Barry Jackier. God’s Covenants with Mankind. Word and Spirit, 2023.

God’s Covenants with Mankind—the title sums it up. This is a book enumerating and describing the covenants God the Creator established with His people. There are six in the Hebrew Scriptures, and, of course, the New Covenant in the New Testament. (Testament is an older word for covenant.)

Jackier focuses a lot on the first covenant, the covenant with Adam. In a sense, there are two parts to it, before and after the transgression. Before the Fall, Adam was told to be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the earth. Sadly, the Fall meant Adam surrendered the dominion to the devil. But after, God in a sense ratified His covenant with Adam and Eve by killing an animal to clothe them and making a promise that the seed of woman would crush the serpent’s head.

He notes, correctly, that the warning God gave about eating the forbidden fruit was literally, “In dying you shall die.” That suggests a state or condition, not an instant poisoning as we might imagine today. Our ancestors now had a sin nature which would be passed on to the rest of us. He notes, as others have, we do not become sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners by nature.

So God’s first promise of redemption from that sin nature was given to Eve. Because of the cutting of the animal, it was in the form of a covenant. (The Hebrew word for covenant, b’rith, simply means “cutting.”)

The second covenant God made was with Noah. That covered a few things: that God would not flood the earth again, that mankind could eat animal flesh but not the blood, and, most importantly, “seedtime and harvest” would remain as long as the earth remained. In other words, people could trust that the seasons would continue so that they could plan their lives and their sustenance around them.

The third covenant was arguably the most important of all the Old Testament covenants, the covenant with Abraham. This covenant is given in detail and covers at least three chapters of the Book of Genesis. In his explanation, Jackier makes an interesting observation. God deliberately limited Himself by His Word. Because of what he had established at the beginning and even with Noah, He could not continue His plan of redemption until He found a man of faith, someone who would take God at His Word in spite of what it might mean to him personally. He found that person in Abraham.

So the Adamic covenant was one of multiplication. The Noahic covenant was one of seedtime and harvest. The Abrahamic covenant was one of faith. We see with Enoch, with Noah, and especially with Abraham, that faith in God brings God’s righteousness to the believer. Any righteous acts follow. The covenant with Abraham was intimate. God told Abraham His plans for Sodom. Abraham was willing to give up his only legitimate son. They could trust each other. Yes, we read that Abraham still sinned, but his righteousness was based on faith, not on his good works, though he had plenty of those, too.

The next covenant may be the most dramatic, the covenant with Moses. The Mosaic covenant manifested God’s glory. It was this covenant that established the formal sacrificial system with the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting. God demonstrated by His miracles that He was indeed superior to the gods of the nations, including Egypt, which was the most advanced civilization at the time. He established the Law, which was more specific about proper behavior and which provided order to the newly-formed nation of Israel. Both the glory and the Tabernacle system pointed to God’s ultimate plan of redemption in the New Covenant.

Jackier also notes that what distinguished Moses himself was that he was concerned and focused on God’s reputation. He saw and understood what God was like, and wanted to be sure that others understood. This was why he sometimes got angry. The incident with the golden calf, for example, only happened about two months after the crossing of the Red Sea. Had the people forgotten so quickly? When God said that He was frustrated and was thinking of starting over with Moses as a kind of new Abraham to begin a new chosen people, Moses reminded God of what the other nations would think if the God of Israel had His people miraculously escape only to die in the desert.

Next is the covenant of David. God promised David that an ancestor of his would be the world’s savior. This was more specific than even the promise to Abraham. David’s covenant involved a number of things, but its main emphasis was praise. David established his tabernacle, not as a place of sacrifice, but as a place of praise. David, of course, wrote many of the Psalms. We are told that he had a heart after God.

The sixth and last covenant was that with Solomon. Solomon built the Temple, the place of “God’s permanent abode on earth.” Solomon’s name means “man of peace.” His rule was largely peaceful and perhaps in a minor way illustrated God’s heavenly city, a habitation of peace for God’s people. But more importantly, “Jesus, the Messiah, David’s greater son, called the Prince of Peace, built God’s eternal habitation, the Church” (1495).

Jackier sums up the New Covenant, the seventh and final Scriptural covenant of God:

Jesus had the dominion originally given to Adam; He practiced the law of seedtime and harvest as given to Noah; He lived in and relied completely on faith, as was shown Abraham; He fulfilled the law and declared God’s glory, as was demonstrated through Moses; He lived a life of continual praise, as David’s greater Son; and He created a habitation for the people of God, as did Solomon. (1500)

Ultimately, of course, “The chief aim is to say, along with the apostle Paul, that Jesus came to save sinners” (1507).

God’s Covenants with Mankind, then goes into detail about Jesus’ sacrifice; and not just a sacrifice but a legal punishment as a result of sanctions for mankind breaking the various covenants. God ultimately established the New Covenant, not with symbolic substitutes, but with Himself.

This review is a mere overview of what this book offers. It really is a summary of God’s plan for history and gives us great insight into the nature of God Himself. Unlike, say, Trumbull’s The Blood Covenant, it focuses on the Bible’s story (or, as some like to say today, the Bible’s metanarrative).

Jackier does espouse the so-called Gap Theory, that there is a time gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, that God created the earth and earlier beings led by the devil destroyed it. He notes that the King James Version of Genesis 1:28 which uses the word replenish. However, the original Hebrew is better translated fill, not refill. The word replenish had a little different meaning in 1611 than it does today. Other than these minor quibbles, which honest Christians do discuss and recognize, this book has much to share. Like Moses, it does glorify God. Jackier is a true son of Moses.

N.B.: Citations are Kindle locations, not page numbers.