes of young people muddling through ambiguous “situation-ships”).

It is within the category of relation that I’d like to consider biblical covenants as defined relations to God, that is, as the logic of a given point of contact between the eternal and the temporal, the heavenly and the earthly, God and Man. One of the many riches, perhaps the crown jewel, of neo-Platonism’s contributions within the stream of Christian thought is its emphasis on the unassailability of God. This can, of course, go awry quite easily, but healthily integrated into a biblical theology it represents a proper understanding of the infinite gulf between the infinite and the finite, encapsulated in the term “fallenness.” God is unimaginably far beyond human reach, comprehension, access, power, and so on. He is, by definition, utterly beyond all, He “who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see.”

Enter, then, the biblical conception of covenant, which manifests the great “unless” upon which some access to God is conditioned. God is totally unreachable unless He chooses to be reachable. Is it any wonder then that the Old Covenant, which will be examined shortly, was made on a mountain surrounded by the glory of God in a cloud? The earth rises up in a great heap, and the sky descends to meet it. The covenant is where the heavens descend to contact the earth. Man cannot behold God lest he die, but Moses saw a glimpse of God through the constraints which God imposed upon His own interaction with Moses.

That glimpse of God redounded to God’s people through the administration of Moses of the Old Covenant, the Law. That covenant was carried with Israel in an ark, a vessel, a container. The Ark of the Covenant was such because it was the vessel in which the Law was physically stored. Therefore, it was also the vessel upon which rested the very presence of God in the midst of His people — again, not as though God could be contained within a golden box, but rather that He chose to locate Himself within a definite place in order to be reached, and that not merely the physical-spatial location of the Ark, but the structure of the Law itself.

The Old Covenant, even within the complexities of the Law, rested on the otherwise simple principle that Israel should obey God’s statutes, and in turn God would bless and keep them. Israel would be God’s people, and the Lord would be their God. The law propounded the conditions for mutual faithfulness. But the story of the Old Testament is not one of Israel’s faithfulness. On the contrary, even as God is writing the Decalogue in stone upon Sinai, the people of Israel are in the act of breaking it. With Moses’ descent, the Law in hand, they face an automatic condemnation. They cannot even keep the Covenant in the moment of its making.

So it is seen that the inadequacy, the impermanence of the Law as God’s Covenant is structurally woven into the Law from the start. The Law is plagued with an essential non-functionality: sin. God graciously ordains the Law as His point of contact with His people, under no constraints except those within which He chooses to manifest Himself, but one end of the Covenant simply cannot be upheld by sinful Man. It is woefully uneven, and therefore does not solve the fundamental problem which necessitated the Covenant in the first place.

There was a time when the rules of God’s relationship to man were not nearly so complex. In fact, there was only one prohibitive rule in God’s relationship to Adam. Prior to its breaking, Man walked in perfect, unhindered fellowship with his Creator. The first sin marks the beginning of the long and fraught history of divine covenant-making.

But, it is precisely in light of Man’s consistent failure that the primeval substance of Covenant is manifest. God can punish Abraham’s seed for their breaking of the Covenant while simultaneously remaining faithful to His end of the agreement, preserving a remnant who shall inherit the promise made to Abraham. God offers the role of remnant to Moses upon the mountain. Like in the age of Noah, He will wipe out the lawbreakers and save one righteous with whom to begin anew. But Moses, in a brilliant foreshadowing of the full substance of God’s covenantal work, prefiguring Christ, intercedes, appealing to God’s own gracious character for the sake of His covenantal inferiors.

So in Christ is it unveiled in full that God’s action of covenant-making, of revealing, relating, manifesting Himself to Man, is finally premised upon grace. It was not necessary that God make covenant, have relation, with Man, let alone that He uphold and rebuild that relation over and again after constant infractions and infidelities. In Christ, the seed of God’s grace, rooted in the Old Covenant, blossoms in the New.

Returning to the fact of God’s unapproachability, the Old Covenant was deadly. The Ark of the Old Covenant could not be touched because it was the Ark of the Law. The Law manifested God’s holy character, and therefore, in view of sin, could only kill. The Law only kills, only condemns, only uncovers the sinner’s shameful nakedness before the unassailable God, and he dies. But more than the cleft of the rock covered Moses’ sinful self in the presence of the Almighty, the Rock that is Christ covers the sinner so that he might see the Invisible God “face to face.”

In the incarnate Word, God approaches Man in the Ark of human flesh. Far from untouchable, He invites our touch, as to Thomas who doubted. Those who touched Him did not die, but were healed. They didn’t simply survive contact with Him, they lived! Even the dead awoke at His touch.

The high priest under the Law, as the Epistle to the Hebrews elucidates, was under incredibly strict parameters by which he could approach the Mercy Seat, and even he was not to touch the vessel of God’s presence. His sin had to be atoned for every time, and his approach was only permitted once a year, with much ceremony and protocol and behind the veil. The Law was never adequate for communion with the Most High.

The covenant with Adam was, “Do not eat.” The New Covenant is, “Take, eat.” The covenant with Noah was, “Do not consume blood.” The New Covenant is, “Take, drink.” That human flesh and blood in which the fullness of God was pleased to dwell becomes our access to God in a far more intimate way than the Law could ever afford. The Ark of the New Covenant is not only tangible: it is edible. It is the bread which a man may eat and not die. It is Communion with the Most High.

The Old Covenant, it is clear, only functioned as a point of contact with Love because He continually supplemented it, indeed substantiated it, with His grace. The New Covenant is grace revealed and given in full. Jesus commands that we celebrate Communion “in remembrance,” “anamnesis” in Greek. This is not a simple calling to mind, a sustaining of a memory. It is a recalling and renewal of covenant. The Old Covenant required continual sacrifices in order to rectify the sins which threatened to destroy the covenantal relation. The New Covenant is the sacrifice which establishes its own covenantal relationship once and for all.

Without grace, breaking of the Law would leave it broken permanently. God consistently answered Israel’s pleas for undeserved mercy, mercy that the Law itself never provided for, and repaired the broken relation, renewed the Law from outside the Law. That renewal is Christ. The New Covenant is that renewal, to which we in the midst of our stumbling and failures need to come over and over, offered freely without interruption. “Love never fails.” This is why the Sacrament of the Altar, the New Covenant in His blood, unlike the blood of bulls and goats, effects the forgiveness of sins. Man’s continual failings are vitiated. His sins cease to be an impediment to Covenant precisely because the New Covenant is the eradication of sins. The extra-legal-grace-intervention of God in the Old Covenant is unfolded as the substance of the New.

God’s New Covenant with mankind is, for His part, that the Son shall be Man, be born, suffer, bleed, languish, die. All that is required of us, we poor, miserable sinners, who have for all time failed to hold up the conditions of every covenant, is that we come to Him. Substantively, it is a covenant that is all His part, as we must imagine any true relation with the unreachable God must be. It is not a relation premised on or substantiated in Law, but “in Spirit and in truth,” in “mercy, and not sacrifice,” “knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” It does not negate the Law, for:

“If we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries. A man who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy at the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the man who has spurned the Son of God, and profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?”

And,

“Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.”

Since the Covenant of Grace is so much better for us than the Covenant of Law, how much worse is it to spurn grace than to break law? How much worse is it to break the New Covenant than the Old? God’s grace was since the beginning the answer to repentance. So, the Covenant of Grace is the Covenant of Repentance. This is why the Supper cannot be eaten before Baptism, nor the Body and Blood received before the Spirit. Grace is not a blanket cast blindly over the world. It is a Man who bids us come and follow Him, who bids us, “Take, eat.”

In sum, a substantial, full communion with the Almighty One cannot rest in any real way upon our feeble ability to uphold covenantal relation, as the Old demonstrated. But the New Covenant escapes our crippling insufficiency, it heals the lame, it is itself the restoration of God empowering us to participate in itself. It is the Son of God giving His flesh and blood for the life of the world. It is the Spirit of God giving us strength to endure temptation and persecution. The veil to the Holy of Holies is torn by grace. “If we are faithless, He remains faithful.” On this truth rests all that Man can and has ever had of God.