This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 4: “An Everlasting Covenant”
This week’s lesson addresses God’s call to Abraham and the covenant He made with him. The lesson’s author does not deal with the clear account in Genesis of the covenant God made with Abraham. The actual Abrahamic covenant is recorded in Genesis 15. The lesson, however, squishes Genesis 12, where God called Abraham out of Ur, Genesis 15, where God made His covenant with him, and Genesis 17, where God gave Abraham the sign of His covenant, into one “thing”. These three passages are distinct, however, and they cannot be morphed into one so-called “covenant”.
In Genesis 12 God called Abram and his wife, his father, and his brother, and took him to a land Abram didn’t know. God told him that He would give him the land and descendants, but this chapter does not mention “covenant”, and His call to Abraham was not a covenant. In fact, throughout the Old Testament God called on people to go and do His bidding, to trust Him and do things they didn’t feel qualified to do. These events record acts of faith in God, but they do not constitute covenants. Even when God promised He would do things for these people, those promises were not covenants.
Genesis 15 records the actual Abrahamic Covenant. The lesson fails to explain the profound significance of this covenant. God reiterated His promises to Abraham—in short, He was giving him seed, land, and blessing—and in this chapter we have the first declaration of how people are counted righteous. Genesis 15:5–6 says,
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.
When God told Abraham, a man with a barren wife, that he would have offspring from a child from his own body, Abraham BELIEVED God. He had no physical evidence that God’s promises would come true, but he believed Him—and God counted him righteous because of his belief.
Paul expands the significance of Abraham’s belief in Romans 4 where he explains that Abraham’s belief PRECEDED his circumcision, and as a man righteous in God’s eyes because of His belief in God’s promises, he is the father of ALL who believe, both Jew and gentile.
Then God reiterated that He was giving Abraham the land for his numberless descendants to possess, and Abraham asked how he could know this promise would be fulfilled. It was then God directed Abraham to prepare the covenant components.
In the ancient near East, covenants between conquering kings and conquered kings followed a strict pattern in the manner of Hittite covenants. These covenants were established by the two kings agreeing to terms of engagement—what the conquering king would provide for the conquered people, and what the conquered people would do for the conquering king. These agreements were sealed with sacrificial animal, and God had Abraham prepare these sacrifices for their covenant.
In the usual Hittite covenants, the two covenanting kings would walk among the pieces of the slain animals in a self-maledictory oath. In other words, they were saying, based on the slain and severed animals, “So be it done to me if I break this covenant with you.”
Such covenants were two-way agreements made on the pain of death if one failed to keep his end of the bargain.
In Genesis 15, however, God does something different. He has Abraham prepare the sacrificed animals so they can make a covenant, but God doesn’t immediately respond. Abraham had to drive away birds of prey that came to eat the carcasses.
Verse 12 tells us when the unique transaction began. When the sun went down, “a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him.”
The words of this verse let us know that this sleep that fell upon Abraham was not a natural sleep. He didn’t “fall asleep”, but sleep “fell upon him,” and “terror and great darkness” also “fell upon him.”
While Abraham was in this deep and terrifying sleep, God spoke to him.
Know for certain
He told Abraham exactly what He would do. Read Genesis 15:13–16, and notice the specific detail God revealed to Abraham:
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 a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
God told Abraham that his promised offspring would be “sojourners in a land that is not theirs.” Remember, God had already told Abraham that the land to which He had brought him would belong to his heirs. But now God revealed that these people would first be strangers and afflicted servants in a land that wasn’t theirs.
Furthermore, God told Abraham how long his descendants would be there: 400 years. After that, God would judge the nation they had served, and they would leave that country with “great possessions”. He then revealed Abraham himself would “go to your fathers in peace”, but he should know that in the fourth generation of his descendants’ sojourn in that strange land, they would return to the Promised Land God had provided.
God wanted Abraham to “know for certain” that His promises that He would give him seed, land, and blessing WOULD come true—and He furthermore told him before it ever happened exactly how long his descendants would be enslaved strangers in a foreign land and when they would return to the Promised Land.
Then, in verse 17, God finally makes His covenant with Abraham. Here is where the story is truly unique from any covenant known to the ancient world. God does NOT ALLOW Abraham to participate in making this covenant!
He has put his chosen man into a deep sleep, disabling him from being able to do anything. He can’t speak; He can’t make promises; he can’t take the self-maledictory oath. He can only hear God as he lies in a deep sleep caused by God.
God Himself passes among the sacrificial animal pieces in the forms of a smoking oven and a flaming torch. God Himself covenants to give Abraham the land He has promised—and again, God is very specific. He tells him exactly the parameters of the land his offspring will receive and the nations that his descendants will replace.
This covenant is UNCONDITIONAL, not conditional. Had Abraham and God jointly cut the covenant together, it would have been CONDITIONAL because Abraham, being human, would have been unable to perfectly keep his own promises.
God, however, cannot lie and cannot break His own word:
God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? (Numbers 23:19).
Adventism does not teach that God made an unconditional covenant with Abraham. He purposely took Abraham OUT of the picture so He could unilaterally promise an eternal promise to the man who was to become the father of ALL the faithful. This covenant was significant because it promised that He would bring about a promised people—and millennia later Paul would explain in Galatians that the promised people culminated in a promised Seed, the Lord Jesus—and God would give this promised people the land He said He would give them.
This covenant became the foundation of the unconditional new covenant that God later made with the promised people: Israel and Judah. Furthermore, this covenant became the promise that the believing gentiles would also inherit as grafted branches in the olive tree of God’s purposes (Romans 11).
Circumcision
Genesis 17 gives the account of God’s covenant of circumcision with Abraham. Circumcision was the sign of the Abrahamic covenant, and this covenant was conditional in the sense that any offspring of Abraham’s who was NOT circumcised would not receive God’s covenanted blessings (Gen. 17:14). Nevertheless, even here God reiterated His promises to Abraham, but Abraham made no promises to God.
Circumcision became the required sign for entrance into the nation of Israel after the nation formed. Without being circumcised, in fact, gentiles were not permitted to participate in the covenant rituals and sacrifices and sabbaths prescribed in the Mosaic law.
Later, after Jesus fulfilled the Mosaic covenant and inaugurated the new covenant in His blood, physical circumcision was no longer required. (See Acts 15, Galatians, Colossians 1, Romans 4). Paul specifically refers to the “circumcision made without hands” that is the reality of the new birth.
God promised through both Jeremiah and Ezekiel that the day was coming when He would make a covenant with His people and give them new hearts, new spirits, and put His Spirit in them. Paul identifies belief in Jesus and the new birth and the sealing by the Holy Spirit as that circumcision of the heart which God kept telling Israel He wanted them to have.
Circumcision of the heart in which believers receive eternal life and new hearts, new spirits, and the Holy Spirit indwelling them, is the entrance sign into the new covenant. Baptism is the public rite which the Lord Jesus asks us as believers to do to declare our new identity in His life, death, and resurrection. The new birth, however, is the fulfillment of the physical shadow of circumcision.
Indeed, even now, God’s covenant promises do not come to those who are not born again. Just as in Genesis 17 God told Abraham that any of his descendants who were not circumcised would be cut off from His people, so now those who do not trust the Lord Jesus and receive His resurrection life and His Spirit will not become part of His people.
- For more information about God’s covenant with Abraham, listen to this podcast: The Really Big Covenant.
- For further understanding of God’s covenants in Scripture, watch this video: The Covenant Of The Pure Gospel
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Colleen,
Thank you so much for this lucid discussion and explanation of the lesson! When I was still planning to write it, once I got the the un-Biblical claim that the covenant with Abraham was when he was called out of his land, I realized that I was just not qualified to do any explanation of the error of that statemtment.
As an Adventist I don’t remember ever really studying the covenants. I do remember that the New is considered the Old, just re-packaged. I look forward to learning and rooting out more of the insidious “Adventisms” that apparently still lurk somewhere in my memory.
Thank you for doing this.
Jeanie