Safeguarding the Promise of Grace

Even after the earth was deluged with a flood, and even after the world united in rebellion at Babel, God kept His promise to save His people. Today, Sinclair Ferguson considers God’s covenant promises to Noah and Abraham.

Yesterday on Things Unseen, we were reflecting on the original promise of what we often call the covenant of grace. It’s a promise that holds the whole Bible together, almost from the beginning, right to the end. And in turn, it unfolds in a series of further covenants that sustain it and clarify it and develop it. That’s actually the case with the covenant that God made with Noah. God introduces it with these words in Genesis 6:18: “I will establish my covenant with you.”

The word “establish” there might actually carry the sense of “confirm”—“I will make sure My covenant remains standing.” In other words, the function of the covenant that God makes with Noah is to make sure that the covenant of grace that He’d already announced wouldn’t collapse, even although the world was virtually going to collapse in the flood. It’s very striking, actually, that when Noah emerges from the ark, the words that God speaks to him echo what God had said in the garden of Eden, and then to Adam. The promise that God gives that He’ll never repeat the flood safeguards the promise He had earlier given that the serpent would be defeated.

But it doesn’t take many more chapters before we discover that the seed of the serpent kept fighting. Remember the story of the Tower of Babel, when there was a concerted effort to achieve a kind of world unity that would establish its own authority over against the authority of God—the seed of the serpent against the seed of the woman. And you’ll remember the way God dealt with that opposition by confusing their languages and dispersing them over the face of the earth. The flood isn’t going to be repeated—God promised that—but once again, it looks as though the seed of the serpent has almost annihilated any faithful seed of the woman.

But no. The second half of Genesis 11 traces the seed of Shem through many years until we come to a man called Terah. And the genealogy in Genesis 11:10–26 makes you feel as though God was watching a moving dot on the screen of history moving along from one generation to the next, and all the while knowing where He was going, heading to Ur of the Chaldees and to Terah’s son, whose name was Abram. And Abram was a seed of the woman to whom God would give another new, covenant promise.

So, God keeps developing the original covenant of grace through a series of new covenants, first with Noah, now with Abram. Terah had two other sons but it was in Abram that God had set His eye. He was the son who would carry the promise, and part of His covenant purpose was that in Abram—that is, in his seed—“all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).

If you’ve been following these podcasts, you’ll know that we mustn’t ever minimize the significance of that word, “bless.” It’s a covenant word. When God’s covenant is made, it leads to either blessing or cursing, salvation or condemnation. The presence of both or either of these words is an indication that God’s covenant is in action and that He’s being faithful to His commitment.

Now, there were new elements in the nature of God’s covenant relationship with Abraham, of course. He’s promised that his descendants will inherit a land and He’s given the sign of circumcision. And these are important, but they’re not the essence of the covenant. They’re more like appendices to it, confirmations of it.

You remember how Paul saw that clearly. Remember how he says in Romans 4 that Abraham’s circumcision, the sign of this covenant, wasn’t a sign of a piece of land, but of the righteousness of faith: “He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised” (Rom. 4:11). In fact, these words also make clear that his circumcision wasn’t so much a sign of his faith as such, but of the righteousness that God provides, the new relationship with God into which he had been brought through faith.

So, the story of God’s faithfulness to His covenant promise is amazing, really, and thrilling. Sometimes it must have looked as though He had completely lost sight of it, or totally forgotten it, but He knew exactly what He was doing. He’s a covenant-keeping God, as well as a covenant-making God. So let that encourage us today. Let’s remember this: God will never forget His covenant promise to us.