The God Who is There: Part 3 – The God Who Writes His Own Agreements

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Theology from Genesis 12.

Hello. My name is Don Carson. This is the third in a series of 14 talks designed to help you uncover what the Bible says. Over the course of this series, we will come across a number of people the Bible mentions, people who play some sort of role in the history of God’s long and multilayered self-disclosure.

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Few, if any, are more significant than a man who lived and died about 4,000 years ago, about 2,000 years before Jesus. For much of his life, he was called Abram. That name means “exalted father.” According to the Bible, God himself changed Abram’s name to Abraham, a name that probably means “father of many.”

The name Abraham (“father of many”) is likely meant to evoke two of God’s promises to this man. First, that over time his progeny would grow and multiply and become many, for he is the ultimate ancestor of all Israelites, and second, that in him and in his offspring, all the nations of the earth would one day be blessed by God. Talk about father of many! If you want to begin to make sense of the Bible’s narrative line, of its plotline, you have to begin to make sense of Abraham. Welcome to the third talk in this series.

I have called this third session The God Who Writes His Own Agreements. How shall we think of the relationship between God and human beings? What kind of mental model do we have when we think of such relationships? In various cultures around us, we could easily delineate quite distinct models.

The first model is the super-soft grandfather. God is pictured as a benevolent gentleman with a long-flowing beard whose primary job is to be nice. When I was a student in Europe many years ago studying in Britain, I went for a while to Germany to improve my German. While I was there in the language school where I was studying (the Goethe Institute), there was a young engineering doctoral student from French West Africa who was also there to learn German.

Because I was reared in French and he was from French West Africa, every once in a while (twice a week or so), we would go out for a meal together and talk a language in which we were more comfortable, French rather than German, which was giving both of us headaches. As I got to know him a bit, I discovered he was married, and his wife was a medical student in London. He was in Germany studying German to go back to finish his doctoral studies at a German university in mechanical engineering, and his wife was studying medicine in London.

It wasn’t too long before I discovered that once a week or so he would go to the red-light district in town and pay his money and have his woman. By this time, I had gotten to know him pretty well, so one evening when we were out for a meal, I said to him, “I don’t mean to be too intrusive, but what would you say if you discovered that your wife were doing something similar in London?”

“Oh,” he said, “I’d kill her.” I said, “That sounds like a bit of a double standard.” He said, “Yes, but you have to understand. From the part of the world I come from, in our tribal structure, she would be dishonoring me. It would be a matter of honor. I would have to kill her.” I said, “But you told me you were brought up in a mission school. You were taught the Bible. You know the God of the Bible doesn’t mark on the curve … one set of standards for men and one set of standards for women.”

He said, “Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son mÈtier. God is good. He is bound to forgive us. That’s his job.” Now in fact he was quoting the words of Catherine the Great. It becomes a great line to justify any sort of guilt, doesn’t it? That’s one kind of model between God and human beings. He is a grandfather whose only job is to be nice and forgive.

Then there’s a second model. This is the model of deism. God is spectacularly great. Think of the unmeasured eons necessary to travel from galaxy to galaxy at the speed of light. How many galaxies are there? Where is the end? God made it all! He is bigger than all of it, incalculably huge, transcendently glorious.

So of course you can’t expect him to concern himself with your two-bit existence down here. You have as much significance to him as a nanoparticle has to us. Even if you’re concerned for the beings on your farm, you don’t really give a lot of thought to the earthworms. Why should God give a snap about you?

He is just so big and glorious and transcendent. He may have wound this whole thing up like a big watch, but now it’s just sort of running down, doing its own thing. Now neither of those models will square very well with the Bible. After all, already we’ve seen God made it all. He is that big all right, but he holds his image-bearers to account. The God who is described in the Bible is incalculably loving. We’re coming to that one.

It’s also described as spectacularly, undiminishedly holy and transcendent, such that when he confronts rebellion, sin, all that is tawdry and evil, he is (there is no other word for it) angry. He holds us to account. The first model, which is very common, can’t be squared with Scripture. The second model can’t be squared with Scripture because this God is intensely personal.

But there’s a third. We might call it the mutual back-scratching model. It’s very, very common in the world of polytheism; that is, in religions where there are many, many gods. These gods are all finite. They all have personalities, and many of them have their quirks and their weaknesses and their own evils and eccentricities and sins. They have their own needs.

The way such pagan religion works is you go to the temple of the particular god in question, and you give the god the kind of thing that god wants. You scratch their back, and then maybe that god will give you what you want. So you want to make a nice safe sea voyage in the first-century in the Mediterranean world? You go to the temple of Neptune, the god of the sea. You offer the appropriate sacrifices, and you hope and pray, therefore, that the god of the sea will keep the sea calm, and you have a safe trip.

You have to give a major speech to your stockholders? Well, fair enough. Then you go to the god of communication: Hermes in the Greek world, Mercury in the Latin world. You offer the appropriate sacrifices. You scratch the god’s back. The god scratches your back. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat arrangement. “You scratch my back; I scratch yours.” That’s the relationship between the gods and us. Do you see?

You live in a certain kind of fear that you haven’t paid enough or scratched appropriately, or maybe the god in question is particularly bad-tempered. It has to be acknowledged that there are some people who think of themselves as Christians who think their relationship with God is of this “you scratch my back; I scratch your back” kind of thing.

Provided you’re good enough, you’ll get married happily. Provided you have your devotions every day, you’ll live a long life and won’t get cancer until you’re at least 96. Provided you’re honest at work, you won’t lose your job the way others will who really deserve to lose them a lot more than you do. Provided I always say my prayers, my kids will never rebel. You scratch my back; I scratch your back.

The problem with this model, of course, is it presupposes the God of the Bible has needs and, therefore, you really can offer him something he needs and wants. That’s why it’s a barter system. That’s why it’s a “you scratch my back; I scratch your back” sort of system. That’s why the system works in theory in polytheism. The gods are all finite, and they do have needs.

But supposing you deal with a God who has no needs, what are you going to offer him? Paul understands that. Paul, a first-century preacher. Paul, who preaches after Jesus has come and died and risen again. Paul, who was trying to explain the difference between the God of the Bible and the surrounding paganism. We find him, for example, in the great, learned city of Athens. At the time, Athens had the reputation for being the most learned city in the world, followed by Alexandria in Egypt. Perhaps Tarsus was next.

When he gives his address to some philosophers and teachers in Athens, he tries to explain what his view of God is over against theirs. Theirs is a world of gods, and the very nature of their religion is, “You scratch my back; I scratch your back.” But he says (Acts, chapter 17, verse 24), “The God who made the world and everything in it …” There’s creation, Genesis 1 and 2. “… is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.”

He doesn’t mean by that that God may not disclose himself in a temple in some sense. What he means is God cannot be reduced to the temple where he is manipulated and domesticated by a priestly class. You can’t get him into a position where you can manipulate him to do your will because he is in a certain temple and certain priests who are in the know can figure out exactly what sacrifices to offer and exactly what ritual to go through provided you pay with enough cash.

The God of the Bible is too big for that. He made everything, and he is sovereign over the whole lot. Then he says this: “And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything.” Isn’t that remarkable? God doesn’t need you. He certainly doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need our praise bands. It’s not as if God gets to Thursday afternoon and starts saying, “Oh boy, I can hardly wait till Sunday when they crack out those guitars again. I’m feeling pretty lonely. I need to be stroked up here.”

He doesn’t need our worship. He doesn’t need our money. He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need anything. In eternity past, before there was anything, God was, and he was entirely full of joy and contentment. Even then, he was a loving God because in the complexities of God’s oneness (in categories we’ll see in due course as this series goes on), the Father loved the Son. We’ll come to those categories.

There was an otherness right within God himself. He didn’t make us because he was lonely and thought, “You know, my job as God will be a little more palatable if I make an image-bearer or two who strokes me once in a while.” He doesn’t need us. Now don’t misunderstand. That does not mean he does not respond to us, that he might not delight in us, that he might not be displeased with us.

It doesn’t mean any of those things. He does respond to us, but he responds not out of some intrinsic need in his own being or character but out of the entire volition of his perfections and will. He responds not because he does not foresee the future, not because he has let things get out of control, not because he has abandoned his sovereignty, not because he is not sovereign, not because he is psychologically damaged, not because he needs something but out of the perfections of all that he is with all of his characteristics and attributes.

He responds always in line with all of his attributes all the time. He is never less than God. Can you imagine how hard it was for Paul to get that point across to a bunch of sophisticated academics whose entire notion of religion was bound up with, “You scratch my back; I scratch your back”?

Then to make it even steeper, Paul adds another line. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. He is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”

We need him. This is also coming out of Genesis 1, 2, and 3. “Life and breath and everything else.” When the Lord Jesus was alive at the beginning of the first century, he taught that not a sparrow falls from the heavens without God’s sanction. The very hairs of your head are numbered. That means in my case, God is keeping a rapidly subtracting account. He knows them all, even the disappearing ones.

Every breath I draw is by his sanction. I am dependent upon him, Paul reminds us, for life and breath and everything else, for food, for health. I am an utterly dependent creature. I’m not the Creator. Now how are you going to have a relationship with a God like that? He is not just some mushy grandfather, and he is not distant. He is as sovereign as the deists want, but he is a lot more personal. He has no needs. You have nothing to barter with. In fact, the only reason you’re still alive is because he sanctions it.

Last week one of my friends who teaches at a seminary in Dallas (a good man, a teacher of the New Testament, has written major books, has three kids … one is a missionary in Siberia, one is a missionary in Russia, and one is a missionary in Afghanistan) was out jogging. He came home, laid down, and died. There was not a blessed thing he could do about it.

If your heart keeps beating, it’s because God sanctions it. If he ever says, “You fool, tonight your soul will be required of you,” you die. If he ever says, “Come home, my child. Now is the time. Your work is done,” you go. How are you going to barter with a God like that? “God, I’ll give you 10 percent.” He owns you. He owns your life. He owns the whole planet. What does that mean?

“Lord, I’ll become a missionary.” Will that make me a better person? “I’ll become a deacon at church.” No, no. There’s only one way you’re going to have a relationship with this kind of God, and that is if he displays sovereign grace, because he doesn’t owe you anything. You and I are rebels, and we have nothing to barter with.

The way sovereign grace (God’s decision to be gracious to some people) works out in the Bible is in a number of different structures. Sometimes what God does is graciously give promises of what he is going to do so people learn to take him at his word, to trust his Word, and look forward to what he is going to do. Sometimes God enters into formal agreements with them. Those formal agreements are called, in the Bible, “covenants.”

They often mirror covenants that were well known in the ancient world so that we sometimes speak of the covenant with Abraham and the covenant with Moses and so forth. He is the God who writes his own agreements, but here again, his grace is spectacularly displayed. We come then to Genesis 12. What’s gone on in the intervening chapters is not particularly pretty. Abominations have multiplied until God has wiped out half the planet with a flood. Just a handful of people are spared, but the leader, Noah, promptly gets drunk.

By the preceding chapter, there is rebellion towering through the land again, defying God. Now in chapter 12 we’re told, “The Lord had said to Abram …” His name is later changed to Abraham. I’ll keep calling him Abraham. “The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you.’ ”

Now he had been in a place called Ur in ancient Babylon. Then he moved to the city called Haran. Now he is being told by God to go to what would eventually become the land of Israel. Now God promises him these things (Genesis 12:2): “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

That’s a promise. Later on the promise is further elucidated. His descendants would be as the sand of the sea. His promised son from whom all of this would come would come from his old age. At this point he is 75 years old. He is an old man! His wife is getting up there too, but nevertheless, the promise is this child will come from the union of Abraham and Sarah, his wife.

Abraham goes through periods of doubt and uncertainty. He tries to short-circuit things by sleeping with somebody else. It’s a pretty messy story, but ultimately God keeps his promise. They have this child called Isaac. Isaac eventually marries, and his wife gives birth to twins. Before the twins are born, God says to the mother, “You have twins inside you. Let me tell you: the older will serve the younger.”

In that culture, that didn’t happen. But in God’s sovereignty, he chose the younger one before either child had done anything good or evil. Just out of God’s sovereign grace, he chose one above the other and predicted what would happen and preserved a certain line down through the years, generation after generation, generation after generation, until the tribes multiplied and multiplied and multiplied and eventually possessed the land.

In the midst of all of these promises, this one stands out too: “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” This is God graciously, sovereignly promising something. But then comes not only promise but covenant. In chapter 17, we read, “When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.’

Abram fell facedown and God said to him, ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: you will be father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.’ ” There’s a pun in the original. “I will make you fruitful. I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant.”

Then verse 9. “God said to Abraham, ‘As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: every male among you shall be circumcised.’ ” This is all very remarkable.

Then at the end of the chapter (verse 23), we’re told, “On that very day Abraham took his son Ishmael and all those born in his household, and he circumcised all of them.” Here is a covenantal structure. In between these two chapters (12 and 17) is another chapter that speaks of the covenant: chapter 15. At the beginning of the chapter, God says, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.”

Then at the end of the chapter (verse 12), “As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep.” He experiences a spectacularly weird vision. The setup for it comes when Abraham asks God the question in verse 8, “ ‘Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of all of this?’ The Lord said to him, ‘Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.’ Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two, and arranged the halves opposite each other.”

Now you have a heifer cut in two halves and a ram cut in two halves, a goat cut in two halves, one bird on one side, and one on the other. “Birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. Then as the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him.

Then the Lord said to him, ‘Know for certain that for 400 years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried in a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.’

When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed through the pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram.” What’s going on? This is bizarre. When we speak today of writing our own agreements, this is not usually what happens at the final signing ceremony.

There were different kinds of covenants in the ancient world. Sometimes you had covenants between a sovereign regional superpower and small vassal states. The regional superpower (the Assyrians at some point in time, the Babylonians at other periods of time, the Hittites at other periods of time) would arrange an agreement, a covenant.

Basically, the covenant said, “We will look after you. We will secure your borders. We will make sure you are protected against enemies. You will pay your taxes. You will show allegiance to us” and so on, so on, so on. It was an agreement between the two parties. Then there would be various curses called down. If either side does not fulfill the terms of this covenant, then may these disgusting things happen to them.

Obviously, it was in the power of the regional superpower to impose the nasties, not the other way around, but that’s the way they were written. Sometimes one of the signs of this was to take animals, tear them apart, put them side-by-side with a kind of bloody alleyway between the two parts, and then the two sides of the covenant would walk between the divided animals so as to signify, “May this be done to me if I break up the covenant. May I be torn apart. May I be cut in half.”

Abraham prepares the animals. Obviously, God isn’t a human being to walk with him between animals. He falls into a deep sleep, and in his sleep he sees a firepot, something to represent the presence of God. What is so stunning is that instead of the firepot moving between the animals side-by-side with Abraham so that the two of them are saying, “May it be done to us if either of us ever breaks the covenant,” God goes through all by himself.

He takes the full responsibility for the fulfillment of the covenant all by himself. That’s grace. Abraham will sin. Isaac (his son) will sometimes be a wimp. The next son, Jacob, learns some lessons on the long haul, but he is a trickster and a deceiver all the way through. He has 12 sons. One of them is sleeping with his father’s concubine. Another is sleeping with his daughter-in-law.

Ten of those sons can’t figure out whether to murder the eleventh or to sell him into slavery. These are the patriarchs! Still God doesn’t wipe them out. He has sworn in this symbolic act. They are to practice the sign of the covenant that they are children of the covenant. So they practice circumcision generation after generation. That’s fine.

Then as the years go by and the moral tide swings up and the moral tide swings down, it is horrendous to see how much damage and destruction are done. God still is forbearing and promises to keep his covenant. He will protect them. He will bring them into this land. From their seed will come someone through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

There’s one more chapter to think about: chapter 22. This is after the favored son, Isaac, has been born. There we’re told, “Some time later, God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham.’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied. Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.’ ”

He gets there. The son, who is about 13, says, “ ‘Father?’ ‘Yes, my son?’ ‘The fire and the wood are here,’ Isaac said, ‘but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham answered, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’ ” But in a horrendous scene, Abraham eventually stretches his own son out on this altar and is about to kill him, to sacrifice his own son.

A voice calls from heaven, “ ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied. ‘Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’ Abraham looked up, and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the place ‘The Lord will provide.’ ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.’

God called to Abraham a second time, ‘I swear by myself,’ declares the Lord, ‘that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.… Through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.’ ”

You might begin by saying, “Boy, oh boy! What kind of God wants someone to sacrifice his own son?” In the pagan religions of the time, it was not all that uncommon for parents to sacrifice their own sons. There was one particular pagan god who was pictured as holding a big stone pot in its hands. This stone god would have a fire built under the pot till it was glowing red. Parents would sometimes throw their screaming children into this pot. That was not all that uncommon. It was a mark of devotion.

But the whole point of this story is that is not what God wants. How can you possibly please God that way? To use this as a kind of test according to the cultural norms of the day, “Do you have the kind of trust in me that the pagans seem to have for their gods … their false gods, their murderous gods … that they’re willing to give their own sons?”

When the push comes to the shove, God says, “Don’t you understand? I provide the sacrifice. How can you ever please me by sacrificing your son?” This is in due course encoded into law in the Old Testament. It’s a horrendous crime to sacrifice your children, over against all the cultural pressures of the day. Don’t you see? This is a God with whom we can have a relationship, not because he has needs and wants us to sacrifice our children but because in sovereign grace, he provides a lamb, he provides a sacrifice.

What he wants of us is that we turn to him wholly and say, in effect, “You are God. You are Lord. You are sovereign. I am dependent upon you. I need you. I will obey you.” For all the failures in Abraham’s life and in your life and mine, God provides the sacrificial lamb. The stories and the accounts begin to multiply and multiply and multiply through the Old Testament in anticipation of a time when God will provide a sacrifice that far exceeds the value of some ram caught in a thicket. Let us pray.

We confess, Lord God, that in a digital world full of countless material blessings, in a world of nuclear physics and an astonishingly fast pace, it takes an effort to think our way through these passages. But we begin to glimpse that you are the sovereign God to whom we owe everything. The very heart of our rebellion is the desire to be God instead of you, to run things ourselves, to barter with you.

We make messes that are damaging to ourselves and to family and to the culture at large, to the relationships amongst nations, everything from petty one-upmanship to racism and genocide and everything in between. Yet at the heart of all of it, we confess, is this horrendous rebellion, this idolatry that demands we be our own gods.

Open our eyes, Lord God, that we may see your sovereign independence, your glory, your patience with us so that we are not destroyed, the way you took time across countless generations to show what a gracious, sovereign God you are until in the fullness of time you sent your own Son to be the Lamb of God who really does take away our sin. Open our eyes and our hearts, Lord God, that we may be drawn inevitably, inescapably to him. In Jesus’ name, amen.