Why would God wait until Abraham's an old man and his wife is barren to fulfill his covenant promise to him that he was going to make of him a great nation? The whole point of God's dealing here with Abraham is to manifest clearly that the benefits of the covenant rest in the power and in the grace of God alone. If salvation was ultimately dependent upon us, upon our faithfulness, our merit, no one would be saved.
Salvation is by the grace of God alone. Our God is a covenant keeping God. He is a promise keeper. And that will be our topic this week on Renewing Your Mind as you hear select messages from R.C. Sproul's series, The Promise Keeper. When you understand the covenants in scripture, I found that it brought so much clarity to the gospel.
So I would not only encourage you to listen all week, but also to request this week's resource offer. When you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, you'll receive lifetime digital access to the complete Promise Keeper series and study guide. And we'll also send you Dr. Sproul's companion book, The Promises of God. Well let's begin this week's study by looking at God's covenant with Abraham.
Here's Dr. Sproul. If there's any one person in the Bible whose name is associated with the concept of covenant, it is Abraham. In fact, Abraham emerges as such an important person in redemptive history that he's called the father of the faithful. In fact, the New Testament looks back to the promises that God made to Abraham, seeing their fulfillment in the birth and in the ministry of Jesus. You will recall, I've already mentioned that in the Magnificat when Mary, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, speaks of God's remembering the promises that had been made to Abraham. When the Apostle Paul uses an Old Testament illustration to illuminate the Gospel and to demonstrate the doctrine of justification by faith, his primary example is Abraham. And so we need to spend some time looking at the circumstances and the terms and the content of the covenant that God made with Abraham. We remember, however, that even this covenant is still an extension of the broader concept, the covenant of grace, because clearly the covenant that God made with Abraham was a gracious inaction. In the 12th chapter of Genesis, we read this account. Now the Lord had said to Abram, get out of your country, from your family, from your father's house, to a land that I will show you, and I will make you a great nation.
I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you. Now here we see the sovereign, supernatural grace of God being bestowed upon a man who is a pagan, who lives in the midst of paganism and in the midst of a pagan country and presumably a pagan family. People often ask questions about the doctrines of grace and the doctrine of election and how it relates to biblical redemption, and I often will say to them, notice that God did not call Abraham because Abraham stood alone as being righteous among the Mesopotamians, nor did He call Hammurabi out of paganism, but God sovereignly chose Abraham and entered into a covenant with him based upon the divine promise. He said to Abraham, get up, get out of this country, and go to a land where I will show you. And we're told that while Abraham was already advanced in years, in response to this revelation, in response to this divine mandate, he left everything that represented security to him in his life, his family, his country, and all the rest, and he went out not knowing where he would go because God promised to give him a country. And again, the book of Hebrews makes much of this of Abraham's fidelity in his response to the promise of God. But notice that the promise says, I will make you a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. I remember back many, many years ago, the Lutheran church had a man who produced an overview of the Bible called the Bethel Bible Series.
Along with the lectures, always came some kind of graphic that illustrated the content of the particular episode that was being treated. And with respect to the covenant that God made with Abraham, the slogan that was used in that curriculum was the phrase, blessed to be a blessing. And that's significant that when God makes this promise to Abraham, the idea is not simply that Abraham individually is going to receive these benefits that God is promising him. Abraham will be singularly blessed, he will be given a great name, and so on.
But the purpose of his blessing is that through him, this blessing would extend to the whole world. Now I want us to stop for a moment and look at the pattern of the covenant promise here. In this instance, the covenant is given to an individual. But the blessings are to go not only to this individual and not only to his family, but this blessing is to go to the whole world. And so you start with the one, and then it expands, as we will see, that the promise to Abraham is then passed down to his son Isaac, and from Isaac to his son Jacob, and from Jacob to Jacob's seed, which becomes the nation of Israel.
And so you go from one person to one nation, and then what happens? Then it comes back to one person, who personifies and embodies the corporate solidarity of the whole nation, and that's Christ. And then from Christ, again, the blessing goes to every tongue and tribe and nation. But here in God's plan of redemption, he starts with one individual and gives a promise to that individual.
Now we see the swearing of the covenant in chapter 15 of the book of Genesis, and I've gone over this in other classes, particularly in Dust to Glory, but because this is so integral to our understanding of the Abrahamic covenant, I want to spend some time again on Genesis 15, because it begins with these words. After these things, the Word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, Do not be afraid, Abram, for I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward. These are the words that God says to Abraham, I am your shield, I am your reward. And Abraham is puzzled by this announcement, and he says, But, Lord God, what will you give me? You know, what's this reward that I'm going to get? As we understand now, at this point, Abraham's probably one of the most wealthy men in the entire world, if not the wealthiest man in the world. And so what do you give to a man who has everything? What's this reward I'm going to get? He says, Seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.
Now there's some cynicism here, isn't there? What are you going to do for me? What can you give me that could possibly satisfy me in light that you have withheld from me the most important thing that I've ever wanted in my life? And that was to have offspring, to have children. And I have all these animals, and I have all these territories, and I have all this money, but there's no reward here, Lord, because I'm childless, and my heir is the servant in my house, Eliezer from Damascus. And so you see there's a thinly veiled complaint that Abraham is uttering here when God tells him He's going to give him a reward, because the last thing that Abraham expects is that the reward would involve progeny, because he was convinced that it was way too late for that. And so he says, You have given me no offspring. Indeed, one born in my house is my heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, This one, that is Eliezer of Damascus, shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body will be your heir.
Then he brought him outside and said, Look toward heaven and count the stars if you are able. And he said to him, So shall your descendants be. Now, the first question we want to ask is, Why would God wait until Abraham is an old man and his wife is barren to fulfill his covenant promise to him that he was going to make of him a great nation? The whole point of God's dealing here with Abraham is to manifest clearly that the benefits of the covenant rest in the power and in the grace of God alone. It's not that God is standing up there saying, Well, Abraham, if you really work at it, I'm going to help you to become great, and I will be your cheerleader as you cooperate with the gifts that I give you so that you can become the head of a great nation.
No. Abraham is incapable of receiving this benefit and this promise apart from the supernatural intervention of God Himself. And so that's what this is about.
And so he said, Go out there and count the stars, Abraham. You think you're childless. You think you don't have any heir. You think the one who's going to inherit your fortune and inherit your blessing is your servant from Damascus. Let me tell you something. You think you're childless. I said I'm going to be not just a reward.
I'm going to be your great reward. Come on outside. Have you ever been in Palestine or in the Holy Land where the atmosphere is so thin? It's unbelievable. Sometimes if you go into the country where away from the glare of the city lights and look at the evening sky, you'll be able to see with so much more penetrating sensation the vast number of stars that are in the sky. In fact, on a clear night you look up and you see the Milky Way, and the Milky Way looks like a cloud because of the billions of stars that are in there. But if you can magnify that to the rarified atmosphere of the Holy Land, it's even more amazing. And this is what Abraham looks up to the sky that is ablaze with stars, and God tells him to count them. They're basically uncountable. But the message comes through to Abraham.
You're not just going to have one child, but your descendants are going to be as the stars of the sky. And then what does the Bible say? Surely you're exaggerating, O Lord.
This can't possibly be true. No, the response of Abraham becomes normative for all history in covenant response to the promises of God. This is why, and this is where, the Apostle Paul cites Abraham as his primary example that the just shall live by faith because the text says when God takes Abraham out and tells him to count the number of the stars in the sky and promises him descendants of that magnitude, we read in verse 6 these words, And he believed the Lord, and it was counted to him for righteousness. Now that's critical because Paul tells us later on that Abraham is not redeemed because of any of the works that he performed in his lifetime. He was saved by faith, the same way any of us can be saved is by faith in God. And now we say, did he believe in Jesus? He didn't even know about Jesus, other than the vague hints that maybe we're in the proto-evangel.
But the principle that is involved here is the same for us. It's faith in the promise. God makes a promise of redemption. Abraham believes God, and we are told that was counted for him as righteousness. Now Abraham was a child of Adam. Abraham was a sinner.
In fact, the biographical record that we get of Abraham in the book of Genesis shows him warts and all. And so the grounds of his salvation are not his own works or his own merit, but rather there is a reckoning or a counting of righteousness for one who in fact does not possess righteousness. And this is the example of the central theme of redemption in the New Testament is that our redemption is by imputation. The only way I get into the kingdom of God is because God counts me as righteous when I am not righteous, not because my faith has some merit that transcends the requirements of works. No, it's not that by faith that we do something so meritorious that we suddenly are fulfilling the covenant of works. It's not that when Abraham believed God, all of a sudden he did what Adam failed to do.
No, no, no. The grounds for Abraham's salvation, though he didn't know it, was the righteousness of Christ. See, that's another mistake that is widely made within Christendom. The idea is that people in the Old Testament were saved one way and people in the New Testament were saved another way. That's why if we look carefully at Romans 3, 4, and 5, we will see that the way of salvation is exactly the same in the Old Testament as it is in the New Testament. That Abraham was saved through faith and the grounds of his salvation was the merit of the one who was to come, which is then transferred to him, to his account. So he's saved by Christ just as much as you and I are.
This is the point that Paul labors in Romans. But in any case, God counts or reckons somebody righteous who in and of themselves is not righteous. This is what the Reformation was all about because the Roman Catholic Church was saying God will never declare a person righteous until righteousness inheres within the person. They would teach that you can't have that internal righteousness without grace or without faith or without Christ. You need all of that, but all of those things that help you get there have to yield inherent righteousness before God will ever declare you righteous. But the whole point of the gospel is that God declares us righteous in His sight before we are inherently righteous, and this was certainly the case with Abraham who was counted righteous. And then God said, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to inherit it. Now, immediately after we are told that Abraham believes God in the promise, he still is befuddled and overwhelmed by the big question, you know, how can I know for sure? How shall I know that I will inherit it? I mean, this seems like Abraham has already backslid that he's fallen out of the faith because a moment before he believes God when he makes the promise, and now he's saying, well, I'm trusting God, but I'm kind of hanging on by my fingernails.
I'd like to have a little more than your promise. How can I know for sure? Now, that's a question that every Christian has to deal with at some point or another. As I've said until you're probably sick of hearing it that anybody can believe in God.
The demons do that. It's believing God that is the hard part, that is living on the basis of the Word of God, trusting the promises of God even when you can't see the results in front of you. And so Abraham has this crisis that we all go through.
How can I know for sure? Give me some assurance, Lord, that I can trust your promise. And then what follows is what I believe is one of the most important texts in all of sacred Scripture. I've said this before that if I were in jail, in prison, in solitary confinement, could only have one book with me, I'd want the Bible. If I could only have one book of the Bible, I would want the book of Hebrews. But if I could only have one chapter of the Bible, it would be Genesis chapter 15. If I could only have one verse of the Bible, it would be verse 17 of chapter 15 where we read, and it came to pass when the sun went down and it was dark, that behold there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces. You know, at conventions and conferences and there's this thing in the Christian world where people buy the author's books and they run up and they want you to sign the book or they sign their Bible.
I don't know where that came from. I didn't write the Bible, you know, but they'll often ask you, and this has become some kind of evangelical tradition, to write your life verse with your signature. The first time anybody asked me that, I said, what's that? What's a life verse? You know, the verse that you pick out of the Bible that's the most important for your whole life. I said, well, I don't have a life verse. They're all my life verses, but I finally acquiesced to those requests, and so when I sign that and people want my life verse, I always write down Genesis 15, 17. And the people will thank me, and then they'll go away, and an hour later or the next day they'll come up to me with this puzzled look, and I read Genesis 15, 17. Are you sure you didn't make a mistake?
I said, no. They said, well, what's that about? It says, it came to pass, the sun went down, it was dark, and behold there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces.
I said, yeah, that's the text. So, what's it about? Well, to understand what's it about, again, we have to go back to the directions that Abraham is given by God when he asked the question, how will I know for sure? God said, bring me a three-year-old heifer, three-year-old female goat, three-year-old ram, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. And then he brought all these to him and cut them in two down the middle, placed each piece opposite the other, but he didn't cut the birds in two, and when the vultures came down in the carcasses, Abraham drove them away. So, we get the picture here that God said, if you want to know how to know for sure that my promises are something you can rely on, then I want you to go out and get these animals, and you bring them here, and you cut them right long ways, lengthwise, cleave them in half.
Then I want you to set them as a pathway on the ground. Arranging, if you will, what's going on here, is a gauntlet where somebody's going to have to move between those pieces. And Abraham's shooing away the vultures because they're hovering over there because of all of these carcasses.
They're looking for roadkill in this process. And now we read in verse 12, when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and behold, horror and great darkness came upon him. And God said to Abram, know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs and will serve them. They will afflict them four hundred years, but then the nation whom they serve I will judge. After that they shall come out with great possessions.
Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace, and you shall be buried in a good old age. And then what follows is the drama of this fire, this torch, this burning oven passing between the pieces. Well, our time is up for today, so I'll have to ask you to wait until our next session to examine further the profound significance of the drama that has unfolded here in chapter 50.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Thanks for being with us. Isn't it wonderful to see the grace of God in the Old Testament, in the life of Abraham, that He, like us, was saved by faith alone? This series on God's promises and covenants is 14 messages, and you can have lifetime digital access to the series and study guide, making it suitable for a small group or Sunday school class when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. In addition to the series and study guide, we'll also send you a copy of R.C. Sproul's companion book, The Promises of God. Ensure you add these resources to your library when you click the link in the podcast show notes, or when you give your donation at renewingyourmind.org. This offer ends Thursday, so request yours today. Tomorrow, R.C. Sproul will return to this dramatic moment in the life of Abraham, here, on Renewing Your Mind. you
