How do you relate to God? Since the triune God is truly transcendent, what binds us to him that we might know that he is near to his people? We long for certainty and assurance to know that our God is with us. So, how might we have confidence that we belong to God for blessing?

Covenant theology is the Reformed way of bringing Scripture to bear upon these questions. A covenant is a formal relationship. It binds two or more parties together in an official way. It has personal dynamics, thus the relationship aspect. It is also legal and authoritative in some sense so that this relationship, as such, is fixed and defined. A covenant establishes a relationship in a certain way so that those involved have specified connection to one another that is hard or impossible to dissolve.

This essay surveys the basics of Reformed covenant theology. The aim is to make these concepts that structure our reading of Scripture and its grand narrative of salvation more familiar. The further payoff is that covenant theology furnishes reassurance for our questions about our relationship with God.

God Meets Us for Blessing

Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) 7.1 more specifically explains covenants, particularly covenants that God makes with his people.

The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe unto him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.

Marking the religious purpose of God’s covenants with humanity, this statement’s key insight is that God’s covenants with us are one way that he voluntarily condescends to promise blessedness and reward. In each covenant, God freely stooped down to forge a way to offer himself to us as our greatest blessedness.

Before and after Adam fell into sin, creaturely obedience per se could not force God to reward us. For Adam in his first condition of original righteousness, God created him, as WCF 4.2 says, “having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it” (see Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24). Though Adam had natural ability to obey God as he should, this obedience on its own would be insufficient to obligate God to offer him greater blessings (see Luke 17:10). For us, after sin entered through Adam’s transgression, our works are even less suitable—even entirely inadequate—to warrant blessing from God. Rather than blessing, “all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them’” (Gal. 3:10). Sin intensified our inability to demand reward from God, making our works unacceptable as anything except reasons for our condemnation.

How then would we receive any blessing from God? In both situations, before and after Adam’s fall, God freely stooped down—voluntarily condescended—to meet us in our condition to offer himself as our greatest blessedness. These arrangements whereby God enables us to receive him as our highest blessedness in everlasting glory are covenants.

This understanding of covenant already offers encouragement for the Christian life. It shows that God wants to bless his people. Nothing obligates him other than his own free commitment to reward his people. God struck covenants with us because he is kind, generous, and desires to bless us. Believers should never doubt that God has a heart to give you blessings.

God’s Covenant with Adam

God’s first covenant with humanity was the covenant of works. Adam was created good and upright, fully able to obey God’s law and so fulfill his vocation to represent God at the creaturely level as the divine image bearer. Nevertheless, Adam outright owed God perfect obedience and, thus, had no claim upon higher reward than to continue in his original condition without penalty.

God, however, covenanted with Adam to address Adam’s inability to warrant reward as a mere creature. Westminster Shorter Catechism (WSC) 12 explains God’s voluntary condescension with Adam:

What special act of providence did God exercise toward man in the estate wherein he was created? When God had created man, he entered into a covenant of life with him, upon condition of perfect obedience; forbidding him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, upon pain of death.

Let us think about the terms and Adam’s experience of this covenant.

God condescended to meet Adam in his condition to offer him heightened fellowship with God as his blessedness and reward. This covenant rested upon the terms of obedience because Adam still stood upright in original righteousness. Adam would not struggle to render the obedience required of him. This obedience merely required fulfilling his calling to reflect God’s image according to the moral law and by filling the earth. This covenant’s principle appears every time Scripture invokes works as the basis—which sinners cannot fulfill—for justification and reward (see Lev. 18:5; Matt. 19:16–29; Luke 10:25–29; Rom. 2:6–16; 10:1–13; Gal. 3:10–14).

In Adam’s experience, this covenant revolved around two trees. God built a garden in Eden and put Adam in it. There, “The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9). Trees filled this garden, but two were central for Adam’s covenant life with God. The tree of life represented the prospect of living forever with God in glorified life (Gen. 3:22; Rev. 2:7; 22:14). The tree of knowledge was a test so that Adam could have defeated the serpent and proved himself righteous so to be confirmed into everlasting glorified life—for himself and his posterity (WSC 16).

God appointed these trees so that Adam would have practical experience of his covenant life with God. They were tangible features of his relationship with God, showing him what was required of him as well as what blessing awaited him.

This aspect of the covenant of works stresses again covenant theology’s encouragement for the Christian life. God does not leave us to wonder about our relationship with him. He appoints features of our life to direct us about this relationship. He still works through Word, sacrament, and prayer (WSC 88). Through these means of grace, God still meets us to give his redeemed people an experience of our relationship with him through Christ.

The Triune God’s Covenant of Redemption

God did not leave us in our estate of sin and misery that Adam’s fall brought upon us (WSC 20). Although God’s grace is a solution to our plight of sin, this grace in Christ was not God’s Plan B. From eternity Father, Son, and Spirit decreed according to their one, shared will in the divine essence to bring upon salvation for the elect (Rom. 9:1–13; 2 Thess. 2:13–14). According to this decree, Father, Son, and Spirit would each have a mission to contribute a specific aspect of bringing this plan to bear upon the elect. Reformed theology uses the label the covenant of redemption to refer to this eternal, pretemporal intratrinitarian arrangement for Father, Son, and Spirit each to manifest himself by executing his mission in history.

For this covenant, we need care with categories. First, Father, Son, and Spirit never work independently of one another. Rather, these missions are how we explain the biblical testimony’s way of associating specific aspects of salvation most closely with one divine person. In Ephesians 1:3–14, the Father elects, the Son purchases the elect, and the Spirit seals them. Still, the Son was certainly involved in election (John 6:70), and the Spirit accompanied the Son throughout his incarnate work (Matt. 3:16–17). These instances demonstrate how Father, Son, and Spirit always work inseparably together, even though specific aspects of salvation appear most closely associated with one person in our historical experience.

Second, this covenant is not an act of voluntary condescension. God’s covenants toward humanity are his free choice to meet us in our condition to offer blessing to us. The covenant of redemption is God’s free choice insomuch as he did not have to decree to save sinners. Nonetheless, the relationships that hold among the missions of Father, Son, and Spirit are not acts of condescension toward one another. These missions are the historical manifestation of the triune God’s decree to save the elect by Christ’s work applied to the Spirit.

What are the missions according to the covenant of redemption? The Father appointed and sent the Son as mediator for the elect (John 10:25–30; John 17:1–25; Eph. 1:3–6; Heb. 5:1–6; Heb. 7:15–22). The Son came to do the Father’s will and furnished the perfect obedience needed to earn our entry into everlasting life, as well as dying to pay our penalty debt for sin (John 4:31–38; John 10:17–18; Phil. 2:5–11; Eph. 1:7–10). The Spirit comes from the risen and ascended Christ to apply his life-giving work to us by working saving faith in us (Rom. 8:9; 2 Cor. 4:4–6; Rom. 10:14–17; Eph. 1:11–14; Tit. 3:4–7). These missions accomplish the triune God’s decree of salvation and bring redemption to the elect.

The pastoral encouragement from this doctrine is to realize the eternal nature of God’s love for every believer. He did not wait until you had faith to cherish you. He decreed his love for you before he even created time. God cannot cease to love his elect because he never began to love his elect. This love has eternally been in God’s heart, coming forth into our experience as the covenant of redemption.

God’s Condescension to Sinners in Christ

Because of Adam’s fall into sin, the condition we all inherit is guilty, lacking the original righteousness with which God created us, and corrupt (WSC 18). God’s voluntary condescension to meet us in this condition to offer himself to us as our blessedness and reward is the covenant of grace. Throughout every period of redemptive history, believers have trusted in Christ alone for salvation, even before he came in his earthly ministry. WCF 8.6 explains,

Although the work of redemption was not actually wrought by Christ till after his incarnation, yet the virtue, efficacy, and benefits thereof were communicated unto the elect, in all ages successively from the beginning of the world, in and by those promises, types, and sacrifices . . . (emphasis added)

This explanation pinpoints Reformed covenant theology’s commitment that Christ and his benefits are the substance of the covenant of grace, delivered to believers under every historical covenant.

Under every covenant since Adam’s fall, true faith received Christ and his saving benefits. When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), he meant it absolutely, not just since his incarnation. Even Old Testament saints came to the Father through Christ. Hence, Jude 5 says that it was Jesus “who saved a people out of the land of Egypt” since Christ is the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim. 2:5). In the wilderness, “the spiritual Rock that followed them . . . was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4). God the Son has been active as Savior through the means of grace given under every administration of the covenant of grace, applying his work to believers even in advance of his coming.

In our day, the proliferation of digital devices makes it possible to view programs in numerous ways. You can watch the same documentary about your favorite theologian on a traditional television, on a tablet, or even on your phone. Whatever device you use, you still view the same content.

This observation illustrates how the various historical covenants were all administrations of the same substance within the covenant of grace. The promise in Genesis 3:15, the Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic covenant, and the new covenant were different “devices” still displaying the same content. Each delivered the same substance of Christ and his benefits received by faith alone.

So Great an Assurance

God meets his people to offer himself to us as our blessedness and reward. We have confidence about how he meets us because he confirms this relationship by covenant. In Genesis 15, when Abraham needed reassurance of God’s promises, God made a covenant with him. In Genesis 17, when Abraham needed further reassurance, God gave him the outward sign of the covenant. God intends his covenants to give us confidence as we walk with him.

God meets his people in covenant that we might know him in everlasting, glorified communion. He met Adam by covenant in the garden. He meets sinners in the covenant of grace with Christ as our surety. Let us rejoice at the sure confidence God provides for how we relate to him and know him for blessing.

The author is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church in Farmington Hills, Michigan. New Horizons, February 2026.