In Genesis 1:5, God began to create, first calling for light, which He divided from the darkness. “So the evening and the morning were the first day.” Then God split the waters, some above the firmament and some below. And God called the firmament Heaven. Then He gathered the waters under the heavens and called for dry land to appear from it and he called it Earth. Then He called for Earth to bring forth grass, herbs and fruit trees, with fruit and seeds in them; this would feed His creation. Everything  had seeds so it could reproduce itself. Then He made the sun and  moon, to rule the day and rule the night. He made stars also. He was getting the Earth ready for His most important creation: man. Then He called for the waters to abound with living creatures, and told the creatures to fill the waters. He created the birds and told them to multiply on the Earth. Then He called for the Earth, the dry land, to bring forth animals and beasts. He did all of this by SPEAKING what he wanted.

Then God said “Let Us make Man in Our image…let them have dominion over the fish…the birds…over all the earth and over every creeping thing…on the earth.” Genesis 1:26

How was man supposed to exercise that dominion? There was brute force, but there was also another way…today we call this prayer. Hint: God spoke words to create everything we see in nature. Those things came from the invisible realm. (Hebrews 11:3) God said let Us make man in Our image…etc. This fact makes our words very important.

Then God blessed the man species and told him to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over every living thing on the earth. That was God’s plan. This mandate has never changed. Men are still supposed to fill the earth, subdue it and have dominion. This purpose stands. All living creatures were given the fruit of the trees and the green herbs for food. All of this He did in six days. Then He rested on the seventh day.

Man was put into a garden (Eden) to tend and keep it. Everything was provided and everything was perfect. Adam gave names to all the animals. God then formed a female partner for Adam so that he would have companionship and to produce offspring and fill the Earth.

The world plunged into darkness

In Genesis Chapter 3, we see the temptation and fall of Mankind into sin and confusion The perfection of Eden was lost as Adam disobeyed the admonition of God and gave away his privileged position, his mandate to have dominion over the Earth. Adam gave his own assignment to the devil. Dominion was the assignment God had given only to him and Adam gave it away. He was able to continue to procreate, but his progeny would now be born under the curse of confusion and the evil rulership that Adam had plunged the earth and mankind in submission to by his disobedience. Because Adam and Eve had bowed their knee to the devil, that evil spirit now had the right and the ability to keep mankind “in the dark,” so to speak. The devil had taken over the lease that men had of the earth, a sublease of sorts. Mankind no longer had the light of God to help them. Adam had chosen darkness over obedience to His Creator. The light in the spirits of men had gone out. He was now ruled by sin, evil, darkness of mind, and satan. Without the light of God, the world is an evil, dark place.

• Romans 5:12 “Therefore, just as through one man, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned. (Study Romans 5)

God’s desire was for Heaven to be on Earth

It was always God’s desire to duplicate the perfection of Eden (or one could say Heaven) on the earth. Mankind, working in partnership with God, was given the authority (the power, the jurisdiction, the charge, the rule, the sovereignty), and the mandate to rule the earth in the perfection of Heaven. It was to be a co-rulership. But men need the Spirit of God in order to think and rule properly.

In Genesis 4:25, we see that men began to call upon the name of God.  “And as for Seth, to him also a son was born; and he named him Enosh. Then men began to call on the name of the Lord.” (235 years after Adam was made and put in the Garden, men on the earth began to call upon the name of the Lord. See the Genesis 5 genealogy.)

Genesis 5 recounts the generations after Adam and how long they lived. Lamech was the father of Noah. When Lamech named Noah, he said “this one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.” Genesis 5:28. During the lifetime of Noah, we see that God made a covenant with him. Noah gave God his attention (most likely because of all the evil on the earth) and God saw a man He could work with. Genesis 6 relates how dark things had become on the earth, with the “sons of God” (the fallen angels) coming and mating with women on the earth and creating giants. The DNA of men was being changed.

God began to make covenants with men

So God began to make covenants with men so that He could do things in the earth. He needed agreement with a human who had been born here. Much like a landlord leases his property to a renter. There are limits to what a landlord will allow, but basically the renter can live there and do as he pleases within those limits. God is the landlord and man is the renter or leaseholder in this deal. But the devil has no self control and evil can and does proliferate.

A covenant is a contract, a treaty, a pact, a deal, a bargain, agreement, a pledge, a promise, a guarantee, a commitment.  (Read the sentence, substituting each word for real impact, ie..) God began to  make treaties or contracts with men…to partner with them. It was the same kind of partnership that God had with Adam before he fell.

In Genesis 6:18-22, after God told Noah to build an ark and how to build it, as well as telling him what was coming, we find God saying to Noah, “But I will establish My covenant (My agreement, My contract) with you; and you shall go into the ark—you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you….Thus Noah did, according to all that God commanded him, so he did. Cf. Genesis 7:5-7, (As a side note, this is also a picture of what the prophet Amos referred to in Amos 3:7 “Surely the Lord God does nothing unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets.”)

We know that Noah and his family and pairs of animals went into the ark and were all saved, as the fountains of the deep broke up and the firmament fell in, flooding the entire earth. After the flood ended and the earth was dried out, Noah came out of the ark and built an altar to the Lord. He, his family, and the animals began to repopulate the earth.

God reiterates the agreement that He had made with Adam in Genesis 9, telling Noah to subdue the earth and have dominion, and also promising that He would never again flood the earth with water. He gave a sign (a manifestation, demonstration; token, evidence, or proof) of this promise: the rainbow. God also gave Mankind permission to eat living creatures as part of his diet along with the green vegetation, but the only prohibition was to abstain from ingesting the blood of the animals.

Noah and his progeny began to multiply on the newly cleansed earth. See those genealogies and the lands they settled in Genesis Chapter 10.