A Covenant of Blessing

Genesis 12:1-4; 13:5-6, 14-17; 15:5-6; 15:7-18; 17:1-7, 15-16

Have you ever felt like you had messed up God’s plan for your life? The story of Abraham and Sarah is the story of faithful, but flawed, people and God working through them…even when they take matters into their own hands and mess up God’s plan.

God’s covenant with Abraham marks a major turning point not only in Abram and Sarai and Lot and his wife’s lives, but in the story of humanity. If we back up to the beginning, God created and all was perfect…until human beings with their free will chose poorly. Things quickly devolved from disobedience and lying about it to violence and murder. Within 10 generations, the way of violence was the way of life. God decided to start over. He saved Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives, and a pair of every species to repopulate the earth, and everything else God flooded. When it was over, God made a covenant with Noah. It was a one-sided covenant. Never again would God destroy creation.

Some time after the flood, estimates of how long are vary widely, while the people all spoke one language, they had an idea and began building a tower to the heavens in hope that they could make a name for themselves. And God saw that this was only the beginning, that if they worked together there was nothing that they wouldn’t be able to do. They would no longer seek relationship with God, which was the whole point of creation. So, instead of destroying life on earth again, God confused their language and scattered them all over the face of the earth.

Then, 10 generations after Noah, people were living all of the world, not able to communicate with each other; none of them knowing God – that was not what God envisioned for creation, so decided to do something new. It would start small again and hopefully grow. God chose a man named Abram. He was 75 years old and married to a woman named Sarai. They were childless, but they lived with Abram’s family – his brothers and nephews and their wives and children.

God speaks to Abram and covenants to bless him with:
1. Land – Go…to a land I will show you.
2. Descendants – I will make of you a great nation, counting your offspring will be like the dust of the earth, or like the stars in the sky, or like the grains of sand on the shore
3. and God promises the blessings to be a blessing – I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

Old Testament scholar Celia Brewer Marshall compares the interaction between Abram and God to a couple trying to dance where the one who is supposed to follow keeps taking the lead.

The first thing they do is invite Abram’s nephew Lot to pack up and move with them since God is going to make him a great nation and Abram doesn’t have any sons. Not in God’s plan.

Then, there’s a famine. So, they go south to Egypt. Where Abram lies about Sarai and says she is his sister – not in God’s plan – and she winds up taken to Pharoah’s palace and Abram gets a hefty reward for his beautiful sister… God has to intervene and inflicts disease on Pharoah and his household so that Sarai is returned to Abram.

God speaks again to Abram. Abram just doesn’t get it. He thought Lot would be the heir, but they had too many animals for the land, so Lot had to leave with his. Abram still doesn’t have children. Now, he complains to God, his heir will be one of his household servants, Eliezar of Damascus. Not God’s plan.

And God says, “No, you will have a child of your own flesh and blood, who will be your heir.” And as a sign, God has Abram set up a traditional covenantal sacrifice. Animals were slaughtered, cut in half and placed opposite each other with a path between and when you went between the cut animals you cut a covenant and said “If I break this promise, let what happened to these animals happen to me.” God, like a blazing torch, passed between, and cut a covenant with Abram – naming the land that God would give to Abram’s descendants. Yet, still no land.

And, still, no children. They just wouldn’t wait, so they made their own plan again. Sarai offered her Egyptian slave, Hagar. Slave women could be surrogates for their mistresses. They would have the baby and place it immediately on their owner’s lap and it was no longer their child. Except once she was expecting, Hagar adopted an attitude with Sarai and refused to give up the child. Ishmael was born. Ishmael is the son of Abraham who is known as the father of Arabs and the ancestor of Mohammed in Islamic tradition.

Again, God speaks again to Abram and tries to reestablish the lead. “Walk before me faithfully and be blameless. Then I will make my covenant…you will be the father of many nations. The sign of this covenant will be circumcision.” A physical sign of cutting away to be a symbol of cutting out anything in your life that comes between you and God.

“And you are going to have a son by Sarah.” And Abram says, “Good news! I already have a son.” And God says, Not the plan! “I will establish my covenant with Isaac, the son you will have with Sarah, as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. As for Ishmael, I have heard you: I will surely bless him; I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation.” Abraham goes immediately and he and his household, including his son Ishmael are circumcised.

An aside – Throughout Scripture, we find Circumcision was a symbolic act – God’s people were called to return to God by being circumcised in their heart. The symbolism of circumcision is that anything in your life that stands between you and God is cut out. It is a reminder that you belong to God.

The early church struggled with what covenants and laws of the Old Testament were to be kept once Jesus established the New Covenant. The Colossian church asked Paul about it and this was his reply, “When you came to Christ, you were ‘circumcised,’ but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision — the cutting away of your sinful nature. For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead.” (Colossians 2:10-11, NLT) Baptism is the new sign of the covenant; our reminder that we belong to God.

When Abraham and Sarah come to the area of Gerar, Abraham again says that Sarah is his sister – not in God’s plan – and lets her be taken by the King, Abimelek, as a concubine and God speaks to the King in a dream and he releases her back to Abraham, and they work out a treaty so Abraham takes some of the land. Then Sarah bears a son, and they name him Isaac.

I used to think as we marched around and sang about Father Abraham having many sons, and I am one of them and so are you that Abraham was a hero, a man who never wavered in his faith. But this story is the story of God using flawed people to achieve God’s dream for creation, not because they deserve it or are especially faithful, but because God is faithful and keeps God’s promises.

This is the story of people who keep trying to take matters into their own hands and keep messing up God’s plan for their lives, instead of trusting God. This story has a lot of promise for us.

God’s vision was to bring people back together and back to God, beginning with one family, who would come to trust God, and God would bless them so that they could be a blessing. The covenant that God makes with Abraham is a distribution plan for God’s blessing. God provides for those who are doing blessing-work as long as they are doing blessing-work, so that God’s blessings overflow and pour out to bless the whole world.

This is the good news, Abraham got it wrong, over and over again. And God was faithful. We get it wrong – sometimes really wrong. And God is faithful. You are blessed so that you can be a blessing. What blessing work are you called to do?