HOME Mission History Worship Sermons Photos Contacts Directions Links

Abraham and Us: Are You Ready For Covenant?

Genesis 17:1-8, 15-19

March 3, 2003

The Sign of the Covenant

Genesis 17

¹When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty;^£ walk before me, and be blameless. ²And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” ³Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, ⁴“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. ⁵No longer shall your name be Abram,^£ but your name shall be Abraham;^£ for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. ⁶I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. ⁷I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring^£ after you. ⁸And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.”

¹⁵God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. ¹⁶I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” ¹⁷Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” ¹⁸And Abraham said to God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” ¹⁹God said, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac

A News Story:

Pauline Lyon lied to doctors to enable her to undergo the in vitro fertilisation treatment which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Lauren, a month before her 52nd birthday.

Mrs Lyon, from March, Cambridgeshire, [England] gave birth to a boy at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, on Monday after undergoing similar IVF treatment. She will be 56 later this month.

A spokeswoman for Hinchingbrooke Hospital said that Mrs Lyon had given birth to a 5lb 12oz boy.

Another News Story:

An investigation has been launched following claims that Britain's oldest mother had fertility treatment.

Elizabeth Buttle says that she gave birth naturally at the age of 60 but it has been reported in a British national newspaper that she deceived staff at a fertility clinic…

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which regulates the industry, is to investigate the allegations.

She denied that the clinic had treated Mrs Buttle, of Wales, but accepted that Mrs Buttle may have been admitted under a false name.

Fifty-five years old… Sixty years old…  the oldest birth mother I found news about was a California woman - 63 years old when she had her daughter[3]…

What was very interesting was that I found no news articles about old men fathering babies…although I did find one record of a father in Kentucky who was 74 when his child was born[4]…  There is hope for some of us after all.

Even with the state of modern technology where it is today, by today's standards, these seem fairly advanced ages at which to have babies…don't you think?

What do you think it was like for Abraham, who fell flat on his face laughing when he got the news that he was going to have a baby.

"What!"  he screams, probably pounding the ground in disbelief with one hand and holding his laughter induced cramping belly with his other "What!  My wife is NINETY years old and I'm ONE HUNDRED!  IMPOSSIBLE!!"

Some people doubt these accounts of the ages of Abraham and Sarah.  Some say that age was counted differently in the ancient days.  Particularly in the book of Genesis we see some really bizarre ages.  We're told that Adam, the first man, lived 930 years (Genesis 5:5), Noah of the Ark and Mount Ararat fame lived to be 950 years old (Genesis 9:29) and Methuselah was the oldest of the bunch and lived to be 969 years old (Genesis 5:27).

Now I don't know how to explain these facts except to say my grandfather didn't know how old he was…

When he was born in a Marash at the turn of the nineteenth century, they didn't keep accurate records, they didn't have a record in some computer somewhere of the exact date and time he was born.  They estimated the date as being something like "the year of the big snow…"

In the days of Abraham, Adam, Noah and Methuselah, things were not better, but more primitive. 

All we know really, is that Abraham was old, he himself believed he was one hundred years old!  He himself believed that he and his wife Sarah were impossibly old to have babies.  But God had different plans for them than what was conventional and what even a wise old man like Abraham thought was possible.

Today and again from time-to-time throughout the spring and summer, once Lent has passed, we'll look through the bible, at the lives of some Old Testament heroes.  We'll be looking at the lives of Moses, Esther, David, Ruth and Sarah.  Today, we're looking to Abraham. 

In his life, we see a remarkable relationship with God.  An ongoing situation where Abraham is continually challenged and pushed to the edges of credulity and even obedience.  Perhaps later in this series we'll look again at Abraham, as he is tested to the limits of obedience and challenged by God to sacrifice his son Isaac.

Today, we look at the birth of that miracle baby, Isaac and through that child and the promise fulfilled in him, the offer of a covenant that God extends to Abraham and to all people.

As improbable and impossible as the birth of a baby was to Abraham and Sarah, the other aspects of the covenant promises that God makes to them are just as unbelievable.  Abraham could be described as an old itinerant and an elderly wanderer.  He follows his father Terah as the man leaves the land of their forebears in Ur and settles in the land of Haran.  At the death of Terah (at the ripe old age of 205, by the way), Abraham again takes off from his father's land.  He is 75 years old at this time.  From there he goes off to wander in the deserts of Canaan and the Negeb.  During a famine, he goes down to Egypt, where he is turned away and refused entrance.  Finally he returns to Canaan and settles, with all his livestock, the shepherds and 'trained men' who were a part of his household, his tents and his riches, gathered in many years of raising livestock and trading as a wanederer throughout the land. He returns to Canaan as an alien and a squatter in the land of Canaan. 

Despite the great riches and wealth, he had no place to stay, no place to call his own.  At this point, He also had no heir and no male son to inherit all his wealth and to carry on his legacy.  But he had his God, to whom he had been faithful, and to whose instructions to keep moving he had never disobeyed.  He also had his old age and his riches, and his wife Sara…and he had one more thing.  He had his wife Sara's poor unwilling slave Hagar.  Sara, in a desperate attempt to provide an heir, so that in his old age, as his abilities diminished and his eventual death became a reality, his fortune wouldn't be split up and she wouldn't be lost and rootless without him.  With an heir, a son to inherit and take over the family, would come stability.

So Abraham considered his wife's bold and unorthodox plan, and with angry Hagar, hesitant and offended Hagar, attempted to provide them an heir, and so they did.  Ishmael was born when Abraham was 86 years old.  However, God did not recognize Ishmael and told Abraham he had someone else in mind and he would be given another son as an heir.  This one to his legitimate wife Sara who was certainly much older than her slave Hagar.  And as we have seen, Abraham was incredulous.

Yet as an itinerant and a wandering shepherd and a livestock trader.  The other promises that God made were just as incredible.

God did not say "You will have a child," but God said to Abraham, " this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations… [And] I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you… And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.”

No wonder Abraham was on his face incredulous…

But this is the nature of God's covenant with Abraham.  That God promises all this to Abraham as a sign of his relationship with them.  All this to establish and prove to Abraham and all his offspring the last phrase that I just repeated at the end of all these promises…"and I will be their God.”

God's intention isn't just to give away freebies willy-nilly, incredible as they may be…but by making all these promises and fulfilling them, he is establishing a formal relationship between Himself and Abraham and his children. 

The one part of this passage which we have not considered to this point, that you may have noticed that I skipped, for the sake of convenience, is the section in verses 9-14 that describe what God expected from Abraham.  Abraham's part of the covenant, the contract, the formal relationship, was to become circumcised - to bear a mark on his body of his relationship with God. 

And as it was a covenant, a formal relationship and a contract that was extended to Abraham's children as much as it was to him, his sons were to be circumcised as well.  The only other thing God required of Abraham was to continue to live obediently, as though they had a close relationship, as they had been doing up until that point, and to accept without doubting, all the gifts and promises that God made to him, like having a child at the age of 100 and while his wife was 90 years old, like become the father of nations and inheriting a land in which he was only a newcomer and a squatter, with no rights.

God established this covenant, this amazing relationship with Abraham and his people.  We are the spiritual descendents of those people.  We are, with all those people all throughout the ages who have believed and accepted God's promises to them, inheritors of those same promises and that same covenant. 

However, a few things have changed over the centuries and millennia.  The Abrahamic covenant was neither the first covenant, nor the last.  God's covenant with Noah, whose sign was the rainbow, contained the promise never again to destroy the world with flood.  Another covenant was the one made with Moses, which didn't involve saving from destruction or providing an heir, but providing the promised land and required the adoption by the people of the Ten Commandments.

The most significant of these covenants that God make with humanity from our Christian perspective, is the last one.  The one in which God sent a messiah, his son to the world, and whose signs are baptism and communion.  We no longer are responsible for the Ten Commandments as directly as was Moses and his people.  We no longer are responsible to circumcise our sons, despite the harmless choice many make to do so.   But we are responsible to baptize and be baptized and to participate in communion as outward signs of the simple reality that we have accepted and received God and Christ in our lives.  Often as difficult and unbelievable as it was for Abraham to accept that he and Sarah were still to become parents, it is difficult for us - post-20^th century, enlightened, modern, pessimistic or even perhaps more ready to believe that just one religion has truth, that all we have to do to receive Christ is to accept Christ.  In other words, the covenant that God makes with all of us is that if we want to receive the blessings of Christ, all we have to do is accept that Christ.  Sometimes that's hard to believe and understand.

The gift and promise portion of this covenant, the counterpart of the promised land in the Mosaic covenant, the heir and the descendents in the Abrahamic covenant and the promise of "no world-destruction" in the covenant with Noah, is the gift of a Messiah, the Son of God and through him salvation in this life and in all eternity.

Are you ready to believe it?  Or are you on the ground, laughing, holding your side in pain, pounding on the pavement and doubting the truth that Jesus is real and can offer a way, and a life that is beyond what we imagine in this world? 

Have you experienced Jesus as an incredible, unbelievable and unexpected blessing?  Have you received the promise of eternal life in your life and for your future?  If so, then you have fulfilled your end of the covenant, and you are free to participate in baptism.  If you have already done so as a child, then you can become a member and express out loud, as your parents did with hope so long ago that you believe in the promise of the Messianic covenant, that Jesus is the way the truth and the life.  And if you have done this, or you are willing to do this at some point in your life, you are ready for communion today.

Communion is just another expression, just another symbol, just another sign of our participation in the covenant of God.  Like the rainbow for Noah, circumcision for Abraham, the Ten Commandments for Moses and Baptism and public confession of faith for Christians, Communion is just another opportunity to receive the assurance of Christ, and to express once again our faith and assurance in God's promises, even as Abraham did, once he stopped laughing, got up off the ground and realized that God was being serious.

Are you ready today to participate in the Covenant of God with us, the covenant of the Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ, to simply believe that God loves you and wants to live in you and you in Him?  If so, then I invite you to stand today with your brothers and sisters here in this church and in all the world, in all times and let us take communion together.

Amen