Take away the word “beloved” and you lose about 20 pages of this book. Remove the hype and constant attempts to convince the reader that what they are reading is not only virgin ground seldom explored by even the finest of Christian teachers, but that Arthur is presenting the missing ingredient to abundant living, and you lose another 50 pages. In addition, reduce the over abundance of “white space” and large chunks of Scripture quotations and you shrink this 275-page book down to about 150 pages. And the book really isn’t that big if you eliminate the elaborate retelling of the biblical stories and personal testimonials designed to prove her case, this book could have been under 100 pages, about 25 of which are of any value.
As you can tell I was highly unimpressed with Arthur’s attempt to abridge the whole of Scripture and Christian living to one component. Has God made covenants with mankind? Without question. Are we to strain every aspect of the Christian life through the strainer of covenant? Apparently not or the New Testament would be filled with such teaching, which it is not. Is the understanding of covenant the key component to the understanding of our Christian life? Is it because we do not have a firm grasp on this subject that so many flounder spiritually? Certainly not, for the same reason as given above. Whenever any Bible teacher attempts to reduce the complexities of Scripture to one factor, then promises that that one factor, properly understood or experienced, is the spiritual secret of Christianity, we know that teacher has simply gone too far. Many try it, and many buy it, but the richness of God, Scripture, and biblical living just cannot be squeezed into simplistic formulas.
Even in Arthur’s exposition of Scripture she makes many careless mistakes. She simply ignores the references to the New Covenant being cut with Israel and Judah, and not the church. She butchers the whole point of the Law being our tutor in Galatians, accepting the English meaning for tutor and applying it to individuals today, totally out of context to the thrust of the passage. In addition, she sprinkles the book with mystical stories and self-promotion.
Our Covenant God is a book that can be happily ignored. And for those thousands (she claims) who have been revolutionized by the covenant concept that she teaches, I suggest a thorough reading of the New Testament to discover if these things are so. They AIN’T.