Puzzles & Promises: Three Covenants Between God and Man

By Derrick Gray Hinson

Can the "puzzle" of God's creation design and His willingness to forge relationship with man be solved? Yes, it can, with this insightful synthesis of Scripture and science to reveal anew God's original plan in Genesis.

In Puzzles & Promises, Hinson utilizes his unique style of teaching to bring to life in pr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Dec 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890413840

Derrick Gray Hinson

Derrick Gray Hinson - historian, educator, and pastor - has taught World History and Religion for more than twenty years. In his second pastorate, he serves Macedonia Baptist Church in NW Forsyth County, North Carolina. He studied Theology and Ministry in Bible College. An honors graduate with degrees in History from High Point University (BA) and American Military University (MA). He and his wife, Pam, have made Walkertown, North Carolina, their home for four decades. They have a daughter and a son, both married, and are now blessed with four grandchildren.

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Dedication

To my wonderful wife of four decades, who has always persevered in my efforts to continue my education. And to my fellow laborers in Christ at Macedonia Baptist Church of Tobaccoville, NC. Without their sacrificial giving, this work would never have had the opportunity to be shared with so many.

Table Of Illustrations

Part 1: Adamic Covenant

Garden of Eden Speculation Map

Serpent Beguiles Eve in Eden

Part 2: Noahic Covenant

Lamb and Harvest as Sacrifices

Timelines of Hominids and Man Appearance

Lineage of Seth Family Tree

The Rape of Polyxena

In Florence Italy

The Ark

DNA Traits in Modern Humans Chart

Noah Releases the Dove

Part 3: Abrahamic Covenant

Map Emigration Comparison Maps

Cities of The Fertile Crescent

Abraham Sees Destruction of Sodom

Abraham with Isaac at the Altar

Foreword

"Everything is simpler than you think, and at the same time more complicated than you

can comprehend."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As the West stumbles towards a post-Christian society, the questions man has long pondered remain the same and will continue to go unanswered through Eastern philosophies and Marxist ideologies. There is nothing new under the sun, Solomon, the Israelite King known for his wisdom, conceded.¹ The remarkable British Christian apologetic C. S. Lewis expressed his views concerning the future in a series of radio broadcasts made during the Second World War, As the world becomes increasingly secular, the beliefs of Christianity will be considered old-fashioned and out-of-touch. Christians will be increasingly marginalized… While we resist the hard times, they can be moments of great spiritual growth. Hold on even in times of ‘famine.’ With time, we will see that God is still at work.²

The answers to a variety of the questions seekers ask today are contained in the first three narratives of the Bible. Where do we come from? How did we get here? Where is God in all of this? The Lord God has been, and remains, at work.

Commentary is defined by Mr. Webster as 1a) an explanatory treatise; 2a) a systemic series of explanations or interpretations; and 3b) an expression of opinion.³ Mountains of commentaries have been written about the Bible, but the best Bible commentary remains the Bible. God uses Scripture to explain Scripture. The Book of Genesis, as the beginning of Jehovah’s expressive word to man, the foundation of all that follows, makes it important. Explicitly it is the book of origins in a wide range of institutions and doctrinal foundations.

Here, in these pages, my comments are humbly added in the effort to explain and interpret three definitive covenants the Lord God Almighty commits Himself to in His efforts to build a lasting relationship with mankind. Our story begins with the tapestry of creation and weaves its way to Jehovah’s covenant with the patriarch Abraham. While some mysteries remain shrouded in riddles, many of the pieces of the puzzle can be put into place as the promises are expounded upon anew.

It has been said, If one can believe the first five words of the Bible, believing the rest is easy. In the beginning, God created…. Everything else revolves around that expression. It has been said, It takes more faith to believe this world just happened by coincidence than it does to believe there is a Creator. Man is different from the animals, the fish, the fowl—it is undeniable. The interdependent reciprocal systems of survival between flora and fauna should rule out the random chance of creation by itself. Simplified for the layman, the plant kingdom absorbs carbon dioxide and emits oxygen, and the animal kingdom and man inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. A more compatible system could not have been devised in a scientific laboratory. Man has always peered into the heavens and believed there was a Creator. Then the question becomes one of whether the Creator remains involved with His creation.

If the Genesis story is not the sole creation tale available for study, if it is not without similarities and overlaps among various world cultures, that is not reason enough to disregard it as a fable. Man’s origin may be questioned, but he did appear and at once migrated to various and sundried regions developing unique cultures wherever he went. It goes without saying creation stories would generally resemble one another. The Semitic peoples, among others, were familiar with such ancient sagas before Judaism ever existed as a religious faith. Instead of making them false, it serves as another manner to reinforce their validity. The complicated nature of life on Earth lends itself to the reality of Intelligent Design. The complex nature of mankind’s relations with this world and between his own kind points to the Bible as the only way to make sense of it all. It remains possible in the Modern Age as it was in the past with Scholasticism to reconcile science and faith. Science should not be feared or despised by creationists. Theories are just that. Faith, according to the Apostle Paul, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen… By faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that things that are seen are not made of things that are visible (Hebrews 11:1–3).

As a student of history with three decades teaching the subject, it is undeniably clear that a thorough examination of the past is necessary to comprehend the world situation in which we find ourselves today. The Genesis storyline explains how we got here. With the recognition of these three distinct promises of God comes a clearer view of the purposes He has for His creation. It is entirely possible to make sense of the world and society we have inherited and, Lord willing, illuminate the reader with regard to our potential destiny. Despite numerous obstacles along the winding path, the Lord God’s master plan to achieve and preserve a relationship with His crowning creation, mankind has been established, and the kingdom of heaven is to be brought to fruition. His willingness to use human beings as His instruments to carry out His will even when they are flawed and filled with wretched shortcomings remains our greatest insight into His personality of grace-filled, merciful love. Study these three remarkable covenants and grasp their meanings in context with their historical settings as well as our contemporary age, and the image becomes clearer as it pertains to posterity.

The primary source of scriptural interpretation is other Scripture. Non-canonical sources are introduced when quoted in the Bible itself. Secondary sources include a variety of previous authors whose research contributes to this specific study. This noted, let us begin.

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1 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, there is nothing new under the sun (Eclesiastes 1:9, ESV).

2 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Geoffrey Bles Publisher; United Kingdom, 1952).

3 Commentary. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commentary. Accessed 31 Jul. 2023.

PART 1:

THE ADAMIC COVENANT

The Creation Story

"Chronology of the Bible does not begin with the World, but with the creation of Man. This should be carefully noted. Concerning the date of the creation of the visible universe the Scripture is silent. All the information given to us as to that interesting matter is what is declared in the first verse of the Bible… therefore, no warrant at all for the term Anno Mundi (Year of the World), but instead, Dr. Martin Anstey, in The Romance of Bible Chronology,⁴ very properly uses the term Anno Hominis

(Creation of Man)."

Philip Mauro⁵

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4 Dr. Martin Anstey BD, MA, The Romance of Bible Chronology (London: Marshall Brothers, LTD, 1913).

5 Philip Mauro, Chronology of the Bible (George H Doran Co., 1922).

In the Beginning, God Created

the Heaven and the Earth

In the beginning, somewhere in the dateless past, God created (Hebrew: bara; to create) this universe, brought something out of what had been nothing.

Elohim (Hebrew plural form of El: Deity/Almighty; Strong One, Supreme One who binds oneself with an oath) is introduced to us here; later, with Noah, Abraham & Moses, He becomes Jehovah Elohim—the Lord God (Hebrew: Lord: Adonai—the Eternal; God: Yahweh—Self—Existent One).

Psalm 19:1 tells us: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament displays his handywork.

The Prophet Jeremiah proclaims: Ah, Lord God! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you (Jeremiah 32:17, ESV).

God is the Almighty, the Supreme One existing throughout all of eternity past. The Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is expressed from the first Bible verse; Elohim is plural. The Apostle John very deliberately explains to us in his Gospel that at the beginning of this world in which we live, the Word (Greek: Logos/Aramaic: Memra; divine expression) Christ Jesus was with Theos and was part of Theos (Greek: Supreme Deity). All things were made by Theos (Greek: ginomai; to become, to generate from nothing, to cause to be).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:1–3, ESV).

Elohim/Theos brought into existence the heavens outside His residence. He placed the earth among the other celestial bodies generated in the heavens.

Prophet Isaiah states: For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (He is God!), who formed the earth and made it (He established it; he did not create it empty, He formed it to be inhabited!): ‘I am the Lord, and there is no other’ (Isaiah 45:18, ESV).

The idea of an Almighty Creator God is consistent with nearly all the Semitic peoples of the Near East. If we accept the historical narrative of Genesis to be authored by Moses upon revelation from the Lord God at Sinai and afterward in the Wilderness journey, it was passed down by oral tradition or written on stone tablets from circa 1250 BC.⁶ The oldest written fragments on paper of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Torah scriptures in Hebrew, date from the Babylonian Exile circa 539 BC. Abraham, the legatee to whom our third promise will be made, met the Lord in the ancient city of Ur in the Fertile Crescent near the Persian Gulf circa 1998 BC.

The Sumerian world Abraham was born into before that fateful calling (circa 4100–1750 BC) while polytheistic recognized a sky god, Il (sometimes referred to as Ilu or sometimes Anu), similar in spelling and meaning to the Pentateuch’s El). The Triune nature of God was recognized as well in a triad of Sumerian-Babylonian gods made up of Il and his sons Enlil (wind, earth & storms god) and Enki (water & creation god) as early as 2600 BC. These deities were worshipped throughout the Sumerian Fertile Crescent: Akkadian, Syriac, and Phoenician.⁷, ⁸

In each Sumerian city-state, there was a pyramid-shaped temple called a Ziggurat for the worship of their sky god. Cuneiform, the world’s first written language, was a form of pictogram consisting of pictures and symbols rather than an alphabet and is thought to have been invented in and for the Sumerian temples as the primary method of record-keeping. There is no stretch of the imagination to believe that creation stories would have been passed down orally from the first peoples in the Fertile Crescent to their descendants in the progressing city-states. The Sumerians literally wrote their history as it unfolded. Babylon, particularly with King Nebuchadnezzar, preserved historical records as he invaded and conquered greater Mesopotamia and Judah by 586 BC. The Jewish Torah, including Moses’ Pentateuch, was written anew during the Babylonian Captivity. Those exiled Jewish leaders pieced together their histories from Moses to Sumerian and Mesopotamian stories that resulted in the eventual biblical Book of Genesis with its creation story.⁹

Sometime after the first creative act of God, something took place to drastically alter the condition of the earth.

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6 Cuneiform, as a written language, appeared in the Sumer region of Mesopotamia between 3500–1700 BC. It found its way into various Semitic regions, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria and Elam (Persia). The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest texts produced was written on tablets as early as 2100 BC in Sumer. It has been found in Akkadian by 1800 BC; Babylonian circa 1300–1000 BC; and in Assyria 700 BC. The Sumerian epic contains a detailed Flood story.

Hieroglyphics in Egypt, where Israelites spent centuries between the Hebrew Vizier Joseph and the Moses-led Exodus, have been dated to 3200 BC. Writing on tablets gave way to papyrus as a primitive form of paper. The Phoenician alphabet, as opposed to these earlier pictogram forms of writing, appeared circa 1050BC. Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew developed from the Phoenicians appearing around 800 BC.

The purpose here is to ponder the dates for the earliest versions of the Hebrew Torah Scriptures, one day to become an integral portion of the Christian Bible. Moses, as a Prince of Egypt, was surely literate—God had providentially put him in a position to become educated as an Administrator and Warrior to bring His people out of Egyptian bondage and begin the establishment of the state of Israel. In the Book of Exodus chapter 24, we find that Moses presented the Divinely inspired Law on twelve pillars of stone for the