The Covenant of Abraham

The covenant we see between Abraham and God is unique among the covenants that we have looked at so far. Both the Covenant of Grace with Adam and Eve, and the Covenant of Noah involving mercy, restoration, and fruition are each mad with the whole of humanity. God promises to redeem all of mankind, God promises to spare all of mankind, but here, in this point, we see a narrower approach to God’s dealings with humankind. Instead of claims relating to the whole of humanity, God instead begins to call out a particular person, Abram. Like an hourglass which contracts towards a single point, before expanding back out again, this narrowing focus that we see here lays out the trajectory that we will see throughout the rest of the Old Testament, God’s concern with all mankind has changed to a selective focus on a particular group of people, those who are the descendants of Abraham.

God begin’s by calling Abram out of his home and away from his people, and into a far away land that Abram has no clue where it is. Beginning in we see God’s first interactions with Abram. “12 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him.”

Something worth pointing out here, Abram doesn't know who God is, he doesn’t know Yahweh, doesn’t know his stories. He is simply an idol worshiper who God selected out of the land and revealed himself to. Many of the things we see Abram do or struggle with in the following passages are as a result of the people he was born to, their customs and ways of life. God takes each of those moments turns them into moments of instruction. Showing Abram that the God who called him out of the land of Ur is not like the Gods he was accustomed to serving. Abram did not have to follow rituals, or manufacture his own safety or security, rather, God would demonstrate his own power and providence through Abram. This is why God says that He will make Abram into a great nation, that he will bless and curse, and that he would give him the land. In response, Abram does what he probably saw countless other people do in his homeland before him, he builds an altar, but where this is different, where this is significant, is that he is building an altar to a God who lives, to a god who is powerful and has declared that he will work on his behalf. Abram is not trying to beseech him, he is not trying to vie for his attention from among Yahweh's other worshippers, he is simply acknowledging what the LORD has revealed about what he will do and Abram’s place in it.

But this is not the limit of God’s covenant with Abram, God gets even more specific, and even more personal in “After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” 2 But Abram said, “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” 4 But the word of the LORD came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” 5 He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” 6 And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .

7 Then he said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” 8 But he said, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9 He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. 11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. 13 Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; 14 but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16 And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,”

Here we see Abram has followed God’s leading out to Canaan, but has arrived at a rather difficult predicament, while God has declared that he will be made into a great nation, he is currently lacking in the children department. It is hard to become a great nation if the span of that nation is only one generation. In a moment of authenticity and desperation similar to those that we read of in the psalms, Abram cries out to the Lord how will you provide for me if I have no heir, my fortune is going to go to one that is not of my own blood, and my line is going to be erased. God begins this chapter by saying that he will protect Abram and reward him, but Abram is most concerned with God’s provision of a future. So the Lord promises him an heir, one that will lead to an innumerable amount of decedents. And while we see this as a foretelling of the Church, and that through it all would come to the Father, imagine for a second, being alone, in a place far away from your life here in Western New York, without an heir or a future to speak of, and then God tells you to look up, and try to count the stars, that from you, one person, God would bring an innumerable people to his name. But as I pointed out earlier, Abram was not instructed in the ways of God, at this point no one was. The attributes that we toss out so easily, all-knowing, all-powerful, ever-present, never-changing, these are all a result of the compilation of Scripture, years of studying it, and even still, we don’t even have the slimmest understanding of what it all means together, what it means to be God.

So Abram asks for something I am sure all of us have at some point in our lives, assurance. Abram is aware of God’s promises, but he needs something to hold onto. So god enters into a covenant with Abram, tying his promises into the way that he will deal with Abram from then on. He commands Abram to fetch five animals and cut them in two, this is the reason the Israelite term is to “cut a covenant” it explicitly involves the shedding of blood. But God does not stop there, he then reveals to Abram what will happen to his descendants, affirming that they would take the land, but letting him know that it will only be after their enslavement in a strange land. God then proceeds to pass between the two halves of the animals, in the form of a firepot and torch. This scene is also significant. as well as historical knowledge of this form of covenant makes the imagery very clear. Passing between the two halves of the animals meant making the statement that if the terms of the contract were broken, may the same thing be done to me. But Abram did not pass between the animals, rather God goes alone, the torch signifying the presence of God, the firepot signifying safety and provision, and the fact that he went alone, signifying both that he would not fail, but also that he would not destroy Abram or his descendants for their failure to uphold their end of the covenant. God established this covenant in mercy, understanding that mankind would not be able to remain fully devoted to him, that heir hearts were divided, and knowing that they would turn and fail time and time again. On that day, the Lord made his covenant. And, as was stated previously in the passage, Abram’s faith was counted as righteousness, It is by faith in God’s promises that Abram is saved. Joyce G. Baldwin makes this statement when referring to the centrality of faith in Abrams walk with God. “This remarkable prophecy sets the human life-span in perspective. Even the man whom the Lord singles out to bless in a special way, and to make the father of his people, will see little of the fulfilment of the promise, first made directly to him. Nor can he contribute anything towards its fulfilment. He and his wife do not even have children, yet all around him are other people’s children in abundance. The discrepancy between his present plight and the word of God could hardly have been greater, nor his helplessness more marked. But faith requires testing if it is to grow. Even more fundamentally, faith can be exercised only when its focus is unseen; once its object materializes faith ‘vanishes into sight’, and God, who has called forth faith, is proved faithful.”

This remarkable prophecy sets the human life-span in perspective. Even the man whom the Lord singles out to bless in a special way, and to make the father of his people, will see little of the fulfilment of the promise, first made directly to him. Nor can he contribute anything towards its fulfilment. He and his wife do not even have children, yet all around him are other people’s children in abundance. The discrepancy between his present plight and the word of God could hardly have been greater, nor his helplessness more marked. But faith requires testing if it is to grow. Even more fundamentally, faith can be exercised only when its focus is unseen; once its object materializes faith ‘vanishes into sight’, and God, who has called forth faith, is proved faithful.

Joyce G. Baldwin, The Message of : From Abraham to Joseph, ed. J. A. Motyer and Derek Tidball, The Bible Speaks Today (England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), 55.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .

The faith that Abram showed, the faith of a man who knew relatively nothing about the God he followed compared to what is revealed to us today, had faith that God was leading him somewhere, had faith that God would be true, had faith that God was great and powerful enough to make this all happen. One of the greatest examples of faith that I have heard of was told to me by a man that I met at the Canton Christian Home next door to Malone. The man’s name was John Osborn, and despite being at 94 years of age still carried with him a fiery spirit and a cheerful demeanor. In our conversation he sometimes made mention of his wife, the two of them were together up until she passed a few years ago. Pastor Moody asked if he would tell me the story of how he had asked his wife to marry him. It was with a twinkle in his eye and a slight smile that he began the story of how he had been in the Marines, on the west coast during World War two, all the while writing letters back to his sweetheart who lived on the east coast out near Maryland. Those letters were what kept him going during the war, and as soon as the war was won and he was discharged he grabbed his motorcycle out from storage, bought a ring, and determined to drive across the United States to ask this girl to marry him. Starting on the coast of California he began the trek across mountains, deserts, and the endless cornfields of the Midwest until he finally pulled up outside her house. Coast to Coast, twenty-eight hundred miles, and here he stood outside he parents home, but when he went to knock on the door, he realized that no-one was home, after asking around he finally was told that she and her family had gone off to Massachusetts to vacation and had been given the address to where they were staying. He then drove up, through several bad rainstorms, and with a few mechanical failures, until he arrived at the hotel where they were staying. Finding her sitting on the deck, and after the excitement of seeing him, he got down on one knee and asked her to marry him, her answer, I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it.... he laughed when he told me this part, but I don’t think he was laughing then, after all that not even a yes or a no? But it wasn’t a no, so he waited, each morning he met her at the door and asked if sh had made a decision, and it wasn’t until the third day after he asked her that she finally looked at him and said yes. The two of them were married for nearly 70 years, and it all started with a journey, and the faith that the person would be there.

This story was told to me by someone who deeply loved his wife, the two of them faithful through all the journeys life took them on, and to this day smiles and laughs when he talks about their time together. I believe that that is one of the most precious things on earth, but how much more precious, how much more joyful, and how much more beautiful are the stories that we have to tell of our Lord, the one who has been faithful to us from the beginning, the one who has never abandoned us or left us wanting, who through each step of the journey, from the creation of the world to the labour of the cross, deemed it all worth going through for each one of us. The beauty of faithfulness is displayed most clearly through God’s everlasting faithfulness to us.

This story was told to me by someone who deeply loved his wife, the two of them faithful through all the journeys life took them on, and to this day smiles and laughs when he talks about their time together. I believe that that is one of the most precious things on earth, but how much more precious, how much more joyful, and how much more beautiful are the stories that we have to tell of our Lord, the one who has been faithful to us from the beginning, the one who has never abandoned us or left us wanting, who through each step of the journey, from the creation of the world to the labour of the cross, deemed it all worth going through for each one of us. The beauty of faithfulness is displayed most clearly through God’s everlasting faithfulness to us.

This is not the end of Abraham’s Covenant however, God is not through with testing him, nor is Abram always as faithful as he demonstrates here and now. In we see a much older Abram, 99 years of age, and God comes to him agian, beginning in verse one: When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. 2 And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” 3 Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, 4 “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 5 No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 6 I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. 8 And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.” 9 God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. 10 This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. 13 Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. 14 Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.” 15 God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” 17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” 18 And Abraham said to God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” 19 God said, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. 20 As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. 21 But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year.” 22 And when he had finished talking with him, God went up from Abraham”

9 God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. 10 This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. 13 Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. 14 Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.” 15 God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” 17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” 18 And Abraham said to God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” 19 God said, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. 20 As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. 21 But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year.” 22 And when he had finished talking with him, God went up from Abraham”

15 God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” 17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” 18 And Abraham said to God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” 19 God said, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. 20 As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. 21 But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year.” 22 And when he had finished talking with him, God went up from Abraham”

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .

The first thing God says to Abram, is that he declares a new name for himself, I am El Shaddai, God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless. The God who Abram had followed all these years now came before him, revealing the power he commanded and wearing it as a title. This is not the only new name in this segment, however, as Abram has his name changed to Abraham, from exalted father, to father of multitudes; and Sarai is changed to Sarah, from striving one, to Princess. God reveals in this time, the sign of their covenant, the first of the separations that will make them a peculiar people in the land, but also demonstrates the immediacy of his blessing, He is their almighty God, Abraham will be the Father of many, and Sarah, no longer striving, has arrived to her rightful position. They will be established. If the first part of Gods covenant with Abraham was meant to be a private demonstration of his faithfulness, this is a corporate one, this is where God’s dealings with the House of Abraham are made public for all to see, and this is where they begin, even more so to be God’s set apart people.

So my question is this, where does God have you going in your life, where does he have you journeying, whether in his word, where you work, or who you spend your time with, God is guiding you. So what are we doing where we are? How are we encountering his will for our lives in prayer, in Scripture, and in service to others? And how prepared are we to serve a God who is more faithful, more powerful, and more caring than we could ever be, will we surrender to him, will we follow him? Let us close in prayer.