Blood Covenant Origins by C.A. Gray

Author:C.A. Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C.A. Gray
Published: 2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Afterword

The story of Isaac’s miraculous birth spans twenty-five years, and eight chapters in Genesis. It’s also inextricably linked with God’s promise to Abraham that he would inherit the land which would ultimately become Israel, but God reveals His plan to Abraham in stages.

By Genesis 13, God has already called Abram (this was his name at first) to leave his father’s house and go to the land that God would show him. But it isn’t until after Abram and his nephew Lot separate that God specifically promises the childless Abram, then in his seventies, that his descendants will be like the dust of the earth. The word used here for descendants in Hebrew is zera , which means seed, or semen. This is significant because in Genesis 15, still childless, a heartsick Abram starts to wonder if the child will be from his own body after all, or whether perhaps it might be an adopted servant. God corrects him then, and tells him that yes, the child will be his biological son. He also gives Abram a new image to cling to: that of the stars in the heavens as a symbol of his numberless progeny. Now Abram can meditate on God’s promise to him day and night: both the dust of the ground and the stars in the heavens are a symbol of the promise. This is the first time that we’re told “Abram believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness,” later quoted in Romans 4:3 as an example for us all.

At the same time that God gives Abram this new word picture, He promises him the land for his possession. Abram asks God for a sign, which elsewhere in scripture indicates lack of faith—but since the writer of Genesis just got finished saying that “Abram believed God,” that can’t be what it was in this case. Perhaps Abram was asking for something to cling to, like the image of the dust of the ground and the stars of the sky, to help him continue in faith for the land during the long years he expected to elapse between the promise and its fulfillment. In response, God tells Abram to gather animals and to cut them in half. Abram at once knows what this means: as we’re told in Jeremiah 34:18-19, this is the preparation for what the ancients called “cutting a covenant.” In this ritual, both parties walked between the pieces of the animals in a figure eight as they made their vows, in effect saying, “so be it done to me as it was done to these animals, if I break my end of this agreement!” Abram understands that God is going to make a covenant with him. But rather than God and Abram walking between the pieces, God puts Abram to sleep and gives him a vision of a flaming torch and a smoking fire pot passing between the pieces instead, as God tells him the terms of the covenant. This

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