Lecture 3: Abraham, the Covenant, and the Promise Under Threat

The lecture, section by section

1. After Babel, one man

   The world is descending, and God answers with a covenant. The covenants are the story's backbone, Adam, then Noah, now Abraham, and what men grasped at Babel, a great name, God freely promises to Abraham: a great name, a great nation, and blessing for the whole world. And nation, Schreiner notes, means kingdom; the promise is royal from the start.

2. Abraham, a new Adam

   Not with absolute continuity, but truly: Abraham is a new Adam, the man through whom God begins to reclaim the world with blessing.

3. Not chosen for his virtue

   Joshua 24 remembers what Abraham was when God called him: his fathers, Terah among them, served other gods beyond the River. Abraham was an idolater. Later Jewish tradition polished him into perfection, but Paul, with Abraham in view, says God justifies the ungodly (Romans 4). Abraham did not belong to God natively; he was taken by grace.

4. Land, offspring, kings, and blessing

   The covenant's elements unfold. The land of Canaan, which points beyond itself to a new Eden, God's garden. Offspring, echoing the old commission to be fruitful and multiply, and Genesis 17 says more: kings will come from him. And blessing reaching every nation of the earth.

5. Isaac, not Ishmael: the promise discriminates

   Not all Abraham's physical children are the children of promise (Romans 9). Abraham himself was content otherwise, O that Ishmael might live before you, but God's plan was not Abraham's plan. When Sarah demands, drive out the slave woman and her son, the New Testament cites her words as the word of God even while, Schreiner argues, her own heart in the moment was sinful: true words, wrong spirit, a complex reality. Galatians reads Ishmael's mocking as the first persecution of the promised line. Through Isaac shall your offspring be traced.

6. Genesis 22: the only son on the altar

   Abraham is told to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, and Hebrews tells us what was in his mind: he reasoned that God could raise the dead. The story itself whispers it, we will go, and we will return to you. By then Abraham knew the promise ran through Isaac and could not die on that mountain.

7. A promise shaped like a miracle

   The story lingers over the decades it took to receive even one son, because the point is that the promise required a miracle; Abraham had no power to produce it. Even circumcision preaches this: given in the same chapter as father of many nations, it marks the very organ of generation, a permanent reminder that the offspring come from God.

8. God alone between the pieces

   In Genesis 15 the covenant is cut in the ancient way: animals divided, and the parties pass between the pieces, invoking that fate on themselves if they break faith, exactly as Jeremiah 34 later interprets the rite. But here God passes through alone, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, taking the self-malediction, the curse of the covenant, on himself alone if the promise should fail. Schreiner hears in it an anticipation of the cross.

9. Both unconditional and conditional

   So is the covenant unconditional or conditional? With Gentry and Wellum, Schreiner answers: both. Unconditional, because God has sworn by himself and walked the pieces alone; the offspring, the land, the kingdom, and the universal blessing will certainly come. Conditional, because the blessing comes through obedience: because you have done this thing, God says after Moriah, and to Isaac, because Abraham obeyed my voice (Genesis 22, 26). James's justification by works belongs to this same stream, and it does not contradict Paul: works flow from faith and are necessary as its fruit. Ultimately the covenant cannot fail; for any particular person, it summons obedient faith. The lecture warmly commends T. Desmond Alexander's From Paradise to the Promised Land here, with one caution: merit is the wrong word for what Abraham's obedience was.

10. Faith the foundation, obedience the fruit

    Abraham believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness (Genesis 15). But his faith did not begin there; Hebrews 11 says it was by faith that Abraham obeyed and went out in Genesis 12. What Genesis 15 supplies is the ground: the foundation of Abraham's standing with God was never his obedience but his faith, and the two are inseparable because true faith always moves the feet.

11. The promise under threat, and the God above the threats

    Again and again the promise nearly dies. Sarah is taken into a king's house twice, in Genesis 12 and 20, and God himself intervenes to guard the line. Abraham fears his servant Eliezer will be the heir, and God takes him outside to count stars, offspring beyond counting, and Paul says every believer is among them, children of Abraham by faith (Romans 4, Galatians 3). As for the land, Stephen says Abraham never possessed a foot of it (Acts 7); the only ground he ever owned was a grave. Schreiner pauses pastorally: God's promises are certain, but their timing and shape rarely match our expectations, and the patriarchs teach us to keep trusting in tents, waiting for what we do not yet see.

12. Jacob, Dinah, and a story on several levels

    The promise passes to Isaac and then to Jacob, not Esau, and not because Jacob was the better man (Romans 9); the story is at pains to show grace choosing a schemer. Then threat after threat: a godly wife must be found so the line is preserved (the long Genesis 24), Rebekah and Rachel are barren, Esau plots murder, Laban schemes, and Jacob divides his camp in terror before Esau's four hundred men, whom God turns friendly. In the dark story of Dinah at Shechem, God sovereignly prevents an intermarriage that would have corrupted the line, yet through an act of deceit and violence he did not bless, and Simeon and Levi bear the judgment for it. The hermeneutical lesson: do not oversimplify a story. God's sovereignty and man's sin run through the same events, and God works his purposes even there.

1. Abraham was called as an idolater and justified as ungodly. How does that change the way you tell your own story, and the way you pray for the person you are most tempted to write off?

2. The promise was certain, yet all Abraham ever held was one son and a grave. Where has God's timing not matched your expectations, and what did the patriarchs do in that gap?

3. Faith is the foundation and obedience its fruit, yet the blessing came because Abraham obeyed. How do you keep both truths standing in your household without collapsing one into the other?