An Incredible Promise! Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Introduction
I am not a fan of great heights. I have never been able to stand on the edge of a high cliff or at the top of a tall building without a quick heart beat and a dry throat. I have no problem with climbing a high hill or mountain, but to stand on the edge of falling is not something I enjoy! Toward the end of Marine Corps Basic Training there is a training event known as the confidence course. It is a series of high obstacles, fast rope lines, and at the end of it is a four story repel tower. It was one of the most frightening experiences of all of basic training for me because of my lack of appreciation for high places. The way it works is that you have to climb up the side of the repel tower and then once at the top there is a person there who helps you to connect your waist harness to the repel rope and guides you as you plant both feet firmly on the edge and slowly lean out backwards until you are standing completely horizontal, parallel to the ground, the only thing between you and certain disaster; a rope and firm grip! This was the most terrifying part for me. The time of leaning out, that moment when you must let go of trust in the platform and place your trust completely in the rope.
The first time I did it I was terrified and I went down rather ungracefully. A few years later I was attending an academy for Non Commissioned Officers called the Sergeant’s Course. Much to my dismay they too had a repel tower that was part of the final week of training. While I was equally nervous about the affair, I was not fully terrified. The past experience of having gone through the repel tower event and living to tell the tale, had given me a sense of much greater trust in the rope.
Transition
This morning as I enter my text, we will see what the Lord has to say to us about trusting in the rope – our anchor of security – the promises of God! We serve a God of incredible promises; a God who is not limited to either our lack of imagination or our lack of understanding the immensity of His power.
How often do we unknowingly mock God’s provision for lack of imagination of the mighty things that God can do? How imprudently do we face the trials of this life full of fear, having no trust in the rope, because we underestimate the intimate nature of God’s protection and provision in our lives?
This morning we will examine the promises of the covenant which God made with Abraham many of which are fulfilled in Christ and in Christ Church. Let us seek an answer to the question, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
Exposition
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16: In today’s Scripture reading we see God making a promise to Abraham; an incredible promise to an old man and old woman that not only would they miraculously bring forth a child, but that child will be the father to Kings. God tells Abraham that he will give to his descendants the Promised Land; that his descendants would occupy the land of the promise of God.
The promise of God is known as the Abrahamic Covenant. That is simply, the covenant that God made with Abraham; the outrageous promise of God to Abraham! The Abrahamic Covenant is an unconditional promise from God to Abraham and his physical and spiritual descendants.
It is unconditional in that God sovereignly decreed that He would make Abraham the father of a great nation and that He would make his name great when He called then Abram in Genesis 12:2-3, “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
The Abrahamic covenant is the foundation of the Church and is the very foundation of our faith. When we examine the New Covenant, the dispensation or age of the Church, only through the lens of the New Testament we miss out on much of the fullness and richness of God’s unfolding revelation of Himself.
God’s sovereign decree was to bless Abraham just as His sovereign decree was and is to save His Church, us, the Body of Christ. There is no ambiguity in the decrees of our Heavenly Father. When the Sovereign Lord makes a promise; it is kept!
Abraham’s spiritual lineage is the Body of Christ. In Christ God has fulfilled much of His promise to Abraham. It is through the line of Abraham that God brought salvation to the world in Jesus Christ. We’ll see that further in a few moments. Abraham’s physical descendants are the physical nation of Israel.
While we’ll focus primarily on the aspects of the Abrahamic Covenant pertaining to Christ, we do well to consider that God is not finished with Israel. (1) Re-gathered in 1948 by the providential hand of God. (2) Protected amidst trials and persecutions for two millennia. (3) Promised to be saved in the end and restored.
In Jeremiah 30:7 “How awful that day will be! None will be like it. It will be a time of trouble for Jacob, but he will be saved out of it.” (NIV)
That is the ultimate message in regard to God’s promise to physical Israel; He will not let her be destroyed. As long as Israel has been a nation it has been in times of trouble. As we look around at all that is happening in the Nation of Israel many Christians wonder what the Bible has to say about the troubles facing Israel.
Even non-Christians are curious about Bible prophecy in these often troubling times. Rather than get on board with those folks who have ignored the words of Christ that “no one knows the hour or the time of His [Jesus] coming,” we do well to remember that the Bible and history warn us against picking dates of His return or climbing to the tops of our barns awaiting His return on a specific date; as some have done throughout the history of the Church.
Whether it was the Babylonians, the Persians, the Nazis, or more modern threats from Islam, the world has always been at war with God’s chosen people. Current events in Israel should cause us to pay attention and to pray for the peace of Jerusalem as the Bible commands.
As Christians, our faith is inexorably linked to the Holy Land and we do well to have a love for her. The ultimate message of the prophecies of the Bible though, is that in the end Christ will return triumphant. When the trumpet sounds and we who are called according to His purpose find ourselves worshipping Him face to face then we will know the details of His coming.
Until that time we have been given clear instruction as to the nature of our task on this earth. It has little to do with the current thread of end time prophecy madness which runs rampant in much of the Church today. It has even less to do with the health, wealth, and prosperity message being pumped out by gold-plated mega churches by way of Christian television and radio.
Our chief task on this earth is to be God’s vehicle for the fulfillment of His promises on this earth. God promised to bring hope to His people; His Church is the medium of that hope; our hands are His hands! Jesus last command to His disciples, and to us, was to go into all the nations and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
So many believers and seekers alike get trapped in these kinds of fruitless ventures. We have indeed been called to bear fruit. Fruit for the kingdom by way of being instruments for God’s blessing in our daily lives and by way of the Church being a vehicle of blessing, proclaiming the truth of Christ crucified for the remission of sins that we who were once alienated from God might be reconciled in Christ!
Genesis 22:1-18: This passage is often referred to Abraham’s test by bible commentators. In hindsight we see that the Lord never intended that Abraham, our spiritual father and the physical father of Israel, should actually kill his son Isaac.
This is both a picture of the depth of the faith of Abraham who had by this time learned to completely trust in God and also a representation of the work of the Cross in the Lord making the sacrifice of His own Son, our savoir Jesus Christ.
It was here that Abraham was really put to the test of whether he did or did not have faith in the rope. Abraham’s heals were, in a sense, planted on the edge of repel wall, rope in hand; would he lean back and in inexplicably greater terms trust in the Lord’s promise or would he do what seemed wise in his own eyes and climb down from the tower, climb down from mountain of sacrifice and spare his son?
It has been said that “God’s promises are like the stars; the darker the night the brighter they shine.” (David Nicholas) In the darkness of such a terrible task at hand, would Abraham trust in God? If he killed Isaac then surely God’s promise to make of him a great nation and bless his descendants would be crushed.
He was already a very old man and Sarah an old woman. From where would he get another son? And why would the God who gave Isaac to him under such miraculous circumstances ask him to sacrifice him by his own hands? In the moments when faith is needed most it is the most difficult to have faith. Faith isn’t faith until it is tested; trust isn’t trust if it is not needed.
While we can not know exactly what was happening in the heart of Abraham, I am inclined toward the understanding that it was not immense courage or strength which allowed Abraham to prepare himself to follow through with the sacrifice of his son. Isaac’s very life was a promise fulfilled by God! As Abraham looked down into the frightened eyes of his son whom he was about to slay, He was looking into the very face of the fulfillment of a promise of God!
We serve a God of incredible promises and what He has done in the past, He will do again! The Lord does not command action without provision just as He does not make promises which go unfulfilled!
On that hill of sacrifice God prefigured the ultimate sacrifice of His own Son, Jesus Christ. Indeed, the words of Abraham were fulfilled in Christ in answer to his son Isaac, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the sacrifice.”
Exodus 12:3-13: God’s Sovereign decree to bless Abraham is expressed in the Jewish holiday of Passover. Every aspect of the Passover prefigures Christ. The Lamb was to be a male without defect. All the people must slaughter the Lamb. There is deliverance for those covered by the Blood. Nothing of the Lamb is to be left till morning. The meat was to be prepared with bitter herbs. It was to be eaten in haste while clothed as for a journey.
Last week I encouraged you to look back at the grace of God in the past in order to have a great perspective on the future grace of God which is to come. Past grace is God’s working in the past which encourages us that if God carried us through what was then He is indeed able to carry us through that which is to come.
But O what a tragedy it is for those who look back in remembrance of God’s provision but never or seldom look ahead to what God is bringing to pass in the future. When the Israelites celebrated the Passover they were looking back at God’s provision even while He was carrying them through trial upon trial in fulfillment of His promise that Israel should not pass from this earth!
God is not finished with Israel and He is not finished with His Church and He is not finished with any of us. God is a God of incredible promises. He promised to make of Abraham a great nation. He will yet fulfill those promises which are reserved for physical Israel. He also promised to provide the spotless and blameless lamb. He answered this promise in Christ and in His Church!
I Corinthians 5:7: While the past grace of the Old Testament points to the future grace of the New Testament, the New reflects the glory of God’s grace in the Old. In John 4:23 Jesus says, “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”
God has fulfilled His incredible promises to Abraham. We are the living witnesses to the answer of God’s promises. D.L. Moody, the great Congregational preacher of old once said that “Looking at the wound of sin will never save anyone. What you must do is to look at the remedy.”
While sin alienated us from God Christ blood, the atonement of our great Passover lamb, when applied to our live according to God’s grace through faith, reconciles us unto our creator and we are renewed and refreshed and made alive in the power of the Holy Spirit within us that we might live lives of experiencing the joy of His presence as our very souls worship Him!
Conclusion
In this life, we are constantly facing difficult circumstances in our life. From the bottom of the repel tower the height looked very frightening and you know what, from the top, it looked even more frightening! But imagine if you will the perspective of God. From on high, from the throne of God the height of the repel tower is little more than a road bump on an almost flat landscape.
What’s more is that not only are our circumstances very small and manageable from the “top down” perspective, God is in the midst of the circumstance with us; He is not only on high viewing us from an eternal top down perspective, He is in it with us from the “bottom up!”
God’s promises are true, they are trustworthy, and because He reigns sovereign over all of His creation, they will surely come to pass. The Sovereign Lord of the Universe does not make promises that He does not keep! “Is there anything that is too hard for the Lord?” Certainly not!
Amen.
