What is God’s response to humanity’s post-flood alienation from Him and from each other? God had promised to Noah that he would not send another flood. He would never again, as it were, press “rewind” on human history and start all over again. God adopts with Abraham what might be called an “infiltration strategy.” God is going to work with one man and his family to spread blessing and communion and harmony back out to the human family. He’s going to infiltrate humanity through Abraham.
God’s plan for Abraham is summed up in just a few verses in Genesis 12:1-3, where God first calls Abraham and bestows on him many promises and blessings. Those verses show three specific promises that are given to Abraham. God tells Abraham that (1) He’s going to make him a great nation, (2) He’s going to make his name great, and finally, that (3) He’s going to bless all the nations of the earth through him. For the purposes of memorization and learning, these promises can be abbreviated to “great nation,” “great name,” and “great blessing.”
This is God’s plan, His strategy with Abraham for infiltrating the human family. He’s going to take Abraham, make Abraham into a great nation, that great nation is then going to spread out and attain a great name. Now, it’s important to know that the term “great name” referred to royalty. That means Abraham’s descendants were going to become royal, to become kings, and to guide other peoples. This would lead eventually to a blessing being poured out on the whole human family.
Let’s imagine how that would have worked. Abraham becomes a great nation. His nation attains a royal status over other nations and having that royalty, that leadership over the other nations, they lead the other nations back to a relationship with God where they can experience God’s blessing and experience Him as a Father. That’s the strategy that God begins with Abraham.
The First Promise: A Great Nation
God implements that strategy in three stages. These stages foreshadow, or “typify,” the stages that Abraham’s descendants, the nation of Israel, are going to undergo in their later history. First, God takes the promise of becoming a great nation and formalizes it. He does so by making it part of a formal covenant relationship with Abraham in Genesis 15. God has Abraham cut animals into pieces, and then comes down in the form of a torch and a fire pot in flame and smoke — common signs of the presence of God throughout salvation history.
In these signs, God moves through the pieces of the animals and promises to Abraham that he will be a great nation. That is an ancient covenant-making ritual. Moving between the pieces of the animals meant “should I not keep the promises that I’m making, may I die like these animals through whose pieces I am walking.” God is taking upon Himself a ritual oath, or curse to back up the truth of what He is promising to Abraham. In Scripture, oath-swearing is always associated with covenant-making because a covenant forms a family by means of an oath.
The Second Promise: A Great Name
In Genesis 17, two chapters after God makes a covenant with Abraham and promises to make him a great nation, God remakes the covenant, adding a new promise: a great name, which means royalty. Here, God explicitly promises to Abraham that children will come from his line, and has him perform another blood ritual, not by cutting animals this time, but by cutting his own body in the covenant of circumcision. The meaning of circumcision was this: “may I be cut off like this piece of flesh that I am cutting off of my body, if I do not keep the commitments that I am pronouncing and speaking at this moment.” Here we see Abraham professing his commitment to God just as God showed his commitment to Abraham previously in Genesis 15.
The Third Promise: A Great Blessing to All Nations
At this point, the only remaining promise that’s not yet been made is the promise of blessing to all the nations. For that to become part of Abraham’s family-covenant with God, Abraham is going to have to cut something more precious than animals, or even his own body. He’s going to have to cut the body of his own son. This leads to the climax of the whole story of Abraham in Genesis 22: God asks him to bring his only son, Isaac, to the top of a mountain, lay him on a pile of wood, and sacrifice him to God.
In order to understand properly this incident in Genesis 22, one must realize that Isaac by this time is an adult. He’s a young man who could have gotten away, could have defied his elderly father and not gone through with this. That this is a sacrifice that Isaac freely accepted is an interpretation that enjoys the universal support of the ancient Jewish tradition.
Furthermore, it’s important to recognize that three times in Genesis 22, Isaac is referred to by a rare Hebrew phrase which means “one and only.” St. John the Apostle will later translate the phrase as “only-begotten.” In John 3:16, the most famous verse of Scripture, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16 is a widely-used verse in evangelization because it sums up the Gospel. However, so few actually realize that the phrase “only-begotten son” is an allusion to Isaac, the only-begotten son of Abraham.
Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac on Mt. Moriah in Genesis 22 was really a “type” or a “foreshadowing” of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Mt. Calvary. Genesis 22 is the “Calvary of the Old Testament,” and Isaac is a type of Jesus. Think of the similarities: they are both only sons, they both carry the wood of their sacrifice up a mountain where they are laid on wood and then willingly sacrificed out of love and obedience for their father.
Of course, we know that the sacrifice of Isaac didn’t pan out. God “called it off” once He saw Abraham and Isaac’s obedient consent. Instead of his son, He gave Abraham a ram to sacrifice. In this, the principle is established that instead of human sacrifice, animal sacrifices are offered in the Old Testament. Instead of dying for our own sins, animals serve as a type or an image of someone else bearing the penalty of our sin.
At this point, God has seen that Abraham and Isaac have the willingness to undergo the same kind of sacrifice that He Himself — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — chooses later to undergo. Interestingly, at almost the same geographical location of the “sacrifice of Isaac,” the Jewish Temple would later be built. And about a stone’s throw away, there is another little hillock called Calvary. On that hillock, another “only-begotten Son” will actually die on the wood to bear the penalty for the sins of humanity — all to fulfill what was promised to Abraham: a blessing being poured out to all the nations.
After Isaac and Abraham consent to the sacrifice, Genesis 22:15-18 states that God calls from heaven and swears, “Because you have done this and not withheld your own begotten son, I will surely bless you and through your seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” That is a kind of proto-Gospel, and expresses the true Gospel in a nutshell. Jesus is that “seed;” He is that descendant of Abraham, who in the image of Isaac, will offer Himself up, in order that a blessing may come to all the nations.
Relation to Evangelization
The relevance of the Abrahamic Covenant to evangelization should be clear: the whole Good News of Jesus Christ was already there in ancient times. If one were to ask, “What was God doing through all human history? Why did He not reach out before the first century AD with Jesus?” The answer is, “God has been reaching out all along. In fact, His whole plan, intended from the beginning, was laid forth way back in 2000 BC or 1700 BC. The whole outline of the Gospel and the development of Salvation History was already present with Abraham.”
To get a little bit ahead of ourselves, the “great nation” promise will be realized through the nation of Israel. The great name, or the royalty, is going to come to fruition with King David and his empire. Then, the blessing to all the world will come through, of course, Abraham’s descendant Jesus.[1] That’s the Good News, the fullness of the Gospel. The basic pattern of salvation is already present with Abraham. God prophesied what He would do centuries before He brought it to pass. That adds a certain credibility to our religion not possessed by other, invented religions.
One can probably think of some religions of recent origin where some self-proclaimed guru comes along, writes or concocts a holy book and passes it off as Divine Revelation. He then gathers together a huge following behind himself. What those invented religions lack is a grounding in ancient prophecy that predicted what they now fulfill. That’s not the case with Christianity. Christianity is the true religion. Christianity is a fulfillment of God’s plan; rooted in real historical events and forecast in advance through prophets like Abraham.[2]
[1] The promise of a great nation and a great name is also renewed in Jesus, who brings these realities to fulfillment in the Church.
[2] Abraham himself is called a prophet in Scripture (Genesis 20:7).