Review Roundup: Covenant Theology (Part 3)

by on March 19, 2026 | Comment

This roundup of reviews on books about covenant theology focuses on shorter, more accessible volumes. These are entry-level treatments of covenant. This review covers them here in order to help readers assess the options for which book to read first.

J. V. Fesko, Signed, Sealed, Delivered: An Introduction to Covenant Theology (Ligonier Ministries, 2025).

J. V. Fesko’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered is exactly the sort of top-tier product you expect when a premiere theologian joins up with a highly reputable organization like Ligonier. It hits the right notes, doing justice to its namesake song produced by the heavyweight combination of Stevie Wonder and Motown records. Fesko’s book is that good.

This book pulls together the much sought after blend of depth and accessibility. It is readable and never overwhelmingly technical. It has details but does not presume much prior knowledge. It explains rich truths while walking readers through all the information they need to reach those greater theological depths. At the same time, this book contains penetrating exegetical insights about covenantal themes that were new to me. It maintains a great level of accessibility while also breaking new ground. How Fesko packed so much depth into such a small and easy-to-read book is one of those rare feats of writing.

One of this book’s key strengths is its mix of systematic theology and biblical theology. Many books on covenant simply repeat the biblical narrative as arranged around a covenantal structure. Yet that descriptive approach often leaves readers with only a vague notion of why covenant is biblically significant. Yes, Fesko draws heavily on biblical-theological arguments. But he somehow manages to catch a snapshot about why each covenant is important in the biblical story of redemption with an impressive economy of words. It was what I had hoped to achieve in my book on covenant, but I came woefully short of my hopes by writing something much longer.

Fesko organizes these biblical-theological insights into the standard systematic categories of traditional Reformed covenant theology. This approach makes the material clearer in every way. It also provides good categories for understanding how the whole Scripture comes together in a unified teaching about covenant.

The greatest strength of Fesko’s work is how he emphasizes that covenant is ultimately about Christ and the church. This message rings through every chapter. It shows that the real value of studying the covenants is in knowing the Savior in the richness of his work and how he meets us in the church. Fesko’s book is undoubtedly the best entry-level book on covenant available.

Alec Motyer, Covenant Foundations: Understanding the Promise-Keeping God of the Bible, ed. Steve Motyer (Christian Focus, 2024).

Alec Motyer is a renowned Bible teacher in British evangelicalism, and this little book is a recovered set of lectures that he delivered on covenant theology to theological students in 1972–73. They are accessible and aimed to inspire students who are serious about the Bible’s teaching. They are marked with the style from the previous generation of British evangelical Bible teaching that is both clear and simple but also presumes the audience’s desire to know something detailed and serious about Scripture.

Motyer’s Covenant Foundations takes a closer look at certain themes in Old Testament covenant theology than a survey of the paradigm that we call “covenant theology.” It is a helpful and useful exploration of issues surrounding the making of covenants as well as the sacrificial system. He goes into depth about how God makes his covenants with Noah, Abraham, Israel under Moses, and David on the basis of his grace. He also looks at how the Mosaic sacrificial system teaches the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. In each of these discussions, he provides a helpful snapshot of an important feature in Old Testament covenantal structures that form pivotal premises in a full-orbed covenant theology.

This book focuses on biblical theology and lacks a more robust theological synthesis from a systematic approach. Motyer has Christ clearly in view throughout his treatment of Old Testament themes. So he understands well that Christ is the end and fulfillment (telos) of all Scripture. At the same time, his comments to this effect are typically forward looking in terms of how the features of the Old Testament covenants point ahead to something that Christ would do. This aspect is certainly true.

This emphasis on its own also leaves one wondering about how salvation worked for believers during the Old Testament. For example, Motyer writes,

Let’s draw the threads together. We conclude that the sacrifices were a divine provision to maintain God’s redeemed people in fellowship with Him. They did this by prolonging the virtues and the meaning of the initial Passover sacrifice, where life went for life and, on the basis of substitution, God’s wrath was propitiated and God’s people were made secure. (66)

Motyer makes the needed connections to how Christ is the true and ultimate substitutionary sacrifice to pay for our sins. He is less clear about the specific relationship of those Old Testament sacrifices to Christ’s sacrifice. The above quoted paragraph, which coheres with the rest of the volume, nearly suggests that the animal sacrifices themselves truly accomplished something. Such is the risk of biblical theology without complementary systematic theology to round out the picture.

Traditional Reformed covenant theology insists that the Old Testament sacrifices were not spiritually efficacious on their own but were proleptically sacramental of Christ’s sacrifice. They gave Christ and his benefits to believers under the old covenant. This truth is clearly stated in Westminster Confession of Faith 8.6. In Motyer’s own ecclesiastical circle, the older Reformed formulation of the Church of Ireland states in Irish article 82:

The Old Testament is not contrary to the New; for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ, Who is the only Mediator between God and man, being both God and man; wherefore they are not to be heard which feign that the old fathers did look only for transitory promises, for they looked for all benefits of God the Father, through the merits of His Son Jesus Christ, as we now do; only they believed in Christ Who should come, we in Christ already come.1

Here the point of Christ’s work given in advance is clearly stated.

Motyer’s work is a great little volume that looks at a narrow remit of issues about covenant. It is accessible and encouraging. It likely does need some supplementary comment along the systematic-theological lines mentioned above.

Richard P. Belcher Jr., Christ Fulfills All: Introducing the Biblical Covenants (Christian Focus, 2024).

Richard Belcher previously made his contribution to covenant theology in The Fulfillment of the Promises of God as a fuller and more academic account of the biblical covenants. Christ Fulfills All represents a digesting of that larger material into a more accessible form.

This little book is a great survey of the outworking of the biblical covenants. It would serve as a good complement to Fesko’s introductory work, discussed above, to expand on the biblical-theological aspect of the covenants. In a very short space, Belcher manages to capture the major contribution for each covenant in the scope of redemptive history. It is a helpful entry point into seeing how covenants tie together the narrative of Scripture as it presses toward fulfillment in Christ.

The drawback of this volume is that it promises something other than what it delivers. It purports to be an explanation of the covenant theology of the Westminster Standards. Certainly, it outlines biblical theology through the lens of the covenants in a way that is compatible and complementary to the Westminster Standards. In regard to the content itself, however, its emphases are on entirely other issues than we find in the Westminster Standards.

Consider the most extensive statement about the Old Testament covenants in the Westminster Standards from Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) 7.5:

This covenant was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel: under the law, it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all foresignifying Christ to come; which were, for that time, sufficient and efficacious, through the operation of the Spirit, to instruct and build up the elect in faith in the promised Messiah, by whom they had full remission of sins, and eternal salvation; and is called the old testament.

In the first four paragraphs of chapter 7, the Confession expounds principles about covenant theology from the perspective of what we today call systematic theology. This one paragraph encapsulates its entire statement on the nature of the Old Testament covenants.

Even with this limited space, the focus is still on an issue of systematic theology concerning how God used the ordinances belonging to the various Old Testament covenants to foresignify Christ and to teach his people about Christ. After all, they had the full forgiveness of sins by faith in Christ even before he came in the incarnation, which is the same issue stressed in WCF 8.6.

And this supports my claim that this book is compatible with the covenant theology of the Westminster Standards but does not do what it promises. The Westminster Standards do not detail a biblical theology of how the covenants advance the biblical narrative. Rather, they focus on how covenant relates to Christology and soteriology. To expound the covenants in biblical- theological fashion is to do something other than, even if compatible with, what the Westminster Standards do.

This book is still a great contribution to the literature by being accessible and Reformed in outlook. Even while doing something other than the Westminster Standards, these confessional documents are still the perspective from which Belcher does biblical theology. He does make good mention of the Standards at a few points along the way.

The focus on biblical theology perhaps leads Belcher to conclusions that I would differ from. Certainly, Belcher holds views clearly within the boundaries of the Reformed confession. Nothing unusual, exotic, or fringe appears in what he argues, as it is all vanilla (in the best sense) Reformed. Still, he is homed in on demonstrating the unity of the unfolding biblical narrative.

We probably needed a clearer discussion of what Belcher means when he says that the substance of the covenant of grace is the same under every administration. I am not suggesting that he means something incorrect. The lack of clear definition on this point easily gravitates toward needing each administration to be the same in the historical sense, as may be the case in this book. When we realize that the covenants are the same in substance by offering Christ to believers under types and shadows, we can start to account for more nuance among the various Old Testament covenants. The areas where this leads to the most disagreement among Reformed theologians are the Noahic and Mosaic covenants.

This book’s strength is in its clarity and accessibility. It is sharp and solid when it comes to distinguishing law and gospel. It upholds grace alone as the sole way of salvation. It clearly states the covenants of redemption, works, and grace. The areas where I differ are nitpicky or complaints I have about numerous works of biblical theology that presume biblical theology is enough to lead to the conclusions that have been most important in traditional Reformed covenant theology. It is a great read and an outstanding introductory-level book about a biblical theology of the covenants.

Note

  1. James T. Dennison Jr., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, 4 vols. (Reformation Heritage Books, 2008–14), 4:104.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here.

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