God’s Covenant (4)

Now the LORD had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father’s house,
To a land that I will show you.
I will make you a great nation;
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Genesis 12.1-3

A continuing covenant
God’s covenant with Noah, being simply an extension of His covenant with Adam and Eve, continued to support the “roadway” of divine revelation unto the days of Abraham. With Abraham, God’s covenant begins to take a more definite shape, based on a set of promises God made to the patriarch concerning His intentions for His people.

The promises of God to Abraham are precious and very great – so great and precious that they prompted this man to leave his prosperous and familiar way of life to go to a distant and unfamiliar place, there to wait on the Lord to fulfill His Word.

God established His covenant with Abraham, as He declared in Genesis 17.2, and we can see that this is the same covenant as has existed from the very beginning. It is inaugurated by an act of God’s grace – calling a man out of wealth and idolatry by holding out to him the promise of life and peace. It requires certain actions of obedience on Abraham’s part, which were to demonstrate his faith and trust in God. The first promise of God to Abraham is the promise of blessing, just as He had blessed Adam and Eve and Noah. The first act of Abraham in reminding himself of God’s grace and promise was to build an altar and sacrifice unto the Lord.

All this looks very familiar because all Abraham was doing was situating himself squarely within the covenant God was entering with him, the same covenant He had entered with Adam and Eve and Noah, only, once again, adjusted for changes in the historical and cultural situation.

The six-fold promise of blessing
God made six specific promises to Abraham (Abram), although we should probably see that all these promises are simply temporal manifestations of the one overarching promise of life and peace with God.

God said He would make Abraham a great nation – many people, extending through many generations. He promised to bless them and thus establish them in a right relationship with Himself. God intended to give this people a great name, that is, to make them influential in the earth, and thus a people who would exercise dominion in certain important ways. He promised to make them a blessing to other people, a channel through which others would come to know the covenant privileges of God, and to protect and provide for them at all times. Finally, God pointed Abraham down the long roadway of time, and promised to bless all families of the earth, both those of the present and those to come, through the relationship He is entering with the patriarch.

These precious and very great promises became a cornerstone for Israel’s experience throughout the period of the Old Covenant. Even into the New Testament, we find the Jews clinging to their descent from Abraham as the defining element of their national identity and hopes. God was promising life and peace to Abraham, as He had done with Adam and Eve and Noah, but He was doing so in terms that were more compelling and more far-reaching than what either of Abraham’s forebears might have imagined. God was again adjusting His unchanging covenant to suit the demands of the roadway from Abraham forward.

Signs for the present and the future
As in previous manifestations of His covenant, God gave Abraham a sign to remind him of the grace and promise of the Lord. Actually, God gave Abraham two signs – one an immediate and temporal reminder of His grace, and one designed to secure the blessings of God for all time.

The sign of circumcision indicated the cutting away of everything that kept God’s people from being fruitful in the blessings of God (Gen. 17). Circumcision is accomplished through the shedding of blood, and it was given to serve as a permanent identifying mark for those who bore it, reminding them constantly that they had been set apart by God within a framework of promises, mandates, and sanctions, within which they were privileged to know the presence and peace of the Lord Himself.

The second sign of God’s covenant with Abraham was actually given first. We read about it in Genesis 15. Here God passed between the pieces of sacrificed animals to signal that He alone bears the authority and responsibility for fulfilling His covenant of promise. God cannot die, like those animals slain to create that covenant pathway; therefore, God’s covenant cannot fail.

But Abraham can – and would – fail in His covenant obligations, as we all do even to this day. Thus God obligated Himself, to ensure that His covenant of promise would always be a covenant of grace, to bear His own wrath against all covenant-breakers and to endure the punishment they and we deserve. Only thus, by God fulfilling His covenant in all aspects, would it remain a covenant of grace and promise.

And only thus, within a covenant of grace and promise, would we know true life and unfailing peace with God.

For reflection
1.  How can you see that God’s covenant with Abraham carries forward the covenant He made with Adam and Eve and Noah?

2.  What is the role of promises in God’s relationship with people?

3.  What is the role of obedience in receiving and enjoying the promises of God?

Next steps – Conversation: Meditate on the promises made to Abraham. Read Romans 4.13-18. How should the promises to Abraham guide us in God’s covenant today? Talk with a Christian friend about this question.

T. M. Moore

You can learn more about God’s covenant and why it’s so important by ordering T. M.’s book, I Will Be Your God, from our online store (click here). For a deeper study of God’s covenant, order the workbook, God’s Covenant, from our online store (click here).

To learn how God’s covenant defines the shape of Scripture, and guides our approach to understanding and using the Bible, enroll in the course, Introduction to Biblical Theology. It’s free and online, and you can study at your own pace or with friends. To learn more and to register, click here. This week’s study is Part 1 of a series on The Word of God, and is available as a free download by clicking here.

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Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.