Adam and Eve, the friend-servants of God, revolted from their friend-sovereign. The wondrous, blessed freedom they had received with their creation in God’s image they despised. His word of warning they ignored, refusing to distinguish and discern what their sovereign had distinguished and discerned for them. They turned from heeding and obeying that word. They turned to the word of another.

They turned to the word of God’s enemy. The serpent spoke his own word. He spoke his questioning word, appealing to the woman’s ability to declare the word with her own mouth. He then spoke a word of defiance. By that word he tempted her to take a middle position. He gave her the demonic choice: Whose word to choose? Whose word to believe? Whose word to follow? Whose word to act upon? The word of her creator and sovereign friend or the word of this stranger who already had defied the word of her sovereign? Whose word to heed? To heed the warning of her sovereign friend or to heed the perverse promise of this stranger, the promise that dared both to twist and to contradict the warning?

In order to understand the truth of the covenant better, we must pay some attention to the tempter. He is the reason and occasion for the revolt of these friend-servants from their friend-sovereign. He is the tempter who was not afraid to slander their friend-sovereign, to twist his good word and warning into an evil, restricting word of bondage. But a proper understanding of the covenant must go further. The devil was originally a servant of Adam and Eve’s friend-sovereign, created holy and upright by God. God had created Satan in great glory and honor. In the hierarchy of the angelic world, he had a place of great authority and rule. But he was tempted by his own glory to aim higher, to take the throne that belonged to his creator. Therefore, Satan staged a shameful revolt in the glory of heaven. He gained to his cause a vast number of angels, who used the power they had received directly from their creator to overthrow him.

Their desperate aim they lost. The power that had created them they could not possibly break by all their creaturely power. The heavenly rebels were deposed from their glory. They were consigned to eternal damnation and immediately placed beyond the pale of recovery.

Two more points about Satan and his demonic host serve the truth of the covenant. 

First, while having similar natures, all the angels were individually created. Satan is not the natural or federal head of his host. He is head by the will and choice of that host. However, the angels did not proceed from Satan but from God their creator. As individuals, their representation by a savior is strictly impossible. 

Second, for all their heavenly glory, the angels never possessed the same significance as Adam and Eve. Though created of the earth, earthy (1 Cor. 15:47), the first parents of the human race were created in the image of God, and in that image they were created for fellowship with God. The question of Hebrews 1:14, “Are they [the angels] not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” has in mind a positive answer. Another point of weakness for the erroneous covenant of works doctrine, in addition to those mentioned in previous articles, is that it fails to do justice to this earthly superiority of our first parents to the heavenly host.

To understand the covenantal nature of the fall into sin, we must consider two relationships.

The first relationship is that between Adam and Eve and Jehovah. When Adam and Eve disobeyed the word of their sovereign friend, they committed treachery and perfidy. From the viewpoint of the covenantal relationship between servant and sovereign, their sin was sheer disobedience.

What gave their disobedience its truly heinous character was manifold. It was entirely willful. There was nothing in their natures that impelled them to sin. They were created in the image of God. There was no depravity in them, no corruption of their flesh. After the language of James 1:14–15, they had no lust to draw them away and entice them. They had no outward need that compelled them to sin. Of all the trees of the garden they could freely eat. No gnawing hunger compelled them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The first mother of the human race gave evidence from her own mouth of her understanding of God’s prohibition. It regarded that very tree, and the commandment indeed came from the mouth of God. Scripture tells us of the thoughts that went through her mind as she considered the tree in light of Satan’s temptation. Her considerations brought her mind into harmony with the temptation, so that out of her own heart and mind came the outward transgression of the commandment of her sovereign friend.

There is another aspect of their relationship with God that made the sin of Adam and Eve more heinous and vile. Jehovah was not merely their sovereign. He was also their friend. In and with their entire natures, created in the way and in the life of fellowship with their sovereign friend, they despised their friend and their blessed friendship with him. As their life was fellowship with him, so they truly turned from him to depart. No longer to walk near to him and with him, who was their fellowship in life, was their deadly departure. They broke their friendship and cast off their fellowship.

There is a second relationship to consider. In breaking their fellowship with their sovereign friend, who was their maker, they forged ties of a new friendship and fellowship. No longer heeding the word of Jehovah their God, they heeded the word of another. In the language of the Belgic Confession, man gave “ear to the words of the devil” (art. 14). 

These two relationships were necessary. Satan’s lie was that there need not be any relationships. Satan’s lie was that Eve could think, will, and act as an independent and a free agent. She could independently think about the tree whose fruit her sovereign friend had forbidden her. She could independently decide what that tree and its fruit were and what they might or might not give her should she eat of the fruit of that tree. She could then independently reach out and take with her own hand and eat with her own mouth. There was God who had spoken. There was the serpent who had spoken. There was man to decide and to choose as an independent being.

All Satan’s words were a lie. It was strictly impossible for the servant to be independent. While the devil held out to Eve the prospect of independence, that prospect was sheer deceit. His purpose the devil attained, to enslave the friend-servants of his bitter enemy to himself.

Giving ear to the words of the devil, the man and the woman created in the image of God adopted to themselves a new sovereign and friend, the serpent. They were still covenant creatures, thinking, willing, and acting according to the natures with which they had been created.

Having made the devil their friend and their ally, they made Jehovah, who was their creator and their life, their enemy. Their friendship with Satan was their enmity with God. Such is the manner of the judgment expressed in James 4:4: “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”

Exactly this manner of judgment is the threat attached to the warning word of God in Genesis 2:17: “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Expressing the same is Psalm 73:27: “For, lo, they that are far from thee shall perish: thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from thee.”

The actions of Adam and Eve powerfully expressed that death. Immediately, they were filled with shame, a shame of their nakedness that they instantly and foolishly remedied by fashioning garments of leaves of the trees in the garden. No longer were their bodies the instruments of righteousness, righteousness that stands before the presence of God naked and unashamed. Instead, their bodies became the instruments of sin. Theirs were the hands that reached out to pick the fruit forbidden by their sovereign maker. Theirs were the mouths that ate in disobedience to God. Their consciences were defiled. So far from becoming gods knowing good and evil, they could no longer face each other in their nakedness. They were ashamed.

If such is what they were before one another, what must they have been before God? If the fellow servants could not stand naked and unashamed before each other, how could they stand before the presence of their Lord God? What must the revolting enemies do before the presence of their sovereign former friend who had become their enemy?

The voice of the Lord God they heard walking in the garden in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8). This was the voice of their sovereign friend, the God who had made them after his image and likeness. This was the voice of their sovereign friend with whom they before had walked and talked, for whom they had lived, and whom they had been delighted to serve. The phrase “in the cool of the day” tells us that this was a regular occurrence, well known and understood by Adam and Eve. They also knew from experience that what they heard was the voice of their sovereign friend, presenting himself in the garden in the cool of the day to enjoy fellowship with his servant-friends.

But now the deathly enmity manifested itself in the complete change in direction of this pair. Bond and ties of loving fellowship and communion, formerly bringing Adam and Eve with delight into the presence of their sovereign creator, were wholly eradicated from their natures. Confidence became shame. Righteousness became sin. Friendship became enmity. The way of Adam and Eve was no longer toward the voice of the Lord God. Communion with God was no longer the way of their hearts and minds. It was not the way of their bodies. The horror of their death was that they must hide themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Their sovereign friend became their sovereign enemy. With no weapons against their former friend, and unable to stand before him, their enmity made them flee and hide.

What a wonder of grace that Jehovah God did not change toward them! As his voice, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, had been the voice of the sovereign friend, so it remained the voice of the i am. It remained the voice of the sovereign. It remained the voice of the friend. But it became the voice of the gracious, sovereign friend.

That same voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day was the voice that graciously pursued after the fallen dead. It was the voice that did not leave but pursued. It was the voice that did not condemn or destroy but sought and found. It was the voice that called out to Adam, “Where art thou?” Although that voice of the Lord God uncovered the sin, the nakedness, and the pathetic excuses of the man and his wife, still that voice did not condemn or destroy.

The voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the cool of the day was a voice and a word of covenantal salvation. It was a word that went to the heart of the awful, deathly, and hellish covenant that enslaved man to the serpent. That horrible, perverse friendship, by the sovereign word of Jehovah, was broken.

“I will put enmity.”

The protevangel, the mother promise, was a covenantal word. It was a word of powerful, sovereign friendship. The friend Jehovah will be friend regardless of the actions of the friendship-breakers. These friendship-breakers had broken friendship in their diabolical alliance with their newfound friend, Jehovah’s great enemy. But the sovereign Jehovah’s friendship prevailed to put enmity instead of that friendship. His friendship could not ignore that evil alliance, but had powerfully to break it. His friendship had powerfully to break the alliance with a word of covenantal friendship.

Jehovah’s promise of enmity was a word of friendship. His promise was a word spoken by the gracious, sovereign friend to bring these new enemies back into friendship, the friendship of redemption and salvation. This word was from their gracious friend to make them know that he would forever be their God. Their friendship with his enemy had not made him cease from being their friend. His salvation was gracious; his friendship, unconditional. His promise was a word for them to take to heart and to keep there. It was a word for them to hear, to understand, and to believe. That word their gracious friend gave them to keep. That promise had to be their confidence in the newly begun warfare against their former friend, the serpent. By that word they had to know that they would have the complete and final victory. It had to be their confidence and the confidence of their seed after them, the seed of the covenant. They and their seed would suffer. They and their seed would have their heels bruised. But they and their seed would have the victory according to the promise of their sovereign, gracious friend. The seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent and his seed.

This word of Jehovah’s friendship was the gracious gift of enmity as the gospel of Jesus Christ, the seed of the woman that would bruise the head of the serpent.

The question must be faced here about this mother promise of enmity: How could the enmity be brought about? How could the friendship between the serpent and the first parents of the human race be turned into enmity? The grace of God’s promise is the friendship of Jehovah to do what he has spoken. He is the one who by himself will put enmity instead of this friendship. He will supply the seed of the woman, who will bruise the head of the serpent. How eloquently this is described in the language of the Belgic Confession in article 17:

We believe that our most gracious God, in His admirable wisdom and goodness, seeing that man had thus thrown himself into temporal and spiritual death, and made himself wholly miserable, was pleased to seek and comfort him when he trembling fled from His presence, promising him that He would give His Son, who should be made of a woman, to bruise the head of the serpent, and would make him happy.

The mother promise was the mother promise because it was the gracious promise of Christ alone. In his sovereign friendship Jehovah gave his Son by promise to Adam and Eve and their covenant seed. His Son, the seed of the woman, would satisfy the judgment of God on behalf of the elect. His Son would be the friend of God to stand where the created friends fell. His Son would be the friend to establish enmity by his word and Spirit, renewing and regenerating these friends of the serpent back into the friends of Jehovah.

The distinct power of the covenant word of promise is that by it and with it, Jehovah, the friend-sovereign, gave his Son to his revolting, treacherous, and perfidious enemies, a gift to make them into his friends again. With the promise he gave them a righteousness to make them acceptable, the ground of everlasting friendship. With the word he gave them perfect salvation and deliverance to bless their troubled hearts with the abiding peace of their sovereign friend’s peace. By his promise they were delivered by the promised seed of the woman. His word, “I will put enmity,” was an effectual word of sovereign grace.