Theopedia

Noahic Covenant

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

— Genesis 9:11 (ESV)

Definition

The Noahic Covenant is the covenant God made with Noah, his family, and every living creature after the flood, recorded in Genesis 8:20-9:17. God promises never again to destroy the earth by flood, renews to Noah the creation mandate first given to Adam, and sets the rainbow as the covenant’s own sign. Unlike the covenants God later makes with Abraham, Moses, and David, this covenant is not limited to a chosen people: it binds God to “every living creature,” sustaining the natural order so that his later work of redemption can unfold within it.1

Confessional Witness

No confession in the Reformed family, the 1689 included, devotes a chapter to the Noahic covenant specifically; the confession’s own chapter on God’s covenant names neither Noah nor Abraham, Moses, or David.2 Reformed theologians themselves classify the covenant’s place in the wider system differently, a disagreement the confessions do not settle.

Biblical Basis

After the flood, Noah offers a sacrifice, and God resolves in response, “I will never again curse the ground because of man… While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen. 8:21-22). God then renews to Noah the command first given to Adam, to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 9:1, 7; cf. Gen. 1:28), now paired with new provisions for a world still marked by sin: every animal is given to man for food (Gen. 9:2-3), except that man must not eat an animal’s blood (Gen. 9:4), and murder is made a capital offense because it strikes at the image of God in man: “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:5-6).

God then formally establishes the covenant, repeating three times in four verses that it stands with “every living creature,” not Noah’s family alone (Gen. 9:9-10, 15-16), and that it is “an everlasting covenant” (Gen. 9:16): “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood” (Gen. 9:11). The rainbow is given as the covenant’s sign, set in the sky as a pledge to both God and man (Gen. 9:12-17). The book of Hebrews later names Noah’s own obedience in building the ark, before any of this was yet seen, as an act of faith that “condemned the world and [made him] heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb. 11:7).

Doctrinal Significance

John Murray identifies five features that together mark the Noahic covenant as a distinct kind of divine commitment: it is established by God alone, “conceived, devised, determined, established, confirmed, and dispensed by God Himself”; it is universal, extending to “all flesh”; it is unconditional; it is “intensely and pervasively monergistic,” excluding any human contribution to its terms; and it is everlasting.3 On this reading, the covenant is, in Murray’s words, “covenant in the purity of its conception, as a dispensation of grace to men, wholly divine in its origin, fulfillment, and confirmation.”4

Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum read the covenant’s renewal of the creation mandate as a restoration of the vocation built into the image of God itself: “The human community must express obedient sonship in faithful loyal love to the Creator God and rule over the creation with humble servanthood and responsible stewardship.”5 On this reading, the covenant’s chief significance is not redemptive in itself but preservative: it secures the stability of the created order for the sake of the redemption still to come, so that, as Gentry and Wellum put it, “the covenant made with Noah creates a firm stage of history where God can work out his plan for rescuing his fallen world.”1

Opposing Views

Reformed theologians have classified the Noahic covenant’s place in the wider system of covenants in two different ways. Herman Witsius holds that the covenant of grace is a single covenant, first revealed in Genesis 3:15 and then progressively unfolded across five redemptive-historical stages, from Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham, Abraham to Moses, Moses to Christ, and the New Testament; on this reading the Noahic covenant is one stage within that single covenant of grace, not a separate covenant alongside it.6 Morton Smith instead distinguishes the covenant God makes with Noah before the flood, which belongs to the unfolding covenant of grace, from the covenant God makes with Noah after the flood in Genesis 9, which he treats as its own covenant of common grace, extended to all flesh rather than to the elect specifically.7 The two classifications agree on the covenant’s content and provisions; they differ over whether its universal scope marks it as a separate kind of covenant or as one stage of the same covenant of grace reaching every living creature for a time.

Objections and Responses

If the Noahic covenant is unconditional and, in Murray’s own phrase, “intensely and pervasively monergistic,” why does Genesis attach consequences to human conduct within it, such as the death penalty for murder (Gen. 9:6) and the curse on Ham’s line (Gen. 9:20-27)? Murray’s own answer distinguishes the covenant’s ground from its administration: the covenant’s establishment and its ultimate promise rest on God’s commitment alone, but “even in this case… obedience to commandments is the means through which the grace of the covenant is to be realized and enjoyed.”4 A covenant can be unconditional in how God brings it into being and still attach real consequences, for blessing and for judgment, to how the creatures within it conduct themselves.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, 2nd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 169, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 231. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  3. John Murray, The Covenant of Grace: A Biblico-Theological Study (London: Tyndale Press, 1954), 12-14, quoted in Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 231. ↩

  4. Murray, The Covenant of Grace, 15, quoted in Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 231, 233. ↩ ↩2

  5. Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 174, quoted in Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 232. ↩

  6. Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man: Comprehending a Complete Body of Divinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), 1:313-316, cited in Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 229n53. ↩

  7. Morton Smith, Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (Greenville, SC: Greenville Seminary Press, 1994), 1:333, cited in Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 229n53. ↩