Often times people will object to a covenant between God and Adam in the garden because the word itself is not present in Genesis 1–3. However, the absence of a word does not mean the absence of the thing itself. If I were to describe to you a rectangle field with two goal posts on each end, what am I describing to you? A football field. I did not have to say the word for you to know what I was describing.
The biblical writers often assume a biblical and redemptive literacy. In other words, they often make connections, allusions, and describe things without making explicit what they are doing because they assume their readers are familiar with the story of Scripture. Furthermore, when God makes a covenant with David, in 2 Samuel 7, the word covenant is nowhere used. But later revelation in the Old Testament tells us that what we see in 2 Samuel 7 is, indeed, God making a covenant with David. We see another example of this principle in the Genesis 2:4–17. Adam was a…
