What is covenant? Covenant is God’s creative way of relating to and working in and revealing Himself to this realm. I have found no other way in which God reaches to man or interacts with mankind in the Scriptures. What people think of as historical accounts are lessons for us in the way people have or have not given a covenant response to God and the outcome of such action. Wisdom for God’s desire to make man in His image is available to us at any time we seek for Wisdom’s input into our life. James 1:5-8 (New Living Translation) 5 If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. 6 But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. 7 Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.
Wisdom governs both God and man through the established covenants God has made with this realm and with man. When I say that God only deals with this realm through covenant, I want to express what the Spirit revealed to me of the vastness of God Who loves us. God is so much higher, so much more than our beings can grasp. We cannot relate to so much Holiness, Splendor, Light and Power. He fills all space. He is Spirit and Life and in Him there is no darkness at all. 1 John 1:5 (New Living Translation) 5 This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all.
Only through the protection that covenant provides can God interact with sinful man. Covenant contains both blessing and curse. Obedient response to God allows God to bless and shape us.

It is mind boggling that Adam was able to walk and talk with God. Though created of dust, God had breathed into Adam His breath and Adam became a living soul clothed in Light. In this Light, Adam was taught of God. The teaching of covenant Adam received had to contain the opportunity to respond. The question has arisen several times, “Why was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil placed in the garden at all?” Covenant demands a covenant response. God had given Adam Life but Adam had to choose Life and the right to dwell in God’s Presence. God clearly told Adam that to choose to disobey His command was to choose death or separation from God and the Life he had with God. The only knowledge Adam had was what he had received from God. The only experience he had with covenant was his “covering” the animals with his authority over them and the giving of each one the identity of a name. Nothing in Adam’s experience responded to his authority or challenged him to choice.

When Adam woke to see Eve, he spoke in covenant language accepting his role as the covenant protector. He was the one God had taught but now a whole new experience opened to him. He was challenged to choice and a divided focus. No longer was God his only focus. He had a fascinating companion he was now teaching and communicating his feelings. Her response to him became vitally important and how to please her challenged his undivided reactions and responses to God. In this new experience, the unchallenged response to God’s warning took on less importance. His response to Eve took precedence of what he knew God said and the importance of obedience faded. His role in covenant became secondary to Eve’s role in his life. Sin entered the world through Adam when he made the choice to not cover Eve and remove her from the temptation. It was his disobedience that ripped the Light from them and the separation from God became immediate. Death entered this realm.

Jesus came that we might have Life. He is the Light of the world. He is God in the flesh of man and only He could take back from Lucifer what he usurped from Adam. He extends to us the relationship with God, the Life, the Light that Adam lost. What distracts us from walking in and abiding in such promise? Have we given back to God the right to be our only source of knowledge? Or do we still retain the right to judge every person and every circumstance through the eyes of our own control? The fifteenth chapter of John is your invitation to the Life of Light. It demands a covenant response from you. Your covenant response is the only way you can know the secrets and joys such a Life can bring you. No sermon or song can produce in you what a covenant response will open to you. Adam failed to give God a covenant response and sin entered the world. We are born in sin but Jesus opens the Way back to God. Day by day, circumstance by circumstance, we are given choice. The lack of understanding covenant and the authority of covenant dims the importance of the choices we make.

It was the lack of understanding of covenant that drove me to search God’s Word. The promise Jesus gave of the ministry of the Holy Spirit to each believer took on new meaning as I gave my effort to search into the Spirit’s hands. I became as a little child and let the Spirit guide me. I saw through His eyes the language of covenant and the Scriptures became new to me. No longer was the Old Testament full of accounts of men’s lives but parables for me to see my own reactions to the circumstances in my life. How important was a covenant response in each trivial matter? What did the New Covenant in Jesus’ Blood mean in each thing I faced daily? No longer was it just an experience of salvation but a way of life I would one day give an account to God, not in words but in Light. Did I live in the Light or just believe in it?

Covenant understanding definitely spawns questions.