Chapter 3, The Covenant

God's Story (Found in Genesis 12-22)
2000 years after sin and death enter God's perfect creation, God chooses to speak to reveal Himself to and through a man named Abraham. God says He will make Abe a great nation, grant him great fame, and everyone on earth will be blessed through him. (Genesis 12:1-3) This are crazy promises to make because Abe is a 75 year old nobody whose wife can't have children. God promises they'll have as many descendants as they stars. How? And how will everyone on earth be blessed through him?

But Abe begins to listen to God. He doesn't completely trust God to provide and does things his own way (For example, lying to the Pharaoh, sleeping with his servant Hagar). But God remains faithful and cleans up the messes, and continues to tell Abe that God will give him a son, Isaac, who will be the start of the covenant promise. 25 years after God first speaks to Abe, Isaac is born and the promise of God is beginning to look possible. Just a few years later, though, God asks Abe to sacrifice Isaac to show his devotion.

The culture Abraham lives in worshiped many gods, who people believed controlled various parts of the world like the sun, moon and rain. These gods were feared so much that people began sacrificing more and more to appease their wrath.

What we learn about God:

• 1) God makes Himself known as distinctly different from the gods of the world: He is good, loving, faithful and desires relationship with humanity.

• 2) The type of relationship God seeks is very different from how most of the world works: Instead of setting up a contract relationship, He begins a covenant relationship with Abraham.

• 3) God's promise, timing and provision are always faithful, even when it doesn't always seem to make sense to us. We must learn to trust and obey Him even if it's hard.

Contract vs. Covenant
A contract is an agreed upon set of expectations between two parties. It is an IF, THEN relationship. Our example was: IF Manny Ramirez plays baseball, THEN the Dodgers will pay him way too much money. If either side doesn't hold up their end of the bargain, the contract is broken.

Your parents are a good way to remember the difference that a covenant is: They provide food, clothes, shelter and protection to you not based upon how well you do your chores, get good grades, or even obey them. They provide those things based on their love for you. If they set up a contract relationship, you'd probably all be living on the streets by the time you were 8.

Your parents still have expectations, rules, and responsibilities for you to follow. Thankfully, however, their relationship with you is based not on how well you live up to some of those rules.

• God's Covenant: God's promise, based on His faithfulness, rather than human action. That doesn't mean there's no expectations on our part, we'll look more at that later.

• God's Timing:We often want God to work on our schedule, but as we see with Abraham, sometimes it can be a long road of tests that help develop us into what God wants.

• God's Provision:God doesn't promise an easy road, but He promises to provide. He is faithful and present even during the hard times. God provides a SUBSTITUTE SACRIFICE in place of Isaac after Abe proves his trust and obedience.