When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.” -Genesis 17:1-8
Throughout Scripture Abraham is held forth as the ultimate example of faith. He was willing to trust God in the midst difficult circumstances and to believe His promises in the face of that which seemed impossible. The Bible, however, does not hide from us the faults and failures of the heroes of our faith. It is not the perfect faith of Abraham, but instead the faithfulness of God that stands out so dramatically throughout the Abrahamic narrative of Genesis 12-25.
Before the birth of Isaac Abraham twice placed his wife Sarah in harm’s way under the guise of protecting his own life. The first of these came as a result of his failure to trust the Lord during a famine in Canaan and their subsequent sojourn in Egypt. The second occurred as the sojourned in the territory of the Negeb and he feared for his life from the ruler of Gerar, Abimelech. Perhaps his greatest personal failure, however, occurred when he followed the instructions of his wife Sarai and took her Egyptian servant Hagar as his wife in order that they might have a child by her. Though each of these serve as examples of Abraham’s faults, God never abandoned His promises to Abraham or his seed.
Genesis 17 stands out in particular because of God’s instructions to Abraham which demonstrate the relationship between physical signs and His spiritual promises. The covenant of circumcision was a deeply personal, physical mark that Abraham and all his descendants were to bear that would serve as a continual reminder of God’s promises to them. This mark was to be an outward sign of the inward spiritual reality of faith which was to accompany it.
These promises, reiterated to Abraham by God, were focused once again around his offspring or seed. While these certainly refer to his physical descendants generally, Paul’s recognition of the importance of this term in reference to Christ in the New Testament should lead us to see the Lord Jesus as the Seed they ultimately anticipated. Like Abraham, He serves as the representative head of His people, but unlike Abraham, His life and work were a perfect example of faith and obedience to God the Father.
While Abraham’s life reminds us that we don’t have to be perfect people to be faithful people, it is Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, which provide for us the hope of being counted righteous before God based on simple faith in Him. Join us this Sunday as we gather to worship Jesus and to celebrate the good news of the Gospel!
Soli Deo Gloria.
-Thomas