A Covenant of Favor

A COVENANT OF FAVOR

Genesis 6:18 and Genesis 9:11 to 17

Before We Start

I held this back when I wrote on chapter six, because the word was there and the covenant itself was not. Moses puts the word down in one chapter and describes it three chapters later.

So we are going to do it the way Moses does it. The word first, then the thing.

Where the Word Appears

That is the word. My covenant.

And look who is speaking. I will establish MY covenant. It is His, He says so, and nobody offered Him anything to make it.

Now look at how much of that covenant He describes in this verse. Almost nothing.

He does not say what the covenant is. He does not say how long it lasts. He does not give a sign for it. He says come into the ark and bring your house.

The word is planted in chapter six. It is not opened until chapter nine.

The Word Itself

I looked it up.

It is given as beriyth, and the entry gives a covenant, a treaty, an alliance, an agreement. Then it says how such a thing was made. A compact, because it was made by passing between pieces of flesh.

And it sends me to two other words for that sense of cutting.

The first one gives to select, to feed, to render clear. No cutting in it at all. The second one does have it, and that second word is bara, the word in Genesis 1:1 where God created the heaven and the earth. The entry there says that where it is used for creating, only God is the subject of that verb. And it gives the cutting under a different use of the same word, where men are the ones doing it.

I am not going to build anything on that, because the entry is telling me where the word came from and not what Moses meant in this verse. But hold it. A covenant in that language was not a handshake.

And one more thing from the entry, which I will come back to. It says a covenant could be broken by men, but the Lord never broke His covenants, and He always remembered a covenant.

Now the Covenant Itself

Three chapters later the water is gone, Noah has come out, and God speaks again. And now He says what it is.

I want to take these one at a time, because each verse gives me something the one before it did not.

There is the term. Never again by water.

And notice what He does not promise. He does not say there will be no judgment. He says it will not come this way again.

There is the sign, and there is who it is with.

Not Noah only. Every living creature that is with you. The beasts that came off that boat are in it too.

I DO SET. He puts it there Himself. Noah is not asked to hang anything up, and he is not asked to remember anything.

The order in that verse runs like this. He brings the cloud. And in the cloud the bow shows. The dark thing comes first, and the sign is inside it.

And I WILL REMEMBER.

That is the entry's word, the one I said I would come back to. The Lord always remembered a covenant. And here He says He will be the one remembering.

The bow is not to jog the man's memory. God says it is for His own.

I WILL LOOK UPON IT. He set it. He remembers it. He looks at it.

And here is the one word the whole thing has been waiting for. Everlasting.

That is what kind of covenant Scripture says it is. Not my word for it. His.

And He says it once more to the man's face.

What I Notice Across the Seven

Read them together now and see who is doing everything.

I will establish. I make. I do set. I bring the cloud. I will remember. I will look upon it. I have established. Seven verses, and Noah is not asked for one thing.

He is not told to keep a rule. He is not told to bring a sacrifice for it. He is not told to teach it to his sons.

That is what I see in it, and it is what made me want to name this one.

So What Do I Call It

Now go all the way back, three chapters, before the word covenant is ever said.

Grace is recorded first. Then the covenant. And when the covenant finally opens, every single verb in it belongs to God.

So this is how I see this first mentioned covenant. A covenant of favor.

I call it that because I cannot find the place where the man earned it, and I can find the place where he was favored.

When I See One

Now let me tell you what I do with this verse.

Every now and again, mostly when the rain has just fallen heavily, a rainbow shows up in the sky. And I wonder if that is God remembering this covenant.

Moses does not say that. He gives me the token and he gives me the reason for it, and he does not say that every bow I see is that moment. So the wondering is mine.

But here is what pushed me to it. Read verse fourteen again and see what He said He would bring. When I bring a cloud over THE EARTH.

Not over my street. Over the earth.

Because sometimes I see one and the rain never fell heavy where I was sitting. And that verse does not say it has to.

So I wonder whether the bow I am looking at belongs to rain that fell somewhere else. This study will not answer that for me.

The Heart

I have made agreements in my life where I had to hold up my end or the whole thing fell over. This is not that.

The bow is in the cloud whether I look up or not. He said He would look at it. He said He would remember.

And what I take from that is that the safest promise I will ever stand under is the one I had nothing to do with making.