Theopedia

Abrahamic Covenant

“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

— Genesis 12:2-3

Definition

The Abrahamic Covenant is the covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis 12, 15, and 17, promising to give him a land, to multiply his offspring into a great nation, and to bless all the families of the earth through him, sealed by the sign of circumcision (Gen. 17:9-14). The New Testament reads the covenant’s promise of blessing to “all nations” as fulfilled through Abraham’s singular seed, Jesus Christ, and reads its own sign, given to Abraham while he was still uncircumcised, as pointing to justification by faith generally (Rom. 4:9-12; Gal. 3:8-9, 16).

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession’s chapter on God’s covenant does not name Abraham specifically. It describes the covenant of grace as “revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament.”1 The covenant God made with Abraham is one of those farther steps: the promise first given after the Fall is renewed to him with the added particulars of a specific people, a land, and a sign, circumcision, that the confession’s own doctrine of baptism later applies to professing believers rather than to physical descent.2

Biblical Basis

God’s promise to Abraham first appears in Genesis 12:1-3: land (“the land that I will show you”), descendants (“I will make of you a great nation”), and universal blessing (“in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”). Genesis 15 renews the promise in a covenant-cutting ceremony in which God alone, not Abraham, passes between the divided animals. Bavinck reads the scene as showing the covenant’s essentially unilateral character: God’s covenant with Abraham “is not really a compact but a pledge. God’s promise obligates him to fulfill it,” and his passing alone between the pieces functions the same way as his self-swearing oaths elsewhere in Genesis 22:16 and Deuteronomy 32:40, to show “the unchangeable character of his purpose.”3 The same chapter records that “Abraham believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6), the verse Paul later grounds his doctrine of justification by faith in (Rom. 4:1-12; Gal. 3:6-9). Genesis 17 adds the covenant’s sign, circumcision, “an everlasting covenant” between God and Abraham’s offspring (Gen. 17:7, 13), and Genesis 22:17-18 reaffirms the promise of blessing to “all the nations of the earth” after Abraham offers up Isaac.

The same chapter also attaches an explicit condition to the covenant: God tells Abraham to “walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you” (Gen. 17:1-2), so that, alongside Genesis 15’s one-sided promise, “the relationship between God and Abraham seems to be conditioned in some sense on Abraham’s obedience.” McCormick locates the resolution of that tension in Christ rather than in Abraham himself: God “will do so through an obedient son.”4

Paul reads the covenant’s promise of blessing to “all the nations” as fulfilled specifically in Christ rather than in Abraham’s physical descendants generally: “the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Gal. 3:8), and the promise was “spoken to Abraham and to his offspring… not… ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many, but… ‘And to your offspring,’ referring to one, who is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). Believers, Jew and Gentile alike, become Abraham’s true offspring and heirs of the promise not by physical descent but “if you are Christ’s” (Gal. 3:29). Paul makes the same point from the order of events in Abraham’s own life in Romans 4: Abraham “received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised,” so that he might be “the father of all who believe without being circumcised” as well as of “the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith” he had before he was circumcised at all (Rom. 4:11-12). Sears draws out the force of the sequence: “since Abraham’s justification occurred while uncircumcised, he serves as a typological figure anticipating the fatherhood of both Gentiles and Jews.”5

Opposing Views

Reformed and dispensational readings of the Abrahamic covenant divide chiefly over what becomes of the land promise once Christ, the promised seed, arrives. On a Reformed non-dispensational reading, the land promise is itself typological, expanding under the terms of the original promise into the worldwide scope Paul assigns it: commenting on Paul’s statement that Abraham would “inherit the world” (Rom. 4:13), Martin argues that Paul is “demonstrating sound biblical exegesis, informed by Scripture’s redemptive-historical storyline” already present in Genesis itself (Gen. 22:17’s promise that Abraham’s seed would possess “the gate of his enemies”), so that “in light of Christ, Abraham’s (singular) seed (Gal. 3), Abraham and his (corporate) offspring will inherit the world as people, both Jew and Gentile, come to faith in Jesus Christ.”6 Dispensationalism instead reads the land grant as a distinct, still-future promise to ethnic Israel: on Walvoord’s dispensational reading, the church itself is a “parenthesis” in God’s plan, “distinct from the future restoration of national Israel that Old Testament prophecy still anticipates,”7 so that the Abrahamic land promise awaits a literal fulfillment to a restored national Israel rather than the church’s own present inclusion in Christ.

Objections and Responses

Paedobaptists press the Abrahamic covenant’s inclusion of infants under its sign as evidence that the covenant sign should likewise be extended to believers’ children under the New Covenant. Hodge argues: “it cannot be denied that infants were included in the covenant made with Abraham, and that they received circumcision, its appointed seal and sign,” concluding that a credobaptist reading is therefore committed to treating “the Abrahamic covenant… as a merely national covenant entirely distinct from the covenant of grace.”8

The Owen-Coxe reading behind the 1689 confession answers by distinguishing two aspects within the one covenant God made with Abraham rather than by dividing it into two separate covenants: an everlasting spiritual promise, fulfilled specifically in Christ and reaching Abraham’s true offspring only “if you are Christ’s” (Gal. 3:29), and a subordinate, typological promise of physical descent, land, and nationhood, fulfilled in ethnic Israel under the Mosaic economy. John Owen read the covenant this way in his exposition of Hebrews 8,9 and Nehemiah Coxe, a Particular Baptist minister who helped prepare the Second London Baptist Confession, argued the same case at length in his own treatise on the covenants God made with men before the law.10 On this reading circumcision sealed the typological, national promise rather than the saving one, so its New Testament counterpart is reserved, like the saving promise itself, for those who have actually believed rather than administered by birth.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 29, “Of Baptism.” ↩

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩

  4. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Foreshadowed,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 190-191. ↩

  5. Philip Chase Sears, “The Mystery Schema of Romans,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 106-107. ↩

  6. Oren Rhea Martin, “The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan: Part 2, The New Testament,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 245-246. ↩

  7. John F. Walvoord, The Millennial Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1959), 227. ↩

  8. Charles Hodge, “Chapter II. The Covenant of Grace,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 364-365. ↩

  9. John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 23 (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), commentary on Heb. 8:6-13. ↩

  10. Nehemiah Coxe, A Discourse of the Covenants that God Made with Men Before the Law (London, 1681). ↩