Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Why the Abrahamic Covenant Still Stands

By Jill Szoo Wilson

The story of Israel begins with a covenant.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word for covenant is berit, a term that refers to a binding relationship established by oath, promise, and obligation. In the world of Abraham, covenants joined kings to their people, families to one another, and tribes to shared responsibilities. They were sealed with spoken promises, witnessed in public, and often marked by physical signs, written agreements, shared meals, or sacrificial rituals that bound those promises to future generations. When the God of Israel enters into a covenant, Scripture takes this familiar human framework and fills it with extraordinary weight. Covenant becomes the chosen means through which God binds his name, his promises, and his redemptive purposes to human history.

The first covenant that shapes the identity of Israel appears in the book of Genesis with a man named Abram, who is living among the people of Mesopotamia. He has livestock, servants, extended family, and an established life when the God of heaven speaks with startling clarity in Genesis 12:

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

With those words, the covenantal story that shapes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Israel, the prophets, the exile, Second Temple Judaism, and the theological world of Jesus of Nazareth begins.

God’s promises to Abram unfold in three movements that will shape every chapter that follows.

First, God promises land. The Hebrew word is eretz, a word that can refer to land, territory, or earth depending on context. Here, it refers to a specific inheritance that will eventually become central to Israel’s national identity.
Second, God promises descendants, even though Abram’s wife, Sarah, remains barren and no child has yet come.
Third, God promises blessing, declaring that through Abram, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” From its earliest articulation, the covenant carries Israel and the nations within the same promise.

The covenant deepens in Genesis 15 through a ritual Abram would have recognized immediately. Animals are divided, and their bodies are placed opposite one another, creating a path between the pieces. In covenant ceremonies of Abram’s world, both parties would walk that path together, publicly declaring that the fate of the animals would become the fate of anyone who breaks the covenant. The Genesis account then unfolds with extraordinary precision. Abram falls into a deep sleep. Darkness settles over the scene. A smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, visible signs of God’s presence, pass alone between the divided sacrifices. Abram never walks the path. God walks it alone. From the beginning, the covenant rests upon the faithfulness of God, who binds himself to promises that will shape generations still to come.

In Genesis 17, the covenant receives a permanent sign in the flesh. God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, meaning “father of many,” and changes Sarai’s name to Sarah. He then establishes circumcision as the physical sign of the covenant, a mark every male descendant will carry in his own body as a visible reminder that he belongs to the family God has set apart. The covenant now shapes identity, inheritance, family, worship, and the future of every generation that follows.

When Abraham dies, the covenant remains alive. In Genesis 26, God speaks the same promises to Isaac. In Genesis 28, God speaks the same promises again to Jacob as he sleeps beneath the open sky near Bethel. God repeats the same promises: Land. Descendants. Blessing. Nations. By the end of Genesis, these covenantal promises have passed through three generations and become inseparable from the identity of the people who will eventually be called Israel.

By the first century, nearly two thousand years have passed since God first spoke to Abram in Genesis. Israel has become a nation. Slavery in Egypt, deliverance through Moses, the giving of Torah at Sinai, life in the promised land, the rise of kings, the voices of the prophets, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the trauma of exile have all become part of Israel’s collective memory. The temple in Jerusalem has been rebuilt, and Jewish life once again gathers around worship, sacrifice, pilgrimage, and the reading of Scripture. Historians refer to this period, from the rebuilding of the temple after the Babylonian exile until its destruction by Rome in AD 70, as Second Temple Judaism. It is the theological, cultural, and covenantal world into which Jesus of Nazareth is born.

Through every generation, the covenant first spoken to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continues to shape who belongs to the people of Israel, how families preserve their ancestry, why the land of Israel remains sacred, how worship is ordered in Jerusalem, how exile is understood, and why many still wait for the promised Messiah. When first-century Jews speak of “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” they are invoking a covenant that still governs Israel’s past, present, and future.

This same covenant stands at the center of the New Testament. When Mary sings in the opening chapter of Luke, she anchors the coming of Israel’s Messiah in promises first spoken to Abraham:

“He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever” (Luke 1:54–55).

When Peter the Apostle stands in Jerusalem after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, he speaks to the people of Israel with the same covenant firmly in view:

“You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed’” (Acts 3:25).

The covenant God established with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continues beyond the boundaries of ethnic Israel and into the nations through Israel’s Messiah.

When Paul the Apostle writes to Gentile believers in Romans 11, he uses the image of an olive tree to describe the nations being grafted into Israel’s covenantal life, sharing in promises that had already been alive for centuries. The image is deliberate. Gentile believers do not replace the natural branches. They are brought into an already living covenant, nourished by promises first spoken to Abraham and carried forward through Isaac, Jacob, Israel, the prophets, and the apostolic witness*.

The covenantal vocabulary remains consistent because the covenant itself remains active. Paul the Apostle never presents Gentile believers as a new people detached from Israel’s story, nor does he present Israel as a covenant that has somehow expired. The God who called Abraham continues to govern the promises he first established in Genesis. Through Israel’s Messiah, the nations now participate in a covenantal story already in motion, joining a people, a history, and a kingdom that began long before the writings of the New Testament.

The New Testament reaches back into the Tanakh with extraordinary precision, grounding the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, the mission of the apostles, and the inclusion of the nations within promises first spoken in Genesis. From Abraham’s call in Mesopotamia to Peter’s preaching in Jerusalem, from circumcision in the flesh to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, from the land of promise to the hope of resurrection, Scripture reveals one God, one covenantal story, one unfolding kingdom, and one Messiah through whom that covenant still stands.

---

*The term apostolic refers to the apostles, the foundational witnesses commissioned by Jesus Christ and recognized in the earliest Christian communities as authoritative witnesses to his resurrection and teaching. Their preaching, teaching, and written testimony form the foundation of the earliest Christian witness preserved in the New Testament.