Now it’s worth thinking about these two acts of consecration. Circumcision was the sacrament that had been given to Abraham so many years before. It was the mark of being a member of the covenant people, and it was accompanied by the promises of God. In this particular covenant, it was a case of God establishing the terms by which He would be the God of the Jews and the Jews would be His people.
Later on there were covenants that, in technical language, are called bilateral. That’s to say there are agreements to be carried out on both sides. But the covenant made to Abraham was not bilateral; it was unilateral, which meant that God established it and Abraham had nothing to do with it. God said, “I’m going to be your God and I’m going to be the God of your descendants after you, and because I’m your God and the God of your descendants, you’re going to do certain things.” In response, Abraham believed God and obeyed, because that’s the only thing you can do when God establishes a covenant like that. God said, “As a sign of that covenant, you’re going to circumcise all of the males in your family, and this is going to be a mark upon you and your descendants forever.”
In Abraham’s faith and obedience, he was receiving and acting upon the promises of God. You may recall that in this particular case it also involved the change in Abraham’s name. He had been called Abram before this, which meant “exalted father.” Yet he had no children. It must have been a great source of embarrassment to him to have to explain again and again when people asked, “How many children do you have?” that he actually didn’t have any. Of course, eventually he went on to become a father when Hagar gave birth to Ishmael. But that did not happen until he was 86 years old.
God said in the context of the establishing of the covenant and the covenant sign, “You are to change your name from Abram to Abraham,” which is a form of intensifying it. It’s like saying instead of your name being “exalted father,” it’s going to be “father of a vast, vast multitude.” And Abraham did it. He did it because he believed God’s covenant promises, even though by this time he was 99 years old and still had one son.
Abraham would’ve gotten his great group of people together there at the oasis at Hebron. He would’ve announced the change of his name, and I suppose some of the servants, when they heard he was going to do that, would’ve laughed about it. When they first heard it, they might have said, “No wonder. A name like ‘exalted father’ brought all that ridicule all those years. Wonder what he’s going to change it to. Maybe he’s going to change it to ‘father of one.'” But instead of that, Abraham changed it to mean “father of a vast, vast multitude,” and it indicated his faith in God, his faith in God to keep His promises as the God of the covenant.
You see, when we come to God in faith, that’s what we’re believing. We’re believing that the God who had revealed Himself in history and, in our case, primarily in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is a covenant-keeping God. Just as Abraham changed his name in his response to that covenant, indicating his obedience to what God said to do and indicating his faith in what God was going to do, so in a sense we also change our names. That is, we take the name of God upon us. We become Christians.
