2 Tim. 2:14-26, God’s Covenant with Noah (1)

In Gen. 6:18 God told Noah, before Noah and his family boarded the Ark, But I will establish My covenant with you.  In Gen. 9:9, after Noah and his family debarked, God said, Behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your descendents after you.  These are the first two appearances of “covenant” (Heb. berit) in the Bible. 

Could it be that God had made a covenant with Adam, and now, after destroying all the inhabitants of earth save for those on the Ark, He was now establishing that covenant with Noah?  It is certainly possible.  Was it the ”covenant of works,” so called by our Reformed brothers and sisters?  If it was, God didn’t refer to it as a “covenant” in Gen. 1-2, nor did He establish a “sign of the covenant” as we have here (and in Gen. 17 where circumcision is the sign of the covenant). 

Now I need to be careful here, because I am not intending to discuss and make my position clear on the debate between “covenant theology” and “dispensationalism.”  If you have read this blog for very long you know where I stand on the overall issue.  And there are a few good books on the subject.  For me, I still appreciate the writings of Charles Feinberg, particularly Millennialism: Two Major Views. 

Years ago, and especially when in Bible College, the debate was difficult because the debaters seemed more interested in scoring points than understanding the Bible.  I absolutely love(d) R. C. Sproul.  But a quote from him illustrates my frustration. 

Covenant theology is important for many reasons. Though covenant theology has been around for millennia, it finds its more refined and systematic formulation in the Protestant Reformation. Its importance, however, has been heightened in our day because of its relationship to a theology that is relatively new. In the late nineteenth century, the theology called “dispensationalism” emerged as a new approach to understanding the Bible. The old Scofield Reference Bible defined dispensationalism in terms of seven distinct dispensations or time periods within sacred Scripture. Each dispensation was defined as “a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.”

What our brother said was, covenant theology has been around for a long time and it has gotten better since the Reformation.  On the other hand, dispensationalism is new, even though dispensationalists see their position held in the NT Church as well as the “early Church.”  And dispensationalism is defined by Scofield.  This debate was significant in encouraging me to care less about “systematic theology” (“dogmatics,” categories of Biblical truth) and devoted myself to “Biblical theology” (allowing Scripture to define it’s own categories, simple distinction, more could be said).  Let me say this much: in the Bible there are “covenants” and there are “dispensations.”  With this, we will deal with Noah and Genesis 9 in the next post.