Bible Trivia | 6 Covenants That Changed Everything | Digging Deeper

Question 1. What sign did God give Noah as His promise never again to destroy the earth with a flood?

Answer: The rainbow (Genesis 9:12–17).

Context & Exhortation: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth" (9:13). 

What stands out is who the sign is actually for. God says the bow will remind Him: "I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant" (9:16). 

The sign isn't primarily there to reassure anxious humans watching storm clouds gather. It's God's own self-imposed reminder of a promise He's making to every living creature, not just to Noah's family.

That's a strange and comforting thought. An eternal, all-knowing God doesn't forget anything, and yet He still chooses to hang a visible, repeatable sign in the sky as a covenant marker, generation after generation, long after everyone who witnessed the flood was gone. Every rainbow since has quietly carried that same promise forward, whether anyone watching remembers its meaning or not. 

God's commitments don't rely on our memory of them to stay true. But He still gives us something to see, again and again, so we don't have to take it purely on faith alone.

It's easy to assume this covenant was only between God and Noah's family, but the text keeps insisting otherwise. Genesis 9:10 explicitly includes "every living creature... of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth" as covenant partners alongside Noah. 

This wasn't a narrow family arrangement. God bound Himself to the wellbeing of the entire created order, not just the humans who happened to survive the flood.

Question 2. What physical sign did God establish as the mark of His covenant with Abraham and his descendants?

Answer: Circumcision (Genesis 17:10–14).

Context & Exhortation: God had already promised Abram descendants as numerous as the stars back in chapter 15. By chapter 17, He renames him Abraham and gives the covenant a permanent, physical mark: every male among his descendants was to be circumcised on the eighth day (17:12), a sign carried in the body itself, not just believed in the mind.

It's worth noticing how personal and permanent this sign was. Not a ritual performed occasionally, not a phrase repeated at festivals. It was  something carried in the flesh for life, visible evidence of belonging to a covenant people. 

Paul later argues in Romans that the mark itself was never really the point; it was a seal of a faith Abraham already had before he was ever circumcised (Romans 4:11).

That distinction matters. The sign pointed to something real underneath it — trust in God's promise — rather than replacing the need for that trust. 

Family, outward markers of faith, whatever they look like in our own life, were always meant to point toward something inward and real. They were never supposed to be substitutes.

The covenant sign wasn't restricted to Abraham's direct bloodline either. Genesis 17:12–13 specifically includes servants bought with money and anyone born in his household, insiders and outsiders alike, under the same requirement. 

From the very beginning, this covenant sign was never meant to be a strictly genetic marker. It was already reaching past bloodline into household and belonging.

Question 3. God promised David that his throne would be established forever through his descendants. What is this promise commonly called, and where is it recorded?

Answer: The Davidic covenant, recorded in 2 Samuel 7:12–16.

Context & Exhortation: David wants to build God a permanent house — a temple, instead of the portable tabernacle Israel had used since the wilderness. 

God's answer, through the prophet Nathan, flips the offer around entirely: instead of David building God a house, God will build David a house — a dynasty. "Thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established for ever" (7:16).

This promise gets tested badly by the time we reach the end of 2 Kings. David's royal line is dragged into exile, the throne sits empty, and Judah's kings largely fail one after another. 

On the surface, the promise looks broken. Yet Luke's Gospel opens with an angel telling Mary that her son will be given "the throne of his father David" and that "of his kingdom there shall be no end" (Luke 1:32–33). This language was a direct quote from this same covenant, centuries later, fulfilled in a way nobody in David's own lifetime could have anticipated. 

See, a promise can look completely dead for generations and still be entirely on schedule. How? Because God's timeline and our sense of "too late" are not the same.

Solomon leaned directly on this promise when dedicating the temple: "the LORD... hath with his hand fulfilled that which he spake with his mouth to David my father" (1 Kings 8:15). 

Within a single generation, David's son was already treating this covenant as a settled, provable fact, not just a hopeful prophecy. 

We don't have to wait centuries to see a promise start proving itself. Sometimes the very next generation gets to watch it happen.

Question 4. Which prophet foretold a "new covenant" God would one day make, writing His law directly on people's hearts instead of on tablets of stone?

Answer: Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31–34).

Context & Exhortation: Jeremiah writes this in the middle of some of the darkest material in his entire book — the old covenant broken, judgment already falling, Jerusalem's destruction either happening or imminent. 

And right there, God speaks through him about something entirely new: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts… for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more" (31:33–34).

The old covenant, given at Sinai, was written on stone and required constant external teaching and enforcement: "know the LORD," people had to keep telling each other (31:34). This new covenant would be internal. Not a law you had to be taught from the outside repeatedly, but one actually written into who you are.

The writer of Hebrews later quotes this exact passage in full, arguing that Jesus is the one who fulfills it (Hebrews 8:8–12). A promise of internal transformation, spoken into a moment of total external collapse. 

Sometimes the clearest word of hope arrives exactly when everything visible looks like it's falling apart.

The old system required constant re-teaching: parents telling children, neighbors reminding each other, generation after generation, "know the LORD." 

Jeremiah's new covenant promises something different: "they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest" (31:34), without that chain of secondhand instruction being the only way in. It's a promise of direct, personal knowledge of God, not knowledge borrowed secondhand from someone else's relationship with Him.

Question 5. In Genesis 15, God made a covenant with Abram through an unusual ceremony involving animals cut in half. What did this ritual mean?

Answer: It was an ancient covenant-cutting ceremony. Normally, both parties would walk between the pieces together. Here, only God did — appearing as a smoking furnace and a flaming torch, passing through by Himself. God bound Himself, not Abram, to keep the promise (Genesis 15:9–18).

Context & Exhortation: In the ancient world, this kind of ceremony was normally performed by both parties to a covenant. Walking between the split carcasses meant something like, "may what happened to these animals happen to me if I break this promise." 

Both sides typically walked through together, each accepting the same risk.

Genesis 15 doesn't work that way. Abram falls into "a deep sleep" and "an horror of great darkness" (15:12), and it's God alone, represented by the smoking furnace and burning lamp, who passes between the pieces (15:17). 

Abram never walks through at all. God takes on the entire weight of the oath by Himself.

This was a one-sided covenant from the very beginning, and Abram wasn't even conscious for the moment it was sealed. The promise never depended on Abram's performance to hold it together. The promise depended only on God's willingness to bind Himself to it. 

That's worth remembering whenever our own faithfulness feels shaky. The covenant was never resting on our grip on God to begin with. It rests on His grip on us.

This one-sided pattern doesn't stay unique to Abraham. Centuries later, at the Last Supper, Jesus takes a cup and calls it "the new testament in my blood" (Luke 22:20). This reflects exactly this kind of covenant-sealing act, except this time God doesn't pass between divided animals. He becomes the sacrifice Himself. 

The same principle holds across both covenants: God has always been willing to bear the cost of the promise personally, rather than requiring us to carry a weight we couldn't.

Question 6. Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a tiny seed that grows into a surprisingly large tree. What kind of seed?

Answer: A mustard seed (Matthew 13:31–32; also Mark 4:30–32 and Luke 13:18–19).

Context & Exhortation: This parable isn't naming a sixth covenant. It's Jesus explaining how every covenant we've just looked at actually works. Noah's rainbow, Abraham's circumcision, David's throne, Jeremiah's promise of a law written on the heart. Every one of them started the same way this seed does: small, quiet, easy to miss if you weren't looking closely.

"Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof" (13:32). 

Jesus isn't describing the biologically largest seed available. He's making a point about scale — something almost too small to notice becomes large enough to shelter everyone who comes looking for it.

That image of birds nesting in branches wasn't new either. Ezekiel and Daniel both used it for enormous kingdoms sheltering whole nations (Ezekiel 17:23, Daniel 4:12). Jesus borrows that same prophetic picture. But He attaches it to the smallest seed available, not an already-towering cedar. He's saying the kingdom will reach just as far, even though it starts out looking like nothing at all.

Set next to the five covenants already covered today, that's the real point of this parable. None of them arrived with visible, overwhelming force. A bow in a cloud. A mark in the flesh. A shepherd's unlikely promise. A law rewritten on the inside instead of stone. 

Every covenant God has ever made with His people started exactly the size of a mustard seed. And every single one of them is still growing.

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