Noah and Abraham

Noah, the Righteous Man who found Favour with God

Noah is the tenth generation from Adam, and by the time of his birth mankind had totally rejected God and given themselves over to the pursuit of evil. But in the midst of this moral darkness, God finds a man who is “a just man and perfect in his generations” (KJV) or “a righteous man, blameless in his generation.” (ESV).

It’s worth noting that even in the times of greatest darkness and depravity, God is always able to find someone who will stand with Him and do what is right in His sight.

(The story of Noah’s flood is well known and we need not go into it in detail here. However, you may read it at your leisure in Genesis chapters 6 to 9 inclusive. You will find the covenant that God made through Noah in chapter 9 verses 8-17.)

The important points about this covenant are:

1. It is a unilateral or one-sided covenant, in that God makes a solemn promise to “every living creature”, but there is no obligation on anyone else to do anything. No matter what else may happen or may be said or done by anyone, God will keep His promise. It is unconditional.

2. It is a covenant of mercy. God was justified in destroying all human life because “every imagining of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually”, and He knew perfectly well that this was not the end of man’s sinfulness. However, God only destroys so that He can build something better. Justice demanded that man be destroyed, but mercy saw the potential beyond the fault and determined that man should have a second chance.

3. God establishes a sign of the covenant – in this case, it’s the rainbow. Whenever He sees the rainbow, He remembers the covenant. Similarly, whenever we see the rainbow, we also can remember the covenant and the promise that God has made.

When we think about Noah and his ark, we normally associate it with the animals going in two by two, but do we ever think about the covenant that God made with us – with ALL of us? And do we ever consider that even in those dark days when men were at least as evil as they are today, God was reaching out to us with grace and mercy to give us – ALL of us – another chance to get it right?

Will this cause you to view the rainbow in a new light? What will go through your mind and your heart the next time you see one? Will you remember that God saw the potential beyond the fault in Noah and his family, recognise that He sees the potential beyond the fault in you, and you yourself begin to look for the potential beyond the fault in other people?

We need to bear in mind, of course, that God did not promise to Noah that He would never again destroy the earth. His promise was that He would never again destroy all life on earth by means of a flood.

The apostle Peter warns us that the earth – and the heavens – will indeed be destroyed in days to come, not with a flood of water, but with raging fire:

The Bible speaks of both the kindness and the severity of God (Romans 11:22). There is a time for God to be merciful, and there us a time for Him to punish.

In the days of Noah, He did both. He punished mankind, but showed mercy to Noah and his family.

In the last days, He will punish the scoffers, as Peter calls them, but show mercy to those whose hearts, like the heart of Noah, are tender towards Him and all that He stands for.

Which group will you be in?

Abraham, the Man of Faith, the Friend of God, the Father of Nations

(You’ll find the story of Abram, later called Abraham, in Genesis chapters 12 to 25 inclusive. Before you continue, you may find it helpful to read all of Genesis chapter 15 in your own Bible.)

Abraham is a key player in God’s plan of salvation, as it is through him that God began to build the family that would later become the nation of Israel. The importance of Israel cannot be overestimated, as it is through them that the Bible has come down to us, and of course it was through them that Jesus, our Saviour, came into the world (see Romans 3:1-2 and 9:4-5).

In the passage quoted above, we see God making a covenant with Abraham. Like the covenant that He made with Noah, this is a unilateral or one-sided covenant, which means that God promised to fulfil the terms of the covenant no matter what Abraham or his descendants, or anybody else, said or did about it.

God promised to give them the land “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the River Euphrates”. It is in a portion of this land that the people of Israel live today, despite the efforts of many of their neighbours to wipe them off the face of the earth.

When God has made a promise, He will keep His word. The existence of the State of Israel today is testament to that fact.

It is interesting to see how God makes this covenant with Abraham. He gets Abraham to cut the animals in half and lay the pieces down side by side. This is exactly what would have happened in those days if two men were entering into a covenant with each other, as we saw in the introduction. God, represented by a fire-pot and a torch, passes between the pieces of the slaughtered animals.

God’s action tells us a lot about the importance that He placed on this covenant, and it speaks volumes about God Himself, that the Creator of the universe would be willing to bind Himself by covenant to a man in this way.

However, this is only phase 1 of God’s covenant with Abraham. If we skip forward to Genesis 17:1-14, we find God expanding on the covenant in a significant way, by transforming it into a bilateral or two-sided covenant.

There are now two conditions that Abraham and his offspring must fulfil in order to keep this covenant. We find them in verses 1-2 and 9-14 respectively:

These two stipulations are important for us, because they pave the way for what God is going to include in the two most important covenants that He has entered into with men, namely the covenant of LAW and the covenant of GRACE, which we will be looking at later on.

The conditions that must be fulfilled are these:

1. God requires a certain standard of behaviour from those with whom He enters into covenant, and

2. There is a price to be paid for entering into covenant with God. That price involves some level of personal cost and the shedding of blood.

Note, also, that just as there was a SIGN of the covenant between God and Noah and all living creatures, namely the RAINBOW, there is also a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham and his descendants, namely the CIRCUMCISION of every male child.

But for now we need to think about something else.

When God spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush, some 400 years after Abraham’s time, Moses asked God to tell him His name:

God refers to Himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:15). Isaac was Abraham’s son, but he was not his only son.

Before Isaac was born, Abraham already had another son called Ishmael, but Ishmael’s mother was not Abraham’s wife Sarah, but his concubine Hagar. Sarah had borne no children and was now passed the age of child bearing, but God was promising Abraham that He would make Sarah able to bear a son, and that he was the only one of Abraham’s sons through whom God chose to work out His plan of salvation:

(For more on this, please see Genesis 22:2, 12; Hebrews 11:17-18.)

Similarly, Isaac had twin sons, Esau and Jacob, but God chose to work through Jacob rather than through Esau (see Malachi 1:2-3 and Romans 9:10-13). Referring to Esau and Jacob during their time in their mother’s womb, Paul says:

The apostle Paul makes the point very clearly that this had nothing to do with any merit that these people may or may not have had, but that it was entirely to do with the sovereign plan of God, which He chose to work out through the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then through Jacob’s twelve sons, who became the fathers of the twelve tribes of the nation of Israel.

Of those twelve, God chose Judah to be the fore-father of king David, who in turn was the fore-father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The purposes of God are not going to be either fulfilled or thwarted by the righteousness or wickedness of man. God is in full control of the destiny of all of humanity.

God repeated the terms and conditions of the covenant that He had made with Abraham to both Isaac and Jacob, thereby reaffirming that this was a covenant that belonged not only to one man (Abraham) but to all of his descendants – or, more correctly, to all of his descendants through the line of Isaac and Jacob (who was also known as Israel).

to Isaac:

to Jacob (Israel):

It’s interesting to note that the nation of Israel, the natural descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, exists today and dwells in the land that God promised to Abraham some 4,000 years ago. What does that tell us about the faithfulness and the power of God?

God Himself said it, through His prophet Jeremiah, referring back to the covenant that He had made with Abraham all those generations previously:

As we read through the Old Testament and see how, time and again, God’s covenant people turned away from Him and pursued their own agendas, we wonder how God could hold Himself back from wiping them out Himself.

But God is faithful to His word, faithful to His promises, and faithful to His covenants. He gave His word to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and He has kept His word to them and their descendants up to the present day.

Does Israel today always do what is right in God’s sight? No.

Does God remain true to His commitment to Abraham, His friend (2 Chronicles 20:7; Isaiah 41:8; James 2:23)? Yes.

The proof is found in this interaction between God and Moses at Mount Sinai:

Just as the covenant of the rainbow stands, the covenant of faithfulness to Israel stands forever.