(Genesis 11:27-12:7, 15:1-18, 17:1-16; Romans 4:2-5, 16b-25; Hebrews 11:8-9a)
That’s the scale and scope of God’s plan. That’s the size of his purpose: the redemption of nothing less than everything. As we saw last week, God has been a God of deliverance from the moment our first parents sinned. There’s a popular idea that “the God of the Old Testament” is all about fire and brimstone and judgment and wrath, while Jesus and the New Testament give us a God who’s all about love and mercy and forgiveness—don’t believe it, it’s bunk. Pure tripe. Right from the first, God has been on about redemption and deliverance for those who are enslaved by sin and oppressed by death. Yes, his wrath is a real thing: it’s the wrath of the lover against anyone and anything that hurts the beloved. His wrath is against sin and death. If we cling to our sin kicking and screaming, then his wrath falls on us as well as a consequence; but if we let him work, it becomes the surgeon’s scalpel to cut us free from the power of sin and death. God is in the deliverance business—all in, full stop.
Now, the danger in affirming God as our deliverer is the ease with which we collapse that “our” to mean a very small “us.” That was the error of the Jews in the centuries before Jesus: they affirmed God as the Lord of all creation and the Maker of all things, but they believed in him as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob only—as their national God who belonged to them and was at work only for their sake. They lost sight of his promise to Abraham: the story of Abraham and his family would end with the whole world being blessed. It’s all too easy for us to do the same. “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” we say. Not quite. God has a wonderful plan for the whole world, and because he loves you he’s given you a part to play in his plan—which may or may not feel wonderful, and in fact is absolutely guaranteed to give you times when your life feels the exact backwards of wonderful. The scale of God’s plan of deliverance and redemption is vast beyond our ability to comprehend.
Given that, his approach to it is so counterintuitive to us as to seem downright bizarre. Human beings know how to do large-scale deliverance efforts, or at least we think we do; we’ve tried a number of them throughout history, with names like the United Nations and the Soviet Union. The missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin put his finger on why such efforts never turn out the way we hope: when human beings try to work deliverance and redemption on a grand scale, we begin with justice, which we try to define by law and enforce by power. Remarkably, the one who is the source and definition of all true justice began not with justice but with mercy, not with demand but with gift.
Instead of working from the top down to impose redemption on a recalcitrant world, God worked from the bottom up. He chose an ordinary individual to be the vessel for his plan. Actually, I suspect he chose two—why else did Terah uproot himself and his family and head off for Canaan? Genesis doesn’t say, but I tend to think God called Terah first . . . it’s just that Terah gave up partway. Then Terah dies and God comes to Abram and says, in effect, “OK, let’s try this again.” On the one hand, it’s a shorter trip from Haran than it was from Ur; on the other, it’s an adventure that’s already been abandoned once, and God calls Abram to pick it back up.
And Abram says yes, and God’s plan goes forward—on the promise that a couple who can’t have children who are wandering around as resident aliens in a foreign land will have a son whose children and grandchildren will multiply into a great nation. As plans for world salvation go, this one’s about like trying to pour Lake Michigan through a McDonald’s plastic straw. But this is what God does. Why? Two reasons, I think. One, because it’s so ludicrous, if it works, it has to be God. No human being would ever take credit for thinking this up, and no human being ever could take credit for making it succeed. Abram, whom God renames Abraham, has to live in absolute dependence on God. God would later tell his prophet Habakkuk, “The righteous will live by faith,” a line which Paul picks up in Romans 1—Abraham is the first great example of this. He had to live by faith: he had nothing else.
That’s what you might call the cynical reason, but there’s another one as well, and I think it’s the more important one: God chooses to redeem the world through relationship. He doesn’t do it through programs and structures and laws—those are secondary; he does it personally. He works the same way in delivering the world as he did in creating it: one person at a time.
In keeping with this, God doesn’t use law and rules as his instrument—that will come, but later—he uses promise. Specifically, he makes a covenant with Abram. You could call a covenant an agreement, but it’s more than that. It’s not a contract, either. We’re familiar with those; we might define a contract as an agreement with enforceable penalties which is held by the government. Thing is, contracts are 50-50—if one side doesn’t meet their commitments, the contract is broken. A covenant isn’t just an agreement, it’s a bond between people which is instituted and held by God; it’s 100-100, and isn’t necessarily ruptured by the failure of one side or the other. Think of blood brothers, if you have any familiarity with that custom—nicking the wrists and putting them together so that my blood is in you and yours is in me; and of course, biblically, marriage is a covenant, though our society has little sense of that now.
To underscore the seriousness of the commitments people made when they made covenants with each other, covenant ceremonies in the Ancient Near East were accompanied by the sort of gruesome stuff we see in Genesis 15. The meaning is not subtle: “May I be cut in half like these animals if I do not keep this covenant.” In fact, the oldest Hebrew phrase is not “to make a covenant” but “to cut a covenant.” Note that only God passes between the pieces. This is a unilateral promise—he’s not requiring anything of Abram here; and he doesn’t really have to do this, because he’s God, he’s not going to break his promise, but he does it anyway. He does it so Abram will understand how serious he is about his promise—as we might say, God is serious as a heart attack.
This isn’t the first covenant God has made with people; flip back a few chapters to Genesis 9 and you see him making a covenant with Noah that he will never again send a flood to wipe out life on the earth. Interestingly, he does something there which serves the same purpose as passing between the pieces, but we usually miss it. The sign of that covenant is the rainbow, right? We see that and think, “Oh, it’s beautiful and it’s a reminder.” That’s true, but there’s more. What God says to Noah is, “I have set my bow in the clouds.” The bow was a major weapon of war, and a drawn bow was a sign of hostility. God has hung his bow, a drawn bow, in the clouds—pointing up. In the flood, he aimed his wrath at the earth, but now he’s pointing it away from the earth, aiming it at himself.
God doesn’t stop making covenants with Abraham, either. He keeps adding on—in Genesis 17 he adds circumcision as a sign of his covenant with Abraham; in Exodus, he makes a covenant with all of Abraham’s descendants together, with the Passover as the sign of the covenant; later on, he makes a covenant with David; and then, ultimately, he brings his covenant with his people to its completion and fruition in Jesus, with baptism and communion taking the place of circumcision and the Passover as the signs and seals of God’s promises to his people. The story of God’s relationship with his people is never primarily a story about us or anything we do. The heart of the story is God’s unfolding promise and plan to deliver his people from slavery to the power of sin and death. As Eugene Peterson put it in The Message, it’s a God-story, not an Abraham-story.
Covenant is, by the way, the context from which we get my favorite biblical word, one we’ve talked about here several times—the Hebrew word h̟esed. Translators use a number of different English words and phrases for this word—lovingkindness, steadfast love, mercy, and loyalty, to name a few—but what it means is the covenant love and faithfulness of God. It’s God’s unyielding commitment to love his people no matter how many times or how badly we blow it—what Sally Lloyd Jones in the Jesus Storybook Bible has dubbed his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”
So as we tell the story of God’s deliverance of his people, what do we learn from the story of his covenant with Abraham? I see two things this morning—there are probably more, but I see two, both quite simple. One, God’s deliverance comes not by might nor by power, but by a person. Sure, there are times when God does deliver his people through acts of great power, like the beginning of the Exodus, but it’s easy to look at those times and get so fixated on the power that we miss God in the story. His interactions with Abraham offer us a corrective: God will do the big flashy stuff sometimes, but that’s not where we should focus because that’s not the heart of what he’s doing. The heart of what he’s doing is in and through ordinary people like Abraham, like Sarah, like you, like me . . . and when the time came for him to shatter the power of sin and death once and for all, he did it by becoming an ordinary person, the son of a general contractor in an ordinary little town who became a wandering gadfly preacher. If you would see God working, don’t look to the extraordinary—not because he isn’t there, but because there, your preconceptions will deceive you. If you would see him working, look to the ordinary.
And two? Well, Tom pointed out last week that God’s deliverance often doesn’t look like what we expect; Abraham shows us that God’s deliverance doesn’t come when we expect, either. Abraham was 75 when God took him for a very long walk and promised to give him many descendants. For 24 years Abraham waited, with God talking a good game but not backing it up—but Abraham kept putting his faith in God anyway. Nearly a quarter-century! Finally it got to the point that God fulfilling his promise was obviously impossible—it was obviously far too late for anything to happen—and that’s when God gave Abraham and Sarah their son.
God doesn’t do what we expect, and he doesn’t do it when we think he has to. He answers questions we didn’t think we were asking, and his ideas of what we need deliverance from don’t seem to match up with ours a lot of the time—and even when they do, it never seems to happen on our schedule. As Rich Mullins once said, “I don’t know why he’s like that. Sometimes it makes me mad.” But the thing is—and I don’t know who else in this room needs to hear this, I just know I’m preaching to myself here—if you look around and the deliverance you long for isn’t coming, whatever that may be, and it seems like it’s too late for you, if it seems there’s nothing left to hope for, that doesn’t mean God isn’t coming. It doesn’t mean he’s forgotten you, or abandoned you, or given up on you, and it doesn’t mean it’s actually too late. The one for whom you wait is the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that have never existed, and he is faithful who promised. Let’s pray.
Photo © 2017 Taiyeb Ahmed Sourov. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
