Religious Education: Understanding the Covenants

This week in Religious Education, we recapped our learning about Moses’ call at the burning bush from Exodus that we learned about in our first week, before moving on to explore the idea of a covenant and what it means in salvation history. We found out that a covenant is a binding agreement between God and humans, which makes them His people. We now know that salvation history is the story of how God has always had a plan to rescue us from bad choices and bring us back to Him. Our learning objective this week was to describe what a covenant is and to explain how God made them throughout salvation history.

We learned about four of the major covenants:

Noah – after the great flood, God promised never to flood the earth again and placed a rainbow in the sky as a sign of His commitment to preserving life.
Abraham – God promised him countless descendants, as many as the stars in the sky, showing His plan for a great family of faith.
Moses – at Mount Sinai, God gave the commandments to guide His people in living free from sin and remaining close to Him.
David – God promised that the Messiah would come from David’s line, pointing forward to the coming of Jesus.
As we explored each covenant, we recognised that God always initiates them. God always promises something out of love and faithfulness, and God always invites a response from His people in return, such as trust, faith, or obedience.

Working in our table groups, we created timelines of the four covenants, using Bible references and key symbols to show their importance. In our next lesson, we shared our timelines with the class before moving on to write our own non-chronological reports about the covenants: what they were, what they meant for people at the time, and what they still mean for us today.

How do the covenants show us that God has always had a plan to bring His people closer to Him?