'Boasting and Faith' Question Three
02 Feb 2010
Question Three:
"Tim Last Sunday, 31/01/10, you mentioned that the Abraham Covenant was sealed by God passing between the divided animal carcasses. You then went on to say that the divided carcasses were a symbol of the way a Covenant breaker would be dealt with e.g. they would meet a similar bloody end. You subsequently mentioned something about the cross as a demonstration of this. However, God was the only one who ratified the Abraham Covenant, so the only one who could be punished for breaking it is Him. If the cross is a consequence of the Covenant being broken and Jesus could not have been crucified as a man for breaking the Abraham Covenant as no man passed through the divided carcasses to seal it, how/where did God break the Abraham Covenant?"
By passing through the pieces God was demonstrating to Abraham His unswerving commitment to the covenant He had just made with him, so much so that it seems Abraham wasn't required to pass through himself. The full weight of responsibility for upholding this promise was accepted by God in doing so, even though part of the promise as read in chapter 17 was that God's people should be blameless before Him. Due to sin and man's inability to fulfill this expectation, an act of God was necessary in order to deal with the sin that impedes man’s potential to walk blamelessly before God. The cross was always central to the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant and vividly demonstrates man’s utter dependence on God to walk blamelessly before Him, as Paul states in Romans 3:27: all boasting is therefore excluded. God in His sovereignty knew that the cross was intrinsic to the fulfilment of the promise. In dying in such a way we see parallels to the sacrificial covenant we read about in Genesis 15 and once more find God is the one who ratifies and not guilty man. The covenant is therefore not broken but fully ratified by God at the cross; what was broken was man’s relationship with God due to his rebellion. Abraham was blameless before God because of his faith which was "credited to him as righteousness", and in the person of Christ and His work on the cross we have the great object of our faith and affection. Here we find also our righteousness.
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