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“Live in My Presence, Be Perfect”
Chapter 8, part 2 of The Blessings of Abraham:  Becoming a Zion People
By E. Douglas Clark

Fourteen years passed, fourteen years of faith, of prayer, of service, of sacrifice, of missionary and temple work, of building Zion. Abraham was now ninety-nine, Sarah eighty-nine, and neither had forgotten the divine promises. But as deeply as they believed, and as much as they served, yet Sarah did not become pregnant as each month proved a new disappointment.

At some point, probably by now, she had entered menopause, but the sources record no expression of disbelief or complaint by her or her husband. “By all objective criteria,” notes a modern rabbi, “God’s promise to Abraham seemed impossible of fulfillment, yet Abraham continued to believe that the promise would be kept.” ^[1] And so did Sarah.

Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the Lord appeared to Abraham. The last time Abraham had seen the Lord was in heaven, when Abraham had been taken up to the divine throne and had been shown the future Zion as his descendants would build it. Now the Lord descended to earth, to Abraham’s abode, and spoke of their relationship, as Genesis reports: “I am God Almighty,” ^[2] the Lord began. “Walk with me and be blameless” ^[3] -or, as in other translations, “Walk in my ways and be blameless” (JPST Gen. 17:1), or “Walk in my presence and be blameless,” ^[4] or “Live in my presence, be perfect” (NJB Gen. 17:1). ^[5]

A rabbinic text recounts that upon hearing these words, Abraham was troubled as he mentally reviewed what he had done amiss. ^[6] Rabbi Amos Miller comments that “the righteous man never feels secure in his righteousness. He is always on guard against some shortcoming in himself and strives to improve himself. It is this sensitivity to any imperfection that makes him truly righteous.” ^[7]

Similarly, Latter-day Saints are warned that because “there is a possibility that man may fall from grace and depart from the living God,” the church is commanded to “take heed and pray always, lest they fall into temptation; yea, and even let those who are sanctified take heed also” (D&C 20:32-34).

In Abraham’s case, in fact, it was his very goodness that had prompted the revelation, according to Jewish tradition.  When the Holy One saw Abraham “walking in perfection and integrity of heart,” ^[8] He revealed Himself to him and commanded Abraham to attain “a perfect love,” ^[9] recalling Joseph Smith’s statement that we are liable to fall until we have perfect love, which comes “when we have a testimony that our names are sealed in the Lamb’s book of life.” ^[10]

It was this attainment that God wanted for Abraham, who was also extended an invitation to enter the same fellowship once granted to Enoch and his people. While still in mortality, they had “walked with God” (Gen. 5:22, 24), ^[11] not only Enoch but “all his people” (Moses 7:69), such that “the Lord came and dwelt with his people, and they dwelt in righteousness” (Moses 7:16).

Having read these passages in the patriarchal records, Abraham would have recognized this new commandment as an invitation to build and perfect the earthly Zion to the point where once again the Lord could dwell with His people on earth. If it was not in the Lord’s plan to translate Abraham’s Zion, yet it could still be perfected to the point that Zion’s King could dwell there.

An Important Revelation

According to Lorenzo Snow, the Lord’s command to Abraham to be perfect reveals something important about both God and Abraham. It reveals that God is a God of blessing, who desired Abraham to prepare himself for yet further blessings:

The command further reveals something about Abraham, who for all his greatness and valor, was yet mortal, subject to weakness and temptation, and needing perfecting:

It is a pattern, continues Lorenzo Snow, for Latter-day Saints, upon whom “the Lord proposes to confer the highest blessings . but, like Abraham, we must prepare ourselves for them … We also are required to arrive at a state of perfection before the Lord, [a process that] requires time and much patience and discipline of the mind and heart. ^[14]

Such striving for perfection is in fact the only road to Zion, for as Hugh Nibley emphasizes, “Zion is perfect, flawless, and complete – not a structure in the process of building. We work for the building up of the kingdom of God on earth and the establishment of Zion. The first step makes the second possible.” ^[15]

Hence as the Lord once commanded Abraham to be perfect, so the Lord has likewise commanded Abraham’s seed (see, for example, Matt. 5:48; 3 Ne. 12:48; and Moro. 10:32), a commandment repeated to the Latter-day Saints: “continue in patience until ye are perfected” (D&C 67:13).

Abraham’s own course in carrying out the commandment to be perfect is revealed in Epiphanius’ assessment of Abraham: he was “perfection itself in godliness.” ^[16] Abraham constitutes the pattern for the process urged by Moroni in his farewell passage in the Book of Mormon: “Come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness” (Moro. 10:32).

New Parents of a Covenant Community

The Lord’s command to Abraham was immediately followed by a promise: “And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and I will multiply thee exceedingly” (Gen. 17:2). At this, “Abraham fell on his face” (Gen. 17:2-3) and, adds the Joseph Smith Translation, “called upon the name of the Lord” (JST Gen. 17:3). The Lord then proceeded to explain that the new community to come through Abraham’s loins would be a covenant community, founded on ordinances revealed from heaven.

For Abraham personally, the commandment and God’s explanation of it pointed him not only back to his forefathers but also forward to his exceedingly numerous posterity, now memorialized by the momentous change in his very name.

“Your name,” declared the Almighty, “will no longer be Abram, Exalted Father, but Abraham, Father of a Multitude, ^[17] for I will make you the father of a multitude ^[18] [or ‘host’ ^[19] or ‘throng’ (FBM Gen. 17:5)] of nations” (GNTCBS Gen. 17:5).

The rabbis pointed out that the additional letter added to Abraham’s name, the he (pronounced “hey”) is one of the letters from the personal name of the God of Israel, Jehovah (Yahweh), ^[20] a fact perhaps symbolizing that God was sharing part of His glory and divine nature with Abraham.

As noted by a seventeenth-century clergyman, God’s covenant to Abraham of a multitudinous posterity was thereby “sealed” in his very name. ^[21] And becoming a father of many nations was one of the blessings that Abraham had long sought (Abr. 1:2), probably indicating that it was a blessing promised earlier to Abraham’s patriarchal forebears. In fact, God’s promise to Enoch – as recorded in the Book of Moses (Moses 7:51-52) – that his seed would inhabit all nations until the end of time may well have been the promise Abraham was seeking.

In Abraham’s case, however, this promise seemed particularly to point to Abraham’s mission: not to ascend to Enoch’s Zion as Abram, or “exalted father,” but to be the founder of the multitudinous Zion to be built anew on earth – as Abraham, father of a multitude. Abraham is the new father of the human family, receiving the same promise once given to Adam, as Abraham had read in the patriarchal records, that “a multitude of nations shall come of thee” (D&C 107:55).

It is the same concept reflected in the rabbinic tradition that by this name-change Abraham was given authority over all nations on earth. ^[22] Once again, from one – Abraham – would come many, a covenant community, even Zion. “He was but one when I called him,” declared the Lord through Isaiah, “but I blessed him and made him many. For the LORD will comfort Zion” (NRSV Isa. 51:2-3).

And the mother of this community would, after the decades of waiting and faith and faithfulness, be Sarah, as the Lord proceeded to explain:

Sarai’s new status was thereby reflected in her new name, Sarah, which connoted royalty ^[23] and “denoted that henceforth she would be ‘a princess for all mankind.'” ^[24] Her inclusion in the covenant was neither incidental nor an afterthought, but an essential part of God’s blessing to Abraham, who was now being crowned, according to Jewish tradition, through the merit of his wife Sarah. ^[25]

Abraham and Sarah were to “share a spiritual role which [would] reach out unto the nations of the world. He was to become … ‘the father of a multitude of nations’ and she ‘a princess to the entire world.’ Abraham could not be ‘a father of multitudes’ if Sarah were not crowned as a ‘mother’ of this multitude.” ^[26]

But in a very real sense, this bestowal of her new name was also a divine affirmation of the mothering role she had already played for decades.

For during her long agonizing wait to become a biological mother, Sarah had been a mother indeed to those around her as she had reached out in righteousness and compassion to those needing her assistance, spiritually and temporally. Sarah is the great example of what Sister Sheri L. Dew taught when, speaking to Latter-day Saint women, she asked,

The great exemplar is Sarah, who became a biological mother of multitudes only after her valiant mothering of multitudes to whom she reached out in maternal love and caring.

And now, having been designated by God as the biological mother of the chosen heir and given a name indicating “a princess to all the nations of the world,” ^[28] “her husband was crowned through her.” ^[29] In the words of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, they “attained together, and only together, covenantal sanctity, being elected by God to be the founders” of God’s people and community, ^[30] for “there is no covenant without Sarah … The covenant was entrusted to the two, man and woman.” ^[31]

As pointed out by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, of the few people in the Bible who undergo a change of name, the only woman to be granted the privilege was Sarah. Hence the dual change of name of both Abraham and Sarah “hints at a change of essence in both Abraham and Sarah’s being, in their whole way of life.”

It is a profound transformation that involved them both equally, which had a double dimension, Abraham and Sarah together. One striking indication of this duality is the recurrent mention of the two as one unit-‘Abraham and Sarah’ – which is not found elsewhere in the Bible … They are depicted as a team, as a couple, and invariably as equals … Abraham and Sarah saw themselves (and are thus seen by future generations) not as a couple raising a family, but as a people building a society, realizing an ideal: parents of a nation. ^[32]

They were, in other words, the parents and founders of Zion, whose inhabitants forever after would be commanded to look to their illustrious forefather and foremother.

Fourteen years had elapsed since Abraham and Sarah had relinquished the joyful expectation that their marital partnership would include participating in the greatest of God’s promises to Abraham – that he would have posterity. Now, to suddenly find out that their original expectation was correct overwhelmed Abraham with emotion, and he “fell on his face and rejoiced” ^[33] or laughed for joy. ^[34]

“It was a laugh of joy and faith,” notes a modern Jewish writer. ^[35] Abraham laughed, explained Barhebraeus, “because he rejoiced in the tidings.” ^[36] A midrash explains that “he rejoiced and was happy at heart that the Almighty had promised to perform this great miracle for him.” ^[37] Hence his falling to the ground was out of joyful worship, not doubt or disbelief. “Against hope [he] believed in hope,” wrote the Apostle Paul, and “staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief,” but “was strong in faith, giving glory to God.”

For “being fully persuaded that, what [God] had promised, he was able to perform,” he “considered not his own body now dead … neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb” (Rom. 4:18-21). Abraham’s joyful laughter was forever memorialized in the name that God now appointed for the newborn: Isaac, meaning “he laughs” or “he rejoices.” ^[38]

Rabbinic tradition commenting on this event speaks of Abraham as a kind of heavenly chariot surrounded by clouds of glory, ^[39] while Philo’s commentary on what God told Abraham on this occasion asserts that the Lord “carried him off and brought him up from earth to heaven . to Himself, showing Himself clearly.” ^[40]

Such a sequence of revelatory events, beginning with God’s appearance on earth and ending in heaven, is not unknown in scripture. ^[41] God’s revelation was a continual unfolding of Himself and His ways to His friend, making Abraham’s life a perfect illustration of Joseph Smith’s statement that “when we understand the character of God, and how to come to him, he begins to unfold the heavens to us, and to tell us all about it. When we are ready to come to him, he is ready to come to us.” ^[42]

In contrast to Abraham, the world in which he lived had gone far astray, denying not only the Atonement of Christ but also the resulting innocence of little children. And as Christ’s atoning blood was foreshadowed in the blood of animal sacrifice, so now it would be foreshadowed in the blood of circumcision that God was now commanding. It was “a sign and a seal of God,” ^[43] says an Armenian apocryphal source, or in the words of a modern author, a covenant “written into the very organ of male regeneration.” ^[44]

And so would it be for all of Abraham’s male posterity on the eighth day of life – a perpetual reminder that “little children are alive in Christ” ^[45] and not accountable until the age of eight years. For if circumcision was already extensively practiced in Abraham’s day, it was only adult circumcision; the circumcision of infants was something new. ^[46] Henceforth and for many generations, infants in Zion would bear the mark in their own bodies of the future shedding of Christ’s blood that had already made them “alive in Christ.”

Only with the advent of Christ, and the shedding of His blood that was foreshadowed by circumcision, would the law of circumcision be fulfilled and the requirement cease. ^[47] But the underlying spiritual reality represented by the circumcision would continue, the reality spoken by the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob, who foretold woe not for the uncircumcised, but for the uncircumcised of heart (2 Ne. 9:33).

Said the the early church father Ambrose: “Bodily circumcision is a sign of spiritual circumcision. Therefore the sign remained until the truth arrived. The Lord Jesus arrived, [who] circumcises the whole person in truth, not a minor bodily member in sign. He abolished the sign; he installed the truth.” ^[48]

Abraham was already living the truth; he would now bear the sign, though advanced in years. One might ask, if this had been God’s plan for him all along, why did God wait until Abraham was so old? A rabbinic text answers that it was in order to demonstrate, by Abraham’s own willingness to undergo this surgery, that it is never too late to convert. ^[49] But perhaps also that the forefather of the Savior might bear in his own flesh, aged though it had become, a sign of the blood to be shed by his Descendant.

Abraham’s blood had not been shed on the altar in Ur when the angel of the presence had protected him from the raised knife. Now, God was asking for Abraham to voluntarily shed a little of his own blood, perhaps foreshadowing the voluntary and supreme sacrifice of the greatest of his offspring, the Lord Jesus Christ. And Abraham, true to the charge, and in perfect emulation of his Savior “hastened to perform God’s precept with eagerness and joy, not for reward nor through fear of punishment, but out of love.” ^[50]

It is a striking similitude of the Savior’s acceptance of the burden asked of Him, who responded to the Father, “Thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever” (Moses 4:2), and then followed through by “lov[ing] the world, even unto the laying down of [his] life for the world” (Ether 12:33).

The pain of surgery and its aftermath were, as recounted in Jewish tradition, one of the trials of Abraham – he “felt the pain” ^[51] – but his concern, as always, was for others, beginning with those who were circumcised on the same day – “part of the trial lay precisely in putting so many loved ones to such pain.” ^[52] His thoughts reached out also to potential converts whom this new requirement might dissuade from accepting the gospel. Inquiring of the Lord on this point, Abraham was told not to worry, that the Lord was in charge and was the Protector of him and the world. ^[53]

Abraham proceeded to circumcise himself and all eligible males “on that very day.” ^[54] Not later in the day, but immediately, as seen in the Jubilees narrative, in which no sooner does the Lord finish speaking with Abraham than “Abraham did as the Lord told him” in having all eligible males circumcised, including himself. ^[55]

Jewish tradition recounts that Abraham “did not hesitate, and thought neither of reward nor pain, but obeyed” with “eagerness and joy.” As for the other eligible males in his household, he persuaded them “with kindly words,” explaining how fortunate they all were to be singled out by God and invited to keep this new commandment so as to enjoy a greater measure of the Divine Presence. ^[56]

This unquestioningly immediate obedience, particularly in this situation, stands out as one of the signal events of his model life. Having assumed for decades that the promise of posterity was to be fulfilled through Sarah, he had, as we have seen, finally abandoned that hopeful assumption, only to learn now that she indeed would become a mother.

One would think that he would go to her first. But intimacy to make the promise possible would now have to wait until the Lord’s new command of circumcision was fulfilled, thereby necessitating weeks of further delay before he healed sufficiently to beget a son. His prompt obedience on this occasion was later extolled among his descendants at Qumran as an example of the dedication expected of the members of the chosen community, ^[57] and is remembered to this day in Judaism, in which circumcision is always performed on the eighth day of life for each male infant, and preferably in morning, “thus emulating Abraham in his eagerness to undertake a divine command.” ^[58]

His example remains a supreme illustration of the first and foundational law of Zion: prompt obedience. “Instead of … procrastinating his obedience,” emphasized President Spencer W. Kimball, “Abraham went out and complied ‘in the selfsame day.'” ^[59]

Which day? According to the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, Abraham’s blood was shed on the very day that would be commemorated by Abraham’s Israelite descendants as the Day of Atonement, ^[60] which in turn would foreshadow the sacrifice of the Savior.