In my previous article I talked a bit about when our faith feels like a contract. I invite you to read that post to better understand what I’m moving toward today. Contracts are transactional by nature and not necessarily a bad thing but when this mindset seeps into faith, prayer becomes bargaining. Worship becomes performance. Obedience becomes a way of keeping God “on the hook.” And when life doesn’t turn out as hoped, we can feel as if God hasn’t kept His side of the bargain. But that’s not how the Bible describes God’s relationship with His people. Instead, we move past promises: recovering the lost language of covenant.
Recovering the Lost Language of Covenant
In our Western world, the word “contract” is everywhere—mortgages, car loans, cell phone plans, even gym memberships. We’re fluent in the language of contracts, but the biblical story doesn’t run on contracts. It runs on covenant.
Why Covenant Feels Foreign
For many modern Christians, covenant feels like an old religious word with little practical meaning. But the problem isn’t with covenant itself—it’s with the way our culture has trained us to think. Contracts are about transactions, accountability, and escape clauses. Covenants are about relationship, trust, loyalty and shared life. We’ve lost this language, and with it, we risk losing the richness of the faith we lay claim to.
Abraham: Covenant as Friendship with God
If love is truly at the center of God’s nature, then it makes sense that when God steps into human history, the first thing He does is make a relationship. We call it a covenant, making a pact, but at its heart it’s God saying: “I’ll be with you, and you’ll be with me.”
When God called Abraham, it wasn’t because Abraham was something special or deserving. Genesis 12 shows God takes the first step:
God Makes a Move
“Get yourself up from your country, from your homeland and from your father’s household, to the country I shall enable you to see, and I shall make you into a big nation. I shall bless you and make you big and you’ll become a blessing” (Gen 12:1-2 – John Goldingray’s First Testament Translation). God has the entire world in His sights, but He began with one family.
By Genesis 15, the covenant deepens. God binds Himself to His promise with a sacred oath — Abraham falls into a deep sleep and dreams that God passes through the broken pieces of sacrificial animals, a symbol in Abraham’s day of a pledge that can’t be broken. God freely limits Himself and binds Himself into a relationship with Abraham. What’s Abraham asked to do? Choose to trust. “He trusted in Yahweh, and he deemed it faithfulness on his part” (Gen 15:6 – Goldingay).
Then in Genesis 17 (Goldingay), we see the other side of covenant: Abraham is invited to walk faithfully — “Live your life before me and be a person of integity.” The relationship is mutual. God initiates the pact, but Abraham is called to respond in trust and faithfulness.
This isn’t a contract where Abraham earns God’s favor. It’s a kind of friendship many of us may never know. Avoiding syrupy sentimentalism, the best way I can describe the relationship, is a mentor/protege relationship marked by radical honesty, and enduring commitment. God initiates the relationship with Abraham, offers guidance and carries the greater responsibility for the outcome of the relationship.
Through Abraham we glimpse God’s heart: not distant control, but relational partnership. God doesn’t just decree blessing from afar; He chooses to weave His purposes into Abraham’s life, with all its ups and downs.
Sinai: Covenant as a Shared Life Together
If I am correct in saying that Abraham’s covenant shows us that God desires friendship with individuals, Sinai shows us that God also longs for a people. When God brought Israel out of Egypt, He didn’t just free them from slavery; He was inviting them into a new kind of life together.
At Sinai, the language is deeply relational: “I shall take you for myself as a people and I shall be God for you, and you will acknoledge that I am Yahweh your God” (Ex 6:7 – Goldingay). Sounds like marriage words, family words — not cold ink on a contract, but the warmth of belonging.
The Ten Commandments, often seen as rigid rules, were never meant to be a checklist for earning God’s favor. They were vows, setting out how this covenant relationship could thrive. “Have no other gods before me” is less a legal demand and more a plea of love: “Don’t divide your heart — stay with me.”
In the same way God first tied his reputation to Abraham, what makes Sinai striking is that God ties His own reputation to this people. We might call that being guilty by association. The nations would know who God was by how Israel lived. Talk about a love that risks — entrusting His name, His honor, His purposes into the hands of human beings who could (and often did) falter.
Yet just as with Abraham, when Israel stumbled, God didn’t rip up the covenant. God grieved, pursued, forgave, and renewed. Over and over, through prophets and poets, we hear God saying, “You’re mine, there is to be no forgetting. I’m wiping away your rebellions like a cloud, your wrongdoings like a thundercloud. Turn back to me, because I’m restoring you” (Isa. 44:21-22 – Goldingay).
The Sinai covenant widens the picture: God’s not only seeking individuals who walk with Him, but a community that embodies His love, justice, and mercy in the world.
Sinai Still Speaks Today
And this is where Sinai still speaks today. God didn’t form Israel just to give them a private membership experience; he was shaping a people who could stand as an alternative to the hate, violence, exploitation, and idols of their age. That call feels painfully current when we think of the hate and evil tearing through our communities in real time – war, corruption, abuse, crime, murders and the deep fractures in our society. It’s in these moments that the Sinai covenant reminds us: God entrusts His love and His name not to the powerful systems of the empire, but to ordinary people willing to live differently. The risk of God’s love continues – God still chooses to be known through a people rather than political rhetoric, people who will bear His image, His heart onto a broken world.
Abraham: Trust as Covenant Life
Drawn from Genesis 12, 15 & 17, when God called Abraham, there were no legal conditions, no “terms of service.” God promised land, descendants, and blessing, all for a purpose, “all the kin-groups on the earth will bless themselves by you.” (Gen 12:3 – John Goldingay Translation) God called Abraham to “live your life before me and be a person of integrity.” (Gen 17:1 – Goldingay) Abraham responded with trust that showed itself in action. His works weren’t prerequisites for God’s commitment; they were woven into the covenantal fabric of faith. His journey, his altars, his intercessions, and even his failures became part of the ongoing relationship.
Perhaps the most vivid display of God taking the initiative to be faithful and limit Himself to his pact with Abraham is through a dream Abraham has in Genesis 15:12-21.
Sinai: Obedience as Shared Life
At Sinai, the pattern continued. It moved from being focused on a papa to a people. God rescued Israel from slavery before giving them the Law. The covenant wasn’t a deal Moses struck with God on mountain—it was a way of life for a people already redeemed. Obedience to the Torah was never about keeping God on their side. Instead it shaped Israel’s lives, teaching them how to live in a right rhythm with the God who had already claimed them as well as living in right relationship with others.
Covenant vs Contract
This is what makes covenant so different from contract. In a contract, failure means the deal is broken. In a covenant, failure does not end the relationship. When Abraham failed and Israel repetedly failed, the covenant stayed strong because of God’s pact to remain faithful. Yes, covenant calls for loyalty, faithfulness, and obedience, but all within the safety of a relationship God Himself initiated. Even when Abraham faltered, or Israel rebelled, God’s covenant faithfulness endured.
Why We Need Covenant Language Today
Recovering covenant language helps us step out of the transactional mindset that plagues so much of Western Christianity. It shifts our prayers from bargaining with God to walking with Him. It reframes discipleship from “keeping the rules” to “sharing life with God.” And it gives us a vocabulary strong enough to talk about love, trust, failure, forgiveness, and restoration—without reducing faith to either cheap grace or rigid legalism.
Covenant is like a garment from God, the fabric is woven together with God’s faithfulness and our response. To lose this word is to lose a vital way of describing what life with God is meant to be where God is not only with us, but for us.