From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Covenant: 3. (Theol.) The promises of God as revealed in the Scriptures, conditioned on certain terms on the part of man, as obedience, repentance, faith, etc. [1913 Webster]
I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. –Gen. xvii.
[1913 Webster]
In chapter 9 of Genesis, God adds, “When the [rain]bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” [RSV, Catholic Edition]
As I interpret this: God is a Creator and not a meddling Deity of the sort worshiped by most Catholics and Protestants and Jews of this modern era. In Scholastic language, God is the Primary Cause (the Creator) and not a secondary cause (a super-creature like most of the gods of pagans, even the God of Plato who created from nothing but in the manner of a human workman as if the substance of Creation somehow existed before it was created).
We become Deists, even when we profess belief in the Holy Trinity, when we see the world as a battleground between God and Satan. God is all-powerful. He does not struggle with any of His creatures, nor does He struggle with any part of the physical universe. If Satan exists, he’d be as powerless as us men regarding matters of salvation or denial of salvation. Only God can save, only God can bring a creature of this universe, this phase of Creation, into a new phase where development and corruption are at an end but life is richer and more complete.
The universe is part of God’s Creation. It’s a special part of Creation, the womb in which the companions of Jesus Christ are growing and developing. It’s not the safe comfortable place that a human womb typically is, though even a biological womb can be hostile if the mother’s body mis-detects the embryo as a foreign growth. Miscarriages are sometimes, perhaps usually, caused by the mother’s own immune system waging a war against this ‘infection’ in her body.
God presumably has His reasons for creating such a world, but I can make a few observations, starting with the fact that we are part of this universe, from a wider perspective — part of the Creation of which this universe is but one phase. If God had decided to make a better universe with less sinful creatures, that wouldn’t have been this universe and those creatures wouldn’t have been us.
God loved this universe before He created it. He loved each of us before we were conceived in our mother’s wombs. Having shaped this universe out of the more general stuff underlying all of Creation, God promised Noah that He would respect this universe and all the living creatures in it, rattlesnakes as well as pretty little girls.
I’m most certainly not a Biblical literalist and I tend to follow the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas that revelations come to us when we align our thoughts with those God wishes us to have — in His divine nature, He doesn’t speak to us in the way of a companion sitting on a facing chair. The Son of God took on a human nature so that we can be His companions in such a way, but He seems to have restricted His conversations — at least verifiable ones — to His own mortal life-time and a few short years afterwards when He appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus.
During His Incarnation, the Son of God Himself performed no acts that need be regarded as the sort of paganistic magic which most modern people imagine miracles to be. Maybe Lourdes has occurred to point us towards this Biblical truth? The high number of extremely unlikely spontaneous cures associated with Lourdes indicates something is happening there on a regular basis, though there is no guarantee. Cures do no automatically come when you step into the waters of the pool. But a strangely high number of cures do come. Very unlikely cures. And cures subject to medical investigation and statistical analysis.
Not a one of those verified cures is close to being impossible in the logical sense. They seem no different from those spontaneous cures that randomly happen even when someone is on their death-bed with an advanced cancer or some neuro-muscular disorder. In fact, I’m not sure if it would be possible for an event to occur in this universe which violates the ‘laws’ of Creation in a clearly perceivable way. Mostly, almost entirely, this universe has its own specific laws of the sort explorable by empirical means. The more general laws of Creation are also somewhat explorable by disciplined speculation starting from empirical knowledge and from our very small stock of revealed truths. This speculative exploration is part of my task in my various sorts of writings and I do my best to discipline my thoughts to the demands of the best available empirical knowledge subjected to the moral and theological ordering which comes from Christian revelation.
The point I wish to emphasize is that God is a Creator and it’s best to think that He will respect the rules He Himself set-up when He first created, the rules He Himself re-instates with each instant that He brings all that is not Himself into fresh existence. This is actually a mis-statement of the truth which is: In God’s ongoing acts of Creation, He acts as a Creator and those acts will be manifested in those regularities we see as the rules or laws of this universe and those more general rules or laws of the greater Creation which sometimes show themselves — but mainly during the Incarnation of the Son of God, including His Resurrection. And those more general rules are that — higher-level versions of the rules we see everyday. They don’t contradict our universe, rather do they reflect the greater possibilities which can arise from that manifestation of the abstract truths which God chose for Creation, creating and manifesting those truths from which He shaped stars and spiders and human babies.
There can be no contradictions between the rules and laws of this universe and the greater truths of Creation if God is the God of Jesus Christ. Enrichment to the extent we can see the greater possibilities of Creation, yes. Those greater possibilities can come to us by way of revelation or by way of speculation, though human speculation and acts of imagination are necessary for understanding even the revelations of God.
God respects His Creation but not in the way of a player respecting the game he has chosen to participate in. God respects His Creation in the way of a Creator who has made the board, the pieces of the game, the rules of the game, and the players.