When the original covenant of works failed, God began another covenant; but this covenant could not be predicated upon human merit because we had already failed. Humanity – the natural descendants of Adam – was confirmed in its sinfulness both by guilt but also by a corrupted nature (Gen 6:5; 8:21). That is to say, humanity shares a common state sin-sickness – a condition of perverted desires.

Adamic Covenant. The covenant of grace began immediately. In the curse on Satan – the greatest enemy of God’s relationship with his creation – God promises a seed (meaning a child) of the woman who will bruise the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15). The covenant of grace begins with this promise, and with the act of God’s covering – an undeserved, sacrificial covering – of Adam and Eve’s nakedness (v. 21). As Meredith Kline summarizes: “Sacrifice was then a part of the earliest ratification of the Covenant of Grace… In the postlapsarian situation, if the Lord is to enter into covenant with a people to bestow his holy kingdom on them, it is necessarily by sacrifice that this is done.”[1] Nevertheless, this covenant of grace comes to Adam only in the most rudimentary form, and it would need much greater clarification and anticipates much greater acts of God to come.

Noahic Covenant. When the sinfulness of humanity grew so great that God would no longer postpone large-scale judgment,[2] he rescued Noah and his family from the flood which wiped out the rest of humanity (Gen 6 – 7). After the flood and a reiteration of the cultural mandate from the creation (8:15-17), God made a covenant with Noah (8:20 – 9:17). Here the language of covenant is made explicit. This covenant particularly aims at the preservation of life through God’s promise and human government in order to preserve the sphere of common grace as a stage for special grace. In other words, God promises to preserve the creation as the stage for his great work of redemption; but he specifically authorizes human government in order to maintain some restraint on the perverse tendencies of the human heart. This covenant is a significant moment not simply in human history, but also for the possibility of the story continuing.

Abrahamic Covenant. The details of the covenant of grace take a much more definite shape with God’s calling of Abraham (Gen 12:1-9). He makes it clear that Abraham’s descendents will be the avenue of his great redemptive project and that they will receive the Promised Land as its setting. Moreover, God ratifies the covenant with a ceremony suggesting that the obligations and sanctions for the covenant will devolve ultimately upon God himself, not Abraham (Gen 15). Finally, God marks out his people, Abraham’s descendents, with the covenantal sign of circumcision (Gen 17:1-14). So with the Abrahamic covenant God has called out a specific people for himself, and obligated himself to fulfill the covenant with them; and this people will be the means by which he accomplishes the redemption of the rest of humanity.

The details of these three covenants – representing particular developments within the larger Covenant of Redemption – have been sketched quickly and in rough form. There’s much more to say with regard to each; but many of the themes will continue to be developed as we trace the rest of redemptive history.

[1] Meredith G. Kline, Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 153.

[2] There is no space here to talk about God’s right to judge humanity. It’s an important and difficult issue which deserves more attention. For the time being, I encourage readers to see chapters five and ten in Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008).