What a Covenant...Wait! What is a covenant?

What a fellowship, what a joy divine! Leaning on the Everlasting Arms! What a blessedness, what a peace is mine, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms! First verse of the hymn, What a Fellowship In the last post, I laid out one understanding of a narrative arc in scripture going from creation to crisis to community to Christ to church to culmination . And like all human understandings there are pros and cons to this idea. One drawback is that it does not emphasize enough the word, covenant . Our modern day understanding of covenant tends to conflate or confuse it with contract. While culturally there are similarities, I think within Scripture the two are not synonymous. A contract has a legal aspect and well-defined consequences for breaking the contract. If I decide to jump ship from Verizon and go to AT&T, there is a well-defined financial consequence for that choice. We are bound by contracts from the places we live to the credit cards we carry to even our jobs