The surprising new covenant promise is revealed, and Abram gets a brand new name! I can’t tell you how relieved I am that I can write Abraham from now on because it’s easier to remember than Abram.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without having to read an entire chapter every week!)
Then Abram fell down onto the ground with his face down in respect and God spoke with him: “As for me, here is my covenant with you: You will become the father of many nations. Your name will no longer be Abram; your name will be Abraham, because I am going to make you the father of many nations. I will make you extremely fruitful and will make nations and kings come from you.” (Gen 17:3-6)
Okay, whenever we see a verse that begins with the word “then”, we need to go back real quick and see what happened right before that because they will be connected. You know, for that matter, there are a lot of words like that—words and phrases like therefore, after those days, and even “it is written” because we have to go back and find out what was written and why! In this case, God had just said, “I am God Almighty (El Shaddai), walk in my presence and behave yourself. I am going to set up my covenant with you and give you a ton of descendants.” Or, at least that’s the gist of it. You can always go back and listen to last week’s explanation of all that if you really want to. But that’s why Abram dropped down and put his face on the ground, to show God respect. He didn’t faint or anything like that. It’s how people paid respect to kings and even idols in the ancient world. And kings would kill you if you didn’t so it wasn’t just about respecting them—it was about being terrified of what kings could get away with. The kings had all the power and most everyone else had none at all. And because they wanted everyone to know it, they made people get down so low that their faces were in the dirt.
It isn’t all that different from bas reliefs—which are carvings and paintings on old palace and temple walls. Some of them show kings on their thrones who are resting their feet on the people they won wars against. And we have talked before about how gross feet were in the ancient world. They can be gross now but imagine everyone walking around in open-toed sandals when the streets were pretty much packed with animal droppings. No foot spray. No clean socks every day. No sprays to kill foot bacteria or toe fungus or any of that. When you fell down on your face in front of anyone, even a king, it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. But if you didn’t do it then the consequences, the results, could be deadly because it was considered disrespectful. I don’t know about you, but making another person get down on the ground with their face in the dirt is what seems disrespectful to me! We’ve talked about honor and shame culture. If you had high honor and you were a king, it meant that you could do whatever you wanted to the people around you.
If you look over at England right now, the Royal Family has to mind their P’s and Q’s because if they do anything the people hate enough, the people might get rid of them. So, they don’t get to lop off anyone’s head the way they used to be able to do. Abram’s experiences with God are still only about twenty-four years old and he doesn’t know God as well as he will at the end of his life. Gods in the ancient world were scary and nasty and petty and fickle. Fickle means that you never know what will set them off and they were very impatient. Abram is still learning that God isn’t like that but even if he did know that, falling on his face was still the right thing to do to show God respect in that culture.
God speaks to Abram, but the details are a bit confusing. God appeared but we don’t know how. Nothing is described except His words. God starts out with an “As for me” statement and that is another one of those phrases that makes us have to look backwards. “As for me” means that whatever God is about to say is His part of the bargain. Abram’s part was in his being commanded to walk before God in His presence and to not do anything to make God look bad or like the gods of the Canaanites. God is saying, “While you are doing your part, this is what I am going to do for you.” Then God describes this new Covenant. Actually, if you notice, He calls it MY covenant. It isn’t OUR covenant, but God’s. God is the great king here and anything He does for Abram is a gift and not because they are equals and on the same level. Not even remotely.
Remember that in Genesis 15, that covenant was a promise to give the Land of Canaan to Abram’s family—but not right away because they would be slaves first in a faraway land. In fact, it would be over four hundred years before God would give it to them. It was only supposed to be four hundred, but folks got uppity and it took another forty years. Remember, that’s called a Land Grant Covenant where a king promises that a family will have a piece of land forever (or until someone else’s family becomes the rulers instead and gives the land to their friends instead). But God never stops being King and so Abram’s children are still given the Land of Israel to this day as an inheritance. God can do that because that Land belongs to Him and He allows His people to live there. It’s about the promise He made to Abram and nothing else. God has never forgotten Abram, or His promises to Abram.
But this covenant is different. This covenant is about God promising children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—and some of them will be kings and many different nations will come from those descendants. Sometimes we think of Abram’s descendants only being the Jewish people or the children of Israel but that is far from the truth, as we will see later on in Genesis. God is giving Abram what every man in the ancient world wanted—a legacy to be remembered forever. A legacy means that your life will be remembered for a long time—that you will be famous long after you die. Today, we think of a legacy differently—my legacy has to do with the changes I make in the world. My legacy can be good or bad. I teach all of you because I believe in you and know how smart you all are (even if you don’t think so) and because I want you to know and trust God and Jesus. If that works out and you guys go on to do good and teach your children to do the same, then my legacy is a good one. But if I were to teach you guys bad things and you went out and did them, then my legacy would be bad. A legacy is about whether the world changes for the better or worse because I lived in it.
But in the ancient world, they wanted to be remembered more than they wanted to change the world. In fact, they didn’t want to change the world—they saw change as very scary. Change might make the gods angry and then who knows what would happen. They wanted to be famous and important and remembered. And dang, Abram lived almost 4000 years ago and he is still super famous so God definitely kept His promise to give Abram a great name back in Genesis twelve. But if it hadn’t been for Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Jesus, then Abram wouldn’t be famous. Because of them, even people who aren’t Jews, Christians, and Muslims know his name. Most other people that famous, are only known because of the horrible things they did—like Hitler. But Abram is remembered because, even though he did some awful things, he kept doing better and better as he learned to follow and trust God and to learn a different way of life than he grew up with in Babylon. Learning how not to be a Babylonian was hard. Learning not to be a Roman in Jesus’s early churches was hard too. Goodness, learning not to be an American is hard for me and sometimes it is hard for me to see when being like an American is not the same thing as living like a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. I bet you know what I mean. It’s hard to live like God wants us to when everything around us seems so normal and okay even when it sometimes isn’t.
Let’s not forget that Abram was from Babylon, where the people were very dangerous, and grew up worshiping gods who were cruel. Abram does some messed up stuff but the people around him weren’t anyone whom you would want for neighbors. The Hittites had to make a specific law telling folks not to bite other people’s noses off. Who even does that??? Who really needs to be told that isn’t okay? Have you ever seen a person who has their nose bitten off by another person? Of course not. It just goes without saying how messed up that is.
God then said to Abram, “You will be the father of many nations.” “Nations” here means people who will live in different places and speak different languages and do things differently from one another and even go to war against each other, not knowing that they are family. Right now, Abram has only one son and so he is probably thinking that Ishmael will have a ton of kids. After all, the angel of the Lord told Hagar that she would have so many descendants that no one could count them. Maybe she shared that with Abram. Or perhaps Sarai would die, and Abram would take a new wife and she would have lots of babies. God had told him before, on quite a few occasions, that he would have a ton of descendants and a great name, but God had never been clear on any of the details, at all. What happened next must have surprised Abram a lot.
“Your name will no longer be Abram—instead, your name will be Abraham from now on because I am going to make you the father of many nations.” Well, this had never happened before. God hasn’t given anyone a new name up to this point, but it won’t be the last time. God will name Isaac Himself, just as He named Ishmael, and He will change the name of Jacob to Israel. And Jesus will give Simon the name of Peter almost 2000 years later. Getting a new name was extremely important because it meant that the relationship between two people was changing. In a way, they were becoming a new person because their role was going to be different than it was before. We’re talked before about how God is the great King of the Universe, right? And that when He created humans, we were created to rule over the world and everything in it like He would. We have God’s image and so it is up to us to do what He would do and treat His creation with respect—but He didn’t say that we were supposed to rule over each other, just the earth and the critters. The world is valuable and precious because God created it, along with every living creature. Instead of falling on our faces, we show God respect by how we treat the things that are His. Jesus actually talks a lot about that.
Jesus once told a teaching story, called a parable, about a nasty, wicked servant whose master went away to a far-off place (Matt 24:45-51). The servant got uppity and started beating the other servants, and he was greedy and eating and drinking everything in his master’s house. Not only wasn’t he being wise and caring for everyone and doing his job, but he was making everyone else’s lives miserable and acting like no one else needed anything. When his master came home and saw what was happening, that servant was punished and tossed out. Which, you know, in those days would be very bad because no one else would give him a job and he would have nothing! The people he was abusing, however, would still be in the house and very happy that their master was home and the wicked servant wasn’t in charge of things anymore. We have to make sure to remember that we are God’s servants and Jesus is our master and even though He isn’t here now, He is coming back and a lot of people who are hurting others and just taking whatever they want and wrecking God’s creation are going to be very sorry. But everyone who has just been doing what they are supposed to will be able to stay where He is. After all, Jesus is coming back to the King here, and not some other planet. We’ll still be living here for a long time.
When God gave Abram a new name, Abraham, He was reminding Abraham that he was a very special kind of servant to the King of kings called a vassal. Now, vassals were very important in Abraham’s world. There were great kings—like Chedorlaomer (who we called the big cheese because his name sounds like it starts with cheddar) and there were little kings of smaller places like the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, if you remember from Genesis fourteen and the battle of the five kings against the four kings. The little kings of Sodom and Gomorrah were called vassals. They were still kings, but they weren’t as big and powerful as Chedorlaomer. He was the great king, the Suzerain, and he had eight little kings who had to do whatever he said, called vassal kings. If the great King went to war, all the little kings had to go with him. But if someone went to war against one of the little kings, the great king and all the other little kings would come and help you out.
In the ancient world, the great king would sometimes give new names to the kings who served him. Giving someone a name doesn’t mean much because every parent does that, right? It’s normal. But when someone has the power to change your name from this to that, that’s special. When Adam gave Eve a name, it was because she didn’t have one–she didn’t have any parents! Adam and Eve were kings because God made them as His images in the world, so they could rule over it wisely. God didn’t need to change their roles—just the place they were living because the Garden was only going to survive without them in it. But on the outside, they were still created to be His image-bearers in the world. The gardening was a lot harder but that’s still what they did in order to eat and to make the outside world more like the Garden in Eden. They were going to be a mom and a dad, but if they had stayed in the Garden they would have been a mom and a dad there too. Their lives got harder but not everything changed. God was still there with them, watching them. Obviously Cain knew Him.
What God is doing with Abraham is very different. God took Abram from a bad place and put him in a better place—not the Garden but pretty darned awesome. God is renaming him because He making Abraham into something entirely new. Abraham isn’t changing but his role in the world is changing. The roles we have in this world are always changing. Each year, you get different chores than before as you grow to be more responsible. In school, you go up from one grade to the next as you learn more and more. You go from being a Kindergartener to a first grader all the way to being a senior in high school. Those are different roles in your life but you are still you. If you get a job, then you have another role as a worker. If you get married, you have a new role as a husband or wife and if you have kids then being a mom or a dad is an entirely new role. When your kids have kids, you become grandparents. But you are still you even though you have new names to the roles you are taking on.
God is still Abraham’s God—that hasn’t changed. Abraham is still the exact same person. But Abraham is being given a new role in life—the father of nations and the father of kings! Not only that, but Abraham is serving God as a little king, showing the world what God is like because right now they have zero idea. God is telling Abraham that even though he doesn’t have a kingdom, he is still a king serving God, who is the greatest King in the universe because He created it! Abraham’s name even has the words “father” and “nation” in it! God is saying, “Okay Abram, you’re my guy and so I am making another forever promise between you and me so that you will know for sure that not only will you have a ton of kids, but they will spread out all over the place and some of them will be kings too. Wowzers. Not bad for a ninety-nine-year-old guy with only one teenage son! And next week we will pick up the story where we left off but right now, I want to talk about what God says about giving new names to us too.
In Isaiah chapter 56, God makes promises to the kinds of people that no one thought belonged in His Kingdom, and one of the things He promises to do is to give them new names. Maybe it’s because they are like Abraham—outsiders. But when they come to God, they aren’t outsiders ever again because God accepts them as His children. That’s a good reason to get a new name. When my kids were born, their last name was different than mine. They weren’t Rosenquists. But we adopted them and when we went to the courtroom to make them officially our sons, their first names didn’t change—they were still Matthew and Andrew—but they got a new name because they were our family. They had been our family in our hearts long before they were even born, but they didn’t have our last name yet. When they got our last name, they got new birth certificates with our names on them as their mom and dad. It was like they came from me even though they didn’t. When we join God’s family, He gives us names that no one knows and not even us. And He gives us roles in His Kingdom.
I am a Bible teacher; that is my part to play in the Kingdom of God. Before that, I was a chemist working in a laboratory. My son Matthew is about to become a police officer and so he will be called Officer Rosenquist because he will have new and different responsibilities. Right now he has a role as a college student. But he’s still Matthew. My other son Andrew is going to school to become a certified nursing assistant. Those roles are very different from each other even though they will both be helping people. I think it would be a good idea to talk with the grownups in your life about the roles they have played in their lives. One thing for sure is that we never know for sure where we are going to end up and what we will be doing. But the same person can perform many different roles—even at the same time. Not only is Mark my husband, but he is also a son and a father and an engineer working to make safe, clean food.
When Jesus took His disciple Simon and renamed him Peter, it was because the word Peter sounds very similar to the Greek word for a rock. He did that because Peter was the oldest of the disciples and the leader. Peter wasn’t ready to be a leader yet, but Jesus knew who Peter would become and that he would be the apostle who would build up the Church in Jerusalem after he went back up to be with the Father. I have a new name but I don’t know what it is. That’s okay. It’s enough for me to know that He loves me enough to give me that name and that even before I believed Him, He knew His plans for me to be a teacher and to teach all of you. And not only that, but whatever I end up doing when I am too old to teach anymore. And the same goes for you when you believe Him and follow Him—you have a new name. It’s a name that no one has ever made fun of and no one can take away from you or make you feel bad about. Maybe you don’t like your name but I guarantee you would like the name God calls you by when He talks about you.
I love you. I am praying for you. Think about what your roles in life are right now and how they will change as you get older. Think about what you might like to do. And then, talk to God about it. He really does care what you think.