MORNING MESSAGE: John Cline
Reader: Ceres Guerrero
Genesis 15; Matthew 26:28
Genesis 15 is one of the most important chapters in the Bible. I will let that statement sink in before I start preaching…Last week, we preached through Genesis 14 and read there that Abram had rescued his nephew Lot from slavery by defeating a large northern army which had overrun five southern city-states, including Sodom, the city where Lot had been living. After Abram returned from his victory up north, the king of Sodom offered him a reward. Abram refused, saying, “With raised hand I have sworn an oath to the Lord, God Most High, that I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the strap of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, ‘I made Abram rich.’” (Genesis 14:22,23) As the story continues on in chapter 15, those two events are then referenced…
After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.” (Genesis 15:1)
God responds to Abram’s fears and doubts. About the military battle: “Is that huge northern army going to come back and get even with me?” About the king of Sodom’s reward offer: “I should have taken that money.” God knows Abram’s fears and doubts. “Abram, I will protect you and be your shield. I will be your reward and supply you with whatever you need.” God’s words, though, still did not assure Abram.
But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so, a servant in my household will be my heir.” (Genesis 15:2,3)
God’s promises, by this time, were sounding hollow to Abram. It has been at least two decades since God first spoke to Abram back in his homeland, in Ur of the Chaldeans. “Lord, what good are these new promises? I moved all the way here for nothing. You haven’t made a great nation out of me and my heirs. In fact, you haven’t even given me an heir. Where’s my son?” Abram desires for God’s promises to be fulfilled but he is now over 75 years old and starting to wonder whether God’s words have merit. As things stand, Eliezer, the head of Abram’s household will inherit Abram’s estate upon his death, this following the pattern in the Ancient Near East that when there is no blood heir, the highest-ranking servant will inherit the master’s estate.
Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” (Genesis 15:4,5)
God’s timing is sometimes slow to our way of thinking, but His timing always has a purpose – such as possibly giving us the time needed to learn to trust Him, or possibly Him knowing about events with other people or in other places which must first take place before the thing promised to us can occur. God would indeed fulfill the promise He had made to Abram by telling him, “Look up at the stars, Abram. Your descendants will be as uncountable as are those stars.” One descendant would be Jesus the Messiah, thru whom would come an uncountable number of spiritual descendants. That answer sufficed.
Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:6)
There are essentially two types of righteousness in our world: righteousness we accomplish by our efforts, & righteousness credited to us by God when we believe. Religions throughout history & around the globe have emphasized the first type: human performance and effort as the way to please God. But, with Abram a second type of righteousness is here introduced: God declares Abram righteous on account of Abram’s believing and trusting Him, not by any good thing Abram has done. This theme of salvation by God’s grace and one’s faith became a cornerstone of Christian teaching. This verse is quoted several times by New Testament writers and expanded upon. Consider these words by the apostle Paul:
What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, discovered in this matter? If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. What does Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:1-3)
Paul had been a devout practitioner of Judaism, one who attempted to impress God by obeying the Law and doing good works. It was only after Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and he was converted that Paul realized it was one’s faith alone, partnered with God’s grace, that makes a person “righteous” in God’s eyes, just as was first shown with Abram. In quoting that verse from Genesis 15 and explaining its meaning, Paul was writing to the church in Rome but he had earlier written about this theme in a strongly-worded letter to the church in Galatia in the area we now call Turkey, for that church had been misled into adopting a “you are saved if you keep the Law” belief.
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?…So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? So also, Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. (Galatians 3:1a,5-9)
There are Christians today who still practice salvation by works. Later in the early church, though – this is still true with some people today – there were some, though, who taught an opposite extreme, that because God’s grace and one’s faith alone saved them, that there is no need of keeping the Law.
You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone. (James 2:20-24)
Those words were written by the half-brother of Jesus, that is James, but the apostle Paul agreed with his words.
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:8-10)
Ok, let’s return to Genesis 15 where we find God speaking to Abram:
He also said to him, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.” (Genesis 15:7)
We have viewed a map these past Sundays showing Abram’s journey. Here, again, though, God’s words weren’t enough for Abram. He wanted proof.
But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?” So, the Lord said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.” Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. (Genesis 15:8-11)
God’s “proof” would be the making of a covenant with Abram using a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. Abram, living in the Ancient Near East where covenants were made, knew that in a covenant the practice was to sacrifice the animals, place their split carcasses of the animals on the ground, and create an aisle of blood in the middle separating them. The two birds chosen were not cut in half because they were small in comparison with the other animals but since there were two birds, they made a big enough pair, one laid beside the two sides of the heifer, goat, and ram, and on each side of the aisle of blood. In the A.N.E., a covenant would be made when the two parties walked through the animal parts together, saying out loud the terms of the covenant. The symbolism was this: if either party later broke the covenant, they were declaring, “Let this same shed blood be poured out on me.”
We moderns get squeamish about shed blood but there were no ancient civilizations that did not use blood sacrifices as part of making agreements or covenants. None! In our day and age, the mafia comes closest to creating a blood covenant when two mafia men cut their wrists, squeeze them together, and seal the deal of creating an agreement for life to work together, in other words, making a covenant. Their blood is mixed, running in each other’s veins for as long as they live.
In Genesis 15, Abram waits for the LORD to appear to make the covenant with him, expecting God to walk through the carcasses with him on the aisle of blood, but God doesn’t come right away, and Abram has to fight off vultures as he waits. That is an analogy of what we sometimes have to do while waiting for God to fulfill His promise to us. But, before God will appear to carry out His side of the covenant, we read that He causes Abram to fall asleep.
As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. (Genesis 15:12)
As Abram sleeps, God reveals to him in a “dreadful” dream that instead of Abram and his descendants immediately gaining the land God would give them, his descendants would spend 400 years in slavery in a foreign land (Egypt), a place Abram’s grandson Jacob and his family would end up living. But when the time of freedom would finally come to them 400 years later, Abram’s descendants would be gifted with abundant possessions which they would use in their taking of the Promised Land (that happened when Moses led them out). As they enter the Promised Land, God’s judgment on the Amorites and the other inhabitants of Canaan will occur, God reveals to him. Just as was the case in the ten plagues of Egypt, God’s judgment upon the people groups would really be upon their false gods. Abram also learns in that “dreadful” dream that he will live to a good, old age, but not long enough to see the prophecy fulfilled.
Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” (Genesis 15:13-16)
A “generation” was the period from a man’s birth until the birth of his first offspring. For Abraham a generation would thus be 100 years, the age Abraham was at the birth of Isaac. So, four Abrahamic generations would amount to 400 years. This covenant was turning out to be much more complicated than Abram had first imagined, but God would carry through on it. A modern contract is a legally binding agreement between parties built on distrust, “made to be broken”, as the saying goes. But a biblical covenant is a spiritual agreement that has a perpetual promise. A contract is transactional, performance-based, while a covenant is relational, acceptance-based.
When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking fire pot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. (Genesis 17:17)
What happened was both mysterious and “mind-blowing” in the words of Josh Howerton, who says about this event, “God wants to make a covenant, which is like a contract, with Abram, except in the Hebrew language it doesn’t say, ‘make’ a covenant; it says, ‘cut’ a covenant. And, in order to ‘cut’ a covenant, God tells Abram to go and get a bunch of innocent animals, slaughter them, and then make an aisle out of the bloodied pieces. What would normally happen in a covenant is the lesser being (Abram) would walk between the pieces, reciting the promises of the covenant, as if to say, “Hey, if I break the terms of this covenant, may I become like these slain animals”. But, in Genesis 15 something happens that occurs nowhere else in all of recorded Ancient Near Eastern literature: Just when Abram was going to walk the pieces, God puts him in a deep sleep and God Himself appears as a flame of fire and God walked through the pieces to make the covenant. In other words, God was saying, ‘If you break this covenant, I’m going to be torn to pieces.’ Howerton adds, ‘My friends, that is exactly what happened 2,000 years later. Jesus, the Lamb of God, was ripped to shreds at the cross. Why? We had broken the covenant, but God was walking the pieces.’” Wow! Going further, Genesis 15 finishes this way:
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.” (Genesis 15:18-21)
Now, at the start of this sermon, I proclaimed that Genesis 15 is one of the most important of all the chapters in the Bible. In closing, I will now review what we have learned today supporting that. Here are
11 facts about Genesis 15 which make it so important:
- This chapter is the first time God says, “Don’t be afraid”.
This was the first of the 365 times – one for each day of the calendar year – that God would make such a declaration to humans in the Bible.
- Abram’s bold honesty in challenging God and His promises (“Look, You have given me no offspring”) was the first time in the Bible that anyone spoke in such a manner to God.
King David in his psalms as well as later O.T. prophets certainly had that kind of relationship with God. God invites His people, even us, to be in such a relationship with Him where we can bare our souls.
- God would be Abram’s “reward”, the first time such an attribute about God is stated.
The members of the later tribe of Levi would, unlike the members of the other tribes of Israel, not be given land. God told the Levites that He would be all they would ever need as He would provide for them and be the “reward”, as it were, for their priestly service. Jesus likewise tells us that he is the answer to every need we have. Whether we require a “shield” or a “reward”, he will provide for us. There are already amazing testimonies of many fire victims in Los Angeles saying exactly that sort of thing. They are an example to us all but let us pray for everyone there to experience God in such a way.
- The dimensions of the Promised Land were here first outlined.
From Egypt in the south to the Euphrates River in the north to the Mediterranean Sea in the west and the Jordan River Valley in the east, God promised to Abram and his descendants this land. For a brief while, during the reign of King Solomon, the Israelites did control all that land, but they would later lose it because of their abandoning of God.
- This covenant shapes the rest of the biblical story.
Consider how often in the Bible appears this theme of Abram journeying from his homeland to go to a new place, but the person does not really know what lies ahead. Only God knows. That theme is still applicable to us today. None of us knows the future. Only God does. We simply need to obey Him and go to where He tells us.
- This was the first covenant with the Jewish people as a whole.
Abram would later become Abraham, the father of the Israelite nation, but the details of what that would mean were first spelled out here.
- God promised Abraham a son for the first time, one through whose descendants the entire world would be blessed.
Isaac, the son born to Sarah, would be the son through whom that blessing would come, as we will read in coming weeks.
- Salvation by faith and God’s grace alone, not by doing any human works or keeping any other laws, was here first stated.
Genesis 15 finds the words “believe” and “righteousness” used for the first time. Abram “believed” Him and God declared him “righteous”.
- This covenant in Genesis 15 became the “covenant of covenants”.
This covenant is the key storyline to the entire Bible. It leads to Jesus referring to it in his words about “this is the covenant in my blood” and promising his followers entrance into the Promised Land of heaven to live in a Kingdom for all eternity with all who believe in him.
- Animal or blood sacrifice shapes the later Levitical laws.
That there is “no forgiveness without the sacrifice of blood” becomes a central theme in the Bible, culminating in Jesus’ blood on the cross.
- Jesus stated this covenant was fulfilled in his sacrificial death. His death was a “new covenant” in his blood.
The Father walked the aisle through the broken, bloodied body of Jesus to establish His covenant with us. God “signed” it for both Him and us. Thus, we can understand more fully the words of Jesus when he said,
This is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26:28)
Let’s pray…
