“The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience 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 has been pleased to express by way of covenant.”
(Westminster Confession of Faith 7.1)

Reformation theology, as enshrined in the Westminster Standards, has long recognized the centrality of God’s covenantal dealings with His people to His redemptive program. In the 1950s and 1960s Meredith G. Kline, George Mendenhall, other theologians pointed out the similarities between the covenants in the Bible and ancient Near Eastern treaties. In the ancient Near East, covenants were treaties regulating the relationship between a suzerain king and a vassal, sworn to by oath, guaranteed by the gods, and which stipulated blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. The Book of Deuteronomy particularly fits this pattern, but really, the whole Bible is fundamentally a collection of covenantal documents. The legal nature of the covenants highlight the seriousness of the obligations of the vassal and the certainty of the promises of the suzerain. Such a relationship would have been readily understandable to ancient peoples, and the LORD God in His providence used this treaty approach to underscore the unbreakable nature of His relationship with His people. He truly will be their God and they will be His people.

Understanding that God’s covenants provide a unifying coherence to all of Scripture should shape how we read and interpret the Bible. As I used various Bible reading plans, however, I found that they did not really bring out this unfolding coherence across Scripture, so I decided to develop my own Bible reading plan which is on this site. The full cycle of readings is below.