It has been found necessary to introduce the covenant in speaking of the promises made by God to Abraham. But the covenant with its implications demands separate consideration, especially in connexion with its renewal, and with the signs attached to it-change of name and circumcision.
1. We appreciate the significance of a revelation in proportion as we understand the state of mind to which it is made. Abraham's state of mind is disclosed in the exclamation: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before thee!” He had learned to love the bold, brilliant, domineering boy. He saw how the men liked to serve him and how proud they were of the young chief. No doubt his wild intractable ways often made his father anxious. Sarah was there to point out and exaggerate all his faults and to prognosticate mischief. But there he was, in actual flesh and blood, full of life and interest in everything, daily getting deeper into the affections of Abraham, who allowed and could not but allow his own life to revolve very much around the dashing, attractive lad. So the reminder that he was not the promised heir was not entirely welcome.
We are familiar with this state of mind. We wish God would leave us alone. We have found a very attractive substitute for what He promises, and we resent being reminded that our substitute is not, after all, the veritable, eternal, best possession. It satisfies our taste, our intellect, our ambition; it sets us on a level with other men and gives us a place in the world; but now and again we feel a void it does not fill. We have attained comfortable circumstances, success in our profession, our life has in it that which attracts applause and sheds a brilliance over it; and we do not like being told that this is not all. Our feeling is, Oh, that this might do! that this might be accepted as perfect attainment! it satisfies me (all but a little bit); might it not satisfy God? Why summon me again away from domestic happiness, intellectual enjoyment, agreeable occupations, to what really seems so unattainable as perfect fellowship with God in the fulfilment of His promise? Why spend all my life in waiting and seeking for high spiritual things when I have so much with which I can be moderately satisfied? For our complaint often is not that God gives so little but that He offers too much, more than we care to have: that He never will let us be content with anything short of what perfectly fulfils His perfect love and purpose.
In setting aside the desire for the crowns and thrones of ambition, we must be very careful that we are not merely yielding to temptations of indolence, of fastidiousness, of cowardice, and calling a personal motive unworldliness for the sake of the associations. No man need set himself to seek great positions, but a man who is diffident, and possibly indolent, will do well to pin himself down in a position of responsibility and influence, if it comes naturally in his way. There are a good many men with high natural gifts of an instinctive kind who are yet averse to using them diligently, who, indeed, from the very facility with which they exercise them, hardly know their value. Such men as these-and I have known several-undertake a great responsibility if they refuse to take advantage of obvious opportunities to use their gifts. Men of this kind have often a certain vague, poetical, and dreamy quality of mind; a contemplative gift. They see and exaggerate the difficulties and perils of posts of high responsibility. If they yield to temptations of temperament, they often become ineffective, dilettante, half-hearted natures, playing with life and speculating over it, instead of setting to work on a corner of the tangle. They hang spiritless upon the verge of the battle instead of mingling with the fray.1 [Note: A. C. Benson, From a College Window, 243.]
2. This being Abraham's state of mind, he is aroused from it by the words: “I am the Almighty God; walk before me and be thou perfect.” I am the Almighty God, able to fulfil your highest hopes and accomplish for you the brightest ideal that My words ever set before you. There is no need of paring down the promise till it squares with human probabilities, no need of adopting some interpretation of it which may make it seem easier to fulfil, and no need of striving to fulfil it in any second-rate way. All possibility lies in this: I am the Almighty God. Walk before Me, and be thou perfect, therefore. Do not train your eye to earthly distances and earthly magnitudes and limit your hope accordingly, but live in the presence of the Almighty God.
Do not defer the advices to some other possible world; do not settle down at the low level of godless nature and of the men around you; do not give way to what you yourself know to be weakness and evidence of defeat; do not let self-indulgence take the place of My commandments, indolence supplant resolution, and the likelihoods of human calculation obliterate the hopes stirred by the Divine call: Be thou perfect. Is not this a summons that comes appropriately to every man? Whatever be our contentment, our attainments, our possessions, a new light is shed upon our condition when we measure it by God's idea and God's resources. Is my life God's ideal? Does that which satisfies me satisfy Him?
When you look up to God out of a state of probation or trial, you cannot but look upon Him as a Judge, and you cannot but fear an impartial judgment from Him. If you look to Him as from a state of education, you regard Him as a Father who has brought you into being with the one purpose of training you into a participation of His own righteousness and His own blessedness. If you see and feel that this object, namely, the participation in His righteousness and blessedness, is the object in existence the most desirable for you, then you will feel that God's purpose for you is exactly your own purpose for yourself, that you could not therefore be in better hands. This is the right condition of man's spirit in relation to God, the righteousness of faith, of perfect trust, perfect confidence.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 228.]
There is a purpose in life. Man can live only by living in this purpose. If any man severs himself from it, he severs himself from life. He may continue to exist in the world for many years, but the vital spark in him will all the while be waning. So also with nations. They flourish or decay just in the measure in which they observe or disregard this purpose.2 [Note: R. H. Hodgson, Glad Tidings! 14.]
3. The purpose of God's present appearance to Abraham was to renew the covenant, and this He does in terms so explicit, so pregnant, so magnificent that Abraham must have seen more distinctly than ever that he was called to play a very special part in God's providence. That kings should spring from him, a mere pastoral nomad in an alien country, could not suggest itself to Abraham as a likely thing to happen. Indeed, though a line of kings or two lines of kings did spring from him through Isaac, the terms of the prediction seem scarcely exhausted by that fulfilment. And accordingly St. Paul without hesitation or reserve transfers this prediction to a spiritual region, and is at pains to show that the many nations of whom Abraham was to be the father were not those who inherited his blood, his natural appearance, his language and earthly inheritance, but those who inherited his spiritual qualities and the heritage in God to which his faith gave him entrance. And he argues that no difference of race or disadvantages of worldly position can prevent any man from serving himself heir to Abraham, because the seed, to whom as well as to Abraham the promise was made, was Christ, and in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, but all are one.
(1) In connexion, then, with this covenant in which God promised that He would be a God to Abraham and to his seed, two points of interest to us emerge. First, that Christ is Abraham's heir. In His use of God's promise we see its full significance. In His lifelong appropriation of God we see what God meant when He said, “I will be a God to thee, and to thy seed.” We find our Lord from the first living as one who felt His life encompassed by God, embraced and comprehended in that higher life which God lives through all and in all. His life was all and whole a life in God. He recognized what it is to have a God, one whose will is supreme and unerringly good, whose love is constant and eternal, who is the first and the last, beyond whom and from under whom we can never pass. He moved about in the world in so perfectly harmonious a correspondence with God, so merging Himself in God and His purpose and with so unhesitating a reliance upon Him, that He seemed and was but a manifestation of God, God's will embodied, God's child, God expressing Himself in human nature. He showed us once for all the blessedness of true dependence, fidelity, and faith. He showed us how that simple promise, “I will be a God to thee,” received in faith, lifts the human life into fellowship with all that is hopeful and inspiring, with all that is purifying, with all that is real and abiding.
(2) But a second point is, that Jesus was the heir of Abraham not merely because He was his descendant, a Jew with all the advantages of the Jew, but because, like Abraham, He was full of faith. God was the atmosphere of His life. But He claimed God not because He was Jewish, but because He was human. Through the Jews God had made Himself known, but it was to what was human not to what was Jewish that He appealed. And it was as Son of Man not as son of Israel or of Adam that Jesus responded to God and lived with Him as His God. Not by specially Jewish rites did Jesus approach and rest in God, but by what is universal and human, by prayer to the Father, by loving obedience, by faith and submission.
Why has God taken such pains to satisfy us that He has indeed loved and forgiven all men? Just in order that every individual might see in God a perfect ground of confidence. Unless you know that God has forgiven you, and that He loves you, you cannot have any confidence in Him; and unless you have full confidence in Him, you cannot have peace with Him, you cannot open your heart to Him, you cannot love Him. It is the belief of His forgiving love to yourself which can alone open your heart to Him. This is the true meaning of the doctrine of personal assurance. It is not that God saves a man because he has an assurance of his own personal salvation, but that our hearts cannot open to God until we are satisfied that He loves ourselves with a forgiving love. Until we are satisfied of His love to us, we cannot love Him; and therefore we cannot obey Him, for there is no obedience without love.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 161.]
4. The question has been keenly discussed whether the covenant denotes a self-imposed obligation on the part of God, irrespective of any condition on the part of man, or a bilateral engagement involving reciprocal obligations between God and men. The truth seems to lie somewhat between two extremes. The covenant is neither a simple Divine promise to which no obligation on man's part is attached (as in Gen_15:18), nor is it a mutual contract in the sense that the failure of one party dissolves the relation. It is an immutable determination of God's purposes, which no unfaithfulness of man can invalidate; but it carries conditions, the neglect of which will exclude the individual from its benefits.
(1) On God's side there is the name of God: “I am God Almighty,” a sufficient guarantee at all times. The name is El Shaddai, “God Almighty.” God pledges His power that on His part the covenant will be kept. As regards the meaning of Shaddai, we are entirely in the dark: neither Hebrew nor any of the cognate Semitic languages offers any convincing explanation of it. But whatever be the etymology of the name, it is true that the choice of it does seem sometimes to be determined by the thought of the power of God, whether in the way of protection and blessing, or in the way of authority, punishment, or trial. We may therefore acquiesce, at least provisionally, in the now familiar rendering “Almighty.”
(2) On man's side the demand is made: “Walk before me, and be thou perfect.” To “walk before the face or presence of God,” meant to order his daily life and behaviour according to His will, so as to retain His friendly approval. To be “perfect” in this holy bond of amity meant to adhere to it with an undivided, unseduced loyalty, mingling his service of El Shaddai who had spoken to him, with no secret hankering after other divinities, and no unquiet misgivings as to the trustworthiness of Jehovah's word. Considering the stage of revelation at which Abraham stood, it covered all that an upright and sincere heart could feel to be incumbent on it in the sight of God, the heart-searching Judge of men.
It is not enough to be merely passive under God's dealings. The spirit of entire submission is a great grace; but it is a still higher attainment to become flexible-that is to say, to move just as He would have us move. This state of mind might perhaps be termed the spirit of co-operation, or of Divine co-operation. In this state the will is not only subdued; but, what is very important, all tendency to a different or rebellious state is taken away. Of such a soul, which is described as the Temple of the Holy Ghost, God Himself is the inhabitant and the light.1 [Note: Madame Guyon, in Life by T. C. Upham.]
