Well, our time is up for the day. I’ll be back with you again tomorrow at this time. Tomorrow my theme will be “Friendship with God.” I’ll be speaking further about the relationship that developed between God and Abraham out of the covenant that they made with each other.

9a:T2931,

It’s good to be with you once more. I’ve been speaking to you this week on covenant as the basis for an enduring personal relationship with God.

Yesterday, I described how God entered into covenant with Abraham as recorded in Genesis 15. You will recall how Abraham had to take the sacrificial animals, kill them, divide the bodies in two, and then Abraham himself passed through those pieces and the Lord, in the form of that flaming torch, passed through likewise. And through passing through the pieces of the sacrifice the Lord and Abraham entered into covenant one with another. Those sacrificed animals spoke of death, the death of those who entered into the covenant. The way into the covenant, then, is through death, laying down your life.

Now I want to trace today the outworking of that covenant in history and also in the personal relationship that it produced between God and Abraham. I’ve expressed this as clearly and as briefly as I know how in my book, The Marriage Covenant, so I’m going to read to you some paragraphs from that book. These paragraphs explain the outworking in history of the covenant the Lord made with Abraham.

“The death of the sacrificed animal is physical, but it symbolizes another form of death for the one who offers the sacrifice and passes through the pieces. The one who does this hereby renounces all right, from that moment, to live for himself. As each party passes through the pieces of the sacrifice, he says, in effect, to the other: ‘If need be, I will die for you. From now on, your interests take precedence over my own. If I have anything you need but cannot supply, then my supply becomes your supply. I no longer live for myself, I live for you.’

In God’s sight, this act of making a covenant is no empty ritual. It is a solemn and sacred commitment. If we trace through history the course of events that resulted from the Lord’s covenant with Abram, we see that each party had to make good the commitment which the covenant represented.

Some years later, when Abram had become Abraham, God said to him: ‘I want your son Isaac—your only son. The most precious thing you have is no longer yours, because you and I are in covenant. It is mine.’ To his eternal credit, Abraham did not falter. He was willing to offer up even Isaac. Only at the last moment did the Lord intervene directly from heaven and stop him from actually slaying his son.

However, that is not the end of the story. God had also committed Himself to Abraham. Two thousand years later God, in His turn, fulfilled His part of the covenant. To meet the need of Abraham and his descendants, God offered up His only Son. But this time there was no last minute reprieve. On the cross, Jesus laid down His life as the full price of redemption for Abraham and all his descendants. That act was the outcome of the commitment that God and Abram had made to each other on that fateful night, two thousand years earlier, when they passed between those pieces of the sacrifice. All that followed from then on in the course of history was determined by their covenant.

So solemn, so total, and so irrevocable is the commitment that is made in a covenant.”

Well, that was the practical outworking of that covenant in history. Each person, God and Abraham, had made a total commitment. There came a time w

Relationship With God

*Browse Series