God has made six covenants with humanity:

1. The Covenant of Creation: God tasked humans with filling the world and ruling over it.
2. The Covenant with Noah: God assured Noah that time and seasons would never again cease.
3. The Covenant with Abraham: God promised Abraham that he would be the start of a great family through whom the world would be blessed.
4. The Covenant with Israel: God delivered rules for Israel to follow, summarized in the ten commandments.
5. The Covenant with David: God promised David that there would always be a descendant of his ruling God’s people.
6. The New Covenant: God wrote his law on people’s hearts by his Spirit, expanding the beneficiaries from Abraham’s family to the global community of believers.

Covenant is a very small book (120 pages) that covers the entire sweep of biblical history in remarkable detail and clarity. Thomas R. Schreiner treats important issues such as the conditional or unconditional nature of the covenants and how God extends mercy even to those who break his covenants.

There are a few areas where I disagree with Schreiner. He makes the corporate versus individual dynamic of the old and new covenants a major point of emphasis in a way that undervalues the collectivist perspective of scripture. He also overstated his case in a couple areas. For example, he claimed that “the rest of the world [in Abram’s day] was opposed to God” (41–2). But what about Melchizedek? Schreiner tries to have it both ways when he argues that Noah was righteous and blameless and walked with God, while simultaneously claiming that his righteousness had nothing to do with God’s selection of him (32). Perhaps a longer book would have brought more nuance and clarity here.

This book is an excellent summary of the various biblical covenants, but at points Schreiner’s theological presuppositions drive the argument.

Schreiner, Thomas R. Covenant and God’s Purpose for the World. Crossway, 2017. Short Studies in Biblical Theology.