The Picture of a Promise, Part 2

Image by Albrecht Fietz ​

Have you ever kept a letter from someone that you love, even if that person is still with you? Or maybe you’ve saved voicemails or text message threads of the same. It is an strange thing that we would keep these messages when we still have a relationship with the real person, but then it isn’t. These messages that we have are moments where the other person has revealed something about themselves, and that act is what is special. I still have the first messages that Abby and I exchanged when we were dating because those messages revealed that budding love between the two of us. It was a witness to the relationship we already had that gave the place for those messages to be exchanged. 

Keeping that in mind will help you understand why Presbyterians get so excited about covenants in the Bible. We’re big on this! We name our churches, colleges, even children after this concept because a covenant is like a letter from God. A covenant reveals Who God is, what He is like, and most critically, how He works. Covenants are the first messages that God sends to His people, and in fact, covenants are how God gathers His people (Myers, 2). 

We are starting into the Christmas season, and that means the Hallmark movies begin at my house. While every Hallmark movie is basically the same—well, is the same— the favorite flavor of Hallmark Christmas movies in my house is the Royal Christmas genre. You’ve seen it. A handsome prince is supposed to marry the surprisingly indifferent princess, when the “plain” Christmas decorator from the small town with no royal blood comes to the castle, teaches the prince the vaguely “true” meaning of a winter holiday (usually the word “family” is involved), the prince falls in love, but they can’t marry because she isn’t royal until blah blah the prince finds a legal way to marry her, usually in the last three minutes of the film after she has gotten in the taxi to fly home. By the prince marrying her, he bridges the legal gap to make a relationship possible and makes her royal. 

Now, given that this is a popular film genre, we understand the idea of a relationship between people of unequal status. It should give us pause as to how we have a relationship with God. We know that we can’t just walk into a castle and demand to be married to one of the royal members of the house. The royals have to condescend as it were to us. And it is infinitely more so with God. God not only has to bridge the gap between, you know, Creator and creature, but also holy and sinner (Myers, 9-11). The way God bridges that gap is by making a promise to us. Those promises gather God’s people and reveal who He is at the same time. Today, we are going to look at one of those covenants.    

Today we are going to pick up where we left off last time in our two points: God provides parameters for people and God provides promises for people. 

As we pick up from verse 8, we begin to see the promises that God has actually already made to Noah and His family. Hang with me as we do a little mining here! God says that He is going to “establish” His covenant with Noah and his family, and that word is important. To establish a covenant means that there is already a covenant in existence, but now it is going to be confirmed. This is different than “cutting” or making a covenant (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament). By God saying “establish” means that God has made a promise to Noah before, and that can be found back in chapter 6:18. There, God is establishing the Covenant with Noah that He will be saved from this flood. 

So, does this mean that Noah was undergoing some sort of trial period? In other words, did God decide that Noah was a good candidate for a covenant but needed to see how Noah would perform first? Does God make promises and then only after seeing some good response does He then confirm that covenant? 

In other words, how do God’s covenants work? 

These are important questions to think through. If God needs to see some proof of works, then Noah wouldn’t have been saved by grace. He would have gotten the covenant because he built a boat! Scarier still, if Noah got in by works, then he would be able to work (or sin) his way out of God’s promises. As we will see in the future, Noah doesn’t behave very well after the flood. The man gets drunk and acts lewdly. Believe it or not, the question affects more than Noah. If Noah can blow this covenant, then you and I are at risk. Look at verse 12. This covenant is for all future generations. When Adam broke his covenant, we all now are subject to death. If Noah breaks this covenant, are we all subject to flood forever? 

Thankfully, the answer is no. This is because Noah got into this covenant by grace. If we go back to chapter 6, we find that word “established” again. That means that there is a covenant promise made prior to chapter six that the Lord is going to confirm. Well, anywhere else in chapter six you look, we don’t see another covenant made with Noah. The only other covenant that God has made was all the way back in chapter 3, the Covenant of Grace (Myers, 131). Adam and Eve broke the Covenant of Works. God promised that if they wouldn’t eat of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would live forever. That covenant had a condition on it, which they broke. Because of that, they were now subject to death, and since they represented us, we are all now subject to death. 

After that in chapter 3, God sets up a new covenant, one where everything is going to be set right. God promises to do that by ultimately preserving a line of people who would love God and oppose the line of the snake, culminating in Jesus, and for our purposes today, is found in Noah (Myers, 128-9). Noah found favor in the eyes of God because God was keeping His covenant to Adam and Eve and the rest of us. God was “establishing,” confirming that He was keeping the covenant of grace. Here stays the line opposed to the snake and it is running through Noah. 
Sounds good so far, but what is God promising through Noah? Is there anything essentially unique with this covenant? 

The first thing we notice is that this is a covenant with all people and animals. Everyone from Noah, his sons, and all future generations! That includes you! The promises and blessings made to Noah are being upheld for you! God is still giving the earth babies. New children are still being born everyday, and as we saw last week, is a sure sign of God’s blessing. This is a blessing that He gives even to people outside the Church! That also tells us that the responsibilities that we saw last week apply to them as well. This covenant draws the whole world into a community, a community that experiences blessings and responsibilities from God. 

Now, those blessings are very specific. This covenant doesn’t mean that the whole world is Christian, but it does mean that the world is spared from a very particular form of judgment: the flood. God is sparing the world from ever having that cataclysmic flood happen again. This is something that He would need to promise as I can imagine that every time the storm clouds gathered, humanity would wonder if they were about to be destroyed again. 

Beyond just saying that He wasn’t going to do that anymore, God gives us a sign. Think about that. It would be enough for God to simply say, “I said it, and I’ll stick with it.” He’s God, but He gives the world the picture of the rainbow in the sky. God doesn’t set it there so that He will remember (God doesn’t forget) but He is setting it there so that we don’t forget that God remembers. As one commentator notes: "A 'sign' points to something beyond itself and therefore requires interpretation, which we find here. Its importance lies in what it communicates and evokes, not the wonder itself" (Matthews, 411). 

The way we do this today is with wedding bands. On March 10th, 2018, I made promises, a covenant, before God and witnesses that I would be dedicated to Abby. As a visible sign of that covenant, I presented her with a ring, and she did the same thing. She made promises, entered into a covenant with me, and she gave me a wedding band. These are symbols and not the covenant itself, but they display the promise that we have made to each other. This communicates to the rest of the world that I intend to keep my promise, and everytime I look at it, I am reminded of the covenant that I am in. If my band were ever stolen, that wouldn’t mean that the covenant is broken or that my promises are void, but I would want to replace it as quickly as possible in order that I might be kind to my wife in declaring to the rest of the world and to her that I want to be reminded of this covenant I have made.   

We should feel the same way with God. When God has made a promise, that is enough, but God is kind enough to provide the sign. That’s not the only one that He has given to us either. God has also provided for us the Lord’s Supper, which we will have next week. It is enough that we have the Bible to tell us that Jesus died for our sins. But God has given to us a picture of that reality that we remind ourselves of every month. We hold the bread and juice in our hands to remind us that Jesus broke His body, spilled His blood for us. We eat it individually as a reminder that this promise applies directly to us, yet we eat it together because we are all a part of a family! We have similar workings in Baptism which show that sin is washed away. These sacraments are like looking at our wedding bands. Every time we do that, we are reminded that we have a relationship with our God and reminded what God did to make that relationship possible. When we break the bread and pour the juice, we see a picture of Jesus’ body and blood being poured out for us, and are by faith spiritually nourished by that.  

Let’s return now to our text in Genesis to take a closer look at this sign that God has given to the world. What does the rainbow do for us? It is a sign given to the entire world that God is holding back His judgment every time there is a reminder of what He did that first time the storm clouds gathered. I was talking to a pastoral colleague at Presbytery this week who was teaching through Genesis, and he had a very interesting point. He noticed the timing of the rainbow, it comes out after the storm is over as if to say, “I could have kept this rain coming. Judgment could have flooded out until the mountains were twenty-two feet deep in water, but I didn’t. Why? Because I’ve made a promise to you all, and here is your reminder of that.” 

There is more that God is doing with that. One commentator put it this way: "Each day that passes without God bringing history to close does not declare that God is unable to judge the wicked; it declares that God intends to do more than judge the wicked. He intends also to gather His people and give them new hearts" (Myers, 139-140). In other words, the rainbow says that there is still time to turn to Jesus, still time to be forgiven by God. But, time isn’t going to go on forever. As we see, God promises in Genesis 8:22, that as long as Earth shall last. The world is not going to last forever. Judgment will come! One scholar put it this way: "In Peter's reasoning, those who use the regularity of time as a reason to doubt God's final, covenantal judgment have forgotten the flood" (Myers, 145). 

Yet at the same time, those who are in Christ have something after that final judgment. As one of my seminary professors put it: "Believers attempt to live obedient to their covenant God, reminded every time they see a rainbow that divine wrath will give way to peace, for judgment is God's strange work (Isa. 28:21)" (Ross, 207).   

We can have confidence that God does not take His Son’s sacrifice lightly. When we come to the table, we are reminded that God has sworn on His Son’s blood to save us. He will deliver us. 

So what does that mean in the meantime? Well, if you are going through something difficult and feel that God has abandoned you or the world for that matter, look at the sign that God has given to you. God made a promise to the whole world, and He doesn’t take promises lightly. Yes, hard times come, but so does deliverance (Ross, 206). 

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