Covenants: Adam & Noah

By Matt Watson

Gen 2:15-17- “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’”

Covenants

Everyone knows about contracts which are legal obligations to follow certain stipulations or face penalties. We write them up and sign them when buying or selling a home, we hear crazy stories about extravagant clauses in musician contracts about what color M&Ms are allowed backstage, and religiously follow an athlete’s move to another team when their contract isn’t renewed. Contracts are almost purely transactional, demanding a financial give and take. It is fully focused on a mentality of “if you do this, then I will do this in response.”

Covenants are like relational contracts in that they determine the relationship between two parties with benefits and consequences if certain stipulations regarding that relationship are followed or not. Marriage is a covenant. It is a legal agreement, but also a relational one, and while many treat it as simply a contract, it is much more significant. 

Where contracts focus on the transaction between two parties, covenants focus on the relationship between two parties. The concept of covenant is absolutely critical in understanding who God is in the Bible, and how he relates to his people. Throughout Scripture, God says, “I will be your God, you will be my people” (Gen 17:7; Ex 6:7; Ezek 34:24, 36:28; Jer 7:23, etc.). 

The Covenant of Works

There are several covenants that God makes between himself and his people, primarily through Adam, Noah, Abraham (and reaffirmed through Isaac and Jacob), Moses, David, and finally Jesus. We will look at several of these over time as we go through the Genesis series, but this article will focus on the first two, the Adamic and Noahic covenants.

The covenant with Adam, sometimes called the Adamic or “covenant of works,” is the covenant made with our first parents in the garden before the fall of man in Genesis 2:15-17. They represented us, all of mankind coming after them, in this covenant with God (Rom 5:12-21) which was a promise to work and cultivate the land with the one stipulation to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

In Everyone’s A Theologian, R.C. Sproul says, “In the covenant of works, the destiny of the human race was decided on the basis of performance, specifically, on the basis of the obedience of Adam and Eve. If they remained obedient, they would enter into an eternal state of blessedness. However, if they failed to conform to that stipulation, then they would die, along with their descendants. Adam and Eve miserably failed that test. They violated the covenant, and as a result, the world was plunged into ruin.” 

We later see with Noah a reaffirmation of this original covenant with Adam (Gen 8:20-9:17). God once again tells Noah and his descendants to go be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth, and then promises to never flood the earth again. The sign of this covenant is God’s bow that he places in the sky (9:13). 

Notice here though that God simply calls it his bow. The bow is a tool for hunting, and an instrument of warfare. A bow pointed at someone or something is an intent to kill them. God sets a symbol for his instrument of warfare in the clouds as a reminder to the people. But he doesn’t set it up there as if to say, “See this bow? If you disobey me you’re going to get it again.” He says the opposite, because the bow is not pointed at the earth, but pointed back up towards heaven. God points the bow at himself.

The Covenant of Redemption

There is an even older covenant than the one made with Noah or even Adam. It is called the covenant of redemption, and it is made with God and himself in the work of the Trinity starting way back at the very beginning of creation.

Sproul says, “The Father initiated the plan of salvation; this means the Father is behind the eternal decrees of election, and he sent the Son into the world to accomplish our redemption. The Son accomplished redemption for us [on the cross]. Finally, redemption is applied to our personal lives by the Holy Spirit” through regeneration and sanctification.

The second member of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, had the bow pointed at him on the cross. He died, with God’s wrath for us and our sin applied to Jesus instead. God continues to remember his covenant and created a new one by the blood of his Son, Jesus. He is not an angry God needing to be appeased, he is a loving Father that has given a way for us out of punishment through faith in Christ Jesus’ work on our behalf. When you see God’s bow in the sky now let it remind you of God’s kindness to you and the message of the gospel. 

Understanding covenants is crucial to understanding how you are saved in Jesus. God is faithful to keep his covenant when Adam and Eve were not, as we do not. He has made the final covenant with his Son, and as a result, we share in all the benefits of that relationship since Jesus took the penalty for our sin.

R.C. Sproul, Everyone’s A Theologian: An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Sanford, FL: Reformation Trust Publishing, 2014), 123.

Ibid., 124.