Blood Covenant Origins

by C. A. Gray

  “What is this you have done?” I asked her, My voice shaking. I had expected sorrow, but I had not anticipated how hurt I would feel. I had given them everything I had created, except for the fruit of one single tree among thousands. Had it not been enough, I would have given them more besides. Did they love Me so little? How could they think I was withholding any blessing from them, after all of that? How could it take them only days to betray Me?

  Eve at once protested, “The serpent deceived me! And I ate.”

  The serpent . I waved My hand once, and the creature appeared at My feet, glaring up at Me. None of the other animals looked at Me with intelligent eyes, as this one did. This was the serpent I had created in body, but the spirit within belonged to another.

  “Lucifer,” I addressed him, heartbroken, but not surprised. “Son of the Morning, how far you are fallen from Heaven! Why? Why would you do this thing?”

  Lucifer, through the serpent’s lips, hissed at Me. “Why them ?” he spat. “ I am the most beautiful, most talented, most glorious creature of all your creation! Yet I cannot so much as roam the earth without sharing the physical form of the most menial of your creatures, while you give dominion of the entire earth to them ! And I’m just supposed to sing about it, as if I’m nothing more than their servant?”

  “You were created to be My servant,” I told him quietly.

  “I will not ,” Lucifer hissed, his words filled with malice. “And what’s more, many of your angels feel exactly the same way, and they are coming with me. We deserve the earth, and it’s ours now! You gave it to your stupid little creature here, but he obeyed me, not You! He gave it to me. And by Your own word, it was his to give to whom he would. There is nothing You can do about it!”

  He was wrong about that, of course. Lucifer had led the angelic host in praise while I embedded signs in the heavens of the one and only thing I could do to restore mankind, though he had not understood their meaning. My plan was neither easy nor immediate. But it would be enough.

  To the serpent, the creature who had yielded its body to Lucifer, I declared, “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.” The serpent’s legs vanished, leaving it only one long tail with a mouth. To Lucifer I added, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” With a wave of my hand, I cast Lucifer out of the serpent. At the same moment, I looked up into the heavens, alight with falling stars. Tears sprung to My eyes as I watched the angelic host who had chosen to follow Lucifer fall to earth, to roam about with him, seeking whom they may devour. They would devour many, I knew.

  I turned to Eve, who was weeping now as she watched My sorrow.

  “I’m sorry!” she cried, “I didn’t mean to, I’m so sorry!”

  She thought that would be enough. I wished it could have been. Inexorably, I informed her, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

  Last, I turned to Adam. My first man. My friend. “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

  Tears ran down Adam’s cheeks too. Neither of them would fully understand the reason for these curses, I knew; not even if I explained it to them. I had created the earth good, and then gave it to them. They gave it to My enemy, ushering in death not just to them and their race, but to the earth as well, now that it was under another master, who had nothing good in himself. I had made Adam and Eve to be equals, for childbearing to be a pleasure, for work to be a joy for them as it was for Me. All of that had now been corrupted.

  I stretched forth My hand and summoned one of My precious creatures: a lion, symbolic of the Lion of Judah that one day would make all of this right again. It bounded up to me like a great kitten, frolicking and licking My hands and face. I caressed its mane, took its head in My hands, and gave it a sudden, sharp twist. Eve cried out at the cracking sound, and the cat crumpled, lifeless.

  I wept as I skinned the first creature to die on My glorious new planet, fashioning from its pelt garments for Adam and Eve. They hid their faces from Me in shame. I knew they and their kind would continue to hide from Me until I gave them a ritual to absolve them of their guilt, at least temporarily.

  I missed them already.

  Once they were clothed, they both stepped out from the bushes where they hid. Still they kept their physical distance from Me, symbolic of our rift.

  I said to Myself, “The man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. Death has entered My world; yet if he stays in the garden, and continues to eat of the tree of life, he will live forever in this fallen state!” I closed My eyes, and summoned four cherubim who had not betrayed Me. With a wave of my hand, I bestowed each of them with a flaming sword, and commanded them to guard the tree of life from all sides. Adam and Eve watched, apprehensive, as the four warriors went to their posts.

  “You must leave Eden now,” I informed them. Adam’s eyes widened, and Eve buried her face in her hands.

  “No, please!” Eve cried out. “Don’t send us from here, please! How will we survive?”

  I bowed my head. “It is a mercy that I send you away,” I told them, “though I know you do not understand that now. It would be far worse for you if you stayed, as you are now.”

  “But… the land outside of Eden is wild, You told me so Yourself,” Adam said in horror.

  “You will survive,” I promised him quietly. “Did you not hear what I said to the serpent? You must survive and multiply. My original covenant to you is still in effect. It has just been… modified now.” I gave him a sad smile. “Though you will not always see Me out there as you have done in here, and our communication will be limited and different, I will still be with you.”

  “But… we can come back here someday. Right?” Eve begged.

  I gazed at her, My heart aching. “Someday,” I promised her. “Someday, all will be made right again. In the fullness of time.”

  Afterword

  One concept of God, particularly with an understanding of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, is that He is completely outside of time, the way an author is outside of his manuscript. Therefore, God wouldn’t experience successive moments in time the way that we do, or the way that I wrote it here. All of it, to Him, would be one eternal NOW. This may be the case; we certainly do know that He doesn’t experience time the way that we do, and “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8). We know that He sees all of time (Ephesians 1:4), though whether through foreknowledge or actual experience seems unclear. Also, those of us who are in Christ are—either literally or figuratively—already seated with Him in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6), even though our physical bodies are still here on earth. On the flip side, there must be some sort of time in heaven, since the martyred saints in Revelation ask God how long it will be before He avenges them (Revelation 6:10). If those in heaven still experience time, presumably God does (or can) in some way as well. Also, we’re told that God calls things that are not as though they were (Romans 4:17), and they subsequently come into being. We are to imitate Him in this way, as Jesus demonstrated for us in all of His miracles. But calling things that are not as though they were implies causality, which necessitates directional time. It would make no sense at all, at least to our minds, if those things simultaneously both are and a
re not (venturing into Schroedinger’s cat territory). Perhaps that’s exactly how God experiences it, but I suspect if I tried to write it that way, I’d confuse both the reader and myself. So, for my purposes, I depicted the sequence of events the way we understand them, even through God’s eyes.

  Genesis 1:1 names Elohim (the plural name for God, incorporating Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) as the creator of the heavens and the earth. Verse 2 says, “The Spirit [the Holy Spirit] of God hovered over the face of the deep”, and John 1:1, referring to Jesus, says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” When it comes time to make man, God speaks to Himself in the plural: “Let Us make man in Our image” (Genesis 1:26). Then God Himself takes a body and walks in the garden with Adam and Eve. Was that Jesus, pre-incarnate? Was it the physical form of the Father? Was it somehow all three of them?

  Moses wrote the story of Genesis almost in an outline format; the first chapter encompasses the creation of both male and female (v 27-28), but then the second chapter goes back to the creation of man in greater detail. So is it possible that Genesis 1:1 is also an overview, and the rest of the chapter describes creation in greater detail? Genesis 1:1 says, “God created the heavens and the earth,” which seems to cover everything that happens after that. But before God ever creates anything in particular, we’re told in 1:2 that “the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” What waters? How were there any waters, before God had created them? Or did He somehow create a nondescript substance at first, and then refined it with His words from there, like a painter paints a background color on his canvas before he fills in the details?

  Some explain this with the “gap theory”: the idea that epochs of time elapsed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. Perhaps in between the two, the world was created and destroyed, and Genesis 1:2 was actually a re-creation. This theory alternatively holds that God created all of the angels in the interim between 1:1 and 1:2, during which time Lucifer and his angels rebelled as told in Isaiah 14.

  But since there is no textual evidence for a gap theory, I assumed what happened was only what we were told, and that the timeline is literal. (This is another debate: was each day actually millions of years, as the Christian evolutionists would have it? I think the evidence for macroevolution is flimsy at best, and there are many logical problems with each “day” of creation taking millions of years. Microevolution, or the slow change within species due to natural selection, is well established, but this is a far cry from the evolution of life from non-life, or one species to another. But I digress.) We do know that Lucifer and all the angels had to have been created at least by the time of the temptation and the fall of man, and Genesis 2:1 says, “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished.” The word “host” in Hebrew could have meant sun, moon, and stars, or it could have meant the heavenly host, or could have referred to both. If it did mean the heavenly host, that leads me to believe that the angels were also created during those first six days. If this was the case, Lucifer and his angels would not have had time to rebel before the temptation of Eve in the garden. This was why I chose to make Lucifer’s fall concurrent with man’s: his act of rebellion was the moment he enticed Eve to disobey God.

  It’s interesting that God creates light three days before He creates the sun, moon, and stars. In Revelation 21:23 we see that the world will return to this same place: the glory of the Lord will be our light, and we will no longer need the sun or the moon. So I assume that the light for those first three days is the illuminated glory of the Lord Himself, giving Him illumination by which to work. On day one, as I read it, He has a different priority: that is the day He creates time. On day two, like painting background layers on a canvas, He separates earth from everything not-earth (here called Heaven, and I assume this includes both the sky within earth’s atmosphere, and the universe outside of it, as well as the extra-dimensional heaven, where His angels live). The water is somehow already present, but He gathers it into one place, revealing dry ground, and then brings forth plants. I think this is because He had to create food for all of His animals, before He made them. He always makes the provision first, before He makes the creature who will need it.

  Creation of the plants is the first place where it is mentioned that God creates everything according to its kind, whose seeds are in themselves (Genesis 1:12). The concept of life perpetuating through a seed recurs throughout scripture, as a metaphor for how the Word of God produces in our lives like a seed whose life is in itself (Mark 4:28). Jesus called his Parable of the Sower the most important of all of his parables (Mark 4:13-20), as a natural illustration of a spiritual truth. The fact that seeds produce after their own kind is also called the law of sowing and reaping, and that too is both natural and spiritual: “whatever a man sows, that will he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). A good seed produces good fruit, and a bad seed produces bad fruit, “for a tree is known by its fruit” (Matthew 12:33).

  On the fourth day, God finally creates the sun, moon, and stars—not just for lights in day and nighttime, but also “for signs and seasons, and for days and years.” God created time on the first day, but now in the same way that the earth’s vegetation contained its seed in itself, so too these celestial bodies contain within themselves a mechanism for perpetuation. The sun and stars perpetuate themselves with fusion at their cores, of lighter elements into heavier ones. Once God set the earth and the planets spinning along their axes and in their orbits, the laws of gravity and inertia have kept them in their proper positions with respect to one another ever since. They have also served as a mechanism for us to keep time: days, years, and seasons.

  The verse that says these bodies are also “for signs” is interesting. All of my references in the retelling to the signs indicating Christ’s conception, birth, and death come from The Star of Bethlehem Documentary 2007 on YouTube by MPower Pictures. I had never really considered that God might have used signs in the heavens for His purposes, as I had always considered astrology to be the exclusive territory of New Age or other religions. Yet apparently, the use of astrology to search for meaning in the sky dates back to the 3rd millennium BC, involving lunar cycles, tides, and constellations as a calendar. The wise men from the east knew from the prophecies of Daniel that the star of Bethlehem indicated the birth of the king of the Jews. There are numerous other scriptural references to signs in the heavens (Luke 21:25, Jeremiah 10:2, Acts 2:20, Job 38:31-33), and the imagery of Revelation suggests that there will be signs in the heavens of the end times as well. Since the universe operates like a giant clock, surely that must mean God impregnated the heavens with these signs from the very beginning!

  The last few days of creation read like a crescendo: the birds and the fish, the creatures of the land, and then the crowning creation of man. Notice that God created everything prior to Adam with just His words, calling things that were not as though they were (Romans 4:17). But when He gets to Adam, He is hands on, fashioning him from the dust. Then He does the same thing with Eve from Adam’s rib, after the six days of creation are completed. Genesis 2 doesn’t make it clear how long Adam was alone in the garden, but it was long enough for Adam to name all of God’s animals, and for God (and presumably Adam) to notice that none of the animals were suitable companions for him. It was also during this time that God warns Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God never tells this to Eve directly, so Eve must have heard about it secondhand, from Adam. This might have been why Satan was able to twist God’s words, making her think she was also not allowed to even touch the fruit. Satan’s strategy often involves half truths; man’s inclination is to toss out the good with the bad once we discover it, assuming the whole thing to be false. When Eve touches the fruit and does not die, she is emboldened to eat it also. How often has Satan taken something good and contaminated it—Christianity in the Middle
Ages, for example, with indulgences and church corruption—so that people on the outside reject it wholesale, as they did in the period of the Enlightenment? It’s a very effective strategy.

  Genesis 2:5-6 makes it clear that at the beginning, God did not water the earth with rain, but rather with a mist that came up from the ground. Many scholars believe that pre-flood, a canopy of water surrounded the earth, and there must have been reservoirs of water below as well (Genesis 7:11). This might imply that the earth was comprised of far more land in its original state of creation than it is now. When the chasms of the deep sprang forth, perhaps tectonic plates shifted, making space for the waters from above and below to form oceans that may never have been there previously.

  The word “covenant” never appears in Genesis, but God’s statement to Adam had the characteristics of a covenant, and Hosea 6:7 calls it a covenant (“like Adam, they transgressed the covenant”). The Hebrew word for Adam means man, and of course he was the first—so this was God’s original covenant with mankind, with Adam as our covenant head (1 Corinthians 15:45). God owned the earth (Psalm 24:1), but leased it to mankind (Psalm 115:16). God gave mankind “dominion” of the earth (Genesis 1:26), and told us to “subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). He made us gods (little g , Psalm 82:6), in His own image and likeness—but Adam sold it for a piece of fruit with a false promise of glory.

  Why did simply eating the fruit deliver this power to Satan? Romans 6:16 says, “Know you not that to whom you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants you are to whom you obey; whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness.” Adam disobeyed God, and obeyed Satan. He thus became Satan’s servant and, as he was our covenant head, we became Satan’s servants through him also.

  Jesus uses exactly this analogy in the parable of the bad tenants (Mark 12:1-11). He tells of an owner who built a vineyard and leased it to caretakers who refused to pay the owner. The owner sent one representative after another to collect what was owed to him, but the bad tenants abused and sometimes killed them. Finally the owner sent his own son, and the evil tenants killed him too. Eventually, he says, the owner will come and destroy the bad tenants. The vineyard in this parable is the earth, the prophets are the representatives, Jesus is the son who was killed, and the return of the owner will occur when the earth lease is up.