Imagine that you get free reign to design the plans for your dream home. You get to pick the kind of rooms you have, you get to decide the layout for where those rooms go, and you get to determine all the great things that will fill those rooms. It is an opportunity to design exactly the sort of home you want.

Now, given all the work and affection you put into that design, it would be wildly frustrating if your contractor accepted those plans and then built a tent instead. You had determined the plans for what should be built. Those plans were what you wanted and what you knew would be best for you and your family. What right does the contractor have to disregard what you have designed and decided to be best for you?

The regulative principle of worship is a Reformed doctrine teaching that we are to do in worship only that which God has commanded in his Word. It is a theological practice reflecting the same sentiment above, that the designer of the house should be heeded in his designs. Since the worshipping community belongs to God according to his plan of salvation, we should follow his blueprint for what that community should be like.

This essay argues that God’s covenant with Noah provides another instance which demonstrates how the regulative principle guides the covenant community in executing the means of grace. In Genesis 6:9–22, we see how God designed the blueprint for what his covenant community was supposed to look like as part of his rescue plan for Noah and his family. The bulk of this passage outlines how God will aid Noah in the coming difficulty through the blessings of the covenant, as well as how Noah is supposed to live within God’s design for that covenant community. In this situation, God was the architect who appointed Noah as his contractor. He delegated the task of assembling the ark to his servant after he had designed the plans for what the ark needed to be. As we will consider, this principle of God designing his covenant community under Noah has profound significance for how we should think about how God’s new covenant community should look.

Noah’s Need for Rescue

To see the regulative principle at work, we need context for why Noah was meant to build the ark. Genesis 6:9–22 reveals that God’s response to sin has two sides. The first side appears in Genesis 6:11–13:

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”

One side of God’s response to sin is judgment.

In Genesis 6, sin had become so prevalent that God would no longer tolerate it. From this we learn that God cannot give sin a pass or neglect dealing with it. We see his just character shining through such that he cannot let evil stand forever. We ought to find encouragement in that truth every time we are discouraged about the world and whatever evils we see at work around us.

Thankfully, the other side of God’s response to sin is revealed in verses 17–18: “For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.” Although God must judge sin, the other part of his response to sin is grace. Though condemnation is coming, God will have mercy. He showered that mercy on Noah and his family by making this covenant with Noah to save him and his family from the coming flood.

Noah’s Means of Grace and the Regulative Principle

The opening illustration about designing your house highlights that you would have good reasons for designing its specifications just the way you would want. Undoubtedly, you know why you need the number of rooms you need and why you need them laid out the way you decided. The architect is best placed to know why his designs are the way they are.

We ought to read God’s instruction about the ark in that light. In Genesis 6:14–16, God details for Noah exactly how to build the ark, naming the precise kind of wood to use and the specific measurements for its construction. When we read those directions in light of the context, we see how fitting the thorough instruction is. God knows the sort of difficulty that is coming, so of course he has the best insight into what sort of boat will be best suited to endure the impending storm.

We would be silly to think God was being overly prescriptive or being too picky by giving these directions to Noah. If you knew that a flood massive enough to kill every person on earth was coming and God told you to build a boat, you would rightly rejoice to have detailed instruction for how to build the boat that would most effectively help you survive this catastrophic event. The measurements and instructions are a mercy, not an intrusion.

We grab hold of how this account helps us think about the church by seeing that those in the ark were God’s covenant community. The ark was the church of Noah’s day. The ark itself was a means of grace whereby that church understood and experienced God’s grace. As much as it was best for God to be the architect telling Noah how the covenant community should be designed, we must realize the same remains true for the church in the new covenant.

Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 3:10–17 that God is the architect of his church, trusting the apostles to oversee its construction. Just as it happened with Noah and the ark, God wrote the blueprints for how his church should look today and trusted his servants to build it. Noah held the apostolic role of his day, and new covenant servants are just as responsible to follow God’s design for how his covenant community should look. Just like a contractor should not build a tent instead of your dream home, so we should not turn the church into anything other than what God’s Word directs us.

We should not view it as overly intrusive to look to Scripture for the details of how we arrange the church and our worship today. Just like God knew best what sort of boat would provide safety and rescue from coming judgment, he knows best what will most effectively distribute grace to his people today.

We then ought to be glad for as much guidance from God’s Word as we can get about how the church, as God’s new covenant community, should look. We should be glad to know that he has ordered it around the means of grace. We are glad that he has given us the church as his explicitly marked people. It was very obvious under Noah who the covenant community was. All its members took part in its means of grace as they rode safely within the ark. The members of the church under Noah were very obviously marked as distinct from the world.

In the same way, we too are glad that we have church membership in the new covenant and so are able to gather around the means of grace. Just as the requirements for designing the covenant community under Noah (the specific direction for building the ark) served to help God’s people, so any requirements for how the new covenant community should look in its order and worship also serve to help and protect us.

Means of Grace unto Christ

We rightly talk about Noah’s ark as a means of grace because it taught about salvation being provided in Christ. Judgment is coming at the end of history, just like the flood was coming in Noah’s day. God’s mercy did not remove that judgment in Noah’s time. It did, however, shield his people from that judgment.

In 1 Peter 3:18–22, the apostle explains how the ark was a type of Christ and our redemption in him.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.

The details of this passage are tricky and beyond this essay’s scope to explore. What is clear is that Christ’s substitutionary death has some relation to Noah’s ark, especially since Noah’s experience of the flood corresponds to how we are baptized into Christ for salvation.¹

The connection Peter made between Christ and Noah’s ark explains why we would talk about Noah’s ark as a means of grace. As Noah and his family rode safely within the ark, they endured through God’s cataclysmic act of judgment. As we belong to Christ, which is symbolized and sealed by baptism, we too are guaranteed safe passage through God’s cataclysmic judgment on the last day. Respectively, we must remember that God put these things in place ahead of time as types precisely to teach his people then and now about Christ and his work. For Noah and his family, the ark taught them what the Savior would do for all believers, thus functioning as their covenant community’s means of grace unto Christ. Westminster Confession 8.6 helpfully explains this typological connection:

Although the work of redemption was not actually wrought by Christ till after his incarnation, yet the virtue, efficacy, and benefits thereof were communicated unto the elect, in all ages successively from the beginning of the world, in and by those promises, types, and sacrifices, wherein he was revealed, and signified to be the seed of the woman which should bruise the serpent’s head; and the Lamb slain from the beginning of the world; being yesterday and today the same, and forever. (emphasis added)

As Peter noted, Noah’s ark was a type pointing to Christ and, in that respect, was the means of grace that applied Christ and his benefits to everyone of that covenantal epoch who used it with true faith. Its role as a means of grace is, of course, why the regulative principle properly describes the ark and God’s detailed program to construct it.

The same still holds true in the new covenant. We too have means of grace unto Christ. Our use of the means of grace should be as close as possible to God’s revealed instruction for how his covenant community should organize and execute God’s ordinances that bring us to Christ. In every covenant, God has revealed how we might receive Christ by faith through the means of grace. In every covenant, God has also provided instruction about how those means of grace should be implemented to work according to his will for our worship and preservation.

Note

1. For exegetical defense of this essay’s interpretation of 1 Peter 3:18–22, see Harrison Perkins, Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2024), 305–8.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Harrison Perkins

  

  Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, associate online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction.

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