The grim reality of Genesis 6 is that the rebellion precipitating creation-wide judgment involves all humanity. Judgment looms for everyone—except for one man. Amid the spiraling wickedness of humanity and God’s solemn intention to bring judgment on that wickedness, Genesis 6:8 declares, “But Noah found grace [חֵן; khen] in the eyes of the LORD.” In a humanity of pervasive wickedness, Noah found grace. This seemingly obvious context is critical to a right understanding of the Noahic covenant. In Genesis 3:15, God had promised that He would sovereignly intervene and turn the enmity in the hearts of some men and women. Rather than being at enmity with Him, God would make certain people to be at enmity with the serpent. God has fulfilled that promise with Noah.

STEPHEN G. MYERS, GOD TO US – COVENANT THEOLOGY IN SCRIPTURE, 193.

Finally, the promise of Genesis 3:15 has implications for Christians’ personal lives of holiness and sanctification because in that verse the gracious enmity between God’s people and sin is seen to be one of the greatest gifts God has given to His people. Often, this is counterintuitive. For a Christian, having to struggle with sin often is seen to be bad. But Genesis 3:15 makes clear that there ought to be enmity between God’s people and sin. If there is no enmity, it is not because there is no sin around the individual or in the individual. There is no enmity because there is no enmity. And if there is no enmity, there is little evidence of a gracious work in the heart of that individual. When a woman’s enmity against sin appears to diminish and her struggle with sin abates and she seems to be at peace, it is precisely then that there is cause for grave concern. God’s people from Eden to the consummation are marked by, and torn by, enmity against the evil one and all of his ways.

STEPHEN G. MYERS, GOD TO US – COVENANT THEOLOGY IN SCRIPTURE, 187.

“When a preacher avoids concrete ethical applications in his sermons,” comments John Frame, “he is not preaching the full counsel of God, and he is not adequately edifying his people.”

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching, 138.

The analogy of Scripture should be reflected not merely in our hermeneutics, but also in our homiletics. . . . This balance between the explication and the application of the Word of God is, we believe, irrefutably established by the analogy of Scripture and powerfully confirmed by the history of Reformed preaching.

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching, 144.

Sin is not simply the rejection of God’s law; it is the rejection of the God who holds out that law as the condition of fellowship with Him.

STEPHEN G. MYERS, GOD TO US – COVENANT THEOLOGY IN SCRIPTURE, 182.

Scholasticism was not something practiced only by “rigid” Reformed theologians; Lutheran and Roman Catholic authors also made ample use of this theological method after the Reformation. In that respect, scholasticism was an ecumenical enterprise. Secondly, scholasticism was not used only in the seventeenth century. The entire Western church had done scholastic theology since the eleventh century. A scholastic approach was also applied in other academic disciplines. The term “scholasticism” thus should not so much be associated with content but with method, an academic form of argumentation and disputation.

Willem J. van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 14.

The Scriptures declare that there is a government jure Divino in the visible church of Christ now under the New Testament. This is evident from 1 Corinthians 12:28: “God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers . . . helps, governments,” in which place these things are plain.

Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici, 54.

The presbyterial government (truly so called) is not in nature any invention of man, but an ordinance of Christ; nor is the execution of it to be stated by the will of man, but only by the sure word of prophecy, the sacred Scriptures.

Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici, 44.

The fact that liberal theology with its naive Pelagianism has dangerously over-emphasized the concept of example does not mean that there is no role nor place for the concept of example in Reformed preaching.

John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching: A Theology of Sacred Rhetoric, 128.

Old Testament examples are New Testament instructions.

From John Owen’s Hebrews: The Epistle of Warning quoted in John Carrick, The Imperative of Preaching: A Theology of Sacred Rhetoric, 122.