What Do You Mean by "Covenantal"?

I was recently asked the question, “What do you mean by “covenantal”? The text below is my answer to that person and I hope it may prove helpful to many in the church.

I admit the term "covenant" can be misused and over used and perhaps the word "covenantal" is not a word at all but an idea. However J.I. Packer uses it when he writes on the covenant and my use of "covenantal” comes from his idea that in our relationships to one another in the church we are expressing a "biblical ethic" that is a reflection of God's bending himself toward us in his covenant with us. Here is how Packer says it,

"The distance between God and the creature is so great," says the Westminster Confession (VII.I), "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 hath been pleased to express by way of covenant." Exactly! So biblical doctrine, first to last, has to do with covenantal relationships between God and man; biblical ethics has to do with expressing God's covenantal relationship to us in covenantal relationships between ourselves and others; and Christian religion has the nature of covenant life, in which God is the direct object of our faith, hope, love, worship, and service, all animated by gratitude for grace."[1]

Therefore when I use covenantal in regards to the life we live as the church it is the life we live out of the new covenant in Christ's blood toward one another as his body not only "animated by gratitude for grace" but exercised by faith in the ongoing grace of God we have in Christ. We are bond together in Christ for love to God and love to one another. Therefore we live in this bond by worshiping around the apostles teaching, prayers, the breaking of bread, sharing one another's burdens and joys. This is very much unlike the world expresses in the suburbs at the block party in the culdesac or in the backyard around the grill and teake torches or unlike the world expresses on the island at the club or unlike the world expresses in the neighborhood under the big oak tree and a grill full of chicken or fajitas. The churches covenatalism is around the cross of Christ where we live by faith in him submitting to his discipline, not forsaking the assembling together, worshiping in our homes and then with homes together in one place, the church building, praying, singing, eating, laughing and crying together, talking about what it means to be a man in the church, home and community with our minds and hearts in the book of the covenant and not the latest Esquire in reflection of Tom Cruises manhood.

Covenantalism is the life of the people of God who have been bought by the blood of the covenant and put by his providence among a particular visible body of his covenant and living bound together in the bonds of love for his glory there until he by his providence, and not a persons passion or wander lust, moves them elsewhere or returns in his fullness.

I am rambling but I hope this is helpful.