THE BLOOD COVENANT

he first man Adam came into the world with a covenant partner waiting for him. His covenant partner was God Himself. The terms of the covenant had been laid down: He could share with God in exercising dominion over God’s earth. He had the knowledge and ability to perform this responsibility because he had been created in the image and likeness of God. What a wonderful privilege Adam had. His responsibility in this covenant was to play his part of exercising dominion over the earth to the fullest. A covenant requires that both parties do not hold anything back. It was life for life. This meant that Adam had to bring his complete life to the altar of covenant. The way Adam could do this was to bring his desires and will in submission to his creator, and this means, he must walk in total obedience to God. Adam had a free will, as there can be no covenant without a free will. Since a covenant is an agreement, both parties must willingly agree and accept the terms of the covenant. God’s word is His oath, and God is all-knowing and all-powerful. He is also the source of wisdom so whatever He declares is established and He cannot go back on His word. Adam’s part in the covenant was to trust God and submit his own life, which was given by God, to God’s wisdom and direction. Adam could enjoy the fullness of God so long as he allowed God to call the shots all the time. God created Adam out of love and for a purpose. If Adam would allow God to call the shots, then he would live a life fit for purpose. Only the creator knows the purpose of His creation and to fully walk in your destiny, you must live under the full direction of your maker. If the creator created you to be like Himself, as in the case of Adam, then you must stay very close to God, by obeying every word of His. By making Adam just like God, God did not only give Adam a body and soul, but He also breathed His own breath into Adam to make him have the very life of God: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7 Adam had the Spirit (breath) of God in him. What he needed to do was to discipline his fleshly desires and subject his will to God’s. Every person is made up of three parts - spirit, soul and body. We are spirit because God is spirit, and we are created in God’s image and likeness. Every person possesses a soul, which is made up of the mind, emotions and will. The soul is where our freewill resides. For us to properly exercise our freewill, God gave us the soul as our own permanent personal gift. Our mind is free to choose whatever it wants. You can choose to fill your mind with what you see or hear from the world around you or fill your mind with what God says. What you fill your mind with is what controls your emotions and directs your will. Our soul directs our lives and so the only way we can live a godly life is to completely submit our soul to God. If we give God our mind and attention, God’s word will anchor our emotion, and we would walk in the perfect will of God and operate like God, just as He created us to be. As part of the covenant arrangement between God and Adam, God had given everything He had created on earth for Adam’s enjoyment. God gave Adam dominion over the earth. Adam’s part in the covenant was to not eat of a particular tree, which scripture calls: ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. God had not only given Adam the choice of willingly joining a covenant with Him, but He was also telling Adam not to seek knowledge outside of Him. The warning to Adam was that the day he sought knowledge outside of God, he would have willingly rejected God’s covenant offer and he would be separated from God. To be separated from God is to suffer spiritual death. “Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Genesis 2:15-17 Unfortunately, Adam obeyed another voice rather than the voice of God and ate of the very tree that God had warned him not to eat of. By his disobedience, Adam had unwittingly opted out of the covenant with God. He had agreed with the other voice in his mind, and his mind had commanded his will to disobey God. Adam therefore had to bear the consequence of his disobedience. Adam had a desire in his flesh to eat of the forbidden tree. He allowed this desire in his mind to force his will to eat of the tree, and as a result he lost this beautiful covenant with God. This was a slap in God’s face. Adam had not returned love for love. He had not returned the respect God had lavished on him by carefully making him like God Himself. The consequence of breaking a covenant is death so from the moment Adam broke this covenant, he died a spiritual death. God was no longer in his spirit and therefore he could not commune with God on the altar of his heart. Adam lived with his body for another nine hundred years, but it was a life of struggle without the knowledge and ability of God. He tried to survive without the assistance of his creator, and as a result, he had a horrible existence of continually trying to understand himself and the world around him. Unfortunately, that has been the curse hanging on humanity and the world, without God. In the absence of a covenant with God, the world has made covenants with false gods who do not bring life but push us into the decay of greed, competition, lust, hatred and death. As the old saying goes: ‘A drowning man will clutch at a straw for salvation’. Creation is too big for man to understand it without God. We were not created to live without God and therefore life has become a struggle living under the curse of the Garden of Eden: