Grace, mercy and peace be to each of you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
I invite you to pray with me. “0 Lord, speak in this place, in our minds, in our hearts, by the words of my mouth, and in the thoughts we form. Speak, 0 Lord, we, your servants, are listening. Amen.”
As I mentioned earlier, today we will look at another of the most basic questions of life…
“How can I be a part of what God is doing in this world?”
The marriage relationship was designed by God to model the kind of relationship that he wants with his people. Any depth of commitment comes through covenant. And covenant is the only way to have a relationship with God. Let me say that again: Covenant is the only way to have a real relationship with God.
As far as I can tell in the Bible, there is no one that had a significant relationship with God outside covenant. So, if you’re looking to be part of what he is doing in this world, then you will have to connect with God through covenant.
This is the question of the day, “How can I be a part of what God is doing?” My guess is that you want that. Even if you are just investigating the church or the claims of Christ, most people want their lives to matter.
And the fastest track to significance is to be part of something bigger than yourself. How could you do that better than to partner with God in His agenda for this world. However, before we move forward, let’s make sure we’re speaking the same language.
We need to define a couple of terms…
Covenant, surely you are familiar with the term covenant in the context of marriage. But you will also certainly hear the term covenant in the Bible. In fact, this Bible is divided into two parts: the old covenant and the new covenant or the Old Testament and the New Testament. Testament and covenant are the same thing. Technically, the Old Covenant is the 10 Commandments brought down by Moses from Mt. Sinai. The New Covenant, specifically, is the blood of Jesus in the sacrament of Holy Communion.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. A covenant, in the ancient world, was an agreement between two parties. It’s kind of like a contract that you might make to buy a house or seal a business deal. Yet there is a difference. In the ancient world, the terms of the covenant were established by the greater party – the person with more power.
The second party could agree or disagree to enter the covenant, but they couldn’t really change the terms of the covenant. So, when we have a covenant with God, we don’t get to alter the agreement or add our own terms. He sets the terms of the covenants, and we can accept them or reject them.
Faith. The second term we need to clarify is faith. In our culture, faith is defined mostly as either a feeling or as mental assent.
“I believe” means “I feel”, or, for others it might mean, “This is what I believe to be true.”
But, here’s the thing … you know that feelings rise and fall. Beliefs give way to behaviors. Over the long haul, relationships thrive on fidelity. So, it is with our faith in God.
God is far less concerned about how we feel towards him, or what we believe about him, as he is our life of loyalty lived for him. If you understand this concept, and I’m certain that you do, then the story of the first major covenant in the Bible will make sense to you.
Abraham, the Father of Faith
All the way back in Genesis chapter 12 God made a promise to a man named Abraham. He was a pagan living in Mesopotamia. God said, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1-2)
God’s covenant with Abraham had two requirements … leave your land and leave your family. This covenant also had two promises … a bigger land and a larger family. That was the covenant, and Abraham pledged his allegiance to it.
Through his obedience, Abraham became the father of the faith.
That’s what the apostle Paul said in Romans 4:3, “For what does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.’
A few verses later Paul said, “The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to make him the father of the circumcised who were not merely circumcised but who also walked in the footsteps of faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.”
Hence, Abraham became the father of the faith. He is the spiritual and biological father of the Jews. He is the spiritual father, therefore, of Christians. And he is also the father of Islam through his offspring, Ishmael. That makes Abraham the single most influential religious figure of human history claiming adherence of nearly 50% of all humanity. That’s huge, but it gets even bigger.
Jesus fulfills Abraham’s Covenant
If we turn to Genesis 15, we see something significant. God asked Abraham to ratify this covenant in a specific way. Genesis 15:9, “‘Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.’ And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other.”
This scene seems a bit frightening. Nonetheless, this was common fair in the ancient world. What we have here is the signing of the contract, not with ink but with blood. That was the significance of the sacrifice.
The idea was that the one agreeing to the contract would make a sacrifice, cut the animals in half, lay them side-by-side, and walk between them. It was a way of saying, “If I break this covenant may it be to me as I have done to these animals.”
For the rest of the day Abraham shooed the birds of prey away. When night fell, Abraham fell asleep. In the middle of the night, God showed up in a pillar of fire, passing between the halves of the sacrifice.
Note, and this is really important, it was not Abraham who would pay the penalty, if the covenant was broken. It was God. God himself said, by passing between these animals, “If YOU break this covenant, may it be to me as you have done to these.”
This is extraordinary in the extreme. And yet, we see the concept repeated in chapter 22. Here, God made a demand of Abraham that seems unconscionable. You may recall his story that in his late 90s (and Sarah’s early 90s, which is even more miraculous), God finally gave Abraham the offspring he had promised him. Abraham and Sarah named their son Isaac.
Fast-forward a few years. We’re not really sure how old Isaac was in Genesis 22. Some rabbis suggested he was 30. My best guess is that he was mid-teens. Either way, Isaac was perfectly capable of out running his father.
That means that Isaac as well as his father submitted to God’s outrageous request when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son.
Personally, I think I probably would’ve said no outright, or I might have assumed that it was a trial to test my moral fiber. But Abraham had a different assumption.
We don’t learn this until Hebrews 11. Nonetheless, Abraham assumed that if God demanded he kill his son that God would then raise him from the dead.
Remember, there isn’t a sliver of evidence for any kind of resurrection back in Abraham’s day. This was pure faith. Listen to what the Hebrew writer says, “Abraham considered that God was able to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.” (Hebrews 11:19)
To you and I this seems like a horribly inappropriate test. And, in fact, if it wasn’t for Matthew 26 we could never fully understand God’s intention. Perhaps you know how the story ends. Abraham lays his willing son on the altar of stone. The wood to burn his body is arranged around the platform.
Abraham raises his knife, and a split second before he plunges it past his sternum, an angel stops him. With breathless relief, Abraham is pointed to a ram in the thicket who will replace his son on the altar. We cannot comprehend what is really going on here until we fast-forward to Matthew 26.
There, on another hill, on another day, there’s another son to be slain. But this time, the Lamb in the thicket and the son to be slain are one in the same. God was using Abraham to point out that he would make good on his promise when he walked between the halves of the sacrifice.
God himself, would pay the price for broken covenant. Genesis 15, Genesis 22, and Matthew 26 are all chapters in the same story.
So, let’s revisit again our core question, “How can I be a part of what God is doing in this world?”
Don’t you want to be? That only happens, and it always happens, through fidelity to the covenant that God himself provides. While the covenant of Abraham was fulfilled through Jesus, so too is every other covenant of the Bible.
The covenant with Adam was to walk with God in the cool of the day as long as they didn’t break loyalty by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What do we do? Our ancestral forefathers, Adam and Eve, ate freely from that fruit and brought a disastrous curse on humanity.
Yet it was Jesus, dying on the cross, who paid the price for us to be reconciled to God. Through him we regain our relationship with God.
The covenant with Noah was to save his family from the flood by following God’s command to build a boat. This was compared to Christian baptism by the Apostle Peter: “God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.
In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 3:20–21)
The covenant with Moses was a national legal system, summarized in the 10 Commandments, that gave God’s nation both liberty and limitation to protect them from their own broken nature. It soon became clear that rules without relationship lead to rebellion. God’s people needed more than law; they needed love demonstrated in a God who would walk between the two halves of the sacrifice.
Jesus claimed about himself that he fulfilled this law: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17)
Or, as Paul put it, “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:13–14)
The covenant with David was a promise that a seed from his line would always sit on the throne over Israel. “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” (2 Samuel 7:12–13)
It became clear all too soon that this promise was never fulfilled through Solomon, or Rehoboam, or any of the other ancient kings. Rather, it was fulfilled through Jesus Christ. The Angel Gabriel promised Mary, just prior to her conception, that her son would fulfill this prophecy, “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David.” (Luke 1:32)
The bottom line is this – Jesus fulfilled every previous covenant. His blood, his sacrifice, is God walking between the animals. He is God in the flesh fulfilling the covenant to Abraham that when the covenant was broken, he would pay the price.
If you want to be part of what God is doing in this world it REQUIRES faith. It requires the faith of Abraham not just to believe God, but to obey his call to leave family and country to a greater inheritance that God will provide in his own time.
It is the faith of Noah, against all reason, to build a boat simply because God said so. It is the faith of Moses to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, leading a rebellious people with nothing but two tables of stone and the 10 commands inscribed upon them.
It is the faith of David to run to God in repentance after his sin, and know that being a man after God’s own heart is not about the heart you have but the heart you are after.
So, let me conclude with a serious question and this is your take away … if your faith were evaluated in the same way one measures a marriage, would you be single, separated, divorced, or married? Obviously, every relationship has room for improvement. So, let’s do one thing this week that would better align us with God’s agenda in this world.
Specifically, evaluate where you are with God, and identify one area of your life … perhaps finances, priorities, habits, relationships … identify one area where you can better align your behavior with your faith and belief belief in a more meaningful way. Amen