God's Covenant Love in Scripture.

A Father Who Keeps his Promises.

A book by Scott Hahn.

God’s Covenant Love in Scripture. A Father Who Keeps his Promises.

In the book A Father Who Keeps his Promises author Scott Hahn examines the “big picture” of salvation history. He explains God’s love in terms of the Covenant relationship that follows through from creation up to Final Judgment. He sees God as more than simply a wise creator. He understands God as also a loving Father; a father in whose image we are made, to live as his children by adoption through his Grace.

Hahn argues that from the very beginning God established a covenant with mankind. This covenant is ‘a sacred family bond’ in which individuals give themselves to one another in loving communion. God called Adam and Eve to share his blessing in the covenant of marriage. But being mortal beings, we have all broken God’s covenant due to the sinful desires and weakness of human nature. Hahn analyses that “the essence of sin is our refusal of divine sonship, because of its sacrificial demands”.  Because of this rejection, we have all earned the just consequences of our actions, which is death through sin. The Bible tells us, ‘the wages of sin is death’. Sin kills the life of God within us. Consequently, we need God’s mercy and grace in order to lift us up out of this mire of sinfulness.

Hahn tells the story of how God embarked on a plan to redeem the human race through love. God used Noah to begin the process of cleansing the Earth. God pledged to Noah to keep him safe, along with his family, and promised never again to wipe out the human family that way again. Through Noah, “God’s covenant with the human race grew to be a household of several families.” Next, God chose Abraham to become for us the ‘Father of Faith’. Even so, with human nature being weak and sinful, it took many direct interventions in the life of mankind to get our attention and cooperation. Being rebellious children, God had to find ways that cut through our stubbornness and resistance. “Israel had to learn about God’s love the hard way.” But because God is a loving Father, he persevered. Having made us in His image, with a reasoning intellect and free will, he faced to problem of how to redeem mankind in its entirety. He found the only way possible to achieve salvation for mankind. Sin was too large an obstacle for any one man, no matter how obedient and loving he might be, to overcome on his own.

God promised Abraham the ‘Promised Land’ where his descendants might be blessed as a nation, and then as a kingdom. God’s covenant was gradually fulfilled through the lives of Abraham’s descendants. Hahn argues, “In considering Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, and then Joseph, it is abundantly clear that God works through real people with real lives – like us – in the ongoing plan to father his covenant family.” 

God then used Moses to lead the twelve tribes of Israel out of captivity in Egypt and to “ratify a national covenant that made them a holy nation”. He called them to occupy the Promised Land of Canaan as their inheritance.

God established a covenant with David to build a worldwide kingdom, establishing an everlasting throne with the son of David “who was destined to rule – with divine wisdom – over all the nations, united as a royal family in their common worship of the heavenly Father within his house, the Jerusalem temple”.  

In the sacrificial language of the Old Testament, only by presenting the blood of an unblemished lamb could the sins of mankind be lifted and washed away for those who believe in Christ. In New Testament language, through the mystical washing away of sin, that God made it possible for mankind to join themselves to him by allowing the Holy Spirit into our hearts and minds and bodies. This is only possible because we are made alive in Christ, and Christ in us. The solution to our sin came in the form of God becoming man in the person of Jesus Christ. God took on our weak and sinful nature in order to heal and perfect us, but also to elevate us to share in his own life of divine ‘sonship’ in order to make us one with the Father. “Christ’s death atoned for our sin by taking it out right at its source” by his rising again to life in the resurrection. Death was unable to hold Christ because he was without sin (sinless).  “Since the ultimate form of suffering is death, the ultimate moment of love comes at the time of death when we accept it and make it a sacrificial gift of self.”

Hahn continues on to explain that “Salvation history reveals sin as literally a broken home…sin is primarily a broken relationship”. Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. After his Resurrection Jesus gave us a period of forty days in which he revealed himself to his disciples. Jesus told them of a wonderful gift that the Father was going to send, the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to us through the sacraments in a powerful way. The purpose of the sacraments is to be instruments through which the Holy Spirit works its healing Grace upon and within us. Jesus instituted the sacraments and now administers them to us, beginning with baptism and coming to the pinnacle in the Holy Eucharist. It is the greatest of the sacraments because it is the true food and drink of eternal life. Jesus said, “If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you are one with me and I am one with you.”

Hahn summarizes his thesis saying, the church catholic is God’s worldwide family that the Father sent the son to establish by the Spirit. We love the church as our mother and revere it as Christ’s bride. As good children we obey its teachings because we love and trust that Jesus will be true to his word. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. As God’s children we are earthly pilgrims heading home to heaven. This makes death a homecoming and heaven a true homeland.