The Covenant of Two Parts

6: 5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the LORD said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD. (; )

Noah Pleases God

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9 These are the descendants of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. 13 And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. 14 Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. 15 This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. 16 Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. 17 For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19 And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. 21 Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.” 22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.

The New Revised Standard Version The Covenant with Noah

God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 4 Only, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 For your own lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning: from every animal I will require it and from human beings, each one for the blood of another, I will require a reckoning for human life.

6 Whoever sheds the blood of a human,

by a human shall that person’s blood be shed;

for in his own image

God made humankind.

7 And you, be fruitful and multiply, abound on the earth and multiply in it.”

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

These two chapters each recount a covenant that God entered into with Noah, one before the event of the flood, and another shortly after the flood. Each highlights God’s intentions for Noah, and his family, as well as his intentions for mankind, from rejection and annihilation to salvation and preservation this duo of covenants again highlights much of how God responds to evil and sin after the events of the Garden. The son’s of God have fallen, mankind has become constantly concerned with evil machinations, and the Lord has been lead to repent that he had made mankind there wickedness grieving him to his very core. A point of note here, there are several times in Scripture that we read of God repenting, changing his mind, or not following through on his prior statements. Comparing this account to several other ancient Near East accounts of a massive flood, God is seen here as responding to the heart of man, out of repulsion at their moral state, whereas the other passages simply make it a matter of annoyance or “noise” that mankind is making, whether this be petitions to the gods themselves, or just general obnoxious behavior. One is a God who has seen his creation fall immeasurably far from its purpose, and the other is a deity that has simply run out of patience. The level of concern that God has for his people reflected in the Genesis account is of note in comparison to these other stories, he is the only one with a seemingly greater hope for mankind. Seeing as it is fundamental to Gods character that he does not change nor would he have anyone whom he would repent towards, the most common explanation for this passage and for passages like these is that the situation that God chooses to act in is interpreted through limited human language, meant to convey what is akin to, but not a direct definition of, the apparent motives and state of God at the time. This ever-present wickedness leads God to declare that he will destroy all living things. The God who looked down and declared that everything was good, now declared that it all will perish. All except for one. At the end of God’s declaration that he will destroy the world, we read that there was one who found favor in the sight of God, Noah. We are told that Noah was blameless and righteous, and that he walked with God, a signifier of deep and lasting devotion to God. What is interesting to note is that his family is not spoken of, but by their association with Noah are included in his salvation, his wife, his sons, and their wives. Despite the broken vertical relationship between God and Mankind, and the subsequent fracturing of the horizontal relationship between mankind, God still chooses to preserve the family, accounting for all those who are of Noah’s line, to be seen in the same light.

The New Revised Standard Version The Covenant with Noah

9 God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. 4 Only, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. 5 For your own lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning: from every animal I will require it and from human beings, each one for the blood of another, I will require a reckoning for human life.

6 Whoever sheds the blood of a human,

by a human shall that person’s blood be shed;

for in his own image

God made humankind.

7 And you, be fruitful and multiply, abound on the earth and multiply in it.”

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 12 God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

So what about the covenant that he makes? What does it entail, and who are its primary recipients? The covenant that God makes with Noah before the flood is in response to him doing as God lead him and building an ark, giving room for both he and his family, as well as the host of animals that would join them as well.

So what about the covenant that he makes? What does it entail, and who are its primary recipients? The covenant that God makes with Noah before the flood is in response to him doing as God lead him and building an ark, giving room for both he and his family, as well as the host of animals that would join them as well. God ordained that Noah and his family would enter the ark, he would not allow them to perish, but rather guided them in preparing a means of escape. And when the time came that they would be caught up in the flood, God shut them in, closing the doors.

I would like us to take a moment to think of what it must have been like for Noah and his family as these events unfolded around them. Noah, a man of God who was utterly alone in the world in terms of those who pursued righteousness, one day, God speaks to him making him aware of God’s decision on the state of the world, and instructs him to build a boat as a means of escaping God’s judgement. Without this revelation all those on earth would have perished, all human beings, and animals as well, no living thing was going to be spared. After receiving this news, Noah would then have had to go home, inform his family, and begin preparing an ark, gathering food, and waiting on the Lord to call them into the ark. It wasn’t until Noah, at six hundred years of age, finally recieved the news that God would send the rain in seven days to destroy the earth that we see the beginning of God’s fulfillment of the covenant he promised Noah all those years ago. His family would survive. As they sat amidst the winds and rain, and even longer afterwards floating on an endless sea of water, the one thing they had to hold on to was that God promised they would survive. They endured by Faith.

The flood narrative can be seen as a parallel to Christ’s work on the cross. Water symbolized chaos and destruction in the ancient world, but through that chaos God prepared a way ahead of time, a way of salvation for Noah, and for those who were under him. God was not intending to save everyone here, there was already a decision that was made, not by God, but by the people, in their hearts they had purposed that evil would hold the place of God. When he speaks of their thoughts being wicked entirely, he does not mean they thought about bad things every once in a while, like we may when cut off in traffick, or in the midst of a heated argument. No, each moment of each day was devoted to their own desires and was absent of God entirely. When the rain came down, when the door was closed, that was God’s final allowance of their behavior. In the NT Christ dies for us, his blood is what we claim as an atonement for our sins, and by it we are spared the pain of separation from God, and just as the ark ferried Noah and his family through the flood, so we are transported through sin and darkness by the cross of Christ, surviving death, and enjoying life eternal with God. Just like Noah, we now live by faith. This imagery is reflected in church architecture, if you have ever been in a large Gothic church, sitting in the sanctuary, I would like you to try and remember what the ceiling looked like. the high arches and crossing beams are meant to symbolize the belly of a ship and is referred to as the naive of the church. Our house of worship, symbolizes the greater promise that we all live in the hope of, that the covenant will be continued after the flood.

Speaking of after the flood, we see that God guides the ark to rest on the top of a mountain, and opening the door for them to depart, reinstates the dominion mandate, to be fruitful and multiply on the earth. This mandate is given to the animals and Noah and his family alike, God intends to see his creation not only survive, but also to flourish. And in the celebration of God’s fulfillment of his promises, Noah prepares an offering to God of some of every clean animal he could find and God, accepting his offering declares that he will never again destroy the world as he did before. Furthermore, he establishes license for them to eat meat, declaring that the animals will now fear them, but that they will be food, even as the plants in the garden were, and furthermore, he establishes a protection on human life, what is now referred to as capital punishment, that to take a life would be to harm the image of God and to forfeit your own life in the process. These covenants are meant to correct some of what was wrong with mankind before. The meant was meant to be a sign of God’s blessing, and opened up all of creation for them to partake of in order to survive, the cursing of the ground that mankind had toiled to grow would cease. Furthermore, to instill capital punishment was to instill a value to human life and dignity, and would prevent the violence that ran rampant before the flood. Furthermore, God declares that he will not flood the earth again, he will not allow it to fall into such abrupt and chaotic tides that wash away mankind. As a sign of these things, He states that the rainbow, a sight we see at the end of each rainfall, would be a testament to his promise, that as the rain ended we would be reminded that God would uphold his promise.

So what do these covenants have to do with us, with those of us who are believers today? Should we go and build boats, should we start collecting animals two by two? If that is the case, then we are going to have a lot of work to do, but its alright, isn’t it we’ve got till we’re at least six hundred years old right? In all seriousness though I believe that there are four important things that can be learned from these passages.

In all seriousness though I believe that there are four important things that can be learned from these passages.

First, is that God keeps his promises, he has promised us that he wouldn’t flood the world again, he has promised us that the seasons of the earth would always be there, He has promised us that he would be with us to the ends of the earth, that he is coming again, that we will be with him forever. The Lord is unfailing in his promises, we can trust him to uphold his end, even if we are failing in ours.

Secondly, That we endure these times through faith, and that faith is an action, a sure step, a leap forward, trusting that God will be as present in the next trial as he was in the previous, as worthy to be blessed in our greatest sorrow as well as in our greatest successes. And that as our walk with him is perfected in Christ, so we too are called to be imitators of him, to show his light, what is worht having faith in, to those around us

This brings me to my third point, that we have a calling, a voice, and time. We are told in that the world will be akin to the days of Noah, when Christ will return. In the meantime, each of us live in the time oft he harvest, each of us tasked with gathering those in for the Lord who would have him, those men whose souls yearn for the father they haven’t met. We are called, each of us, to live in the Hope of the resurrection, to the glory of God the father, and so that those around us may wonder why we are as strange and peculiar as we are. God has not shut the doors yet, he has not left them to their own wickedness, there is still time

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

My final point is this. Today is not that day. The heart of man is not entirely wicked. While it may be sinful, delusional at times, or distracted there are many who desire to do goodness, who desire to see righteousness prevail, and yet they don’t know why they may feel that way, why it is that they value human beings so, or why they desire to aid those who need it. It is because they are indwelt with the image of God, and such grace that is sufficient to be made aware of his moral calling in their life. But beyond that, as to his nature, the sacrifice of his son, and the culmination of creation, they remain ignorant. may we, as we are lead of the Holy Spirit, take the time this week to show Christ to those around us, to wilfully engage with others about his desire that they know of him, and the eternal relationship he seeks to have with them. The world will not be drowned in chaos once more, but it will be consumed in fire, purified, the chaff will be blown away, both within our lives and from those around us. May we heed the leading of the Lord that we may be good and faithful servant’s of the kingdom. Let us pray.

These two chapters each recount a

This concludes this weeks lesson on the Noahic covenant, next week we will be looking at Abraham, So again, if it has been a while since you have read this passage, I encourage you to take the twenty minutes or so to read through the covenant that God makes with Abraham and to consider How it is that Abraham is changed by it and God is revealed more clearly to us.