⁶⁸ “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
    for he has visited and redeemed his people
⁶⁹ and has raised up a horn of salvation for us
    in the house of his servant David,
⁷⁰ as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
⁷¹ that we should be saved from our enemies
    and from the hand of all who hate us;
⁷² to show the mercy promised to our fathers
    and to remember his holy covenant,
⁷³ the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us
⁷⁴ that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
might serve him without fear,
⁷⁵ in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.

In other words, the offspring of Abraham cried out to God for help (Ex. 2:23; Ex. 3:7-9) – a covenant cry, and God heard and responded in accordance with His blood covenant obligation. Of course, those crying believed their primary tormentor was the human being – Pharaoh, but the Lord knew it was really a supernatural being – Satan, and his grip upon us that was the primary problem.

For God’s response to his covenant partner’s real problem came not in the form of Moses or other Old Testament deliverers, but in Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, as Zechariah prophesied. Remember that in a blood covenant, each blood covenant partner is required to give all that He has, as necessary, if the covenant cry for help cannot be adequately answered with anything less.

The Father obviously believed that man’s problem with satanic oppression could not be solved by anything less than Jesus, God’s co-equal at the time of His being sent to the earth (Ph. 2:5); otherwise, the Father would presumably have utilized other means to adequately answer the cry.

So the question then becomes this: why did God obligate Himself to send Jesus, His only Son?

There can only be one reason, and it is the reason that the Scripture expressly supports: God did it so that we, the spiritual offspring of Abraham, would not doubt that Jesus is utterly sufficient to counter every conceivable form of satanic oppression that prompted the covenant cry for help.

Hebrews 6: 13-16 confirms this:

¹³ For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, ¹⁴ saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” ¹⁵ And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise. ¹⁶ For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation. ¹⁷ So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, ¹⁸ so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. ¹⁹ We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul…

In other words, God made the promise (whether of a child or of a territory) to Abraham, and then guaranteed it by giving it teeth, in that He secured the fulfillment of the promise by entering into the ritualized blood oath with Abraham (and his offspring) of Genesis 15 – the promise and the ritualized oath being the two unchangeable things of verse 17 above, such that God cannot lie. (“Once I have sworn in my holiness, I will not lie to David.” Ps. 89:35) This was so Abraham would be convinced of the truth of the promises, and therefore would have the faith/perseverance (Hbr. 6:12) to obtain the promise, as verse 15 above states.

And faith is what carried Abraham through the ordeal of not only waiting for Isaac to be born, but of sacrificing Isaac in Genesis 22,  because Abraham was convinced that God would have to raise Isaac from the dead to keep His covenant promise that “all nations would be blessed in him.” Hbr. 11:19 That is the only way Abraham was able to carry through obediently to God’s command to slay his son, at least until the angel of the Lord stopped him. He was focused on the stakes involved with God actually breaching the blood covenant, and he concluded that it would be much easier for God to raise Isaac from the dead than to breach His covenant promise concerning Isaac’s future offspring.

Likewise, the Lord knew that the Wilderness Jews would need faith (and courage) to enter the land of the giants in Canaan and prevail against them. God’s gift of the land of Canaan to Abraham was expressly set forth in Genesis 15. God’s failure to deliver the land to Joshua and Abraham’s offspring would have meant a breach of the blood covenant. This is why the Lord was so angry with the Wilderness Jews when they first failed to enter in such that the whole generation perished after spending another 40 years in the desert. See Numbers 14. They didn’t believe He would uphold His end of the covenant!

Other heroes of the bible were keenly aware of the blood covenant and the stakes in the event of a breach by the Lord. The three young Jews thrown into the furnace were no doubt aware of the numerous psalms promising rescue, and in addition the specific promise of Is. 43:2: When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, Nor will the flame burn you.

David himself expressly relied on the blood covenant to  summon the courage to challenge Goliath. David was a slip of a boy of around age 16 in 1 Samuel 17, but noted to all of the Hebrew soldiers listening that Goliath was “uncircumcised” (1 Sam. 17:26, 36). What David was saying was that Goliath had zero right to the land of Canaan, because God had gifted the land to the circumcised, Abraham and his offspring, like David and the rest of the Hebrews. For this reason, David knew that God had to give him the victory over Goliath. In fact there is no record of David ever losing a battle.

But we know that over the centuries Israel and Judah lost battles in the promised land, which may tempt us to discount or doubt the truth or continuing validity of the blood covenant, but should we? On obvious explanation for failure is not God’s faithlessness, but the faithlessness of the relevant Hebrew leaders.

And, frankly, failures plainly could not have been due to God’s faithlessness to the blood covenant because God is not dead, as the universe which He upholds is still here. And this, of course, is how we must think about our own lives and the lives of others when God’s promises seem to fail. The fundamental premise to start with is that it is not God’s fault, but stems undeniably from some aspect of disobedience or faithlessness on our part. The contrary approach, blaming God, is demonstrably false, as stated above.

Quite simply, understanding the blood covenant, then, means understanding the mystery of faith. Ps. 25:14 (NASB)

* *

Returning to the concept of making a gift obligatory, a good example  is a gift formalized into a legal Act of Donation. A person can do whatever he wants with his property. He can even tell someone he is going to give them something and fail to do so. But if he formalizes the intention to gift property into a legal notarized Act of Donation, then the gift is legally enforceable by the beneficiary if the donor fails to follow through.

Because once formalized by legal rituals, the intention to gift now has teeth, as there are now consequences in the event of a breach. In Abraham’s day it was the same, in the case of a promise to gift afterwards secured by a ritualized blood covenant.

* *

Equally significant is the fact that God entered into the blood covenant so that we, as Abraham’s spiritual offspring, would not doubt that Jesus is a sufficient response for all that has prompted our cry for help to God over the centuries – whether physical or emotional torment from the Enemy, financial hardship, or relationship heartbreak. For if Jesus was not sufficient to meet our needs, then God would be in breach of the covenant, and having cursed Himself with death as part of the Genesis 15 ritual, would die, and the universe would presumably then disappear as it is held together by Him. Col. 1:15.

But now that we understand that Christ had to be sufficient for all our needs, as God’s covenant response, fear dissipates, such that we can now live our lives “without fear”, as Zechariah prophesied above. Fear incapacitates us all.

Can you imagine living life without fear? This seems to be exactly what the Lord intended to accomplish for us by giving us the security of knowing the absolute sufficiency of Christ – that He is to us “all things pertaining to life and godliness” (2 Pe. 1:3)

Once we are actually able to internalize this revelation and let the fruit of its being planted within us sprout up, fear and anxiety are seen thereafter only in the rear-view mirror.

* *

And these are the wondrous reasons why there should no longer be any semblance of post-Christmas depression in the life of any believer.

Christ is sufficient for all things…  in fact, He is a lavish response to our cry to the Father (Eph. 1:7). We can all rejoice in that, and look eagerly to receive all that He has for us going forward.