God’s covenant with Abram-Abraham and Sarai-Sarah was with a man and his wife and their descendents, who would comprise only part of the human race. She was his covenant partner, as shown by the Lord’s insistence that only she could be the mother of this covenant line, even if it took a miracle. It was the first non-universal covenant involving selection of a chosen, remnant people, who would live in their own land. However, God intended to use this covenant for a universal purpose: to bless all peoples of the earth through the descendants of Abram and Sarai (Gen. 12:3; 22:18). So this was really a covenant for all of humanity through Abram and Sarai, whose family was to be God’s channel to reveal himself and his character to the world.

In the Bible, the story of Abram and Sarai is the paradigmatic journey of faith (Rom. 4; Gal. 3). When the Lord told Abram to "Get going from your country…" (Gen 12:1), they started packing. Was that faith or works? Not either…or…; it was faith working (compare Gal. 5:6) because living faith naturally produces corresponding works (James 2:26). But works produced by faith do not buy promised blessings, such as greatness, land, or descendants. These works are only the way in which faith receives God’s free gift, which is given by grace and received through faith (Eph. 2:8–9).

The grace through faith dynamic, which is consistent throughout Scripture, reveals itself in the narrative order of covenant formulation: Formal ratification of Abram’s covenant with a sacrificial ritual (Gen. 15), a comprehensive stipulation (17:1—"Walk before Me, and be blameless"), and the covenant sign (17:10–14, 23–27—circumcision) follows deliverance in war (Gen. 14) and the Lord’s statement that he is Abram’s "shield" (15:1). Similarly, it was after the Lord had already delivered Noah from the Flood that he inaugurated his ongoing covenant, with stipulations (Gen. 8–9). Likewise, God delivered the Israelites from Egypt (see Exod. 20:1–2) and only then gave them his commandments (verses 3 and following) as part of the covenant ratification.

Unlike modern politicians, God promises, delivers, and only then carries out an inauguration. The fact that he consistently gives his ongoing stipulations/commandments to people who are already saved demonstrates that obedience to these divine laws cannot earn them salvation, which is a gift of pure grace that living faith only receives.

When Abram trusted God’s promise to give him children, against physical odds, it was his faith that was reckoned to him as rightness (Gen. 15:6). Deuteronomy 6:25, promising rightness to Israelites who observe the Lord’s commandment(s), is complementary rather than contradictory because covenant obedience is only part of receiving by faith that works.

Further evidence that the covenant with Abram was based upon grace is found in the powerful covenant ritual of Genesis 15, in which "there appeared a smoking oven, and a flaming torch which passed between" pieces of sacrificial animals (verse 17, NJPS). These objects represented the Lord, for the next verse summarizes: "On that day the Lord made (literally ’cut’) a covenant with Abram" (verse 18).

Comparisons with other ancient Near Eastern covenant rituals and with Jeremiah 34:18–20 indicate that passing between split animals functioned as a conditional self-imprecation by which the lesser party to a covenant signified, in effect: "If I break this pact, let me be chopped up like these animals." The remarkable thing in Genesis 15 is that although God was the superior party, who gave the terms of his covenant to Abram, he graciously broke protocol by representing himself as passing between the animal pieces, thereby binding himself to his covenant promises.

In subsequent history, the Lord never violated his part of the covenant, but when his people broke their part, he again departed from the established pattern, much more radically this time: Rather than chopping up the wayward human party, he sent his Son to become human and to be broken as their Representative. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13 NASB95).

Abram had faith from the beginning of his partnership with God, but there was plenty of room for his faith to grow. As an ordinary person like us, his trust was at first undermined by fear for his own skin, to the point that in a potentially dangerous situation (foreshadowing the Israelite sojourn in Egypt) he jeopardized fulfillment of the covenant promise by being willing to compromise his wife through misrepresenting her to the Egyptians as merely his sister (Gen. 12:10–20). Through a series of encounters with God over many years, during which there were other brushes with covenant jeopardy, Abram progressively developed greater trust in the Lord, relinquished his fear, and sought the well-being of others, beginning with his own family and then extending to members of other nations.

When Abraham finally trusted God enough to let go of his own son, the divine gift who was the key to his future, God set in concrete (with an oath) the covenant promise that all nations would be blessed through him (Gen.. 22:15–18). Thus the radical obedience of Abraham in passing the ultimate test of faith (Heb. 11:20—believing that God could raise Isaac from the dead) culminated a journey of trust, unselfish love, and blessing away from the destructive cycle of faithless self-absorption leading to curse that is so prominent in the earlier stories of Adam and Eve, Cain, Lamech, and the builders of Babel (see Paul Borgman, Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2001]).

Although we are living thousands of years after Abraham and Sarah, their story inspires us, their spiritual descendants (Gal. 3:29), with hope for a better future through partnership with God.

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