Genesis 17:1-2 The Importance of Blood Covenant

Understanding the importance of covenant will revolutionize your fellowship with the Father and create a foundation of trust in Him and the authority of His WORD. Understanding the reality and absolute bedrock of your covenant with Almighty God will cause your faith to grow by leaps and bounds to new dimensions of strength and confidence.

Ancient people knew the significance and power of covenant. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines covenant as a “usually formal, solemn, and binding agreement or promise usually under seal between two or more parties, especially for the performance of some action.” This sounds like our modern word contract, but many of today’s agreements are easily broken and often not worth the ink with which they are written.

A true blood covenant, like those understood and entered into by tribal societies, was a finding agreement: “until death do us part.” Even then, the commitment could last up to eight generations. But in Deuteronomy 7:9 God promised to keep His covenant and mercy with those who love Him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations. Through the eternal power of the blood of Jesus, our new covenant, based on better promises is forever sealed!

After Adam’s treason, God’s intense and unconditional love (Hebrew: hesed; Greek: agape) went into action with the eternal plan of redemption that was in the mind of God from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8; 1 Peter 1:18-20). He put into motion His plan to rescue man from his illegitimate stepfather, satan, to whom Adam had bowed his knee and yielded his God-given authority through disobedience (Luke 4:6; John 8:34;, Romans 6:16). In Genesis 17 we see God’s reaching out to a man named Abram and receiving permission to enter into a binding agreement with him.

God promised Abram to be a God to him and his seed and to bless and multiply him exceedingly (Genesis 17:2). He promised Abram land and that his barren ninety-year-old wife would have a son, through whose seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 18:18). He then bound Himself to Abram through the power of a blood covenant.

In a covenant, promises are made on both sides, names are exchanged, and the whole transaction is sealed in blood. Abram shed his blood through circumcision – the seal of his covenant with God. Since God is a Spirit (John 4:24), He had Abram shed the blood of animals to ratify His part of the covenant (Genesis 15:9-10). Then, according to true covenant rules, He gave Abram a new name – a covenant name. He called him Abraham, “the father of nations”, inserting a letter from His own Name (‘h’ Hebrew ‘hey’ from YHWH) into the middle of Abraham’s name. He did the same with Abraham’s wife’s name, Sarai, who then became Sarah: “mother of nations.” God then swore by Himself (Hebrews 6:13-17) to uphold the covenant, since there is none greater than He.

After Isaac, the son of promise, was miraculously conceived and born to a ninety-year-old woman and a one-hundred-year-old man, God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, through whom Abraham had been told his descendants would be as the sand of the seashore and the stars of the sky in multitude. Abraham obeyed: “He reasoned that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from which he indeed received him in a figurative sense” (Hebrews 11:19). Abraham was fully persuaded his covenant Partner would uphold His end of the covenant (Romans 4:20-21). He told the young men who accompanied them to the site, “Stay here with the donkey. The boy and I will go over there and worship and then return to you” (Genesis 22:5). Because of Abraham’s covenant with God and his faith and willingness to sacrifice his son, the way was paved for God, his covenant Partner, to sacrifice His Son. The way made for Jesus, the spotless, eternal covenant sacrifice, to legally come into the earth to redeem mankind.

When you receive revelation of the absolute, final authority of God’s covenant WORD, sealed in the eternal blood of Jesus, a new and unshakable confidence rises up in your heart that God’s unchanging WORD stands rock-solid, forever. Psalm 119:89 says, “Forever, O Lord, Your word is established in heaven.” It is guaranteed in heaven’s eternal integrity.

Jesus, the Lamb of God, the WORD made flesh, said, “Heaven and earth will pass away but My Words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33). And Hebrews 6:17-19, further revealing the steadfastness and unchangeableness of God’s Word, says, “So God, wanting to show more abundantly the immutability (Unchangeableness) of His counsel to the heirs of promise, confirmed it by an oath. So that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuse might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this hope as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, which enters the inner Place behind the veil.”

Unlike the old covenant that depended on His people’s ability to keep it, the new covenant, now between God the Father and Jesus (Galatians 3:16-20), can never be broken. You are in Christ Jesus by the new birth, made a joint heir with Him – forever bound, by faith, into this unchangeable and eternal covenant. When you believe and rely on the steadfastness and integrity of God’s unchanging WORD to you, nothing can stop the fulfillment of His promises. The believer who knows and stands on his covenant with the living God, like Abraham, can confidently stake his life on the integrity of his covenant Partner’s WORD, knowing that Almighty God has sworn by Himself in the blood of His own Son. The words of this eternal covenant are activated by faith, so if you’ll believe it, receive it, and act on it, it will surely come to pass!

This is from an article written in the Kenneth Copeland Study Bible.