We in the week talking about covenants. Yes, covenants we need to. In the words of one

recent book on the topic, quote, the covenants are not the central theme of scripture. Instead,

the covenants form the backbone of the Bible's meta-narrative, and thus it is essential to put

the covenants together correctly in order to discern accurately the whole council of God.

These are the words of Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellam. So covenants are sort of skeletal

structure and we must put them together rightly and to explain covenants and how they work.

I call Dr. Don Carson on occasional Fridays to call him up as part of our relationship

with our friends at the gospel coalition. Carson is the co-founder and president of the

gospel coalition. And he's the editor of the NIV Zondervin study Bible, which is the

study Bible version of what we're doing in these occasional Friday podcasts. So what

is a covenant and how do they hold our Bibles together? Here's Dr. Carson to explain

the point. Christians know, of course, that the Bible is made up of two testaments. They

may wonder from time to time where the word testament comes from. It comes from two passages

in the New Testament, one in Hebrews and one in Galatians, where actually the word is properly

rendered covenant. It would be easier. It would be more accurate to speak of the Bible

as having two covenants, the old covenant and the new covenant. Of course, we've inherited

the term testament. So we'll continue to speak of the Bible having two testaments. But

the notion of covenant shapes an awful lot of how the Bible is put together rather than

testament. Again, we should begin in Genesis 1, 2, and 3 in the Garden of Eden. The word

covenant isn't used there. But one of the striking things that we've already seen part

of about Genesis 1, 2, and 3 is that those chapters lay a kind of seedbed of notions that

are developed in much richer detail farther on in the Bible. The Bible doesn't talk of

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