The Bible in 16 Verses: 5. Father Abraham, Genesis 12

The Old Covenant Pointing to a Future Covenant

Okay, so as you can see, we're up to session number five. We've gone through. There it is, okay. The time is coming. In other words, we're in the Old Covenant which is pointing us to a future covenant.

Although some of the Old Testament saints didn't understand that or realize that until we get to the prophets. But we're at Father Abraham today. Abraham's a pivotal picture in Old Testament history. Okay, we're tracing the storyline from Genesis.

We're still in the book of Genesis, all right, and that's going to point us to the time has come. In other words, the fulfillment of what all the Old Testament covenants were pointing to and what the Old Testament prophets were pointing to.

The Seed of the Woman, the Seed of the Serpent, and the Promise of Redemption

Up until this point in time, the key biblical theological theme was last week, redemption. God promised us a Redeemer, and He talked about the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. There are always going to be two seeds in this world, and I was talking to Sister Annette this morning.

At the cross, there were two thieves. One represented the seed of the woman, the thief on the cross who repented and believed. The other one represented the seed of the serpent who continually blasphemed God and told Jesus, why don't you get us down from here, knowing that He was guilty of being put on a cross.

So there's always going to be that war between the two seeds. So what's our storyline so far? God created a very good kingdom of which He is the King. He created human beings, His children, to represent Him in that kingdom, and they were responsible to expand it.

Through their sin, Adam and Eve rejected God's commission and rebelled against their Father and Creator. Yet God provided His covenant of love, His covenant love toward them despite their unfaithfulness.

Very good did not turn into very bad. It just proved the character of who was always very good, and that's God. There will be ongoing enmity between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent from now on.

But God promised a Redeemer who will crush the head of the enemy and secure God's victory. With this promise, very bad turned into very hopeful. So we're in a state of very hopefulness right now. So we're up to Genesis chapter 12, and today's verse that we're going to concentrate on is, in you, meaning Abraham, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

And what we see is God's covenant family expands in the patriarch period, growing from a married couple, Adam and Eve, to a family, Noah and his sons, and then into a tribe, Abraham and his entire clan.

God's covenantal promise continues. And I like this quote from D .L. Moody, God never made a promise that was too good to.

Be true.

God's promises are not too good to be true. They are truly good. As we're going through this, if I'm going a little too quick, just please raise your.

Hand.

I know I'm speeding through a lot of this stuff. I just want you to get the content so that we're going to build on it week by week. So if I'm going too fast or you need clarification on something, just raise your hand.

We'll stop and we'll go through it. It's not a problem. So even while the effects of God's curse on humanity and the conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman rage on, God was still working to fulfill his promise in Genesis 3 .15.

Once God makes that promise, he's going to fulfill it, and he's going to bring it about by his own decree and his own providence. To this end, God would call another man to be the agent through whom he would bring the saving blessings to the world.

As the war continued at the Tower of Babel, we're going to read that passage on the next slide, the people in the line of the serpent tried to make a name for themselves. But we will soon see that God's plan was to covenant with one man, make a name for himself and fulfill his promise.

Again, see that it is God who's moving history forward. If it was left up to humanity, this would never happen. God is the one who has to continue to make promises, continue to sustain, and by his grace bring about the fulfillment of his promises.

Okay, so now this is the Tower of Babel, Genesis chapter 11. Then they said, come let us build for ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, behold, they are one people and they will all have one language. This is only the beginning of what they will do and nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Come let us go down there and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth. And they left off building the city.

Therefore its name was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all.

The earth.

And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. Now it's really interesting here when they say, let us make a name for ourselves. Anyone know what the Hebrew word for name is? You might hear a Jew say, Baruch Hashem Adonai, Hashem, the name.

The word for name in Hebrew is Sheb. Who was chosen by God in Noah's line to bring forth the promises?

Shem.

Mankind is now making a Shem for themselves. They want to bring their ideology and their view to the world. And again, this is being done by the children of man. So let's see, God confuses their language.

Obviously we see in Acts chapter 2, God reverses that. He reverses the Tower of Babel and now he will give them the gift of tongues where they speak in other languages and people will actually understand what they're talking about.

But this is really a rebellion spitting in the face of God that mankind is now going to make a Shem, a name for themselves.

Shem changed to shame, yes.

God's Call to Abram and the Promise to Bless the Nations

Okay, so God came to a man named Abram, which would later be changed to Abraham, and called him with an astonishing promise. 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.

I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you I will curse and in you all the families of the earth should be blessed. Now before you start wondering what made Abraham so great, let's be clear.

It was not because he was so righteous or noble that God called and promised to make his name great. In fact, he was an idolater, a worshiper of other gods, Joshua 24 -2. There was nothing about Abraham that made him particularly worthy of God's call.

It was all of God's grace. It's God's graciousness towards this one man, Abram. In fact, he's taken an idolater, someone whose father was an idol maker. So he probably, at that time, you did whatever your father did as far as work went.

Abraham was probably an idol maker as well. So God's going to call a very unlikely character to bring about the promises that he promised. Unlike the builders of the Tower of Babel, Abraham was minding his business, not seeking a great name.

God did not decide to make Abraham's name great because he had built a tower that would bring him fame. Instead, God graciously took the initiative and made a covenant with Abraham, choosing him to be the one through whom the offspring of the woman would come.

God elected him. And I want you to, every time you read the word election in scripture, I want you to think mercy. Election is mercy. It's God having mercy on someone and bringing them into a covenant with him.

So where people who are opposed to reformed theology or Calvinistic theology look at that and say, oh, see, God's playing favoritism. He's choosing that one but not choosing the other. But really what it is is God's having mercy on that person, giving them eyes to see and ears to hear when they don't deserve it.

No one deserves it. You cannot force mercy. If you force mercy, it's no longer mercy.

Right?

So God has mercy upon whom he'll have mercy and he'll have compassion upon whom he'll have compassion. And none can, none of us can shake our fist at him and say, what have you done? Why are you doing it like this?

It's his prerogative. And he's doing this to fulfill his promise because if it was left in our hands, it would be mush. God appeared to Abraham and made him the most amazing promises. Promises that both moved forward the promise of Genesis 315 and gave more details about God's plan of redemption.

God's promise to Abraham included making Abraham a great nation, giving him a land, and receiving great blessing.

Okay?

This is entirely on God to do this. What is needed to make a great nation, or for that matter, any nation, we could talk about laws, leaders, maybe even a capable military, and all of those are probably important ingredients.

But for any nation, great or small, to survive, it needs land and it needs a people. Remember, this is all going to point forward to the church. The church is the nation.

Right?

God's nation. And what land does the church own?

The world. Right?

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. The promise is going to be expanded once we get to there. Just giving you a little spoiler alert. Abraham's problem was that he had neither. Abraham had no land.

First of all, he was not a homeowner. He was a nomad, a wandering shepherd. While his father had probably amassed a certain amount of wealth in terms of livestock, no amount of cattle could make up for not owning land.

But God promised him a land, a place where God would dwell with his people. Also in Genesis 1130, mentions that Abraham's wife, Sarai, later changed to Sarah, was barren. While they certainly had plenty of servants, Abraham and Sarah had no children they could name as their heirs.

So, God picks Abraham. Sarai is his wife. God promises him a people. Abraham's got to be saying to himself, how are we going to have a people? I'm like 90 years old. Where's this child coming from? God tells Abraham, look towards heaven and number the stars if you're able to number them.

Our first impulse is to picture this conversation happening as Abraham is sitting alone in front of a dying campfire, clear night sky, spangled with myriads of stars, while we imagine Abraham gazing up, overwhelmed by the innumerable points of light before his eyes.

We see, wow, my goodness. And even when Sproul goes through this story, when he's explaining, he says, I can imagine God giving a pregnant pause, like waiting. So, okay, Abraham, count the stars. I'm waiting for him to go one, two, three, you know.

But, as we read on, we discover something unexpected. The sun is up overhead and wouldn't go down for another seven verses. God's command to Abraham was given in broad daylight. We get to verse 12, it says, and the sun was going down.

And then a deep sleep fell on Abraham. Count the stars. I can't see them, it's daylight. Abraham, staring up at the blue midday sky, could no more see the stars than he could see his countless descendants.

God's message here is profound. While your sight is too weak to see the stars, I the Lord can see them. I the Lord can also see your many descendants, even though you cannot. In other words, we are to trust what God says with his mouth over what we see with our eyes.

You look outside, you look on the internet, you turn on the news. Fear is contagious. That's why God over and over and over in the Bible says, be not afraid. Be strong and courageous. Philippians 1 .27.

And not frightened in anything of your opponents, as that is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of our salvation and that from God.

Right?

God is saying, my word takes precedent over your eyes. Though you cannot see the descendants and you cannot see the church growing maybe right now,.

He said it.

It's going to happen. Don't be fooled. Don't get overwhelmed by fear. Very easy to do. Go back to God's word. He promised. He's a God who will fulfill his promises. God's lesson isn't simply that Abram's descendants will be as numerous as the stars, but Abram must have faith and trust the Lord that these countless descendants will be given, even if he has yet to see the very first one.

Abram gets the point and he believed God and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. Romans chapter 4 points to this as our doctrine of justification by faith alone. Abraham believed God. It was reckoned to him as righteousness.

At that point, he's in right standing with God.

He's justified.

Faith provides the vision that enables one to navigate life in a way pleasing to God in times of daylight and in times of darkness. So when you look up in the sky and you don't see stars, you can say God said his descendants will be as numerous as the stars.

Even though I can't see them, I can trust what God says. At this point, Abram was about 75 and Sarah was 65. Not exactly prime years for childbearing, right? When they died, all of their property would go to another family.

But God promised to make Abraham a landless, childless, Gentile nomad into a great nation. Again, he's choosing the most unlikely of characters to bring about the most important, incredible blessings that the world would ever see.

All the nations of the world will be blessed through Abraham's seed. God also promised that Abraham would be a blessing to all the families of the earth. You might think that since he had money, Abraham should have been able to accomplish this one on his own.

After all, don't we tend to think in terms of finances and prosperity when we think of God's blessing? Like so many people think, oh, God's blessing, you know, is money, BMW, big house, vacations. But don't tell the guys at Trinity Broadcasting Network, right?

Financial prosperity is not the primary indicator of God's blessing. Think back to the garden. What did Adam and Eve have in the garden? What was the greatest blessing that God gave to Adam and Eve? Promise of a future Messiah, sure.

The greatest blessing was living in God's very presence, knowing him and worshiping him. That's prosperity. Being made right with God, knowing him, knowing him as your father. Being in his presence, bringing in the presence of his people, magnifying and glorifying his name.

Making his name great, not our name great. Hashem, the name. In fact, that's how Israelites would greet each other. They used to be Hashem, Hashem, the name, the name. And then it actually got shortened.

They would meet each other and say, Hashem, Hashem. Like it was an indicator of them that they were of God's people. So our goal is to be in the presence of God, knowing him and worshiping him. So when we think of the promised blessing to Abraham, a big part of it is the very presence of God.

Being from an idolatrous family, Abraham was not exactly the best man to mediate the presence of God to the world. Nonetheless, the promise was that through him, all of the families of the earth would receive a blessing.

The blessing of God was never intended for a single family or a single nation.

Right?

Do you realize Abraham is not a Jew? He's a Gentile. All the Jews, all the Pharisees say, we have Abraham as our father. And unknowingly, they're saying we have a Gentile as our father. He comes from the line of Ebed.

That's where we get the term Hebrew. But Abraham, Abraham is not a Jew. He's going to give birth to Isaac. Isaac's going to give birth to Jacob. Jacob is called Israel. And then his sons are the 12 tribes of Jacob or the 12 tribes of his new name, Israel.

So Israel is not even formed at this point. It's a very important thing. Because some people, they call them Zionists, right? They believe that all the promises are just for the Jews, just for Israel.

And what they don't realize is that those promises for Israel are conditional.

Right?

If they keep the law, they keep the land. If they reject the law, what happens?

They lose the land.

So all the people are saying, oh, Israel, the land belongs to Israel. Do I believe that they have a claim to it? Absolutely. But if you go covenantally and you start invoking the name of God, they have broken God's covenant over and over and over and over again.

This can get into dispensationalism, which we're not going to do right now, but that's where it comes from. The goal of this promise was intended to be worldwide in scope. And here it is, Revelation 5 -9.

Memorize this. What nation is he talking about? The church.

Right?

We shall reign on the earth. We are a kingdom of priests. We are not just priests, we are royalty, and our loyalty belongs to Jesus, okay? So this wasn't about one tribe. Israel was supposed to be, was supposed to pastor the nations, to be a light to the Gentiles.

Unfortunately, they failed in their mission, but that didn't stop God, right? God tells Abram to go and fetch a heifer, a she-goat, a ram, a turtle dove, and a pigeon. An odd request to our modern ears, but Abram knows exactly what God is up to, and he quickly cuts the animals in half and waits for God to act.

Keeping away the birds of prey, Abraham keeps vigil through the sunset. He then falls into a deep sleep, and God tells him that his descendants will be sojourners in a foreign land, enslaved for 400 years.

But then, God will rescue them and give them the land of Canaan. God confirms his promise by passing through the middle of the cut-up animals as a smoking fire and a flaming torch. In Abram's world, it was part of the solemn act of making a covenant.

By walking between the two halves of the sacrificed animals, so what Abraham did, he took the animals, cut them in half, put one piece over here, one piece over here, and he did that with all the animals.

So now there's an aisle that you would walk through. Where do we hear about aisles, right? By walking between the two halves of the sacrificed animal, the persons entering the covenant were saying, may I end up like these animals, dead and cut in half, if I'm not faithful to my promise and oath?

It's a very serious curse that would be brought upon you if you broke the covenant for covenant unfaithfulness. In response to Abram's lack of faith, God makes a covenant and binds himself to keep his word.

Notice who walks through the animal pieces. Abraham's, Abram, Abraham, he's asleep on the side. God walks through as a flaming torch and the pillar of cloud. In other words, God is saying himself, this gives, this points to the trinity, the triunity of God, where father and son walk through the halves of the covenant saying, we are going to keep this promise, meaning it's unconditional.

This is going to happen whether Abraham's faithful or not.

Yes, yes, yes, exactly, right.

I will stop existing because God cannot be separated. I will cease to exist if this doesn't happen. Excellent point. In the days immediately following God's promises in Genesis 12, Abraham and Sarah had plenty of reasons to doubt his word.

They grew no younger and as the years turned into decades, they still did not have a son. A lot of times we're reading chapter 12, 13, 14, 15 and we're like, oh yeah, that's another day, another day, another day.

This is years that this promise would take to be fulfilled. Think about what we're going through now as we see God's redemptive history unfolding before our eyes, right. We want it, boom, quick, quick, quick.

Abraham was waiting over 20 years for the promise of an heir to come. What did Abraham do the morning after God gave him the promise? He woke up, he fed his animals, he took care of his family, he did his fields.

What'd he do the next day? The same thing, the same thing, the same thing. A lot of times our lives are marked by mundane Christian living. And when I say mundane, it's the day in, the day out. Yet every day we are to glorify God in the midst of that, okay, knowing that the promise will come.

Right, gardening, we're doing gardening. Excellent point. At one point they tried to take matters into their own hands. Sometimes we do the same thing, right. Sarah convinced Abraham to have a child with her servant Hagar.

Wonderful, what could go wrong? Like Pastor Chris says, what could go wrong? But God would not be so easily manipulated. It was the son of Abraham and Sarah, not Hagar, who would be the heir of God's covenant promises.

Even as the years rolled by and the couple remained childless God kept reiterating his promises to them. He changed the name of Abram, which means something like exalted father, to Abraham, which means father of a multitude.

In other words, once God changed his name to Abraham, now everybody is calling him Abraham, Abraham, Abraham. And what is he hearing? You're father of the multitudes. You're gonna be father of the multitudes, father of the multitudes.

He kept being reinforced that that's who he is.

Why?

Because God took dominion and renamed him. Sarai's name became Sara, which means princess. She would be the mother of a nation, right? The king marries the princess. She's gonna be the mother of the nation.

It's not entirely clear what the name Sarai meant and whether it had substantially different meaning from Sara. At least we can say this new name added emphasis to Sara's role as the mother of the nations.

So both of them now have new names, right? God is taking dominion and moving history in a certain direction, which is not going to change. Finally, 25 years after God had appeared to Abraham in Genesis 12, it happened.

They had a son named Isaac. It was through this son that God would bring blessing to the world. It would be through the offspring of Abraham that God would one day crush the serpent's head. But first there was a test.

There's always a test. Test number one was in Genesis 12. Now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land I will show you. In other words, leave your familiar surroundings, your family and your home.

Go where I tell you to go. What was Adam told?

Go, right?

Go, expand the garden. What was Noah told? Go, expand the garden. What was humanity's response? No, let's congregate and build the tower. God confused their languages in what he did. He spread them out.

The goal is to spread out, to cover the globe. Test number two, Genesis 22. Take your son, your only son, Isaac. Didn't he have another son? Hagar with Ishmael, his only son. The son of the promise, yes, John.

Yes, right, he took matters into his own hands. The son was a work of his flesh, yes. So it reads, test number two, take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.

So, God, you're telling me the son who you gave me, promised me, who's going to be the heir of everything I own, and through whom, which the promise is gonna be fulfilled, I'm to kill him? Could you, listen, you gotta put yourself in Abraham's shoes.

He doesn't have the scriptures like we have. He doesn't know. Like, he's gotta be saying to himself, God is schizophrenic. He promised me a child, now he tells me to kill the child, right? This is, but think about what has to be going through his head, right?

Otherwise, he's telling Abraham, you're gonna leave your inheritance. You're gonna burn it. Watch this. When God told Abraham to go, leave your country, he was asking him to sacrifice his past. But when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he was asking him to sacrifice his future.

Think about what this points to. This is the essence of the gospel. Repent and believe. Repent, change your direction. Leave your past behind you. You're gonna turn. What happened in the past is the past.

That's no longer who you are. You're moving forward. Believe, trust me for your future. No longer trusting yourself and your own desires and your own plans. Deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me.

God renames Abraham father of a multitude, all right, Sarah, princess. These are foreshadowings of what's to come brought about by God's hand, not man's. I mean, if this ever is a spotlight on God's sovereignty and his accomplishing the promises, I don't know what is.

Abraham and Sarah tried to do it themselves, right? And it was a work of the flesh. Nothing is ever going to happen through a work of the flesh. It's only gonna happen by God's spirit. So that's why it's important.

God gives us his plan of salvation. He gives us his commandments. We are to abide by those because those are the means by which God uses us to do these things, okay? It makes the plan easier. So what is God telling Abraham?

Sacrifice your past. Now he's telling him in an act of faith to sacrifice your future. It's gonna be in my hands. After 25 years, God appeared to Abraham in Genesis 12, gave him a son, Isaac. It was through this son that God would bring the blessing to the world.

It was through the offspring of Abraham that God would one day crush the head of the serpent and Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac as God had asked him to do. He passed the test. As he's got the knife in the hand, whoa, stop, Abraham, stop.

I now know that you really believe me. I now know that you trust in me, right? And then God provides a ram in the place, right? But it would still take a while. In the rest of Genesis, we meet the rest of Abraham's family.

His son Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau, seed of the woman, seed of the serpent, and the family tree really started to branch out. Just as God had promised, the family would eventually become a nation.

But these two nations, both of them, Jacob and Esau, both became nations. But these nations would war against one another. Again, you see this playing out over and over. It's the same storyline. So in the years following his initial promises in Genesis 12, God laid the foundation for multiplying Abraham's family line and making his descendants a nation.

But they still didn't have any land. While God told Abraham that he would give his seed, the land from the Nile River to the Euphrates, that is from modern day Egypt to Iraq, they would not get it right away.

They had to go to Egypt and wait hundreds of years before they would finally get the land. But the promise was secure because God was the one who issued the promise. Joshua 21, 45, not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed.

Every one of them came to pass. You also find that in Numbers chapter nine, the several places where all the promises that God made to Israel were fulfilled. Now the question is, is Israel gonna be obedient and maintain the promises that God made to them?

Because it was conditional, right? So they lost the land. They lost so many different things. They were deported. Their enemies came upon them and conquered them. These were all things that God promised would not happen had they been faithful to God.

It was a conditional promise. That's why when we get to the covenant, the new covenant, the good news is it's the covenant ratified, made by God to save us apart from our obedience or disobedience. The last of the promises that God made to Abraham was the promise to bless all the families of the earth through him.

But to be a blessing to others, Abraham had to receive a blessing from God first. And that is exactly what happened. As the promises were unpacked over time, God told Abraham that he would be their God.

I will be your God. You will be my people. The promise to be their God was not a light thing. With these words, God was promising to give the same blessing to Abraham and his offspring that he gave to Adam and Eve.

He would live with them as their God and they as his people. But this raises a question. What would keep Abraham and his seed from messing up the same way Adam and Eve did? How could God guarantee that they wouldn't break his covenant as well?

How can God guarantee that the seed is going to come through? In Genesis 15, again, we refer back. God walked through the divided animals alone. He's swearing that he's going to keep this covenant. It's not based on Abraham's obedience.

By doing this, he was binding himself to keep both sides of the covenant. He was not only committing to keep the promises himself, he was also committing that if Abraham failed to remain loyal and keep the covenant, he, God, would suffer the consequence of that failure.

Like Ted said, God was saying, I would cease to exist. God was binding himself both to the promises of Genesis 12 and the obligations of taking the blessing to all families of the earth. In this amazing scene, God was binding his own fate with that of Abraham's seed.

This is, those are the animals cut in half. That's the smoking pot and that's the flaming torch passed through. It had to be an unbelievable, Abraham was asleep, but it had to be an unbelievable scene to see that take place, right?

He's, God is the covenant keeper. We're the covenant breakers, right? That's why the story is about God. It's not about us. That's what makes the God-man, Jesus, all the more important, all the more precious, all the more desirous, desirable to be in union with him.

It was to Abraham that God clarified that the line of the seed of the woman would run through this family. And it was in the vision to Abraham that God made plain his total commitment to making these promises happen, so much so that he was willing to put himself on the line.

God will finish what he started and keep his promise. He keeps his covenants. Again, he's the covenant keeper. We are the covenant breakers. Yes, brother. The pillar of cloud by day and the fire by night, right?

Representing God. They were following God through the desert wilderness. There was a test for the Israelites in the wilderness,.

Right?

They failed the test. How many times do we fail the test? Let's be honest.

Yeah.

Thankfully Jesus did. That's the whole point, right? The law is to show us our sinfulness and our condemnation. All the law could do, the commandments can do, is bring death, right? That's why God made a new covenant based on the spirit,.

Right?

The spirit brings life, the law brings death. So where we're still disobedient, right? But should be growing in faithfulness, right? We rely on, we cling to the one who promised to save us, the one who paid for our sins, who said, I am going to redeem you.

I will be your God and you will be my people, right? This is the law gospel distinction. We're guilty when it comes to the law, but we are saved, reconciled because of the new covenant and the spirit.

Thank God for that. So God never made a promise that was too good to be true. The new covenant sounds too good to be true, but it's not, right? God's covenant is true. He's going to redeem a people, okay?