Genesis 17: 1-8, 15-22
“A New Name”
Lesson for October 31 / November 1, 2015 Dave Taylor
“Now when Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; Walk before Me, and be blameless. 2 “I will establish My covenant between Me and you, And I will multiply you exceedingly.” 3 Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him, saying, 4 “As for Me, behold, My covenant is with you, And you will be the father of a multitude of nations. 5 “No longer shall your name be called Abram, But your name shall be Abraham; For I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.
6 I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of you, and kings will come forth from you. 7 I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you. 8 I will give to you and to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.”
…
15 Then God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her, and indeed I will give you a son by her. Then I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.” 17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said in his heart, “Will a child be born to a man one hundred years old? And will Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” 18 And Abraham said to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live before You!” 19 But God said, “No, but Sarah your wife will bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac; and I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. 20 As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I will bless him, and will make him fruitful and will multiply him exceedingly. He shall become the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. 21 But My covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you at this season next year.” 22 When He finished talking with him, God went up from Abraham.”
Introduction
In Genesis 12, we read and considered the story of Noah and the great flood. We discussed facing great storms in our life – the type of storms that defy explanation. We did not pretend to understand why, only that these storms offer and opportunity to meet God. You will recall that when we face inexplicable and unexplainable tragedy we only have two choices: turn to God or turn away.
Today, in Genesis 17,we see God making a promise to Abraham. An amazing, incredible, and, if we’re honest, an unbelievable promise. Abraham, at age 99, and his wife Sarah, at age 90, were going to have a child! And through that child, God was going to establish an everlasting covenant.
As long as we’re continuing in the vein of honesty, let’s be candid about this: it was impossible. It wasn’t that Sarah viewed herself as too old, she was. It wasn’t that Abraham believed it could happen, it simply couldn’t. We need to start this lesson is a place of candor: God asks the impossible. And He does not even pretend that what He asks is possible without Him.
Let’s start there…because that is where God started His lesson to Abraham.
“I am God Almighty”
God could have used any of His myriad of titles (i.e., the Most High God, the Lord Master, the Righteous Lord, the Lord who makes you Holy), but He used this one when He met Abraham: God Almighty1. That is a clue – He is about to say something impossible.
It is a commonly-held misconception that God will not ask you to do more than you are able. That's wrong: He will do it all the time. Paul taught that God “will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able” (1 Corinthians 10:13). “Tempt” refers to the processing of proving or test the quality of something (or someone). But this kind of “testing” is not the point God makes with Abraham when He announces Himself with the title of “almighty”.
In our lesson of impossibility – of what “can’t” be – let’s be careful. God asks the impossible, but the Bible is candid about the burden this can impose. Elijah was told by an angel to "Arise, eat, because the journey is too great for you." (1 Kings 19:7) In Psalms, we also read “I am benumbed and badly crushed; I groan because of the agitation of my heart.” (Psalms 38:8). The pain is real. The pithy response of “with God, nothing is impossible” can easily sound like we are minimizing the very real pain and sorrow that come to our lives. That is not what we are trying to do today.
1 In Hebrew, “El Shaddai”. See Strong’s 7706b. See also http://biblehub.com/hebrew/7706b.htm.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul was candid about his difficulties: “For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came [to us] in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead;
who delivered us from so great a [peril of] death, and will deliver [us], He on whom we have set our hope.” (2 Corinthians 1:8-10).
Paul notes that his own burden was beyond his own strength. Paul viewed this as an opportunity to know and trust in God. As with the great storms we considered in the story of Noah, Paul urges us to turn to God so that “we would not trust in ourselves, but in God.”
God often asks us to accomplish impossible tasks, because that is how we are meant to learn to know that God is “God Almighty”.
As the Psalmist asks, “From where shall my help come? My help [comes] from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth.” (Psalms 121:1-2). Consider this: God told Peter to walk on water. And Peter did it...right up until the part where Peter realized it was impossible to walk on water. As Matthew related the story, “But seeing the wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink…”
(Matthew 14:30). But note how he (and the other apostles) arrived at the point of doing the impossible: “He made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side” (Matthew 14:22) God sent his people into a storm, met them in the middle of the storm, and then, and only then, did Peter accomplish the impossible task.
“Walk before Me, and be blameless.”
With Abraham, God introduces Himself as all-powerful, but He does not yet let on what’s coming. Rather, He indicates the purpose of what’s to come with the declaration that Abraham should “walk before Me. And be blameless.” (Genesis 17:1). Some Bible translations use the word “perfect” or “perfected” in the place of “blameless”. (See, e.g., KJV: “walk before me, and be thou perfect.”)
As we’ve already noted, God sometimes asks the impossible. Is this another impossible commandment? In telling Abraham “be thou perfect”, is God setting Abraham up for failure? As Paul notes, “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) Therefore, it is unlikely that God is suggesting that the blessings that God have promised Abraham turn on the condition that Abraham never sin again.
First, God says "Walk before me". This is a Hebrew idiomatic phrase. It is a general term for going and a specific term for walking regularly in relationship or companionship with another or with a set of ideas. For example, we read that Noah and Enoch both
“walked with God.” (Genesis 5:22, 6:9). The Hebrew word for walk is much more akin to what Christians mean when we refer to our "walk". It is not referring to a commandment or a "work" that Abraham must accomplish (though we discussed our role in fulling our purpose in Genesis 12). In this case, God’s direction to "walk" is suggesting Abraham will "join with God" in His journey.
Then, God tells Abraham to “be blameless”. “Perfect” is used in some translations of Genesis 17:1 (e.g., KJV), but neither blameless nor perfect appear to mean "perfect" in the English sense of the word. It seems unlikely that God is commanding Abram to be “perfect” in the sense of being without flaw, as a precondition to the blessing He is about to provide. The Hebrew word is
“tamim”. In the New Testament, the equivalent Greek word is “teleiosis”. This is the word used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when He declared, “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” It refers to perfection in the form of becoming mature or fulfilling the purpose. For example, in Hebrews the author teaches “For everyone who partakes [only] of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.” (Hebrews 5:13-14, emphasis added) This is also similar to the instruction of Paul to the Ephesians with a purpose to “attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13, emphasis added) The KJV translators used “perfection” in the place of maturity in these passages. It is perhaps simplest to consider “maturity” as fulfillment of purpose.
As Strong explains it, “It is well-illustrated with the old pirate's telescope, unfolding (extending out) one stage at a time to function at full-strength (capacity effectiveness).”2
To bring this together, God told Abraham in Genesis 17:1-2 that, with God, Abraham could fulfill his (and His) purpose. The best illustration of this application comes from God, Himself. Before Jesus died on the cross, he declared “It is finished.” (John 19:30) – using the same root word to express the fulfillment of the purpose of God’s plan. The Almighty God has declared to Abraham that He is about to help Abraham fulfill his purpose, grow to maturity, and become perfect…with an impossible promise.
“I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.”
Note the verb tense: “ have made”. When God came to Abraham as the God Almighty, He had already done it, now all Abraham had to do was accept the call to fulfill it. Without belaboring the point, it is worth noting that God’s will would be fulfilled (See, e.g., Psalms 138:8 “The Lord will accomplish what concerns me”). But the story of Abram includes an interesting note: Abram appears
2 Strong’s 5055, see also http://biblehub.com/greek/5055.htm
to be fulfilling a purpose that his own father, Terah, had the opportunity, but failed, to perform. Recall Genesis 11:31, where we read that Terah took his family (including Abram) “from Ur of the Chaldeans in order to enter the land of Canaan; and they went as far as Haran, and settled there.” As we discussed a few weeks ago, at that time, Terah and his family (again, including Abram) worshipped false gods (see Joshua 24:2: “From ancient times your fathers lived beyond the River, [namely], Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods.”). But while Terah did not accept his call, Abram did.
Also recall Abram’s experience from the time God called him at age 75 (see Genesis 12:1) to this point in Genesis 17. Only 5 chapters have passed in the Bible, but 24 years have passed in Abram’s life. There appears to have been something transformative in those 24 years. Something that has changed Abram from a person who worshipped false Gods, to a man who would ultimately be a father of a multitude of nations. But, again, the way God made the promise to Abram indicates that the promise was already fulfilled – but there was a catch, as we can see…Isaac did not even exist, yet. And Ishmael, according to God, was not the son God was talking about.
“An everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you” and “I will be their God”
Abraham is introduced to God’s everlasting covenant. The word in Hebrew is “berith”; in Greek it is “diatheke”. These are amazing words; words used to describe the fundamental promise of God to His people – to be their God. And, perhaps not surprisingly, these are words that we struggle to comprehend in English. These words are variously translated as covenant, will, testament, treaty, promise, and agreement.3 But in reality, there is no simple way to comprehend the words.
Significantly, there is a bit of a linguistic divergence between the Hebrew and the Greek. In Hebrew, the word designates a legal bond initiated by a sovereign in which (in most cases) stipulations or terms governed the outcome of blessing or lack thereof for the inferior party.4 In Greek, it can often be associated with a will and testament. Martin Luther explained that "He who stays alive makes a covenant; he who is about to die makes a testament. Thus Jesus Christ, the immortal God, made a covenant. At the same time He made a testament, because He was going to become mortal. Just as He is both God and man, so He made both a covenant and a testament."
On some level, all of these words are correct, yet all are flawed and fall short.
• “Testament” (which is derived more from the Latin translation of the word, as applied in the context of a will) suggests no need for an intermediary – something which the New Testament plainly notes is a feature of God’s covenant. (See, e.g., 1 Timothy 2:5-6: “For there is one God, [and] one mediator also between God and men, [the] man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all.”; see also Hebrews 9:15: Jesus is the “mediator of the new covenant.”)
• “Promise” suggests no expectation from God as to our response to the everlasting covenant, but God does expect a response: “Let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” (Hebrews 12:1) (See also Hebrews 10:35-36: “Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.”)
• “Covenant” (especially in English) suggests a mutual obligation – as if God’s grace is dependent on our actions, which the Bible also cautions against. (See, e.g., Romans 4:2: “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.”) In sum, trying to understand the breadth of His promise is like trying to simplify the concept that God is Love – it is one thing to say it, but quite another to “get” it.
But none of this is perfectly descriptive of God’s purpose, which is, simply put in His declaration that “I will be their God”. This is the first of 28 times that God promises that “I will be their God” in the Old Testament. So what does it mean when God says He will be your God?
First, He has chosen you. As Jesus declared, “You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and [that] your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.” (John 15:16) And, in choosing us, God the Almighty has promised us His love, despite all our shortcomings. Peter explains, “But you are A CHOSEN RACE, A royal PRIESTHOOD, A HOLY NATION, A PEOPLE FOR God’s OWN POSSESSION, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; 10 for you once were NOT A PEOPLE, but now you are THE PEOPLE OF GOD; you had NOT RECEIVED MERCY, but now you have RECEIVED MERCY.” (1 Peter 2: 9- 10)
3 Strong’s 1242.
4 Literally, the word berith means “to cut”. This is the source of the phrase “to cut a deal”. See, for comparison purposes, www.torahresource.com/EnglishArticles/Heb9Covenant.pdf.
Second, He will change your heart. While we might struggle to describe His love and His promise with words, God will teach it to our hearts. "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Hebrews 8:10, quoting Jeremiah 31:33)
Third, He will change you. The change in our hearts can lead to change in our lives; a new life.
“5 And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.” 6Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. 7“He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son.” (Revelation 21: 5-7)
“Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, "I WILL DWELL IN THEM AND WALK AMONG THEM; AND I WILL BE THEIR GOD, AND THEY SHALL BE MY PEOPLE.” (2 Corinthians 6:16)
Fourth, He will be there. Period. "For I am the LORD your God, who upholds your right hand, Who says to you, 'Do not fear, I will help you.' (Isaiah 41:13).
Finally, while the covenant / promise / testament is not dependent on it, there will be a response by us: Not only does He promise that “I will be their God,” but He also promises that, in response, He will be God to us. Recall Jesus’s teaching about the analogy of the vinedresser in John 15: 1-7:
1"I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. 2"Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away;
and every [branch] that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. 3"You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. 4"Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither [can] you unless you abide in Me. 5"I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. 6"If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. 7"If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”
There is caution in this – notice that Jesus is clear with the promise and the warning to us. First, we are “already clean”. As with Abraham, it is the promise that God makes and the sacrifice of Jesus that made us “blameless” or “perfect”. But, God will “prune”
so that we “may bear more fruit”. Grapevines want to grow across the ground or out to the side, not up the wall or on the post, where they will bear the most fruit. If God is our God, He will send us in directions we do not know to accomplish things we cannot otherwise do. Then we will respond with more fruit.
“Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed”
There is an important distinction that is easily missed in this passage. Note that God came to Abram and announced Himself as
“God Almighty” - that is a clue about the nature of what is coming. On first reading, it reads as if God has just made some amazing and incredible promises to Abraham, responded by mocking those promises with laughter. The Hebrew word for “laugh” lends itself to several interpretations, including mocking.5 But it also refers to joyful laughter. We read that Abraham “fell on his face and laughed.” (Genesis 17:17). We do not read that God was angry with Abraham for his response, but it is clear that Abraham had a moment of doubt (or at least of “wonder”) - or, in the very least, he had a moment where Abraham asked God if Abraham was really understood what He meant. Abraham asked God if He was talking about Ishmael, which God responded, “No, but Sarah your wife will bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac; and I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him” (Genesis 17:19). Sarah, on the other hand, did laugh in a way as if she did not believe (see Genesis 18:14-15). Recall, however, that Abraham was told the news by God, Himself, who had prefaced the words with the promise that He was “God Almighty” (Genesis 17:1). Sarah, we read, heard the words from messengers later sent by God, while
“listening at the tent door”. (Genesis 18:10). While she initially denied laughing (see Genesis 18:15), her laughter did become joy as God fulfilled His promise with the birth of Isaac. Significantly, the name “Isaac” is derived from the same word as “laughter” or
“joy”.6
God fills us with wonder. Sometimes we laugh with joy and sometimes with initial disbelief and the miracles that He can bring in our life. We must remember that He is “God Almighty”. But He is also “Love”. That love is what we need to ultimately understand when we examine the key of this whole passage: the new name.
5 Strong’s 6711.
6 See http://www.reformjudaism.org/and-sara-laughed-and-laughed-and-laughed.
What it means to get a new name:
It would be easy to focus too much on the new name, itself. But let’s keep it simple for this discussion. Abram means “exalted father”. Abraham means “father of a multitude of nations”. As Timothy Keller puts it, if Abram means “Daddy”, then Abraham means “Big Daddy”. As we noted a few weeks ago, surely this promise has been fulfilled. Of the more than 7 billion people on the earth today, more than 4 billion people (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) view Abraham as the father of their religion.
But there is more to a new name than merely a newer, more exalted title. To the Hebrews, a name was an identity, not just a designation. Consider when God gave Jacob a new name "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed." (Genesis 32:28) God was not referring to an identification, He was referring to Jacob’s status.
Revelation 2:17, ultimately, is our guide, here: “To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.” Christians often look beyond the mark in this passage. The “white stone” is a reference to Greek culture, which would have been clear to John’s readers in Revelation. Put simply, on matters put to a vote, those entitled to vote would place a white stone or a black stone on a table. A person acquitted of a crime would know that because a white stone was placed on the table. In Revelation, we read, as a preface to the new name, we have “overcome” and been acquitted.
As a brief tangent, notice how God follows this pattern in His promise to Abram: “Walk before me; and be blameless.” (Genesis 17:1). But, in the promise described in Revelation 2, we see a “new name written on the stone”. New means “kainos”. This means
“fresh, different, unused, novel”.7 It does NOT mean “neos”, which refers to time. As in “My name was Dave, my new name is Chuck.” So the new name refers to a change in the character of a thing (or a person), not its next in line. Name means “onoma”.
This does not literally refer to a person’s name, but to the nature of a person, described by their name. In the Hebrew concept, a name is inseparable from the person to whom it belongs, i.e. it is something of his essence (Souter). That is why the Jews would not utter the name of Yahweh. Finally, Revelation 2:17 ends with a reference that is, in reality, the whole point. It reads “no one knows but he who receives it”. It sounds like hidden mysticism: there is a great secret name that you can learn by becoming Christian. But it is no secret. “Know”, here, refers to the form of something seen or perceived.8 Remember HIS name – Exodus 3, Moses on Mount Horeb,
13Then Moses said to God, "Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you.' Now they may say to me, 'What is His name?' What shall I say to them?" 14God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.'" 15God, furthermore, said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.' This is My name forever, and this is My memorial-name to all generations.
John 8:58 “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am.’" Then they tried to stone him…
APPLICATION: THIS IS THE NAME ON THE WHITE STONE, AND, ULTIMATELY, THE POINT OF THE PROMISE AND THE NEW NAME – the fact that God Almighty can take that messy, guilty life you’ve made…and give you a new name…that is His name. And as He promised, He will be your God.
As the author of Hebrews wrote about God’s promise: “God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us.” (Hebrews 6:17-18)
7 Strong’s 2537.
8 Strong’s 3609a.
