The Covenant of Grace

Flick with me to Genesis chapter 15. We're going to be reading from that this morning. We'll get to another huge turning point in the story of the Bible. Another huge diversion or another great leap forward in the story of the Bible. We've been seeing the process of the unfolding story of the Bible moving through the covenant of works, or the Adamic covenant, through to the covenant of common grace, which is the covenant.

And today we get to the Abrahamic covenant, or what is better known as the covenant of grace. These are huge events in the story or the narrative of the Bible. We understand that there is a progression, don't we, throughout the Bible, but these are the great hooks by which the story progresses and moves on and kind of actually starts narrowing down as we start moving towards the new covenant or the cross of Jesus. We've seen two covenants, like I've said, have been made so far. The first one was with Adam.

The second one, the covenant of grace. Now remember, a covenant is a type of contract agreement between two parties. The first covenant was made between two parties, God and Adam. Adam representing the whole of humanity. Remember that?

The condition of that agreement was perfect obedience. Adam and Eve were to live in the garden to fulfil the cultural mandate of filling the earth and working the earth to more productivity, to subdue the earth and create beautiful things. The blessings of that covenant was eternal life in paradise, and the curse for breaking that deal was death. Now today we get to the next covenant, which is probably the second most important covenant of them all. The first, you could say, is a covenant of works, God's original agreement with mankind, but the second one, the Abrahamic covenant or the covenant of grace is probably the second most important in the Bible.

The impact of this covenant runs from Genesis three, right in the beginning of the Bible, right through to Revelation 22 at the end, and in fact, our future. We already saw a hint of that last week when we heard that Adam and Eve were to have an offspring. Remember? The offspring that would crush the head of the serpent as the serpent attacked the offspring. And we get a hint right there in Genesis three of something that will become a full blown promise today as we reach a man called Abraham.

God makes a covenant with Abraham and sets in place a master plan for the human race. Let's turn to Genesis 15. We're gonna read the entire chapter. In the ESV, we see the title that they've given this chapter is "God's covenant with Abraham." Genesis 15, verse one.

Thanks, Arlene. Verse one: "After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram. I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great."

"But Abram said, 'Oh Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.' And Abram said, 'Behold, you have given me no offspring and a member of my household will be my heir.' And behold, the word of the Lord came to him. 'This man shall not be your heir.'"

"'Your very own son shall be your heir.' And he brought him outside and said, 'Look toward heaven and number the stars if you are able to number them.' Then he said to him, 'So shall your offspring be.' And he believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness. And he said to him, 'I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.'"

"But he, Abraham, said, 'Oh Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?' God said to him, '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 of these, cut them in half, and laid each over against the other, but he did not cut the birds in half. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram, and behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him."

"Then the Lord said to Abram, 'Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward, they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried in good old age, and they shall come back here in the fourth generation for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.' When the sun had gone down and was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces."

"On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, 'To your offspring, I give this land. From the River of Egypt to the Great River, the River Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.'" So far, our reading. There was absolutely nothing particular and special about Abraham. Nothing special about him at all until God burst onto the scene of his life.

In Genesis 12, there is not very much that stands out for him and that makes him stand out as a particularly good or righteous or noble guy. He's just a man living in a place called Ur of Qaldiyah, which is modern day Iraq now, which would, in those days, later become Babylon. He wasn't necessarily nicer than other people, the Bible says, or more spiritual than they were. God, in Genesis 12, just comes to Abram. In an act of immense grace, we have to understand that God sovereignly and graciously seemingly chooses Abram out of the blue.

And He makes a promise to Abram in Genesis 12, and the beginning of this covenant is established. Theologians call this unconditional election. There were no conditions to being called or elected by God. This is how the story begins in Genesis chapter 12. "Now the Lord said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land 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.'"

"'I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonours you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.'" Abram comes to know God, in other words, through a miraculous revelation of God. What does God promise him in Genesis 12? God promises Abraham a people, a place, and God's very presence, God's blessing.

Now remember two weeks ago and tie this back to Adam. These are not random promises. What we find in God's original blessings for Adam and Eve was people, place, presence. People: perfect relationship. God blesses Adam with Eve.

Place: the garden, and in fact, perfect world to inhabit, and God's presence, God walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. For Abraham, He has promised a people. Abraham will have descendants, many of them. Abraham is promised a place, a land that will be his and Abraham is promised the presence of God, that God will watch over Abraham. Those who curse Abraham, God will curse.

Those who bless Abraham, God will bless. God is now protector of Abraham. This is the essence of the covenant. God says to Abraham, "I will be your God and I want you to be my people. I will be your God."

"You will be my people. Abraham, you will become a great nation and I will protect this nation and through my people, you will bless the world." And so we find the plan of God continuing. We see that it is gracious. It is without condition.

It is God initiating this with a man called Abraham. But then we come to the receiving of that or the accepting of that promise by faith. We see that already beginning in Genesis 12. Abraham hears this word of God. He doesn't know this God.

Abraham would have been a Gentile idol worshipper in Babylon. Here comes Yahweh, speaks to him, and what does he do? He obeys. He leaves family. He leaves everything, and he and his wife and the few little bits of possessions that they scrape together, they leave and they start heading down south towards the land of Canaan.

We skip over a few adventures in between chapters twelve and fifteen. We get to chapter 15 that we just read, and Abram is now in Canaan, the land that had been promised to him, but there's a problem. We find Abraham afraid, don't we, as we start reading it? He's afraid and he's upset at the start of the chapter. If you quickly flick back, you'll see that Abram has just had a huge battle.

There was a fight between him and some various kings who were his neighbours. Not only in this situation in chapter 15 is he at risk of those enemies perhaps retaliating, but he's also, we see, not taking any reward from the king that he helped. This king of Sidon offers him a reward, and Abram says no to that offer. God will bless me. He holds on to Genesis 12.

God will bless me, not you. Instead, he says that God will be the one who blesses and no one else. But now he's afraid of what he could have done to his neighbours. You know, we hate upsetting our neighbours. Imagine if these neighbours had swords and guns.

He's afraid. There's pretty powerful enemies that he could have made and in this context of fear, we find Abram at the start of chapter 15. And verse one, we find God comes to Abram again and this is what He says: "Abraham, afraid. I am your shield. I am your very great reward."

Abraham, you don't need that king's treasure. I will be your reward. If you have Me, you have the greatest reward there is. Now Abram, and probably like us, he's not immediately satisfied with an answer. Maybe a little bit of coin would have helped.

I don't know. He's not immediately satisfied with that answer. He has heard God promise things before, but he's beginning to doubt now. This is many, many years after Genesis 12. But nothing has happened.

Nothing has happened. Where is this promise? He's migrated. Country. He's set himself up.

The business is starting to run. His sheep and his goats, they're multiplying, but there is no child. How will he be made into a great nation if he doesn't have a biological heir? Now Abram's response to God is something that is common in the life of faith, isn't it? We may have just won an enormous battle.

We may be coming off a very great high, but now he is sitting under this situation. His spirit has begun to sink. He has just announced to the kings around him that he is a fairly substantial player in the game now. He's powerful enough to have his own army, but really he's just a simple farmer. He's not an army general.

And so when he goes and sits down that one night in his tent, he begins to sob. Have you ever felt that way? Like a spiritual depression. I was talking with some people in our church who have just come back from Israel and they mentioned to me that the sort of lull that you come back into, the spiritual depression after having walked the same soil that the Lord Jesus has walked, coming back to normal life. Have you experienced that spiritual depression after a great victory?

After a great spiritual high, there comes a spiritual dryness and people start seeking God because of it. People stop rather seeking God because of it. They stop attending church over it. Their lives get messy. What's the cure of this?

Well, the text indicates that it's just hard nosed belief that cures it. It's just stubborn faith that gets you through. Dependence on God. We see in Abraham's situation, God doesn't immediately click His fingers and gives Abraham what his doubting heart was yearning. I don't have a son.

It's been years. God reminds him, however, of the promise, and He reassures him. And in fact, He makes this promise even more explicit. He says to Abraham that He would indeed have a son. Abraham, you will have a son.

And from that son, God is going to produce so many descendants they won't be able to be numbered. And one of the most beautiful details of this story happens in verse five. Have a look there. Genesis 15, verse five where it says, "God brought Abraham outside and said, 'Look towards the heavens and number the stars if you're able to number them.' Then He said, 'So shall your offspring be.'"

It's a beautiful little part of the intimacy of God. Abraham is in his tent. He's moping. He's fuming. And God leads him like a father leading a little child to the backyard out.

And you can just imagine if you've ever been in the desert looking up at the stars with no light pollution and the stars are dazzling. God says, "This is how many your descendants will be. This is how great a nation you will become." And then verse six says this simply: "Abraham believed the Lord." Abraham believed the Lord.

The phrase about that faith described in verse six is perhaps the most important verses in the Bible. Do you believe that? Verse six says that God then counted Abraham's faith as righteousness. Abraham believes God and God credits that faith as righteousness. Now later on in the New Testament, Paul the apostle develops and explains the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith on this single verse.

Faith was essential for Abraham to receive what God was offering him. That is what faith is. It's not a certain level of spirituality. You must have 50 faith points in order to be saved. You must have 50 or a 100 faith points in order to receive healing.

Faith was Abraham just saying, "Lord, I'll hold out my hand because I believe You will give me something." When you and I believe the Gospel, what is simply happening there is we acknowledge our utter helplessness because of sin and we look to Christ to have done the job to save us, consider us completely righteous, because through faith, we stretch out our empty hands and we receive God's promise that He has made everything right through the work and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. That is what faith is, receiving. This leads us to the final point.

There is one reason and one reason alone why this promise of the covenant is something that Abraham can believe in, that he can put his trust in, and that is why it's also called the covenant of grace. Because this whole covenant, this whole thing depends on God and not on us. Remember the covenant of works with Adam and Eve was a covenant of them doing what was right. Perfect obedience. Perfect obedience.

It relied on human effort, but the covenant of grace enacted and established here is going to be fulfilled by God, and this is how God shows it to Abraham. God tells Abraham, "Go and get a goat. Go and get a few little birds. Go and get a heifer, a ram, and slaughter them and cut them up in two halves." The Bible says that Abraham goes and he does that.

Now we know that up until this point, there's this promise that God has been saying, but now it's going to become a covenant. Because a covenant in those days, there was a customary ritual that was enacted to make sure that the covenant or the agreement was binding. Two parties entering into this covenant binding agreement would sacrifice two animals, cut them in half, blood and guts everywhere. And as they made this commitment to one another, as they said, "I will give you 20 gold pieces for 50,000 heads of cattle," or whatever. They would make this covenant, this binding agreement by walking between this carcass, walking through the entrails of this dead animal.

Now can you imagine that? It's very neat now just signing a bit of paper. But they would do that. And as they did that, each of them would say, "May I become like this dead animal if I don't go through with this deal. May God smite me and kill me if I don't go through with this."

This technical term for this agreement is a self maledictory oath. When each party walks through these pieces, they make an oath. May I become like these dead animals if I ever break the terms of this covenant. Now from God's side, we know that there are many terms to this agreement. God says, "You'll have descendants.

You will have a place. You will have a country to live in, and you will have My blessing. You will have Me as your God." But for Abraham and his descendants, there's only one term and that is be My people. Just be Mine.

I will be your God with all these blessings and you just be My people. This is signified and sort of cemented again at another rehearsal of the covenant at Genesis 17 where the covenant is again repeated, but this time God says, "The sign of your faithfulness to Me is the circumcision. That is where circumcision comes in." The sign that you belong to Me, that you will be My people is the circumcision. And ultimately, it comes down to faith in Abraham.

And He will uphold His end of the bargain through faith. That is the second half of faith. Faith is not simply acknowledging something from God. It is faithfulness to God. And so the covenant of grace with Abraham is faith through circumcision.

Covenant blessings is people, place, and presence. The covenant curse is they will be killed. They will become like this dead animal, but this is why it's a covenant of grace. We see in verses 9 through to 21 that really weird scene, right?

And we don't understand exactly what's happening. Abraham splits these animals in two, but before he's able to participate in the covenant agreement, he falls into a deep sleep, the Bible says, and terrible darkness comes over him, but he is somehow able to see a smoking pot and a flaming torch come down, and they move between these carcasses. He watches on, and he's not able to do anything but watch on. This is the incredible reality of this scene. In this covenant agreement supposedly between two parties, there aren't two parties making this oath.

There is only one and that is God. As both the torch and the flaming pot, God promises, therefore, to uphold this deal even on behalf of Abraham. By doing this, God takes sole responsibility for the promises of the covenant to be kept. In other words, if Abraham and his descendants were to break this agreement, God will pay the consequences. God will pay Abraham's consequences.

God is saying, "May I become like these animals if I do not fulfil what I have promised you even if the reason why I cannot fulfil it is due to your inability, your disobedience." That is why it's called the covenant of grace. Whilst the covenant of works relied on human effort, the covenant of grace relies on God. Ultimately, as we'll see, this covenant isn't about establishing a family in a cosy part of the Middle East. Like Adam and like Noah, God's plan is global in perspective, global in scope.

He wants a whole world restored, but He's going to do it in various stages and Abraham is stage one. We saw that Eve would have an offspring to combat Satan, didn't we? There's this murky hope about a future saviour. With Abraham, we find another promise of offspring that would bring blessing to the world. We see that as well, don't we?

And again, there's double meaning here. The blessing of the world relates to the fact that even non-descendants of Abraham would receive God's blessing and presence. Non-Jews, in other words, will receive God's blessing. Indeed, that's why all Christians, whether they are Jewish or not, can be called sons of Abraham. Galatians 3:7 says, Paul writes, "Know then that it is those of faith who are sons of Abraham."

Whatever our nationality, in other words, if we have faith in the covenant promises, if we have faith in the covenant God, we receive its blessings. Blessings. The whole world does. But then there's a second meaning to this word offspring. There's a second meaning to the descendants of Abraham, and that is found in a specific man who would come from the Jewish people, Jesus.

He's the one through whom all the world will be blessed. And Jesus, we know, is more than a man. He is perfect God who made a promise to us, the same promise. A promise to not fail those who He has set His heart on. He would not fail even if Abraham and his descendants did.

Paul makes this incredible accusation also in Galatians 3. He says, "God's people did indeed fail." If you know your Bible, we know they do. God's people did indeed fail, but God did not and that is why Jesus had to come. That is why Jesus had to die.

This is what Paul writes: "Christ redeemed us. He bought us from the curse of the law, the curse of the contract, by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.'" The oath God made on our behalf points beyond the lifetime of Abraham and points to the day when God on oath said He would pay in His blood.

God made the covenant contract so certain that nothing, not even our sin, not even Abraham's descendants' unfaithfulness when they started worshipping the gods and the idols of the people around them. Not even these things could break God's promise because God promised on His own oath. How powerful is that? Why would we ever want to doubt this God? That is how we know we are saved, therefore, not based on our grip of God, not based on our understanding or trying to figure Him out.

The power of the Gospel is about His grip on us. It's not about what we can offer God. It's not about what we can choose for God. It is that God has chosen for us freely. Friends, when we find ourselves in the storms of life, when we find ourselves tempted to reject this God, tempted to disobey His clear and perfect word, remember this.

In our unfaithfulness, God is faithful. God remains faithful. Know that your survival, know that your righteousness, your holiness is not dependent on yourself but the Lord. And if you find yourself sinking beneath these waves that come in life, know that this is not your grip on the hand of Jesus that matters, but His grip on us. What comfort it is to know that we have a God who relentlessly pursues us at the cost of Himself to make sure that His promise and His word will not be broken.

Praise God. Let's pray. Father, we thank You and we receive these words, God. This promise again, I want to be your God. I want you to be my people.

Oh, Father, what a simple equation. What a simple thought, and yet we know how fraught with inconsistency the second half of that commitment can be. If only we could choose You as our God, as if only we could remain faithful to You, oh, God. But thank You that it does not rely upon us. Thank You that we are known by You.

Oh, and by the time of Abraham, You've seen our brokenness and our fragility. We cannot stick to this game plan. And by Your grace, by Your power, by Your sovereign decree, You've taken this on Yourself. Oh God, what can we do and say in response to this, but just to thank You? And Father, how then in light of this, can we choose anything but You?

Why would we turn our backs on this God who loved us so? Because God, before we knew You and we thought our God was a hard God, we enjoyed our sin. We enjoyed our rebellion. But when we saw the love and the faithfulness of our God in the face of Christ, our hearts were broken. And it becomes a complete and utter joy to live a life worthy of the forgiveness and freedom that we have already received.

Father, we pray that that realisation may mark us till the end of our days. Father, help us to never forget that. Oh, may we be faithful to You as You have already been faithful to us. And so, Lord, we give our lives in humble service to You, in humble adoration and praise, with deep gratitude, with thankful hearts because of Jesus Christ and this promise that will never be broken. Amen.