Lecture 7: The Abrahamic Covenant: A Great Name, a Single Seed, and Blessing for Every Family

The lecture, section by section

1. Babel: the covenant kept against man's will

   The progeny of Noah were to fill the earth; instead they gathered in the plain of Shinar to build and make a name for themselves, lest they be scattered. God confused their speech and scattered them anyway, seeing to it that his covenant purpose stood even against the will of its beneficiaries. The pattern is now set: God is a loyal covenant keeper, and man is not.

2. A name grasped and a name given

   Naming in Genesis is an act of authority: God names what he creates, Adam names the animals, and a name represents its bearer, which is why changed men receive changed names, Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel. The men of renown before the flood and the builders of Babel were literally men of a name, seeking renown by their own effort, and both stand judged and, tellingly, anonymous: no one knows who they were. Against that backdrop God tells Abram, I will make your name great: prominence received from God's hand, not earned, the very shape of faith.

3. Leave your nation; I will make you one

   Genesis 10 defines a nation by three things: common ancestry, common language, common land. The command of Genesis 12, leave your country, your relatives, your father's house, is therefore a command to leave his nation, with the promise that in the land God will show him, God will make of him a great nation. With it come the promises: blessing, a great name, and this, that Abraham himself becomes the location of blessing, those who bless him blessed, the one who disdains him cursed, and in him, ultimately, some out of all the families of the earth blessed.

4. How may I know? The oath of Genesis 15

   Abram obeyed and went, and in Genesis 15 he presses God's promise with two questions: what use is reward without an heir, and how may I know I will possess the land? God answers the first with a promise of a son from Abram's own body, which Abram believed, and it was counted to him as righteousness. He answers the second by cutting a covenant: a smoking oven and a flaming torch, smoke and fire, the very signs Israel would recognize as Yahweh's own presence, pass alone between the pieces. Within the oath God foretells the sojourn: your seed will be strangers in a land not theirs, and I will judge that nation, and they will come out with many possessions.

5. One covenant, signed and renewed

   The attempt at an heir through Hagar in Genesis 16 was man's own device, and Essex notes dryly that the world is still living with the consequences of Abraham's two sons. Genesis 17 does not make a second covenant; it gives the sign, circumcision, of the covenant already sworn, a point recently reargued in the literature and reaffirmed: Scripture speaks of one covenant made with the fathers, renewed to Isaac in Genesis 26 and to Jacob in Genesis 28 and 35. Genesis 18 restates its purpose as a settled fact: Abraham will surely become a great and mighty nation, and in him all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

6. Because you have obeyed: Genesis 22

   When Abraham does not withhold his son, the angel of the LORD, who is the Lord himself, swears by himself: blessing, multiplication as the stars and the sand, the possession of the enemies' gate, and blessing for all nations in his seed, because you have obeyed my voice. Both things are true at once: God will fulfill the covenant because he has sworn, and because Abraham believed and obeyed. Hold the implication, Essex says, until Deuteronomy 30: if God's promise is to be fulfilled through obedience, God must ultimately bring about an obedient seed like Abraham.

7. The law keeper before the law

   Genesis 26 renews the covenant to Isaac because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws. Abraham was a law keeper, Essex smiles, and the problem is there was no law: law here means God's spoken direction, and every time God spoke, Abraham responded in faith and obeyed. His troubles came when God had not spoken and he acted on his own devices, a pattern with obvious application for every believer who schemes to secure what God has promised.

8. Too much Israel, too little Abraham

   The exhibit of self-secured blessing is not Abraham but Jacob, grasping his brother's heel from the womb, the foot-grabber turned deceiver, until God tames him late in life. Israel's whole later history, Essex suggests, can be read in one line: too much Israel and too little Abraham, too much scheming to establish their own name and righteousness, too little faith that receives what God gives.

9. The seed: corporate and singular

   Seed is a singular word with a corporate reach, and Genesis 22 uses both within a breath: I will multiply your seed as the stars, corporate, and your seed shall possess the gate of his enemies, singular, the one who overcomes, matching the promise to Judah's line in Genesis 49. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed is therefore singular, and when Paul writes in Galatians 3 that the seed is Christ, he is not reading something in; he is reading Genesis accurately. Here the Abrahamic covenant becomes the means by which the Noahic commitment, some saved out of every family, comes to fruition: the gospel preached beforehand to Abraham.

10. Genesis under one covenant

    The whole book gathers around this covenant: chapters 1 through 11 build the need for it, 12 through 25 narrate its making, and 26 through 50 flow out of it, until the dying Joseph says God will surely visit you and bring you up to the land he swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Genesis ends on a covenant-keeping note, and Israel on the plains of Moab could complete the thought: he brought us out of Egypt exactly as Genesis 15 said, and he will give us the land.

11. The Sovereign who works in the open and in hiding

    Israel's God is the powerful creator, Abram's shield, El Shaddai. His sovereignty runs through the whole book, openly in the early chapters where God acts and speaks directly, and more hiddenly in the Joseph narrative of chapters 37 through 50, where events are simply told and the reader learns to see the unseen hand, summed up in Joseph's words to his brothers: you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Both registers of sovereignty will keep alternating through the whole Old Testament.

12. Evil: the vocabulary of Genesis

    The word usually translated sin appears surprisingly seldom in Genesis, in part because the mountain of commandments has not yet been given for man to miss. The book's dominant moral term is evil, the opposite of good: where good acts for another's benefit and well-being, evil withholds that good and acts for another's loss. Its first appearance is in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; Adam and Eve, already knowing good by relationship with the good God, came to know it instead by the experience of its opposite. By Genesis 6 the intent of every heart is only evil continually, and the earth is corrupt and filled with violence.

13. Judgment, grace, and the last word of blessing

    Sin meets correlating judgment: exile from Eden, exile for Cain, the flood, the confusion of Babel, the overthrow of Sodom. Yet grace threads through the same chapters, God choosing Abram the youngest son of Terah, Jacob the younger twin, Judah the fourth-born. And over it all runs blessing and curse: God wants blessing, abundance, benefit, and blessing will be his final word, just as Moses' last speech in Deuteronomy 33 is blessing after the judgment-song of chapter 32. Some make blessing the key theme of Genesis; Essex gives preeminence to covenant, because the covenants are the avenues down which the blessing travels. His purpose statement for Genesis: the God of creation chose to bless sinful mankind and to establish human rule of the earth through Abraham and his seed.

1. Babel grasped at a name and is nameless; Abraham received a name and is honored across the earth to this day. Where are you tempted to make a name rather than receive one?

2. Abraham obeyed every direct word from God and stumbled when he schemed without one. What does that distinction teach about waiting on God rather than engineering his promises?

3. God swore to bless all families of the earth through one seed. How does knowing that the gospel was preached beforehand to Abraham change the way you read the rest of Genesis?