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Have you ever stopped to think about how it is that you can have a relationship with God? I mean, we hear that a lot in church, but how does that actually work? How do you as a little human being standing on a rock that is floating in space that is 93 billion light years in diameter form a relationship with the God Who made all of that? How is that not an arrogant thing to assume? How are we able to do this? The answer to that lies in this passage in Genesis 12. It has been hinted at in Genesis 3, 6, and 9, but it is going to be spelled out for us in chapters 12, 15, 17, and 22. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the Abrahamic covenant. It is not an exaggeration to say that if you don't understand this covenant, you aren't going to understand any of the others, nor are you really going to understand the New Testament. The promise to Abraham and how it was done is going to provide the basis for Paul's argument for how we are saved by grace in Romans 4. It will form Paul's argument for predestination in Romans 9, and most relevantly for us, it will form Paul's argument for Gentile inclusion in the New Covenant in Galatians 3-4. And it isn't just the New Testament that finds this important, as it will come up a lot in the rest of the Old Testament as well. While it will be mentioned a lot in Genesis, I want to just draw your attention to Exodus. This covenant will be brought up in Ex 2:24-25 as the reason for why God is about to act. It will be brought back up when Israel needed comfort in Exodus 6 that He really was going to come and save them. Interestingly, it doesn't come up again until God is ready to consume Israel for their sin in Exodus 32, when Moses invokes that covenant as the mediator between God and the nation. What's fascinating is that he doesn't bring up the Mosaic covenant just made on Mountain, but rather he brings up the promise made to Abraham. God spared the entire nation based on the promise that He made to one man. That is how our God works. When He makes promises, He is going to uphold them. So let's see how God forms relationships and how that applies to us today by looking at our two points: God forms relationships through covenants and God advances His plans through covenants God forms relationships through covenants In order to know how God forms a relationship through covenants, we need to know what a covenant is. This word shows up 270 times in the Old Testament, and at its most basic level, it is a truly binding promise made between two or more parties. There were some pretty hefty punishments for breaking covenants, so even if a covenant was made deceptively, it still had to be honored (Joshua 9:18-21; Galatians 3:15). Oftentimes, and we will see this in Genesis 15, covenants were made in blood, requiring the death of an animal with the idea being that if the promise was broken, the offender would suffer the same fate as the animal. To take on a covenant was truly obligating oneself! This concept of a covenant is actually something that comes from human culture that God took upon Himself. Historical documents show us that kings in this time period would set up a covenant document that would look an awful lot like what we see in Genesis. This doesn't mean that the Bible has made up the idea of God forming relationships this way, it just means that God took something that was familiar to humanity and used it so that we would understand. It is similar when it says that God adopts us. We know what adoption means (and in the original context of Roman law, it was an unbreakable bond way stronger than what we have today), so to apply that to our relationship with God gives a real impact. In short, God forming a covenant with us is an example of condescension on God's part. In other words, as one writer put it, God "stoops" down to our level in order to form a relationship with us (Stephen Myers, God to Us, 9). He has to stoop because we are not only creatures and He the Creator, but we are also sinners and He is perfectly holy (Myers, 10-11). The only way on earth or in heaven that we can have a relationship with God is if He and He alone makes it possible. There was nothing that Abram could do to force a relationship to happen. He was a sinful, tiny human being just like you and me. For him to have a relationship with God required God to initiate this relationship. Of all the ways that God could have expressed the relationship, the fact that he does so in this way should be such a comfort. He could have made it like a business contract that could be negotiated and changed and exited. He could have made it like a product purchase with a receipt, returnable if undesirable. Instead, he used a covenant, an intimate relationship bound on pain of death. Honestly, God needed to make it that way, because that is really the only way that God could give confidence to the promises that He has made. God Advances His Plans Through Covenants Let's just take a look, as we slide into our second point, at what we have seen so far in Genesis. The very first covenant made to Adam and Eve promised eternal life and bliss which Adam and Eve quickly broke. That covenant was made on condition of Adam and Eve's obedience. This clearly demonstrates that even perfect human beings cannot be counted on to hold up their end of the bargain. From there, in Genesis 3, God makes the covenant of grace, a covenant, a promise that would depend on God's faithfulness to it rather than theirs. In that one, He promises, in the middle of a now-decaying garden that He would make all things right and would do it through the seed of the woman. For Adam and Eve to imagine that God would do something like that would be absurd bordering on blasphemous, yet they can dare to hope that because God said it would happen. Next, when humanity gets to the absolute breaking point of evil, God makes another promise. Noah finds favor in God's eyes. God forms a relationship with him and preserves Noah from the flood. This promise advances the previous promise that He made in Genesis 3 to set all things right. And now as we get to Abraham, we will see God promise something even better. As one scholar put it, "The story has been one of failed hopes: creation and fall, childbirth and murder, personal deliverance and global rebellion. But in the person of Abram, the Lord initiates a plan for humanity and the world that includes true blessing for an individual, his offspring, and the world." (John Redd, 133) He continues later by saying, "...the work of redemption has been limited to individual instances of protection and deliverance from divine judgment. In the Abrahamic covenant, however, the redemptive program shifts to one of positive benefit – that is, blessing – both for the people of God, and for the whole world." (John Redd, 133). So what does this mean for us? I thought of a number of things, but I want to mention just two takeaways that we have here. The first is that God chose to have a relationship with us that places obligations on Himself. That is an immensely personal way of relating to us. No other god is like that. Every other god that we humans invent is aloof at best. The gods of the ancient peoples barely tolerated their worshipers much less formed personal, binding relationships with them. The second takeaway that I would bring to your attention is that this sort of relationship makes prayer possible as we know it today. To pray to other gods usually is going to involve bringing some sort of payment first. You have to convince the other gods to listen. The fact that God has established a relationship with us gives us the open door to prayer. My kids don't have to make an appointment to see me, or try to convince me to give them the things they need, as pale of a representation of good fatherhood as I am. God has formed a relationship with you such that you can approach Him and ask anything in prayer. He has bound Himself to you. Indeed, the final covenant that was made with us was made around a table of, among other things, unleavened bread and wine. There Jesus establishes a covenant saying that this is the new covenant, in my blood. God didn't just have to stoop; He had to bleed. And He took on a body just to be able to do that. We consider it presumptuous at best to ask others to pay for our debts, but how outlandish would we be to ask the lender to pay our debts for us. How bordering on unimaginable would it be to ask the victim of our crime to not only forgive us but to pay our penalty! How could a murderer ask the family of his victim to forgive him AND for them to serve his life sentence for him? And yet that is exactly what God does for us. How could we possibly have that arrangement? How could it be possible for us to even imagine? It is because God stooped down to make that very arrangement. That is how we have a relationship with God. And that's how He moves history forward. Because He is just that good.
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