Genesis 15

¹ After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” ² But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” ³ And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” ⁴ And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own sonshall be your heir.” ⁵ And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” ⁶ And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. ⁷ And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” ⁸ But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” ⁹ He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” ¹⁰ And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. ¹¹ And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. ¹² As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. ¹³ Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. ¹⁴ But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. ¹⁵ As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. ¹⁶ And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” ¹⁷ When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. ¹⁸ On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, ¹⁹ the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, ²⁰ the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, ²¹ the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”

I remember a lot of preacher stories from when I was a kid in church. I am referring to stories that were (I would later discover) repeated in churches all around the Bible belt because of their special evocative force and illustrative power. One of the great disillusionments of growing up in the Bible belt, by the way, is discovering how many of these stories you heard were not actually true! Even so, one of my favorites turned out to be true after all.

I probably heard a dozen times growing up the story of the tightrope walker who walked over Niagara Falls. He walked back and forth a number of times and did a number of tricks along the way. The people cheered wildly. Then he pushed a wheelbarrow back and forth across Niagara Falls. The people, again, cheered wildly! Then he asked, “Who here thinks that I could push a person in this wheelbarrow across the falls?” The crowd jubilantly expressed its faith in such an idea through loud cheering. But then he asked, “Wonderful! Now who would like to volunteer to ride in the wheelbarrow?” Then…dead silence. Complete silence!

The point of this wonderful story was clear: it is one thing to have faith and another to truly trust. Many believe in an idea but they stop short of staking their lives on that idea.

Again, it turns out this story was true! The man was Charles Blondin and his feats in walking over Niagara are simply amazing. Smithsonian.com reports that:

He crossed at night, a locomotive headlight affixed to either [end] of the cable. He crossed with his body in shackles. He crossed carrying a table and chair, stopping in the middle to try to sit down and prop up his legs. The chair tumbled into the water. Blondin nearly followed but regained his composure. He sat down on the cable and ate a piece of cake, washed down with champagne. In his most famous exploit, he carried a stove and utensils on his back, walked to the center of the cable, started a fire and cooked an omelet. When it was ready, he lowered the breakfast to passengers on deck of the Maid of the Mist…By the time he gave his final performance, in 1896, it was estimated that Blondin had crossed Niagara Falls 300 times and walked more than 10,000 miles on his rope. He died of complications from diabetes the following year. In nearly 73 years on this earth, he never had life insurance. No one, he’d always joked, would take the risk.[1]

And there you have it! “No one would take the risk!”

Let us talk about faith and trust, about “taking the risk” in what you profess to believe.

Abraham believed God but struggled to fully trust God’s promise to him.

Abraham has just come off of an amazing military victory followed up by his wonderful and fascinating meeting with the mysterious Melchizedek. It is interesting, in light of this fact, to find in Genesis 15 that God is having to comfort and assure Abraham and that Abraham appears to be struggling with a degree of uncertainty.

¹ After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” ² But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” ³ And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” ⁴ And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” ⁵ And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” ⁶ And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. ⁷ And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” ⁸ But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?

The great man, the great patriarch, father Abraham, is unsettled in his spirit. We know this because:

• God says to Abraham, “Fear not…”
• Abraham asks, “What will you give me?” and express concern about God’s promise of a lineage.
• Abraham seems to almost accuse God: “You have given me no offspring…”
• Abraham asks, “How am I to know that I shall possess it?”

Kent Hughes offers the interesting observation that “Abram’s great heart slows and spasms with doubt and fear. This is not uncommon to human experience following strenuous victories.”[2] That is true, is it not? Oftentimes doubt comes on the heels of great moments with God. C.S. Lewis says somewhere that at no time did he struggle with doubt more than immediately after some debate in which he had successfully defended the truth about God. In a December 24, 1930, letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis had written:

I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old skeptical habits, and the spirit of the age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address. Mind you I don’t think so—the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so.[3]

Maybe Abraham was going through something like this, though I do not think he was struggling with doubting God’s existence. Rather, I mean the struggle between a rational belief in God but a struggling trust in God. There is another example of this in the Bible, and it is found in Mark 9. Here, a father is watching his son be tormented by demons. The disciples have tried to cast the demons out but have been unable. Then Jesus Himself arrives on the scene. The exchange between him and the father is most interesting:

²¹ And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. ²² And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”  ²³ And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” ²⁴ Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

There it is: “I believe; help my unbelief!” I think that, in essence, is the cry of Abraham in Genesis 15. I believe in you, God, but I am struggling to truly trust in your promise. How are you going to do it, God? How? God first responds by reiterating the promise. He does so in a powerful way:

⁵ And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” ⁶ And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. ⁷ And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” ⁸ But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?

Before we consider Abraham’s wonderful response in verse 6, let us note that God does not scold Abraham for his questions and his struggles. Neither, by the way, did Jesus scold the struggling father in Mark 9. Instead, God points Abraham to the stars and says, “Look! So shall your offspring be!”

Beautiful! Amazing! Here is the divine promise illustrated through God’s own creation. Then we see Abraham’s response: “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Faith. Belief. Abraham receives the promise!

E.A. Speiser has observed of the phrase “And [Abraham] believed the Lord” (v.6) that the word “believed” [he’^emin] carries the basic sense of “to affirm, recognize as valid.” “In other words,” Speiser writes, “the result is not so much a matter of objective faith as of an absolute fact. Our ‘Amen” derives from the same Heb. root.”[4] Ah! Abraham gives his Amen! to God’s promise.

The New Testament writers, by the way, made much of Genesis 15:6. Paul, in Romans 4, quoted the verse thus:

³ For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”

And James, oftentimes and wrongly depicted as being at odds with Paul’s understanding of salvation, quoted the same in James 2 but added something interesting.

²³ and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God.

Abraham was called a friend of God. Yes! It is true. Friends have faith in their friends.

The New Testament writers pointed to Abraham’s belief as the model for all belief and built their understanding of salvation by grace through faith on it. Just as Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him as righteousness, so too we receive the righteousness of God through putting our faith in Jesus.

Genesis 15 represents therefore a high-water mark for the story of salvation history up to this point. We see Abraham believing in God, putting his faith in God, and it being counted unto him as righteousness. At this point this amazing truth is a declaration. In Christ, however, we find the explanation, the answer to how that can be: Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us by grace through faith.

God gave Abraham assurance through a sign that meant more than he could understand at the time.

Did you note that Abraham, even after his believing in verse 6, still returned to a questioning stance in verse 8: “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” That is fascinating to me. It tells me that it is possible to believe and to believe in admirable ways and still struggle to understand, still struggle to truly lean into what you believe. To this question God, again, does not rebuke or condemn Abraham. Instead, He does something quite dramatic and even shocking in order to give Abraham assurance.

⁹ He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” ¹⁰ And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. ¹¹ And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. ¹² As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. ¹³ Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. ¹⁴ But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. ¹⁵ As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. ¹⁶ And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” ¹⁷ When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. ¹⁸ On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, ¹⁹ the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, ²⁰ the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, ²¹ the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”

What in the world is happening here? God tells Abraham to bring a number of animals and cut them in half! Then He instructs him to put the halves across from each other thereby creating a kind of bloody path between them along which God Himself passes in the form of a fire pot and flaming torch. So great was the carnage that Abraham had to chase off hungry birds of prey.

Then God gives Abraham what he was wanting: “Know for certain…” (v.13). There is the certainty for which Abraham had looked (though it should be noted that God not only voiced a certain word about the blessing coming to Abraham’s children but also the bondage in Egypt coming to them!).

What can this mean, this bloody word of certainty? First, we should note that this kind of ritual was not uncommon in the ancient world. John Walton has offered a number of examples and their overall meaning:

In tablets from Alalakh, the throat of a lamb is slit in connection to a deed executed between Abba-El and Yarimlim. In a Mari text, the head of a donkey is cut off when sealing a formal agreement. In an Aramaic text of Sefire, a calf is cut in two with explicit statement that such will be the fate of the one who breaks the treaty. In Neo-Assyrian literature, the head of a spring lamb is cut off in a treaty between Ashurnirari V and Mati’ilu, not for sacrifice but explicitly as an example of punishment.[5]

This helps us get at what is happening. In the ancient world when two parties made an agreement it was not uncommon for them to inflict some violence upon an animal as a sign of what would happen to either party if the agreement was broken or violated by them. The Old Testament scholar Robert Alter further explains:

Covenants in which the two parties step between cloven animal parts are attested in various places in the ancient Near East as well as in Greece. The idea is that if either party violates the covenant, his fate will be like that of the cloven animals. The Hebrew idiom karat berit, literally “to cut a covenant” (as in verse 18), may derive from this legal ritual.[6]

Ah! So God is “cutting a covenant” with Abraham. Some see the antecedent for our notion of “cutting a check” or “cutting a deal” in this ritual. God is hereby giving Abraham an assurance that is greater even than His appeal to the stars. He is going to give Abraham something that Abraham can touch, can see, can smell, can remember so that if ever Abraham is plagued by doubts or wavering trust he can go back to this moment, back to this cutting of the animals in two.

But if these rituals were intended to call down curses upon any who would violate them, that suggests a fascinating thought indeed. R. Ken Hughes writes that “God…was symbolizing that if he were to break his word, he would be sundered like the butchered animals.”[7] Yes, God is putting God’s own name on the line in His promise! You might protest that this is absurd, that nobody could mete punishment out on God. And you would be right. That would be the point! God’s promise is as certain and strong and sure as God’s own name and might and power. The thought of God breaking His word is as ludicrous as the thought of somebody punishing God for doing so! Neither would ever happen.

Abraham now has something he can look at, something he can point to, something that God has placed in the realm of concrete history and human sense-perception. He has this ritual, this cutting of the covenant, this shedding of blood.

Whenever Abraham was tempted to doubt he only had to remember the covenant that had been ratified by the cutting, the breaking, of these animals and the shedding of their blood! His certainty, his hope, his trust, was now in the blood that was shed.

Stop. Think. Listen:

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is foryou. Do this in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:23-24)

Listen:

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. (Matthew 27:50-51)

Listen:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh (Hebrews 10:19-20)

Church, hear me: On the cross of Christ, God cut a covenant in the person of His Son. Jesus said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Corinthians 11:25).

The cross of Jesus Christ is the exclamation point at the end of all of God’s promises!

I will save you!

I will deliver you!

I will forgive you!

I will bring you home!

I will bring you through!

I will bless you!

I will never let you go! I will never let you go! I will never let you go!

But how, Oh God? How?

His answer: I have cut a covenant with you and the covenant that was cut is My only begotten Son!

Do you doubt? Look to the cross and believe.

Are you afraid? Look to the cross and take courage.

Are you wavering? Look to the cross and be strong.

Are you lost? Look to the cross and be saved.

 

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-daredevil-of-niagara-falls-110492884/

[2] R. Kent Hughes, Genesis. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2004), p.222.

[3] Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root, eds. The Quotable Lewis. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1990), p.165.

[4] E.A. Speiser, Genesis. The Anchor Bible. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964), p.112.

[5] John H. Walton, “Genesis.” Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009, p.85.

[6] Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses. The Hebrew Bible. vol. 1 (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), p.49n8.

[7] R. Kent Hughes, 234.