Covenant Time

Today we read a short section of the Abraham narrative found in Genesis. Like the Noah narrative last week, we do not need to read the whole text to understand the issues since we have heard it many times. Although you may wish to read it again this week as you explore how God has touched your life. There are several characteristics of the account that shows it was handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition before it was written down. The seeming repetition of the story and the age of Abraham and Sarah are two of those characteristics. In our short narrative today we find Abram in another encounter with God after he and Sarai decided to take God’s plan into their own hands. God had promised that Abram would have children, but in their eighties, thinking Sarai was well past the age of childbearing she gave Abram her slave-girl so that he could have children. When Hagar conceived Sarai had second thoughts about the affair and drove her into the wilderness where Hagar had an encounter with God. Thirteen years later God visits Abram to reassert the promise that he will have descendants from Sarai. At that encounter God makes a covenant with Abram, reasserts the promise of a son from Sarai, and changes their names. For Abraham and Sarah to be God’s meant that having faith in God will make them the parents of nations.

Paul uses this story of Abraham and Sarah in his struggle to make faith in Christ, not following the law, the center of Christian life. His argument was to claim Christ opened up God’s salvation to all people and not just to those who originally received and followed the law. By using Abraham and Sarah he could argue, since the Law did not exist at that time, they could only answer God by faith. That means faith has always been the criteria of being children of God. The Law which came later was how a person lived out their faith.

That is where we stand. It is only by faith that we can become the children of God. While many claim that you need to do something to become a child of God (like accepting Jesus as your personal savior or be baptized a certain way) Paul is emphasizing that you could never do enough to win God’s approval. Just like Abraham and Sarah you can only cling to the gift that God has given you – Jesus’ death and resurrection. But as God tells us by changing the name of Abraham and Sarah, receiving God’s faith changes us from slaves of sin to children of God. That change is shown by our lives. We have found our cross, picked it up, and now follow Jesus. That cross is how we serve others. That cross is sharing God’s love with the world. That cross is our joy and salvation.