Blessing to the Nations: The Abrahamic Covenant

The Abrahamic covenant is the most important covenant in the Old Testament and remains vitally important for our understanding of the New Testament. The craziest part of Abraham’s story is that God chose him for seemingly no reason. God surely had his own reasons, but he does not share them with us. Instead, we see God choose to cast his lot with Abraham and his descendants out of all the other people and families and nations on the earth.

When we first encounter Abraham he is called Abram, and besides his genealogy, the first thing we hear is God’s instructions to him. In Genesis 12:1-3, God tells Abram to move from where he grew up to a new place that God will show him. God promises Abram that he will bless him, make Abram’s name great, and make his descendants into a great nation. God says that he will bless those who bless Abram and curse those who curse Abram. And finally, God says that in Abram all the families of the earth will be blessed.

The Abrahamic covenant gets remade, rephrased, and added on to multiple times throughout the story of Abraham, but this is the first instance of it. God has guaranteed that his protection will be with Abraham, that his future legacy will be secure in great descendants who will remember his name, and that he will cause the whole world to be blessed. Before we’ve even seen Abraham do anything at all, God has told him and us that his life and legacy will have global consequences.

Genesis continues with what Abraham proceeds to do and includes some actions that are foolish and sinful and some actions that are wise and brave. Abraham isn’t perfect, but he’s trying to follow God and God corrects him where he needs to. We pick up again with his story in Genesis 17, in which God officially makes a covenant with him and gives him the new name of Abraham by which we know him. As part of the covenant, God says that he will make Abraham the father of many nations, which is what the name Abraham means in Hebrew. God also says that from Abraham will come kings, and that the land that Abraham now occupies, the land of Canaan, will be given to his offspring forever and he himself will be their God.

The sign of the covenant, the mark that identifies Abraham and his descendants as the recipients of this covenant, is circumcision. This was no small sacrifice to make for Abraham, but the privilege to receive God’s blessing and ensure it for his offspring made it more than worth it. Abraham had seen how God had led him and protected him throughout his life and knew the value of this blessing and this covenant. This is also why circumcision is so important for the Jewish people in the Old and New Testament. Circumcision is a sign that they are recipients of this promised blessing from God through Abraham, and to forego circumcision means being cut off from Abraham and cut off from God’s blessing.

There is a problem with this covenant though. Abraham and his wife Sarah are about one hundred years old and they do not have a child of their own. Being so old, they will not be able to have a child, but Abraham does already have a child named Ishmael together with his slave Hagar. Abraham imagines that it will be through Ishmael that this covenant is fulfilled, but God tells him that instead he will indeed have a child with Sarah despite her old age. And as God promised, they do indeed miraculously have a child and name him Isaac.

Before the final statement of his covenant with Abraham, God chooses to test him. God asks Abraham to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Abraham faithfully obeys, but just as he is about to bring down the knife to kill his son, God stops him and provides a ram for the sacrifice instead. The story in Genesis does not tell us what Abraham was thinking in this moment. However, the author of Hebrews tells us that since God promised that Abraham would have many descendants through Isaac, Abraham trusted that God would raise Isaac from the dead even if he were to kill him for the commanded sacrifice.

Some readers of Genesis are guilty of taking this passage out of its context and treating it as a test that God might ask of any believer. However, God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac only makes sense as a test of Abraham’s faith because Isaac is the son through whom God’s promise to Abraham will be fulfilled. The test is not whether Abraham trusts God enough to kill his son, it is whether Abraham trusts that God will surely make a great nation through Isaac through the seemingly impossible circumstances of him being dead. This test would not make sense for any other son, and we should not expect the possibility of this being a test of faith that we might face.

Because Abraham had faith in God and trusted him even to sacrificing Isaac, the child of promise, God reiterates again the covenant and promise to him. God promises to bless Abraham and make his offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. He also adds to the covenant that in Abraham’s offspring all the nations will be blessed.

This last part is the most important part of the Abrahamic covenant and the reason that it is the most important covenant in the Old Testament. The Bible presents us with two possibilities of how this promise may be fulfilled. The first is through the nation of Israel, being Abraham’s offspring, serving as a beacon of God’s blessing for all the nations to see and glorify God because of it. The second is for one individual offspring of Abraham to be a source of blessing for all the nations. One of these possibilities is never realized, while the other is how God does ultimately choose to fulfill this promise. We will explore the ramifications of this promise and how it relates to the covenants in more detail in the future.

The Abrahamic covenant is often said to be unconditional or unilateral. Unconditional means that the covenant has no conditions that Abraham must meet. God has promised to do these things, and that promise does not depend on anything that Abraham needs to do correctly. Unilateral means “one-sided”, referring to the fact that the covenant is like a contract that only binds one party, or side. God is bound by the contract to do what he has said he will do, while Abraham is not bound to do anything.

The practice of circumcision may seem like it is a condition that Abraham and his descendants must meet in order to meet the terms of the covenant, but the passage clearly describes it as a sign of the covenant and not part of the terms of the covenant itself. The difference may seem arbitrary or even non-existent, but it is quite important to stress that circumcision is not done to earn the blessing, but only to mark someone as a recipient of the blessing.

The blessing of this covenant is passed down to Abraham’s son Isaac, and then on to Isaac’s son Jacob, to whom God gives the new name Israel. It is Israel’s sons that form the twelve tribes, and this is how God becomes the God of Israel. Through the Abrahamic covenant, God has tied himself to this one family and promised to make it into a nation and be their God.

The flood of Noah failed to eliminate sin from the world, so this was the next part of God’s plan. By associating himself with one man Abraham, who becomes a family, that becomes a nation, God is hoping that this nation’s faith in him and his blessings for them will lead every other nation towards himself. If you are at all familiar with the Old Testament, then you will know that this does not happen because of Israel’s repeated failures. God will use this covenant and the descendants of Abraham both to demonstrate the futility of humanity trying to atone for their own sin and to bring forth the one man through whom it will be possible to atone for sin.