III. But Abraham appears before us invested with a MYSTIC character, which it is of great importance rightly to understand.
1. He is to be regarded as standing in a _federal_ or _covenant_ relation, not only to his natural seed, but specially and eminently to all believers. “The Gospel,” we are told by St. Paul, “was preached to Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.” “Abraham believed in God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness;” in other words, he was justified. A covenant of gratuitous justification through faith was made with him and his believing descendants; and the rite of circumcision, which was not confined to his posterity by Sarah, but appointed in every branch of his family, was the sign or sacrament of this covenant of grace, and so remained till it was displaced by the sacraments appointed by Christ. Wherever that sign was it declared the doctrine, and offered the grace, of this covenant--free justification by faith, and its glorious results--to all the tribes that proceeded from Abraham. This same grace is offered to us by the Gospel, who become “Abraham’s _seed_,” his spiritual children with whom the covenant is established, through the same faith, and are thus made “the heirs with him of the same promise.”
2. Abraham is also exhibited to us as the _representative_ of true believers; and in this especially, that the true nature of faith was exhibited in him. This great principle was marked in Abraham with the following characters:--An entire unhesitating belief in the word of God;--an unfaltering trust in all his promises;--a steady regard to his almighty power, leading him to overlook all apparent difficulties and impossibilities in every case where God had explicitly promised;--and habitual and cheerful and entire obedience. The Apostle has described faith in Heb. xi, 1; and that faith is seen living and acting in all its energy in Abraham.
A few miscellaneous remarks are suggested by some of the circumstances of Abraham’s history:--
1. The ancient method of ratifying a covenant by sacrifice is illustrated in the account given in Gen. xv, 9, 10. The beasts were slain and _divided_ in the midst, and the persons covenanting passed between the parts. Hence, after Abraham had performed this part of the ceremony, the symbol of the Almighty’s presence, “a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp, passed between the pieces,” verse 18, and so both parties ratified the covenant.