THE COVENANTS!!!

Before a single word is written about the benefits of covenant, the weeping must be acknowledged. Rachel stands at the head of this book because she stands at the head of the very chapter in which the new covenant is announced. Read Jeremiah thirty-one and you will find it: the weeping in verse fifteen, and the new covenant in verse thirty-one. Sixteen verses apart. The same chapter. The same breath of the same Spirit.

This is not accident and it is not literary decoration. The Holy Ghost set the greatest covenant announcement in the Hebrew Scriptures inside a chapter that opens with a mother who refused to be comforted. He did it so that no generation would ever be able to say that the doctrine of covenant was written by men who had never lost anything.

What This Book Is
It is organised in three parts, exactly as the subject demands. Part One asks what covenant IS - the etymology of berith, diathēkē and qeyāmā, and the mechanics by which a covenant becomes effectual. Part Two asks what covenant is FOR - its purposes in the mind of God and the promises deposited within it, with the anchor text of Deuteronomy eight and eighteen taken apart clause by clause. Part Three asks what covenant DOES - the catalogue of benefits and blessings, and the honest work of naming what covenant does not promise as well as what it does.

Six appendices follow. The first is a complete catalogue of every covenant recorded in Scripture, divine and human. The second identifies which covenants are currently in force and which have been fulfilled and closed. The third sets out one hundred and fifty-three scriptures on covenant, in canonical order, from Genesis to the Revelation. The fourth gathers one hundred and fifty-three global witnesses on covenant - from the generals of God and from Jewish history. The fifth surveys the doctrine of twelve great covenant teachers, from Kenyon to this present hour. The sixth gathers the declarations that close each chapter into a single instrument for daily use.

One hundred and fifty-three is not an arbitrary number. It is the number of great fishes in the net at the sea of Tiberias - a net full, drawn to land, and for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken. It is the signature of a full catch held in an unbroken net, and it is the right signature for a book about a covenant that has never once torn.

So understand that these pages were lived before they were typed. Where the book comforts you, that comfort was tested on the author first. Where it corrects you, the correction landed on this desk before it ever reached yours. I am not throwing words down from a balcony. I am handing them across a table, from one covenant man to another, with the bread still between us.

There is hope in thine end, saith the LORD.