Genesis 17:3

Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael (Genesis 16:16), and he is ninety-nine when this chapter opens, so thirteen years pass before Scripture records God speaking to him again. Those years followed Sarai’s plan to gain the promised heir through her maid (Genesis 16:1–4), and Genesis 16 tells of the strife that came from it. Now God himself takes up his word to Abram again, at an age when a son by natural means is past hoping for. Sarai is old and barren as well, and later in this chapter Abraham laughs at the thought of a son born to a man of a hundred and to Sarah at ninety (Genesis 17:15–19).

“The LORD appeared to Abram” uses the covenant name Yᵉhôvâh, the name of the God who binds himself to his people and keeps faith with them. The verb is râʼâh, “to see”, and here it means that God let himself be seen. This is a direct and personal meeting, and God is the one who begins it.

God’s command follows his name, so the call rests on who he is. The verb hâlak is the common word for walking, used in Scripture of a whole manner of life. To walk before God is to live in his sight, aware that he sees you, and to go his way day after day. It is a call to steady obedience and to closeness with him.

“Be thou perfect” translates tâmîym, which means complete, whole, sound or without blemish, and when it is used of people, blameless or upright. Moses gives Israel the same charge: “Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God” (Deuteronomy 18:13). David takes it up as his own resolve: “I will walk within my house with a perfect heart” (Psalm 101:2).

Abram answers God first with his body. The verb nâphal means to fall, and to fall on the face is to bow down to the ground. The word for face, pânîym, is plural in form but always singular in meaning, and from the face itself it comes to mean the front of a thing and a person’s presence. In Scripture people bow this way before a king, a messenger of God or God himself, owning that the other is far above them. Abram is the head of a wealthy household, and here he lies face down before the Almighty.

He is one of many. Moses “bowed his head toward the earth, and worshipped” when the LORD passed before him (Exodus 34:8), and Joshua “fell on his face to the earth, and did worship” before the captain of the LORD’s host (Joshua 5:14). Isaiah cried, “Woe is me! for I am undone”, when he saw the Lord (Isaiah 6:5), and John “fell at his feet as dead” before the risen Christ (Revelation 1:17). The psalm calls all of us to the same posture: “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker” (Psalm 95:6). Reverence like this is the right answer to God’s holiness, and it is also how a heart is made ready to hear him.

The word at the heart of these verses is covenant, bᵉrîyth, a solemn and binding agreement, and the word is also used of an alliance, a treaty or a league. It comes in verses 2, 4 and 7, twice in verse 7. God first called Abram and gave him promises in Genesis 12:1–3, and in Genesis 15 he made a covenant with him over animals divided in two (Genesis 15:9–18). Here he renews that covenant and widens it.

Every part of it begins with God. In verse 2 he says, “I will make my covenant”, and the verb is nâthan, “to give”, a word used very broadly for putting, setting and making. God gives his covenant as a gift. In verse 4 the words “As for me” (ʼănîy) and “behold” (hinnēh) put God’s own commitment first, and he calls it “my covenant”. In verse 7 he says, “I will establish my covenant”, with the verb qûwm, which in this form means to raise up or set up. God sets the covenant in place himself, and the word “everlasting” in the same verse says how long it will stand.

The first thing God promises in the covenant is offspring. “I will multiply thee exceedingly” joins râbâh, which in this form means to make many or to increase, to mᵉʼôd, “very, greatly, exceedingly”. The Hebrew doubles the adverb, “exceedingly, exceedingly”, so the promise is as strong as words can make it. God had already promised Abram a great nation and a seed as many as the stars (Genesis 15:5), and now, with the heir still unborn, he says it again with greater force.

Verse 6 repeats it with a picture from growing things: “I will make thee exceeding fruitful”. The verb pârâh means to bear fruit or be fruitful, to sprout, grow and increase, and mᵉʼôd stands beside it again. For an old and childless couple this fruitfulness could only be God’s work.

Paul tells how Abraham received it. He “against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations”, and he was “fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:18–21).

“Thou shalt be a father of many nations.” The word for father, ʼâb, is used of an ancestor and of the founder of a people, and Abram will be both a forefather in the flesh and the father of a far wider family. The word for nations, gôwy (plural gôwyim), means a nation or people and is often used of foreign nations, the Gentiles. In Hebrew the phrase is ʼav hamon goyim, a father of a multitude of nations.

In verse 5 God puts this promise into Abram’s name. ʼAbrâm means “high father” or “exalted father”. ʼAbrâhâm means “father of a multitude”, and the verse explains it at once: “for a father of many nations have I made thee.” The name is built on ʼâb, father, with a root that probably means to be populous, and it sounds like hâmôwn, the word behind “many” in the promise, which means a multitude or an abundance and elsewhere a noise or tumult. In Scripture a name often says who a person is and what he is for, and when God gives a new name he gives a new standing. He later renames Jacob as Israel in the same way (Genesis 32:28). From now on Abraham’s own name announced the promise every time anyone spoke it.

“Have I made thee” again uses nâthan, and it is in the past tense. God speaks of Abraham’s fatherhood as already done, while Abraham has only Ishmael and Sarah has no child at all. Paul quotes this very line and says that Abraham believed God, “who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Romans 4:16–17).

Verse 6 adds a royal line. The word for kings is melek, and yâtsâʼ means to go or come out, so the kings will come from Abraham himself. Earlier God spoke of a great nation, and now he speaks of nations with kings among them. The promise was kept in Israel’s kings, above all in David, to whom God promised a son whose throne he would establish for ever (2 Samuel 7:12–16). It reaches its height in Jesus, of whom the angel said, “the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David”, and “of his kingdom there shall be no end” (Luke 1:32–33). He bears the name “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:16), and those who belong to him are “a royal priesthood, an holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9–10).

Verse 7 extends the covenant to “thy seed after thee in their generations”. The word zeraʻ means seed or grain, and from sowing it comes to mean offspring. “In their generations” takes in each generation in turn as it comes. The covenant is “an everlasting covenant”, and ʻôwlâm speaks of time reaching on out of sight, perpetual. God binds himself for all the time to come.

The heart of the covenant comes at the close of the verse: “to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.” All the other promises serve this one, because in it God gives Abraham himself. Scripture repeats these words as the centre of God’s dealings with his people. He says to Israel in Egypt, “I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God” (Exodus 6:7), and in the law, “I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people” (Leviticus 26:12). Jeremiah gives the same words in the promise of the new covenant (Jeremiah 31:33), and Hebrews quotes them of the covenant Christ brings (Hebrews 8:10).

Verse 8 adds the promise of land. God calls Canaan “the land wherein thou art a stranger”, and the word behind “stranger” (ger, or magur) describes a sojourner. Abraham lived there as a landless herdsman, so the land would come to his family purely as God’s gift. God first promised it when Abram came into Canaan: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7). Here it is “all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession”, in Hebrew achuzzath ʻolam, a holding kept for ever. The psalm sings of it: God “hath remembered his covenant for ever”, “Saying, Unto thee will I give the land of Canaan, the lot of your inheritance” (Psalm 105:8–11).

The verse ends, “and I will be their God”, with ʼĕlôhîym once more. The land serves that bond. It is the place where God’s people could live under his rule and blessing, worship him, and be “a light to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:6).

The God who appeared to Abram is the same God today. When one of his promises looks impossible from where you stand, his name is the answer: he is the Almighty God. The thirteen years before this chapter show that God comes back to his people after their own plans have gone wrong, and that what he has promised depends on his faithfulness. If you are Christ’s, you are Abraham’s seed, and the words “to be a God unto thee” are spoken over you. That is the deepest gift of the covenant.

His call to Abram also comes to you. Walk before him, living each day in his sight with a heart that is wholly his, and bow before him as Abram did, ready to listen. You walk in the strength of the God who gave the command, and the God who made Abraham a father of many nations has made you part of that multitude.