The Covenant of Works

So this morning, we are beginning a series on the covenant, on the covenants and covenant theology. The covenants, I believe, is one of the best ways that we actually understand the story of the Bible. The covenant or the covenants that make up this big promise of God actually progresses the story of the Bible. And as we'll see this morning, it starts very early in the story of the Bible. Three years of patience and careful teaching and time had been running out.

Time and time again, he had explained why he had to die. And time and time again, even his closest friends had failed to understand. Now only hours before his arrest, the Son of God grasped his final opportunity. Taking up a cup of wine in his hands, He thanked His Father and spoke to the 12 and said, "This is my blood of the covenant, which I will pour out for many for the forgiveness of sin." Have you ever wondered why Jesus said blood of the covenant?

We read it every time we have Lord's Supper, don't we? We probably have memorized those words. Why the blood of the covenant? Why even that word, the covenant? Wouldn't it have been okay to say this is my blood which has been poured out for the forgiveness of sins?

Most Christians that have sort of understood the gospel understand that Jesus had to shed His blood in order that we might be forgiven. Far fewer, I suggest, would be able to explain what Jesus was meaning when He said the blood of the covenant. In fact, many of us could put our finger over the word covenant there and read over it and we would understand it in just the same sense. And yet, this is the word that Jesus at His last supper, at the crescendo of His explanation for the cross, chooses this word, puts this word in there. It's a final picture given to the men who would become the great preachers of the gospel of His resurrection.

And Jesus, for one, thought the word covenant unlocked the meaning of that death. Thirty or so years earlier, in fact, before Jesus had been born, His uncle sung a hymn of praise to God. As Zechariah looked forward to the birth of his own son, John the Baptist, he praised the Lord who was about to, and this is from Luke 1:72, he praised the Lord who was about to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember His holy covenant, the oaths that He swore to our father Abraham. There's a shift taking place for Zechariah, and here he remembers this covenant.

Zechariah knows something is about to happen, something enormous, something that would shake the world and he refers back to a covenant made with Abraham right back in Genesis at the start of the Bible. In fact, I dare say if you weren't able to read the Bible through in one day, from beginning to end, this idea of a covenant promise, you'd probably see, you would probably understand that it is right there in the centre of the story. You would see that the covenant is a theme that links the very different books of the Bible to make it one united story. Blazing through the Old Testament like a firework exploding into full colour at the coming of Christ. Even from just these two passages, we see the hints of the covenant being a concept that will allow the message of salvation God offers to grow naturally out of the story He is telling.

It is through understanding the covenants that we move through the story of God's salvation for man. It's a kind of passages we look at so far that would move J.I. Packer, the great theologian and preacher, to go as far as saying this: the gospel of God is not properly understood till it is viewed within a covenantal frame. Secondly, he says the word of God is not properly understood till it is viewed within a covenantal frame.

And thirdly, he says the reality, the reality of God is not properly understood till it is viewed within the covenantal frame. This is how important this is. God, Gospel, and Scripture. None can be properly understood until seen in light of the covenant.

What exactly then is a covenant? It's not a word we use very much nowadays, is it? We, I don't think we use it in any sort of conventional, normal scenarios, yet it occurs over 300 times in the Bible. That's a significant amount of times. And not just in the dusty corners that only the very adventurous Christians go to.

You know, the minor prophets, the weird, difficult passages. No. This is found in some of the key stories of the Bible. The Sunday school favourites, in fact, of Noah and the ark, of Moses and the 10 commandments, of King David, the giant slayer. The story is centred on these characters.

The covenant progresses through them. And so, as an overview, this is what the covenant of the Bible, the covenants of the Bible look like. See if I can work this little button there. From the covenant of the works in creation all the way through Jesus and the cross, and then further the covenant of redemption. This is what we'll be working through these next few weeks.

The question remains, what is a covenant? That's how they sort of fit together in the story of the Bible. But what is a covenant? Well, a covenant is an agreement between God and human beings, where God promises blessings if the conditions of the agreement are kept and threatens curses if the conditions are broken. So you could almost argue that it's a modern day contract.

And in fact, covenants were also made in the biblical times between people. You could say it is a modern contract, but as you can see, there are spiritual elements to this agreement. Humans could make these covenants, but they would often invoke spiritual deities in this agreement. They would say that if I don't give you an amount of grain for this amount of money that you're offering me, then may my god smite me. Or if I do this, may your God bless you.

May my God bless me. Today, you can break a contract and you can be sued for damages. In biblical times, if a covenant is broken, you better watch out for that lightning bolt. God's covenant with humanity is an agreement between God and humanity where God promises blessings if the conditions of the covenant are kept and threatens curses if the conditions are broken. Okay.

So this morning, as we already saw, it starts somewhere. Where does it start? Well, that's what we look at today. The initiation of this covenant and it takes us all the way back to creation, Genesis 1 and 2. In the opening account of creation, we see that for the first five days of the creation account, God had formed and was filling the universe.

He had filled it with light. He had filled it with sea. He had filled it with air, with land, with birds, and with fish. God reveals Himself to be a God who enjoys forming and then filling empty spaces. He creates the celestial bodies of the stars and the suns and the moons, filling up a vacuum of outer space with these incredibly large, marvellous things.

But then, Genesis 1 builds up to crescendo. Day six, creation of man and woman. God makes man and woman in His image and God says to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, of the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Genesis 1:28. We see something amazing.

God had been forming and filling a whole universe. Now, in their own small way, God is giving them a godlike mandate. Adam and Eve are to likewise fill the earth. They are to be fruitful. They are to have other God-image bearers themselves, and these little children and grandchildren are to spread to the corners of the earth, to move from beyond the garden, to fill the earth, to multiply.

But not only that, as His little images, men and women are to rule too. God says in Genesis 1:28: you are to have dominion over the earth, over the animals, the fish, and the birds. And so under God, they were to be king and queen of the world. They were to care for this world, to rule over it. This is the agreement that God makes.

Now, I can't stress how important this understanding is actually for our understanding as Christians and how we live today. How we understand who God is even and ourselves. Because this idea, this promise, this agreement that is made in Genesis 1:28, this idea of creation and of man's purpose changes our lives now. Many times, I've heard the teaching of the Garden of Eden that it was perfect. It was perfect.

Beautiful, immaculate garden that Adam and Eve lived in. It was a perfect existence, people say. Well, if by perfect we say that it was without sin and there was no disease and no death and no danger, then I say fair enough. Yes. I can understand that that is perfect.

After all, God announces that everything is very good in Genesis 1:31, but the one thing that creation at this stage wasn't is finished. It wasn't finished. There were still things to create. The world needed to be subdued. Did you see that?

Did you take stock of that? Subdued is not a word that suggests that everything is finished. And just in case you were in any doubt, God makes this very point in Genesis 2:15. He says, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to what? To work and keep it.

To work and to keep. Adam and Eve were meant to change the world, to improve, I might dare to say even. And again, this is not saying that anything was wrong. It's just at this point, at this point, there weren't any horses that had been broken to pull plows. There hadn't been any crops of potatoes and corn growing in neat, manageable fields, they were all over the place.

Trees needed to be chopped down to build houses. Minerals needed to be mined to produce metals. Aeroplanes and ships needed to be built to explore the world to fill the world. Similarly, it wouldn't do Adam any harm to nip down to the land of Havilah, as Genesis says, and where there's gold and precious stones and create something beautiful for Eve. A nice set of earrings or a necklace.

And while Adam might be doing this, maybe Eve could have gone and chopped down some bamboo and created a flute and started playing beautiful music. That was something that was created in her to be able to do. So much to do. So much built into humanity. So many possibilities.

All created in humanity by God to explore and discover. In other words, the world that God handed over to Adam and Eve was not a dusty museum that they had to protect and make sure no one broke and was covered and admired and preserved. It was an art gallery. It was an art gallery full of empty canvases that needed to be touched and bits of clay that needed to be sculpted to create something beautiful by the hundreds and the thousands of artists created in the great artist's image. This is the command.

This is the command that God gives Adam and Eve, and it's referred to by theologians as the cultural mandate. The cultural mandate to fill the earth, to fill the earth, to subdue it, to have dominion over it. It reminds us, therefore, that our work today, our work today, our families, our marriages, our art, our hobbies, our science are good things. These are good things. They aren't some spiritual things that the pastor does something far better than I do.

The pastor and the elders are superior in some way to my work as an accountant or a lawyer or a nurse. These are good things created by God for us to do. And so our work and our art and our science are or at least should be ways of making the earth more pleasant. Ways of loving our neighbour with our various gifts and the roles that God has given us. But wait.

Alongside this incredibly positive command, there's also a negative one, isn't there, tied to this account. Alongside this command, there is a negative command. One thing that mankind must not do. Genesis 2:16-17: And the Lord commanded the man saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die." Everything available but this tree.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is off limits and hence, there's a way for Adam and Eve to ruin this wonderful world that they've been given. There is one way. And if they were to steal the fruit from this tree, they would be betraying God. They would be abandoning their King and their Father, destroying the peace, this perfect peace that had been given to them and killing themselves in the process. This is the second reason why perfect is perhaps not the most useful word to describe the Garden of Eden.

Because at this stage, things weren't complete. There's a possibility that everything could go horribly wrong. And it does. Oh, what a sad day. So how are we to define this agreement?

We could summarise the situation in Eden with three Ps. God's people in paradise with God present. But the setup isn't static. Something is going to change. And here at last, we come to the idea of the covenant.

Remember, a covenant is an agreement between God and human beings where God promises blessings if the conditions are kept and He threatens curses if they are broken. And we see this in Eden. A covenant is made. Firstly, and positively, humans must obey God and live a life of fruitful development of the world, the cultural mandate to fill, to subdue, and to have dominion. And secondly, negatively, they must not take the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The curse, the curse if the conditions are broken is spelled out very crystal clear by God in Genesis 2:17: you shall surely die. So the covenant is between God and Adam, the covenant king. But since Adam and Eve were the first of mankind, this agreement was also with us as descendants. They are our representatives there for Adam and Eve. The conditions of this covenant was perfect obedience.

That is what it hinged upon. That is what it depended upon. Perfect obedience. How that would look positively was that man would obey the cultural mandate. And negatively, man must not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This means Adam could break the covenant actually in two ways. Actually in two ways. He could eat this fruit or he could be lazy. He could not be fruitful. He could not live and fill and subdue.

And the blessing, well, the blessing is eternal life. The blessing is incorruptible life on earth with God as Father and further with the potential with the potential for sin and death to have no power. So imagine Adam and Eve at the beginning, you know, if we go right back, at the beginning there of human life and imagine them as soft clay figures, little clay moldable figurines. There's an option for them to go one way or the other, and they will be set in that forever. They can choose God, be obedient to Him, and have the possibility of eternal life without sin or they may choose and believe what Satan ultimately deceived them with, to be like God, knowing good and evil.

They have the option to one day be set in their final form and the question is, would they harden with hands held aloft in worship to God? Or would they become stony figures with hands and fists raised to God in rebellion? And their answer, whether they knew it or not, would be that their consequence is not just for them, but for all their descendants. Adam and Eve had the choice to live for God and therefore could have been blessed with life forever, the covenant of works. Do good and you shall live.

That is what is on offer for Adam if he had remained faithful. And if he had done that for, I don't know how long, the trumpet would have sounded. And he would have been given the tree of life to eat from and that he may live forever. He would be rewarded with the world and descendants without sin, without suffering, a world without tears or temptation, a glorified world that we don't meet again until Revelation 21 at the end of the Bible. Now wrapping up for us, an amazing thing has happened, however.

That is how the covenant starts. That is how the story of the Bible starts. According to 1 Corinthians 15, the Bible tells us that many, many generations after Adam and Eve, Jesus, the man who was God in flesh, Jesus, made humanity alive in a way that Adam never did. Paul writes, and we already read some part of that in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul writes this: for as by a man came death.

A man, a single man, Adam, by another man has come also the resurrection of the dead. It had come this way. If there was one important man, a man that made an ill-fated decision that time for all humanity, there would be another time and another important man who would turn the tables. 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, Paul says, for as in Adam, all have died, so in Christ shall all be made alive. But this is the new Adam, this Jesus, and He is far better than our weak and our sad forefather.

Paul explains, the first man Adam became a living being. This first man Adam became a living being, but this last Adam has become a life-giving spirit. Jesus is the better Adam because Jesus actually upheld this first covenant. This covenant of works, perfect obedience was required, and this Jesus, our glorious Saviour, our great representative, He maintained it. He lived it.

Though He was a man, the Bible says He did not sin. He did not enter into this same disobedience that all of us have entered into. In many ways, Jesus was the same as Adam. They were both representatives. They were both utterly human and they were both tempted to sin even, the Bible says.

Both had the same options, to obey or to disobey. And both had our futures in their hands. But our friends, the news is incredible. The news is incredible. The difference with Jesus is that there will be no possibility for things to go wrong again with this new Adam.

Jesus has won for us the reward of eternal unspoiled ability. Jesus has won for us as we read this morning of a victory over sin and death that is perfect, sinless, pure white holiness, the life that we have always wanted. We'll never face eternal death. Because of Jesus, this last Adam, we will join God in glorious resurrection life in a glorious world. And the best is, like the best fairy tales, the end of the story is far better than the beginning.

The end of the story is far more glorious than even the Garden of Eden. And so we are encouraged this morning to live humbly and gratefully in this truth. Oh, Christian, that we may now choose to fulfil this humanity, this mandate that was given to us to fill the earth with good work, with great gifts, with music, with creation, with beautiful woodwork, John, with science and knowledge and empathy and love, with caring for the weak and the sick, Erica, our nurses, that we may work with skill and creativity and ingenuity. Your work and your hobbies, ministry, it all counts. It's all been redeemed by this God, the Saviour of ours, and it is all good.

And so if we work this week for the glory of God and with awe and gratitude in our hearts, then what we achieve at the end of the day, at the end of our working week, it cannot help but buzz with power, this work that we do. It cannot help but ooze with passion, explode with purpose. There's nothing we do this week, therefore, that is mundane. Nothing that is too small time. When God's glory is being reflected in our work, we are busy with worship.

And we are living out not then a career. We are living out a purpose. We are finding what we were designed to do. God, guys, that is great news. Let me pray for us.

Father God, we thank You that we can understand this incredible purpose, this incredible power that You have built into our lives. This is not something that we must now somehow discover or learn or work towards, but God You have created this in us. Skill and passion and ingenuity. And Father, this work is reflective of this mission that You had given us and this choice at one time to obey or to disobey. And Father, we know not only because we've read it, but we know it in ourselves, Father, that we chose wrongly and that we have been marked and we have been marred by disobedience.

Oh God, we know it. And so we wrestle in this world, in this place full of brokenness, full of longing, full of emptiness. Lord, we see, oh Lord, like we've seen in this week, people with so much creativity, musicians, composers dying in addiction, dying in emptiness. And Father, we feel the pain.

And yet we have this golden imprint on our lives, image-bearer of God. And Father, we longed and we looked for that final Adam, the one who could save us, the one who could live this perfect life, this obedient life. We all became living beings through the first Adam, but Father, we have now received eternal life through the second. Thank You, Lord, for this great and powerful message. Father, we pray that our lives can be in tune with it, can be empowered by it, that we can view our existence, that we can view our work, our families, what we invest our time into with great and holy awe.

We are busy with worship. And so Father, redeem and renew those aspects in us that's not quite there yet. Help us to live out this commission, this mandate, and Father help us to reflect and shine Your glory into all the aspects of this world. In Jesus' name, amen.