The Covenant of Abraham (No Other Gospel #13)

The primary issue of Galatians is that of the gospel--because in the Galatian churches there were two competing gospels, one of faith, one of the law. One gospel saw salvation as coming through faith in the atonement purchased by Jesus Christ. The other saw salvation coming through the Mosaic law or the Mosaic covenant. This is an irreconcilable contrast--it must be one way or the other. Having stated his general proposition at the end of chapter 2, Paul begins chapter 3 by an exhortation, reminding the Galatians of their own past experience with the gospel--of all they had seen and heard and experienced--all of which should have made them immune to the false gospel of the Judaizers. Then he drew two pictures; one was of the blessing of the gospel of faith. This is typified in Abraham who was a man of faith and a man who was blessed by God and promised great blessings. The other picture is the curse of the gospel of law because all that law can do to lawbreakers is curse. There can be no salvation through the law because through the law there is only a curse. Salvation must, therefore, come through faith, faith in God, just like Abraham found. Having said all that, Paul adds another argument to the same end, based on the idea of a covenant.

Brethren, I speak after the manner of men; Though it be but a man's covenant, yet if it be confirmed, no man disannulleth, or addeth thereto. Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise. (Galatians 3:15-18)

We have to remember two things going into this passage. On one hand, we have the story of Abraham, the story of a man who found God's blessing. And on the other hand, we have the story of Moses, the story of a lawgiver and his law.  Clearly, as Paul has already shown, the blessing which Abraham found came through faith, and not through the law--if, for no other reason, because the Law (the law of Moses) had not yet been given. And no doubt Paul knew some would object: “That was then, this is now. Faith was all right for Abraham because he lived before the law. He was part of a different dispensation. But now that the law is given, we find salvation through it, not through faith as Abraham did.” There is some plausibility to this argument. Certainly, there does seem to be a degree of progress in God's revelation. God seemed to slowly focus His word into a more sharp and clear form as time passed. Abraham offered sacrifices but there was no formal system of sacrifice as was delineated under Moses. God seems to have revealed things to Moses that he never revealed to Abraham. Christianity and Judaism are emphatically historical religions. Time and space are very important. History and sequence of events have meaning. And so it would be easy to think that the Mosaic Law changes or removes the promise made to Abraham.

And so to answer this objection, Paul wrote this argument, using an analogy from human life, from something his readers would have understood very well. Once two men make a contract, and that contract has been duly signed, sealed, and delivered, one of them can't just add something to it or decide to alter it. A human covenant is a much less serious thing than a divine covenant, yet once it is in place, you can't add or subtract from it all willy-nilly. If you could, there would be no point in making covenants or contracts in the first place. Imagine if you had a contract do work for someone for a set wage and then after the work was done they told you they had decided to change the contract for a lower wage. That's not how that works. Obviously, there are dishonest men who try to brake or manipulate or even forge contracts. But that doesn't change what a contract is or how it's supposed to work.

God made a covenant with Abraham. “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.” (Genesis 17:7) We've talked before about Abraham's relationship with God. God gave him blessings and made him a blessing, but the point to remember is that the source and dynamic of Abraham's relationship with God was faith. Therefore, we can say in a general sense, that this covenant was a covenant of faith.

So here we have Abraham and God's covenant with him. And then, 430 years after Abraham, we have Moses. (And yes, there's some debate about what Paul is counting from or to in order to get this number, but for the point of the argument the exact number doesn't matter.) God gave a promise, a covenant to Abraham--and that covenant could not be altered or thrown out of court by the law which came later. That would be dishonest and illegal--to try to abrogate a contract after it has already been ratified by some different contract later. This isn't an attack on the law. As Paul will show in a minute, the law does have an important function. But whatever it is and whatever it does, the one thing we can say from the outset is that it can't cancel out the covenant with Abraham. God wouldn't make a promise to Abraham and then cancel it out by making some other arrangements with Moses. That's just not how covenants and contracts work, at least when being used honestly.

Because the covenant of faith was given before the law, that means salvation is of faith, not of the law. But in order for that argument to work, we have to establish exactly what God's covenant with Abraham was. And we have to notice more specifically who were the parties to this covenant. On one side, we have God. On the other side, we have Abraham and his “Seed.” “Seed,” in this sense, is rather archaic, so we can understand it better if we say “descendent, child, posterity.”

But to whom exactly was this promise? Abraham had eight sons--Isaac, Ishmael, Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. But see what God said to Abraham. This was before Isaac's birth when it still seemed, from a human standpoint, that the birth of a son by Sarah was impossible, and when Abraham's only son was Ishamael. “And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him. And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year.” (Genesis 17:19-21) Do you see what God said? He blessed Ishmael and made a great nation out of him--but the covenant of God, all the promises which God had made to Abraham, the fullness of that promise which had not yet been spelled out--all that belonged to Isaac, not to Ishamael and (by implication) not to Abraham's other sons. The promise of God to Abraham and his posterity did not mean everyone that could trace their ancestry to Abraham, but only his posterity through Isaac.

Isaac had two children, Esau and Jacob. Jacob is best remembered for having a ladder named after him. But the important point about Jacob's Ladder was that God was at the top of the ladder and this is what God said: “And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” (Genesis 28:13-14) This is clearly a restatement of God's promise to Abraham. And it was given to Jacob, and not to Esau. Esau became a great nation and God at least for a time protected and blessed him, but the specific covenant which God gave to Abraham was to Jacob and not Esau.

This was something the Jews themselves recognized. God's covenant with Abraham did not apply to all those who could trace their lineage to Abraham. It was with Isaac, not Ishmael; with Jacob, not Esau. Abraham had many seeds, many descendants, but God's covenant did not concern all of them. Now, to the Jews, they would have said that it did apply to all the children of Jacob and obviously there was a sense in which that was true. But Paul is arguing that there is something more. Jacob was chosen over Esau. The blessing which Isaac gave Jacob (albeit unintentionally) was specifically that he would be lord over his brethren and that his mother's sons would bow down to him. (Genesis 27:29) And why I mention that is because when Jacob was blessing his own children, he says almost the same thing to Judah: that his father's children would bow down before him. (Genesis 49:8) It's almost as if, once again, there was a narrowing of the promise, or at least of one part of the promise. From all the sons of Abraham to Isaac, from the sons of Isaac to Jacob, from the sons of Jacob to Judah, from the descendants of Judah to David, and from the descendants of David to one specific son of David. Throughout the thousands of years of history, God's promise had slowly narrowed and focused until it zeroed in on one specific baby born in a manger in Bethlehem. Not all the countless descendants of Abraham, but one specific descendant was the real object of the promise.

God had made great promises to Abraham; God had made a covenant with Abraham, a covenant of faith. And this covenant was not merely some temporal matter dealing with land--though of course, it included that. Paul saw that fundamentally this covenant was the plan of salvation. God's promise to bless all nations through Abraham was the promise of the gospel. Jesus was the seed of Abraham in whom was focused and concentrated the whole of the Abrahamic covenant. And because that covenant was a covenant of faith, it follows that the gospel was one of faith, not of the law.

We saw in a previous article that all Christians, even among the Gentiles, who seek for God through faith are sons of Abraham because they have the defining characteristic (i.e., faith) that Abraham had. But it's also true in another sense. Jesus was, physically, a descendant of Abraham through his mother Mary. And, so Paul seems to say, He was the consummation of the Abrahamic covenant. As Christians, we are identified with Christ and therefore with the lineage and covenant of Abraham, which is the covenant of faith.

Paul sums up his whole argument in verse 18: God promised Abraham an inheritance, an inheritance of the blessing of God. And while there was a physical side to this inheritance, fundamentally Paul saw it as a spiritual reality--and that spiritual inheritance was focused in Abraham's descendant, Jesus Christ. As such, the inheritance of Abraham is the salvation that came through Christ. If this salvation was a result of the law, it would not come from faith in God's promise; but clearly, salvation is a result of faith in God's promise, for it was a promise and not a law which God gave to Abraham, hundreds of years before God gave the law to Moses. Though Abraham lived thousands of years before Christ, yet in a sense the covenant he received was the gospel--and therefore it is clear that the gospel is of faith, not of the law.