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Adam, Noah, and the Kingdom: The Fulfillment of the Commission to Adam in the Old Testament From the time of the fall, the redemptive work of God in history has always been covenantal. Furthermore, each covenant that God granted to man involved the restoration to man of his original commission and grace from God so that man could accomplish that mission in history. But until the coming of the Messiah, redemption is not accomplished and every "new Adam" in the era of the old covenant imitates the first Adam, sinning against God and breaking the covenant. The center of Old Testament eschatology is the hope of the Messiah, the King and Savior who will first save man from Satan and sin, but also, as an essential aspect of that salvation, restore man to Edenic blessing and lead man to fulfill the Edenic commission. The promise of salvation in Genesis 3:15 is part of God's curse upon the serpent and Satan. It is not too much to say that it implies the overturning of Satan's work in tempting man to rebel against God. In other words, implied in the curse upon the serpent is the promise that Satan's attempt to get man to join him in rebellion against God will ultimately fail. It is an implicit promise that the seed of the woman will fulfill the original covenant task that God gave to Adam, although now, after the fall, it must be fulfilled through spiritual warfare. When we read the text of Genesis, it is important that we see the profound and comprehensive implications of the original promise of salvation. If we read the Bible "normally," we should be reading in expectation and hope so that the various expressions used in later Scriptures that point back to this fundamental promise stand out. The Noahic Covenant As we read the chapters that immediately follow this promise, we might feel that our hope has been betrayed, for by the time of Noah, it appears that Satan has actually won the historical warfare God announced in Genesis 3:15. Enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent did not result in the defeat of the serpent, but in the defeat of the seed of the woman, for there was only one family on earth that feared God. The judgment of the flood was the result of man's gross apostasy. The text of Genesis lays no little stress on the fact that the flood brought the world back to the place it was in Genesis 1:2. The darkness of the storm, the water covering the earth, and the destruction of the order that had been established by creation are a de-creation judgment necessary to the re-creation of the world. When the flood is over, there is a new world and a new humanity. God, therefore, gives to Noah the same covenant that He gave to Adam.
In addition, God promises Noah that He will never again destroy the earth by a flood. This does not mean, as has sometimes been suggested, that He may destroy the world by some other means - an interpretation which transforms God's gracious promise into a veiled threat! It is, rather, a guarantee that Noah and his descendents would be able to fulfill the commission that God gave them through the normal processes of God's covenantal providence. It is a promise that there will never again be the kind of historical gap that occurred at the flood. If there could be any doubt about this, we need only to compare the covenant promise in chapter 9:8-17 with God's oath to Himself in 8:21-22. Clearly, the covenant promise to Noah merely repeats the previous oath. And the LORD smelled a soothing aroma. The covenant oath is unambiguous: no catastrophic interruption until the very end of earth history. It is also apparent that the covenant calling that God originally gave to Adam and Eve is repeated. This means that the human race has a covenant work in history and that God has promised to preserve the world until Noah and his true descendents can fulfill that calling. There will be no discontinuity of Noahic proportions, no apocalyptic interruptions, until the Adamic/Noahic commission has been fulfilled. If this is not what the promise means, we must despair of the possibility of "literal interpretation"! If this promise, foundational to the rest of the Biblical covenants, is to be taken seriously, it must function as a covenantal standard by which later promises are to be understood. In other words, the Noahic covenant is a redemptive covenant that cannot be understood apart from the original covenant in the Garden. It is the redemptive covenant, in fact, that grounds all the rest of redemptive history. For the theological significance of the flood includes the fact that God's wrath against man's sin was so great that God destroyed the earth and virtually re-created everything from scratch. Given the fact of man's sin, we might expect that similar judgments in history would be necessary, as indeed both the premillennialist and amillennialist believe.[3] But the covenant oath that God gave to Noah affirms precisely the opposite - God will not be doing this again. From now on, morning and evening, summer and winter will continue until the end of history. God will do His redemptive work without repeatedly erasing the board and starting over. Every other renewal of the covenant grace of God is grounded in this Noahic promise. One of the basic errors of both premillennial and amillennial eschatology is the failure to do justice to the Noahic covenant, the foundation for redemptive history.
[2] It is interesting to note that God says He will not again smite the "adamah" (Hebrew for "ground") because of "adam" (man). The covenantal relationship between man and the earth is explicit in the Hebrew. The word is "ground" rather than "earth" in order to emphasize more clearly man's covenantal headship. [3] The premillennialist insists that only the apocalyptic judgment of Christ's second coming can possibly bring in the kingdom. The amillennial position is essentially similar in that it claims that only after the end of history can the kingdom promise be fulfilled. In other words, only the judgment of the Second coming can usher in the kingdom.
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