Our Passover/Easter season was extra special this year. We enjoyed an elegant, meaningful and joyful Seder meal with several dozen brothers and sisters in Christ on Good Friday, then joined other worshipping friends for a sunrise service and breakfast early Easter morning, and finished at a local church with a celebration of Christ’s resurrection filled with jubilant music, children dancing and baptism of new believers. Thinking back upon it all I realized how covenant-centric it all is…. in a small way we moved from one covenant snapshot to another.

The Seder is a remembrance commanded by God of the Passover protection covenant through which Moses brought God’s people out from their bondage. Tho commemorating a specific event in history, it also foreshadowed the time when God would deliver his children from their cruel bondage to sin in order to bring them into in the Promised Land of sharing life with God.

At the Passover supper Jesus lifted the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” That event concluded with Jesus’ prayer to the Father, a prayer laced with references to the core purpose and result of covenant — “I in you and you in me” — becoming those who share life forever:

I pray also for those who will believe in me through [my disciples’] message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me…

John 17:20-23

Jesus was motivated by his passion to see us brought into that covenant fellowship, that shared life with God.

Our salvation is a covenant, established in God’s heart from before the beginning of time, made between Father and Son, now offered to those who come to trust in the Son and his sacrifice for our sin. And its purpose is to bring us into God’s promise to share life with him, now and forevermore.