The Covenant

 “The Covenant”

Text: Genesis 15  // Series: Beginnings

Message @ JRCC – Sunday, Feb 27, 2011

Well good morning, friends.  I am going to invite you to come back and take your seats and as you do so I want to ask you a question…  And I’m going to ask you to get into discussion with those who are seated around you on this question so if you haven’t taken the opportunity to meet, please do before you begin your discussion. And the question that I want you to discuss is this: How many contracts do you estimate you are currently involved in or legally bound by?

• For your home (mortgage, insurance…)
• At work (employment, EI, CPP, ethics…)
• Products & services you use (phone, fitness, bank, credit & loyalty cards…) 
• Activities you participate in (organized sports, schooling, clubs or professional associations, travel, drivers licence…)  

So turn to the people next to you and try to come up with a number.  Ready – Go. 

Alright, I’m going to invite you back…  What kind of numbers did you come up with… shout them out.  When you stop to think about it, so many aspects of our modern life are governed by contracts.  I rented a video yesterday – signed my name without even thinking about it.  I engaged in a contractual obligation.  And then I got to thinking ‘what if I don’t bring my movie back.  Eventually, they’ll charge the credit card they have on file.  And if I don’t pay that bill, then the credit card company will be nice for a while but then it will play hardball and they may come after some of my other assets.  But the problem there is that I’m under contract there, too.  When you stop to think about it, it really is amazing how many contracts – hidden and overt there are around us all of the time.  And we don’t even think about most of them, do we?  Last week, iTunes sent me an 85 page notice on how they’ve updated the terms of service, if you’re like me you don’t even read half of that stuff – you kinda browse through to the bottom of the first page, click “accept” and poof – you’ve just painlessly with your pinky finger, entered into yet another binding contract.  I want you to keep that idea fixed in your mind as we progress through our time in God’s Word this morning.  Because we’re going to look at a unique biblical kind of a contract called a covenant and we’re going to see how significant and how powerful it is and how amazing it is that Almighty God would covenant with people.  People just like you and me.

Well, this morning we are wrapping up our first teaching series of 2011 where’ we’re gone through the first 15 chapters of the book of Beginnings.  In January and February, we’ve been looking at the topics of history, mystery and theology in the first book of the Bible, Genesis.  Those of you who are teachers know the importance of revisiting your learning outcomes, so let’s review where we’ve been and why we’ve been there.  In the past 8 weeks, our goal has been to give you some of the basic Building Blocks of Biblical Theology:

The reason we’ve been emphasizing these things is so that when you read the Bible for yourself, which we anticipate that you do outside of Sunday morning and there’s a tool to help you with that journey called a Momentum Journal - when you come across a passage, you can look back and say “I remember this.  This makes sense in light of that stuff in Genesis.”  That is because Genesis teaches us an amazing amount of things about God, about ourselves, and about our world.  For example, when we started in January, we talked about the

• Integration of faith & science – in Genesis 1-2.  We saw that the Bible is concerned with the questions of who and why and not how of Creation.  We spent an evening with Dr. Brown exploring evolution and God’s design and work in creation and how we might be thinking people and not get distracted or sucked into stupid arguments or false dichotomies.  Then, in Genesis 2, we looked at 
• Rhythms of work, rest and trust – Sabbath and God’s commands and plans for us as people who are made in His image.  In Ch. 3  
• The presence of evil in the world and in the heart & actions of every person – our first ancestors rebelled against God, who had given them free will and choose willful disobedience.  This was not just an isolated choice - we still do the same thing and the consequences are immense.  We are separated from God.  In story after story in Genesis, this plays itself out.  In Ch. 4 we see the first brothers, Cain and Abel and how Abel chose authentic worship and 
• Generous living (giving our first fruits) – while Cain chose to let the sin that was crouching at his door master him.  In 6-10, the story of the great flood, we saw how the thoughts and intentions and  actions of everyone all the time were wicked and so God displayed
• God’s judgment and His mercy – In saving Noah and his family.  But still people rebelled against God, and we saw that instead of fidelity and obedience to His command to fill the earth and multiply, there was a group in chapter 11 that built a tower called Babel.  And in God’s action of scattering them we saw this demonstrated…    
• God’s heart for the nations.  Then last week, we met one of the central characters of the Bible, a man named Abram, later Abraham.  And Pastor Keith reminded us in Chapter 12 of God’s call and His    
• Blessing has responsibilities & costs

And so today, we continue the story or Abram…  But we won’t finish it.  In fact, there’s so much more exciting stuff in Genesis that we’re going to be picking up the rest of the book in July and August while our family is on sabbatical with fantastic special guests under Pastor Keith’s leadership. 

But today our focus is on the last big building block of this book of beginnings and that is the concept of the Covenant. We’re going to ask

• What is a covenant? The word appears 287 times in the OT and there are 25 specific instances where covenants are drawn up in the Bible so it would seem that it’s a somewhat important theme or concept if we want to understand and live out a biblical worldview.  We should ask:
• What is the difference between a contract and a covenant? 
• Does the biblical notion of covenant have significance for us today? 

So let’s pray as we jump into the reading of God’s Word this morning. 

When we last left Abram, in Chapter 12, God came to him and promised to bless him.  But, as Pastor Keith highlighted, life is not easy for Abram.  Sometimes we have these idealized pictures of the Bible and biblical characters.  Oh, if only I could hear from God like Abram did.  Well, over the course of recorded interactions which began at age 75 and ended 100 years later, God speaks to him 8 times, sometimes with decades of silence in between.  And when God does speak to him, it’s not always great news!  Open your Bible or take out your iPhone and look with with me at Genesis 15.  I’m going to be reading from the New Living translation beginning at verse 1.  We’re going to look at God’s promises to Abram in Gen 15 and finally, how God guarantees them in the form of a covenant. Let’s read [v1]

• Do not be afraid (15:1)
• I will protect you (15:1)
• Your reward will be great  (15:1)

I love the realism of Abram’s response (15:2).  Um yeah, that’s great God.

• You will have a son (15:4)

This is the starry night part of the story we like to focus on…. [v 5]  And the simplicity and the power of the text is striking… [ v. 6]  Abram moves from fatigue to faith.  He believes God and trusts his character for what he cannot see or even hope to imagine…

• Future promise of land (15:7)

But (and I love this about Abram) we move from starry night to realism again.  Um, God?  About your promises, I have a big question. 

But Abram replied, “O Sovereign Lord, how can I be sure that I will actually possess it?”   At this point, God takes covenantal action. 

 The Lord told him, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”   

So Abram presented all these to him and killed them. Then he cut each animal down the middle and laid the halves side by side.”  (Genesis 15:8-10a)                                               [Read 15:10b-18]

• 400 years of oppressive slavery (15:13)
• Wealth for his descendants (15:14)
• Peaceful death in old age (15:15)

Scripture Slide – Genesis 15:17-18

This is one of the most significant, but most unusual passages we’ve come across in Genesis to date…  God and Abram ‘Cut’ a Covenant

But here’s where it would be helpful to pause and ask:

• What is a covenant?  The simple answer, for which I am indebted to my Old Testament professor Dr. Elmer Martens, is that it is:

-         “An arrangement between two parties in which the greater commits himself to the lesser in the context of mutual loyalty.” (Martens, “God’s Design: A Focus on Old Testament Theology”). 

You see, what God and Abram are doing here though it seems weird and bloody to us, is a similar idea but in a much stronger sense as clicking the “I accept” button on your mouse or singing your name to a document.  It is the culturally understood way of entering into a contractual arrangement.

You see, when the Bible uses the word covenant, it’s talking about a very specific and very deep type of binding contractual arrangement.  In ancient times, people would not enter into covenants lightly.  Euphemistically, you may have heard of signing your name in blood?  Well, they would do something like that in the ancient near east when they were making a covenant.  They would take an animal – in this case, a cow, a goat, a ram and two birds – and they would cut them in two and lay it on the ground, and the parties who were engaging in the covenant with one another would walk through the middle of those animal carcass together and say to one another ‘may it be done to me as it has been done to this animal if I fail to keep any part of this covenant.’  We know this from archeological evidence because we have all kinds of Examples of Ancient Covenants {two photos} from this time period that use the very same construct as this one in Genesis 15 or God’s covenant with Israel at Sinai.

Well, we certainly don’t do that today, do we?   But maybe that’s because we tend to think in terms of contracts and not covenants.  Think about all of those contracts you discussed at the start with your neighbours…  Think about a business contract or a contract you sign to get into a fitness club.  In those, it’s almost all about what you are going to get from the other party.  What they will do for you, how they will they serve you.  Let’s think about some of the Differences between Contracts and Covenants

Contracts

• Expected Benefits that I am to receive.  Here’s what you will give me.  When my car gets in an accident, you will fix it.
• Mutual agreement – There are things you will do, and things I will do (such as pay the deductible)
• A contract is usually born out of Negotiation – think about selling or buying a house or car – negotiating on price and what’s included. 
• And that’s because contracts tend to be Thing-focused
• They emphasize the duty – Performance – filled with If / then statements (also known as loop holes!).