Christ Through The Bible: Genesis 1 & 2. The Creation Of Man And The Covenant Of Creation

1: 26, 27 Man created in the image of God

Man was bestowed with the one quality that sets him apart from and raises him above all other brute animals. Read Psalm 8:5-8. He was created in Gods image. Thus, he does things that reflect the nature of his Creator. He can think, discriminate, reason, evaluate, be intuitive just like God. He has wisdom, shows love, is merciful, forgives, and can demonstrate righteous wrath. He even rules as a vice-regent over Gods creation, v. 26. Like God, he can also do something remarkably similar to the Creator. He can create. No other creature can begin to approximate mans creative abilities. Birds peep a simple tweet. Man writes symphonies. An alligator pulls together some weeds for her young to lie in in the open swamp. Man constructs skyscrapers, palaces, millions of homes that are impervious to the elements and that regulate temperature and protection. An animal cannot vocalize a single word. Man can rattle off as many languages as he can master with words that can give any nuance of meaning. A man can paint a picture that is so true to an actual scene that he rivals the Creator in its duplication. Creating anything reflects the Creator and Gods glory. Painting, for example, is God-glorifying in itself alone. One does not have to paint just religious pictures like they did in the Middle Ages. The act of painting anything glorifies God because it reflects the Creators own nature. Man can also relate to God spiritually because the law of God is written on his heart (Romans 2:14,15). And he has a soul or spirit, which is the only creature endowed with such by God (Gen. 2:7). There is no part of man in which Gods image does not shine forth through him.

God made man and woman in His own image - male and female. In 1:26, God says Let us make man in our image, in our likeness The us/our combination - plural - implies more than one personality in the God-head. Hence, even in the opening chapter of the Bible, there is allusion to the Trinitarian God. Obviously, God is neither man nor woman. He is Spirit (John 4:24). So what does this mean? In the God-head, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit possess deity equally. But within the Trinity there is also willful submission in their relationship to one another. The Father is the head, but the Son submits to the will of the Father (I Corinthians 11:3). This headship/submission role in Gods nature described within the Trinity is what God created in the man and womans relationship to one another. This is what is meant when Genesis says, God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. The man was made head of the woman, and the woman was made submissive to the man (Read Eph. 5:22-24). God made creatures like Himself, or in our likeness. His highest creatures are like Him in that there is equality and yet headship/submission in their relationship with one another. A husband is the head, and the wife is in the submissive role because that is what God Himself is within Himself. It is not demeaning. It reflects the glory and image of the Creator.

1:28 The Creation Mandate or Cultural Mandate. This is the first job description for man. What did God want man to do?

1. Be fruitful. Adam was to populate the earth, and this command has never been abrogated. He was to develop the social world and civilization with families.

2. Subdue the earth. Absolutely everything in this world you see is from the earth. Man was to discover all the elements and secrets of the earth through the chemistry of combining the elements of earth and air to harness the amazing resources God placed in the earth for his benefit. He would learn to farm, build bridges, design computers, and make musical instruments. By being a steward of the earth, he could accomplish all the things we have seen in history and now.

3. Have dominion over everything.The first action of dominion was in naming the animals God made - 2:19, 20. Some animals can poison and others can rip a man to pieces. But man can create antidotes and guns that master any beast or its effects. Man is the King of Gods creation. Read Psalm 8:4-8.

1:28 God blessed them. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever for man to rebel against God with all the blessings that he enjoyed below. Here are a few God gave him.

Stewardship over the garden, 1:28, 2:19

Authority over Gods creation, 1:28, 2:19

Sustenance for his daily provision, 1:29

A beautiful environment in which to live, 2:9

Labor that was fruitful, 2:15

An intimate partner who was like him to help him, 2:20-23

A righteous home in which to live with the prospect of a holy family life

Family fruitfulness, 1:28

The possibility of Eternal Life, 2:9

Peace and fellowship with his creator

Chapter 2 - The creation of man in detail and the Covenant of Creation

In this chapter you will see three creation ordinances. By creation ordinances, we are speaking of inviolable laws which cannot be broken. Like the law of gravity, you do not break those laws, although by ignoring them they may break you.

The Sabbath - commands about the Sabbath were stated before creation and after sin. It seems it is an imperative for man.

Labor - Man was to subdue the earth. This was one of the purposes for his existence.

Marriage - the purpose of the womans creation before sin was to be a helper to the man. Paul discusses this in I Corinthians 11:7-12. Before sin, this was designed to be a blessing of companionship to Adam and to complete him as a person since it is not good for the man to be alone (separated from himself), 2:18. In marriage, these two would cling to one another and become one. This is a mystery, says Paul (Ephesians 5:32). People who have been married for a time will begin to comprehend it, however. Marriage is an ordinance protected by the command of no divorce, or trying to separate what has become one. Those who try to separate what God has mysteriously joined together by covenant agreement in marriage will reap the curses that divorce initiates.

2: 9, 16, 17 The Creation Covenant with Adam and all mankind

This is the first mention of a covenant in the Bible, but it is a concept that dominates the Scripture and explains everything in it. If you miss this, you will miss the meaning of the Bible and what everything in it is about. It is absolutely crucial to understand what a covenant is. Everything from this point on in Genesis is about the covenants.

So what is a covenant? A covenant is a mutual agreement between two or more persons. It is a bond that binds two parties together with obligations and blessings if the covenant is kept and penalties if the covenant is broken. Mans covenants with each other are ALL two sided. Thus the Bible refers to marriage as a covenant (Jeremiah 31:31,32). A man and a woman make marital agreements with one another.

But Gods covenants with man are not two-sided. No creature can have an agreement with the Almighty, and the Almighty does not make mutual agreements with a creature. Gods covenants with man are ONE-SIDED. God sovereignly makes covenants with man and disregards bartering and contracting. God imposes His will on man with promises of blessings for obediences or curses if man breaks the covenant. But God also makes promises that He will keep what He has covenanted with man, even if the man is not faithful to that covenant. You might say that Gods covenants are promises in which God binds Himself with life and death, His own life and death if such a thing could be. But since God is always truthful and cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and will never be unfaithful to His covenant promises, Gods covenants are promises that cannot be broken and, thus, He will never die. You might say Gods covenants are self-binding, one-sided, life and death promises in His own blood that God makes with man. No agreement is needed by man to fulfill Gods covenants.

Theologians often talk about three major covenants that give structure to understanding what the Bible is about. They are:

The Eternal Covenant - the covenant the Trinitarian members of the God-head made together in eternity past before creation. This will be introduced in the Genesis 3 notes.

The Covenant of Creation - the covenant God made with Adam after creation and before sin.

The Covenant of Redemption - the covenant the God made with man after sin to save him from eternal death. It begins in Genesis 3. It develops and unfolds gradually and becomes more pin-pointed as history progresses. It is affirmed over and over through Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, and culminates and is fulfilled in Christ.

Understand the three covenants above, and you will understand the structure and the grand story of the Bible. It is called The History of Redemption. This is the primary way to comprehend your Bible and what is going on there. It is not by making moralisms and applications from the Bible that can help you live a better life. It is not about telling these old, ancient Bible stories of the amazing events and the people of faith or disobedience in the Bible. The Bible is often presented as a series of unconnected tales that stand around like telephone poles with no lines connecting them, sort of like Aesops Fable. Making sense of the Bible isnt even just about the New Testament with almost no reference to the Old Testament. It is about literal events in the Old and New Testaments that took place in history and were revelations about the redemption that was coming through Christ. Every person, every event you read about in the Bible is related to that in some way. The Bible with both Testaments is sort of like a novel. It is telling a unified story of Jesus Christ and how God brought salvation from sin to His people and His world after it fell under the Curse. To be more specific, it is ALL about one person, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. He is on every page, everywhere. The story is presented primarily in the structure of the three major covenants above. Another way of thinking about it is to remember that the Bible is Gods revelation of His Son Jesus coming to save man and the creation from the curse of sin. This story is presented in three chapters. Those chapters are the Eternal Covenant, the Covenant of Creation, and the Covenant of Redemption. Most of the story is found in the third chapter, which has seven sub-chapters of its own: the covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and the final fulfillment chapter in the New Testament when the covenant is completed with Christ.

The first covenant in history was the covenant God made with Adam, sometimes called the Covenant of Creation, in Genesis 2:16, 17. There God imposed His will on his creature. Eat any tree in the garden. But if you eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you will surely die. Apparently, if he had eaten from the Tree of Life, (2:9), he would have lived forever in a righteous state with all the blessings of life and peace with God that he had enjoyed in the garden in a perfect creation. So he was offered either life for obedience or death for disobedience. Little did Adam know that as the first man, he represented all mankind as the federal head of every human being. Just as the President represents every citizen of the United States, whatever Adam did, he acted for each individual in the entire human race. This Covenant of Creation is the historical setting that causes all the rest to follow. Although it sounds like the beginning of the story, it isnt. The story begins in eternity past with the Eternal Covenant. But that will make more sense if we begin with how it all started in history first. Adam and Eve knew nothing about the Eternal Covenant. The fullness of that information did not come out till many centuries later. That information will be presented in Genesis 3 to add blazing light to that sordid chapter. The story of Jesus is about to begin. It starts in Chapter 3.

by: Dale Haven Cox

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