Gen. 12:1 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Abraham was 75 when God made this covenant with him. Twenty-four years later, God gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision. This was not an entirely new covenant but rather a way for the covenant to be administered. Through the covenant sign of circumcision God was giving to Abraham and to all of his descendants a very visible sign of what God promised to do and what was to be in response their duty. At this time God also promised to Abraham all the land of Canaan.

God’s dealing with Abraham is of supreme importance. As Robert Reymond has summarized: “Once the covenant of grace had come to expression in the spiritual promises of the Abrahamic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant became the picture or model of God’s continued work of salvation leading up to the coming of Christ.”[1]

Now later as the descendants of Abraham were brought out of Egypt by God’s mighty power, Israel was given what has been called the Mosaic Covenant. Again this was not an entirely new covenant, it was a new way for the covenant to be administered. Israel was given many laws and ceremonies. Israel was never to earn her salvation by keeping God’s Law. Rather God gave to Israel the law as part of His covenant dealings with His people. God always deals with people in terms of covenant.

With David, the covenant of grace reached another important stage. The Davidic covenant formally established the manner in which the Lord would rule among his people. The climax of the OT is found in 2 Samuel 7. O. Palmer Robertson writes: “Prior to this point, God certainly had manifested himself as the Lord of the covenant. But now God openly situates his throne in a single locality. Rather than ruling from a mobile sanctuary, God reigns from Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. In a climatic sense, it may be said that under David the kingdom has come.”[2]

All the OT covenants made with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David point the way clearly to the coming of Christ and the New Covenant of which He would be the mediator.

Hebrews 12:24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

We will consider this New Covenant in our next study.

[2] O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants, 229.

The Westminster Confession of Faith in Chapter 7 speaks of the distance between God and man as being so great that we could never experience any enjoyment of God as our blessing and reward if God did not take the initiative to come to us. And God has done this through the means of covenant.

There are different definitions for covenant:

Covenant – an agreement or promise between two or more persons.

Covenant – a bond in blood, kingly given, broken only by death.

Covenant – the relationship that God begins and determines with His people.

Theologians debate on whether to call God’s dealing with Adam in the Garden of Eden a covenant. The word is not found in Genesis 1-3, but there are basic elements of what can be called a covenant. The covenant between God and Adam is sometimes called the covenant of works or the covenant of life. Looking at Genesis 2:15-17, there are the basic parts of a covenant. Adam was given permission to eat of every tree of the garden and forbidden at this time to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Gen. 2:15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Genesis 3:17-19 And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Note that Adam and Eve are then kicked out of the Garden of Eden with no hope of return. They were cut of covenantally from the life that they had one enjoyed. But before Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden they were given a promise in Genesis 3:15.

Genesis 3:15 “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Here in these words we see that God would bring salvation to Adam and Eve not through their own obedience but through a coming Savior.

The Westminster Confession of Faith states that following the fall of Adam (and Eve), the Lord was pleased to establish a new covenant.

Westminster Confession of Faith: 7.3 – Man, by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein he freely offers unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life his Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.

Now you know enough about the Bible to realize that there are at least 4000 years of OT history before the coming of Christ. God prepared the way for the coming of Christ in a number of ways. God raised up the godly line of Seth. God then chose Noah and his family to be the ones who would continue the human race after God brought an incredible judgment on the entire world.

Then in Genesis 12 we have what can be described almost as a new creation. We have in Genesis 12 the beginning of Abraham’s story (it actually is introduced at the end of chapter 11).

Gen. 12:1 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

We will continue looking at the Abrahamic Covenant next.