Like Sands Through An Hourglass--Creation and the Flood

 

Genesis 1:26-30

Genesis 2:16-17

Genesis 3:14-19

Genesis 9:8-17

So I got you all hyped about color coding your hourglass, but we have some work to do before Friday, when we will add a color.  I was going to do a brief skim over these two covenants with the main ones we will be covering, but I realize they are important to set the stage, introducing God as the Covenant "always-keeper", and mankind as the Covenant-"we-will-almost-always-promise-to-keep-but seldom-willers".  

We will start at the beginning--Genesis 1.  Elohim--Creator God--created the heavens and the earth.  Light, darkness, water, sky, land, vegetation, sun, moon, seasons, land and sea animals--all of it, good.  Then Elohim said, "Let us make man in Our image." (verse 26); and gave man--adam--dominion over His creation.  In Genesis 2, God lays out the terms for a conditional covenant--"You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.."  (vs. 16-17)  God is inviting adam--the word for man--into a sacred partnership where the two will bind their resources to accomplish a goal.  God=Creator, Adam (and soon, Eve)=caretaker.  Within this story, we see the beginning of the beautiful covenant of marriage, too.  But that's for another time...

Genesis 3 brings the worst news--the serpent twists God's command and plants the seed of doubt in their minds. They are the covenant partners of Creator God, and yet they so quickly trade the truth of God for a lie.  They break the conditions of their covenant and immediately fall into the knee-jerk reaction mankind still uses today--the blame game.   There are consequences to broken promises, they faced them that day and we face them still now.  God is a Promise Keeper--He said there would be consequences and there are.  But God’s grace--God is a Promise Maker and Maker and Maker and Maker.  Although they leave the garden to face weeds and thorns and pain and more sin,  God has hinted at a covenant to come, a covenant of victory over sin and death.

Just 6 short chapters later,  mankind has grown so sinful that God plans to wipe them from the face of the earth, save one man--Noah.  God uses a flood to destroy the whole creation, but He recreates it.  We see water coming from the skies;  a bird of the air flying away, first coming back with a branch (there is fresh vegetation) and then not returning at all.  (there is land).  The flood waters recede and once again, a man and his family stand in God's creation.  Does God know that mankind will once again sin?  Of course He does.  Sin entered the world through Adam; Noah was plagued with it, too.  But God issues an unconditional covenant to Noah and to everyone who has been and ever will be.  We can't break it because we carry absolutely no weight in it.  God promises to never to destroy the whole earth with water again.  The reminder is the bow in the sky.  Awe-inspiring, more beautiful than we deserve.  When God says He Will, He will.