It’s Wednesday morning. Early. The house is quiet. You’ve made the tea. You’ve sat down at the table. And your Bible is open at Genesis. Chapter eight.
Because last week, I asked you to do something. I asked you to read Genesis chapter eight before we sat down for this lecture.
If you did it, well done. If you didn’t, you’ve got about three minutes before we get into Genesis nine. You can do it now.
Verse twenty. Verse twenty-one. An altar. A burnt offering. A pleasing aroma. And the Lord saying in His heart, “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake.”
Now. Van Drunen has told you something about Genesis nine. He’s told you that Genesis nine is the formal charter of what he calls the common kingdom. That after the Flood, God set up a new arrangement. Universal. Preservational. Not redemptive. Governed by natural law.
And he says this is where your Monday morning lives. Your work. Your business. Your politics. Your courts of law. All sitting under the Noahic covenant, on natural law autopilot, until Christ returns.
That’s a big claim. That’s the whole foundation of his system. Knock that out and the whole house caves in.
And here is what I am going to show you today. The real foundation is not made of natural law. It’s made of blood. The basement is an altar. The basement is the smell of burning animal flesh going up to God.
Van Drunen built his common kingdom on Genesis nine, pretending Genesis eight wasn’t there.
My name is Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk, and this is Exiles No More.
Let’s go.
What This Argument Will Give You
Here’s what we’ll cover.
First, Van Drunen’s case. The four claims he makes about the Noahic covenant. Stated fairly, in his own framing, so you know exactly what we’re tearing down.
Second, Genesis eight, verses twenty and twenty-one. The verses he skipped. The atoning sacrifice that sits underneath the whole covenant. The thing Willem Ouweneel saw that Van Drunen missed.
Third, Genesis nine, verse one. The mandate. We’re going to put it side by side with Genesis one, verse twenty-eight. And you’re going to see that God hasn’t replaced the dominion mandate. He restated it. Word for word.
Fourth, Genesis nine, verse six. The image of God. The reason for the death penalty for murder. And why that one sentence puts a stake through the heart of natural law as the law of the common kingdom.
And by the end, you’ll have one image in your head that you’ll not be able to shake. A column of smoke. Going up from an altar. In a world that had just been washed. And you’ll know what that smoke means for your Monday morning.
Van Drunen’s Case From Genesis 9
Let me put Van Drunen’s case the way he would put it. In his book, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, chapter four.
He says the Noahic covenant of Genesis eight, verse twenty, through Genesis nine, verse seventeen, is the formal establishment of the common kingdom. I’ll quote him. “God himself established and rules the common kingdom.”
And he gives you four features.
One. It is universal. God makes the covenant with all of humanity, with believer and unbeliever alike. With every living creature. The covenant rainbow appears over everyone, not just over God’s covenant-keeping people.
Two. It is preservational. The covenant preserves the natural and social order. It is not about saving sinners. It is about keeping the world running until the end.
Three. It is governed by natural law. The moral backbone of the common kingdom is not Scripture. It is the law God writes on the human conscience. Available in principle to every man.
Four. It is temporary. It expires at the return of Christ. It is not part of the new creation. It is scaffolding. The scaffolding comes down when the building is finished.
Now if all four of those claims are right, then you really are a citizen of a common kingdom on a Monday morning. You really are operating under a non-redemptive covenant. You really are bound to natural law and not to Scripture in your civic life.
That is a serious system. It is internally tidy. And it has shaped a generation of Reformed pastors and seminary students.
So you have to know it. If you sit down with a man at a coffee shop, and he tells you Genesis nine establishes a common arrangement governed by natural law until Christ comes back, you can’t just shake your head. You have to know what he’s claiming. Because the next move you make is the move that decides whether your faith governs Wednesday morning or just sits on the shelf in your living room.
So. Now we have the claim. Van Drunen says Genesis nine is the charter. Let’s open the Bible. And let’s read what’s actually on the page. Starting with what he never quotes.
Genesis 8:20 and the Smell of Atonement
Picture it. The water has gone down. The Ark has come to rest on a high ridge in the mountains of Ararat. Noah and his family have stepped out onto wet ground. There are no other people anywhere on the earth. No houses. Not a single temple. There are eight souls. Some animals. And a planet that has just been wiped clean.
Now, what is the very first thing Noah does? Does he plant a vine? No, that comes later. Does he build a house? Actually, no. Does he start a business? No.
Genesis eight, verse twenty. “Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.”
An altar. Built first. Before anything else. Clean animals. Clean birds. Burnt offerings. The whole animal consumed. Smoke going up from a brand new world.
Where in the Torah do we find this kind of sacrifice? The Hebrew word is olah. Burnt offering. The animal completely consumed by fire. You’ll find it in Leviticus chapter one, verses three and four. It is the primary atonement offering of the whole Levitical system. The blood deals with sin. The fire consumes the flesh. The smoke goes up. And the Lord smells it.
Verse twenty-one. “And the Lord smelled a soothing aroma.”
Soothing aroma. In the Hebrew, reyach hannichohach. Now keep that phrase in your head, because you are about to see it everywhere.
Exodus chapter twenty-nine, verse eighteen. The ordination sacrifice for Aaron. A soothing aroma to the Lord. Leviticus one, verse nine. The burnt offering. A soothing aroma to the Lord. Leviticus one, verse thirteen. Same again. Leviticus one, verse seventeen. Word for word. Leviticus two, verse two. Leviticus three, verse five. On and on.
That phrase is not a fancy flourish from the writer’s quill. That phrase is the precise legal and judicial formula for a sacrifice that reconciles God to the offerer.
Now look at what the Lord says next, in the rest of verse twenty-one. “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
Read that one more time. The Lord is not promising mercy because man has become good. Man has not become good. The Flood hasn’t fixed the heart. The Lord is promising mercy because of the altar. Because of the burnt offering. Because of the smell of atonement.
Now turn back a page to Van Drunen. He is telling you the Noahic covenant is a “common” arrangement. A non-redemptive arrangement. Governed by natural law. Independent of grace. Unrelated to atonement.
But the foundation he stands on runs wet with blood, and the air he breathes is thick with the smoke of sacrifice.
You cannot read Genesis nine without Genesis eight. You cannot quote the covenant and skip the altar. You cannot lay the cornerstone of a “common kingdom” on the undressed stones of an altar of Jehovah.
Because if the smell of atonement is the reason God does not curse the ground again, then everything that follows in Genesis nine sits on a redemptive foundation. Not a natural one. A redemptive one.
The Noahic covenant cannot be shoehorned into a category called “common”. The Noahic covenant is common grace, yes. It blesses the just and the unjust, the rain falls on the worker and the shirker alike. That’s all real.
But what many call “common grace” is not a common kingdom. “Common grace” is grace. Grace operating in one world. Under one Lord. Through atoning blood. Pointing forward to the Cross of Christ.
Genesis 9:1 Is Genesis 1:28
Now. Open your Bible. Two fingers. One finger in Genesis chapter one. One finger in Genesis chapter nine.
Look at Genesis one, verse twenty-eight. “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Now turn to Genesis nine, verse one. “So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”
That sound familiar? Where have you heard those exact words? Eight chapters earlier. Spoken to whom? To Adam. In a garden. Before the Fall.
Now turn the pages to Genesis nine, verse seven. “And as for you, be fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth and multiply in it.”
That’s the same sentence again. Not once, but twice in one chapter. Word for word from Genesis one.
Now ask yourself. Is God here in the business of replacing the dominion mandate with a new “common” arrangement? Or is God restating the dominion mandate to a brand new humanity in a brand new world? Is He setting up a new and different framework? Is he bolting on a separate “common kingdom” with a different law to His original creation?
No.
He is clearly reissuing the original commission. Be fruitful. Multiply. Fill the earth. Subdue it. Have dominion. That’s the command Adam got. And Noah got the very same orders from headquarters. Twice in one chapter. You got the same marching orders the day you were baptised into Christ, the Last Adam.
This is Rushdoony’s point, and it sits like a boulder in the middle of Van Drunen’s theological boulevard. The dominion mandate has never been revoked. Not at the Fall. Not at the Flood. Not at the Cross. It has been corrupted in fallen man, and often ignored by God’s people, but it has never been removed.
Man is constituted as a dominion-taker. Image and dominion are inseparable. You cannot bear the image of God and not be responsible for exercising your part of the dominion mandate.
Now if Genesis nine is the dominion mandate restated, then Genesis nine is not the charter of a common kingdom. Genesis nine is the charter of the same kingdom. The kingdom of God. In a Flood-cleansed world. With the mandate intact. With the cultural commission pulsing with life and energy.
So if anyone tries to sell you Genesis nine as Noah’s separate, natural-law, religiously-neutral, common-kingdom commission, you ask him to put it side by side with Genesis one, twenty-eight. And watch his face change. Let the Scriptures thunder. They will testify against his claims.
There’s one more verse we have to look at. The verse Van Drunen leans on hardest to make his natural-law case stick. Genesis nine, verse six. Where it looks, on the surface, like God is appealing to a kind of natural reasoning. But we are going to read it carefully. And it is going to do the opposite of what Van Drunen wants it to do.
Genesis 9:6 Is Not Natural Law
Genesis nine, verse six. “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God He made man.”
Now Van Drunen looks at that verse and says: there you go. There’s the common kingdom getting set up. A civil law. The death penalty for murder. Applicable to all humanity. A first principle of natural law and natural justice. He reads it as God appealing to a reason every human conscience can grasp.
But look at what the verse actually says. Look at the reason God gives. “For in the image of God He made man.”
That is not an inference from natural law. That isn’t a deduction from the structure of the cosmos. That isn’t something the pagan conscience reasons up to from raw observation. That is direct, revealed theology from the mouth of God Himself.
Where does an unaided human reasoner get “the image of God”? Where does an unaided human reasoner get the idea that murder is wrong because it strikes at God’s likeness in another? Does he get it from observing nature? Does he get it by watching the motion of the stars in the sky? Does he get it by inspecting the structure of a tree?
No. From the mouth of God alone does this wisdom flow.
Here is a real test of the natural-law theory. Walk into the offices of a modern abortion clinic. Walk into the offices of a Soviet commissar in nineteen-thirty-seven. Walk into the offices of a Roman patrician in the second century who’s decided to expose his newborn daughter on a hillside because she’s surplus to requirements.
And try, with natural law alone, with no Bible, to explain to those men why what they’re doing is murder. Try to do it without the image of God.
You will not get there. Because the moment you take the image of God out of the equation, the value of human life vanishes. It becomes a matter of opinion. A matter of what is useful for the state, or convenient for the parents, or expedient for the empire.
This is exactly Gary North’s point. The moment you base human dignity on autonomous reason and not on God’s revealed Word, you’ve already lost. Because someone will redefine “reason” tomorrow. And then “human” the day after. And there is no foundation under your protest except “well, I think…”.
Genesis nine, six, does not give you a natural-law civil order. Genesis nine, six, gives you a theological civil order. A civil order in which the magistrate carries the sword because man was made in the image of God. That is not common kingdom theology. That is biblical theology, with the magistrate operating under the Word of God, well before Sinai spelled it all out in black and white.
So put it all together. Genesis eight, verse twenty. Atoning sacrifice. Genesis nine, verses one and seven. Dominion mandate restated. Genesis nine, verse six. Civil law grounded in the image of God.
Where is the common kingdom in any of that? It isn’t there.
Van Drunen has read into Genesis nine a category called “common” that the text does not name and does not need. He has built a theological mansion on a verse that says the opposite of what he claims. He has sidestepped the altar. He has skipped past the mandate with his eyes firmly shut. He has stopped his ears to the image of God. And he has slapped a label on his ideas that reads “The truly Reformed view of the world.”
Nice try, but no biscuit. It’s a clever piece of theological word-smithing dressed up in confessional clothes. But it does not stand on the text of Genesis nine. Because Genesis nine has a stony altar that is far too heavy to move and far too massive to ignore. And that altar is smoking.
What You Do This Week
I’m not going to leave you with four chapters of demolition and no instructions. Four specific things. For this week.
Step One. Read Genesis Eight and Nine in One Sitting
Open your Bible. Read both chapters out loud. Slowly.
Pay attention to the altar in chapter eight. Pay attention to the restated mandate in chapter nine, verses one and seven. Pay attention to the image of God in chapter nine, verse six. Pay attention to the rainbow at the end.
And ask yourself one question. Does this sound like the establishment of a “common” arrangement governed by natural law? Or does this sound like the God of redemption restarting His big project for this world, with a world freshly wiped clean like a plate?
You’ll see it for yourself. You don’t need a PhD to smell the smoke.
Step Two. Memorise Genesis 9:6
The whole verse. “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God He made man.”
Get the second half into your bones. “For in the image of God He made man.”
Because that one clause is the answer to every secular theory of human rights. It is the answer to every utilitarian who tells you human life is just complicated chemistry. It is the answer to every common-kingdom theologian who tries to sell you a civil order without the Word of God.
You ask him, “Why is murder wrong?” You watch him fish for an answer that does not require Genesis nine, verse six. He won’t find one.
Step Three. Write Down One Place You’ve Been Told the Bible Doesn’t Apply
This is the mirror turn. Don’t start with Van Drunen this week. Start with yourself.
Where have you let “common kingdom” thinking settle into your own decisions? Have you assumed your work is religiously neutral? Have you assumed your investment choices are religiously neutral? Have you assumed how you vote is just personal preference and natural reason?
Write it down. One area. And ask: what does the altar at Noah’s feet say about that area?
Because if the foundation of the world is atonement, there is no part of your life that runs on a different foundation. Not one inch.
Step Four. Sit With the Next Question
Here it is. We’ve taken the covenantal pillar away from Van Drunen this week. But he has one more. A philosophical pillar. A pillar called “natural law.”
He says natural law is enough to govern the common kingdom. He says Romans chapter two, verses fourteen and fifteen, proves it. Pagans, doing by nature the things in the law. The work of the law written on their hearts. He says that’s the foundation of a moral order that doesn’t need the Bible.
So this week, do this. Open Romans. Read chapter one. Read chapter two. Read them in one sitting. And pay close attention to chapter one, verse eighteen. The bit where Paul says men are “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness”.
Because Van Drunen quotes Romans two and forgets Romans one. Just like he quoted Genesis nine and forgot Genesis eight. It’s a pattern. And next, we’re going to trace that pattern to its conclusion.
The Last Word
Let me leave you with this.
Van Drunen built his common kingdom on Genesis nine. And he acted like Genesis eight wasn’t there.
But the smoke from Noah’s altar will not be ignored. It rises. It reaches the nostrils of God. And it tells the truth that Van Drunen’s whole system is built to hide.
There is no common kingdom. There is one earth. One Lord. And the only highway back to Him is the one that runs through blood.