by Aaron Davis
In court, the young girl was terrified but agreed to testify against her attacker. She swore to tell the “whole” truth, but then the judge excused the jury and told the young girl and the prosecution that we could not submit her testimony on the meth because it could sway the view of the jury concerning the defendant on the issue.
When the jury came back in, the testimony continued. The young girl was asked, “What happened next?” and she said, “He sniffed some drugs on my dresser.” This was a part of her “whole truth” that she swore to tell; it was what happened next in her nightmare. But when she said it, the judge immediately stopped the case and declared a mistrial.
The terrified girl cried and apologized to us for messing up the case but also decided with her family that they didn’t want for her to go through the trauma of court again. The guy walked, and a rapist went free that day because of a difference between what she vowed to do in telling the “whole truth,” and what was expected of her, in spite of what she swore to do.
When things like this happen, the message sent is that the world expects an illusion of integrity, as long as you are comfortable in exercising that illusion, or it fits within the parameters of acceptable manipulation. Furthermore, in the case of a jury trial, as in the case above, if you share the whole truth after you have committed to do so but are then instructed not to, the judge could declare a mistrial, mandating the prosecution and defense to once again present the tainted and manipulated information to a different jury.
I wonder if these repeated displays of inconsistencies within our society as it pertains to our words, our oaths, and our covenants can leave people with associative misperceptions about God from a covenantal perspective as well.
Whether or not we should, we often project human characteristics on God, and much like an adult having grown up with an abusive father, we may have difficulty identifying with the father nature of God. If that’s the case, all our perspectives about God, His covenant with man, and His promises are often skewed by our human experiences.
This is why I believe that it is important to understand that from a biblical perspective, covenant does not reflect and is not limited by the commonly misunderstood human example of it.
FROM GOD’S PERSPECTIVE, HIS COVENANT WITH US IS NOT BREAKABLE
The kingdom of God (which we will also elaborate upon in more detail in later chapters) is a covenantal kingdom. Everything that is available to man within the kingdom of God is a direct result of God’s covenant promises toward man. In essence, man’s covenant with God is the Constitution of the kingdom of God.
Hebrews 6:13–18 (MSG)
When God made his promise to Abraham, he backed it to the hilt, putting his own reputation on the line. He said, “I promise that I’ll bless you with everything I have—bless and bless and bless!” Abraham stuck it out and got everything that had been promised to him. When people make promises, they guarantee them by appeal to some authority above them so that if there is any question that they’ll make good on the promise, the authority will back them up. When God wanted to guarantee his promises, he gave his word, a rock-solid guarantee—God can’t break his word. And because his word cannot change, the promise is likewise unchangeable. We who have run for our very lives to God have every reason to grab the promised hope with both hands and never let go. It’s an unbreakable spiritual lifeline, reaching past all appearances right to the very presence of God where Jesus, running on ahead of us, has taken up his permanent post as high priest for us, in the order of Melchizedek.
In the United States, we have specific rights as US citizens that are defined to us by our Constitution. Also, because of this Constitution, we can place a demand upon the rights that are defined within it when any other person (or kingdom) infringes upon those rights. These rights extend to any soil occupied or claimed by the government of the United States of America. These rights are backed by the unified enforcement of We the people and ultimately the government we have elected to represent us within the kingdom. Our citizenship and our allegiance to this kingdom offers us certain and specific unalienable rights. However, it is up to us to place a demand upon those rights when and if they are infringed upon.
And so it is also in the kingdom of God, where we have promises and specific rights available to us. I’ve come to question if it is not a necessity, when those rights are infringed upon, for We the people of God to place a demand upon our covenant rights. As Ralph Allan Smith says, “From a biblical perspective, the essence of established covenants between God and man is and has always been His love toward us. To discern the essence of a covenantal relationship, we need only to consider the book of Deuteronomy, one of the first books of the Bible and one that emphasizes the covenant. First, God’s love for His people is the basis for His calling them. Then, they are urged to respond to Him in love, expressed by loyalty to the covenant established with God.”12
This model of love continues through every covenant established between God and man throughout the Old Testament and is finally completely fulfilled in the new and final covenant through Christ. The significance of covenant throughout the biblical story of creation and redemption is essential to understand if we are to fully comprehend all of what Christ established in the New Covenant.
Initially, God created the world as His kingdom to manifest His glory (see Psalms 8 and 19).
Psalm 8 (NKJV)
The Glory of the Lord in Creation
O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
In Genesis 1:28, it was God’s intention that as they bore more children, who also lived under God’s rule (“Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.”), they would be extending the boundaries of His garden (His government) through the simplicity of their devotion to Him. The greater the number of people in a right relationship to God, the greater the impact of their leadership. This process was to continue until the entire earth was covered with the glorious rule of God through man.
But in Genesis 1, we discover it’s not a perfect universe. Satan had rebelled and had been cast out of heaven, and with him a portion of the fallen angels took dominion of the earth. God could have destroyed the devil and his host with a word, but instead He chose to defeat darkness through his delegated authority—those made in His image who were lovers of God by choice. And since man was given the keys of dominion over the planet, the devil would have to get his authority from them. And as it was in the beginning, it seems consistent and important to realize that even today, Satan is empowered through man’s agreement.13
Since God constitutes a covenantal kingdom of love, the created world, too, is a covenantal kingdom over which God set Adam and Eve to rule. Their rule was to be based upon love for God and one another. They were to guard the created world and take care of it so that it would bear fruit for God’s glory (Gen. 2:15). The fall of man was a rejection of God’s love and a rejection of the way of love among men. Th
e violence of the pre-flood world is the climax of the rebellion of the fall and the logical outcome of the rejection of God’s love.
Redemption means the restoration of the covenantal purpose of God. Man is restored to his original calling as God’s image, which means man is called back into the fellowship of the covenantal love of the Father, Son, and Spirit. The created world, too, must be restored to its original purpose of revealing God’s glory through the covenantal stewardship of God’s image. The kingdom of righteousness and love must come to historical realization in order that Satan’s lie and the temptation in the Garden may be utterly defeated to the glory of God. Redemption finds its fulfillment in the Kingdom of God. God has poured out His covenantal love upon us in Jesus Christ in order that through faith in Him we may be re-created as His children and brought into an everlasting fellowship of love.
The Bible is the story of God’s covenantal kingdom—its creation, its corruption by sin and folly, and God’s gracious redemption of that kingdom to the praise of the glory of His grace. The central theme of the Bible, the covenantal kingdom of God, reveals the nature of the Triune God as a God of love who has called man into a fellowship of love with Himself.14
At the root of God’s covenant with man is His love for us, but this covenant is also a two-way street of formal relationship. In our covenant with God, there is a mutual love commitment expressed in legal form through that covenant—in essence binding us through love to God’s promises for us.
Again, the analogy of marriage is helpful. The fact that a wedding vow is a legal ceremony does not detract from the love it expresses. On the contrary, if a man professes to love a woman, but he refuses to assume legal obligations, the reality of his love is dubious at best. God’s love for man is expressed in the legal form of a covenant in which God takes obligations upon Himself and calls man to be loyal to the covenant. The covenant, therefore, has a clear structure and may be expressed in formal legal language. The book of Deuteronomy, the book of covenant love, provides us with our understanding of the covenant. The whole book is a covenantal document, structured in terms . . . that are used throughout the Bible to define the covenant.15
Covenant is the structure of the entire biblical story. In the beginning God created man and the whole world in a covenant relationship with Himself, placing Adam in the Garden of Eden . . . There, Adam was to enjoy God’s highest covenant blessing, fellowship with God Himself. But, Adam broke the covenant . . . This could have been the end of the story, but God is a God of grace. He renewed His covenant with man and promised to establish a wholly new covenant through a new Adam (Gen. 3:15).16
Romans 5:12–21 (AMP)
Therefore, as sin came into the world through one man, and death as the result of sin, so death spread to all men, [no one being able to stop it or to escape its power] because all men sinned.
[To be sure] sin was in the world before ever the Law was given, but sin is not charged to men’s account where there is no law [to transgress].
Yet death held sway from Adam to Moses [the Lawgiver], even over those who did not themselves transgress [a positive command] as Adam did. Adam was a type (prefigure) of the One Who was to come [in reverse, the former destructive, the Latter saving].
But God’s free gift is not at all to be compared to the trespass [His grace is out of all proportion to the fall of man]. For if many died through one man’s falling away (his lapse, his offense), much more profusely did God’s grace and the free gift [that comes] through the undeserved favor of the one Man Jesus Christ abound and overflow to and for [the benefit of] many.
Nor is the free gift at all to be compared to the effect of that one [man’s] sin. For the sentence [following the trespass] of one [man] brought condemnation, whereas the free gift [following] many transgressions brings justification (an act of righteousness).
For if because of one man’s trespass (lapse, offense) death reigned through that one, much more surely will those who receive [God’s] overflowing grace (unmerited favor) and the free gift of righteousness [putting them into right standing with Himself] reign as kings in life through the one Man Jesus Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One).
Well then, as one man’s trespass [one man’s false step and falling away led] to condemnation for all men, so one Man’s act of righteousness [leads] to acquittal and right standing with God and life for all men.
For just as by one man’s disobedience (failing to hear, heedlessness, and carelessness) the many were constituted sinners, so by one Man’s obedience the many will be constituted righteous (made acceptable to God, brought into right standing with Him).
But then Law came in, [only] to expand and increase the trespass [making it more apparent and exciting opposition]. But where sin increased and abounded, grace (God’s unmerited favor) has surpassed it and increased the more and superabounded,
So that, [just] as sin has reigned in death, [so] grace (His unearned and undeserved favor) might reign also through righteousness (right standing with God) which issues in eternal life through Jesus Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) our Lord.
So we see that from the very fall of man, God, in His love, was already planning a means to redeem man and reestablish His relationship with him. The redeemer and promised Savior who was foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15 would be the One who would again fulfill the purpose of God in creating the world by establishing the kingdom rule of God in the earth.
DID ADAM EVEN HAVE A COVENANT?
The word covenant is not actually used in early Genesis when we hear of the fall of man. So how can we derive that what Adam experienced was actually covenantal, and as a result, the promises continue to extend to man?
We understand that the original relationship was a covenant because we see all the elements of the covenant in the narrative, and because Hosea explicitly refers to this arrangement as a covenant (Hosea 6:7). Furthermore, when the word covenant is first used in the Bible in Genesis 6:18 and 9:9–17, the repetition of the same language that occurs in the first chapters of Genesis clearly indicates that the covenant with Noah is a redemptive renewal of the original covenant, the Edenic covenant, or the “Covenant of Works,” with Adam declaring that Man was given rulership over the earth. This covenant was conditional because it lasted as long as Adam obeyed the terms of the covenant.
In this original covenant, God promises Adam life and blessing so long as he does not eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, at which time if he does, he would “surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17), the land would be cursed, and then have to be worked harder to grow crops, and he would have to toil all of his days until his death (Genesis 4:17–19). Adam ate the fruit anyway and forfeited the covenant. Even in a state of paradise (Eden), man could not maintain a right relationship with God.
Although Adam’s sin left man in a fallen state, God had a plan to redeem man back to the original state and made second promise* in Genesis 3:15, explaining for the first time in scripture that God had a plan for man’s redemption and that from a woman’s seed would come one that would overcome sin and redeem man from the curse of sin. This one who would overcome sin and redeem man was Jesus.
“The original covenant with Adam is the basic covenant for the entire era that begins with the creation and lasts until the incarnation of Christ. Paul points to this when he explains the whole history of the world in terms of two men, Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12–21; I Cor. 15:22–49). Adam was the head of the old covenant. Christ is the Head of the new covenant. Adam was the vice-regent of God who failed and led his sons into sin (Rom. 5:12). Christ is the vice-regent of God who kept God’s covenant and won the blessing, both for Himself and for His seed (Rom. 5:19; cf. Isa. 53:10–12).”17 This means all of mankind!
COVENANTS ESTABLISHED IN CHRIST
Although I am not going to go into in-depth detail concerning all of the covenants that God established with man, I would like to quickly summarize, for the sake of understanding, that after the fall of Adam, the Bibl
e records five additional covenants leading to the sixth and New Covenant established in Christ.
In the Noahic Covenant, God showed His gracious mercy toward all mankind, both redeemed and unredeemed, causing it to rain on the just and the unjust and assuring the ongoing, uninterrupted cycle of seasons. In it He demonstrated His unwillingness to allow the sinfulness of man to derail His plan set forth in Genesis 3:15, His unwillingness to allow the sinfulness of man to abrogate the pre-fall command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” a command reiterated after the flood to Noah.
In the Abrahamic Covenant, God demonstrated His unmerited favor and unilateral choice of Israel as “the apple of His eye,” a special people called out from among the nations through whom the Messiah would come.
In the Priestly Covenant, God promised the perpetual priesthood of the line of Phinehas that carries all the way through to serving in the Lord’s earthly millennial temple.
In the Mosaic Covenant, God revealed His holiness and the heinousness of sin. The daily sacrifices provided a constant reminder of the need for the shedding of blood for the remission of sin, for the propitiating of God’s wrath.
In the Davidic Covenant, God promised the perpetual reign of the descendants of David, ultimately fulfilled in the Messiah and His millennial reign.
In the New Covenant, God evidenced anew His continual pouring out of grace, a promise through which He would put His law within His people, writing it on their hearts.18