Genesis 17:1-14
Amen. You can be seated. Turn
in your copy of God’s word to the book of Genesis chapter 17. Genesis chapter 17 can be found
in the pew Bible on page 11. Before we read God’s word, let’s
ask for his help and blessing. Pray with me. Lord, we come to your scriptures
now, believing that it is your word to us, your people. We need
to be comforted and built up in our faith. Some today may
need to be convinced and converted unto salvation through faith
in Jesus. Lord, so we ask now that your word would not return
void, but it would run and do its errand. that it would do
the work that you send it to do this day. Bless the reading
and the preaching of your word, especially as it is paired with
the sacrament of baptism this day. Hear us, help us, and bless
us now in the name of Christ, amen. Hear the word of the living
God. This is Genesis chapter 17. When Abram was 99 years old,
the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, 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. Then Abram fell on his face and
God said to him, behold, my covenant is with you and you shall be
the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your
name be called Abram. but your name shall be called
Abraham. For I have made you the father
of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful
and I will make you into nations and kings shall come from you. 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. And I will give to you and to
your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all
the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession. And I will be their
God. And God said to Abraham, as for
you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after
you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you
shall keep between me and you and your offspring after you.
Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall be circumcised
in the flesh of your foreskins. It shall be a sign of the covenant
between me and you. He who is eight days old among
you shall be circumcised every male throughout your generations,
whether born in your house or bought with your money from any
foreigner who is not of your offspring. Both he who is born
in your house and he who is bought with your money shall surely
be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your
flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is
not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut
off from his people, for he has broken my covenant. Amen, the
word of the living God. I wonder how many of us still
take the Sunday paper Maybe if you do, you glanced at your headlines
this morning. Local news, regional news, state
news, national news. There’s the economy. There’s
local crime. There’s a war in Ukraine. There’s an election season coming
up. There are all sorts of things in the headlines and it’s really
a crashed horse in depression, if you ask me. Maybe you didn’t
pick up the Sunday paper, but you turned on the local channel,
the national news channel, and you listened to these headlines
and you began to wonder in your mind, is there any hope? Is there any hope for this world
that we live in? Politics doesn’t seem to save
us. The economy can’t save us. The healthcare system can’t save
us. We go through the list and we realize it’s up to God. It’s up to God almighty. And
he is the one we meet in this passage of scripture. He is the
one who appears to Abraham, our forefather of old. Some of you
have no doubt studied the names of God and maybe you’ve run across
the name El Shaddai. There was a song in the 1980s
when I was growing up, I think popularized, maybe sung by Amy
Grant. God Almighty, El Shaddai. This God Almighty appears to
Abraham. Now, Abraham didn’t have a daily
paper. He didn’t have cable news channels.
He didn’t have, you know, Fox 8 or the Spectrum, you know,
regional news we get on our televisions. but he was a man of great influence.
In fact, he was the man of the Middle East. He had a pulse on
the things that were going on in the world around him. And
God came to him, God Almighty, El Shaddai, came to Abram and
said to him and to him alone, I will be your God and you and
your offspring will be my people. And we’ll go on and explain in
a few moments more of these details, but I want you to stop and think
for just a moment about how dark of a time Abram lived in. The headlines would have been
just the same. The national news would have been just as dark.
The economic situation would have been just as hard. Remember,
Abram lived through famines. Abram lived with all kinds of
paganism all around him, but he is the one family. He is the
one and only family that God came to when he was living in
Ur of the Chaldeans, worshiping idols, living a rather prosperous
life. He is the only one, the only
family God came to and said, I am taking you out of the world. I am separating you from paganism. I’m separating you from culture.
I’m separating you from all others in this world. And I am putting
my name on you. Now you think for a moment about
all these headlines, all these dark times we live in and say,
how can one family do so much? We don’t have to go that much
greater distance back into the book of Genesis to understand.
Remember Genesis written by Moses, he wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the five books, the Pentateuch we
call them. He wrote them as a sort of worldview for Israel. This
is your maker. This is the world he made. This
is the reason he made the world. And these are your ancestors.
And this is how you are to walk in obedience before the living
and true God. So when, when, Abram is the only
family, as it were, living for God. We say, oh, he was the only
one. No, Eve. Eve had Seth. And after Seth
came Noah. And remember, Noah, for a hundred
years, hammered and nailed and sawed on an ark. A hundred years. Being ridiculed,
maybe as you were on your way to church this morning. Oh, you’re
going to church. Sunday’s Saturday number two these days. What’s
church? What’s the Sabbath? Who is God?
That’s what our neighbors seem to say. And so just as Noah hammered
and nailed and sawed on the ark for a hundred years, maybe you
live a faithful life to the living God. You’re the, you’re the only
family on the street that backed out of the driveway this morning.
You know a bit of how Noah feel. It only, it only takes one family.
That’s very often how God works. He takes a simple, lonely family
and he says, walk before me and be blameless. Nobody else will
be doing this. Nobody else will think this way,
believe this way, live this way, act this way. Remember the words
of Jesus. If you want to follow me, you
must deny yourself. Take up your cross and follow
me. Jesus also said narrow, is the
gate. He also speaks of a seed being
scattered. Some of it falls on the rocky
path. Some of it falls among the weeds and is choked. Some
of it falls in other difficult places for seed to germinate
and to become prosperous. But only a little of the seed
falls into the good soil where it is watered. And it produces
a harvest a hundred fold for the kingdom of almighty God.
We can read the headlines. We can say what dark times, what
sad times we live in. Is there any hope? And the answer
from the scriptures is yes, there is. There is a God who makes
covenants with families. And I want us to think for just
a few moments today about the divine covenant God made with
Abram. And how this divine covenant
is a family covenant and it’s an eternal covenant. Abram was
a special man. He was called by God from paganism. He was called by God, you might
say, out of New York City. He was living in a big city.
I mean, they had Starbucks on every corner. You know, they
had the good target, right? Not the 1980s target with just
limited things. I mean, they had the super target.
They had every amenity possible in Ur of the Chaldeans. And he
says, I want you to leave the gods you know, the family you
love, the routines you have, and go to Canaan, a dust bowl. Go to Canaan and there I will
multiply you. Now keep in mind how old Abraham
is. He’s 75 years old. Now I know people in the Bible
lived a really long time, but 75 is past the time to be having
babies. Babies are for the young, right?
You’re supposed to be a grandparent, Jason, when you get a little
older. But Abraham was 75 years old. And there’s a little pun on his
name. Abram was the father of multitudes. His name would be
changed to Abraham, the father of many, a singular and kind
of a plural play on words. But this divine covenant made
by God with Abraham was beyond our imagination. The God of the
universe, the maker of heaven and earth, came to Abram in an
old age, in a prosperous country where he wasn’t thinking about
making any changes. And this living God comes to
him. Now, keep in mind, Abraham was used to holding idols in
his hands. You can hold an idol in your
hand. You can toss it from person to person. You can speak to it.
You can ask it to do things and it can do nothing. But here now
the living God comes to him and he says to Abram, I’m going to
make a covenant with you. Now, I don’t know how well we
understand covenants these days. I have a covenant with Duke Energy.
I pay them money. They give me electricity. A storm
comes and power goes out, they’re supposed to restore it. So I
pay, they give, I pay, they give. That’s a kind of a two-way street
relationship that we have. And we have it with Spectrum
and Piedmont Natural Gas and the City for Water and so on.
But covenants in the Bible aren’t an Arab trading agreement where
we dicker back and forth with God and say, God, you give a
little, I’ll give a little. And it’s like a, you know, a
used car deal, but that’s not how covenants work in the Bible.
God almighty from heaven imposes covenants on his people. And this divine covenant that
God imposed on Abraham was, I will be your God. You will be my people. I will be a God to you and I
will bless you. And, the covenant blessings,
you can summarize it quickly. Grapes and grandkids. Where do we get grapes from?
I’m going to give you the promised land. A land flowing with milk
and honey. You’ll live in houses you did
not build, with walls you did not raise. You’ll eat from vineyards
you did not plant. And you will drink water from
cisterns you did not dig. That’s the grapes side of God’s
covenant promises. And the grandkids, remember he
takes Abram out and he says, look up Abraham, see all the
stars. We can’t see the stars anymore because we got all the
lights, right? We got the malls and the Walmarts
and the car dealerships and the strobe lights and all the rest.
And we can’t see the stars at night as if we would stop and
look. But Abraham went out one night
and God says to him, look at all the stars of the heaven.
Your offspring will outnumber them all. Then he says, look
at the dust of the earth. Look at the sand on the ground.
Your offspring will outnumber the numbers of the particles
of sand under your feet. Just go to the seashore and just
the little bit of sand we see. We put up our chairs and our
umbrellas and our coolers and our radios and all the rest.
We have about 50 feet of shore. That sand goes for miles and
for depths. And God promises to Abraham,
the number of your offspring will outnumber the stars, and
the particles of sand. This is God Almighty. This is
no longer a wooden idol that he worshiped in Ur of the Chaldeans. This divine covenant comes from
God Almighty, El Shaddai. And he says to him, I will be
your God. You will be my people. You’re going to receive these
great blessings. And so Abraham obeys God. He
makes this migration of faith to the promised land. This is
not just a divine covenant, it’s a family covenant. It’s for Abraham
and his children. It’s for those who are near and
those also who are far off. There’s obligations when God
covenants with us. We’ll hear of this in a few moments
when we baptize this little one. But we read through the scriptures
and it’s our job to raise our children in the fear and the
admonition of the Lord. It’s our job to explain baptism
to them. It’s our job to explain to them
who God is, what he has done and what he has promised to do
that is yet to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ. You know, I don’t
know about y’all, the kids we had did not come with an instruction
book when they were delivered by the stork. All right. You
know, that’s how it happens. They did not have a book in their
arms or tied around their toes. But God’s word is sufficient.
It is sufficient for everything we need to believe and everything
we need to know for living for God’s glory. And so we have to
teach and train and explain to our children. We have to model
it for them. The home in one sense, the covenant
home, in a sense, is like a greenhouse. Maybe in the winter when it’s
cold outside, the sun still comes in your greenhouse. You put in
your seeds, you put in the water, and the sun comes through. There’s
protection from the cold, but you get the sprouts. And when
the weather outside finally gets warm, you can put them in the
ground where they’ll safely make it through the seasons. And our
children are like those seedlings. They’re in our homes for a time,
for our training, for our instruction, for our discipline, a model and
example of how to worship, how to live for God, how to sin and
how to seek forgiveness. But in that greenhouse, for whatever
number of years it is, they get to safely grow until they are
planted in the soil of this earth where they will serve the living
God. And so we stretch our own lives
back to the life of Abraham. This same God has come to us
and says, I will be your God. You and your children will be
my people. Walk before me and be blameless. And so as families,
we get to live in covenant with almighty God who met with Abram
and who meets with us today. I want to explain one more thing
about God’s covenant. Maybe the most important thing.
It’s an eternal covenant. Hebrews chapter 13, I think has
one of the best benedictions, one of the best blessings of
the scripture. We usually hear it on the Sunday
after we have the Lord’s supper. And it goes like this. Now, may
the God of peace who brought again from the dead, our Lord
Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep. through the blood
of his eternal covenant. May he equip in you that which
is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ, to whom be all
glory and dominion and power. Brothers and sisters, everything
we do in life, everything we do is before the face of God,
it’s in the strength of almighty God, and it is through the blood
of his eternal covenant. covenant. It is not by the works
of our hands. It is not by the strength of
our faith. It is not by the tears that we
may cry or the efforts that we may give. It is all under and
by and through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so when
God called Abram out of paganism and brought him into the land
of Canaan, he gave him a sign that would speak to the eternal
and spiritual reality of life and covenant with God Almighty.
And we have in the history of the scriptures, the history of
God’s people, these different signs. For Noah, it was the rainbow. I will never again destroy the
earth by sending a flood of such a great catastrophe as before. Eve had sons. The curse of sin
was on her, but the covenant of God was from your offspring
will come a Messiah. And so her covenant sign was
sons. David had the kingship. And on
and on, we can go through the scriptures and see God gives
signs that represent a spiritual reality. And the beautiful spiritual
reality of circumcision, now baptism in the New Testament,
is that God makes covenant with his people. He cleanses his people. And you think of circumcision
and now baptism, God generationally cleanses our offspring. God generationally
works in and through families to bring about faith in our little
ones. We could say a million things
about baptism. I mean, literally a million things.
I love how one theologian says that when we look at baptism
or look at the Lord’s Supper, it’s like a moving picture of
God’s grace. We can see death and life. We
can see resurrection. We can see cleansing. We can
see washing. We can see regeneration. We can
see new birth. There’s so many things that we
can see, but there’s one thing we must see when it comes to
circumcision in the old covenant or baptism in the new covenant. The reality behind the sign is
our engagement to be gods. When Abram obeys God and it’s
on down in chapter 17, he does what God says. He takes care
of business, couple hundred males in his household. He engages
them to be the Lord. He brings them into covenant
with God Almighty. And then some years later, Isaac
is born and the same thing. Now Israel later, will receive this accusation
from God. He’ll say, you are circumcised
in the flesh, but your hearts are not right. And God looks
for a day when his own son on the cross will be cut off. He’ll
be cut off in order that we can be brought near. And Jesus brings
about through the work of the cross, the work of his Holy Spirit,
he brings about the inward change of each of our hearts. where
God circumcises our hearts. He sprinkles us clean. He makes
us new in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we participate by faith
in this same covenant ritual is Abraham. Think about that
for a moment. Our spiritual heritage reaches
all the way back to the beginning. And so when some three, 4,000
years later, we sit here in church, we call upon the same God, who
makes covenant with Abraham and with us. We call on this God
and we see greater things than Abraham did. Abraham looked towards
the Messiah. We now look back at the cross
and we see clearly and fully all that God has done. So read
the headlines. Is there hope? Read the newspaper. How dark is the world? Can God
save it? Well, there’s always hope in the birth of a little
one. There’s always hope in the baptism of the next generation. There’s always hope when we covenant
with God to teach our children, to walk in his ways, to worship
him and to live for him. Now, life does not go perfectly.
We know that well. Life does not go perfectly, but
God says, you do the work. You put your faith in me and
you have every expectation that through the preaching of the
word, the discipline of the home, the participation in the life
of the church, your little ones will hear of Jesus Christ. And
they may rise up one day and say, I never knew a day that
the reality of Jesus was not present in my life. That’s one
of the great blessings of being a Christian family in a Christian
church. Now try that on for size today.
Where are most people today? If they’re not still in bed,
they’re at the soccer field. They’re at the ball field, they’re
on another weekend excursion. And so we live life sometimes
thinking, well, I’ll sprinkle a little water on them, I’ll
put a cute dress on them, we’ll have chicken salad for lunch,
and all will be well. Now God imposes a covenant on
us and says, I will be your God. But he puts obligations on us,
walk before me and be blameless. And so the challenge for us as
Christians is to so order our lives that we’re in the word,
we’re in the covenant community, we’re in the house of worship.
We’re teaching and pointing our little ones to who God is and
all the realities of following him. And it’s not a guaranteed
recipe for success. You know that Abraham, he circumcised
Isaac. He was the child of promise.
But what about his other son Esau? He was circumcised as well.
And he became the father of many wicked nations, the Bible tells
us. And you could go on and look
at Jacob and Esau. You could go on and look at other
examples in the scriptures. And I know the heartbreak many
of you have. Some of your children don’t walk with God. Yet you
baptize them. You brought them up in the covenant.
And all we can do is cling to the promises of God that are
yes and amen in Jesus Christ. Friends, that’s a good bit of
hope. When we can look at the world around us, look at our
own children and put our faith in El Shaddai, God Almighty. Let’s go to him in prayer. Our
Lord, we thank you so much that you did not leave us in our sin
and in our misery. You did not leave us outside
the garden wandering east of Eden. building towers and living
futile lives against you. But you came looking for Adam
and Eve. You clothed them with the skins of an animal. You promised a Messiah who you
have now sent as the offspring of Abraham. And we look to him
in faith now for our salvation. And we look to him for the salvation
of our children, our little ones. that perhaps by our example,
but especially by our words, they may say, I never knew a
day that I didn’t hear of Jesus and see the ways and wonders
of salvation. Lord, your promises are strong
and they are true and they are yes and amen in Christ. And we
cling to them in hope. We look to them in faith and
we pray all this in the name of Jesus, our savior. Amen.