Resources:
- Our Covenant Theology teaching series
- Book study on Sam Renihan's book
- Our episode: Is Your Theological System Any Good?
- Ask Theocast: GENESIS: About Creation? A Science Book? NEITHER?!?!
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https://youtu.be/m4aCy9aF7hE
Semper Reformanda Transcripts
Justin Perdue: Welcome to Semper Reformanda. We want to talk specifically about covenant theology in Genesis and how, if you do not have the equipment of a covenantal view of Scripture, you're going to miss a ton in the book of Genesis. By missing a ton, we mean missing really important stuff for your theology wholesale, for your rest, your peace, and your assurance. You're just gonna miss things that God has been doing from before the world began. We're going to riff on that now.
Jon, I think if we're going to be responsible and we're going to start a conversation about covenant theology with respect to anything, but certainly the book of Genesis, we actually need to rewind to before Genesis 1:1. Genesis 1:1 is kind of the scene one of the movie. But we've all seen good movies where partway into the story, we get a flashback before the movie began and it just changes everything because now you understand. That's what the covenant of redemption is. The covenant of redemption, known as the pactum salutis, is the covenant made amongst the Godhead before the world got started. So God, amongst Himself, in particular, the Father and the Son, covenant together to save a people out of the massive fallen humanity, and those people would be saved by the work of the Son in their place, and then would be applied to them by the covenant of grace. This is a big deal. We get this in Ephesians 1, maybe most pointedly. If Genesis 1:1 is scene 1, Ephesians 1 is like the flashback to before the movie gets started and it changes everything. So we realize that when God says, "In the beginning," and all these things, and, "Let there be...", God already has a plan—that is a plan to redeem. That's huge because we realize that God has always existed. When everything else is getting started, God has already been, and God has always been good, and God has always been a Redeemer because that's who He is. And He is glorified and known through His grace, His mercy, and His gift-giving nature.
Jon Moffitt: A couple of thoughts, and because this is Semper Reformanda, I will tell you right now if I hadn't found the message of rest, I might be one of those stories where I grew up in a pastor's home and I left Christianity. God is sovereign and He will not let go of His own, but I look at how much meaning for life I have today because it has nothing to do with my performance and everything to do with the message of Christ. I'll never run out of a meaning for life.
Justin Perdue: This is, I trust, useful to say. It's the same for me. I always knew that Jesus was legit, but I struggled with so many things within Christianity. If I had not found this, I don't know what would have happened to me either. I think I would have still been trusting Christ cause there's always been something about him I couldn't walk away from in spite of all my doubts and fears and lack of assurance. But I can imagine how miserable life would be. It's already hard. It beats you to death and there are plenty of things that I wrestle with and doubt and struggle with right now. My only hope and stay in the midst of all that is this: it's that Christ is the same always, and that he is sufficient to save even me.
Jon Moffitt: I mentioned that because, when I think about reading the word of God from the New Testament lens, through the Old Testament, it helps, for instance, that the priority of God's Word is the fulfillment of the pactum salutis. God is going to fulfill that. So the purpose of the Old Testament is the preparation, explanation, and I would say firm foundation of the promise. God didn't just say He was going to do it and really didn't give us any way to see His work. He is gracious to weak sheep. There's a video of the sheep that was in the crevice and a guy pulls him out, he runs, and literally just jumps back in. It's so funny. That looks just like pastoral ministry—it is. This is what we do. But when I think about understanding that God had a covenant, a promise, and that the Old Testament is the shadows of the run-up to it, it changes how one reads the Bible. I read the Old Testament from a dispensational background, which was handed to me from not only my upbringing, college, and seminary, of which the Old Testament really becomes Israel-centric. It's about the development and the promises made to Israel, and really the glory of Israel, not surpassing God—not to misrepresent my dispensational brothers—but there's so much attention given to the promises. But even true dispensationalists, those who really know their theology, even progressive dispensationalists, believe in a restoration of Israel and the sacrificial system, not the atoning system, but the sacrificial system. That's, that's how
Justin Perdue: And the temple being rebuilt and all this stuff.
Jon Moffitt: The shadow becomes the substance.
Justin Perdue: Homie, last time I checked Jesus is done fulfilling that thing.
Jon Moffitt: Yes. They believe in Jesus. Jesus is good, sola fide, all of that. But it's like a confusion: is it all Israel? When we get to the new heavens and the new earth, is Israel going to be like number one Christians, and then all of us Gentiles are number two Christians. I can see why some dispensationalists thought that there were two ways of salvation: Israel under the law and those under grace. When you understand a covenantal perspective, which Justin and I are trying to help you understand, we don't just say this. We really want you, as a listener, to embrace the absolute rest and glory when it comes to looking at your Bible from a covenantal, redemptive-historical understanding. Go take the introduction. We also did a book study with Sam Reniham's book. Both of those are available on our website and on our YouTube channel. You get the notes and all that kind of stuff. Please do that. It's worth your time. It will help make your Bible make so much more sense to where my argument is: you're going to stop devotion-ing it, you're going to start studying it, to see the glory of God in ways in which you just didn't know existed because you moralized it your entire life.
Justin Perdue: Right. And you're going to find yourself reading the beginning in light of the end, reading every part of it in light of the whole.
Jon Moffitt: With the light on.
Justin Perdue: Correct. Instead of there just being this dark room with furniture in it, and you're kind of stumbling around in there, you're gonna flip the light switch on and you're gonna start seeing stuff—and it's going to really connect things for you. You're going to start seeing the types and shadows and pointers to Jesus all over the place in the Old Testament. And it's going to be, I think, a super encouraging experience for you. You're going to be given a compass like to where you could be dropped into any section of the Old Testament and you're going to be able to orient yourself and you're going to understand where we are in the flow of redemptive history that is covenantal, what God is doing, where Christ is, and how do we understand this in relation to him? All of that is really good for us.
So we've already begun our conversation about the covenant of redemption and how that's the precursor to Genesis wholesale and the precursor to everything that's going to happen. But then another thing that's super essential for our understanding of Genesis, and really the rest of Scripture, is the covenant of works that God makes with Adam. We touched on this some in the regular episode, but we can talk maybe a little bit more in depth now where God makes man in His own image and He makes a covenant with Adam. This language is entirely legitimate because the things that you need to comprise a covenant are there. God does bless them and tells them to fill the earth, subdue it, reign over it, and all those things. And then there is the presence of the tree of life in the garden when God puts the man there, and that tree of life is going to show up again at the end of the story as representative of redemption, salvation, and eternal blessedness. So there's the tree of life present, and then there are things that Adam has to be doing. God puts him in the garden to work it, keep it, watch over it, and all these things. And God then gives him a prohibition: you can't do this one thing. And then God gives a sanction: if you do, you'll die. We have all the parts and pieces that we need to have to make a covenant there.
Then when we connect especially what Paul writes about Adam in Jesus, the implication there is that if Adam had succeeded, then we'd be good. But because he fell, we're ruined, and we need someone to come and succeed where Adam failed. And that's what Christ came to do. So the covenant of works understanding is historically Reformed and it's entirely biblically legitimate. Even there's language in Hosea about how Israel, like Adam, broke the covenant and all these kinds of things. It's very clear that Adam was in a covenant agreement with God and Adam failed in it, and we fell in him, his failure is imputed to us, and then now we're in need of a redeemer who can come and save and restore us and recreate us—and that's what Christ came to do.
Without a framework of the covenant of works—I know we've said this before—there's a lot of fall out of it. One of the things is when you realize that our one shot to earn righteousness before God, when we realize that that's done, it's over, and we can no longer make our way back to the tree of life—notice that language at the end of Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve are thrown out of the Garden and there's cherubim there to guard them from coming back in and make their way to the tree of life. They can't make their own way back. We got to have somebody else to do it for us at the end of the day.
Jon Moffitt: I was going to say that the other thing that covenant of works introduces to you is that sin is not an act because the act was already committed by Adam. It's part of our nature now. So it's sin as nature. What the law is designed to do is prove to you sin as nature, because you naturally do what's contrary to the law so that you can look at it and say, "Oh, I can't do enough acts because the act by Adam has been given to me, and now I need the acts of Jesus given to me so that I can be right in the eyes of God." Covenant theology is really helpful here specifically when it comes to the covenant of works.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other people in history that believe in imputation. Imputation means to impute or to impart on the behalf of another.
Justin Perdue: To reckon or consider somebody.
Jon Moffitt: We receive that which we did not earn or that which we do not deserve. That's what impute means. Of course, there are other people outside of the Reformed theology, but we would argue that historically speaking, and I think most accurate to the text, is the framework of a covenantal framework.
Now, I will agree absolutely with everyone who criticizes us and says, "Well, the system you use called covenant theology is not a biblical word used of itself." We would say, yes. Is there an actual thing that says covenant of grace? No. We call that a word-concept fallacy. You have to be very careful. There's a lot of things in Scripture that we use as systems that help us understand the whole. And we're arguing that this place of rest that everyone loves comes from a helpful guide, and it is that—a guide, leading us to the substance, which is Scripture. So the guide of the confessions, the guide of covenant theology lead us clearly through the clutter of our own sin, history, and bad exegesis. It leads us through the clutter to the clarity of the point of the Bible, which is Christ. I feel like as you study the word of God, the guide actually makes sense. You're not feeling misled. When I was an Arminian dispensationalist, there were texts we literally ignored because we did not have an explanation for them.
Justin Perdue: Right. Brief synopsis here. Covenant of works, and then in the covenant of grace: through the one man's disobedience, everybody became sinners—covenant of works; through the one man's obedience, many will be made righteous—covenant of grace. In Adam, all died—covenant of works; in Christ, all will be made alive—covenant of grace. Right. And so what we would argue is that this understanding of the first and second Adam is inherently covenantal in how we see it. At the most high level, the highest level, there are two covenant heads in the Bible, ultimately, that all human beings are under. You're either in Adam or you're in Christ. And so a covenantal framework helps us see those things and helps us understand not only what happened to us when Adam fell, but like you even alluded to a minute ago, what it is that Christ has accomplished for us and how he in fulfilling a covenant of works in our place really has accomplished everything we need. Then it's given to us through the covenant of grace received by faith.
So the question then is asked rightly: what then is there left for us to do? Answer: nothing. And this covenantal framework helps us understand that. By saying nothing, I mean, there's nothing left for us to do in terms of our standing before God and our peace before Him. That covenantal framework is essential for our assurance and our peace.
We'll just go and talk a little bit about the covenant of grace, Jon, and talk about our particular understanding a little bit. In Genesis 3:15, immediately after Adam and Eve have fallen into sin, God makes the promise that there will come one who is the seed of the woman who is going to crush the head of the serpent. As we've said, it's the first promise of the gospel, it's the promise of Christ, and it is the promise of the covenant of grace not based on anything that Adam and Eve do.
Jon Moffitt: And it is the promise that saves, because that's the promise that saved not only Adam and Eve, but Abraham.
Justin Perdue: Amen. Exactly. What we're going to see from that point forward is an unfolding, not only of that plan to redeem and save, but more specifically, we're going to see the covenant of grace itself revealed more and more by farther steps as things unfold through the rest of the Old Testament. And then we're going to see that covenant of grace, that promise, established and accomplished when Christ shows up on the scene and then starts to say things like, "This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood." That hearkens back to so many things in the Old Testament, from the Passover to even the new covenant language of Jeremiah and Ezekiel where Jesus has now come to do this new thing, where God's people are now going to be saved by grace, through faith, in him.
Jon Moffitt: That's good. I would say the first three chapters of Genesis, in my opinion, the most important part of that is the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. I actually believe once you understand Ephesians and you read that as the prologue to Genesis, you can even see all three. You see God creating humanity...
Justin Perdue: The covenant of redemption beforehand.
Jon Moffitt: That's right. You can't have redemption without creation, so he creates it and then there's the fall and then there's grace. So you have all three tri-covenantalism right there in the opening or the beginning—and that really is the point of the book. Creation is important, and the reality of creation is important, and that it is by Christ that is important, but it's not the point of why it was written. It wasn't written to prove to everybody that God is a legitimate creator and that you should believe in that God, the point of it is that God is a legitimate Creator who legitimately saves sinners. That's the point of it. If we're just proving that God's a legitimate Creator, we're still damned. We're still in trouble. We need Him to be the Redeemer, not just the Creator of our souls.
Justin Perdue: Right. Even in creation—this is just an observation not directly related to covenant theology, but it's very much related to God's nature and something you just said, and maybe this could be a closing thought here—the question of why God made man is one that Christians have sought to answer throughout the entire history of the church. I would put myself in the camp along with many, including Irenaeus, who understood that God made man so that he would have someone on whom to bestow his blessing. He didn't make us because he needed us. He didn't make us just to serve Him like other people thought, like the gods made humans because they need food and they need humans to be their slaves. God didn't make us for those purposes. He made us so that He might have creatures on whom to bestow His blessings, because God has always been good, He has always been benevolent, He has always been a Redeemer, He made us and we're made in His image, and we reign in his stead and all those things—and we blow it. But then God acts to save because it's who He is. I think that's a very sweet thought and a good one about our God and His nature and His posture toward us. And this has always been His plan, and He would accomplish it through Jesus. He has never deviated from it. Though we are faithless, He remains faithful.
This is a good time. I hope this was helpful for people. And I agree with Jon that if you have questions about covenant theology and you really want to dig into this more, please do go and listen to our teaching series on it. It's about three hours of content, as I remember. Five different episodes where we go through an overview episode, a covenant of redemption episode, a covenant of works episode, and then two episodes on the covenant of grace—one covenant of grace in the Old Testament and one covenant of grace in the New Testament.
If that sounds interesting to you, go check it out. We hope it's helpful.
Jon Moffitt: I'd also recommend this book study we did on Sam Renihan's book. We'll put those in the notes.
Justin Perdue: We'll put it in the notes. Go look at it.
Thanks for your time. Thanks for your support. Thanks for your encouragement that you send us. Everything that you send us, we read. We're very grateful for you. We're excited for the future and we hope you are, too. We'll talk again here at Semper Reformanda.
