Sermon; Sunday 16^th Nov. 2003 Cole Abbey Presbyterian Church

Genesis 2.

The Roots of the Kingdom: The Covenant of Life

When I was at art school we had to learn to draw the human figure. In order to help us, we studied the human skeleton and we had to think through how muscle and ligaments and skin were all related and connected to that basic skeletal structure. Having an understanding of the skeleton, the hidden framework of the human body, meant that we were sensitive to the way the body moved and worked. It was all designed to enable us to make art work that looked solid and real.

Now the Bible has a skeleton, an underlying framework, and everything else in Holy Scripture, like muscle connected to the skeleton, relates to and fits into it. And that skeletal framework, the backbone of the bible, is to be found in its COVENANTAL STRUCTURE. The unifying theme of Scripture is the theme of the covenant. Understanding the covenantal backbone that runs throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, from Adam to Christ, is the key to interpreting it, and to becoming sensitive to the way God works in history with fallen human beings, like you and me.

It will help us make the art work of our Christian lives and professions solid and real

But the term, ‘covenant’ is not one we tend to use much in our culture. In the Bible the God’s covenants refer to non-negotiable, binding personal engagements that come from God and are Sovereignly administered. God in His role as King and Lord graciously enters into a covenant with His creatures, in which he voluntarily agrees to fulfil certain promises for them, and demands the fulfilment of certain conditions from them. 

Now the architectonic principle, the basic repeating pattern, according to which everything else functions in salvation history, is the pattern set by the developing and unfolding of God’s covenants with His people.

 As we shall see, God first made a covenant with Adam in Eden, which Adam failed to keep. After the broken Adamic covenant, God made a series of remedial covenants. He set about undoing the effects of Adam’s sin, by establishing a new covenantal pattern. He made a covenant with Noah, then with Abraham, with Moses, and with King David. And common to all of these covenants was their central focus on One who was to come, who would do what Adam failed to, that is, keep perfectly the covenant law of God, and more, this One would not only keep the law, but take away the curse of the law we have all incurred by our sin.

In other words the covenants are all focussed on the coming of Jesus Christ to overwrite Adam’s failure with his victory.

In His perfect life of covenant KEEPING for us, and in his perfect sacrificial death under the covenant CURSE, instead of us Jesus replaced the guilt and corruption of believing members of Adam’s race with His own righteousness.

He mediates the New Covenant in His blood, a better, fuller, and richer covenant for all who believe in Him.

All the previous covenants since Adam are really parts of this one covenant in Christ. God’s covenants are in fact nothing more than the unfolding revelation in history of one overarching covenant of grace, and at the core of that redemptive covenant stands the life, death, and resurrection, of Jesus of Nazareth.

So it’s clear that apart from understanding the significance of the original covenant made with Adam, we will never fully appreciate the nature of the redemptive covenant we now enjoy through Christ.

Understanding what happened in the Garden helps us understand the reason behind what happened on the Cross.

So let’s turn back to Genesis 2 and what we will call the Covenant of Life made with Adam and his descendants in the Garden of Eden.

 And right away you will have spotted a problem, as you read through Gen. 2. The text, you see, doesn’t say anything at all about a covenant. The word is never even used in Genesis 1-3. But the absence of the term does not mean that the absence of the thing.

If you turn to Hosea 6:7 we’re told there, that there is in fact a covenant in operation here. We read of Israel, that, “like Adam they have broken the covenant”. Israel’s disobedience was a covenant breaking just as Adam’s was. Like Israel, Adam was in covenant with God.

And then if you look at the use of the names of God in the first three Chapters of Genesis, you will see still more evidence that there is a covenantal relationship in operation in the garden.

 In Chapter 1 the general name for God, elohim, is used. And from Chapter 3 onwards, this general name, and the special covenant name of God, YHWH, the LORD, by which God was specially known to Israel in His covenant, are used interchangeably depending on the context. But in Genesis 2 both names are used in conjunction.  God is YHWH-Elohim, the LORD God.

This double-barrelled name for God is only found 36 times in the whole of the old Testament, and 20 of these are in Genesis chapter 2! Moses is making a point about God here. And that point is that Elohim, who made the heavens and the earth in Chapter One, is the same God who made covenant with Israel at Sinai, YHWH. He is YHWH Elohim. The Creator is the Redeemer. The King of Creation is the Covenant Lord. The appearance of God’s covenant name here is meant to make us expect a covenant context.

And when we look at the context for the use of this covenant name in Genesis2, a covenant pattern is exactly what we see.

Clearly the arrangement between God and Adam is a non-negotiable, binding personal engagement that comes from God, and is Sovereignly administered.

Just as in all other biblical Divine covenants, God initiates this relationship with Adam, and lavishes upon Him certain benefits, He gives promises of yet further blessing to come, and sets certain conditions to those promises. There are signs of the covenant, and covenant curses for disobedience.

Look first with me at the covenant benefits he lavishes on Adam in 2:4-14.

You will notice the graphic language that is used to describe the perfections of the Garden of Eden and its suitability to Adam.

Look at verse 5. “No shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the earth had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground”

 Now we know from Genesis 1:11 that God made the land produce vegetation, seed bearing plants and trees on day three of the creation week.  And all of this happened before the creation of Adam in 1:27 on day six. Now however, in 2:4-7, we are told that God made Adam while no shrub of the earth and no seed bearing plant had yet appeared. How are we to resolve this apparent contradiction?

Well, the answer is very simple and it points to a glorious truth. In Genesis 1, God decrees the beginning of a process of production by the land. Specific plant life is brought forth, others however must await the arrival of man on the sixth day of creation. The trees that produce fruit were made first so that there would be food provision already in place  for Adam when he was made. The other plants of 2:5 await his care and protection. God so designed them as to need a human gardener to cultivate and tend them.  Adam is to work the earth, and he is to do so in partnership with the Lord God who would send rain upon the earth to water the garden. God and Adam were to work together to make Eden’s beauty spread throughout the globe.

Now here’s the point. The earth, and the man God made, fit each other perfectly. God makes a perfect interdependence between Adam and environment, and between Adam, the environment, and God.  Adam is made to fit the garden and the garden is made to fit Adam. God is the gracious covenant Lord who provides for His covenant child.

God always lavishes abundant graces upon His covenant children far beyond their entitlements. You are in God’s covenant today if you have received the covenant sign, and are baptised into Christ’s church. The benefits you enjoy far exceed anything you could ever possibly merit or deserve in God’s sight.

It has always been this way. God has so designed it that he might show us His great grace and love freely given to all His covenant partners.

When we read the Genesis narrative and see the wonderful grace of God towards sinless Adam, how we ought to thrill to realise that the same Lord has lavished so much more even than this on us. Adam was blessed in Eden, but he had no sin. We are blessed in Christ despite our sin. God made a covenant with sinless Adam by his decree alone, but God in Christ makes a covenant with us by taking to Himself the likeness of sinful flesh and being found as a man, He humbled Himself for us, even to the death of the cross!

If God is loving and gracious in Eden, to stoop down and make a covenant with Adam, how much more gracious is He in a fallen world to send His own son, who knew no sin, to become sin for us, that in Him we might become the righteousness of God!

And then notice how magnificent this garden-home God planted for our first parents actually was in vs. 8-14.

God made all kinds of trees grow there; they were pleasing to the eye and good for food (vs. 9). There was a river that watered the land, and divided into four headwaters. The land itself was full of gold (vs. 11) resin and the precious gem onyx. (vs. 12)

Now try to picture the situation the Israelites were in, as they were reading this description of the Garden of Eden.

They had been taken out of slavery in Egypt by Moses, and were now wandering in the arid, desolation of the Sinai Desert.

 And they come to read the narrative of God’s rich provision for Adam, and it is everything they do not now possess. Everything that the desert was not is found in Eden. In the contrast between the opulence of Eden, and the desolation of the Sinai wilderness, there is a most dramatic picture of the bliss and wonder of a world without sin, and a graphic reminder of all that has been lost by the Fall. Israel could not avoid reading Genesis 2, looking around them in the desert, and realising how much they still needed of the covenant Lord’s redemption.

Instead of a wilderness, Adam had a garden. Instead of arid parched land he had an orchard, watered with flowing rivers. Instead of poverty and mortal danger all around, there was complete safety, opulence, precious stones and gold everywhere.

Israel was like the janitor at the headquarters of a giant multinational company who sees the members of the board arrive each day. He notices their opulence and the deference with which they are treated. He can’t help but feel the lowliness of his own position, his poverty and inadequacy, in contrast to their riches and prestige, and he wonders how ever a person might go from being a janitor, to becoming a Chief executive officer.  

We are supposed to feel with Israel the lowliness of our current state, in contrast to the opulence of Adam’s Garden, and we’re meant to cry out to God, ‘what or who can ever restore to us what we have lost? We need Eden restored, we need One who will obey where Adam sinned.’

And with Israel, we are to turn to the provisions of God in his covenant for our answers. We must turn to the Mediator of the New Covenant, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Last Adam.  OH, let Adam’s blessedness in the Garden provoke you to cry to God in shame, with the realisation of all that sin has caused you to forfeit. And seek its restoration, and indeed its surpassing, in the redemption found only in Jesus.

So first, there were amazing covenant blessings. But, 2ndly, there were also some wonderful covenant promises.

Look at vs. 9. In the very heart of the garden, we read of two trees. One was a sacrament and the other was a test. We’ll come back to the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the tree of testing, when we look at the conditions attached to the covenant promises. But let’s notice for now that, as in many of God’s covenants, there was a special covenantal sign and seal of the promises God has made. In the Covenant with Noah that sign and seal was the Rainbow. With Abraham it was circumcision. The covenant of Sinai added to circumcision the Passover. Today, under the New Covenant, the signs and seals of God’s covenant promises to us are Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In the garden the sacrament, the sign and seal of the covenant, was the Tree of Life. 

Adam was to eat from the tree of Life that was put in the centre of the garden, as a sign of His dependence on God, the Covenant Lord, for life itself. God held out to Adam the promise of Life and all that ‘life’ means in the Bible; profound eternal union and communion with God, in perfect equilibrium with his environment. Adam was to eat continually from this tree to mark his permanent dependence on the covenant Lord for life and grace. The tree of life was a promise made visible.

So there was the promise of a sustained eternal life of fellowship with God, here and now. But there are also covenant promises of yet fuller blessings to come, and they are littered throughout the story.

There is the hint, for example, of an era of greater blessing to come in the gift of the Sabbath day. You will notice that alone among the days of creation the Sabbath is consecrated, made holy. Look at 1: 3; “God blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy”. All the other days are blessed but only this one is consecrated.

In other words, Creation still awaited a fuller consecration. The rest of God’s creation, made on days one to six, looked towards a day when it too would share in the holiness of God’s seventh-day-rest. That was God’s intention for creation from the beginning, and when you scan through the rest of scripture, you notice that God has not given up on His programme of bringing all creation under the banner of consecrated rest.

In fact, the testimony of Scripture is that so much of God’s ultimate design for His world, glimpsed here in un-fallen Eden, was, in God’s purposes, always intended to await the coming of Christ and His glorious return at the last day, for its realisation.

Creation itself, says the apostle Paul in Roamns 8: 20-21 was subjected, as a result of Adam’s covenant breaking, to frustration, “in hope, that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay, and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”  

And again, when we turn to 2 Peter 3:13, we read that we are to be “looking forward to a new heavens and a new earth, the home of righteousness.” A new creation, consecrated to God.

And that, as you know, is a picture that finds its most graphic portrayal in Revelation 21:1-3, where John writes, “then I saw a new heaven and a new earth….And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’.”

A consecrated creation, a ‘home of righteousness’, in which the Lord himself will dwell, is what God still has his sights on. And creation groans as in the pains of child birth until that day.

Today God plans to bring the whole created order, into the enjoyment of His Sabbath consecration. It will become the home of righteousness, of perfect holiness and sacredness. But that is a plan God, the covenant Lord, inaugurated in Eden, in the covenant he made with Adam.

So first, there were covenant privileges, and secondly there were covenant promises, but finally notice that there are also covenant conditions and curses attached to those promises.

Look at verse 16, “ And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘you are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

Here we see the two final elements of the Biblical divine covenants. The conditions of the covenant, the covenant law, ‘you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. And the curses of the covenant, ‘you shall surely die’.

The tree represented a test, a probation for Adam. Sinless Adam, remember, had a will free to choose to obey or disobey.

Eat from this tree, the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam, and you are declaring that you no longer want God to decide, within the scope of His covenant, what is good and what is evil. You want to decide for yourself. You want to be final arbiter of what you judge to be right and wrong. You want to be your own God.

All Adam must do to remain forever in this sate of bliss, and usher in the era of worldwide consecration and blessing promised, is to obey God’s law, remain under the covenant rule of the Lord, let God decree for him what is good and what is evil. He need only refuse to take into his own hands, decisions God claims as his own. He must keep the covenant and turn away from the forbidden tree.

But Adam refused to obey. He fell from the bliss of Eden, he forfeited the blessings promised. And with his fall all creation, and all his descendants were subjected to sin’s effects.

And that means that because Adam did not keep covenant we are in a hopeless condition before God by nature.

You see, when the Lord makes a covenant in Scripture, His covenant partners are always a representative figure. He is not a private individual merely. He stands before God as the representative-head of a whole class of people. So in Eden, just as the promises related to Adam and his descendants, (they were to go forth and multiply, you remember, and eventually extend the borders of Eden’s bliss, filling the earth and subduing it), so also the covenant curses apply to Adam and his descendants. God’s curse on Adam’s sin, “you shall surely die”, was a curse not only on Adam, but on all his descendants, whom he represented in the Covenant.

The Shorter Catechism sums it up well, ‘The covenant being made with Adam, not only for Himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him and fell with him, in his first transgression.’

You and I die because Adam sinned. And ‘death’ in the Bible is not just physical and temporal, it is spiritual and eternal. 

Paul explains the results of Adam’s breech of covenant for us more clearly in Romans 5:12-21. Sin, he says, entered the world through one man, Adam. And death came to all through that one sin. He tells us in vs. 16-18 that judgement followed Adam’s sin, with the result that God condemned all men. In vs. 19 we are told that because Adam is our covenant representative before God, and he sinned, we too are ‘made sinners’.

Paul’s point is that, because of Adam, you are constitutionally a sinner, and if you are not a Christian today, you stand condemned before God, and physical, temporal death here, to be followed by eternal, spiritual death hereafter is the sentence that has already been passed over you in Adam.

That’s why Paul could say earlier, in Romans 3:10-12 that, “There is no-one righteous, not even one… All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no-one who does good, not even one.”

You are guilty and condemned because of Adam’s sin, and because of all the actual sins that flow out of the corrupt nature you inherited from him.

And here is our problem.  The law of God, that was set before Adam to obey in the garden, and is set before us in the Scriptures, still binds us to perfect and perpetual obedience. We must obey God.

But by nature we cannot obey God. We are already condemned, and are constitutionally sinners. As King David prayed in Ps. 51:5 ‘surely I was sinful from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.’

You must obey God but you cannot obey God. From your first breath you were a rebel.

Now what will you do? Heaven is forever shut to you, and the final era of a consecrated creation will be forever denied to you unless a solution can be found.

Who can save us from this body of death?

Thanks be to God….through our Lord Jesus Christ.

What we need is someone to come and undo Adam’s covenant failures, and replace it with his own covenant keeping. What we need is someone who will keep covenant for us as our covenant representative before God. This one, Paul tells us came in Jesus Christ. He is, 1 Corinthians 15:45, our Last Adam.  So that, just as in Adam, all die, so in Christ all will be made alive, vs. 22.  Or, as he says in Romans 5:18, ‘just as through the obedience of the one man, (Adam), the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man, (Jesus, our last Adam), the many will be made righteous.”

What you need is a Second Adam, to represent you before God, and obey God’s covenant Law where Adam did not, and you cannot.  God Himself has given you that Second Adam in His sinless son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And the only question that remains for you today is under which covenant representative do you stand? Are you in Adam who failed, or in Christ the Second Adam who triumphed? Will you die eternally in your sin, or will you live forever in a new heaven and a new earth, a home of righteousness, consecrated to God, with the Lord Jesus Christ at its centre?

Jesus bore the curse of the broken law to take away your guilt, and he lived a life of obedience to the standards of God’s law so that you can be declared righteous.

He has done it all. There is nothing left for you to do, but get into Christ by faith. Hide in the covenant Head that is Jesus and receive the forgiveness of your sins and the acceptance of Almighty God.

Find in Jesus, Eden restored, fellowship with the Covenant King, access to the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. Come to Christ. He has kept the covenant of works that we might bask in the glories of a new covenant of Grace.

Oh, may we learn to cling to Jesus, and prize Jesus, and stand amazed at the Covenant love of Jesus. What mercy and grace God has showered down upon us that he should give us His only Son. What an amazing thing that the One who made the covenant with Adam in the garden, is the same One who took flesh in Jesus Christ to make a covenant with us, lost sons and daughters of Adam, at the cost of His lifeblood.

As we read the tragic narrative of Adam’s sin, may God give us grace always to remember the glorious record of Jesus obedience, and rejoice with full and glad hearts that His righteousness is ours by faith, Adam’s sin is wiped away, and all our disobedience is covered by His perfect holiness.

Amen.