Reflections on God's Covenants: Laura Cason

A few years ago Ryan gave a sermon at the Well on the concept of covenant: what it means and how we are to participate in it as members of the body living after Christ’s death. He described the blood covenants in the Old Testament made between the Jews. In that time when a covenant was made between two people, they would bring animals and split them in two. They would then arrange the halves to form a pathway which the people entering into the covenant had to walk through to symbolize that should they break the covenant, they would invoke on themselves the same fate as the split animals. That night, Ryan specifically went into detail about God’s covenant with Abram, as described in Genesis 15:

But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?” So 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; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. 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 four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and 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 at 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 between the pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”

‭‭- Genesis‬ ‭15:8-21‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Ryan used these passages to talk about the unilateral nature of God’s promise to Abram. A covenant generally takes two parties to complete. Each one is responsible for their own half of the agreement, but in this instance, Abram was unable to fulfill his half of the covenant as he “fell into a deep sleep”. So, the Lord fulfilled both halves. There are many interpretations of this part of the story; but that night, Ryan’s interpretation was that God had put Abram into that sleep because He knew it was not within Abrams’s power to bring anything to the Lord that could satisfy the debt of the promise God was making to him. He fulfilled both halves of the promise and so ensured His own word would be born out. His strength was made perfect in Abram’s weakness. No act of man could change God’s will to fulfill His promises to His people. No lack of ability or insecurity or shortcoming could stand in the way of God fulfilling His covenant. He saw Abram in all his weakness and chose to prosper him beyond anything he could have earned for himself. I think of the sermon Ryan gave that night with surprising frequency. It seems everywhere I turn, the faithfulness of God’s covenant with us is evident. My understanding of faith shifted radically that night. For the first time, I began to understand justification although I couldn’t have called it that at the time. 

So, at Hot Summer Nights this year as Ryan shared his ordination papers with us and his writings on the doctrine of justification, I came to realize that in the same way, justification is a covenant made between God and His people. And just as He did with Abram, He fulfills both halves. God calls us to be more like Him and then makes us so. As soon as we accept Jesus as our Savior and become part of God’s kingdom, we are irrevocably made part of God’s holiness. No shortcoming or flaw or sin can separate us from Him, and just so, no deed or sacrifice or act of charity can bind us to Him. He alone is the way. We are made worthy by the justification we receive from God through Christ alone so that we may truly say we are no longer sinners but saints. Our identity was once founded in our sin. We were bound to it and controlled by it. But in Jesus’s death on the cross, we can be confident that, while we may still sin, we are no longer captive to its power and it cannot name us. Only God can name us, and He has named us holy.

Laura Cason (left) has been a beloved member of our community at The Wesley Foundation for some years now. She enjoys reading, planning parties, cooking and hanging out with her friends. We are so grateful to know and be loved by her through Jesus.