When God makes a Covenant, He really makes a Covenant. In chapter 17, Abraham is given the promise of a permanent Covenant, which means it will be around as long as God is around. And you know, that’s forever!
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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!)
This week we’re going to move ahead in chapter 17 to verses seven through nine. When I was a kid, they had these commercials on TV where they wanted you to call in and buy something—like knives that could chop a metal can and a tomato. And they would show you the knives and tell you the price and say, “But wait! There’s more!” And then they would tell you that they were sending two sets of knives for the same price! And if that wasn’t enough, they’d say, “But wait! There’s more! If you call within the next two minutes, we will send you a professional knife-sharpener free of charge. The set has a fifty-year limited warranty!” Which was silly because those commercials were on all the time, and they had no idea who called within two minutes of seeing it but we weren’t thinking straight. We were just impressed that a kitchen knife could cut a can in half. What they really wanted was to press us into a quick decision so that we would buy whatever it was without thinking about it first.
Of course, when God makes an offer, there are no gimmicks. And when God makes a covenant, there is no limited warranty. God will always keep His end of the promise even when humans don’t do their part. There are bad consequences when we disobey for long enough, but He is still faithful and always waiting for us to come to our senses. And when we are faithful, He will sometimes even add more to His promises. That’s what is happening in our verses today.
Let’s do a quick word review before we start, okay? Covenants are agreements between two people or two countries where they swear to do certain things and not do other things. For example, if you and I make a covenant, it means that I can’t do anything bad to you and when you need help, I have to come and help you. But people don’t always do what they say they will do, so covenants got broken all the time—like in Genesis 14 with the war of the five kings versus the four kings. If you have studied American history, then you know our government made many treaties with the Native Americans and broke them over and over again because we were stronger and could get away with it. But a covenant with God is always different. He’s the strongest and He could do unfair things to us, but He doesn’t. He is completely trustworthy. But having a covenant with Him means that He is honest with us about what He expects us to do and not to do; in exchange for that, He’s our God. That’s a really great deal for us.
The CSB uses offspring to describe Abraham’s children and his children’s children and their children until the end of time, but I like the word descendants. Abraham lived almost four thousand years ago, and his children are still all over the place. They are his descendants. Not me though. My ancestors fell out of the Bible back in Genesis 10 and I am just glad to be here worshiping God at all! God’s going to use the word permanent to describe His covenant and the word permanent means that it will last forever. It won’t wear out and God won’t change His mind. As long as Abraham’s descendants live as God wants them to live, they will enjoy the perks of God’s covenant but if they stop, they won’t be able to enjoy the good stuff. That doesn’t mean that God takes the covenant back, because whenever they would say they were sorry and do what was good again, He would forgive them, and their lives would be good again. Because He is their God, they can always depend on Him to forgive them. Let’s look at those verses now:
I will confirm my covenant that is between me and you and your children and your children’s children forever. It is a permanent covenant to be your God and not only that, but the God of your descendants after you. And to you and your future descendantsI will give the land where you are living—all the land of Canaan—as a permanent possession, to live in forever, and I will be their God.” God also said to Abraham, “As for you, you and your descendants after you forever are to keep my covenant. (Gen 17:7-9)
Wow, this is such a big change from Genesis 15! There, God told Abram that He would make or cut a covenant with him, and they said it like that because that’s what happened—critters were cut when most covenants were made. Those ones were actually cut in half and that was like totally normal in Abram’s world. But now in chapter 17, God is taking the covenant that He cut with Abram and establishing it with Abraham. So, what’s the difference between cutting a covenant and establishing one? Well, God is taking a promise to Abraham and his children and making it a permanent promise forever—not just a promise but something that is a done deal. Say I promise to take my kids to some awesome vacation destination and they believe me because they trust me, but then one day I say, “Look, I bought the tickets and paid for the hotel and the plane rides! We’re really going! Get your bags packed.” That’s when my promise is established through action. It’s just a promise until it actually happens. Although God promised Abram more descendants than anyone could ever count, He hasn’t done anything to actually make it happen yet. Abram and Sarai made it happen themselves, and right now they think they did the right thing, but God is telling Abraham that He Himself will be doing something about their need for kids. You can almost hear the music in the background telling us that Abram is getting a sick feeling in his tummy.
But God is saying something else important here—“My covenant isn’t just with you or with you and your children, but through all your descendants until the end of time.” Now, I couldn’t say that to you because I will die probably before a lot of you have grandchildren—but God endures forever. He is never going to stop being our God. He’s the one true God and the only God. He made the universe and everything in it and He has chosen to be very interested in all of us. He was interested in you before you were born, interested in you right now, and He will be interested in you when you grow very old. Jesus said that God is the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob even though they have been dead for almost 4000 years. Jesus said that God is a god of the living and not of the dead and so I don’t know how it all works but somehow, to God, they are all alive right now even though they are all dead (Matt 22:32). God doesn’t forget the people who die, and He doesn’t stop loving them. I think time must work very differently for God but that’s just my opinion.
God then says that the covenant is permanent, which means it is forever and will never wear out or expire. You know, you buy a gallon of milk and it is fresh and yummy but when it expires, it is no good anymore and it gets all chunky and smelly and gross. This covenant with God isn’t like that. It’s fresh forever. Like a Twinkie—no, that’s just a joke. They won’t really stay fresh forever, but they have so many preservatives that they can last a long time! The only preservatives in God’s covenants are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustworthiness, gentleness, and self-control. And boy are we glad that God has self-control because if I was God then all the people who don’t use their turn signals or don’t return their shopping carts might just up and disappear.
What is this permanent covenant? To be Abraham’s one and only God and the one and only God of all of his descendants until the end of time. Whoa, that’s one serious promise—He’s saying, “I am sticking with you and all of your children forever, no matter what.” Imagine if you were being bullied at school or at church or in the neighborhood or wherever, how much better you would feel if a really big kid or maybe a Marine told you that he’d always stick by you and wouldn’t ever abandon you. I don’t know about you, but I wish that had happened to me. I was like bully-bait when I was a kid—small, scrawny, and clumsy. I am not scrawny anymore but I am still small and clumsy! To Abram, that would sound like his kids were under special protection because they had a god watching them all the time. And in a lot of ways, they would be but it didn’t mean that bad things wouldn’t ever happen to them. Bad things happen to everyone and when we have it too easy, we forget about God and figure we don’t need Him. That’s going to happen a lot with the children of Israel and it is even true now. But when bad things happen, we can remember that God hasn’t abandoned us.
But you might say, “Hey wait, I am not related to Abraham at all! So, this isn’t about me!” But let me tell you something that John the Baptist said once; he told people that they shouldn’t feel superior just because they were related to Abraham because God can make Abraham more kids out of rocks if he wanted to. I must be a rock because my ancestors disappeared from the Bible all the way back in Genesis 10. And in John 8:39, Jesus said that Abraham’s children are the ones who do what Abraham did. What did Abraham do? He trusted God and lived in God’s ways more and more every year so that everyone around him would see how special our God is. Abraham wasn’t perfect, and he messed up a lot, but he kept learning how to not be a Babylonian because they treated people badly. Paul said that Abraham’s children aren’t all of Abraham’s children—we’ll see that more as we go through Genesis—but only the children of promise. And Paul then says that we are children of promise. Some of God’s children are Jews and others are Gentiles, but when we trust God as our God and learn to live in His Kingdom right now—we become the children of Abraham too. Just like Abraham did. God said “Follow me,” and Abraham did. Then Jesus said, “Follow me,” and we do. And it’s the same exact thing.
But wait! There’s more! God says, “The Land of Canaan, where you have been living for the last twenty-four years, will belong to your descendants forever, permanently, to live in it, and I will always be their God.” Ask the grownups you know about how they would feel if someone came up to them and gave them a house where everything was paid for and they could live in it forever as long as they were good neighbors. You know what? Their lives would be a lot less stressful. Just knowing that they had a home that no one could ever come and take from them and all they had to do was be good to other people. If it was you, do you think you would be grateful to the person who gave you the home and the land it was on? Especially if it was really good land and you could grow your own food on it and have critters? Abraham has no home right now—he has been living in a tent and moving from place to place for twenty-four years—and he is no spring chicken. That’s an old saying—do you guys know what it means? A spring chicken is young, just hatched. You guys are spring chickens. I am not a spring chicken, but I am still a lot younger than Abraham. Where was I? Oh yeah.
And the bit about being good to their neighbors? That was all just part of what God meant when He said, “As for you, you and your descendants after you forever are to keep my covenant.” But that isn’t all God was saying—God always wants us to be salt and light to the people around us, whether they believe in Him or not or obey Him or not. Did you know that salt makes everything taste better? Even cookies have salt in them—just a bit because it makes them better. Oh wait, jellies and jams do not have salt. That would be gross. Okay, salt doesn’t make everything better. But that’s not the point. The point is that people should be able to live better and see the world better and especially see God better because we are around them. God never tells us to be darkness and dog poop, okay? Now that I think about it, that’s a worse combination than I was even thinking in the first place!
God raised up Abraham’s family and made covenants with them because He needed a people to show the world what He is like. To do that, He did make their lives a lot easier by giving them land and homes and by making the soil very good for crops and feeding their critters. He promised to bless everything for all of them, if—if they would keep His covenant. Next week we will talk about the new covenant command. Parents, if you need help talking about this with your kids, I did a special program on this—Episode 180 on my Character in Context program, which I am linking in the transcript. And I already did a full program on circumcision for the kids a few episodes back. Next week, we will be talking about what it meant when it was applied to everyone in the camp and not just Abraham and his children.
Something that can be hard to understand is that when we read the Bible, we will find good things that are promised to everyone when everyone is living like God wants, and bad things that will happen to everyone when most people aren’t living in a way that makes God happy. The promises of the God’s covenant aren’t just on a person-by-person basis, like, “Okay, Miss Tyler, if you do everything right then nothing bad will happen to you and you will get everything good,” and say, “Okay Mister So-and-So, if you keep doing bad things then nothing good will happen to you and everything bad will happen to you.” We wish it was like that, but we know it isn’t. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, that’s just normal.
God makes promises to His people as a whole community, “The more faithful you all are to me and to one another, the better it will go for all of you.” And that’s always true. If all the people in the town love God and one another, it will be a great place to live, and they won’t struggle the same way they would if they lived in a town where a lot of people hated God and hated each other. And sometimes, people who say they love God are hateful to other people, but I John 4:20 says that anyone who says they love God but is hateful to other people is nothing but a liar. When we are cruel to others, we are being cruel to God too. When people aren’t living like God wants, there are murders, people stealing and lying, and all sorts of terrible things. When people live in a community like that, there is a lot of stress and hunger and hopelessness. People get sick and die—even the people who really do love God. There are wars and greed and people being mean to folks who don’t look like them or who are weaker. Some people are very rich while others go hungry. Some people take drugs because they can’t deal with how terrible things are, even though drugs make it much worse. That’s the opposite of the Kingdom of God, where people love, encourage, and take care of one another. But that’s not all.
God can’t afford to completely bless us when we are going in the wrong direction. If He does, then we will think we are just all that and a bag of chips even when we are just a bag of grape Jolly Ranchers or black licorice. Blech. And we see in the Bible that when everything is great, people forget God entirely. If you have a neighborhood where one person has millions of dollars and a mansion and everyone else in town is dirt poor—it isn’t because the rich guy is so great, it’s because there is something very wrong going on. Even if the rich guy is bragging about how much God loves him and favors him. In God’s community, things are better when the people are better and when they are working with God and not against Him. That doesn’t mean that people can’t come from the outside and do terrible things to them, but it does mean that a lot of the ways that people usually suffer just won’t happen because God is being honored and people are being loved. The covenant with God, Jesus said, really boils down to following two commandments. We have to love and obey God, and we have to love one another. We can’t do anything to anyone else that we would hate to have done to us—not ever.
When Moses gave them the commandments of God, they were designed for a certain culture. A lot of those laws don’t even make any sense anymore (truly, we don’t even know for sure what some of them meant) and others were just improvements on the way things were. They were a starting point and not an ending. The prophets told people that they needed to be even better than the Laws told them to be, and Jesus? Oh my gosh, Jesus told us that we need to work toward being so perfect that we never hurt anyone, not ever. Not even our enemies. Moses didn’t teach anyone how to be perfect—only Jesus could do that. Moses could only teach people to be better than the nations around them. And I think that’s always been the point of what the Law and the Prophets and Jesus have been doing. We need to always be better at loving each other than the people around us. When people who don’t know God at all act more loving and kind and generous than we do, it makes God look like He isn’t even real. It makes people want nothing to do with God. And you know what? That was me for a very long time. I knew about God and I even heard Him sometimes but I was angry at Him because of how the people who said they followed Him were treating me. I was angry that He was letting them get away with it. I was angry at the bullies down the street whose father was a pastor who would just say, “Boys will be boys,” when one of them hurt me. I was angry at the rich girls who were Christians who made fun of the way I dressed and looked. I was mad at the Christian boys who could be just as mean as the ones who weren’t. But my friend Tiffany was a Catholic and she was always kind—she was the real deal. She made a difference.
When the Christian people in our lives aren’t light and salt, even unbelievers know something is very wrong and it makes them angry, and angry at God too. God has a very difficult balancing act to do. He is trying to get the mean Christians to learn to love others and stop being prideful, while also trying to get the people who don’t believe in Him or are angry with Him to give Him a chance. Being around other Christians and especially when we are kids and just learning what to expect in the world, should be like eating a lightly salted cookie in the warm sun and not like trying to avoid dog poop while walking in someone’s yard at night. If we truly love God, and want to keep His covenant, then we have to clean up our yards and flip on a light switch. We should live our lives so that things will be easier for everyone and not harder. We should care more about whether people have enough to eat than we do about what holidays they celebrate or what they are wearing or how they look. We should care very deeply about whether they want to know God or avoid Him entirely based upon how we treat them.
Bearing God’s image, being His representatives to the world, is the biggest responsibility you will ever have in your life. Even if you become a heart surgeon or the President or fly an airplane or just whatever high-stress job you can think of, it will never be as important to people as what they think about God when they are with you. And no, we can’t do it all right especially not right away. It doesn’t work like that. But as we follow God and learn who He really is and what is most important to Him, He makes us more like Him in all the ways that count. In the ways that not only obey His commandments but go above and beyond to loving people so much that we don’t even need to look at the commandments because it isn’t in us to hurt anyone.
I love you. I am praying for you. I know for a fact that your generation is very special and that when you grow up, you will be much better at showing the world what God looks like than anyone my age. Honestly, we’re doing a terrible job of it and need you to fix it.