Sermon Series - Covenant - Abraham

“Blessing, Promise, and Covenant”

            Last week, we focused on the Covenant that God makes not just with Noah, but with all of creation.  After the flood, God covenants with all of creation never to destroy the earth again with a flood.  As we will see throughout the summer, God marks God’s covenants with a sign and with Noah, the sign is that of the rainbow.  As Noah, his family, and the animals depart the ark, they are God’s new creation.  The old is destroyed, the chaos is contained, and a new beginning occurs. 

            According to the Biblical genealogy, four generations separate Noah from today’s story of Abraham – making Noah, Abraham’s Great grandfather.  Now, Biblical time, at least in the book of Genesis, does not correlate with how we understand time.  Many of these people lived for hundreds of years, so four generations expands a whole lot more time than what we would define four generations to be in our day and age. 

            As God calls Abraham or Abram, the mood is definitely different from that of the day of Noah.  There is no sense of God being upset or disappointed at humanity.  Rather, God sees potential and is ready to lead Abram and Sarai into this new future.  As God asks Abram to leave his country and follow God to a new land, God proclaims two things:  that Abram will become a great nation and that God will bless him.  And then, just as God covenants with all of creation through the sign of the rainbow, God proclaims to Abram that all people on the earth will be blessed through him. 

            The word covenant has not yet been used in this story, but it opens with a promise, a promise of being a great nation, a promise of being blessed, and a promise of that blessing - blessing all of humanity.  What a task Abram undertakes, leaving behind everything he knows and understands.  The old is gone, and the new is ahead.  In order for God to shape Abram and Sarai into the people, into the nation, into the blessing that he wants them to become, he must separate them from all that they know, their culture, their routines, their habits, their rituals.  All of that must be left behind in order to be shaped into something new.  Just as Noah was God’s new creation, so too are Abram and Sarai.  God is staying faithful to the covenant with Noah by not destroying the earth, rather, God has found potential in Abram and Sarai and is moving alongside of them with a new approach. 

            The story of Abram and Sarai spans several chapters, as they enter the promised land only to leave it due to famine.  Over time, Abram begins to despair, he has trusted God and been faithful but he cannot comprehend how he will be a great nation if he still has no offspring.  Sarai is barren.  This is a story that illustrates God’s time versus our time and how, we as people, are impatient and when things don’t seem to be working out we take matters into our own hands.  So, Sarai gives Abram her maidservant Hagar to be the surrogate mother for Sarai.  This, of course, ends in disaster as the human emotions of jealousy play out.  But God does not seem to get angry with Abram and Sarai, for all of their mistakes, for all of their poor choices, God continues to work with them and reminds them that Abram will indeed have offspring and a great land. 

The word covenant first appears in the Abraham story in Chapter 15 while Abram is in a deep sleep.  God speaks to him in a dream, telling him about his descendants and how they will be enslaved for four hundred years before they return to this land that God is promising Abram.  In the covenant God makes with Abram he gives clear geographical lines to define the land Abram’s descendants shall have: from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.      

God again gives the covenant to Abram at which time he also gives Abram a new name.  No longer will you be called Abram, your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.  In this reiteration of the covenant God proclaims that it will be an everlasting covenant between God and Abraham’s descendants.  In this covenant there is the promise of: land – the whole land of Canaan, the promise of being a great nation, and the promise of being a blessing.  And just as with Noah, once God gave the covenant, God marks it with a sign such as the rainbow, God marks this covenant with Abraham with circumcision.  Circumcision is to be the mark of the covenant.  My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. 

In the Biblical sense, a covenant is much more than a promise, it is much more than a contract between two parties, it marks a way of life in living with God.  God creates the covenant as a gift of hope, a source of identity, and a sign of belonging.  But covenants are not just to be given, they are to be lived.  So as God gives, the people receive and respond.  In the case of Abraham, the response and the action is being marked with circumcision. 

What makes the Abrahamic covenant different from the Noahite covenant is – the covenant given to Noah is immediate, it is God’s gift to all of creation from that point on.  Whereas with Abraham, the covenant is for the future.  Abraham will never dwell in the Promised Land, he will never see his descendants become a great nation, for Abraham it is a postponed blessing, promises to the future.  And with faith, Abraham accepts this.  He is willing to give of himself so that his children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will have a future with God.  As it was put in one of my resources:  he was willing to embrace the future with his present passion and was willing to take risks and make sacrifices for the benefit of those generations ahead of him. 

On this Fourth of July weekend, I can’t help but think about our nation’s early forefathers and the gift of the Constitution that they gave to future generations.  They lived out a passion for a new way of being society and blessed the future generations through their own courage, risks, and sacrifices. 

The story of Abraham does not end with Moses bringing the people out of Egypt into the Promised Land and the fruition of becoming a great nation in the time of King David and King Solomon.  Abraham is mentioned at least 72 times in the New Testament scriptures.  He is the father of the faith.  For Paul, in his letter to Rome, he focuses on the faithfulness of Abraham, that it is not through any of his works or through the law that earns him God’s love.  Paul’s intention in this letter is to illustrate that we too have received God’s promises through Abraham, not through the law, but through sharing the faith of Abraham.