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“If you’re able, please stand...” Reading Genesis 3:14–19. “...Thanks be to God.”
Babylon Bee, “New Bible Interpretation Goggles Now Available” (July 24, 2017).
Series: “Right from the Start.” Things went horribly wrong. But “right from the start” God made a way of salvation and invites us to receive it!
This morning we’re looking at “the covenant of grace.” God’s promise to save all who trust in him.
Sermon: (1) The Covenant of Grace and the Promise of Christmas, (2) The covenant of grace from the Garden to Gabriel, (3) The covenant of grace and the Advent of Christ.”
We need to remember a couple things from last week as we begin.
A Divine Covenant: A divine covenant is where God in a solemn oath defines a specific, new relationship with his people. In these covenants there are promises, and there are conditions for receiving blessings and curses.
These divine covenants don’t happen often. They’re major and they divide salvation history into major epochs: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Christ/the new covenant. With each of these covenants, there’s massive change in how God relates to humanity.
It’s good to think about the idea of a covenant because a covenant is relational. It’s personal. It’s not a financial transaction. It’s not a scientific process. It’s personal. It’s a person entering into a special relationship with someone else.
Last week we talked about “the covenant of works” in Genesis 2:16–17:
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 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.” (Gen 2:16-17)
This moment gets called a “covenant” in Hosea 6:7. We call it a “covenant of works,” because the key condition for receiving blessing and avoiding punishment is obedience. Obedience to God’s commandment is what will lead to blessing and away from the curse of death.
Well, Adam didn’t obey and the fall of humanity was the result. The consequence was God’s punishment of the serpent, the woman, and the man.
The serpent is cursed. The woman is told that childbirth will be painful and marriage will have conflict. The man is told that the ground will be cursed, and his earthly labors will always be difficult and opposed by the ground itself.
Because of God’s covenant and man’s disobedience, humanity had now forfeited all expectation of blessings and closeness to God. If humanity was ever to experience fellowship with God and God’s earthly and spiritual blessings, it would never be by obedience to his laws.
But in these hard words from God is hope! It’s in the cursing of the serpent that we find the first gospel promise in the Bible. That’s why it’s been called the Protoevangelium – “First Gospel.”
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gen 3:15)
In the fall itself, Eve and the serpent and then Adam and the serpent, all conspired against God. They rejected God’s law.
In this protoevangeliumGod promises to break this unholy alliance. Humanity can be influenced by the devil, but the kind of friendly alliance in the Garden is broken.
But then there is the promise about her “OFFSPRING.” Her Offspring shall “bruise the head” of the serpent—even as the offspring of the serpent will “bruise the heel” of her offspring.
In this cryptic language is the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who destroys the work of the devil and crushes the head of the serpent.
But he will only do this by allowing the serpent to “bruise his heel.” He will suffer and die in order to destroy suffering and death for his people.
The salvation of all people is found in this promised OFFSPRING OF THE WOMAN.
Right here in the Garden is the Promise of Christmas:
But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” (Matt 1:20-21)
Christ and Christ alone can “save his people from their sins.” Once the fall happened and the covenant of works was broken, this was true.
Because of the fall, for us to be saved we need someone to be a MEDIATOR between us and God. But there is only one—Christ!
1 Timothy 2:5:
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. (1 Tim 2:5)
Hope in that Mediator is what saves and what has always saved.
This idea that faith in Christ the Mediator saves is what has been called the Covenant of Grace in the Reformed tradition.
For Old Testament saints, it’s faith in a coming Mediator. For us, it’s faith in the Mediator who has come.
We can use the framework of John 3:16 to explain this:
The Covenant of Grace through the lens of John 3:16
John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Covenant of Grace: “For God so loved the world, that he promised the Redeemer-Offspring of Eve, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
APPLICATION: See the love of God here. You can imagine a father with his young child at a pool. The child’s playing at the edge of the pool in water that’s too deep. The child falls in and panics. But immediately, in the blink of an eye, his father’s right there. “I’ve got you! I’ve got you!”
That’s our God in the Garden of Eden. Man falls and could have been punished with death at that very moment. But God says, “I’ve got you! I’ve got you! I’ve provided another way.”
There was no hint of this other way of salvation before the fall of man. But once man fell God immediately spoke the promise of the covenant of grace.
That’s the love of God!
Remember Gabriel: He was the angel who announced the birth of John the Baptist to Zechariah and the birth of Jesus to Mary.
When we speak of the covenant of grace from the Garden to Gabriel, we mean the way of salvation that was by grace through faith is there at every point.
As soon as Genesis 3:15 is spoken, this way of salvation as by grace through faith is present.
Let’s look passages that makes this crystal-clear. This helps us see we’re not just putting on our Babylon Bee Bible Goggles. We’re putting our Bibles together the way God lays it out.
First Era: Adam to Abraham (and the Noahic covenant of preservation):
4 By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. 5 By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. (Heb 11:4-5)
By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. (Heb 11:7)
Second Era: Abraham and the Abrahamic covenant:
and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” (Gen 22:18)
6 just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”? 7 Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. 8 And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” (Gal 3:6-8)
And then the teaching of Jesus:
“Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” (John 8:56)
Abraham was hoping in Christ!
Third Era: Israel/Moses and the Mosaic covenant at Mt. Sinai:
For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. (Heb 4:2)
The law of Moses is a complicated issue. But Hebrews reminds us that it was also “good news” to believe!
Fourth Era: David and the Davidic covenant:
5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, 6 just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works: 7 “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8 blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.” (Rom 4:5-8)
The last covenant in the Old Testament contains only promises and no conditions. It is the new covenant.
This is pure promise. No conditons. No description of how it will actually happen.
But it shows us what is ultimately ours through the covenant of grace.
Jeremiah 31:31–34:
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jer 31:31-34)
APPLICATION: The Bible is a complicated book. Many passages are ones we don’t understand and may never understand. But the covenant of grace reminds us that beneath this complexity is a beautiful simplicity. A simple call. A simple promise.
Put all your trust in God and his mercy—and you will know life!
These Old Testament eras all have that same message.
When we turn the page from the Old Testament to the New Testament we step into the age of fulfillment.
With the Advent of Christ—we go from hoping in a future Redeemer to trusting in the Redeemer who has come.
But what we want to see is that the New Testament presents Christ as fulfilling the promises and covenants of the Old Testament:
Right before the Christmas miracle, Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist is born. His father Zechariah prophesies of the day of salvation that’s arrived—not because of his son John but because of the Messiah that will soon be born to Mary:
68 “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people 69 and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, 70 as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, 71 that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us;
72 to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, 73 the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us 74 that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear. (Luke 1:68-74)
This “horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David” is Christ!
One mediator, Christ!
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. (1 Tim 2:5)
John Murray, The Covenant of Grace:
The mediator of the new covenant is none other than God's own Son, the effulgence of the Father's glory and the express image of His substance, the heir of all things. He is its surety also. And because there can be no higher mediator or surety than the Lord of glory, since there can be no sacrifice more transcendent in its efficacy and finality than the sacrifice of Him who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot unto God, this covenant cannot give place to another. Grace and truth, promise and fulfilment, have in this covenant received their pleroma, and it is in terms of the new covenant that it will be said, ' Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them ' (Rev 21:3).
John Murray, The Covenant of Grace[1]
The covenant of grace and the miracle of Christmas. In a place where death and a sad ending was the expected outcome, GOSPEL goes forth!
A promise that the offspring of the woman shall bring salvation to those dead in sins and separated from God.
This gospel is a covenant of grace—a commitment by God to save all who trust in his mercy, especially his mercy revealed in the Redeemer-Offspring of the woman.
Prayer and Closing Song: “Who Would Have Dreamed”
[1] John Murray, The Covenant of Grace, 31–32.
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