Genesis 15:17-19 (NKJV) 17 And it came to pass, when the sun went down and it was dark, that behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces. 18 On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates–
We have seen that God’s greatest expression of covenant in the Old Testament was his covenant with Abraham. The addition of the law added under Moses gave Israel a consistent way to maintain relationship with God even when they broke the covenant by committing sin. However, that was never what God was after. The fulfillment of another covenant spoken through the prophet in Jeremiah 31 was the New Covenant put in place by the redemptive work of Jesus. Everything available to man under the Old Covenant is still available today, only in a more sure and powerful way.
Let us look at the first way that the New Covenant in Christ is better than the Abrahamic/Mosaic covenant. First, it is between two parties that will never break it. When God cut the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, we see that the parties who actually participated in the ceremony were not God and Abraham. Paul tells us in Galatians 3 that the covenant was between God and Abraham’s seed. He emphasizes that it was seed as of one particular descendant not seeds as of many descendants. There was one person who would come from Abraham who would be the human representative of God’s covenant with man. That descendant of Abraham was the man Jesus of Nazareth.
In today’s scripture we see how the covenant ceremony was conducted in Abraham’s day. In the first part of this chapter, Abraham asked God how he could know that he would have children, given his advanced age and the fact that Sarah was barren. God showed him the stars of the sky and told him that is how numerous his descendants would be. Verse 6 says “he believed God” and his faith was accounted to him as righteousness. It did not say he was righteous because the penalty for sin was not yet paid for. However, the fact that he believed what God said enabled him to “credit his account” with a form of right standing with him. It was Abraham’s expression of faith that moved God to instruct him to assemble a certain collection of animals, kill them, cut them in half and lay the parts on the ground.
That was the procedure for making a covenant. Once the bleeding sacrifice was out on the ground, the participants of the covenant agreement would walk between those pieces and declare the terms of the covenant. They would exchange weapons to signify their power. They would exchange names to signify their life and substance. There would be a mark or scar made in their flesh, to signify that this agreement had been sealed in blood.
Once the ceremony was done, they were forever joined together. All that one had, also belonged to the other. If one was attacked, the other must defend him. If one had need, the other must come to their aid. This was never just between the two parties that made the covenant. It always extended to their descendants. That is why David sought out a descendant of Jonathan to bless, even after Jonathan had died supporting his father Saul in battle. David and Jonathan had a covenant. Saul, Jonathan’s father hated and betrayed David. That did not change their covenant relationship. David found Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth after Jonathans death and made him a part of his own family.
I shared all that to say this. It was not Abraham who walked in the covenant ceremony. He was asleep. It was a “smoking furnace and a burning torch” that passed between the pieces of the sacrifice. I have never studied out who was represented by those two fiery manifestations, but I know that one had to be God, and the other had to be the seed of Abraham that Paul speaks of in Galatians 3. Why is this so important?
Although the covenant was with Abraham, it applied to him via the seed that walked through the pieces. That seed was in Abraham at the time of the covenant ceremony; therefore, Abraham was part of the covenant just as those who followed him were . So, who was the covenant really between. It was between the two who walked. It was between God himself and the physical seed of Abraham who would be Jesus the Christ.
Jesus did not carry the seed of his adoptive father, Joseph. He was born of a virgin. The seed that fertilized her egg was “the word of God (1 Peter 1:23.”) The seed from the male is what carries many forms of Identity. He determines the blood type, and he determines the sex. This is not by chance it is by design. Spiritually it is the human seed, not the human egg, which carries the sin nature which came upon man at the fall in the Garden of Eden. Jesus did not carry that trait because his father did not pass it on to him. John 1:1 tells that the Word, the seed that fertilized Mary’s egg, was God. God was Jesus’ father.
Mary, his mother, was fully human. However, she could not pass on to him the traits that would come from the male part of the equation. She did not determine his blood type. She did not determine his gender. She did not pass on the sin nature that she received from her father. All of those things he got from his “biological” father. However, because she was his mother, he was human. It is interesting that a child is considered Jewish by rabbinical law if the mother is Jewish. It does not matter what the father’s lineage may be. Since Jesus’ mother was Jewish, Jesus was Jewish. However, this is just a type so we can understand what God really wants us to know. Since Jesus’ mother was human, he was human. It did not matter that his father was not.
Today we understand that all of this occurs via DNA. They had no idea such a thing existed. Applying that understanding, we can say that Jesus was a mix of his mother’s DNA and his Father’s DNA. He was God and he was man. He was the perfect bridge between the two. The covenant of Abraham was not just between a fallen man and God. It was between God and a human who did not have the sin nature the rest of humanity carried. It was between God the Father and God the son.
The significance of this cannot be overstated when we talk about covenant. In the Old Covenant, the parties involved were God and Abraham, extended to his descendants. God would never break the covenant, but it was impossible for Israel to keep the it. He added the law through Moses to give them a way to push the consequences for breaking it to the future. In this way, God could keep providing the benefits he had promised Abraham. However, this was never the fullness of what God wanted.
Because the New Covenant was between two beings who never change, it cannot be broken. Jesus kept it perfectly on the earth and God has always kept it perfectly, even when Israel did not. Paul tells us something in Romans 8 that is significant.
Romans 8:3 (NKJV) For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh,
The law was added to the covenant of promise because of sin. They had to keep the covenant in the flesh, and they had to do flesh acts to cover their sin when they did not. What Jesus did, the law could not do. Jesus’ death burial and resurrection changed man’s nature. It put God’s law in his inward parts.
Since the covenant was between two parties who would never break it, and since the work of Christ made keeping it a matter of the spirit, it was possible for man to walk free of the flesh. When the flesh took control and man did sin, the covenant was not broken, just the sense of fellowship between God and man. The born-again man can always come back to God, repent of his sin and be both forgiven and cleansed. This will never change because the covenant partners will exist for eternity.
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