The Abrahamic Covenant

Image by Terje Ansgar Eriksen




What is the biggest promise you've ever made? Most of the time, we don't realize we are making such a promise at the front end. Most of the time, we realize just how big of a promise we've made when we are halfway into that commitment. It can be something small like a bake sale that gets out of control, or it can be something profoundly large like a marriage that needs deep forgiveness within it. When we make big promises, sometimes we can rise to the occasion, and other times we just can't. We often put God in that box. We assume that God may or may not be able to keep up with the promises that He has made. As we will see today, God absolutely fulfills His promises to us, in particular, His promises for our salvation. 

It is hard for us to imagine that our salvation is being worked out here with a little man with a funny name from a distant town, but they are. What is happening in these short few verses is nothing less than the shaping of history. This is the working out of one of the most important promise made in the Bible, the Abrahamic covenant. We are going to explore just how important this covenant is by looking at the fulfillment of the three separate promises God makes. God provides His people a place, God provides His people a Savior, and God provides His people a blessing.  

God Provides His People a Place
Last week, we saw that God forms relationships with His people via a covenant and had the opportunity to enjoy the signs of the new covenant with us. Now, we are going to look into how the covenant with Abram leads us to where we are today, and that must start by looking at the covenant with Abraham itself. This particular covenant, as one scholar points out, develops and gets details and things revealed as we go from chapter 12 to 22 (Redd, 135-6). The core of the promise that is made though can be found right here at the very beginning of God's relationship with Abraham. We will see this core promise echo through the rest of Genesis (and the rest of the Bible, really) either explicitly or implicitly. God promises Abraham three things: a land, a seed, and a blessing. Though, this will play out over seven "wills" that are contained in these verses (Waltke, 203). 

In order to understand what is at stake here, let's start with where Abram is at the start of our passage. Abram is just another guy (Joshua 24:2 tells us that he was another idol worshiper living in Ur) in the world. Ur was actually a pretty great place to live, and we know more about this particular city than any other ancient city of that time (CITE). Even if he was just near the city of Ur, it was quite a place to be close to! The walls around the city were more than a mile around, and there were two ports where trading could take place! There were houses, streets, and possibly even a sewer system! The walls of buildings at the corner of streets were curved to allow carts to pass by without clipping the building! More than the technological advancements, there was a huge ziggurat in the city, something that Abram probably worshiped at. 

God is about to call Abram to leave all of that, and the leaving of the city isn't even the hard part. 

When Abby and I were about to get married, I was looking for a ministerial job. I had been on the hunt for the better part of a year, and despite the sending of resumes and a handful of interviews, just nothing was coming up. There was one more place to apply to: Brewton, Alabama. Population: 4,000. My wife grew up just outside of Metro Birmingham, populations: 250,000. The most recent thing that had happened in Brewton was a new Taco Bell. It shut down the roads. The call came. We accepted. Passing chickens and ponies, we drove down the winding two lane road into Brewton. That was an exercise in faith and love for my new bride. She was going to leave everything that she knew to throw in her lot with some youth pastor who couldn't find a place to even live in that town until 10 days before the move! Now, like Abram, when we went we found a blessing. The people there embraced us, and we could find a place to be for the time that God had us there. 

Abram's situation was very different. At least Brewton had a Walmart (and honestly, a pretty nice one at that). Abram is being called away truly from everything, and this is seen in his call away from family. This would have been harder than leaving the conveniences of a city. Every safety net would need to be left behind. He is being called to leave his country, his culture, even down to the smallest family unit possible (Matthews, 111). As Matthews points out, "So strong was the identity of a person with his father's household that an individual’s behavior had implications for the entire family (Josh 2:18; 1 Sam 17:25; 2 Sam 14:9; 24:17)." (Matthews, 111). In other words, Abram is being asked to be completely undone. This won't be the only time that he will be asked to do this either. One commentator noticed that this bookends Abram's life: "In Genesis 12 Abraham is called to leave his past out of simple trust in God's promises, and in Genesis 22 Abraham is called to abandon his future out of simple trust in God." (Waltke, 196). 

In return, Abram is going to be given, among other things, a place, a land. 

Do you long to have a place? People crave that. We see in the news how hard it is to own a home nowadays, but people still seek it. Even more dramatically we see in the news the wars that are going on are ultimately about place. Who is going to live where and why? The importance of this question rises to the level of bombs. This tells us something. There is this longing in our souls to *be* somewhere, to put roots down, to merge our souls with the surrounding people. I think we feel this now more than ever. The internet told us that we could form our own lands anywhere and everywhere. But what we found is if anywhere and everywhere is home, then nothing is. God is offering Abram a place where he can belong. Where he can have his family. Where he can be secure (what place would be more secure than the one chartered to you by the almighty Himself?). 

But Abram was looking beyond even that. Look at Hebrews 11:8-16, "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore. These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city." 

Abraham was looking towards heaven! God wasn't just offering another spot of dirt (although He was doing that, too); He was offering a spot in heaven. Jesus picks up on this for us as well when we get to John 14:1-3 "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also." Jesus is promising us a land. By fulfilling what He said to Abraham for this patch of land, we can know that He will do the same for us in heaven. 

Hold onto that. Sometimes you are told to do the same thing that Abram was told. Calvin restates it so well: "I command thee to go forth with closed eyes...until, having renounced thy country, thou shalt have given thyself wholly to me." (quoted in Waltke, 205). In other words, God almost never tells us beforehand where we are going when we start out on a journey on Earth. But He has told us where we are ULTIMATELY going. He is leading us to a land that He will show us. No, we can’t see it right now. We are called to exercise, as one commentator put it, a "divine imagination (i.e., seeing things that are not, as though they were)..." (Waltke, 196-7). 

I love this concept of "divine imagination" because I can't do this very well. I am not able to visualize something that isn't there. Abby can do this very well. I'm told to imagine what it would look like to move the couch from this end of the room to the other, and if I concentrate EXTREMELY hard, I can sort of do it. What I have found to work easier is to simply trust my wife for aesthetic decisions. If she thinks the couch will look great over there, then it will, whether I can imagine it or not. And the same is true of God. 

Our imaginations are really broken, so they need something to be guided towards. We can't see what isn't there most of the time. But we trust God when He tells us that there is going to be a thing there. When God tells us that He will work all things for our good, we have to believe Him, even when there is nothing that we can possibly see to make it so. When God tells us to be obedient to Him even when it is going to cost us our jobs, our family relationships, our own reputation, our time, our imagination can't see it working out. But God will make it so. I know that because God has promised us a land. He has promised us a place that we are journeying towards. It is as sure as it was for Abram. 

What is holding you back from embracing that promise? What is keeping you from exercising that divine imagination? If you are like me, the thing that distracts the hardest are the supposed facts on the ground, what I can see right here, right now. You look at your marriage that has been sour for, well, as long as either of you can remember. It seems like that if God really cared about it, He would have done something by now. Yes, we’ve prayed, we’ve gone to counseling, but we just want to give up. Don’t settle there. On one interpretation of this passage, Abram left part of the way but settled in Haran with his father. Settling before God tells you to doesn’t bring you His blessing. Instead He calls us, as Eugene Peterson put it, long obedience in one direction. 

What does that look like? What does it look like to embrace God’s promises? It looks like a trust in God that doesn’t leave you bitter and cynical. It is a trust that looks beyond the present moment. Why did Abram take that step away? Because he believed God. When Abram took that first step away from what he knew and who he loved, it must have felt nuts. I’m sure when Abram first brought it up to his clan they tried to talk him out of it. Wouldn’t you try to talk your family members out of packing up, leaving the United States, burning up their social security card, and not providing a means of contact? I would! Sometimes that’s what faith looks like. It means praying for that daughter or son when years of it has not yielded what you want for them. It means continuing through trial of physical pain and still saying, “God is good.” 

How do we do that? We believe God when He says that there is a place that we are going. We believe God that we are on our way to heaven. 

So what is our takeaway from this passage? God made Abram a promise, among other things that we will look at next week, that there would be a land for him, but it would require leaving behind his way of life to go to it. In this, God was giving the Israelites the divine right to this land, something that they would take hold of in the coming centuries when they were lead by Joshua. This promise extends far beyond a geographical region, but looks towards what the Ultimate Descendant, Jesus Christ, would lead us into. He has granted us a place, and we are going to it. We are called to leave behind former things, and follow Jesus where He leads. That may sometimes look like leaving everything. That may sometimes mean losing everything. But what it always means is that God will grant us more than we have sacrificed in the land to come. 


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