Ted Cruz’s politics aren’t just conservative, they’re theological. Jonathan Newman explores how dispensationalism shapes US ...

In the day that YHWH made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your seed I have given the earth, from the river of Egypt to the great river Perath.” ...

We’ll see the human solution … and the divine one. We saw last week the central point of Abraham’s (still, technically, Abram’s) life: God made a covenant with him.

Abram builds an altar, sacrifices animals as signs of his commitment to this covenant, and keeps guard at the altar so that the sacrifice remains intact, i.e., not stolen by birds of prey.

The author of Genesis, in our first reading, brings this point home when he recounts the forging of the covenant between God and the patriarch Abraham…then called Abram.

Here as before the emphasis is almost completely on God. Again repeating the promise to Abram (now Abraham), God commands him to circumcise every male as a “sign” of the covenant (17:11).