EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
3/22/2026/ 8:22 PM
My
Worship
Time Focus: PT-3 “The
Promise of the Abrahamic Covenant”
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Luke 1:72b-73
Message
of the verses: “and to remember
His holy covenant, the oath which He swore to Abraham our father,”
I will try and pick up where I left off from this morning’s SD on these
verses which will finish the commentary on these verses.
John
MacArthur writes “Israel has never possessed all the land promised to Abraham
(vv. 18-21). Only when the Lord Jesus
Christ takes the throne of David and establishes His earthly kingdom will
Israel experience the full blessings of the Abrahamic covenant.
“Genesis
17 reveals another important component of God’s covenant with Abraham. In verse 2, God said to him, ‘I will
establish My covenant between Me and you, and I will multiply you exceedingly,’
then repeated that promise in verse 4: You shall be the father of a
multitude of nations.’ To further
reinforce that point, the Lord changed his name from Abram (‘exalted father’)to
Abraham (‘father of multitude’), because God declared again, ‘I will make
you the father of a multitude of nations’ (v. 5).
“In keeping with that promise Abraham became not only the father of the
Jewish people, but also of the Arabs.
Earlier Sarah, despairing of even having a child herself, ‘took Hagar
the Egyptian, her maid, and gave her to her husband Abram as his wife’ (Gen.
16:3). The child born from that
union was Ishmael (v. 11), the ancestor of the Arab people. But Ishmael was not the child through whom
the covenant blessings would come:
“15 ¶
And 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 moreover, I will give you
a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples
shall come from her." 17 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?" 18 And Abraham
said to God, "Oh that Ishmael might live before you!" 19 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. 20 As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I
have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall
father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation. 21 But I will establish my covenant with Isaac,
whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year.’’ (Genesis 17:15-21; cf.
Romans 9:7; Galatians 4:28)
(Romans
9:7; Galatians 4:28)
“7
and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but
“Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.”
“28
Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise.”
“Three times in this chapter (vv. 7, 13, and 19) God
described His covenant with Abraham as an everlasting covenant. It will never be abrogated, but will
ultimately be fulfilled when Christ reigns during the millennial kingdom.
“Although
the Abrahamic covenant was enacted unilaterally by God and is thus
unconditional and irrevocable, the enjoyment of its blessings comes only
through faith. Genesis 22 illustrates
that principle. In keeping with His
promise, God had given Abraham and Sarah a son (Gen. 21: 1-3).”
(Gen.
21: 1-3)
“1 ¶
The LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did to Sarah as he
had promised. 2 And Sarah conceived and
bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him.
3 Abraham called the name of his son who
was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac.”
“Years later (cf. Gen. 21:34), when Isaac was a young
man, God gave Abraham a shocking command:
‘Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to
the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the
mountains of which I will tell you’ (Gen. 22:2).”
(cf.
Gen. 21:34)
34
And Abraham sojourned many days in the land of the Philistines.”
“Humanly speaking, this was incomprehensible. Isaac was the son through whom God had
promised to make of Abraham a great nation.
Would not his death, therefore, abrogate God’s covenant with
Abraham? But Abraham’s faith did not
fail, and he set off with Isaac to obey God’s command. According to Hebrews 11:19, Abraham believed
that after he sacrificed Isaac, God would raise him from the dead. But as he was about to plunge the knife into
his son,
11 ¶
But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said,
"Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." 12 He said, "Do not lay your hand on the
boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have
not withheld your son, your only son, from me." (vv. 11-12)
“Abraham, faith that God could keep His promise is a
model for all believers to follow (cf. Gal. 3:9).”
(cf.
Gal. 3:9)
“9
So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man
of faith.”
We can see from this part of this SD that Abraham was a man of great
faith, but it took a while for that faith to develop as I don’t believe that he
was a believer at that point in time, when he first left his land to go to the
land God would show him, but certainly
was a while after God told him to move from his land and go to the land that He
would show him to go to, and that land was what would become the land of Israel
some four hundred years later after Joshua led the children of Israel into it
once they came out of Egypt which took forty years of wondering in the
wilderness before they would enter it.
You can read that story in the book of Joshua. All of these verses, like every verse in the
Word of God are very important and can teach us great things.
Now we
have looked earlier about the birth of John the Baptist, as it is similar to
this story about Abraham and Sarah having a child when they too were very
old. When we get to chapter two we will
see the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Earlier in this chapter we saw the story of How Mary became pregnant
with Him. That is three miraculous births
that we have looked at, as Jesus, as stated will be born in the early part of
Luke chapter two.
3/22/2026 8:57 PM
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