Covenant

 Covenant 

 

An agreement of promises 

 

Imagine your dad says, “We need to work on keeping your room cleaner. Let’s make a deal. Every Saturday, if it’s clean, I’ll take you to the ice-cream shop.” You shake hands and both say, “I promise!”

God made promises with people called covenants. He promised to give them good things and have a close friendship with them. In return, they promised to obey and love God. 

In His covenant with Abraham, God promised to bless him and everyone in the world through him. 

In His covenant with the Israelites,He gave them rules for living. If they lived God’s way, they’d show His goodness to the world. 

In His covenant with David, God said someone in David’s family would bring God’s kingdom of peace to the world. 

Do you think God did what He promised? Yes, always! Do you think the people did? Nope, they didn’t. Imagine if you didn’t do your part in the deal with your dad, and your room was always a mess of stinky clothes and toys. “Pee-yoo!” your dad would say every Saturday. “No ice-cream shop today.”

God saw that His people needed help, so He made a new covenant. This time Jesus would come and do what everyone before Him couldn’t He obeyed God perfectly!

Can we do what Jesus did? No, we mess up all the time. But if our faith is in Jesus, we can receive good things from God and have a close friendship with Him. 

God does something else amazing through the new covenant, He changes our hearts. He helps us love what He loves and want to do what He says is good!

 

 

Genesis 15,17

 

One of the first covenants God made was with Abraham. God promised to give Abraham a big family, even though Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were old and had no children. Abraham must have thought, How can that happen? But he kept listening. God said, “Can you count all the stars in the sky? No! Your family will get really big, and like the stars, there will be too many to count.” Sure enough, later Sarah had a baby, who was the start of a big, new family. 

 

 

Get on a see-saw with a friend. Notice how you both have to do your part for it to work? It’s the same way with covenants. Both God and the people promised to do their parts for God to bless the people. 

 

God, thank You for always keeping Your promises.