Called into Covenant (and Out of Babylon)

We have a recurring theme in the Bible. One human race in Adam is fallen. God chooses someone out of the world and reveals Himself to them. They respond in faith. But that faith looks like a leaving behind of city or even of people. In this case there is an even more decisive break. It is not only one man named Abram responding to God, but God Himself is making a kind of final break—at least for now.

Up until the end of Chapter 11, the Genesis account has shown God’s dealing with the nations, or the whole world. The beginning of Chapter 12 signals the beginning of a new world. What makes that hard to see is that, instead of physically closing the whole book with something like the Flood, God sees fit to let the old world move forward and to begin the new world more like a single seed falling into a vast but dark and thorny wicked field.

A kind of death must occur to this new man in order for him to be any different than the rest. There is a statement of Jesus that will help us see what this looks like on the personal level:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him” (Jn. 12:24-26).

We will see once again that the covenant of grace was not a repudiation of the orders of creation. Grace perfects nature. It does not destroy it. So it was with Abraham. We will see three first steps to this redemptive-historical truth.

• Pilgrimage from the old world

• Promises from the new world

• Priority as the building begins

Doctrine. When the Lord calls His people out of Babylon, He will bless them and make them a blessing.        

Pilgrimage from the Old World

Chaldea was a synonym for the wider region called Babylon. This is not often enough stressed. 

“And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the splendor and pomp of the Chaldeans, will be like Sodom and Gomorrah when God overthrew them” (Isa. 13:19).

So when it says that this family ‘went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans’ (11:31), it means that they left that southern most city of Babylon which bordered the Persian Gulf.

About the family itself, an interesting mirror image occurs between the generations of Noah and the generations of this man Terah. Just as Noah had three sons, one cursed, so Terah had three sons, one blessed. Now ‘Haran ,’ who ‘fathered Lot … died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans’ (vv. 27-28), which, I think, is why they called the name of the place they stayed on the way to Canaan by his name, as a tribute. We have already seen how many readers of Scripture make everything about strict chronology. Here there is confusion for those readers about who all got the call and when. Calvin says,

“They who explain the passage to mean, that God spoke to Abram after the death of his father, are easily refuted by the very words of Moses: for if Abram was already without a country, and was sojourning as a stranger elsewhere, the command of God would have been superfluous.”1

This is important for two reasons: first, that Abraham remain the central character and that the manner of his conversion was direct and supernatural; second, that the first place (Ur) they left remains a type of us leaving everything behind. Leave your country here is analogous to Jesus’s words to the disciples:

“Follow me … [to James and John] in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him” (Mat. 4:19, 21-22).

Others suggest the break from family was not thorough enough, and that perhaps the call is reiterated with a finer point: ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house’ (12:1). But this is the first mention of a revelation to any of them. It was a hardly a flashback to Ur, since Abram is addressed (not Terah), Lot alone can come of the male family members, and it is clear that the departure connected to this was ‘from Haran’ (vv. 4, 5). Haran was not physically part of Babylon anymore, but even further north past the borders of the Assyrian empire. But it was a whole world system that Abram needed to get out of. There is a hint later on in the Old Testament as to what was at stake,

“And Joshua said to all the people, ‘Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods’” (Josh. 24:2).

When I am in conversations with Dispensationalists about the exact referent of “Israel” or with Baptists about the intended recipient of the covenant sign, I am fond of repeating a maxim—God invented the Jew. Of course I am not presuming that the pennies will instantly drop, but a seed has hopefully been planted in the mind that there is nothing “ethnic” about the people in question until God has separated them as holy. There is no magic blood here. Hold that thought.

Promises From the New World

It is typical in preaching this passage—if one has not done so already—to introduce the idea that Reformed theologians have called the COVENANT OF GRACE. We see its historical emergence here in this text. We may define this covenant roughly as “God’s promise of eternal life to a people in Christ, first announced to Abraham, fulfilled in Christ, and which forms the church.”

If we took all of the main texts where this gets unpacked to Abram (soon to be Abraham) there would be seven promises in all.

(i.) A great nation (Gen. 12:2).

(ii.) Blessed to be a blessing (Gen. 12:2-3).

(iii.) Your name great (Gen. 12:2).

(iv.) The land (Gen. 13:15).

(v.) Innumerable offspring (Gen. 13:16, 15:5, 17:5-6).

(vi.) Kings from his line (Gen. 17:6).

(vii.) An everlasting covenant (Gen. 17:7, 13).

We will have a chance to come to the land promises later on, but let’s just look at the “nation” one since it comes first.

When we dig deeper, we must inevitable come to the relationship between the Abrahamic covenant and the Mosaic covenant—that these were not two radically different covenants, but rather two “administrations” in the covenant of grace. The Mosaic was the “national stage” of development, when they had become that “great nation.” It is quite true that those later administrations (to Moses, to David, to the church in the New) are called “covenants,” however some nuance is unavoidable. 

For example, the covenant revealed at Sinai was one of the first fulfillments of God’s promise. Simply think of the beginning of Exodus, when it says of Israel that, “Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Ex. 2:23-24). So that deliverance and birth of the nation was rooted in the covenant promise and so an outworking of the same covenant of grace.

Priority as the Building Begins

Our last point here will not be a big section, but it is an important observation. Twice he builds an altar, first ‘at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh’ (v. 6); second,  to a hill country ‘with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east’ (v. 8). What is the significance of him building an altar? We have already seen that with Noah. We saw that this at least points to the priestly role of the patriarch. This is the place of sacrifice to the Lord. But there is another point backward to earlier Genesis. The phrase that he ‘called upon the name of the LORD’ (v. 8) was already used about Seth and his line from 4:26. This signified that these were God’s people.

I think the answer to the significance of these acts takes us right into our closing applications.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. There are two extremes in being “called out of Babylon” to a new “land” or “country.” One is to think that there is a one-to-one correspondence between every type and shadow and the application for us. So the Anabaptist tradition in the Radical Reformation saw one’s conversion to Christ as a literal and total separation from the “things of this world.” But which things? Clothes and bodies? And if not, where do we draw the line? The other extreme is to reduce types and shadows to just moral stories.

We can put these two extremes in other terms. Recall the debate about how the Noahic Covenant relates to the others. In the Radical Two Kingdom View, the covenant made with all mankind through Noah regards the common things by which God preserves the world. We call this the “secular.” Now this covenant that God is making with a particular people through Abraham regards the holy things by which God raises up a Redeemer for a new world. We call this the “sacred.” We take no issue with this division and even the language that those like Dr. VanDrunen uses—thus far.

However, if the city that Abraham forms, advancing through this world, is an avoidance of all of those creational mandates, then what we wind up with is a shallow commonality and sacred ghetto.  

Use 2. Consolation. What Abraham was promised starting in this passage, the Apostle Paul calls the gospel.

“And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Gal. 3:8).

We have a rule of biblical interpretation that has gone by many names. Augustine once put it in this way: The New is the Old concealed; the Old is the New revealed. We call this the analogy of faith. It says not only that we interpret Scripture in light of Scripture, but also that we interpret the less clear passages in light of the more clear passages. One of the clearest exhibitions of this principle on display in Scripture is the New Testament (principally in Paul’s letters) interpretations of those Old Testament texts which introduce the covenant of grace. If we ever find our own interpretation of one of these texts in Genesis on a collision course with Paul’s own Holy Spirit-inspired interpretations, guess which interpretation is wrong. 

This is the first of many such Pauline commentaries on Genesis, and it is good news in a short space. The gospel finds its root and spring in the promises that God made to Abraham. The ultimate way that this is the case is that from his line, the Christ would come. That is the ultimate blessing. But we will find that Abraham is also a type of the Christian.

In one passage of Paul’s—we have the pilgrim call out, and the payment that makes it possible.

“He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins”(Col. 1:13-14).

The Christian has been transferred (past tense) out of the devil’s city, and so the Christian must (continuously) come out of that place. It is a vast topic, and we are just getting started in the genesis of it.

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1. Calvin, Commentaries, I:341-42.