Feast and Follow with Knollwood
Religion & Spirituality:Christianity
Have you ever stopped to think about how it is that you can have a relationship with God? I mean, we hear that a lot in church, but how does that actually work? How do you as a little human being standing on a rock that is floating in space that is 93 billion light years in diameter form a relationship with the God Who made all of that? How is that not an arrogant thing to assume? How are we able to do this? The answer to that lies in this passage in Genesis 12. It has been hinted at in Genesis 3, 6, and 9, but it is going to be spelled out for us in chapters 12, 15, 17, and 22. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the Abrahamic covenant.
It is not an exaggeration to say that if you don't understand this covenant, you aren't going to understand any of the others, nor are you really going to understand the New Testament. The promise to Abraham and how it was done is going to provide the basis for Paul's argument for how we are saved by grace in Romans 4. It will form Paul's argument for predestination in Romans 9, and most relevantly for us, it will form Paul's argument for Gentile inclusion in the New Covenant in Galatians 3-4.
And it isn't just the New Testament that finds this important, as it will come up a lot in the rest of the Old Testament as well. While it will be mentioned a lot in Genesis, I want to just draw your attention to Exodus. This covenant will be brought up in Ex 2:24-25 as the reason for why God is about to act. It will be brought back up when Israel needed comfort in Exodus 6 that He really was going to come and save them. Interestingly, it doesn't come up again until God is ready to consume Israel for their sin in Exodus 32, when Moses invokes that covenant as the mediator between God and the nation. What's fascinating is that he doesn't bring up the Mosaic covenant just made on Mountain, but rather he brings up the promise made to Abraham. God spared the entire nation based on the promise that He made to one man.
That is how our God works. When He makes promises, He is going to uphold them. So let's see how God forms relationships and how that applies to us today by looking at our two points: God forms relationships through covenants and God advances His plans through covenants
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