What blessings have you received as you have made and kept sacred covenants? How can you help the young women understand the covenants they have made and will make in the future? How will understanding covenants influence the young women to live more righteously? What can the young women do to prepare to learn? For example, they could read a talk, watch a video, or study a scripture related to this doctrine.
The Savior prepared Himself to teach by spending time alone in prayer and fasting. Follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost as you prepare to teach the young women about ordinances and covenants. Our class: Who is missing today? What visits do we need to make? Who should we invite to an upcoming activity? Who needs our help and prayers? Our responsibilities: What assignments do we need to make? What assignments have we fulfilled? How have we invited others to come unto Christ, and how can we invite others now?
Our lives: Remind the class of the discussion from the last meeting. What experiences have we had with applying what we learned?
What experiences have we had in the past few weeks that strengthened our testimonies of the gospel? If possible, discuss these items beforehand in a class presidency meeting.
Covenanting was part and parcel of what it meant to live in the ancient near east. It makes sense then that a merciful God would reach out to humans to reveal himself and bring about reconciliation through a structure they already understood. How strategic! Like every good story, the covenantal story began long ago in a land far, far away—the garden of Eden. To do so, however, would bring the curse of death on humanity. Easy-peasy, right? Imagine that.
Adam and Eve chose to disbelieve God and trust their own instincts about right and wrong. They sinned against God, fracturing the human-divine relationship, and plunged humanity into sin and death. Thankfully, the rest of the Bible describes how God sets out to repair this broken partnership with humans.
There are, however, five explicit covenants that form the backbone of the Bible: those God makes with Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David and the New Covenant inaugurated by Jesus. Rather, he will preserve the world as he works towards fulfilling the promise of Genesis , rescuing humanity and creation through the offspring of the woman.
He reiterates the cultural mandate Genesis , inviting humans to partner with him in filling and ruling his world. In Genesis 4, Cain sides with the Serpent, killing his brother in cold blood, and a man named Lamech brags about his murderous, chauvinistic ways. Sin has enveloped the whole world. So God sends a destroying flood upon the earth to purge it of wickedness, making way for a restored creation that will begin with Noah and his family.
Stipulation s : None. Sign : Rainbow Genesis God enters a redemptive partnership with Abraham, developed progressively in Genesis 12, 15, and He promises Abraham a huge family that will inherit a promised piece of land in Canaan and bring universal blessing to all humanity through his family.
You can remember these promises like this: 1 offspring, 2 land, and 3 universal blessing. Evil continued to reign over the world. Genesis traces the downward spiral of mankind, peaking in the story of the tower of Babel. Then, in a stunning act of grace, God selects Abraham and calls him into a covenantal relationship.
Stipulation s : Abraham is to leave his land and follow God wherever he leads, walking blamelessly before God and training his family to do what is right and just, and keeping circumcision in every generation.
This is both a conditional and unconditional covenant. God and man each have a part to play, but ultimately these promises will be fulfilled because God will see to it that they come to pass. Sign : Circumcision Genesis God rescues Israel from slavery in Egypt and promises to make them his own treasured possession, a holy, set apart nation. He will personally dwell in their midst and bring them into the promised land. He Yahweh will be their God and they Israel will be his people.
Moreover, they will be a kingdom of priests that mediate his goodness and glory to all the nations. An epic role in redemptive history. They cry out to God and God hears them, sending Moses to be his instrument of divine power to lead them out of Egypt towards the promised land.
When they reach the foot of Mt. Sinai God shows up in a big way like huge! Stipulation s : This was a conditional covenant of grace. Israel was to obey the terms embodied in all the laws given at Mt. Sinai summarized in the ten commandments. God promised to bring blessings if they followed his commands, but curses if they disobeyed see Deuteronomy 28 , most notably exile into foreign lands. And we get the feeling in Deuteronomy that the water is poisoned from the start.
Then in Jeremiah 31 , where God is getting ready to take, to destroy Jerusalem. Because they disobeyed. And he's told them over and over and over again, and they have not listened. So when Jeremiah before he does this, he says, "I'm going to make a new covenant with you. Not like the covenant which I made would when I took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. My covenant which you broke.
And he says, "But this is the covenant that I will make with you in those days. I will take my law and I will write in on your heart. No longer on tables of stone, but I will write it on your heart. I will be your God, you will be my people. And I will forgive your sins and remember them no more. And so here is a covenant that is a covenant that is written on tables of flesh, our heart. And here is a covenant in Ezekiel 36 will expand that, that puts his Spirit within us.
Here is a covenant that grants us forgiveness of sins. But you say, "But if you don't put men under the law, they can't obey God. Because the new covenant puts his Spirit within us, puts the law within us. So that his Spirit within me causes me to walk in the statues, enables me to keep his commandments. He neither ate bread nor drank water.
And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Share this. What is a Covenant?
Covenants are not exactly contracts.
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