(Re)Creation and Covenant

What is a covenant?

God is a covenantal God.

Even before their was sin on earth, God was operating in a covenantal way with people.

For now, we can think of a covenant as the way that God works together,

with, and through human beings,

to bring about His purposes in His world.

In a large sense,

God’s purposes have never ever changed.

From the moment He makes Adam and Eve,

His purpose for creation is that all of it would flourish,

that all of it would exist to glorify Him,

And that humans have a special role to play in bringing this all about.

The interesting thing is that after sin and death come into the picture in the garden,

Yahweh doesn’t just snap His fingers like Thanos and make everything how we wants it again.

No,

Even though people have changed,

God hasn’t changed.

Hebrews 13:8 LEB

8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Human sin does not change the fact that God is a covenantal God.

Human sin does not change the fact that God is still going to work together, through, and with humans to bring about His purposes.

Which have never changed.

God is still moving all of history towards the goal of entering His rest.

And He does this primarily through His covenants.

And it is by these covenants that we are given a clear description of

A. How He is doing it

B. The part we have to play

Covenants are the framework for the story.

They’re not exactly like the chapters of the story, so much as they are the major plot points.

Like when Bilbo finds the Ring.

Or when Buddy the Elf finds out he’s not actually an elf.

They are the highpoints.

The mountain peaks.

In fact, in many cases, these covenants are literally given on mountain peaks.

ESTES PARK IMAGERY

The Peaks show us where the story is going, the distance between them is the content of the story.

Summary of the covenants:

God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology Major Covenants in the Bible

1. The Covenant with Creation

Genesis 1–3

2. The Covenant with Noah

Genesis 6–9

3. The Covenant with Abraham

Genesis 12/15/17/22

4. The Covenant at Sinai

Exodus 19–24

5. The Covenant with David

2 Samuel 7/Psalm 89

6. The New Covenant

Jeremiah 31–34/Isaiah 54/Ezekiel 33–39

These are not contracts.

They are covenants.

And what makes a covenant a covenant is faithfulness and loyalty in love.

“Thus, by a ceremony or legal process, people who are not kin are now bound as tightly as any family relationship. Marriage is the best example of this. A man and a woman, who are not previously related, are now bound closer than any other bond of blood or kinship”

Another thing we must keep ever present in our minds when discussing covenant, is that all of these covenants serve as high points in God’s unfolding plan to bring about the restoration of the creation by the work of His Son.

Each of these covenants are designed to bring about the next necessary step in God’s renewal of all things.

They have a sort of trickle down effect.

V Shaped Covenants

DRAW ON BOARD

Some of the covenants, like with Noah, are very universal.

Other covenants,

like the covenants with Israel at Sinai,

and the Davidic covenant,

these are more limited in the scope of people that they initially effect.

But they are all pointing ultimately,

to the New Covenant.

And what is so astonishing about the New Covenant, is that THIS is the moment when all of the previous covenants can now be fulfilled and obeyed.

The Mosaic covenant was between Yahweh, and the people of Israel.

But it was pointing to a time when ALL people would be in covenant with God.

But the difference between those two covenants would be that the New Covenant would actually be obeyed.

Jeremiah 31:31–34 LEB

31 Look, the days are coming,” declares Yahweh, “and I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors on the day of my grasping them by their hand, bringing them out from the land of Egypt, my covenant that they themselves broke, though I myself was a master over them,” declares Yahweh. 33 “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares Yahweh: “I will put my law in their inward parts and on their hearts I will write it, and I will be to them God, and they themselves will be to me people. 34 And they will no longer teach each one his neighbor, or each one his brother, saying, ‘Know Yahweh,’ for all of them will know me, from their smallest and up to their greatest,” declares Yahweh, “for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will no longer remember.”

By the time we reach the New Covenant

We’ve reached the tallest mountain peak on our journey.

And what do we find at the top?

A tree, with the son of God nailed to it.

And instead of chaos water, there is living water

A reversal of the curse.

Self giving love.

Today, we are honing in on the covenant made with Noah.

The Noahic Covenant.

And we’re going to look at it through the same lens that we have been looking at the rest of Genesis.

Why do the Israelites coming out of

Noahic Covenant for Israelites:

God is showing the Israelites that he is still interested in working WITH humans beings to care for and bring about the restoration of creation.

They are about to get their own land.

This is a reminder that they are to care for that land.

ELABORATE how Mosaic law teaches them how.

He also tells them, “Stop murdering people.”

Genesis 9:6 LEB

6 “As for the one shedding the blood of humankind, by humankind his blood shall be shed, for God made humankind in his own image.

This was God’s major beef with the pre flood world.

We see a pre law law.

It’s important to note that God is not making a new covenant here, but confirming an old one.

Like a wedding vow renewal.

God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology The Flood Story as a New Creation

the flood story is presented in the narrative as a new creation. Just as God ordered the original heavens and earth out of the chaotic deep or ocean (Gen. 1:2; Heb. tĕhôm), so here God orders the present heavens and earth out of the chaotic floodwaters. Genesis 8:1 records that God caused a wind (Heb. rûaḥ) to pass over the waters of the flood covering the entire earth, which reminds one of the creation narrative, where the Spirit (Heb. rûaḥ) of God hovers over the waters of the original chaotic deep. In the creation narrative, God gathers the waters together and the dry land emerges; then he commands the earth to bring forth vegetation. After the flood, the dry land emerges as the waters subside, and the earth brings forth vegetation, as we see when the dove returns with an olive leaf in her beak. These parallels indicate that, after the flood, we have a new beginning like the first beginning.

Noah is a new Adam.

We often will talk about Jesus as a second Adam.

But in a way, Noah is the second Adam.

As we see this new creation imagery and the reaffirming of the covenant with creation,

The reader would hope to see Noah as the promised son of Eve who would defeat the serpent and escape from the clutches of sin.

But that is not what we see.

We see a near reenactment of what we saw in the garden of Eden.

Sin, by misusing God’s gifts.

Nakedness.

Shame.

Curses.

Next week we will see how as this broken family expands and grows,

it is literally setting the scene for God to save the world.

We are headed down the same track as before.

Last time it culminated in destruction.

What’s going to happen next time?

We, on the other side of Christ’s death burial, and resurrection,

know that the next time around,

Jesus drank the full cup of God’s wrath on our behalf.

Breaking the power of death.

Noahic Covenant for us:

God is deeply commited to you.

You are His creation.

We should care for the earth and each other.

We should fill the earth with little people who are taught to draw near to God.

If the Noahic covenant could be fulfilled in a perfect way, I imagine a family on a nature hike, talking about how to protect an endangered species they’ve encountered, and because it’s been raining, there’s a rainbow out.

And the child asks, Daddy, what is that?

And the Dad kneels down and says,

“Little one, that is God’s reminder to us that our whole family, and every animal and tree on this mountain belongs to Him, and because He takes care of us, we take care of each other, and all things.”

But then it gets deeper than that.

The rainbow is a reminder for us.

God says

Genesis 9:12–17 HCSB

12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between Me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all future generations: 13 I have placed My bow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. 14 Whenever I form clouds over the earth and the bow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all the living creatures: water will never again become a flood to destroy every creature. 16 The bow will be in the clouds, and I will look at it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all the living creatures on earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have confirmed between Me and every creature on earth.”

What the new covenant teaches us is that a day is coming when we will be able to live, work, play, and worship God without fear one day.

Did you know that the book of Revelation depicts God’s throne in heaven as being surrounded by a rainbow?

Revelation 4:2–4 HCSB

2 Immediately I was in the Spirit, and a throne was set there in heaven. One was seated on the throne, 3 and the One seated looked like jasper and carnelian stone. A rainbow that looked like an emerald surrounded the throne. 4 Around that throne were 24 thrones, and on the thrones sat 24 elders dressed in white clothes, with gold crowns on their heads.

The presence of a rainbow in God’s throneroom is

And here’s how we know this.

Let’s go back to our theology of water we were talking about last week.

the waters of the flood are understood as the primeval waters of chaos or the waters of the abyss (Gen. 1:2; 7:11), which God in creation had restrained and held at bay, but had not abolished (Gen. 1:6–7). They symbolize the power of nothingness to undo creation, a destructive potential which remains to threaten the created universe with reversion to chaos. In the narrative of the Flood, God is represented as allowing the waters of the abyss to flood the world, returning it to chaos

Following the destruction of the devil, death and Hades (20:10, 14) – the last of the destroyers of the earth – the new creation is characterized by one feature that makes it really, eschatologically new: ‘the sea was no more’ (21:1). The waters of the primeval abyss, that represent the source of destructive evil, the possibility of the reversion of creation to chaos, are finally no more. So the judgment of the old creation and the inauguration of the new is not so much a second Flood as the final removal of the threat of another Flood. In new creation God makes his creation eternally secure from any threat of destructive evil. In this way Revelation portrays God as faithful to the Noahic covenant and indeed surpassing it in his faithfulness to his creation: first by destroying the destroyers of the earth, finally by taking creation beyond the threat of evil. Only then does it become the home he indwells with the splendour of his divine glory (21:3, 22, 23).

The people of God need the same things.

We need a priest, we need a sacrifice, we need singing, we need teaching.

And we need signs.

Covenants frequently have signs.

The Noahic covenant has a rainbow.

The Abrahamic covenant has circumcision.

These signs serve as reminders ultimately for US that we belong to God.

The New Covenant, which we are living in now,

has a sign as well.

It’s called baptism.

And baptism is the ultimate sign that God is reversing the curse AND the potential for us to ever drown in the chaos waters of death.

These waters, which have threatened to engulf humanity forever, have been changed.

At the very moment when Jesus dies, defeating death,

water flows from his body.

Water, which previously carried the power of death,

is now the power of life.

The element which was previously used for destruction is now used for life.

So when you see a rainbow, remember your baptism.

They are connected.