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Adam, Noah, and the Kingdom: Amillennial and Premillennial Interpretation of the Adamic Covenant Neither amillennialists nor premillennialists suggest that the Adamic mandate is simply forgotten. We may even say that in both systems the mandate is fulfilled. However, in neither system is the Adamic mission fulfilled in normal history. This seems to contradict the meaning of the original mandate and the renewal of that mandate to Noah and his descendants. If the mandate is to be fulfilled after the second coming of Christ by glorified men in heaven, as the amillennialists aver, or by a glorified Church in cooperation with the unglorified saints of the millennium, as the premillennialists claim, then the whole point of the promise to Noah seems to be undermined. If the mandate is not going to be fulfilled within the boundaries of normal history, why is the republication of the Adamic mandate to Noah accompanied by a promise that God would preserve the normal covenantal flow of history until the end? Amillennialists especially have little to offer in the way of justifying their interpretation of the Adamic mandate. Hoekema begins his interpretation of eschatology with the Genesis 3:15 promise, as if that promise did not look back to the original mandate. On his view history can end at any time. There is no special historical mission for mankind that must be fulfilled before Christ returns. The premillennialist view allows for a sort of historical fulfillment of the Adamic mandate, but not until the future kingdom after Christ has returned to destroy Satan and His enemies. Among other problems, it is odd to mix people in resurrected bodies with those in Adamic bodies working together to fulfill the commission that God gave to Adam and his descendents. There more important incongruity has already been pointed out, the catastrophic manner of the introduction of the kingdom. Christ's second coming in judgment is precisely the sort of historical discontinuity about which God spoke to Noah, when He swore that no such interruption of normal covenantal history was to occur until the Adamic/Noahic mission had been accomplished by Noah and his descendents. But the premillennialist, at least of the dispensational school, also appeals to the covenants. To him they are proof that God will not abandon Israel until the covenant promises are fulfilled. God said that He would break His covenant with Noah before He would allow the nation of Israel to depart from before Him (Jer. 31:35-37). The house of David and the Levitical priesthood are similarly involved with the promises to Israel (Jer. 33:19-26). The irony here is that in order for the dispensationalists vision of a future for Israel to be fulfilled, the Noahic covenant must be broken, for the dispensationalist views the second coming of Christ as including catastrophic judgments in the heavens as well as in the earth (Rev. 6:12-17, etc.). If the covenant promise through Jeremiah is that Israel will not disappear until the covenant with Noah be broken, then on the dispensationalists' literalist interpretation of the book of Revelation, the covenant with Noah is broken during the tribulation. Of course, apart from the problem that a literal interpretation of the signs in the heavens would undermine the Noahic covenant and thus, too, the promise to David and Israel, the larger difficulty for the premillennial interpretation is that the Second Coming of Christ is a greater intervention than the flood. It is certainly the kind of intervention that God promised would not occur. To build the new covenant fulfillment on what is nothing less than an abrogation of its foundation in the Noahic covenant seems obviously the wrong approach. In the postmillennial view, the language of the book of Revelation is figurative. There is no abrogation of the Noahic covenant, which is kept until the second coming of Christ at the end of history when the historical promise has been fulfilled. The question that remains is how the New Testament interprets the first coming of Christ, His fulfillment of the covenants, and the second coming. Does the New Testament endorse the amillennial view that the Adamic mandate is postponed to post-historical eras? Does the New Testament support the premillennial view that only the coming of Christ can deal with Satan adequately so that the Adamic mandate can be fulfilled in the semi-post-historical kingdom era? Or, does the New Testament teach that God will work through the normal processes of covenantal history - including, of course, the miraculous but mysteriously unobtrusive work of the Holy Spirit - to bring about the salvation of the world through the preaching of the Gospel? If the postmillennial view is true what happened to the promise of God to Israel?
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