THROUGH THE BIBLE: Genesis 1..

Welcome to Cornerstone Reformed Baptist Church. Thank you for using and sharing our resources. What you're about to hear is God's Word from one of our teaching elders. We trust that God's Word will inspire, instruct, and bless you. For further teachings or information on our ministry, please visit us on our website at cornerstonerbc.

com. That's cornerstonerbc.com. Genesis chapter 17. We're going to continue with the corporate reading of scripture as we always do by the grace of God.

And this morning we found ourselves in chapter 17, a very important chapter in the development of the history of the story of redemption as we are studying it in the book of Genesis. So we're going to be reading the whole chapter and then digging into it as as we can now. Chapter 17. This is the words of God written from the English Standard Version. When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am God Almighty.

Walk before me and be blameless that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly. Then Abram fell on his face and God said to him, behold, my covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abraham, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout the generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession. And I will be their God. Verse nine. And God said to Abraham, Abraham, As for you, you shall keep my covenant and your offspring after you throughout the generations. This is my covenant which you shall keep between me and you and your offspring after you.

Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money, from any foreigner who is not of your offspring, both he who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money, shall surely be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh, an everlasting covenant.

Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people. He has broken my covenant. And God said to Abraham, As for Sarai, your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations.

Kings of people shall come from her.' Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child? And Abraham said to God, O, that Ishmael might live before you. God said, No, but Sarah, your wife, shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac.

I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. As for Ishmael, I have heard you. Behold, I have blessed him, and I will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation, but I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year. When he had finished talking with him, God went up from Abraham.

Then Abraham took Ishmael, his son, and all those born in his house, or bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham's house, and he circumcised the flesh of the fourth king that very day, as God had said to him. Abraham was 99 years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, and Ishmael, his son, was 13 years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. That very day Abraham and his son Ishmael were circumcised, and all the men of his house, those born in the house, and those bought with money from a foreigner were circumcised with him. Amen. This is the word of God, beloved.

Here in chapter 17, we have a jump of time. chapter 16 in verse 16 it says to us that Abraham was 86 years old when Ishmael was born and now chapter 17 it starts saying that Abraham or Abram is 99. 13 years have passed have elapsed from that moment that Ishmael was conceived and now this when the Lord comes and appears himself to Abram Now, the appearing of the Lord is very important in this chapter 17. And there is a way in which we could divide the appearing of the Lord in two different things. And this is what I want you to remember.

The Lord is appearing to Abram in chapter 17, and two things are going to happen. The second one is that he is going to give a little bit of framework to the promise that Abram had received in Genesis 12, 13, and that has been established or ratified in Genesis 15. He's going to come and going to say, Abram, I'm going to give you a son. Sarai is going to bear a son in the next year, and you're going to name his name Isaac. So the promise that Abraham had received that was kind of like the abstract promise from the lips of the Lord, now this promise has a little bit of a framework, has a structure.

In one year you shall bear the son of the promise and you will name that son Isaac. This is very important because by the naming of the son Isaac and also giving Abraham a time for the coming of completion of that promise, Now, the law is distinguishing between the two offsprings that are derived from Abram or Abraham. Thirteen years before he had conceived, Ishmael was born from Hagar, the slave. And this is the offspring of Abram or Abraham according to the flesh. He thought that the promise was not going to be fulfilled and then he takes Hagar and then she conceives a son to Abraham and his name is Ishmael.

This is the offspring according to the flesh. But now in chapter 17, the Lord is going to give the promise of the offspring according to the promise that was given in Genesis 12 and 13 and 15. So here we can see now clearly in Abram two different offspring. One that is according to the flesh, Ishmael, and another one that is according to the promise. Now we know that this offspring is named Isaac.

That is the second thing. But there's another thing that happens here, because the appearing of the Lord comes now with the establishment of the covenant by giving a sign of the covenant. And that sign of that covenant is circumcision. And I want you to notice the development of the Abrahamic covenant from chapter 12 to chapter 17. Because in chapter 12, a promise is given.

In chapter 13, a promise is confirmed. And then in chapter 15, as a brother explained to us a couple of weeks, a covenant is established. And Abram has faith in chapter 15 upon the promise that was given to him. And a covenant is ratified, as Paul will say in Galatians. So it's a promise that then moves into a ratified covenant, but here there's another component that is given to that covenant.

I sign, and the Lord calls that sign circumcision. Every male of your house will be circumcised, and new males that are born, they will be circumcised when they turn eight days old. This is a sign of the covenant. Beloved, this is very important because these two offspring that we find in Abraham, one according to the flesh and one according to the promise, that is Ishmael according to the flesh and Isaac according to the promise, are going to be sealed, both of them, with the sign of the covenant. The chapter finishes saying that both Abraham and every male in the house, including Ishmael, were circumcised that particular day.

So they received the sign of the covenant. Now, Ishmael was not the offspring according to the promise of the covenant. He was the offspring according to the flesh. But everyone who were living in the house of Abraham were sealed with the sign of the covenant. The Abrahamic Covenant is very important for the development of the story of redemption, beloved.

Because in Abraham, we find two different streams. One that corresponds to a promise given in Genesis 12 and 13 and ratified in 15, and another stream that comes from the flesh or obedience. If I can give you an illustration, it's like a coin. It's a coin that has two sides. One side is of the flesh, which is Ishmael, and the other side is of the promise, which is Isaac.

But both sides of that coin are sealed with the sign of the covenant, which is circumcision. So circumcision is on both sides. It's on the promise, Isaac, and it's also on the flesh, which is Ishmael. This is very important, beloved, because in Abraham, we have two streams that will be foreshadowing something that is going to come in the future. Paul says to us in Galatians that in Abraham there are two covenants or two streams.

One that belongs to the slave, that is Hagar, and the other one that belongs to Zarah, the princess. Now, the one that comes from Zarah is according to the promise, and this is the Jerusalem, this is the promise given by faith. But the other one that comes from the flesh is according to the strength, or is according to the power of Abram in his own strength. Why is this important, beloved? Why is it important for us to understand that in Abram there are two different streams?

Beloved, as I said to you during the Bible study, there was in the Old Covenant, it was thought that you will establish a real relationship with God by belonging to the people of the Old Covenant. That is, by belonging through the flesh and belonging through circumcision and by the keeping of the law to this covenant of Israel. Circumcision given to Abraham is a shadow of the law that will be given to Moses and Mount Sinai. Circumcision is a shadow of the law, the Ten Commandments and all the law that is given to Israel. And then people under the old covenant, they thought that in order to establish a real relationship with God, they needed to belong to that covenant of the flesh.

But then when Jesus Christ comes, He reveals that the real covenant that God established with His people was not the covenant of the flesh through Ishmael, but was the covenant of the promise that was given by faith to Abraham in Genesis 15. So the promise and faith was before the flesh, was before circumcision. Circumcision was a sign of the promise that was given to Abraham by faith. Genesis 15 verse 6 and 7 says that Abraham believed in the promise that the Lord gave him, and that was accounted to him as righteousness. He believed first, he had faith first, and then in chapter 17 he receives the sign of that covenant, of the establishment and the fulfillment of that particular covenant.

This is a type, this is a shadow of what happens in Jesus Christ, beloved. by the promise that we have in Jesus Christ. And spiritual reality is producing us by the Spirit. We believe and we have faith, and upon faith we have the seal of that spiritual reality, which is obedience. And that obedience is symbolized initially in baptism.

So baptism corresponds to that circumcision, because it's a circumcision of the heart. Something that happens internally. Beloved, In Abraham, we have two different streams. One that is obedience and the other one that is the promise. When the Lord Jesus Christ comes, He is the offspring.

He is the seed of Abraham. And He fulfills all the requirements of the law. And by fulfilling all the requirements of the law, He makes us as Isaac, sons of the promise. This is what Paul says in Galatians, that it's through Isaac, who is the son of the promise, that Jesus Christ, being the seed of Abraham, makes us Isaacs, makes us sons or children of that particular promise, beloved. It is not by the works of the law.

It is not by the works of circumcision. That's why the apostle will say that in Jesus Christ, circumcision or uncircumcision avail for nothing. But what really matters is faith working through love, because faith is preeminent to that sign of obedience, which is circumcision. Circumcision comes in chapter 17 as a sign of the promises that had already been given to Abraham. But now I want you to notice something very important here, that this is a coin with two sides.

One side is a promise and the other one is obedience. And let me submit to you that the side of the promise, you can not only track it to Genesis 12, but you can also track it back to Genesis 3, when the promise is given to the offspring of the woman. Abraham knew that the promise that he was receiving from God was not only a promise of physical land, but it was a promise of redemption that had been given to Adam and Eve. that they had been ejected from the Garden of Eden, that they were alienated from the presence of God, and that it was through the offspring of the woman that they will recover this communion that they had with God. And that could only happen if that offspring was one of us, was a man like of us.

That's why it's called the offspring of the woman. But nobody from us, no offspring of a woman would have been able to keep the requirements of the law. So that's why God sends his beloved Jesus Christ, his son, so that he will become one of us and he will be the recipient of that promise and then by grace in faith in him we will receive that promise beloved My words are not sufficient to explain and to communicate to you the depths of this glorious truth, because once men and women, Adam and Eve, are ejected from the garden, God starts to accomplish this story of redemption through the people of Israel, through the person of Isaac, and making all of these foreshadows of a reality that was to come, and that is salvation in the person of Jesus Christ. Amen?