Genesis 15 – Being Human

This reading is Genesis fifteen.

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.

Not Abram, I am your shield.

Your reward shall be very great.

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.

And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.

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.

And he brought him outside and said, Look toward the heaven and number the stars.

If you are able to number them, then he said to them, So shall your offspring be.

And he believed the Lord, and he counted to him his righteousness.

And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.

But he said, O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?

He said to him, Bring me a heifer, three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon.

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.

And when the birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

As the sun was going down a deep sleep fell on Abram, and behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him.

Then the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in the land that is not theirs, and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.

But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.

As for you ye shall go to your fathers in peace, ye shall be buried in a good old age, and they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between these pieces.

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, the land of the Kenites, the Kinesites, the Cadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Gergeshites, and the Jebisites.

And so reads God's word.

My name is Mark, I'm one of the leaders here.

How often do you find yourself having to kind of manage your uh your doubts?

Uh I think that we all, to some degree or another, have had doubts or questions.

Some of us are prone to long seasons of second guessing, I'm sure.

In fact, to uh to to be a parent uh is to spend your entire existence second guessing decisions that you make.

Am I doing this right?

How badly am I messing up uh my children?

And uh perhaps that is you.

Maybe you don't really doubt things very much.

Maybe you kind of are the person who has buyer buyer's remorse.

I have this every time I change the car, I drive away from the uh from the car dealership going, oh, should I have done that?

Did I get a good deal?

Was that a good was that the right one?

Or maybe do that when you kind of buy a piece of technology, like, oh, should I have spent that on that?

Was this the right one to get?

Maybe you're a buyer's remorse sort of doubter.

What about when it comes to your your faith?

What are your doubts like there?

Do you sit here and you think, well, is God even real?

Uh is Jesus who he said he was?

Does he really love me?

Did he really rise from the dead?

Is God even in control?

Does he see me in my suffering?

And if he sees me, does he really even care?

Is my faith strong enough for him to like me?

Am I really a Christian at all?

Maybe actually you come from that sort of background where you have all of those sorts of questions, but you've been taught not to let them up, to keep them bottled up and pushed down.

How are you with your doubts?

What do you do when you doubt?

What are your doubts about God like?

If you have doubts, if in raising some of these questions you're sitting here about to have an anxiety attack, take heart.

Because we've got a doubter here.

This passage is going to be, I hope, balmed to your soul.

I think it's going to do us good, particularly if you're a doubter, and we all are at one point or another.

Abram here is expressing his doubts.

He's struggling, he's got questions.

He's got questions about God.

He's questioning whether or not God will come through for him and be good to his promises, be good to his word.

And what does God do?

He comes and he assures and reassures Abram in some remarkable ways.

He gives him something solid to root his faith in, as we shall see.

And so we're going to look at this passage under two main headings this morning.

First is Abram's doubts and God's assurance.

First, Abram's doubts.

If you were here last week, you'll remember that Abram's coming off the back of a great victory.

He saddled his horse with his allies and he went and he defeated some pretty powerful kings and came back with quite a lot of uh spoils of war.

And they had this interaction with the king of Sodom who came out and offered to make uh Abraham very rich.

And Abram says, No, no, I don't want any of your stuff.

I'm not letting you gonna go around saying I made Abram rich.

And another king comes out in Melchizedek, and he comes out and he blesses Abram in the name of God most high.

And Abram responds by giving a tenth of everything that he has received to this priest king, Melchizedek.

And verse 15, or sorry, verse one of chapter 15 uh follows immediately on from this situation where it says, after these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.

After all of the exertion and all of the exhaustion, after all of the uh the adrenaline left his body, after he is driving away from the car dealership, he begins to niggle with doubts.

He begins to get fearful and scared.

Has he done the right thing?

Will actually the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, will they come after him?

Later, he's questioning and doubting, and uh and and that that gets reflected not just from his circumstances, but it gets reflected upwards.

Have you noticed that about yourself?

That sometimes your doubts start really small, and then what happens is they spiral.

So you might be thinking, Well, was that a right thing to do with with Sodom?

And you know, I've let him have all of this stuff, and maybe he's gonna have it out for me, he's gonna come and get me, and and he snowballs.

And before he knows it, he's like, Um, and what about you, God?

Where are you even in all of this?

And you promised me a son and heir, and uh, and you haven't made good on your word.

Have you noticed that when you get into a doubt spiral, those doubts get bigger and bigger and bigger?

And before you know it, they're big existential doubts about do I even really know who I am and what is God and how is he even there?

And does he even love me?

Well, Abraham's kind of in this spiral, and he's scared and he's doubting.

And God comes, and the first thing that God says is, Fear not.

Fear not, Abram.

I am your shield, your reward will be very great.

Don't worry about the fact that you turned aside from the wealth of Sodom.

I'm your shield, I've given you victory in battle, and your reward will be great.

Abram responds by then voicing his doubts, verses two and three.

But Abram said, Oh Lord God, what will you give me?

For I continue childless.

God had promised him a son, I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.

Very common thing to, if you were childless, to adopt uh somebody into your family to be a uh your heir.

And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.

He's saying to God, I have doubts, God.

I have doubts about you.

I've doubts about whether or not you're gonna keep your word.

I've got doubts about whether or not you're good for your promises.

How does God respond?

How dare you, Abram?

Do you have any idea who it is you're talking to?

How dare you speak to me like that?

No.

That's not how God responds.

Because God's not like us.

Verse 4.

The word of the Lord came to him.

This man shall not be your heir, your very own son shall be your heir.

He brought him outside and said, Look towards the heaven and number the stars, if indeed you were able to number them.

And then he said, So shall your offspring be.

Right back at the start of the passage, God told Abram not to fear before he even said a word.

God knew the struggles and doubts in Abram's heart before he ever had to voice them.

And God made the first move to come to Abram to reassure him.

Didn't you see that?

Did you notice that?

But God comes before Abram has said anything and says, Fear not.

I know you're struggling.

I know you're scared.

I know you're doubting.

Fear not.

I'm your shield.

Your reward will be very great.

And then in verse 4, after Abram has vented, gotten stuff off his chest, rather than God getting miffed at him, he says, Okay, I'm gonna reassure you, what I've said, I haven't forgotten.

Eliazar of Damascus is not gonna be your heir.

I'm gonna give you your very own heir from your own offspring.

But then in verse 5, he goes a little bit further.

He brings Abram outside at night and tells him to look up.

Now, we live uh in a city now, and so when you look up, well, in Ireland, when you look up, all you see is clouds, even at nighttime.

But uh imagine that uh that it was a clear night, you would still you get a sense of light pollution.

You can see some stars, but it's it's nothing like when you're in the countryside.

Have you ever been to those uh those places, those secluded places where there's very little light pollution?

You go outside, and you can you can see almost the the band of the Milky Way going up like this from the horizon.

You see stars that you've never seen before because the light pollution has dulled them out.

That's the image that you need to have in your mind's eye.

Abraham's Abraham doesn't have any street lights, right?

So God's telling him to go outside and to look up, and he sees billions of stars.

Far-flung nebulae where stars are born, and God says, Count them, if indeed they can be counted.

And then he says, So shall your offspring be.

What's God doing here?

He's not just expressing the promise again, he's impressing his promise upon Abram using an image in order to assure us of our faith, in order to reassure us of God's promises.

God engages all of our senses.

Yes, he speaks a word of promise, but then he confirms the word of promise by engaging our other senses.

And in this, uh in this case, it's our visual senses.

He takes Abram outside and says, Look, I'm not gonna just speak to you again.

I'm gonna show you an image that you can keep in your mind in order to remember what it is that I have said.

I have spoken the promise to you.

Now I want you to see it, Abram.

God here is He's laying hold of the imagination of faith and saying, look, Abram, do you see?

Do you see Orion?

Do you see Ursa Major?

Do you see the nebulae that I have placed in the heavens?

Look at them.

Your Ospring are going to be like that.

Stand in awe of the cosmos that I have created.

And just as you look up in wonder at the stars, so in not too long from now you will look down in wonder at your son, Abram.

Fear not, I haven't forgotten my promises.

If faith is like a climbing wall, then this vision is a firm handhold, a firm foothold that Abraham can lay hold of and remember God's promises.

And this is how our God works.

When we are doubting God's promises, God doesn't make his promises more sure, he makes us more sure of his promises.

Do you see?

He's making Abram more sure of the things that he has promised.

Like I said at the start, some of you were brought up in a family or a culture where doubting was bad, especially when it came to religion and faith.

You didn't question the priest, you didn't question the pastor.

To ask questions, to ask why, was forbidden.

Receive it, keep quiet.

And as a result, the doubts that you have carried in this morning have never been dealt with.

You've just kept them locked away.

And you know that they're there, but you haven't voiced them because you think to voice them would be bad.

I want to tell you that that's wrong.

God stands ready to make you more sure of his promises, to voice your doubts.

Others of you, perhaps, who have grown up in the secular West and you've done arts degrees, and you've been told that doubt is a virtue, that actually to be assured of anything is to be arrogant, that you should stay in your doubts.

That's wrong too.

God is big enough for our doubts.

He's not rocked or angry at your questions, but he also doesn't want to leave us in our doubts.

He wants us to make us, he wants to make us more sure of his promises.

And that's what Christianity is.

Christianity is a journey from doubt to greater faith.

So if you're a doubter here this morning, you're very welcome.

It's necessary that you're here with your questions and that you voice them and that you are prepared to move from doubting to stronger faith.

That's what God is doing here with Abram.

He's making him more sure of his promises.

And how does Abram respond after he speaks this word of promise and God gives him this image that he's able to hang on to?

How does Abram respond?

Verse 6a, and he believed the Lord.

He believed God.

Now, it's not just that Abram believed in God.

Lots of people believe in God.

Most of you here probably believe in God, that there is such a being as God, however you conceive of him.

And yet, it might be the case that while you believe in God, you don't trust him.

You don't take him at his word.

You don't hear his promises and receive them as being true.

Abram doesn't just believe in God as an intellectual concept.

Abraham takes God at his word and trusts him.

Abraham believed God.

And what was the result?

Well, the result is there in the second half of verse 6.

Follow the logic.

Abraham believed God, and he, that's God, counted it to Abram as righteousness.

God counted Abram righteous because of his belief.

Or put it another way, because of his faith.

Abram placed his faith in God, and God made him righteous.

What's going on there?

There's two possible ways of thinking about righteousness in the Bible.

The first is that righteousness is when you are morally upstanding, when you do morally good things.

That's the first way of understanding it.

The second way of understanding it is that God, the judge, declares you innocent.

That's the second sense.

Which one's going on here?

Well, it's the second one, isn't it?

Because Abram hasn't done anything in this passage morally righteous.

What he has done is simply trusted the promises of God.

And how has God responded?

God has declared him to be innocent.

He has declared him to be righteous.

Not by what he has done, but by the simple fact that he has trusted God, placed his faith in God, taken God at his word, and God has declared him righteous.

This verse, Genesis 15, 6, is huge in the mind of the New Testament.

It goes to the very core of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, that we are made right with God, declared innocent before him.

On what basis?

On the basis of the fact that we're morally upstanding?

No.

On the basis of our faith alone, that we take God at His word, that we trust His promises.

How does God respond?

He declares us righteous.

He changes our status before Him and says, You are innocent in my sight.

That is what it means to follow Him.

And we we receive this by trusting Him, not just believing in God and some vague concept, but to take Him at His word, to trust Him.

When Jesus says, follow me, repent and believe the good news, that is, to turn around from the direction that you're going in and start going a different direction.

And to follow me.

To come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, to take my yoke upon you.

I will give you rest.

To trust God is to rest in Him.

And his response is that He makes you righteous.

He declares you innocent.

Move from doubt to deepening faith.

Second point.

We've looked at Abram's doubts.

Now let's look a little bit more closely at God's assurance that he offers Abram.

In the second half of the passage, the second two-thirds, I suppose.

In the second half of the passage, it looks like Abram immediately begins to start doubting again.

Let me pick it up at verse 7.

And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you the land, this land to possess.

But Abram said to him, O Lord, how am I to know that I shall possess it?

And he said to him, Bring me a heifer, three years old, female goat, three years old.

We'll come to that in a second.

It looks like Abram's beginning to doubt God again.

How will I know?

How will I know that I'm to possess it?

See, doubting God again.

I don't think that's what's happening.

I don't think that when Abram says, Oh Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?

He's not doubting God.

He's doubting himself.

He's not doubting God.

He's doubting himself.

Now bear with me.

He's in sense saying to God, How do I have the strength to kick out all of these guys that Jared so wonderfully read uh without swearing too much at the end?

Uh how will I kick out all of these tribes?

I'm just one guy.

Yes, I've got my allies, but how do I know that I'm going to possess the land?

He's doubting himself.

And aren't these the doubts of real faith?

You say, okay, God, I trust you.

I don't trust myself.

I believe in you.

I believe that you are Jesus strong and kind, but I feel really weak.

And oftentimes I'm not very kind.

He's not doubting God.

He's doubting himself.

And look at how God responds.

So verse 9, God gives Abram this command to go and gather a petting zoo.

Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon.

God gives him this command.

And what follows is one of the strangest and most wonderful parts of the whole Bible.

God commands that these animals are to be brought, and instead of opening a petting zoo, what Abram does is he immediately cuts them all in half.

Sorry?

Did you notice that God didn't command him to do that?

God was in heaven going, nobody asks you to do that, Abram.

Petting zoo, remember?

No, no.

Abram instinctively, in listening to the command to go and get these animals, understands that something's happening.

He understands that in getting those animals, the next thing that he should do, once they're all together, is cut them all in half.

What is going on?

He knows that there's something happening, that this is what he is supposed to do.

What is it?

When two people get married, in the uh wedding ceremony itself, there are a number of promises that are made between the bride and groom.

And in a sense, though no one says it, in a sense, there's a there's a question kind of looming in the background over all of these promises.

And the question is, how do I know that you're going to keep your side of the bargain?

How do I know?

How do I know that you're going to remain faithful?

How do I know that all that all that you are is mine?

How do I know that you will be with me in sickness and in health for richer for poor?

How do I know that all of those promises you intend to keep?

And so in marriage ceremonies, they don't just make promises, they sign a legal contract.

And so, in a sense, you're saying to your spouse, you want to know how in this I am?

Do you want to know my intent to keep these promises?

Fine, I'll sign.

I'll sign on the dotted line, and I will, in doing so, I will legally bind myself to you and declare that if I break this, there will be consequences.

You don't believe me?

You want to be sure that I'll keep my promises?

I'll sign on the dotted line.

And together, they do what?

Well, they make a covenant, a binding promise, a contract between two parties that binds them together.

Now, the issue here with Abram is that Abram doesn't have pen and paper handy because he doesn't live in a writing society.

He lives in an oral society.

And so rather than signing contracts, what you do is you act out the contract, and that's what's happening here.

You cut the pieces in two.

This is what happens, it's very common in the ancient Near East.

You cut the pieces in half, and then you lay them out.

So you've got half half a heifer and half a goat and half a um a ram here, and you've got the other half here, and you've got an aisle down the middle between these two bloody pieces.

And if there's two equal parties entering into an agreement, what they would do is they would walk through the pieces.

And in doing so, what they were acting out was if I renege on my half of the bargain, if I don't keep my promises, man, end up like these animals here.

That's what the contract is saying.

Now that's two equal parties.

What was also quite common was that uh a great king like King Kedalomar that we saw last week, a great king that's much more powerful than you, would come and he would subdue you and say, Right, I'm gonna rule over you now, I'm gonna be your king.

And there would be a ceremony with saying, Okay, you're gonna pay me uh so much in tax, and uh and I'll give you protection uh because of that.

And in order to kind of give those promises, again, the animals will be cut in half.

But in that ceremony, it's only you that walks the pieces.

The great king stands over here while you're walking through, and in a sense, what the great king is saying to you is you uh mess around, you don't keep your half of the bargain, you're gonna end up like these animals.

That's what's going on.

A contract is being made.

In fact, the a covenant is being made, and what you say about a covenant is you cut a covenant because we cut the animals.

But look what happens here.

We read that a darkness falls over Abraham, terror and dread.

Verse 12, as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abraham, and behold, a dreadful and great darkness fell on him.

Why does he feel this great and terrible darkness?

Because in these moments the holy God is coming close to a sinful man.

And God again speaks, just as before, he speaks a word of promise.

Verse 13: the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in the land, but that eventually they will be brought out with great possessions and possess the land that he is giving to them.

We don't have time to dwell too much on these verses, but essentially what God is saying is these promises are not going to be realized without hardship.

Have you noticed that in your Christian life?

That actually, in order to realize the promises of God, that actually life is difficult.

He's giving Aram a heads up, saying it's going to be hard for your offspring.

But I'm going to be with them, and I'm going to bring them out, and I'm going to bring them out at just the right time.

I'm going to bring them out at the time when my actions are at their most just.

But again, God does more than speak a word of promise.

Verse 17.

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces.

Darkness and fire and smoke in the Old Testament are symbols of the presence of God.

God has shown up.

See that again in Mount Sinai.

When God is giving the law to the children of Israel, that there is darkness and smoke and fire.

This image in verse 17 of a flaming torch, it's a very difficult image.

You read lots of different uh translations and they'll say different things because it's a very different image, a difficult image to try and translate.

The best way of trying to conceive of it is this imagine, imagine a streak of lightning, right?

We've all seen lightning kind of fork across the sky.

Just in an instant, you see that brilliant blinding white light.

Imagine a fork of lightning that streaked across the sky and remained.

Imagine this ball of lightning crackling and fizzing, keeping its shape and moving between the pieces.

That is what the image is trying to convey.

This odds by terrifying, live, crackling, pulsating, active thing coming down and passing between the pieces of the hewn animals.

Wonderful and terrifying all at once.

Abram cut the animals in half.

And he thought that God, the great king, was going to say, right, Abram, take some O's for me.

Abram cut the animals, expecting that he would be the one to be asked to walk between the pieces.

But that's not what happens.

God the Eternal, God the unchanging one, the Holy One, He walks alone between the pieces.

And in doing so, he is telling Abram, If I don't keep my side of the bargain to give you this land, if I don't keep my side of the promise, may I be cut off.

May the impossible become possible.

May my immortality become mortality.

May my changelessness become changeable.

May I die.

That's how certain you can be, Abram.

But that's not all that God is doing.

Because there are two parties in this bargain.

There's God and there's Abram.

And yet it is only God who walks between the pieces.

And in doing so, he is saying, I will take the punishment for your faithlessness too.

If you let down your side of the bargain, may I be cut off.

If you fail, if you sin, if you falter, let me be cut off.

Mark chapter 15.

Mark 15 · chapter mention

When the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

At the cross, darkness fell.

Just as it did here.

And at the cross, the Son of God was cut off.

The impossible became possible.

The immortal became mortal.

The changeless became changeable.

And God died.

Why?

Because he passed alone through the pieces.

He took both sides of the contract on himself.

He said, I take the punishment for your faithlessness.

I get cut off because of your sin, not you.

I cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

So that you might never have to.

And who has Jesus done that for?

For everyone who believes God.

And God declares him innocent because Jesus, the innocent one, was cut off.

For yeah.

Hebrews 6, Peter referenced this last week.

Hebrews 6 says, We have an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.

What is the remedy to our doubts?

What is the remedy to waves of doubt and uncertainty?

You need an anchor for your soul.

It must be a dreadful thing to be at sea, to let down your anchor and to find nothing solid and to continue to drift and to watch the land fall below the horizon and be completely lost, to be adrift, all familiar points fading away and not knowing what direction to go.

You need in your life to put your anchor down into something solid.

If you try to attach your anchor, the anchor of your soul to circumstances like career or family or comfort or security or money, you're putting your anchor down into the water.

These things change all the time.

They're fluid and they're moving.

Every one of those things you will eventually lose.

You need to put the anchor of your soul down into something solid.

You need to put the anchor of your soul down into Christ, the one who was cut off for you.

To hold firm to the one who holds you fast, to cling to him and to his unyielding promise, to take him at his word, that he will forgive you, that he will restore you, that he will bless you.

No other worldview, no other religion, no other way of living can do that for you.

No circumstance can give you the assurance that will put to bed your doubts and deepen your faith.

We move from doubt to ever-deepening faith by receiving the assurance of God who forgives us because he was cut off for us.