After the Flood: God’s Covenant and the Rainbow
by Jeremy Painter
November 19, 2025 · Abundant Hope Fellowship, Bremerton, Washington
Kind: Bible study
Scripture: Genesis 9:1-7, Genesis 9:18-29, Genesis 9:8-17, Genesis 4, Genesis 8:21, Leviticus 18:1-8

Source: https://acts238.life/repository/sermons/jeremy-painter--after-the-flood
Published by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon transcript on that page.
Free to copy and share with attribution.

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All right, I'm teaching from Genesis 9 this week, and we'll go through each verse of this chapter. Let's go there right now. If you'd open your Bibles to Genesis chapter 9, and I'm going to read the first seven verses and comment on these seven verses, and then we're going to skip ahead 11 verses and go to verse 18, and read to the end of the chapter there and comment, and then at the end, I'd like to go to the middle that we skipped and end with this particular section on the covenant that God made. Okay, so there are three things, really three discrete or distinct episodes in chapter 9 of Genesis. We have the laws of retribution that the book of Genesis speaks of after the flood. Then we have a section on the rainbow that God put in the skies, a sign of His covenant with man. Then we have an episode, a sad episode to end the chapter on the curses

that are given to Noah's son, Ham. All right, so those three episodes I'd like to cover. Verse 1, And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. That sounds a lot like Genesis chapter 1, doesn't it? Be fruitful and multiply, God said to Adam and Eve. Fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground, all the fish of the sea, into your hand they're delivered. Now that sounds very different from... Everybody close those back doors over there. Thank you. Verse 2 sounds very different from the world of Adam and Eve. The fear and the dread of you shall be upon every beast. All right, so we got in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2, we had human beings having what seemed to be a pleasant relationship, a cordial relationship with the animals,

but something has broken and there's a complete change now on the other side of the flood. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast. It's not just a fear, but a dread of you. What a remarkably different world Noah inhabits, beginning with the animals. God gives fear to the animals to protect man from the change nature of the animals. There are animals that are now extraordinarily powerful and now vicious and they could destroy man. And then there's also protection in this for the animals. Because if all of the animals were just as docile as they had been in the Garden of Eden and mankind with his new nature and with his allowance to kill animals, maybe animals wouldn't survive. Okay, so there's a scarcity now. It requires a hunter now to get most of the animals, unless you have some very domesticated animals like sheep or ox and cows, that sort of thing. But for the most

part, they run from you. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything, but you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning. From every beast, I'll require it from man. Or and from man. Okay, so if a beast kills a man, that beast is to be put to death. That still happens today, right? Put a dog down that has gravely hurt a child. That law is still enforced intuitively. But then there is this. From his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. Why? For God bane man in his own image. Okay, I actually want to read a couple more verses so that we get to the law of what's called lex talionis. Okay. And you be fruitful and multiply

increased greatly on the earth, verse 8. Then God said to Noah and his two sons, Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you. Okay. And all right, I lost my place there for a minute. Okay. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. For God made man in his own image. Okay, there's a law of the eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. This is sometimes called the law of retribution or lex in Latin lex talionis. Law of retribution, law of retaliation. All right, so whatever you inflict upon a man, that should be inflicted upon you. So why? Why has God now instituted this law of retribution? It seems that the reasoning is, since God isn't going to flood the earth anymore, as we're going to find out with the rainbow, he has to institute something in a flood's place, some threat, some undergirding principle that will keep fallen man on track and

prevent evil from overwhelming the world again. All right, so since God's not going to send a flood, when the evil of man reaches such a level of intensity that it overwhelms and makes society and civilization impossible, now he's going to, he's distributing that or deferring that job and giving it to human beings themselves. You're going to have to police yourselves. And lex talionis is that principle. The explanation for why shedding a man's blood is a capital offense is, as the scripture says here, God made man in his own image. That's the explanation. That's why. God alone creates and destroys human beings. Murder is making oneself God. That's moving into the place of God. And so it becomes incumbent upon society to take the life of a man who has taken the life of someone else. Remember back in the beginning, God gave dominion to man. He gave him dominion over the whole earth. And here he's given him even more dominion. He's given

him even dominion over other men. And in that statement that God gave dominion to man is explanation for why God doesn't always prevent all the bad things that could happen. He's given man the job of preventing bad things from happening to man. Either we have dominion or we don't. Did. All right. To reiterate something I've mentioned a couple of times, the Holocaust survival rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, after he emerged from the Holocaust, he continued, unlike many of his compatriots, to carry on his Jewish faith. Many fell away into atheism. They couldn't believe anymore in a good God, the God of the Bible after going through the Holocaust. And someone asked Heschel, where was God in the Holocaust? How could God allow this to happen? Where was he in the Holocaust? And Heschel's answer is profound and very simple. The question, he said, the question is not where was God in the Holocaust? The question, the real question was where was man? Where were

those who could have prevented it? There were literally millions of people who stood by and watched it happen. God gave dominion to us. He gave us the job of making sure that if you inflict something upon somebody, that's inflicted upon you. In many ways, I'm thankful for our justice system in the United States. It isn't purely retributive. It is also meant to rehabilitate, but oftentimes our justice system lets us down, doesn't it? And it hurts. We're, you know, our congregation, many of us know what's going on with someone who took the life of one of our members. And we know, we feel the sting of hearing that it could be as little as one year. Whenever the justice system is too harsh and you're drawing and quartering people in public and making a show out of grisly methods of death, when you go overboard, you're harming society. But when you go underboard, you're also harming society because with a really lax justice system,

people don't have incentive to stop committing crime. And there are some people who's the only thing that prevents them from committing crime is the fear of the law, the fear of justice, the fear of the prison system and the fear of the death penalty. That's all that keeps some people. That's all that keeps some people from being public criminals. All right, so we no longer have the threat of God flooding the earth when it reached certain limits of evil. So he has given us the job. As a society, he doesn't want individuals going out vigilanteing. But as a society, we have the job of enforcing loss. So there's the precedent for that here in scripture by whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. All right. Okay. Oh, I should mention, it sounds like the law of retribution or lex talionis. It sounds like it's really iron age, bronze age.

It sounds really primitive. It sounds maybe even a little bit bloodthirsty an eye for an eye or tooth for a tooth. It's easy to view it that way. However, there's another side to the law of retribution. If you go back a couple of chapters in the book of Genesis, if you go to Genesis chapter four, then Genesis chapter five, you'll see the story of a man by the name of Lamech. And he starts singing a song bragging to his wives one day. And here is his song. It's the first song we have recorded in scripture. And we know it's song because it's written in Hebrew poetic meter. He says, I have wound or I have killed a man for wounding me. That's his song. I have killed a man for wounding me. In other words, he bruised me. So I killed him. You see how he values himself. All right. A wound on me is worth a death for you. All right. The

law of lex talionis, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, is a law that limits retribution. So that if somebody wounds you, you can't kill them. If somebody wounds you, they can be wounded. If somebody steals from you, then they owe that in retribution back. But you can't bankrupt them because they stole $100. So see how this particular law, it allows for there to be such a thing as justice, but it also limits the retribution to what was inflicted. So you don't have disproportionate responses to things that happen. All right. Now that's that particular law. Now I'm skipping ahead to verse 18 and maybe it'll become evident why I'm doing this here in just a few minutes. Okay. I want to read to you the story about Noah getting drunk now verse 18. The sons of Noah who went forth from the Ark were Shem, Ham and Japeth. Ham was the father of Canaan. Okay. Verse 18. Notice that we don't get here

the names of Shem's sons or Ham's son or Japeth's sons, only the name of one of the sons of Ham and his name is Canaan. Okay. So this is Noah's grandson. The question you might want to ask, keep in the back of your mind is, why only Ham's son is named here? And then notice that his name is Canaan. Where do you know the name or the word Canaan from? The Canaanites, the promised land. It's going to be really important for interpreting this story. Okay. Remember, remember I tried to use an illustration last week about mosaics. A mosaic is made up, it's one big picture made up of a thousand little pictures. Okay. And the Bible is building a library of little tiny pictures so that you can step back from it and you can see that there's one big picture that's developing from all of these little tiny pictures, these vignettes. And here's another instance of that, of a little story that's

going to help us tell a bigger story. Okay. Ham was the father of Canaan. Verse 19, these three were the sons of Noah and from these, the people of the whole earth were dispersed. Okay. Meaning all of the nations of the world come from these three. Chinese, the Arab, European, a Polynesian, they all come from these three. Verse 20, Noah began to be a man of the soil or a man of the land. And he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent or naked in his tent. All right. Don't know if this was the initial discovery of alcohol. I have no idea, but that seems unlikely. I don't know. But whatever the case, he decided, okay, I'm going to become a gardener and I'm going to plant a vineyard and then enough time passed for him to pick the grapes and to allow them to ferment and hold them in place for a

while. And then he drank the wine and he became drunk. And then I've never been drunk. So I don't know, but maybe you get hot. I have no idea. But whatever the case, he lost his sense and ended up being naked in the middle of his tent. Now the tent that you have to imagine in the ancient world is probably not this little tiny, this little tiny, you know, tarp. They live in tents. They typically live in tents. And if you go to the Middle East today or you go to, you know, where I've gone in Algeria, the tents are as big as this church building, some of them. Great, big, sometimes public places. And here's the survivor of the flood. And he's naked in the middle of his tent. The man who could survive a world full of water couldn't manage a cup full of wine. There's a lesson in that, I think. All right. And him, the father of Canaan, look

at how that's mentioned again, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Jepeth, the other two brothers, took a garment and laid it on both of their shoulders and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Interesting. Their faces were turned backward and they did not see their father's nakedness. And when Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, how? I have no idea. He said, cursed be Canaan! A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers. Now, it doesn't say cursed be Ham, the one who actually sinned against his father here. The curse falls upon Ham's son, Canaan. And what is the curse? He's going to be a servant of the servants. Yeah, that's going to take a few minutes to unpack, but he's going to be a servant to servants. In other words, he's going to be the lowliest, a slave of slaves. The problem

with the word servant as a translation in the Bible is it's not quite strong enough. We have made kind of nobility out of the sound of the word servant. We even have college degrees named servant leadership. Like it's a really, you know, high and lofty word in our language being a servant to people. But scripture doesn't use the term servant. The Greek and the Hebrew terms underlying the words often translated servant is it should be slave. Okay, cursed be Canaan, a slave of slaves shall be he be to his brothers. Okay, now I want to say 26 will go to the next few verses and then I want to comment on this curse. Noah also said, blessed, not cursed, blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japeth, that is extend the borders of his territory, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant. Okay, and after

the flood Noah lived 350 years, all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died. Okay, what a note to end your appearance on the pages of scripture. Okay, remember that God had said that man is sinful from his youth in the previous chapter. That was in chapter 8 verse 21. The episode of Ham and Noah illustrates this. What did God do when Adam recognized his nakedness? What did God do when Adam recognized his own nakedness? He covered him, he clothed him. What did Ham do when he recognized his father's nakedness? He laughed at him and went and told his brothers, come, hey, look at the old man. All right, something God instinctively wanted to cover the nakedness. Ham wanted to expose it. Who was it that first wanted to expose nakedness in the Bible? Satan, the serpent. So Ham has the spirit, he has the nature, the serpent. It's anti-God, it's against the nature of God. God moves in compassion, the

serpent wants humiliation. Noah has three sons and he's described as, as we read, a man of the soil, a man of the land. This is a deliberate echo of Adam who also had three sons and was a man of the land or a gardener. Okay, you see how Adam's first Adam and Noah is like a second Adam. Another characteristic shared by Adam and Noah. Adam is naked in the garden and upon eating the forbidden fruit discovers his nakedness. The second Adam, Noah, is covered until he partakes of the fruit of the vine and then his nakedness induces the sin of Ham and the curse upon Canaan. Okay, also the future Canaanites, who are the descendants of Canaan, will live in a land flowing with milk and honey, won't they? That's what Israel says is the land of Canaan. It's a land flowing with milk and honey. In other words, it's a land resembling in some way the Garden of Eden. And they, the

Canaanites, like Adam and Eve whose sin revealed their nakedness, will be driven from Canaan and dispossessed. See, Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden, the Canaanites thrown out of the land of milk and honey. See, little story, little story and something starting to emerge, a bigger story. Okay, notice further, fruit is involved in human transgression in both stories. The forbidden fruit of the tree and then the fruit of the vine. Adam partakes of the tree of knowledge that's in the middle, betach, which is the Hebrew word for the middle, in the betach of the Garden. And Noah is said to be naked and drunk in the betach, the middle of his tent. Okay, also, Eve saw that the forbidden tree was good for food. Ham saw his father naked. When they ate the fruit, Adam and Eve knew, quote, that they were naked, unquote. Noah, when he awakened from his drunkenness, quote, knew what his youngest son had done to

him. In Eden, God asked Adam and Eve, who told you you're naked? After the flood, Ham told his brothers about his father. So the same words and images are being repeated over and over again, a library is being built up. Okay, to bring a connection between these stories. Okay, there's also similarity in the names of the offspring of the two Adams. Cain is Adam's cursed son. Canaan is the name of Noah's cursed grandson. Okay, so it's meant to be, it seems an equivalence, an echo of the name Cain in the Canaanites. Okay. Shem, Ham, and Japeth are going to be the founders of the various nations of the earth, so the drunkenness of Noah and the iniquity of Ham prepare us for, and maybe account for, the conflict that arises between nations. All right, now, only Ham's son has mentioned in this passage, as I've drawn attention to a couple of times. And this is because it seems the writer wants us to

connect the sin of Ham with the name Canaan, which will be the name of the land God promises to Abraham's descendants. Canaan will be the promised land, the land of the Canaanites who will turn out to be wicked in the object of God's wrath. The question that could arise in contemplating the justice of a grandson receiving a curse caused by his father's sin, that question has already been asked, should a son be liable for what his father did? Okay, that question comes up. Shouldn't a man pay for his own sins? All right, let's step back and look at this. If you take a closer look at this scene, you'll notice that the punishment for Ham's sin has to be shared by his son Canaan because Ham's sin is a sin against the father. So you connect together the preceding statement on Lex Talionis, eye for an eye, and the curse upon Ham put those two things together. And here's what we have. Ham

has taken away his father's dignity. He has treated his own father like a stranger even worse. So the eye for an eye punishment God imposes is to make Ham be unable to pass down an inheritance to his son Canaan. Slaves don't have an inheritance. If they're a slave, their children will be a slave. They inherit slavery. Noah's curse is that Canaan will be a slave to Shem. So in treating his father as if he weren't a father, Ham is treated as if he weren't a father to his son, able to pass down an inheritance. A good one anyway. Still, was it was it fair though for Canaan to be punished for his father's sin? There have been ancient Jewish commentators who've tried to fill in the gaps a little bit on this because it looks like it's a little unfair in retrospect. And if you read the ancient Jewish literature on this, you'll see a couple of rabbis suggesting it was actually Canaan

that was laughing at his grandfather's nakedness. And there are all kinds of attempts to explain it, kind of explain it away and make it seem a little more just. Now was it fair for Canaan to be punished for his father's sin? Oftentimes children of a bad father emulate their father. And this is exactly what happened with Canaan and his descendants. Listen carefully. We're going to find out in the next chapter that the descendants of Canaan are the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Canaanites. The three enemies of God's people, Israel. Watch this. This is Leviticus chapter 18 verse 1. Listen very carefully. I mean, we're talking a thousand years later. Listen to this. The Lord spoke to Moses saying, Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt where you lived. You shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to

which I'm bringing you. In other words, don't act like where you've been and don't act like where you're going to go. Speak to the people of Israel. Say, I'm the Lord your God. You're not going to do like they did in Egypt. You're not going to do like they do in the land of Canaan. You shall not follow their statutes. Verse 4. My ordinances you shall observe and my statutes you shall keep following them. I am the Lord your God. You shall keep my statutes and my ordinances by doing so. You shall live. I am the Lord. None of you for six shall approach anyone near of Ken to uncover what? Nakedness. This is a thousand years later. Moses is being instructed. Don't do like the Egyptians. Don't do like the Canaanites. I'm going to I'm going to read a couple more verses and then this is just this is amazing. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father which is the

nakedness of your mother. She is your mother. You shall not uncover her nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife. It's the nakedness of your father. Look at how again a thousand years later God is instructing Israel don't do like the Egyptians. Don't do like the Canaanites. What do they do? They uncover the nakedness of their father and mother. What does uncover the nakedness of? That seems to be a euphemism for some kind of sexual approach. All right. Egypt was famous for incest. All right. This is a passage against incest. Egypt again was famous for it. All of the descendants of the pharaoh they married within the pharaoh's family. You married your sister a boy marries his sister Cleopatra for instance you know thousands of years later she married her brother. She was the product of a sibling marriage. They kept it in the family. They kept it real close. This sort of thing was happening in the 16, 17,

1800s in Europe. For the theory or principle of the divine right of kings had crept into European consciousness and the idea was God made a man a king by some kind of inherent nobility. He was above his peers and he was God on earth is basically what he was and you're not supposed to touch the king the king is the body of the kingdom and so there are consequences for having an idea like that a very like metaphysical almost spiritual idea of your blood having a certain kind of inherent nobility to it apart from other people and one of the consequences was is that all the kings and queens all the royal families of Europe began to intermarry and only intermarry so the princess of Spain would marry the prince of Germany the prince of Germany princess of Germany would marry the princess of Spain and after a couple hundred years of this you're not getting a very deep and wide gene pool

anymore you're getting a very narrow one and so what ended up happening was you started having all kinds of diseases creeping into the royal family that none of the rest of the population had for instance one of the diseases was manifest as what's called the Hobsburg Lisp or Lipp the Hobsburgs were Holy Roman Emperor family and they kept on intermarrying with other royals through the European nations okay so the Hobsburgs all ended up having this extreme lisp and this really weak chin that was barely above their Adam's apple so they were you could spot a Hobsburg from anywhere and they still exist today although they've widened the gene pool a little bit so they don't have that same recognizable problem but all the they started these boys started dying in childhood because this was just a manifestation of a deeper genetic problem the son a Victoria yeah Victoria's son Victoria's descended from the English and German line the Hobsburg line even and he

had a problem where if he was just a little cut he couldn't his blood wouldn't clot so he you could just bleed out hemophiliac thank you so this is what happens when the gene pool gets very narrow and this is what was the Egyptians were doing it works for a little while you keep continuity but over time it ends up having its revenge and this is this is the kind of incest that was very normal in Canaan and in Egypt and notice how it's put it's put euphemistically uncover the nakedness of which harkens way back to ham Canaan's father uncovering the nakedness or exposing the nakedness of Noah his father interesting alright so new world after the flood new relationships new promises new knowledge of the destruction that sin causes and yet the same old human heart but look but look there's a blessing upon shim in Japeth curse upon him but shim and Japeth are good what did they do they took

a garment and they put it over their shoulders and held it right here they stood side by side and they walk backwards until they get to where their father is they probably see his feet and then they keep their heads pointed that way and then they cover him up this is lauded this act is lauded by Noah and by the writer of Genesis remember God covered Adam when he was naked shim and Japeth covered naked Noah in other words they imitated God think about this on the from the point of view of our just our lives that we live what's the fifth commandant say it louder honor your father and your mother the previous four or how you treat God the four after honor your father and mother about how you treat other people and in the middle the way you relate to man and the way you relate to God is how you relate to your parents honor your father and your

mother the days upon the the days upon the earth shall be long honor your father and your mother when you get older as many of you have discovered you start seeing flaws in your parents maybe you found maybe you discovered those flaws when you were a kid maybe they were very apparent but maybe you had this idea of your parents as being almost sinless and wise and everything and then you get older and then you see they're very human and they're flawed they too need a savior and it's very tempting when you get older to see your parents they're falling apart they're doing things that they never did before naked in the middle of the tent what in the world are you doing I like children now what do you do you think God stops caring how you treat them once they get past a certain point he doesn't think of how awkward that stepping backwards was sometimes you need to remember this

keep this burned in your imagination remember this when you're thinking about how you treat your parents when they get older and they're a mess it's awkward walking this way you're gonna have to go out of your way to try to cover up their mortality their folly they're gonna do dumb things they're gonna think in really silly strange ways but honor them walk backwards if you have to and cover them don't expose them don't laugh at them don't ask others to join you and laughing for them that's the spirit of this age is to mock older people should not be making fun of older people should do it walk backwards it's awkward it's not the way we're supposed to walk they're supposed to be taking care of themselves but they can't now something's wrong walk backwards cover them love covers a multitude of sins doesn't the scripture say that a multitude of sins when's the last time you covered somebody's sin you didn't let

other people know about it when's the last time you covered somebody's folly and you didn't point it out the last time you suppressed it and made sure made sure that other people couldn't see this this ignorance it's very I mean here we are Genesis 9 and all kinds of consequences flow out from not honoring a father God takes it very seriously if you're the child of elderly parents remember that your parents are becoming like children but you don't treat them like children this is a one way street in life I know we all we lose our independence and we come back to a kind of state of childhood but our children shouldn't treat us like children cover our folly you're gonna need it too someday you're gonna be spitting there's gonna be saliva slipping out of the corners of your mouth you're gonna say things you never would have said if you were in your right mind there are gonna be fears that

younger people have no idea of and they're mostly imaginary but remember they're way closer to death than you are you're gonna be there someday and it all comes back honor your father and your mother so that your kids can see you honoring their father and mother and and they'll treat you well because they've learned it from you okay I don't have much time left only 8 minutes but I need to close with the rainbow covenant this is the story in the middle of chapter 9 here we go God said to Noah and to his sons with him as for me I'm establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that's with you the birds, the domestic animals every animal of the earth with you as many as came out of the ark I establish my covenant with you hey where in this whole passage does Noah talk and say okay I accept the covenant all uphold

the covenant too nowhere, Noah is completely silent the only time Noah ever speaks on the pages of all the pages of scripture the only time he ever speaks is the portion I just read to you at the end of chapter 9 where he's cursing and blessing his sons he's silent a covenant is supposed to be with two people two mutually agreed upon terms or one set of terms but two principal partners but Noah never speaks God just says I'm establishing a covenant with you that's gonna be important never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth God said this is the sign of the covenant that I make between you and me and every living creature that the covenant or is every living creature that's with you for all future generations what's the sign I have set my rainbow in the clouds no I have set my

bow in the clouds that's the literal Hebrew it's the term for as in bow and arrow I've set my bow in the clouds we know that's a rainbow but he calls it a bow a bow is a weapon a lethal weapon I have set it in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth when I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds I will remember my covenant that's between me and you the water shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh when the bow is in the clouds I will see it and remember secure the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all the flesh that's on the earth God said to Noah this is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all the flesh that's on the earth this that's the bow in the clouds the rainbow the word

used for rainbow in Hebrew is just literally the word for bow as I mentioned as in bow and arrow it's God's bow that is a sign for God himself to remember and for human beings to remember also that God won't destroy the world again by water the bow in the sky is the sign of a covenant with no liable partner it's a covenant not made with somebody agreeing to it the reliability of this covenant therefore rests upon the integrity of God alone not upon man good thing normally covenants are you do this I'll do this you pay me $200,000 I'll give you my house you withhold the $200,000 you don't get my house you see that's a covenant but this is a covenant where there's just one active partner in it and it's depending upon his word not the other parties a few of the great covenants that God made rests entirely upon the character of God himself and doesn't depend upon the

reliability and character of man he'll be faithful in these covenants no matter what the other partner does God will do what he's going to do and use as a guarantee of his promise his own person once you take notice now the direction of the bow imagine the rainbow in your mind you see it rainbow is a bow pointed where upward toward the heavens an arrow instead of being pointed towards man in a threatening manner downwards you do this I'll destroy you again instead it's pointed upwards towards God as if he would be the one to receive the fatal wound for humanity's sin you see this little picture it's a little vignette and one day we're going to step back and we're going to see for the promise that Abraham would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith for this reason it depends on faith in order that the promise

may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all of Abraham's descendants not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share in the faith of Abraham for while we were still weak at the right time Christ died for the ungodly indeed rarely will anyone die for a righteous person though perhaps a good person someone might actually die for but God proves his love for us and that while we were still sinners Christ died for us much more surely then now that we have been justified by his blood will we be saved through him from the wrath of God the bow is pointed at him if we sin he dies my God praise God praise God thank you for the gospel father forgive them for they know not what they do hmm and we know God loves us because he laid down his life for us he who knew no sin became sin that we who were unrighteous might be

the righteousness of God he condemned sin in his own flesh praise God praise God amen I had one other example of the heaven pointed bow but we'll get to it in Genesis 15