The Covenant with Abram

One day, the Lord appeared to Abram in a vision, promising, "Do not fear, Abram, I am a shield to you; your reward will be very great" (Genesis 15:1). Abram wasn't totally sure, since he did not have any children yet, and wondered and was concerned how this promise and the previous promises would come about.

To reassure Abram that He would keep His word to him, God made a covenant. God asks him to find and kill a heifer, a ram, a goat, a dove, and a pigeon. Then, Abram was to cut them in half (except the birds) and lay the pieces in two rows, leaving a path through the center. God put Abram into a deep sleep and a deep darkness descended. God passed through the cut pieces, effectuating the everlasting covenant between God and Abram. A blood covenant communicated a curse with an oath. The parties involved would walk the path between the slaughtered animals so to say, "May this be done to me if I do not keep my oath."

There was an important difference in the blood oath that God made with Abram in Genesis 15. When the evening came, God appeared in the form of a "smoking fire pot and flaming torch [that] passed between the pieces" (Genesis 15:17). But Abram had fallen "into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him". Thus, GOD ALONE passed through the pieces of dead animals, and the covenant was sealed by God alone.

Abram expected to walk down the middle path but God could not let Him have any part in this Covenant. There was not part for Abram to have, because the covenant did not depend on Abram at all. The truth is that God was making a covenant that concerned Abram - not only to be fully responsible for His part but also to be fully responsible to fulfill Abram's part for him. Everything depended on God, who promised to be faithful to His covenant. "When God made this covenat, since there was no one greater for Him to swear by, He swore by Himself". Now Abram and his descendants (us) could trust, count on, and believe in everything God promised.

Normally, the two parties would walk between the pieces as they committed to the covenant, with the implicit warning being that a failure to keep the promise would bring the same fate upon the promise-breaker as was brought upon the animals - death. Here, however, only God passes between the animal pieces. The Lord takes it upon Himself alone to accomplish His word, and vows to be destroyed should He not keep it.

In this Covenant God is basically telling Abram, "I'm putting My very deity on the line here. I'm swearing to you by MY holy nature. If I don't keep this word, I will no longer be God." Then He confirms the covenant by walking down the middle path between the dead animals representing Abram and HIMSELF. So not only did He swear that He would fulfill His own part concerning Abram but He also swore that He would fulfill Abraham's part also. This made God totally responsible to bring both parts to pass. Now this covenant was not just to Abram but to all of God's people. He made a covenant with the promise that He seals with an oath based upon His own very nature. There is no conceivably higher guarantee than that.

Then God renamed abram. "No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you a father of many nations." Gen 17:5

The difference between a promise and a covenant is that a promise is conditional and a covenant is totally unconditional because God swore that He was totally responsible to fulfill His Part and our part also. The New COVENANT does not dependent on the human side of things for its fulfillment. It is totally fulfilled in us, in the blood and body of Jesus Christ. The Old Covenant was solely dependent on the human side, "All that the Lord has shown us we will do," said the children of Israel, and they continually failed miserably. Like ourselves, who dedicate and rededicate, resolve to do better, be better, pray more, be more, give more, study more, and when we're honest we realize we fail, too. That is why God said there would be a new covenant, in which, "I will dwell in them and walk in them and be their God," would be the reality. (2 Cor. 6:16). "I will put my law in their inward parts; and write it in their hearts," said Jeremiah. (31:33) Ezekiel said of our day, that He would "put His Spirit within us, and CAUSE US to walk in His ways." (36:27)

The law, which is what we are under when we think it depends on what we do, say, think, etc., fails, and always fails, because of "the weakness of the flesh," (Rom 8:3). It is perpetually supposed to do so, and will perpetually do so, that we might finally see the futility this false (and idolatrous) idea or consciousness that God's life in us depends in any sense on ourselves because we live by the faith of God, which is believing that HE has done it, is doing it, and will continue to do it. The Lord of the Universe is inside you now, and HE made a covenant concerning you, which does not and can not depend on you to fulfill, but on Him. Depend on the One Who Promised, not the one who receives the promise (you)!

Look and see what God in Christ has already done. "I have sprinkled clean water upon you, and ye are clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, I have cleansed you. A new heart also I have given you, and a new spirit I have put within you; and have taken away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I have given you a heart of flesh. And I have put my Spirit within you, and I will cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep mine ordinances, and do them. . . . And ye shall be my people, and I will be your God." These these five things that God has already done: (1) cleansed us with clean water, (2) given us a new heart, (3) given us a new spirit, (4) taking away the stony heart and given us a heart of flesh, and (5) put His Spirit within us. The combined result of these five matters is: to "cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep mine ordinances, and do them. . . . And ye shall be my people, and I will be your God."

God's covenant is His only solution for us to be free from sin and to be Holy just as He was holy. He uses His covenant to heal us. Therefore, the Christian life has no other secret than living by Spiritual Fusion - Christ's Spirit is infused with our Spirit which was accomplished totally by HIS DOING!!!

We know that God is faithful and righteous and that what He has said, He will do (has to do). God cares for us and WILL fulfill what He has said in the covenant, for He has accepted the blood of the Lord Jesus. God binds His own will to the covenant and can move only within His covenant. If He had not established a covenant with us, He could treat us as He wished. However, since He has made a covenant with us, He can do only according to what is said in the covenant. He must fulfill His covenant; He cannot be unrighteous. We praise God that He loves us and has had mercy toward us to such an extent that He cannot treat us in any way other than righteousness. There is no grace greater than this.

"And inasmuch as it is not without the taking of an oath: by so much also hath Jesus become the Surety of a better covenant. Wherefore also He is able to save completely them that draw near unto God through Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them."-Heb vii. 20, 22, 25.

A SURETY is one who stands good for another, that a certain engagement will be faithfully performed. Jesus is the Surety of the New Covenant. He stands surety with us for God--- that God's part in the Covenant will faithfully be performed. And He stands surety with God for us, that our part will be faithfully performed too. If we are to live in covenant with God, everything depends upon our knowing aright what Jesus secures to us. The more we know and trust Him, the more assured will our faith be that its every promise and every demand will be fulfilled, that a life of faithful keeping of God's Covenant is indeed possible, because Jesus is the Surety of the Covenant. He makes God's faithfulness and ours equally sure.

We read that it was because His priesthood was confirmed by the oath of God, that He became the Surety of a so much better Covenant. The oath of God gives us the security that His suretyship will secure all the better promises. The meaning and infinite value of God's oath had been explained in the previous chapter. "In every dispute the oath is final for confirmation. Wherein God, being minded to show more abundantly unto the heirs of the promise the immutability of His counsel, interposed with an oath, that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have a strong encouragement." We thus have not only a Covenant, with certain definite promises; we have not only Jesus, the Surety of the Covenant; but at the back of that again, we have the living God, with a view to our having perfect confidence in the unchangeableness of His counsel and promise, coming in between with an oath. Do we not begin to see that the one thing God aims at in this Covenant, and asks with regard to it, is an absolute confidence that He is going to do all He has promised, however difficult or wonderful it may appear? His oath is an end of all fear or doubt. Let no one think of understanding the Covenant, of judging or saying what may be expected from it, much less of experiencing its blessings, until he meets God with an Abraham like faith, that gives Him the glory, and is fully assured that what He has promised He is able to perform. The Covenant is a sealed mystery, except to the soul who is going without reserve to trust God, and abandon itself to His word and work.

Of the work of Christ, as the Surety of the better Covenant, our passage tells us that, because of this priesthood confirmed by oath, He is able to save completely those who draw near to God through Him. And this, because "He ever liveth to make intercession for them." As Surety of the Covenant, He is ceaselessly engaged in watching their needs, and presenting them to the Father, in receiving His answer, and imparting its blessing. It is because of this never-ceasing mediation, receiving and transmitting from God to us the gifts and powers of the heavenly world, that He is able to save completely---to work and maintain in us a salvation as complete as God is willing it should be, as complete as the Better Covenant has assured us it shall be, in the better promises upon which it was established. These promises are expounded (ch. viii. 7-13) as being none other than those of the New Covenant of Jeremiah, with the law written in the heart by the Spirit of God as our experience of the power of that salvation.

Jesus, the Surety of a better Covenant, Jesus is to be our assurance that everything connected with the Covenant is unchangeably and eternally sure. In Jesus the keynote is given of all our intercourse with God, of all our prayers and desires, of all our life and walk, that with full assurance of faith and hope we may look for every word of the Covenant to be made fully true to us by God's own power. Let us look at some of these things of which we are to be fully assured, if we are to breathe the spirit of children of the New Covenant.

BY ANDREW MURRAY

As the Holy One He says: " I am holy; be ye holy; I am the Lord which hallow you, which make you holy." The highest conceivable summit of blessedness is our being partakers of the Divine nature, of the Divine holiness.

This is the great blessing Christ, the Mediator of the New Covenant, brings. He has been made unto us "both righteousness and sanctification" ---righteousness in order to, as a preparation for, sanctification (Remember that the words sanctify, sanctity, saint are the same as make holy, holiness, holy one.) or holiness. He prayed to the Father: "Sanctify them; for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves may also be sanctified in truth." In Him we are sanctified, saints, holy ones (Rom. i. 7 ; 1 Cor. i. 2). We have put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and holiness. Holiness is our very nature.

We are holy in Christ. As we believe it, as we receive it, as we yield ourselves to the truth, and draw nigh to God to have the holiness drawn forth and revealed in fellowship with Him, its fountain, we shall know how divinely true it is.

It is for this the Holy Spirit has been given in our hearts. He is the " Spirit of Holiness." His every working is in the power of holiness. Paul says: "God hath chosen us unto salvation, in sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth." As simple and entire as is our dependence on the word of truth, as the external means, must our confidence be in the hidden power for holiness which the working of the Spirit brings. The connection between God's electing purpose, and the work of the Spirit, with the word we obey, comes out with equal clearness in Peter: "Elect, in sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience." The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the life of Christ; as we know, and honour, and trust Him, we shall learn and also experience that, in the New Covenant, as the ministration of the Spirit, the sanctification, the holiness of the Holy Spirit is our covenant right. We shall be assured that, as God has promised, so He will work it in us, that we "should serve Him without fear, in righteousness and holiness before Him, all the days of our life." With a treasure of holiness in Christ, and the very Spirit of holiness in our hearts, we can live holy lives. That is, if we believe Him "who worketh in us both to will and to work."

In the light of this Covenant promise, with the Blessed Son and the Holy Spirit to work it out in us, what new meaning is given to the teaching of the New Testament. Take the first epistle St. Paul ever wrote. It was directed to men who had only a few months previously been turned from idols to serve the Living God, and to wait for His Son from heaven. The words he speaks in regard to the holiness they might aim at and expect, because God was going to work it in them, are so grand that many Christians pass them by, as practically unintelligible (1 Thess. iii. 13): "The Lord make you to increase and abound in love, to the end He may stablish your hearts unblamable in holiness at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints." That promises holiness, unblamable holiness, a heart unblamable in holiness, a heart stablished in all this by God Himself. Paul might indeed say of a word like this: " Who hath believed our report? "He had written of himself (ii. 10): "Ye know how holily and righteously and unblamably we behaved ourselves." He assures them that what God has done for him He will do for them---give them hearts unblameable in holiness. The Church believes so little in the mighty power of God, and the truth of His Holy Covenant, that the grace of such heart-holiness is hardly spoken of. The verse is often quoted in connection with "the coming of our Lord Jesus with His saints"; but its real point and glory,---that when He comes we may meet Him with hearts stablished unblamable in holiness by God Himself: all too little this is understood or proclaimed or expected.

BY ANDREW MURRAY

The infinite importance of this truth in the Christian life is easily felt. The life Christ lived in the Father is the life He imparts to us. We are to abide in Him and He in us, even as He in the Father and the Father in Him. And if the secret of His abiding in the Father be this unceasing self-abnegation-" I can do nothing of Myself "-this life of most entire and absolute dependence and waiting upon God, must it not far more be the most marked feature of our Christian life, the first and all-pervading disposition we seek to maintain? In a little book of William Law's, that has just been issued, (Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue. By William Law. With Notes. The thought is worked out with exceeding power, and the lesson taught that the only thing man can do for his salvation is to deny and cease from himself, that God may work in him.) he specially insists upon this in his so striking repetition of the call, if we would die to self in order to have the birth of Divine love in our souls, to sink down in humility, meekness, patience, and resignation to God. I think that no one who at all enters into this advice, but will feel what new point is given to it by the remembrance of how this entire self-renunciation was not only one of the many virtues in the character of Christ, but, indeed, that first essential one without which God could have wrought nothing in Him, through which God did work all.

Let us make Christ's words our own: "I can do nothing of Myself." Take it as the keynote of a single day. Lookup and see the Infinite God waiting to do everything as soon as we are ready to give up all to Him, and receive all from Him. Bow down in lowly worship, and wait for the Holy Spirit to work some measure of the mind of Christ in you. Do not be disconcerted if you do not learn the lesson at once: there is the God of love waiting to do everything in him who is willing to be nothing. At moments the teaching appears dangerous, at other times terribly difficult. The Blessed Son of God teaches it us-this was His whole life: I can do nothing of Myself. He is our life; He will work it in us. And when as the Lamb of God He begets this His disposition in us, we shall be prepared for Him to rise on us and shine in us in His heavenly glory.

"Nothing of Myself"---that word spoken eighteen hundred years ago, coming out of the inmost depths of the heart of the Son of God---is a seed in which the power of the eternal life is hidden. Take it straight from the heart of Christ, and hide it in your heart. Meditate on it till it reveals the beauty of His Divine meekness and humility, and explains how all the power and glory of God could work in Him. Believe in it as containing the very life and disposition which you need, and believe in Christ, whose Spirit dwells in the seed to make it true in you. Begin, in single acts of self-emptying, to offer it to God as the one desire of your heart. Count upon God accepting them, and meeting them with His grace, to make the acts into habits, and the habits into dispositions. And you may depend upon it, there is nothing that will lift you so near to God, nothing that will unite you closer to Christ, nothing that will prepare you for the abiding presence and power of God working in you, as the death to self which is found in the simple word---NOTHING OF MYSELF.

This word is one of the keys to the New Covenant Life. As I believe that God is actually to work all in me, I shall see that the one thing that is hindering me is, my doing something of myself. As I am willing to learn from Christ by the Holy Spirit to say truly, Nothing of myself, I shall have the true preparation to receive all God has engaged to work, and the power confidently to expect it. I shall learn that the whole secret of the New Covenant is just one thing: GOD WORKS ALL! The seal of the Covenant stands sure: "I the Lord have spoken it, AND I WILL DO IT."

BY ANDREW MURRAY

The law can NEVER give LIFE. The law was not designed by God to be the solution for sin, it could only expose sin.

Many who are born again think "I never could obey God’s law when I was an unbelieving sinner...but now that I am a believer and now that I have the Holy Spirit I can obey God."

WRONG!!

God put that old stinking mind set to death in Jesus. You and I cannot obey God...and God is not asking or demanding that you try. If you try to obey laws then you set the law up as your judge again. You will fall short all the time. The accuser will condemn you. You will try harder or give up. You will view God as some unfair despot far away who asks too much of you. You will think that this Christianity is all too hard. Fear of going to Hell will dog your steps and keep you awake at night...Or you will just flip out and go back to your old ways of dealing with life.

You are a new creature in Christ not so that you still are responsible to do the right thing all the time for God with His help. Praying for God to help you to obey Him is not a prayer God will answer in the way you think. He will show you that He is with you, in you, and that is enough. He will show you Christ in you the hope of glory. No man shall boast in His presence””"I obeyed God!" Or, I did the right thing.

Jesus Himself said he could do nothing.

Here is a Shocking truth - even Christ the human man could not please His Father with all the possible Grace, Power and Help that God provided. God INFUSED Christ with His own Spirit - Life making HIM ONE with the Father. Christ had NO separate obedience of His own.

The solution to sin is being INFUSED with God's very Spirit - Life making us one. WE have no separate Life of our own.