Yesterday on things unseen, we were reflecting on the original promise of what we often call the Covenant of Grace.

It's a promise that holds the whole Bible together, almost from the beginning right to the end.

And in turn it unfolds in a series of further covenants that sustain it and clarify it and

develop it.

That's actually the case with the covenant that God made with Noah.

God introduces it with these words in Genesis 6, verse 18.

I will establish my covenant with you.

The word established there might actually carry the sense of confirm.

I will make sure my covenant remains standing.

In other words, the function of the covenant that God makes with Noah

is to make sure that

the covenant of grace that he'd already announced wouldn't collapse, even though the world

was virtually going to collapse in the flood.

It's very striking, actually, that when Noah emerges from the ark, the words that

God speaks to him echo what God had said in the

Garden of Eden and then to Adam.

The promise that God gives that he'll never repeat the flood safeguards the promise he had

earlier given that the serpent would be defeated. But it doesn't take many more chapters before we discover that the seed of the serpent would be defeated.

But it doesn't take many more chapters before we discover that the seed of the serpent kept

fighting.

Remember the story of the Tower of Babel?

When there was a concerted effort to achieve a kind of world unity that would establish

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