This
is the forth in a series of lessons on God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis,
chapter 17). In our previous lessons we have seen where God’s covenant
was an everlasting covenant with Abraham and with his descendants. God
promised to give to Abraham and to his descendants the
The true promise was for an everlasting heavenly land, not an
earthly land. God’s promise has always been for an everlasting heavenly
home with Him. It has been promised to Abraham and his descendants by
faith.
What we saw previously was that God was giving
Abraham both the old covenant and the new covenant promises at the same
time. The new covenant promise was the true promise. The first
(old) covenant promise was being given to his earthly descendants as the
earthly copy.
We heard the Hebrew writer tell us how that first covenant was a faulty covenant. He said, “For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second” (Hebrews 8:7).
He then tells us why it was a faulty covenant
when he spoke of the people of the covenant and said, “For finding fault with
them”. It was a faulty covenant because the people were
faulty. God is a perfect God and He demands perfection. Man cannot
receive the covenant promise of a home with God unless he obtains perfection.
It appears that God was telling Abraham of His perfection requirements just before He gave Abraham the covenant (In Genesis, chapter 17). In the first verse of that chapter, God told Abraham, “I am God Almighty; Walk before Me, and be blameless”.
Based on the Hebrew wording God is
commanding Abraham to walk before Him and be “perfect”. After telling
Abraham to walk before Him and be perfect, God gave Abraham the covenant with
its everlasting promise for an everlasting
Remember, Jesus is God’s Word from the
beginning and He is God’s creator (John, chapter 1). When God appeared to
Abraham and made His covenant with him, it was Jesus who was speaking to
him. Jesus was making the promise to Abraham and He knew that He would
need to do what was necessary to make Abraham and his descendants perfect and
righteous so that they could meet the covenant conditions and receive its
promises. He knew that He would be required to come to earth and die on
that cross in order to fulfill His covenant promise to Abraham.
If we go back in time to Enoch and then to Noah, we see scripture saying how those two men walked "with God", not before Him (Genesis, chapters 5 and 6). Scripture says that “Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him”. Scripture says of Noah, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time; Noah walked with God”.
Those two men
walked with God before God gave His covenant to Abraham. They walked with
God but the Scripture says that Abraham was commanded to walk before God and be
perfect. Did it have to do with the covenant that Abraham was receiving?
God was making His covenant promises to Abraham and to his descendants.
It appears that He was telling him that their covenant requirement would be
perfection.
There is another Old Testament scripture that
speaks of a man of faith (A descendant of Abraham) walking before the
LORD. It shows how walking before the LORD means walking in obedience to
God’s word. After Solomon completed his work of building the temple, God
appeared to him and made some promises to him. God spoke of David and
told Solomon, “As for you, if you walk before Me as your father David walked,
even to do according to all that I have commanded you, and will keep My
statutes and My ordinances, then I will establish your royal throne as I
covenanted with your father David” (2 Chronicles 7:17-18).
The covenant that God made with David was a
part of the same covenant that He made with Abraham. The true covenant
promise is the promise of everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven.
David was being told that one of his descendants will rule as king over
that kingdom forever. Solomon was also being given that promise but, as
he walked before Christ he would not try to hold as faithful to God as his
father David had.
The requirement is to walk as David walked and
do what God has commanded. David was not perfect in his walk but he
always repented and returned to his walk when he came to himself. We will
also make mistakes but we must live a life that keeps turning back to God when
we mess up. If we live a repentant life and love God with all of our
heart, He will make us perfect. As the scripture says, “I HAVE FOUND DAVID the
son of Jesse, A MAN AFTER MY HEART” (Acts
Abraham had to walk before Christ and be
perfect because he was receiving the covenant promises. Abraham had to
walk on earth before Christ would come and walk on earth. Jesus is
speaking to him as God Almighty and Jesus will not walk on earth as a man for
another two thousand years. When Jesus came He would walk
perfectly. Christ is telling Abraham that he must also be perfect as he
walked. That was God’s covenant requirement for Abraham and for his
descendants. They needed help to be able to meet that requirement.
Remember, the new covenant descendants of
Abraham (By faith) would be required to pick up their crosses and follow
Jesus. Christians must follow Jesus as they walk. Those old
covenant descendants could not follow Jesus because He had not come to lead the
way. They needed to walk their walk of faith before He walked but they
had to follow the path of obedience to God’s word. They had to hear and
obey Jesus as He spoke directly through angels or through
Moses.
When He tells Abraham to walk before Him and
be perfect, it appears that He is telling Abraham that both he and his descendants
must walk in perfect obedience to God’s word until Jesus would come. They
would never be able to do that but if they would do their best and believe
God’s promises, Jesus would later make them perfect. Christ gave Abraham
help when He gave Abraham credit for righteousness because of his faith.
Because Abraham would walk the walk of faith, Jesus justified him and made him
perfect and righteous.
The first covenant required that man obtain his own perfection by perfect obedience to the old covenant Law and by offering perfect sacrifices. Paul spoke of the old Law’s requirement for perfection in Galatians Chapter 3. He was addressing his comments to those who believed that all Christians had to keep the old covenant Law and especially the Law’s requirement for circumcision.
Paul tells them it is
those who are of faith that will be blessed with Abraham, not those of the
Law. He said, “For as many as are of the works of the Law are under a
curse; for it is written, "CURSED IS EVERYONE WHO DOES NOT ABIDE BY ALL
THINGS WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF THE LAW, TO PERFORM THEM” (Galatians 3:10).
The Law demanded perfect obedience or one was cursed.
Moses had written, “Cursed is he who does
not confirm the words of this law by doing them” (Deuteronomy 27:26).
Moses also said, “It will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all
this commandment before the LORD our God, just as He commanded us” (Deuteronomy
Moses had repeated the Ten Commandments to
them and he then added the great commandment. He told them, “You shall love the LORD
your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might”. They had to
keep it all. Under the old covenant man was left to his own abilities to
earn righteousness by being perfect under the Law. Moses said it and Paul
said it. James also wrote, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet
stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all” (James
Their covenant demanded perfect obedience to
the Law in order for them to be made righteous. That was their covenant
requirement for receiving
The old Law was
written so as to provide atonement for man's sin and to perfect God’s people
but they could never meet the conditions. The Law demanded blood from
perfect sacrifices ("Whatever has a defect, you shall
not offer" - Leviticus
In addition to
perfect sacrifices, only perfect priests were to offer those sacrifices (And
serve in the outer room of God’s house). The Law said of a priest with a
defect, “he shall not go in to the veil or come near the
altar because he has a defect, so that he will not profane My sanctuaries” (Leviticus
It was a weak and
useless Law from a faulty covenant because man was not perfect and the Law
could not make man perfect. They could
never comply with the requirements of the Law because, “the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and
not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer
continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near” (Hebrews 10:1).
The old covenant Law
only had the shadow; it did not have the reality. Under the shadow, when
an imperfect priest drew near, he was profaning God's sanctuary and he was not
welcome in God's presence.
Having the perfection necessary to draw near
to our perfect God would require a better way. God provided the way
through Christ. We can now draw near to God through Christ because, “By one offering, He perfected for all time those who are
sanctified” (Hebrews
His offering makes
us perfect because He was a perfect priest offering a perfect sacrifice.
He lived a perfect life under the Law and He remained perfect including His obedience
at the cross. Paul spoke of that obedience saying, “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even
death on a cross” (Romans 2:8).
God was telling us about His perfection
requirements in the covenant promises that He made to Abraham. Paul
speaks of the promises to Abraham and says, “Now the promises were
spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, "And to seeds,"
as referring to many, but rather to one, "And to your seed," that is,
Christ” (Galatians
When we read from the NASB translation (The
same is true of most modern translations) where God told Abraham, “I will give to you and
to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of
Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (Genesis, chapter 17), the original
Hebrew word for, “descendants” was, “zera”, meaning, “Seed”.
God meant “Seed”, singular, meaning Jesus,
only. When God told Abraham that He would give that land to him and to
his Seed, He only meant Jesus, not all of Abraham’s earthly descendants because
God foresaw none of Abraham’s other descendants being able to meet the covenant
conditions. The promise was only made to the one descendant who would
meet the covenant conditions of perfection.
Jesus was perfect in His obedience to the
Father’s commandments and that included obedience to the Law of Moses because
that was God’s law to His people when Christ lived on earth. He once
spoke of the Law and said that not a letter or stroke of it would pass from it “until all is accomplished” (Matthew
He accomplished it all at the
cross. Until that day came, He lived perfectly under God’s Law. He
once told the disciples, “but so that the world may know that I love the
Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me.” (John 14:31) He
was exact in His obedience because He was perfect in everything.
So, if Jesus is the only heir of promise, how
can we expect to become heirs to the covenant promises? We can only
become heirs with Christ if we are “In Christ”. We must become
one with Him to become perfect and to share in His glory.
In His great prayer (Recorded in John, chapter 17), Jesus said, “I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (Verses 20-21).
He then spoke of those
that have obtained perfection by their unity with the Father and Son (“I in them and You in
Me, that they may be perfected in unity”). We must become one with Christ
to be made perfect with Him.
In Galatians, chapter 3, Paul tells us that
the Scripture foresaw how God would justify the Gentiles by faith when it
preached the gospel to Abraham, saying, “ALL THE NATIONS WILL BE BLESSED IN
YOU”.
All nations will be blessed in Abraham when those of faith have been brought
into Christ, the only perfect Seed of promise. Paul will continue by
telling us how we do that in the last verses of that chapter.
In verse 29, he tells us that we are Abraham’s descendants and heirs according to the promise, “if you belong to Christ”. In verse 28, he tells us that applied to those who “are all one in Christ Jesus”. He says that includes everyone, whether Jew or Greek (Gentile), slave or free, male or female.
Paul tells us how we become one
in Christ Jesus in the previous verses when he says that, “you are all sons of God
through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ
have clothed yourselves with Christ”.
We must belong to Christ if we are to become
sons of God and heirs with Him. We become one in Christ when we have
become clothed with Him in baptism. Everyone who has become one with the
only perfect heir is an heir with him and is a son of God. They will have
been made perfect by having been clothed with the perfect Son of God.
Paul says that salvation and eternal glory are
only found “in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy
A few of the ancient ones were faithful and
they believed God’s promises. They lived under a Law that could not make
them perfect to receive the promises but, because they believed and obeyed
God’s word, God will give them what had been promised. That is why the
Hebrew writer said what he did in chapter 11 of his letter. We read what
he said about Abraham living in the earthly land of promise as if he was an
alien in a foreign land but he was looking for that city built by God.
The writer will continue to speak of the
ancient faithful and say how they were seeking a country of their own.
They were seeking a country but it was not that earthly land. The writer
says, “And indeed if they had been thinking of that country from which
they went out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is,
they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not
ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews
Remember, after
The writer ended chapter 11 speaking of those who had
gained approval by their faith but they never received the promises. He
says they had not received what had been promised, “because God had
provided something better for us, so that apart from us they would not be made
perfect”.
What had been promised was an everlasting
We can only have His perfection when we
believe His word with obedience. We must have faith in the promises of
God. We must believe He will give us the covenant promises if we meet the
covenant conditions. Salvation is only found in Christ Jesus because that
is the only perfect place on earth.
We must be made perfect and that can only
happen in Christ Jesus. He is the only perfect one and the only heir so
we must be “In Him” and be made one with Him if we are to receive the
covenant promises. We must hear John tell us, “but whoever keeps His
word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we
are in Him: the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same
manner as He walked” (1 John 2:5-6).
If we say that we are “In Him”, we ought to walk as
He walked. Jesus walked in a way that denied self to live for
others. He walked about doing good works for others and He died doing
good works for others when He died for me.
I must take up my cross and follow Him.
I must walk like He walked and “walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and
gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Ephesians
5:2). We must follow Him and walk in love.
In His Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapter
5), Jesus tells us what God requires. He mentioned a number of things
that were different from what they had been taught but at the end of that
chapter He said something that stands out. He told them to love their
enemies and pray for those who persecuted them “so that you may be sons
of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and
the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”.
Only sons of God are heirs. We must be a
son of God to be an heir in His house. If we are to become sons of God,
we must love all people, even our enemies. He tells us that anyone can
love those who love them but we are to be different. He tells us, “Therefore you are to be
perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”. They likely
did not believe that He meant exactly what He said about being perfect.
He did. He will make us perfect if we follow Jesus and walk in love just
as He walked in love.
Remember, God is love (“The one who does not
love does not know God, for God is love” – 1 John 4:8) and if we are His
children we must walk in love. That means doing works of love for
others. That is why we were created for good works. We must hear
Paul say that we are, “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand so that we would walk in them" (Ephesians
Paul had just written to say how we are saved
by grace, through faith and not by works, but true love does works of
love. We were created to do good works and if we walk “in love” as Jesus walked, we
must be doing good deeds. We must love others in deed and in truth.
When we are walking as Jesus walked, we are being led by the Spirit of God. Paul spoke of that in Romans, chapter 8. He tells us how we have been set free from the old Law of sin and death (The Law of Moses) by the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ. We are no longer to “walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (verse 4).
Paul
tells us that we are not to live according to the flesh “but if by the Spirit
you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live”. He is
speaking of the evil deeds that are done for self satisfaction. We are to
put those deeds to death and replace them with deeds of love done for others.
We must be led by the Spirit as we walk
because, “all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Romans
Paul speaks of
that when he tells us how Christ became a curse for us, “in order that in Christ
Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would
receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Galatians
3:14). It is the promise of the Spirit that allows us to become His son
and have that home with God. Those who have the Spirit of God are sons of
God and heirs with Christ.
When God appeared to Abraham and told him to, “Walk before Me, and be blameless”, God was giving Abraham his requirements for meeting the covenant that He would give a few verses later. That chapter (Genesis, chapter 17), however, is just an earthly description of the true covenant of the promise of eternal life in Jesus.
Jesus was the promised covenant to
man from the beginning. God spoke through Isaiah saying, “I will keep You and
give You for a covenant of the people, To restore the land, to make them
inherit the desolate heritages” (Isaiah 49:8).
Our righteousness no longer depends on our
perfection under the Law, it depends on our faith in the one who has met the
conditions of the Law for us and then offered Himself so that we can obtain His
perfection.
Jesus lived a perfect life under that Law and
He did for us what we could not do for ourselves. By His perfection He
earned righteousness for us. We can only obtain His perfection and His
righteousness by faith in Him. We must believe His promises like Abraham
believed His promises. If we believe His promises and obey His word, He
will make us one with Him (We will become clothed with Him) and He will give us
His perfection and His righteousness.
All of the faithful of both covenants and from
the time before the covenants have been made perfect by the blood of
Christ. They have all become one together “in Christ” with us and they will
receive that city to come.
Johnny Rogers
Revised
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