The Covenant, Faith, and Obedience — The Foundations of Our Salvation

The Most Important Covenant

This Torah portion has some of the most important covenants between God and man. If I ask in a Christian university class, "What is the most important covenant that God made with men?" — most Bible students would say, "The New Covenant!" Well, the New Covenant, without a doubt, would be a very important covenant made between God and man. But in my opinion, it is the covenant that God made with Abraham. In my opinion it supersedes the covenant of Sinai, and it supersedes the New Covenant. Because without the promises and the covenant with Abraham, there would be no giving of the Torah in Sinai, and no Savior born in Bethlehem.

Please think about this and meditate on the importance of Abraham and of the close relationship that God had with Abraham, and Abraham had with the Almighty One, the God of Israel.

There are three promises that the Lord gives Abraham, and they are an inseparable part of the Lord's calling of Abraham. You can't take one or two of these promises out of the very calling of Abraham. The three are a package that stands together. If one is not valid, all three are not valid. There is no time limit to these promises of the Lord to Abraham:

In this parashah God also gives His promise to Abraham and to his seed, the promise of the Land. This promise of the land is part and parcel with the two other promises. How can Christians around the world believe the lies and the manipulation of scriptures, and deny the right of the Jewish people to hold on to God's promises to Abraham? All the promises of God are true, and so are also the promises of the Land. This of course does not mean that Arabs (the seed of Ishmael) can't live side by side in peace with the children of Isaac and Jacob.

This promise is actually repeated many, many times in the Torah. Here are a few of the places that this promise is repeated in the Five Books of Moses: Gen. 15:7–18, 17:7–8, 24:7, 26:3–4, 28:4–13, 31:3, 35:12, 46:3, 48:4, 50:24; Ex. 6:8, 33:1; Lev. 20:24; Num. 14:8, 34:2–29; Deut. 6:10, 26:2–4, 31:20, 34:4; Josh. 5:6.

The One-Sided Covenant of Genesis 15

The meaning of the dream that Abraham has in chapter 15, where the Lord cuts animals in half and walks through the animal halves as a flame of fire, is that if I don't keep my promises to you, Abraham, may I be cut in half and be burned. This kind of oath is known in ancient Mesopotamia and it is the strongest possible oath, calling a curse upon yourself if you don't keep your word.

What it means is this: the person who gives that covenant — if I don't keep my word and if I break my covenant, may I be cut in half and burned. May I be cut in half and burned. I will keep my promise. I will keep my covenant. Come what may, I will keep my covenant.

The reason why the Creator gives this total assurance to Abraham is because Abraham,

The faith of Abraham in God's promises is beyond reason. It is a faith that has moved Abraham and Sarah his wife and a camp of hundreds of people that followed Abraham because he converted them from idolatry to faith in one God. The one God who created the world, the one God that keeps His promises.

Here is what the Lord said to Isaac about his father Abraham:

For many Christians this text is a revelation. Having faith, my dear brothers and sisters, does not give a person carte blanche to disobey or to be disobedient. Obedience has always been important to those who exercise faith, trust, and loyalty in the Lord.

What Biblical Faith Actually Means

In most Christian circles, having faith is essentially simply an agreement with or acceptance of some theological principle. It is at best an acceptance of some semi-rational idea that is called "faith." Most Christians have never experienced persecution for their faith, or have had to sacrifice something as precious as their relationship with their family.

In the Bible, faith means the kind of faith that Abraham had. Faith for Abraham and for all the faithful children of God in the Bible meant putting our total trust in the Lord and in His promises, leaving home and country and family if necessary if commanded so by God. All the examples of faith that we have in the Bible — and the list of the faithful characters in the Bible that is in the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11 — includes people who expressed their faith through the deeds of their lives.

Biblical faith is not a theorem formulated by some Christian committee of clergymen huddled in some dark basement of one of the Catholic Churches in order to force simple Christians to bend their ideas to fit the prison of the mind established by the church, so that the church can rule over them. Historically, Protestant churches have been a little better than the Catholic Churches, but not much better. They too defined what "faith" is and who are the "faithful" in the relationship of the people to their church and mainly to their denominational doctrines. Being faithful in the Protestant world means attending church, giving money to the church, and accepting and parroting the doctrines and teachings of your denomination. When I read the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and even the New Testament apostles, the faith of these heroes of the faith would easily be considered as unfaithful and rebellious by most Protestant denominations.

Of course this is not only an Old Testament paradigm. The same paradigm is all over the New Testament, from the teaching of Yeshua the Messiah in what is called "The Sermon on the Mount" to the parable of the fool and the wise man who build their houses. Yeshua says that the one who built his house on the rock is the person who hears and obeys. Here you have it from the apostolic letters:

Salvation without faith is not going to happen. Faith without obedience and observance of God's commands is also not effective, because salvation is a process and not an ad-hoc occurrence. Of course everything has a beginning and the beginning of the process of salvation is faith, but after faith comes confession, and repentance, and baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 2:28ff).

Obedience in Action — The Circumcision

One of the most significant indications of obedience that Abraham fulfilled, in my opinion, is in our reading of Parashat Lech-Lecha — the circumcision as reported in Genesis chapter 17. Leaving Haran with his family and going down to the land of Canaan was a big move of both faith and obedience. But in my opinion, this act requires much more faith than just packing your bags and traveling to the land of Canaan.

Abraham, a nonagenarian, is circumcised with a primitive knife at a time when iron had not yet appeared — only bronze is available. Also there is no anesthesia nor antibiotics. You just cut, because God commanded it and God promised.

In the final results of anything and any time, what really matters is what we do and not what we say. I know that words are important, but I also know that what a man does in those moments that are very lonely, and only God and me are in the decision-making position — what I do is so much more important than what I say.