God's Covenant with Abram, part 3, and why we're all happy about unilateral faithfulness...

This isn't creepy at all...

Genesis 15:7-21

How did we get here? Well son, when a man loves a woman...(just kidding).

God promised to give Abram a son and make him a great nation, (see previous blog). Abram, though an old man, trusted God's promise to make of him and his barren wife a great nation as numerous as the stars in the sky. So Abram believed God and his faith was counted to him as righteousness. Now God follows up with the promise, (again), that God would give Abram the land he promised him. Now Abram is still learning to trust the Lord and has trouble trusting such a substantial promise, (although if you trusted God to give you children at 80 something years old via a barren wife, you'd think you could trust God to give you some property, but I digress), so God is going to show Abram the trustworthiness of His promise about the land.

Abram says, "O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?' He (God) 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.' And he brought them all these, cut them in half and laid each half over against the other." (v8-10).

Not as gross as pictures of blood, but close. 

God is going to make a covenant, or a sacred agreement with Abram. He is going to make a promise to Abram to keep his word to give him the land he promised to he and his descendants after him. Make a note here: when God makes a covenant with a person it frequently involves the shedding of blood. This was the case with Noah in Genesis 9, when Noah made sacrifices to God after surviving the flood. You could also argue that a covenant was involved with Adam and Eve when he killed animals to clothe their naked bodies in Genesis 3. In this instance, God had Abram kill some animals, cut them in half, and lay them on each side of the other. (I was going to put a picture of blood here, but it would just be gross. Kind of like these pictures of Michael Bolton).

A little cultural background here is needed because otherwise this just looks really weird and gross and people are going to get upset, (kind of like the feelings you get when looking at Bolton, but I digress). There are dead animals lying all over the place for goodness sakes! What is going on here? Animal lovers everywhere are losing their minds! Why is God being so gross!? Calm down, let me explain.
In those days when men were making a covenant with each other, one of the ways they would confirm or ratify the covenant was through the sacrifice of animals. They would sacrifice the animals and then both of them would together walk through the middle of the carcasses. What they were essentially saying to one another was this:
1) This is a sacred agreement we are entering into, (ergo the dead animals).
2) If one of us fails to keep the terms of the agreement, may we be ripped asunder and killed, (like the dead animals).
In other words, making a covenant like this was serious business. (Aren't you glad you don't have to do this when buying a house? Then again if we did, maybe we wouldn't have had the housing crisis of 2008...oh no I didn't!).

Okay, with the background explained, let's look at what happens. For our purposes I am going to focus solely on v17-21.

"When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed 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 Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites." (v17-21)

 So God promises to give the land to Abram's descendants. I know all of the people groups here ending with "ites" are a bit confusing. Just take note that God promises to give Abram's descendants a certain area of land where currently all of these other peoples are residing. In other words, he will remove any opposition and anybody that is in the way to fulfilling the covenant. Here's what is so remarkable about this covenant. Remember a few scary Michael Bolton pictures ago where I talked about how dead animals were used in making covenants and how the two men would walk through the animals as a sign of the seriousness of their agreement? Well in this situation GOD, (symbolized by the smoking pot and flaming torch), ALONE walks through the animals. Abram is on the sideline. God is promising that HE will act, HE will bring the people into the land, HE will fulfill the covenant.

Does this remind you of any other agreements God makes with Abram? Remember the blog about Genesis 12 and Abram? God kept telling Abram, "I will". "I will make you a great nation", "I will give you a great name", "I will bless you". There, just as here, the agreement God makes with Abram is unilateral. It is not an agreement based on the cooperation of Abram. It is not based on Abram's faithfulness or unfaithfulness. It is not based on the faithfulness of Abram's descendants for that matter. It is based on God alone. God is basically stating, "May I become like these dead animals if I fail to keep my covenant." It's a serious deal.

Okay. I hear you saying, "That's neat Travis, but so what? What do a bunch of dead animals on the ground, an old guy who lived 4,000 years ago, and God's covenant in Genesis 15 have to do with me in the 21st century?" I get it, it's a fair question. Let me try to answer.

- God is going to make several covenants in the Bible. Some are going to be conditional where one party agrees to do certain acts and God agrees to respond in a certain way, (i.e. the Mosaic covenant, but we're not there yet). Other covenants in the Bible are going to be like the one with Abram where it is unilateral. God promises to do something. Period. The fulfillment of that promise is up to God.
- The way that we look at Abram and later, the people of Israel, his descendants, is very significant in how we read the Bible. We have to keep in mind that God is never going to forsake his people because of the unilateral covenants he had made in the past.
- Later in the Bible God is going to make a "new" covenant that is also going to be unilateral. It is going to be based solely on the faithfulness and grace of God. It is also going to involve death, blood, and separation. God is going to act, apart from the cooperation or actions of men, to save men from their sins and return them to a right relationship with him. We need to know about the unilateral faithfulness of God and take comfort that covenant as well.

- Finally we, just like Abram, can take part of that new covenant, by believing as well. We can believe, like Abram, that Jesus Christ, God's only son, paid for our sins on this cross, was separated from God, died and rose again, so we could be restored to fellowship with our Creator. If we believe God like Abram, (see previous blogs), it will be counted to us as righteousness as well.

Amen.