The Covenant with Abraham
What is God’s response to humanity’s alienation from Him and from each other? God had promised to Noah that he would not send another flood. He would not, as it were, press rewind on human history and start all over again. God adopts with Abraham what we might call an “infiltration strategy.” God is going to work with one man and with that man’s family to spread blessing and communion and harmony back out to the human family and ultimately with Himself. He’s going to infiltrate humanity through Abraham.
God’s plan for Abraham is really summed up in just a few verses in Genesis 12:1-3, where God calls Abraham initially and bestows on him many promises and blessings. When we analyze those verses, we see that they are three specific promises that are given to Abraham. He tells Abraham I’m going to make of you a great nation, I’m going to make your name great, and finally, through you all the nations of the earth will be blessed. We can break that down for the purposes of memorization and learning into three parts and just call them: “great nation,” “great name,” “great blessing.”
This is God’s plan, this is God’s strategy with Abraham for infiltrating the human family. He’s going to take Abraham, make Abraham into a great nation, that great nation is going to spread out and attain a great name. Now, it’s important that we know that the term “great name” referred to royalty. That means Abraham’s descendants were going to become royal, they were going to become kings, they were going to guide other peoples, and that this would lead eventually to a blessing being poured out on the whole human family.
We can kind of imagine how that would have worked. Abraham becomes a great nation. His nation attains a royal status over other nations and having that royalty, that leadership over the other nations, they lead the other nations back to a relationship with God where they can experience God’s blessing and experience Him as a Father. That’s kind of the strategy, that’s the program that God begins with Abraham.
God implements that program or that strategy with Abraham in three stages that foreshadow, or we could say “typify” the stages that Abraham’s descendants, the nation of Israel, are going to undergo in their later history. First, God takes the promise of becoming a great nation and He formalizes that by making it part of a covenant, a formal covenant relationship with Abraham. He does that in Genesis 15 by having Abraham cut animals into pieces and then God comes down in the form of a torch and a fire pot in flame and smoke; these are common signs of the presence of God throughout salvation history.
God moves through the pieces of the animals and promises to Abraham that he will be a great nation. That is an ancient covenant-making ritual. The point of moving between the pieces of the animals was a rite that meant “should I not keep the promises that I’m making, may I die like these animals through whose pieces I am walking.” What God is doing is taking upon Himself a ritual oath, a ritual curse to back up the truth of what God is promising to Abraham. That is a ritual oath, again, and we see in Scripture that oath-swearing is always associated with covenant-making because, of course, a covenant is a forming of a family by means of an oath.
In Genesis 15, God promises Abraham to be a great nation and makes him part of a family relationship with Abraham. Later in Genesis 17, God remakes the covenant with Abraham, including now the promise of a great name (which means royalty). And there in Genesis 17, we read how God explicitly promises to Abraham that kids will come from his line. God has Abraham perform another blood ritual, this time by not cutting animals but by cutting his own body in the covenant of circumcision. The meaning of circumcision was this: “may I be cut off like this piece of flesh that I am cutting off of my body if I do not keep the commitments that I am pronouncing and speaking at this moment.” There, we see Abraham professing his commitment to God just as God showed his commitment to Abraham previously in Genesis 15.
So now, the only remaining promise that’s not been made part of this family relationship between God and Abraham sealed by blood-oath rituals is the promise of blessing to all the nations. For that to become part of the covenant with Abraham, Abraham is going to have to cut something more precious than animals or even his own body. He’s going to have to cut the body of his own son. This leads to the climax of the whole story of Abraham in Genesis 22 where God asks Abraham to bring his only son, Isaac, to the top of a mountain and lay him on wood and sacrifice him to God at that point.
In order to properly understand this incident in Genesis 22, we have to realize that Isaac by this time is an adult. He’s a young man who could have gotten away, could have defied his elderly father and not gone through with this. That tells us that this is a sacrifice that Isaac freely accepted and that’s the universal ancient Jewish tradition as well, that Isaac consented to this sacrifice.
Furthermore, it’s important that we recognize that three times in Genesis 22, Isaac is referred to by a rare Hebrew phrase which means “one and only,” a phrase that St. John the Apostle will later translate as “only-begotten.” In John 3:16, the most famous verse of Scripture, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” which I memorized as a child out of the old classic King James Version. We all know John 3:16, and it’s a widely-used verse in evangelism because it sums up the Gospel. But, that phrase “only-begotten son,” so few of us actually realize that it’s an allusion to the only-begotten son of Abraham.
Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac on that mountain (it was Mt. Moriah, by the way, in Genesis 22) was really what we call a “type” or a “foreshadowing” of Calvary. I always tell my students that Genesis 22 is the Calvary of the Old Testament. Isaac is a type of Jesus, think of the similarities: They are both only sons, they both carry the wood of their sacrifice up a mountain where they are laid on wood and then sacrificed to God out of love for their father.
However, of course, we know that the sacrifice of Isaac didn’t go through because God called it off once He saw Abraham and Isaac’s consent and said, “No, Abraham, don’t sacrifice your son Isaac, sacrifice a ram instead.” That establishes the principle that instead of human sacrifice, instead of ourselves dying for sins in the Old Testament, animal sacrifices were offered as a type or an image of someone else bearing the penalty of our sin.
At that point, God has seen that Abraham and Isaac have the willingness to undergo the same kind of sacrifice that God the Holy Trinity is going to have to undergo. At almost the same geographical location, because it helps to know that the place where Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac, is where the Temple would later be built and about a stone’s throw from there is another little hillock that we call Calvary. On that hillock, another only-begotten Son will actually die on the wood for the sins of humanity to fulfill what was promised to Abraham, that is the blessing being poured out to all the nations.
So, after Isaac and Abraham consent to sacrifice, we read in Genesis 22:15-18 that God calls from heaven and He swears, “Because you have done this and not withheld your own begotten son, I will surely bless you and through your seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” That is a kind of proto-Gospel. That is the Gospel in a nutshell, the promise to Abraham that through his seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. Jesus is that seed, He is that descendant of Abraham, who in the image of Isaac, will offer Himself in order for that blessing to come to all the nations.
One of the big points of the encounter with Abraham is that we realize that the whole good news was really present in a nutshell already in ancient times. If you ask, “Well, what was God doing through all human history? Why did He not reach out before the first century with Jesus?” We can answer, “No, God has been reaching out for a long time. In fact, the whole plan that He intended to do was back in 2000 BC or 1700 BC; around that time frame is where we place Abraham. The whole outline of the Gospel and the development of Salvation History was already present there.”
To get a little bit ahead of ourselves, the great nation promise to Abraham will be realized through the nation of Israel and the great name or the royalty, that’s going to come to fruition with King David and his great empire. Then, that blessing to all the world is going to come through, of course, Abraham’s descendant Jesus. That’s the good news, the fullness of the Gospel, etc. The basic pattern of salvation history is already present there with Abraham. God prophesied what He would do centuries before He brought it to pass. That gives a certain credibility to our religion that other invented religions don’t have.
Not to name names, but we can probably all think of some religions of recent origin where some self-proclaimed guru comes along, writes or concocts a holy book and passes it off as Divine Revelation and then gathers together a huge following behind himself. What those invented religions lack is really a grounding in ancient prophecy that fulfilled, that predicted what they have come to fulfill. That’s not the case with Christianity. Christianity is the true religion. Christianity is a fulfillment of God’s plan rooted in real historical events and forecast in advance through God’s prophets like Abraham. Abraham himself is called a prophet in Scripture (Genesis 20:7).