Although God created all things to exist in a state of blessedness, in Genesis 3 we see that Adam and Eve have brought a great curse upon the world. We saw that curse operating with full force in Gen. 4-11. At the end of the Bible John the apostle tells us that the curse will be no more(Revelation 22:3).

At the end of time God will destroy the curse to such an extent that we will once again live in a state of total blessedness. To emphasize this John pronounces not one, not 2, not 3, not 5, not 6, but rather 7 blessings upon God's people in the Book of Revelation. By pronouncing SEVEN blessings upon us (a divine number), John is saying that we will live in a state of perfect blessedness. By the end of Gen. 11 though with the incident at Babel the curse is fully operating. Although Jesus is the One who ultimately does away with the curse, God started destroying the curse before Jesus came to earth. The story of Abraham is so important because with Abraham God begins to destroy the great curse which has fallen upon mankind.

Many Christians simply do not understand the significance of Abraham. The claim that he is so significance though is seen in the fact that 3 of the world's great religions all claim that they go back directly to Abraham: Judaism, Christianity according to Paul, and also Islam.

Why is Abraham so important? First, because his life begins the destruction of the curse. Second, because God promises to bless only 2 people: Abraham and his seed. The identity of that seed is important. Third, because the way Abraham was saved is the way we too are to be saved. Why is this statement true? Because according to Paul, Abraham is "the father of us all" (Rom. 4:16). God is going to make a promise to Abraham, not only to Abraham though, but to Abraham and to his children. Abraham sets the tone for what it means to be in a right relationship with God, that is, to be saved. The way he was saved is the way we too are saved.

(At the beginning of the story of Abraham, Moses calls him "Abram." Only later does God change his name to Abraham. For the purpose of simplicity we are just going to call him "Abraham" throughout the entire study.)

THE COVENANT (Gen. 12:1-3)

Before we look at the actual covenant God made with Abraham, we need to understand what the Bible means by "covenant." To put it simply, a covenant is a promise, or even better, it is a contract one person makes with another. We saw God making a covenant with Noah after the flood. Here God makes another covenant, this time with Abraham. This is THE great covenant/promise of the entire Bible.

The first version of God's covenant with Abraham stresses the concept of the blessing: "Go forth from your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's house, to the land which I will show you; and I will make you a great nation, and I will BLESS you, and make your name great; and so you shall be a BLESSing; and I will BLESS those who BLESS you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be BLESSed" (Gen. 12:1-3).

Look at the progression in this promise God made to Abraham. First God says that He is going to bless Abraham. Then God says that He is going to bless all the families of the earth "in" Abraham. In other words, God is going to use Abraham in order to bless all mankind, including us.

Throughout the story of Abraham, God develops this promise to Abraham. Gen. 15:1-6 in addition to Gen. 12:1-3 is monumental in the development of Christianity. In Gen. 12:1-3 God tells Abraham that He is going to make of him a great nation and that not only will God bless him but that he also will be a blessing to all peoples. Now if Abraham is going to be the head of a great nation, then he is going to have to have children. The nation Abraham was going to have was not going to be acquired through conquest but through the birth of sons, grandsons, and many more descendants. According to Gen. 15:1-2 Abraham is facing a major problem which is preventing him from being the father of a great nation--he is childless.

Because Abraham has no child, he has made Eliezer of Damascus his heir. God though tells Abraham that Eliezar is not going to be his heir (Gen. 15:4) According to Gen. 15:4 Abraham's heir will come from none other than Abraham's own body. God then takes Abraham out beneath the starry sky and promises him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in heaven (Gen. 15:5). We who live in the city don't always appreciate this. Go out though into the country on a cloudless night, and you will see the magnitude of God's promise. The stars are too numerous to count. So will be the number of Abraham's descendants.

According to Gen. 15:6 how does Abraham respond to this promise? He responds by believing God. God responds to Abraham's belief by reckoning it to him as righteousness (Gen. 15:6). (Again I cannot stress enough to you how important this verse it.)

The clause "reckoned to him as righteousness" is a HUGE concept in the Bible; I cannot emphasize enough how important this concept is. This clause has behind it a banking image. It has the idea of a merchant or banker assigning a value to an object which is different from the object itself. For example, when Julia Motycka from Motycka's Gift Shop assigns to a basket of goodies the value of $50, the basket is not the $50. What it is and what its value is are 2 different things. Well, belief is not the same as righteousness, but God the Ultimate Banker has assigned the value of righteousness to our belief.

This system of being made righteous totally flies in the face of the way we think that people are made righteous. We think that people are righteous because they do righteous works. God doesn't operate that way because He knows that that kind of system will never produce a righteous person. Neither does He tweak the system. He doesn't say, "OK, I will declare that the person who does righteous deeds 51% of the time will be declared righteous," or "I will declare the person who does righteous deeds 30% of the time righteous." Instead, God scraps this system of righteousness and replaces it with the one in which faith is given the value of righteousness.

Someone asked me recently how Noah could be called righteous since he later got drunk and exposed himself after the experience of the flood and the ark. That question is based upon the idea that righteous deeds are what make a person righteous. Most people do view righteousness that way. To be honest though, if that is the way we determine who is righteous, then nobody is righteous, even the person who becomes a Christian. According to Heb. 11:7 Noah was declared righteous for the same reason Abraham was--he believed God. He believed God to such an extent that he built an ark after God told him to. Building the ark did not make him righteous; believing God is what God says made Noah AND Abraham righteous. (Although we are going to want to do righteous deeds, this concept really relieves us of a lot of pressure.)

Faith/belief is the key characteristic of Abraham. Abraham's faith is such a vital part of him that the NT calls him "Abraham, the believer" (Gal. 3:9).

Just how serious is God about His promise (covenant) to Abraham? When Abraham asks God how he could be sure that God meant to keep His promise, God orders Abraham to take a 3-year-old heifer, a 3-year-old female goat, and a 3-year-old ram, and cut them in half. He is to line a path with half of the animal on one side and with the other half on the other side of the path. After killing a turtle-dove and a pigeon, he places one on one side of the path, and the other on the other side (Gen. 15:9-10).

At this point a deep sleep overtakes Abraham. God then further elaborates on His promise to Abraham: "You can be sure that your seed will be strangers in a foreign land, and they will be oppressed as slaves for 400 years. But I will punish the nation that enslaves them, and in the end they will come away with great wealth. . . . After 4 generations your descendants will return here to this land,when the sin of the Amorites has run its course."

God now appears to Abraham as a smoking oven. To show Abraham that He meant business, God in the smoking oven moves down the path between the slaughtered animals saying the following: "I have given this land to your seed, all the way from the border of Egypt to the great Euphrates River . . . " (Gen. 15:13-17).

Why did God pass between the animals which had been cut in half? God passed between the animals which had been cut into 2 pieces as if to say that if He broke His promise to Abraham and to his descendant[s], then He would inflict the same fate upon Himself that He inflicted upon these animals. Now that is serious.

God once more develops the covenant with Abraham in Gen. 17. From Gen. 12 and 15 you come away with the impression that God has made the covenant only with Abraham. According to Gen. 17:7 though God is making this covenant with Abraham and his seed or offspring. Unfortunately some of our modern translations destroy the meaning of Gen. 17:7 by translating the word here as "descendants" instead of "seed" or "offspring." The word used here is critical. The word can be singular or plural. For example, the words "seed" and "offspring" can mean only ONE seed and ONE offspring, or they can mean many seeds and many offsprings. (The word "descendants" does not allow for this double meaning.) Whatever else this passage means though, it means primarily that God is making this covenant with Abraham and His seed (offspring).

THROUGH THE EYES OF THE APOSTLES

The Blessing and The Curse

The concept of blessing and especially the concept of the blessing of Abraham are important terms for the apostle Paul. Galatians and Romans basically describe the way a person is saved, that is, the way a person comes into a RIGHT relationship with God. He claims that if we try to become righteous by keeping the Law, then the following will fall upon us: "CURSED is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the Law" (Gal. 3:10).

By living a perfect, sinless life Christ can take our curse upon Him when He dies upon the cross. When we accept by faith what Jesus did for us on the cross, we receive the following: "in order that in Christ Jesus the BLESSING of ABRAHAM might come to the Gentiles" (Gal. 3:14). This blessing of Abraham is nothing less than another way of speaking about the salvation Jesus has purchased for us on the cross.

The Blessing Comes Only By Faith

Paul states over and over again that the only way a person can receive this blessing/salvation of Abraham is by receiving it the same way Abraham did--by faith. Unfortunately, many have changed what Paul means by faith. For Paul faith is believing and accepting; for others faith is really faithfulness. Although my faith will make me faithful, there is a radical difference between faith and faithfulness. For example, our Church of Christ and Catholic brothers believe our faithfulness saves us. The first group says you must be baptized in addition to believing in Jesus if you are going to be saved. The Catholics add confirmation, the Lord's Supper, marriage or monastery vows, confession, and the Last Rites. Yes, they believe that Jesus' death on the cross is necessary to our salvation; however, they also assert that we must be faithful in keeping this rites if we are going to be saved.

The only problem with this is that this is NOT the way Abraham was saved, that is, made right with God. All Gen. 15:6 says is that Abraham BELIEVED God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. It doesn't say that Abraham believed God and was baptized, or believed and perform the 7 sacraments, or believed and attended church, or believed and tithed. All it says is that Abraham believed God and God THEN declared him to be righteous.

"Ah," you might say, "but baptism was not around when Abraham was saved." So. According to Paul there is only ONE God, that is, He is consistent. He's not schizophrenic saving some people one way and another people another way (see Romans 3:30). The only way any man has ever been declared right with God is by his faith (see Heb. 11:1-40).

God Made the Covenant with Abraham AND Jesus

Remember that God did not make this covenant/promise of blessing with Abraham alone: "And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your SEED after you . . . (Gen. 17:7). Although the word "seed" can refer to many seeds, here according to Paul this word is referring primarily to only ONE seed, ONE offspring. According to Paul that One Seed is Jesus (Gal. 3:16).

The covenant God made here was strictly made with Abraham AND Christ. When you understand that this blessing is related strictly to Abraham AND Christ, you begin to understand how much more meaningful the beatitudes are in the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus 9x says that His followers are blessed, He is not saying primarily that we are "happy" creatures. Rather He is saying that God's promise to Abraham is coming true. The curse is in the process of being broken. The blessing is now coming in full force.

Too often when you ask somebody what was the difference between Abraham's faith and our faith, that person will respond: "Whereas Abraham believed in God, we believe in Jesus." On the surface that answer might seem right. The only problem is that it contradicts what Jesus said. When Jesus is engaged in a conflict between Himself and the Jewish religious leaders (John 8:12-59), the Jewish religious leaders begin to get agitated because they believe that Jesus is making some pretty heady claims for Himself. In fact they ask Him if He thinks He is greater than Abraham. To this Jesus outlines His relationship to Abraham: "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day; and HE SAW IT, and was glad" (John 8:56). According to Jesus Abraham was looking for the coming of Jesus. Acts 7:6 and Gen. 12-21 inform us that not once did Abraham inherit a single foot of land in Canaan, the Promised Land. Why then did Abraham follow God? He followed God for the sake of his seed, that one ancestor God was going to use to bless the world. Although Abraham did not know all there was to know about this Person who was coming, we know that this Person was none other than Jesus. Whereas we look back to Christ's first coming, Abraham looked forward to Jesus' coming.

Since God made the covenant/promise only with Abraham and Jesus, I must be rightly related to one of them if I am going to receive the blessing. Since Abraham is dead, that leaves only Jesus. If I am going to receive the blessing, then I must be rightly related to Jesus, and the only way to be rightly related to Him is for me to trust Him as Lord and Savior.

If I don't receive the blessing God is offering me in Jesus, then all I have left is the curse. The choice is mine--Jesus and the blessing, or no Jesus and the curse. The choice is that simple. The blessing/salvation is found nowhere else (Acts 4:12); it is found only in Jesus.

This affects not only our salvation but also our life here on earth. I counseled with a couple whose relationship had gone to pot. After they told me about their troubles, I told them that what got them into this mess was the fact that they had not been following Jesus and that the only way they were going to get out of this mess was by following Jesus. If they continued to do their own thing, their relationship for all practical purposes was over. The truth is that if I want to enjoy God's blessings in my life right now, then I have to go to the One Person where the blessing exists, Jesus.

Having said all this, it must also be admitted that there is a plural aspect to the word "seed." God promised to bless Abraham and his seed, Jesus; however, it is true that God made promises also to the Jewish people, Abraham's seed, plural. Although as God's people the Jews have not followed God the way He wanted them to, they nevertheless remain His people. Because they have not accepted Jesus they may not all be saved; however, God still has His hand on them, and because of His relationship with Abraham, God promises once more to perform a mighty deed of salvation on Israel's behalf. We would do well to remember that God promised to curse those who curse Abraham's seed, whether it be Christians or Jews.