2024-10-16_God’s Covenants with Man

Genesis 1-2 and 9

God’s Apprentice

Genesis 1:28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God creates the material universe and says that it is good, because He sees how creation is in sync with and reflects without blemish His will. The material universe is not good as He is good, for He alone is uncreated and eternal life. Creation is a derivative of God. It is created and is not eternal (meaning that it lacks something, namely, the essential nature and character of divinity in and of itself). Nevertheless, when created, the material universe has a likeness unto God that is proper to created and derivative life. What matters is that God sees this derivative likeness to Himself as good even though it is not divinely good. Furthermore, there are no gradations of the good at this point, so the implication is that, though the material universe is not divinely good, its goodness is equal in the degree of goodness as His goodness. In essence, God has chosen to attribute divine goodness to that which is not intrinsically divinely good. This is an expression of divine love toward that which is at best derivative of divinity: God is adopting what is not divine into His divinity and, therefore, attributing divine goodness to that which is not divinely good in and of itself. He does this not out of necessity, for there is no necessity in God by definition. He has no need, for He is complete in Himself. Nevertheless, it is in the character of love for love to be shared, to be directed toward that which is outside of oneself, and for the greater to choose to enable the lesser to be as much like the greater as possible. This is what God does in stating that the material universe is good: In essence, He is adopting this material universe into Himself and making a commitment to this material universe to enable it to be as much like Him as it can be. This commitment by God to the material universe is there from the beginning, and so in the sense of being intrinsic to God’s creation of the material universe, we can say that God from the start predestinated material creation to be like Him. When the material universe later is caught up into man’s sin, and is perverted, it loses that intrinsic likeness to Him. Sinful man has taken the material universe down a different path from the one God had predestined for the material universe. In essence, sinful man has kidnapped the material universe from its adoption in God, and as a result, the material universe is disordered, prone to sickness, perverted from its prior beauty and purpose, and always ends in physical death. Since the material universe has fallen because of man’s sin, the solution for the material universe is for man to be adopted into God by Christ Jesus and in accord with the Father’s pleasure. If and when this happens, then all the material universe is restored to its adoption into God, which is to say, it will be good as God is divinely good even though it is not divinely good in and of itself. 

Ephesians 1:5: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.

Predestinated meaning intrinsic to creation from the start that it should be adopted by God into Himself so that it can be as good as He is divinely good. But since that was thwarted by Adam’s sin…

Romans 8:22-23: For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

Once man is adopted into the family of God by the intercession of Christ Jesus, and then all the material universe is adopted again into God by virtue of man, then…

John 17:21: That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

Adoption into the family life of God is accomplished through the intercession of Christ Jesus on account that sin had entered the world. Before sin, though, God intended to adopt the material universe into Himself by having man cultivate it into being more like Him. God is inexhaustible, and so cultivating the material universe to be more like God in a never-ending process. It is not futile, though, for at every stage in cultivating the material universe to be a bit more like God, the cultivator is experiencing the joy of learning something more about God through creation and of making creation that much more adapted to God.

Proverbs 1:5: A wise man will hear and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels.

St. Maximus the Confessor (7th Century Mystic): The person who loves God values knowledge of God more than anything created by God and pursues such knowledge ardently and ceaselessly.

In essence, God intended for man to be His everlasting apprentice in cultivating in a created life a life that is ever more like the divine life. Why not make the created life as much like the divine life as possible from the start? That is exactly what God did, which is why He says that creation is good without putting any gradation on goodness. Nevertheless, He makes man an apprentice in further cultivating goodness in creation – further goodness being possible with that which is also as good as created existence can be because God is inexhaustible, so this means that if the standard of measure is God Himself, then the best creation paradoxically can be always a better creation. Why make man an apprentice in this work of cultivating forever a better creation? So that man may know the joy always of being apprenticed to an inexhaustible God, such that the capacity for man to improve in wisdom and in love also cannot be exhausted. Man’s purpose is never totally finished, and so man never totally loses his identity in God – man being identified as the one who still has more to do, to learn, and to love – while at the same time, sinless man is not removed from the inexhaustible joy of forever moving deeper into God either. He retains his unique identity, while being completely inside God, and he comes to see that his weakness and ignorance (and, if he had sinned, his former sins) are nothing in comparison to God’s love.

St. Isaac of Nineveh (7th Century Mystic): As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with God’s mind. As a fountain that flows abundantly shall not be dammed by a handful of earth, so the mercy of the Creator is not vanquished by the wickedness of the creatures.

In being apprenticed to God, man also experiences the joy of putting his own unique mark into God’s creation. As God is love, so God shares His dominion over creation, so that man’s mark on creation is included in the definition of what makes further cultivated creation that much more a creation that is like unto God. Therefore, man’s work matters. Man’s contribution is not at all necessary to God, but God elects as an outpouring of His love to adopt man’s contribution as if it had been His own. Man’s artistry in cultivating creation is caught up into the divine goodness by adoption. Therefore, in part because of how man cultivates the earth, the following is true…

Venerable John of Damascus (7th Century Monk): The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God.

The Problem of Sin

For man to be God’s apprentice, man can grow in wisdom and in love, which is to say, he can be more mature over time than Adam in his initial state of innocence. Nevertheless, no matter the stage of man’s developmental journey, he must retain his underlying likeness unto God. Where that likeness is gone, because of man’s sin, man cannot be an apprentice anymore. He loses the intellectual and moral compass that would keep his inquiries and his experiments in the work of cultivating creation headed godward. Either he will embrace what he realizes to be debauchery, like the fans of the giants in Genesis 6, or he will determine what is bad to be good.

1 Corinthians 2:14: But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

God’s Noahic Covenant with All Mankind

Genesis 9:12-17: And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.

As discussed before, in order to save the Holy Remnant from the extreme perversions of man in sin, God baptizes the created order with Himself. God is the rain that falls upon the earth to the extent needed to cover over all livings things not preserved in the ark. Forty days and nights of even the most devastating of all natural rains would not be sufficient to cover over the earth in the manner described. The rain and the flood may look like natural occurrences, but they are of God and serve His salvific purpose. Like in the multiplication of loaves and fishes in the Feeding of the Five Thousand, naturally occurring things (loaves, fishes, water) and processes (feeding, raining, flooding) are caught up into God’s will, which is to say, are made sacramental, and thus achieve ends far beyond what would be possible in the natural world. In the case of the Great Flood, what happens naturally is that all living things not preserved in the ark are drowned and later devoured or decomposed. What happens sacramentally is that God kills off the perverted old creation and gives rebirth unto a new creation that will be safeguarded from its own excess in sin by His Covenant. A worldwide Holy Baptism allows for mankind, and the rest of creation through mankind, to move forward in a manner where a Holy Remnant can be preserved. The preservationist character of this Noahic Covenant is symbolized by the rainbow, which serves within the sky as an iconic border between the heavens and the earth. There will be no Great Flood again unleashed from the heavens. At the same time, the rainbow extending from one horizon to the next suggests the rooftop of a worldwide tabernacle. Going forward, creation as a whole will be an ark in which God keeps His people close to Himself and works providentially to guide human history toward salvation. In a sense, creation as a whole is a New Eden, except that the generational lines emerging out from Noah will not be as innocent as Adam had been when first created. Moreover, this New Eden will be occasioned by animal sacrifice, which had not been known in the Original Eden. As man proceeds to corrupt his New Eden, God then will narrow the size and the occupants of the New Eden successively from all mankind, to all those who follow from the line of Abraham, to all those who comprise Israel, and finally to one man, the Incarnate God, Christ Jesus. God moves the New Eden from the largest to the smallest sized circle so that He may be all the more immanent with His chosen people, until in Christ Jesus the fullness of the covenantal relationship is encompassed in the love of the Father for His Son and the faithfulness of the Son for His Father. The Covenant brought down to the relationship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the person of Christ Jesus is the one Covenant God makes with man that man cannot defile. For Christ Jesus is the only man in that Covenant, and He will remain in all things obedient unto the Father to the end. Why not form this perfect and eternal Covenant right after the Great Food, rather than establish first the several Noahic, Abrahamic, and Mosaic Covenants? The reason is much the same as giving Adam dominion over creation in the Original Eden. God wants man to participate in his own salvation as much as he would have participated in the cultivation of the earth to the glory of God if he had not fallen into sin. God includes man in God’s work in and through creation as an expression of His love for man, for in participating in that divine work, man grows in wisdom, in faithfulness, and ultimately in love.

God’s Covenants in Genesis as Restoring Family

From Covenants in Genesis: The Hebrew word for covenant is berit. A covenant is a particular relationship that binds people together as one (God and people, or people and people) by promised terms. Biblical covenants are often sealed with ceremonies that include the shedding of blood to show the solemnity of the covenant and to foreshadow Jesus shedding His blood to secure our New Covenant salvation. Throughout the covenants between God and the elect, the recurring theme is that He will be their God and they will be His people, because He will send Jesus to forgive their sins, which is the essence of the New Covenant. In each covenant, there is a “head”, who is responsible for the oversight and execution of that covenant agreement. In the New Covenant, this head is Jesus Christ. The Bible teaches the leadership principle of singular headship and plural leadership. God the Father is the singular Head of the Trinity and serves in plural leadership with the Son and Spirit. Similarly, in the family, the husband is the head, and the husband and wife are together the plural leadership working together to lead the family. The man and woman are equal in every way as image bearers of God. They are both responsible before God, just as God held Adam and Eve responsible for their sin in the Garden. However, the man is held firstly responsible, which occurred when God confronted Adam first, even though Eve was the first to sin. Genesis also highlights the covenant relationship we have with God as part of His redeemed people and not merely an individual who lives and worships in isolation from the rest of God’s people. To become a Christian is not only to enter a covenant with God but also to be adopted into a covenant family with brothers and sisters in Christ.

Marriage and Family are the foundations of the social order that God aims to reinforce in His Covenants with man. Sin works first and foremost in tearing down the family and the societal order premised on the family. Thus, the earliest sins had to do with tearing down the trust in shared obedience to God that had underlie the marriage of Adam and his wife; breaking apart the brotherly relationship between Cain and Abel; improper conjural relations between “the sons of God” and “the daughters of man;” etc. Reestablishing family order is the basis of that law by which sin will be condemned, judgment will be based, and salvation will be necessary.