Covenant of Revelation Defended

So I’ve just released my book, The Covenant of Revelation, and it appears to have a rather simplistic take on the Bible—so much so that I feel a little embarrassed about it, actually. In this short blog post I wanted to write a defense for it to show you the logical structure that underpins the book.

Foundational Premise: God does all things for His glory.

To assert this is nothing more than to assert that God has volitions and a plan for creation. In other words, He’s a rational actor. I take this premise as both foundational and self-evident, and as such I feel no need to justify it.

I will say in passing however that the strength of this premise is seen when you try to invert it. So if the statement “God does everything for His glory” is false, then “God doesn’t do everything for His glory” is true. But what specifically doesn’t He do for His glory? Does He do some things to establish and spread glory, and some things to sabotage and undermine it? Or say the things He doesn’t do for His glory are neutral, that is, sometimes He’s about the business of His glory, and sometimes He’s busy doing other things. What are those other things? Increasing our love for Him? That brings Him glory. So not only is the negative of this statement absurd, I can’t even conceive of what it means. Which may speak to a limited intelligence on my part, admittedly, or it may speak to the validity of the premise.

Corollary : God created the universe to glorify Himself.

No surprises right? The creation of the universe is a subset of the category “all things done.” We might also restate this corollary as: God glorifies Himself by revealing Himself to the universe He’s created without much fuss either.
I like putting it that way because makes it easier to see the consequence that God is about the business of unveiling His nature, attributes, desires, abilities, thoughts, and heart to the world—which was the reason He created in the first place. It also allows for the follow on statement: the Bible was breathed out by God for His glory. Which can be reshaped to: The Bible was given to glorify God by revealing Him.

Now if this is true, (and I think it is) then there are certain logical conclusions that must inevitably follow.

Conclusion 1: The Bible is designed to reveal Christ.

Conclusion 2: The Bible is about Christ

Corollary to Conclusion 2: the things in the Bible are about Christ.

Which means: “the covenants in the Bible are about Christ” or “the covenants in the Bible were given to reveal Christ to the world.” So far so good? Nothing spectacular about any of these statements right? Wrong. Conclusion 2 is absolutely devastating to ordinary evangelical theology. It’s checkmate in 7 for the mainstream opinion. Or if you’re not into chess it’s the Arizona Rangers big iron going Bang! For if the covenants are about Christ then the new covenant has to be about Christ too, and the stool which Baptist theology rests on gets the legs kicked off at that point.
The book is the proof of this.