Clough Genesis Lesson 53

     Covenant theology; Covenants; Covenant to Abraham.

 

Before we get into the lesson I’d like to respond to some of the feedback cards that have been handed in.  The first question is: Abraham was not a believer until Genesis 15:6 yet he exhibited the behavior of a believer prior to that time, particularly in obeying the command of Genesis 12:1-4.  Please comment.  I think what you’ve got here… it’s very hard, incidentally, to find out where people are believers in the Old Testament, but I think that you’ve got here a kind of thing like you find in Acts 10 with Cornelius, where he for all the world looks saved in Acts 10 and yet he very distinctly says in Acts 11 he wasn’t until the time when Peter came down to the house and witnessed to him.  It was only then that he really became a Christian.  So whatever the calling ministry of the Holy Spirit is, He apparently he has the capacity to do this.

 

Another card asks about the “a-h,” when you go from Abram to Abraham, and also Sarai to Sarah, the “a-h,” are these “a-h”s the same and does it indicate God with man.  I don’t think so because the a-h in Sarah and the a-h in Abraham are linguistically two different elements.  So I don’t see anything too common there. 

 

In Genesis 16 you say that Hagar was proud and haughty; I fail to see this in the text.  Isn’t it possible that Hagar hated Sarai because she was being used to produce children for Sarai.  You have to interpret Genesis 16 in the light of Genesis 21 and in Genesis 21 it’s quite clear what the nature is.  This is not a freaky interpretation, incidentally, that I just thought of; it’s just the standard routine type interpretation for Hagar over the many, many years that it’s gone on, showing her unregenerate nature and that of her son, Ishmael.

 

This is the second round on this question; I’ll try to ask it more precisely this time.  If Israel is entitled to any of the land outlined in Genesis 15, then why are they not entitled to all of it now?  And the answer is the same reason as they were not entitled to all of it now in the Old Testament.  Many of the prophets simply said because you are a state of partial redemption you are not qualified yet to fully occupy all the land.  And we would simply argue that the same condition persists in our present day.

More on that in a little bit.

 

Finally: I believe in the covenant of grace; it is the outworking of the eternal covenant of redemption between the persons of the Godhead.  Of course you would not agree, not believing in particular redemption.  Yet I do not believe in infant baptism simply because of the difference between a covenant nation and covenant individuals.  Covenant individuals always existed; covenant nations were abolished with the advent of the church age; in Christ, no Jew or Greek.  The two signs of the covenant are not only different signs but are ministered to differing people.  There is now no covenant nation but covenant individuals receive the sign.  This is in response to last week and the baptism thing.  I’m going to give a bigger answer to this but first a preliminary one and that is that you can’t make Abraham a covenant nation in Genesis 17 because he wasn’t.  The covenant nation didn’t begin until Mount Sinai, so I fail to see what that has to do with the price of beans on Sunday afternoon in New York.  It’s just that the covenant doesn’t exist, there is no national covenant in Genesis; the national covenant begins in… if you want conformation of that look in the Prophets, when the Prophets talk about the birth of the nation Israel, they refer it not to Abraham but they refer it to the time of Sinai.

But this gets into a bigger thing and I want to take a few minutes before we continue in our lesson in Genesis to explain to some of you why we are not a covenant classical Reformed church and why instead we are a fundamental, dispensational premillennial church.  There are reasons and my objection takes the form of two categories.  One is an objection to basically classical covenant theology, and a second objection is peculiar to what I perceive to be happening in Dallas.  In the Dallas area there are some men, sharp students of the Word, that are reading Berkhoff and reading some of the Covenant theologians, and this is fine but with lack of experience in exegesis on the part of many of them, they’re going into deciding whole theological systems with a very little base of exegetical support.  This would be all right in itself, except for the fact that what follows I find strange, particularly when one knows the history of Covenant Reformed thought.  Classical in history Covenant Reformed thought has always led to a concern for the culture, a concern for the arts, a concern for the sciences, a concern for politics, a concern for literature, a concern for education.  And I find in the particular narrow group I have in mind that instead of the boys going out into these areas they’re becoming more and more monastic, reducing all of the aspect of life to the narrow theological.  And this is a peculiar thing that is peculiar to that group.

 

Now my criticisms against Covenant theology basically.  I have three basic objections, three reasons why I am not a Covenant theologian and why, in fact, Lubbock Bible Church goes on under my ministry as a premillennial dispensational church.  The first is that Covenant theology basically stresses the unity in theology; that is, it brings together all the doctrines and stresses… if we can go through here, what are common denominators to doctrine, can we build up a unified system.  An example of this would be the way the idea “covenant” is used; it varies from system to system with various readers, details in eschatology between men like Oswald Allis, for example, and other writers are profound, but nevertheless, generally speaking the Covenant theologian takes the abstract and speculative idea of a covenant and uses it as a logical sorting device within which he arranges all his doctrine.  Now again, that would be all right if it was simply labeled for what it is, a speculative form of theology. But what, in fact happens is that it’s not content to stop there.  What then has to happen is a downplay and a ridiculing of the distinctions in the progress of revelation in history.  So all these differences are more or less smeared out under this general speculative concept of the Covenants. 

 

This is not my observation; it didn’t start with me.  I quote Dr. James Orr.  James Orr was not a fundy, he was not a dispensationalist, he happened to be one of the most renowned religious authorities in the 20th century, he was the editor of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia that came out at the turn of the century.  He’s an Englishman.  Said Dr. Orr, (quote) “Covenant theology’s most obvious defect was that in using the idea of the covenant as an exhaustive category,” I underline “exhaustive category” “and attempting to force into it the whole material of theology it created an artificial scheme which would only repel minds of simple and natural notions.” (End quote)  And then he goes on and describes the various details.  But the whole point is that because it is trying to seek unity in the realm of the abstract, one of the problems of Covenant theology is it pulls the center of attention away from concrete historical events and over onto an idea or an abstraction.  And this just isn’t the way theology comes or the way doctrine and truth come in the Scripture; it always comes to specific particulars and there’s a diversity in theology, not just a unity. 

 

And this is why I’m a dispensationalist, because I believe in a balance between unity and diversity.  Those of you in art will see what I’m getting at will see what I’m getting at if you think in terms of the fact that when an artist gets too heavy on his unity it destroys his creativity to work with the little pieces and the diverse element.  So my first objection to Covenant theology as a scheme is that it’s speculative, it’s very heavy on unity and I think it does a very poor job, frankly, of handling the diverse elements in the progress of revelation.

 

My second objection to Covenant theology is that I believe it ignores the progressive teaching of the Holy Spirit throughout the church age.  The Holy Spirit was given to open the canon of Scripture over many, many centuries.  The Holy Spirit, since the rapture has not yet taken place, is still in the business of doing this, and one area where you can see this is the tendency is just because the Reformers were amillennial, therefore we will be amillennial; that is, we don’t believe in a literal millennium.  And I think I observe the same error in classical Reformed Covenant theology that I observe with what happened to Roman Catholicism after the Reformation.  When Rome was challenged by Luther and Calvin what they did is they went to Trent and they formed what was known in history as the Catholic Counter Reformation and what they did there was they froze down, locked down, the theological categories and it became very hard and they became stone-like, fossilized, at the level they were in the 15th century, and what I observe about Covenant Theology is that it’s fossilized theology, frozen at the 17th century level.  It’s not really speaking to the issues of the 20th century.  And I will give you examples of that later.

 

This is not to say that we don’t use results of Reformed Theology.  I find Reformed Theology one of the most powerful systems ever made.  Reformed theology is to be commended; it has got us back exegeting the Scriptures with a literal hermeneutic. Reformed theology emphasized the objective nature of the cross of Jesus Christ.  Reformed theology has produced very powerful apologetic systems, one of which I use and am a great proponent of.  Reformed theology clearly saw the cultural implications of the Christian faith, which very powerfully assert from this pulpit.  But there are things that Reformed theology never did do and one of them is it never reformed eschatology.  It left eschatology where Roman Catholicism had left.  It did not extend the literal hermeneutic into areas of prophecy, nor did Reformed theology ever purge itself of scholastic rationalism.  It maintains that all the way down to the modern days of a man like Gordon Clark.  So because it didn’t do these things it was followed by, in church history, the Wesleyan Revivals, where Wesley and the other men tried to balance what they saw as excesses that followed out of classical hardening Reformed theology.

 

And you had after this two things that happened in the 19th century that I think are significant.  One is that you have a massive rise of cults; you have Jehovah’s Witnesses, you have Seventh Day Adventism, you have Mormonism, and they all seem to spin off of an inability on the part of the established church to deal with eschatology.  There’s a remarkable correlation between an inability of 19th century classic Reformed people in eschatology and the challenge of the cults of the 19th century.  Another thing that happened in the 19th century was higher criticism and evolutionary thought.  And Reformed theology remained rather impotent against both of those two movements.  So we ask questions?  Why should we freeze the theology at the 17th century level and not develop to fight the enemies of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.  So my second objection is that Covenant theology neglects the progressive teaching of the Holy Spirit.

 

Now the third and I find more serious objection to Covenant theology is that it does not fully adhere to a literal hermeneutic and therefore in practice does not fully let the Bible speak.  If the Bible is partly legal literature, and it is, the only way you interpret legal literature is literally.  One doesn’t sign a contract and interpret it figuratively.  And if we’re not going to interpret the Bible literally then somebody else is going to interpret the Bible.  It’s like the law in American courts.  Today we’ve got a way of tickling the sphere of constitutional law from a literal interpretation of the Constitution.  So now instead of the law making the law we have the judge making the law.  And when you abandon the literal hermeneutic in areas of prophecy, as Covenant theology does, then you do not permit the Bible to speak with full force. What you’re doing is letting the interpreter speak for the Bible.  Again, this is not my criticism; I can quote one of the great students of Covenant theology in its hermeneutics, Dr. Daniel Fuller, who says, (quote) “In Covenant theology there is a tendency to impute to passages a meaning that would not be gained merely from their historical and grammatical association.  This phase of interpretation is called the theological interpretation,” (end quote).  Incidentally, if you want a good example of this, go to the library and pick out any Reformed commentator on any of the Old Testament prophets; just read it, that’s all, just pick out any Old Testament commentary by any Reformed covenant man and see how they handle the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and so on, and just watch.  It’s just an experience you have to have.  I had to have it because I, as an Old Testament major, had to go through every one of them. 

 

Here’s another quote by Albertus Peters, who quite frankly comes out and says exactly this point.  “The question whether the Old Testament prophecies concerning the people of God must be interpreted in their normal sense, as other Scriptures are interpreted, or can properly be applied to the Christian church is called the question of the spiritualization of prophecy.”  In other words, spiritual­izing the prophetic passages in the Word, when we don’t any other passages of the Word.  It strikes me as rather odd and arbitrary.  So these are the three objections basically and I think historically it’s interesting to observe that the two most virulent attacks against higher criticism has largely come from the fundamentalist movement in 1878 and following and in the 20th century the most virulent attack against humanism has come out of premillenniarian fundamentalist circles in the creationist movement.  I myself lived down and interacted with the early creationist societies, I was intimate with both sides when the AFA split from the CRS back in 64-65 and I was privy to all the discussions that were going on then.  And I can say as an eyewitness observer that the people that spoke out the strongest for creationism were the people who believed in a literal Genesis, and inevitably, I never observed a Reformed person speaking up like that.  The people that were putting cold water on the creationist movement in 64-65 were all Reformed people; it was the fundamentalists, like Whitcomb and Morris and others who basically broke the ice and now we see [can’t understand word/s] serious challenge humanism has yet faced in the 20th century with the widespread creationist movement.  So these are reasons why I’m a premillenniarian dispensationalist, that is one who literally interprets the Scripture, of if you prefer, a fundy.

 

Turn to Genesis 17.  For those of you who didn’t catch a word of that, relax, now it’s your turn and we’ll go to the text.  Here we have the outline; we come now in Genesis 17 to basically the end of the first part of the call of Abraham and the story cluster about that event.  I think this morning it would be best, rather than to go into Genesis 18 and go into the text there, it’d be best to just stop at the end of Genesis 17 and let me review and pull together where we’ve come in the book of Genesis because from Genesis 18 on the stories are going to illustrate the theological framework that has been built up.  So it’s important we understand this.

 

We have looked at Genesis and we’ve looked at these events. We’ve looked at the creation, we’ve looked at the fall, we’ve looked at the flood, we’ve looked at the Noahic Covenant, and we’ve looked at the call of Abraham. These are not the only events of the Bible but they are five crucial events of the Bible, events that you as a Christian ought to know.  And I would encourage you to read the Bible and saturate yourself so you could sit and tell all of these events to a small child in your own words.  That would be a nice test; can you articulate this in a child-like way to someone, any of the five events, can you tell the story of this, with all the key elements in the story?   And if you can that tells you you’re close to the text and then we can start building doctrine but we can’t afford to prematurely begin building doctrine if we really don’t know the story itself. 

 

So to pull this together we’re going to look at a category, not directly related to what we were talking about before but it’s called “covenant.”  Now this is not the covenant of Covenant theology.  This is the covenant of biblical theology; it starts out using the word in Hebrew, berith, and this word does not occur until Genesis 6 and the problem of Noah.  Now here’s where we even have to be careful because some dispensationalists insist on seeing covenants in Eden.  Well, you can infer one is in Eden, perhaps, but if we want to be hard-nosed about it the word “covenant” does not occur there and there is no formal signing of it either.  The first time we find the formal structure of a covenant is in Noah’s day. 

 

For the sake of simplicity and pulling this together so we can all follow, let’s look at what a covenant is and then look at four things that every covenant must have to be a covenant in the Bible.  These aren’t the only things; this is just a quick summary, not exhaustive.  The word “covenant” would be identical to our word “contract.”  If you want something in your head to just think of, to grab hold of, just think of the word contract; you sign your life insurance policy, you signed a note to borrow money from the bank or something like that, you’ve signed a contract.  Now I stress this because the unique thing about biblical Christianity is that do you realize that we are the only people in the history of the world, ever, to have a God who made contracts with His people.  The idea of a legal contract binding God to His people is unique to Israel.  No other ancient nation ever had this because no other ancient nation had a verbally revealing God.  So we then have “covenant” meaning a legal contract.

 

Now as a contract it has four parts, let’s say; you can quibble, it has more maybe but for the sake of teaching let’s just go through this.  Terms: every contract has terms in it.  Now here’s the important thing about the terms of the contract.  The terms of a contract area always interpreted literally.  We get into the building program and we sign a contract with a plumber to do the plumbing, those terms are interpreted literally in a normal, straightforward way.  There’s not some fancy way of interpreting it.  They are interpreted in a normal, straightforward way. And when we have, say the plumber sit down with somebody representing LBC and we work on a contract and we say okay, we want that contract signed thusly and such and so on, ten months down the road we decide well, instead of having the toilet bowls in the right wing we want them in the left wing.  Well now that wasn’t in the contract, says the plumber, it clearly says that kind of plumbing was over in the right wing, not the left wing.  Oh well, but we had fountains and water over there and see, that’s figuratively what we meant and so we changed the terms of the contract by a figurative last minute interpretation.  Well you see the chaos that would be caused in courts of law and other places if this were allowed to happen.  It just simply doesn’t happen this way and this is another, incidentally, further argument why we hold to a literal hermeneutics in these contract positions because we’re dealing with not just any term, we’re dealing with contract term.  The contract has been signed.

 

The second part to all contracts in the Bible that must be tracked carefully by the student of Scripture is who are the parties to the contract: in this case the plumber and say Lubbock Bible Church are the parties to the contract. They are legally defined; certain obligations fall upon them, performance of contract or breech of contract.  These charges and these specifications can’t be brought unless we know who the parties are and who the parties are are defined in the contract.  And you don’t switch parties on down without certain legal devices. 

 

The third thing that we have in the Bible is that we always have a sign of the contract.  We have some instrument or some sign that serves as a monument or a memorial to the existence of the contract.  In the Old Testament there were certain things that people did as sort of a ritual to remember, makes us all remember by making us do something that hey, we’re in contract, we are contract people and we have to do something to remember that. 

 

A fourth thing that all the Bible contracts had to have is because of depravity and that is, they had to have a founding sacrifice.  Now why did they have to have a founding sacrifice?  They had to have a founding sacrifice because the contract is between a holy God and sinful man.  Now how can a holy God and a sinful man come together in contract, talk to one another, agree that one is going to do something for the other, and not bridge the sin barrier. And so since the sin barrier is there between God, who is holy and sinless, and man who is fallen and totally depraved, because of that problem you always have to have, so to speak, the contracts lubricated and that is, in order to function, have a founding sacrifice.

 

That’s the structure of all Biblical contracts.  Now let’s turn to the first one back in Genesis 9, we’ll review for a moment and see how this contract goes.  Let’s look for four parts; see what those parts are in the contract.  First let’s look for the legal term. Genesis 9:11, the legal terms are stated quite clearly, “I will establish my contract with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood” or cataclysm, “neither shall there any more be a flood” or cataclysm, “to destroy the earth.”  So an acquiesce global catastrophe is insured against in the terms of this contract.  And there’s nothing else mentioned, just the acquiesce global catastrophe is prohibited by terms of this contract.  I stress this to you so you’re not thinking I’m going to pull sleight of hand on you later.  Please notice again verse 11 says nothing about anything else.  I will show you that it says much about everything else by way of implication, but in the terms of the contract it says nothing about anything else, just the global catastrophe of water.

 

The next thing that we want to look at, since we’ve looked at the terms, we’ve seen that in Genesis 9:11, is who entered into the contract, who are the parties to this thing.  Let’s look at Genesis 9:9-10.  “And I, behold I, establish My covenant” or contract “with you, and with your seed after you; [10] And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the field.”  Dropping down to the end of verse 16, “I may remember the everlasting contract between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.  [17] And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between Me and all flesh that is upon the earth.”  So we can at least say that the parties of the contract were God, they were Noah, and Noah’s seed, and at least the animals in the ark; we might quibble about animals outside of it, but the animals in the ark, at least we can say that those are parties to that covenant.  So that’s the second thing that we observe.  And again may I remind you that the parties to the contract can’t be switched by a figurative sleight of hand after the contract has been signed. 

 

Now the contract is signed, incidentally, with Noah and all his seed. That’s interesting because that means that the first contract that appears in the Scripture is a contract with both the elect and the non-elect.  All of Noah’s seed are included in this contract.

 

Now the sign of the contract, Genesis 11:12-17, you all know, as we said during that period of time the rainbow.  The rainbow is as a physical thing and I suggest when we read the text here, go out and look at rainbows.  Next time we have a shower or frontal passage here go out and look at a rainbow.  If you want to know where to look just look on the opposite of the sky the sun’s sin; the sun’s got to reflect it to get the rainbow, so if the sun is in the west you look in the east; if the sun’s in the east look at the west, and see if you can spot a rainbow. Sometimes here you can find beautiful displays on the high plains of the twin bow, the one that’s inverted and then the regular bow.  And as you look at the bow, Christian parents, take your children out to look at it and tell them as you physically look at the bow so that they’re learning that the God of the Scripture is the God of general revelation; take your son and your daughter out and say there, God signs His name once again in the sky. And use that terminology because that’s the terminology of Genesis; that’s using nature the way God wanted us to use it. 

 

And when you look at the bow think of this.  The rainbow is an optical phenomenon made up of two other physical entities and both of these other two physical entities are entities used again and again in the Scriptures for God’s Word and His salvation. What are they?  Water and light!  Now isn’t it peculiar that God takes light, which He uses again and again for His revelation, Jesus said “I am the light of the world,” and then on the other hand He uses water, and the waters of salvation as Isaiah says, and He puts the two together and He says that’s My signature.  And then whenever we see the rainbow, whether it’s in Revelation or Ezekiel, it always seems to be the picture of God holding back His judgment in mercy.  So the rainbow has powerful meaning and it becomes a sign of the Noahic Covenant. 

 

Now in Genesis 8:21-22 we have the fourth element of this covenant which is the founding sacrifice.  We studied this in detail so we won’t repeat but just to remind you, in verse 20 Noah built an altar and there upon the altar he laid his sacrifice and killed the lamb.  And may I say this again; when you read this don’t think of it as so many words; try to visualize a lamb being slaughtered, and the clean beast being slaughtered.  We haven’t done it in about two years so I guess it’s about time we brought the film that shows the slaughtering of a lamb to you, done by the Israelis in Israel so you’ll actually see what it is to see a lamb tied, put on an altar, have its throat slit, and watch it bleed to death and then watch it burn.  It’s not a pretty sight at all and I think some of us who are not used to the blood and the gore of a sacrifice do not understand the smashing awfulness of this kind of thing.  We tack a cross on our jewelry, which is fine, but if we would understand, the cross is an awful bloody gory thing and we forget, unless we actually physically see a lamb slaughtered once in a while what it all looks like. 

 

And so there was this founding slaughtering sacrifice that was made.  And notice in verse 21 that when God has Noah make the sacrifice he specifically mentions sin.  Now the depraved nature of man is not a Pauline doctrine.  Paul didn’t make it up, it goes all the way back here.  Here’s one of the earliest passages in the Bible as to the deep depravity of man.  Notice again verse 21, “the imagination of man’s heart is evil form his youth,” that’s a strong powerful Old Testament confirmation of total depravity, that man is completely depraved.  Now again it doesn’t mean everybody is as bad as he could be; it means that though every area of our life is touched with sin. 

Why in Genesis 8:21 do we have sin mentioned?  It’s very simple; because the sin is in the parties to the covenant.  And God has to cover, by means of the founding sacrifice He has to cover the sin of the sinful parties, and when that is covered then He can enter a contract with them.  And there are going to be people that He enters into that will never accept Christ but temporarily in mortal history they are covered… temporarily, not eternally, temporarily they experience a covering of the cross of Christ articulated in here.  But it’s to preserve them for the duration of mortal history.

 

So we have these four parts to a covenant. We see them in the Noahic Covenant.  Now here comes the clinker.  The debate has gone on and on and on and on for at least 200 to 300 years about how literal the terms of these contracts ought to be taken.  And the argument usually is look, these covenants we know, literal or not, lead to great universal spiritual truths.  They are the programs that point to Christ to, to redemption, to all sorts of things.  Now, say these people, if these are going to be the results, all these great universal spiritual truths, then how can you stand here and keep on interpreting this covenant in a very legal narrow way; it seems to me the two are incompatible. And that’s one of the arguments brought against literally binding us and locking us down to these covenants.

 

The answer is simple; the answer is that when these covenants, particular this one, the Noahic Covenant, is taken literally it leads to universal truths that extend out far beyond the domain of that literal covenant.  Let’s think a moment, think of how this goes.  And I take you back to the Noahic Covenant because I think most of you, regardless of how much you’ve been in the Scriptures, this is easy to follow.  Look again at Genesis 9:11, the terms of the Noahic Covenant.  Now what are those terms?  The terms of the Noahic Covenant say that He will protect planet earth from an acquiesce catastrophe.  All right.  But we know that there are ways of triggering off an acquiesce catastrophe on the face of this earth. We have a mild acquiesce every twelve hours; we call it the tides, because of the gravitational effect on the moon on the earth.  But if, for example, in addition to the moon we were to have a passing body in the solar system come near the earth we would experience tidal waves, unscheduled, and if it passed close enough with enough mass and we had a high enough gravitational interaction we would have stupendous tidal waves that would rapidly destroy the surface of the earth as we know it.  Not only would there be water sloshed around and astronomically high tides, but we would have the earth’s mantel ruptured by the internal pressures of compression and expansion.

 

So the question is, then, to literally guarantee the term of verse 11, does it not follow that God has to literally control things beyond the earth?  In other words, what I’m saying is, the scope literally of verse 11 is sheerly the planet earth, nothing else.   But to guarantee that verse 11 will take place God has to control the problem of wandering astronomical bodies.  That means he has to control the entire solar system.  But He can have inputs from outside the solar system and so ad infinitum and what we come out with is a generalized truth that verse 11 literally interpreted sounds like it’s restricted only to planet earth, but when we think about it verse 11 implies total sovereignty over all nature.  Or said another way, God can’t promise to fix this piece perfectly unless He controls every piece perfectly.  One bit of chance, one bit of non-sovereignty in the system and the whole thing goes into a pile of marbles.  So in order to keep the covenant going and to guarantee His work God has to be a certain kind of God.

 

So what have we done? We have adhered to a strict, narrow, literal interpretation of the Noahic Covenant, but we have made implications from that covenant.  We said for this covenant to take place thus and such must happen.  Maybe I can use another illustration before we come to Abraham.  There were contracts signed in the federal government that established something we know as the NASA, national space agency.  NASA engaged in a program that had specific objectives.  One objective during the Apollo program was man on the moon.  The earlier Gemini program had another objective.  NASA had those narrow objectives, and is it not true that NASA’s job was not to do 800 other things, NASA’s job was oriented to those contractual terms literally interpreted.  But now the students of math, you have you little pocket calculator.  Where do you think that came from?  It came from the technology of the space program.  And you have chips and you have all the other things that are going on, things that were aided and abetted by the space program.  So though NASA had a literal, narrow defined objective we have tremendous fallout from that performance of that contract.  So this why one ought not to thing that because we have a little, narrow, interpretation of the covenant we don’t accomplish big things thereby. 

 

Let’s look at Abraham now.   Turn to Genesis 15 and we have the second biblical covenant, Abraham’s covenant.  Like Noah’s covenant it has the same four parts.  Like Noah’s covenant it is to be interpreted literally in the same legal way.  With Abraham there came a new dispensation.  Prior to Abraham things were different on this earth because Abraham was the beginning of a line that led to Israel, it eventually became a nation and on down to the cross of Jesus Christ.  Prior to Israel there was just the age of the Gentiles. During this age of the Gentiles revelation appeared to come here, there, everywhere; there was no one exclusivistic channel of revelation. After Abraham there is one narrow exclusive way God only reveals and talks to man, through the Jew.

 

That being so we have a major shift in history at this point.  It’s really a serious shift in the administration or dispensation of God’s economies.  Before we have a gospel of a certain kind. We’ll call it gospel number one; the gospel in the earlier days pointed to Christ by means of the virgin birth.  It’s apparent that the early primitive monotheists had some idea of a virgin birth; why do we always have the fertility goddess that looks suspiciously like Eve painted on every pot and every jewelry; why do we have the constellation Virgo in the skies, called the same virgin in culture after culture after culture. Where’d that come from?  It came, I believe from this primitive, pre-Abrahamic revelation available to man.  That was gospel one, they could come to know Christ as He was limitedly revealed in that era. 

 

Then we come to a new period of history.  [Taps on board] This is Genesis 1-11.  Now Genesis 12 on we have Abraham and the age of Israel; it goes all the way up to the New Testament.  And during the age of Israel we have added things, and the first added thing to the gospel or clarification to the gospel is how is a man really saved.  Now in the old gospel, gospel one, the emphasis of course was on Christ and of course nobody’s ever been saved except by Christ, but the emphasis wasn’t clear.  Beginning with the gospel under Abraham it is now clear that I am justified by faith only, sola fide. I do not carry any good works with me and say before the judgment seat of God, God, I have to be accepted here in Your court of justice because of this, because of this, because of this, because of this. And He says no, you’re not accepted before Me because of this, this, this, this and this, all the stuff that you brought in here, get it out of here, it doesn’t meet My standards.  So the only thing I can come to when I come before the judgment seat of God is to come with Christ, with perfect righteousness.  Now that’s the truth in the beginning of the gospel with Abraham that’s made.

 

Now let’s look at the details of the Abrahamic Covenant.  Let’s first look at the terms.  This is a covenant that sets up the new dispensation.  What are the terms of this covenant?  Let’s look at these terms, remembering we are looking at a legal document.  And when we see this in Genesis 15:13-16 it’s said that this covenant has to do with the history of a seed… a history of a seed.  So one of the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant is that there will come forth from Abraham “a seed.”  And this is his descendants, somehow defined.  A second legal term in the Abrahamic Covenant is verse 18-21; it says “In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram,” and you have specified in geographical, physical terms, the land.  So now we have the second term, that I will give that seed a land specified by those geographical boundaries, the Euphrates River, on to Wadi El-Arish. 

 

Then we have the third term of the Abrahamic Covenant, not explicitly mentioned here but mentioned elsewhere, Genesis 12:3; Genesis 22:18, that through all of this Abraham will be the channel of spiritual blessing to the world.  Those are the three center points in the Abrahamic Covenant.  The seed in view here is not the Church; it’s talking about physical seed that comes out of Abraham.  The land is not some spiritual blessing, it’s physical geography and terrain, and the worldwide blessing is coming out of Israel.  Now to show you that we have to be careful of the contract I thought I’d lend a little interest for those of you who have been over this material three or four times and to you it’s old hat; I have to keep everyone amused during the hour, so here’s some little contemporary twist for those of you who are already aware of this.

 

As you know there’s a great discussion about the Camp David accords and the right of the Jews and the Arabs to the land, as one of you said in the feedback cards.  And it’s interesting that last week’s Christianity Today had a full series on the Israeli conflict and the right of the Jew to the land and they had some Christians writing. And then they had the Jews and the Arabs respond.  I want to read you a section of one of the Arab’s responses to this.  Now keep in mind you’re studying right now the contract to the land, so let’s see how sharp you are and see if you can see the mistake this man makes.  Listen carefully; this man is George [sounds like: Sha mah] the counselor to the Jordanian mission to the United Nations in New York City.  He’s writing about the Jews right to the land.  Here’s his point:

 

“The Jewish claim to Palestine is falsely based on the ancient biblical promise to Abraham recorded in the book of Genesis. They” the Jews “interpret the seed of Abraham as referring only to those who identify themselves as Jewish in religion but the Bible does not ever say that Abraham’s promise was exclusively limited to the Jews.  In the context of the Bible the words “to thy seed” include Arabs, who claim descent from Abraham through his son, Ishmael.  God’s promise to Abraham, in fact, was made at the circumcision of Ishmael, not Isaac, and Ishmael preceded Isaac in birth.  Ishmael was the father of a large number of Arab tribes, and in addition Abraham also became father of many more Arabian tribes through his concubine, Keturah.  Sarah’s rejection of Ishmael in Genesis 21 does not negate the clear statement of the account,” (quote) “‘and also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation because he is thy seed.’”  (End quote) “The promise made to the seed of Abraham, moreover, was not unconditional but clearly irrevocable as Deuteronomy 28 states. The promises made to the patriarch could be and ultimately have been annulled.”  Notice, “the promises made” in Genesis 15 you’re looking at “can be and have been annulled by national apostasy.  This is also in accord with what Christians hold on the basis of their New Testament.  The Christian Paul, for example, argued that the promises of the Old Testament prophets apply to all mankind.  More specifically he uses such terms as ‘the Israel of God,’ to refer to the ideal Christian church and not the physical Jews.  Even Gentiles, according to Paul, by accepting Christ could become heir to the promises made to Israel,” (end quote.)

 

Now he made two very bad mistakes as he articulated the position, basically he holds the same position Christian amills hold, that God has given up the Jew, that the Jew has no more function and purpose in history other than to be persecuted down over the centuries.  But instead of being this anti-Semitic the premillennialist holds that God yet has a future place for the Jew.  And he does so because of implications of the Abrahamic Covenant. 

 

Now we just went through some of the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant, let’s look at the parties and the rest of the parts, then draw some conclusions.  We defined the terms; the parties are clearly defined as Abraham and his seed and God.  We know this from many passages in Scripture but turn to Genesis 17:20 for one.  Here, when the seed was finally born God, who signed the contract, made a very clear distinction about what seed was the party to the covenant.  So let this circle represent the set of all descendents of Abraham.  Let the small circle inside the big circle represent the set of that seed which is party to the covenant. So we’ll label “seed” meaning all the descendants physically of Abraham, and this subset as a seed that are covenant party to the covenant, Genesis 17:20-21.

 

Verse 20, Ishmael I bless, I bless, I bless, I bless, I bless, but verse 21, “But My covenant will I establish with Isaac,” now nothing could be clearer. One wonders where Mr. Shamah [?] was when Genesis 17:20-21 was before his face.  I presume what happened here is that the Jordanian friend is using the Koran and evidently is reading more of this in the Koran than he is the Old Testament text.  But Genesis 17:20-21 clearly show that the physical seed of Abraham has a subset within it, and it’s to that subset that the promises are made.  And the subset can be defined, we don’t have time, but if I could take you on a verse chain all the way through the Old Testament, all the way up to Romans 9, and if you looked at that verse chain you’d see that that subset of Abraham is the born again or whatever you want to say, the saved remnant of Israel.   The saved remnant of Israel is the party to that covenant. And of course the sign of the covenant is the circumcision.  The founding sacrifice was the slaughter here.


What about the implications of this literal covenant?  The implications, like the Noahic Covenant, are the same.  If you take a literal view of the Abrahamic Covenant, never mind the Church, never mind believers, never mind getting all that other stuff in there, just relax and look at it as Abraham would have looked at it.  Let’s just keep it locked down, tightly legal to that.  Let’s see what we can draw just from that.  Let’s look again at those three terms, the seed term. God says Abraham, I’m going to multiply your seed and I will be with your seed.  Now in Old Testament terms being with somebody meant that God was eventually going to come into personal relationship.  In other words, He was going to solve the mandate of Genesis 1.  And out of this promise we can infer the coming of Christ.  And that’s exactly what Paul does if you look at Galatians 3:16.  So from the seed promise, without making it figurative, because Christ still literally is a Jew, literally He has physical genes of Abraham, so we’re still locked down to a literal interpretation, but the seed has vast spiritual application. Christ is implied in this seed part. 

 

Now let’s come to the land part of the Abrahamic promise. The Abrahamic promise ties all spiritual blessings to a land, a physical place. What does this mean?  I’ll tell you what it means; look at Matthew 22-23 and Jesus infers the doctrine of the resurrection from it.  The logic is simple, if God promises an everlasting blessing and the everlasting blessing means I walk on land, I don’t walk on land when I’m in the grave do it, so I have to get up out of the grave and walk on the land, and thus the resurrection.  So the land promise of the Abrahamic Covenant interpreted literally, not figuratively, forces us into a doctrine of resurrection.  Proof:  Look at how Christ argues for yourself, Matthew 20:23-33.  So Christ Himself infers that.  And then the worldwide blessing means that the information given to Abraham must somehow permeate the world and there’s lots of room in there for the Church to carry that out. 

 

Now someone is going to say yeah, yeah, that’s all great but what do you do about the fact that the Christians in the New Testament are called the sons of Abraham?  Isn’t that figurative?  What do you do about that one Clough?  Turn to Galatians 3; remember the point: does the New Testament totally undo the covenant, like Mr. Shamah of the Jordanian embassy to the U.N. says, or does the Abrahamic Covenant still continue to function and we have something else going on in Galatians 3.  If you also want corollary references, Romans 4 is a parallel passage but we don’t have time to cover that, just Galatians 3.

 

Turn to Galatians 3:7-9 because historically Galatians 3 precedes Romans 4, Paul wrote it first. 
”Know ye, therefore, that they who are of faith,” presumably Jews or Gentiles, “the same are children of Abraham.  [8] And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles through faith, preached before the gospel onto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all the nations be blessed. [9] So, then, they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.”  Ah, doesn’t verse 7 say that the sons of Abraham include Christians?  And then doesn’t that make a problem because doesn’t that make us parties to the covenant, and if we’re party to the covenant aren’t we parties to the land promise of the covenant?  Good, we’re going to go visit Israel and claim our plot.  Is that what we do?  No, first we look carefully at what is said in Galatians 3. 

 

What we have here is a figurative use of language.  Let me explain it a moment.  Again and again in the Bible it’s called antemeria is the name of the figure if you want to be the literary scholar, this is for the English majors, it means two nouns that are linked together to become a semantic equivalent to an adjective and a noun.  For example, “city of holiness,” Isaiah 52, equals “the holy” adjective, “city.”  Semantically there’s no difference, it’s just a way of expressing it and it’s a figure of speech.  “The city of holiness” is semantically equivalent to “the holy city.”  My claim is that what’s going on in Galatians 3 and Romans 4 is simply antemeria, that is, that what we have is “the sons of Abraham” is semantically equivalent to Abrahamic-like sons.  The reference has to do with the character of the sons, not their physical lineage. There is something that corresponds in these sons to Abraham’s character.   I assert this on the basis of two facts.  One is that nowhere in Galatians 3 or Romans 4 is there one reference to the terms of the covenant.  Now isn’t this strange; if we are plugged into the covenant, why aren’t the terms of the covenant given in Galatians 3 and Romans 4. They aren’t; not one reference to the covenant is given in either of those two passages.  There are references in the context to the covenant but they are all references to the faith Abraham had to get into the covenant; they are not references to the covenant itself.

 

The second fact of the matter is that the seed of Abraham that is given… the point in Romans 4 is that it was defined by the faith Abraham had when he was in uncircumcision, and we know that circumcision is a legal sign of the covenant, so obviously what he’s saying is that the faith that is spoken of here is something that is not unique just to the literal legal parties of the covenant.  There is no reason in Galatians 3 or Romans 4 to go back and in a violent fit of hermeneutics suddenly figuratively amend legal documents. 

 

Now observe, for example, in Galatians 3:8, “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen, preached the gospel unto Abraham, In thee shall all nations be blessed.”  That has nothing to do with the covenant.  The covenant has to do with the coming out of the seed, it has to do with the land, it has to do with the worldwide blessing, but the point that verse 8 is saying is what was it that we have in common, the gospel, which is Christ, which is salvation that goes to all men.  The covenant, literally interpreted, bring Christ into existence. Wasn’t Christ literally of the physical seed of Abraham?  It was because the covenant was literal, narrow, confined to Palestine, that it was precisely the generator of the salvation that is spoken of here.

 

If you go on and look at verse 14, “That the blessing of Abraham,” “the blessing of Abraham” mentioned in Genesis 12 but it is not mentioned in Genesis 15, the Abrahamic Covenant is a means to getting the blessing, “the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”  Again, it’s the kingdom of God that has come though the person of Jesus Christ.  Abraham’s contract is the foundation of that kingdom.  [16] “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made.”  Now notice something, in verse 15-16; we’ve spoken a lot here about the necessity of legally interpreting legal documents.  Notice Paul does the same thing in verse 15, “Brethren, I speak after the manner of men: though if it be but a man’s contract, yet if it be confirmed, no man disannuls it or adds to it.”  You don’t tamper with the language of the covenant; to prove it in verse 16 he makes a very tight argument on the plurality and singularity of a noun.  And you will notice that the moment he does this, in verse 16, the word “seed” does not mean what it meant before verse 15.  All the way we’ve had the figurative use of seed, verse 7, verse 8, now suddenly in verse 15 we get down to the covenant itself and now he drops the use of that word, “seed,” figurative use and he says there is only one seed, he sums the whole Messanic lineup in Christ.  He drops the figurative use of the word “seed,” then he goes on to make his argument, which is another story, in the Galatians context.

 

The whole point of Galatians 3 and Galatians 4 isn’t the Abrahamic Covenant; not at all.  The point is here’s Abraham and here’s the covenant that was given to him at a point in time.  What Paul is looking at is how did this man get into the program of God.  How did God bring him in?  He brought him in by fully justifying Abraham and that’s the point he’s making.  The land promise never even comes up for discussion; the point that he’s saying is of course there are these things, but the real thing that we’re interested in isn’t the details for the Jews; we’re interested in how a man gets into the plan of God and he gets there by justification by faith and by faith alone.  And so the issue is: do you have Abraham’s faith.

 

As you sit there this morning you ought to ask yourself, do I have Abraham’s faith?  Let me give you a few test questions, things that you ought to mull over to yourself in your own leisure.  Am I trusting that I will someday be passed by the judgment bar of God because I’ve had a spiritual experience, because I’ve invited Christ into my heart, because I’ve had this answer to prayer, that answer to prayer?  Are you basing your approval before God on those religious experiences?  Please don’t because if you are you don’t have the faith of Abraham. Abraham didn’t base his trust in the coming seed on something he and Sarah had.  The whole point of the discussion was that hey, we’ve tried everything and nothing works.  If this seed is ever to come it’s got to be miraculous intervention.  And what your attitude ought to be, and mine, is if we are ever going to pass before the judgment seat of God it’s got to be because He Himself comes to our aid and He Himself provides the pass, because if He doesn’t provide the pass we can’t have it; we don’t know it, we can’t make up our own, or anything any more than Abraham could have had Isaac by himself without a miraculous intervention. That’s Abraham’s faith.

 

Another way of looking at it. When you think of your faith are you looking in your heart to something, even regeneration, that the Holy Spirit is doing in you or are you looking outside of yourself up to heaven where Christ is your interceding high priest, where He takes His righteousness and credits it completely to your account.  The first kind of person does not have Abraham’s faith. Said in summary, what we’re asking you is on what basis do you claim salvation?  Is the basis on which you claim salvation religious experience, or is it sheerly a legal thing that God has credited to your account, the full, complete, total righteousness of His Son.  Abraham’s faith was that kind of faith and that’s the only kind of faith that will ever by that kind of faith that God justifies.  God justifies only through sola fide, only through faith in Him; not faith in Him plus my religious experience, or because I spoke in tongues, or because I was water baptized, or because, because, because, because.  Huh-un, God justifies us only because Christ’s righteousness is credited on my account up there, not in here, up there.

 

We’ll turn to hymn….