The Covenant Of Grace Series

But Noah didn’t yet know that. If you went to somebody who lived in Vancouver and said, "How do you like the rain?" They might say, "Well, I don’t mind the rain, you kind of get used to it. But if you said to Noah, "Say, Noah, what do you think of rain?" That question alone would make his heart stop. He would say, "I’ve only seen it once and I did not like it. The one time it rained I wound up in a boat over a year with my family and a bunch of smelly animals. You don’t want any rain. Plus, everybody on the planet died and all the animals. Rain is very bad." And the first drop that hit his forehead, he might have grabbed Mrs. Noah and the gang and headed back to the ark and said, "We better get in, it’s going to rain again." That’s all he knew, that’s the only rain he ever knew. Not to worry, Noah, not to worry. It will rain and rain will be a part of life, but it will never be a worldwide devastation such as that first rain.

Here starting in Genesis 9:8, we have three discourses from God to the family of Noah, the eight people that constitute the entire population of the earth humanly speaking. We will spend just about all our time on Gen. 9:8-11 discussing the "The Stipulations of the Covenant" But to illustrate the elements of the covenant, I will be referring to the end of verse 17 in this section.

What God says in these three speeches to Noah, his wife, three sons and their wives is essentially God’s message to all humanity because all humanity is constituted in those eight people. This is Elohim’s first speech, verse 8, "Then God said/spoke to Noah and to his sons with him." They are humanity, the men represent the women who are their wives, they are humanity. God speaks directly to the whole human family, the whole human race.

Notice exactly how it is rendered in verse 9: "Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you,.

The main point of this chapter is that God is going to make a promise. This is what I’m going to do, God says, I’m going to make you a covenant, a berith, a promise made by God to man. This is very important because this establishes that God is a covenant maker as part of His personal commitment to man. He is a promiser who makes covenants. From now on throughout the entire Bible, God is known as a covenant making God who is faithful to keep His covenant. This covenant with Noah is the first explicit of 5 divinely originated covenants in Scripture explicitly described as “everlasting.” The other 4 include: 1) Abrahamic (Gen. 17:7); 2) Priestly (Num. 25:10–13); 3) Davidic (2 Sam. 23:5); and 4) New (Jer. 32:40) (MacArthur, J. J. (1997). The MacArthur Study Bible (electronic ed.) (Ge 9:16). Nashville: Word Pub.)

God makes it with Noah’s family which constitutes all of humanity, so really it is a covenant or a promise that He gives to all mankind. Beyond that, even makes the promise to the animals, all creatures on the earth. And the promise is a very simple one, I’ll never do what I just did again. I will never again drown the world in a universal flood.