Impossible God
October 13, 2024 Speaker: Ben Janssen Series: Genesis Part 2: Abraham and the Blessing of Living by Faith
Topic: Sacraments, Covenants Scripture: Genesis 17:1–27
Genesis 17 is, along with Genesis 15 and Genesis 12 before it, a crucial text in seeing what the Old Testament has promised and what the Bible is all about. It is therefore also important for seeing what it is we now have as believers in Jesus as the one who has brought into reality—right here in front of our eyes—what Abraham could only have hoped for.
This chapter is structured in two similar halves. Verses 1-14 are mirrored by verses 15-27. For example, God changes Abram’s name, then he changes Sarai’s name. Abram falls on his face in both halves. In both God speaks of his covenant. Both conclude with references to the practice of circumcision.
What can we learn from both halves of this narrative? What I want us to see today is that the life of faith requires God's people to trust that God will do what seems impossible. We see this by observing in this chapter the extraordinary covenant, its expanding context, and the essential character of God’s covenant partners.
The Extraordinary Covenant
The first thing we see in this chapter is God’s extraordinary covenant with Abram and Sarai. It is this covenant, which is based on God’s promises to Abram in chapter 12 and formalized in the ceremony in chapter 15, that is at the heart of the biblical story. To be a Christian ought to mean that we are convinced by and captivated with what God has promised in this covenant with Abram. This is what Christians believe the Bible is all about. It is what Christians believe Jesus has brought to fulfillment.
Be Fruitful and Multiply
The Abrahamic covenant does not come out of nowhere. In verse 2, God speaks of this covenant with Abram with its promise to “multiply you greatly.” This covenant, in verse 4, will make Abram “the father of a multitude of nations.” Verse 6 again promises that God will make Abram “exceedingly fruitful,” making him “into nations” with kings coming from him. This covenant, verse 7 says, will be “an everlasting covenant.”
Similarly, in the second half of this chapter, God says of Sarai that “she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her” (v. 16). Verse 19 also speaks of this covenant as being “everlasting.”
Now, what can we say about this covenant? The references to being fruitful and to multiplying are not simply references promising a long and influential family tree. To understand what is being promised here we can’t just look ahead, we have to also look back. To be fruitful and to multiply takes us all the way back to the sixth day of creation, when God made human beings in his image, and commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion. . .” (Gen 1:28). So, what God is promising to do in this covenant with Abram is not just bless him and bless others through him. God is promising to put the whole creation back in place. It is in this covenant with Abram that God is promising salvation. It is in this covenant with Abram that God is promising a new creation.
God Almighty
I don’t know to what degree Abraham understood all that. But he certainly understood that God was promising big things. Impossible things, in fact.
In verse 3, Abram falls on his face, no doubt because he is in awe at yet another appearance of God and the assurance of the promises he has heard before. But thirteen years have passed since the last episode in the previous chapter. Presumably, nothing all that noteworthy has transpired at that time. Abram has a son now, Ishmael, but that doesn’t make him all that unusual. Surely God is done with Abram. He is ninety-nine years old. What more could God want to do with him?
Well, what God calls himself in verse 1 is instructive. “I am God Almighty,” El Shaddai in Hebrew. Scholars aren’t quite sure what the origins of the term are, but its meaning can be discerned by its usage. This particular name for God means that this is “the God who intervenes powerfully.”[1] The ESV translation, “God Almighty” gets at that. When God identifies himself in this way, it’s like he is saying, “I am Someone who can go way beyond your wildest dreams and imaginations.” No, Abram, at age 99, has not seen the end of what God is going to do.
The reason God identifies himself in this way at this point is because of what he promises in the second half of the chapter. He says in verse 16, about Abram’s wife, Sarai, “I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her” (Gen 17:16). Unbelievable! Abraham again falls on his face, but this time he laughs. It’s just too much. “Don’t make me believe that kinds of stuff.” He says, in verse 18, “Oh that Ishmael might live before you!” Can’t God just bring his remarkable promises to pass through Ishmael? Nope, God is going to do something more remarkable than that. God is going to do the impossible.
God at Work Through Us
Now, most of us have no problem imagining that God can do the impossible. Imagine being amazed at God telling us how many miles we’ve walked our entire lives or exactly how many raindrops have ever fallen from the sky or some other petty piece of trivia. Actually, don’t imagine that. El Shaddai is not God’s name because he uses his power to do supernatural tricks that wow us. He is El Shaddai because of the power he plans to to work out in us.
This is one of the important aspects of the fact that God hasn’t just made a promise to Abram; he has made a covenant with him. He plans to show his great might, not just to Abram and his family, but through Abram and his family.
And so, another decade has passed in Abram’s life, and now it is time for Abram to know God in a different way. It’s not until here, after Abram is utterly powerless that he will be able to know this God who has made a covenant with him as El Shaddai.[2]
And so it is with us. Who knows what God Almighty will do through us, even when we are at our weakest moments.
The Expanding Context
Second, here in Genesis 17 we see God Almighty, the impossible God, beginning to expand the context of what he has promised to Abram.
Name Changes
He says to Abram in verse 4, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.” In order to confirm this point, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham. Similarly, in verse 15, he changes Sarai’s name to Sarah. What is the significance of the name changes?
It's probably nothing so far as the meaning of the names goes. Sarai and Sarah both mean “princess,” and are probably just variations on the same name. And though English translations often tell us that “Abram” means exalted father and “Abraham” means “father of a multitude,” many scholars contend that that is reading into the different names too much, that this, too, is just another variation on the same name.[3]
Whatever the differences that we could try to see in the meaning of the names, the more important point is that God changes the names in light of his covenant with Abraham and Sarah. These covenantal names mark this moment and encourage them to look ahead to what the impossible God is going to do through them. [4]
The God who does the impossible, God Almighty, is making it known to them the spectacular thing he aims to do through them. God is going to make them “into nations and kings shall come from you,” as verse 6 says.
The Covenant Formula
Verse 7 is an important verse. “And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” That last part of the verse is the first time we come across what theologians call “the Covenant Formula.” It is in abbreviated form: “I will be your God.” The full version includes, “and you will be my people,” as we find in Exodus 6:7.
God is opening up Abraham and Sarah’s horizons, expanding their context, and hopefully ours as well. What is it that God is going to do? He is going to put the world right, yes; but he is going to do this through a reciprocal relationship with his people: he will be their God, and they will be his people. This reciprocal relationship is what is at the very heart of the Abrahamic covenant. [5]
Here's what that means. It means that the promise here to make Abraham “the father of a multitude of nations,” with “kings” coming from him, is about so much more than Abraham or any of us could have ever imagined. God had promised that all the nations of the world would be blessed by Abraham and now we begin to see how that will all come about. All the nations of the world will be Abraham’s offspring. His family will end up ruling over the whole world!
Don’t let verse 8 trick you into thinking anything less than that. Yes, in that verse God promises to Abraham and his offspring “all the land of Canaan.” But he has already set the table for Abraham’s inheritance to not be limited to the so-called Promised Land. Paul notices that, too, writing in Romans 4:13 that “the promise to Abraham and his offspring” is “that he would be heir of the world.”
Immeasurably More than Imagined
Speaking of Paul, he is the one who also penned a doxology to the impossible God, the one “who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph 3:20). I saw someone reference this verse recently at a wedding, indicating that they thought it unimaginable how God had brought this lovely couple together. That is nice. A piece of fine Christian romance, I suppose. But it misses the point Paul is making in Ephesians 3.
Yes, God does love you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but that is true whether you live happily ever after with your “soul mate” or your story is one of painful broken relationships. What if God promised you a full and happy life, lived to the full, with hardly any pain or adversity or trauma? Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that be unimaginable?
But would it be good enough? Would that be the best you could think of, with death eventually still stealing the show?
And even if we are imaging a glorious afterlife with streets of gold and endless delights in heaven, we would still be missing the point of what God is up to that is even better than that!
So, what is it that God has promised that is beyond our comprehension? Well, that’s just it. We can’t comprehend it. But we get our clearest sense from looking at what God has done for us in Jesus.
Earlier in Ephesians 3, Paul says that the mystery of Christ which has now been revealed is “that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph 3:4-6). Start to catch a glimpse of this extraordinary purpose of God that has been brought to fulfillment in Jesus, Paul says, and your life will never be the same again. To know the “love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” will bring us into the fullness of God himself. You don’t have to wait for the afterlife to see what God has unfolded right here in time and space, right under the nose of the principalities and powers of darkness. In Christ, God is putting the world together again by making his people into one glorious new humanity. Catch a vision for what God is up to in Jesus, and you can’t help but be drawn into the masterpiece of God.[6]
After all, we are his masterpiece, Paul says in the previous chapter—his “workmanship”, his poem, his piece of art—created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10).
The Essential Character
That is why, a third element we find in Genesis 17, in both halves of the chapter, is the essential character that God requires of Abraham, indeed for all who are in on this covenant.
Walk Before Me, and Be Blameless
So, again in verse 1, God says, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” To “walk before God” means to “serve as his emissaries or diplomatic representatives.”[7] To be blameless refers to one’s moral conduct; God expects his covenant partner to be “impeccable, honest and sincere.”[8]
It would be wrong to conclude from this that Abraham has to earn the covenant promises of God. As we saw in the covenant ceremony back in chapter 15, God has guaranteed the fulfillment of his covenant with Abraham. But it would also be wrong to conclude that God cared nothing for Abraham’s response to this covenant.
Just look at verse 9, where God tells Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations.” He then gives him a sign of the covenant, the practice of male circumcision, and fully expects Abraham to keep it. As verse 14 warns, “Any male who is uncircumcised has broken this covenant and is to “be cut off from his people.”
And in the second half of the chapter, in verses 22-27, Abraham does what he is told. He and all the males in his house are circumcised. He kept the covenant.
A Kingdom of Priests
But what does this covenant sign mean?
The practice was not new. Other ancient peoples practiced it, but its meaning may be traced back to the Egyptians, who practiced circumcision as “an initiation rite for priests.”[9] If that’s the case, then the sign of circumcision, applied to all the men in Abraham’s family, means that every single one of them were to serve as priests of God from birth.
Add to that the placing of this royal priesthood family in the land of Canaan, and we are starting to see the point. As one scholar puts it, placing Abraham and his family in that location is like placing them, in modern terms, “along the central spine of the internet in the ancient world.”[10]
No wonder then that God demanded that Abraham and his family be blameless as his emissaries. God plans to put them in a strategic place in the world so that as the world moves by them they see a royal priesthood, living as genuine human beings, properly related to God and to each other, and properly stewarding the earth’s resources, too.[11]
The Obedient Son
It’s some plan, isn’t it? The question is, did the plan succeed?
Through the long and winding story of Abraham and his family, it is a perplexing question. It kind of looks as if the answer is no, or at the very least “not yet.” But “what the Old Testament predicts is what the New Testament testifies is now here.”[12] Yes, the claim of the New Testament is that the Abrahamic covenant has not only not failed; it has now been fulfilled. That’s what Mary proclaims in her song (Lk 1:54-55) and John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, in his (Lk 1:72-74).
If only we would believe it, too. Yes, God has raised up an obedient Son, one who has perfectly represented him. And yet, this Son, God’s own Son, Jesus, was cut off. He took on the covenant curse so that we could receive the covenant blessing through him.
And now, having been united to Jesus, the call for us in our day is also to walk worthy of this gospel which has saved us. We are to represent him to the world as heirs of the Abrahamic covenant. How we are to do that is a matter of prayer and communal wisdom, but that we are to do it is unmistakable.
After all, is that not what it meant when we took on the new covenant sign of baptism, marking us out as God’s royal priesthood, calling us to live in his way?
We who believe in Jesus are incorporated into the Abrahamic covenant. And the same promises that were made to Abraham—and have been fulfilled in Jesus—are ours now to embrace as we trust the Almighty God to do the impossible through us.
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[1] Peter John Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, Second Edition (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 295.
[2] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 305.
[3] Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, vol. 1, Word Biblical Commentary, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glenn W. Barker (Dallas: Word Books, 1987), 252.
[4] Bruce K. Waltke and Cathi J. Fredricks (Genesis: A Commentary [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001], 262) suggest that Sarah's birth-name looks back to her noble descent while her covenantal-name looks ahead to her noble descendants..
[5] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 307-308.
[6] Much of the preceding paragraph is based on lectures by N.T. Wright on Ephesians, June 9-12, 2024.
[7] Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2015), 114.
[8] Gentry and Wellum, God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants, 115.
[9] Gentry and Wellum, God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants, 121.
[10] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 297.
[11] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 297.
[12] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 751.
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