Genesis 15:7-21
The Terms of the Covenant

God has renewed one part of his twofold promise to Abram — the promise of a Seed. Abram has been told that his heir will be one born from his own body, and that through that heir his offspring will be as numerous as the stars of the sky.

And he will have a son, a physical descendant Isaac. But Isaac will not be the final fulfillment of this promise. Rather, Paul tells us, the one true Seed of Abram is Christ in whom all the promises of God are yes and amen. For that reason Paul boldly declares that this promise was God "pre-preaching the gospel to Abraham," preaching the gospel to Abram beforehand, ahead of time.

And Abram was justified by faith. He believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

Now we come to the renewal of the second part of God’s promise to Abram — the land promise. And this also, for Paul as well as the writer of Hebrews, is the pre-preaching of the gospel. For the land is ultimately no earthly piece of dirt, but a heavenly country, the holy residence of those who forever have fellowship with God, the restoration of paradise as it was before the Fall or, really, better. For it is the restoration of paradise as it would have become had Adam not sinned.

This is the promise pictured in the promise of the land of Canaan to Abram’s descendants — the promise of heaven to Christ and all who are in Christ by faith. 

  1. The Prologue and Abram’s Response
    1. Identification and History
      1. I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans
        1. What Israelite, hearing this, would fail to think of the 10 commandments?
        2. Remember, Genesis is written — or at least put in its final, inspired form — by Moses, who offers it to children of Israel in the wilderness so they may understand their own history.
        3. These are almost exactly the words by which God sets forth the terms of the covenant he gives to the people under Moses
        4. So it is clear that God is about to establish a covenant with Abram
        5. Remember that Abram had rejected the King of Sodom’s offer to divide the spoil
          1. And we saw then that the King of Sodom was really offering to make a covenant with Abram — a treaty by which they would come to one another’s aid in war and decline to make war against each other.
          2. Further, we saw that the King of Sodom was trying to make himself out to be the Great King in the covenant
          3. For ancient near east covenants were usually between a great king and a lesser king — and it was always the great king who stipulated the terms of the covenant
          4. When the king of Sodom took to himself the right of dividing the spoil (v. 21), he was claiming to be that great king who had the right to stipulate what Abram received as booty from their mutual war.
          5. But Abram rejected that offer and any suggestion that it would be the king of Sodom, rather than the Lord Most High posessor of heaven and earth, who would make Abram great
          6. He was holding out, you see, for a better offer, an offer he knew would come for God had promised
        6. So here God comes as the great king, claiming Abram’s loyalty, and asserting the right to stipulate the terms of a covenant between Abram and himself.
        7. He is about to obligate himself and Abram to the terms of this covenant
          1. Just as he obligated Israel to keep his law and obtain entry into the land and obligated himself to bless them if they kept it and to curse them if they failed
          2. Just as he had obligated Adam to keep that original covenant in the garden and obligated himself to bless Adam with life if he kept it or curse him with death if he failed.
        8. Like all ancient near east covenants, this one begins with an identification of the great king and a historical prologue stating the obligation of the lesser king to the greater
        9. In effect, it says, "look what I’ve done for you. This is why I have the right to impose this covenant upon you."
          1. The king of Sodom would have begun, "I am the king of Sodom who saved you from the hand of Chedorlaomer and his fellow kings Amraphel, Arioch, and Tidal."
          2. A ridiculous statement from what the Genesis 14 tells us. The king of Sodom was busy hiding in the hills while Abram was out saving his hide.
      2. I am the Lord
        1. note, no "your God"
          1. The Israelites had the full expression "I am the Lord your God."
          2. But God has not yet come to Abram to declare to him "I will be your God"
          3. This precious statement, that the "possessor of heaven and earth" will belong to Abraham has not yet been revealed. We must wait two chapters for that.
        2. God, here, is making a statement of his absolute sovereignty
        3. Abram has called him in 14:22 "The Lord Most High, possessor of heaven and earth"
        4. He is the great king above all the gods who holds in his hands the depths of the earth and the highest mountains as well, the sea is his for he made it and the dry land was formed by his hand.
      3. Who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans
        1. An interesting statement
        2. "Who brought you out of the land of Egypt" is a statement of God’s work on behalf of his people
          1. They were slaves
          2. God freed them
        3. But Abram was not a slave in Ur of the Chaldeans
        4. There is every indication that he was well off and had no earthly reason to leave
        5. Just as we in our sin were content and felt no need of a savior
        6. God and God alone knew that Ur was not a sufficient dwelling place for Abram
          1. For Abram would pass away
          2. And Ur would pass away
        7. So God is in effect saying, "I was the one who alerted you to the defectiveness of Ur in the first place."
        8. And I was the one who chose you out of there and distinguished you from your fellow citizens and even from your own family.
        9. I brought you out of that kingdom of darkness to promise you the kingdom of light.
    2. The Promise
      1. To give you this land to inherit it.
      2. Remember, the land is a picture of paradise regained, of fellowship with God restored, of an eternal home in heavenly places.
    3. Abram’s Question
      1. How shall I know that I will inherit it?
      2. Again, like last week, this is not an impertinent question
      3. Abram has believed God’s promise regarding the seed and been justified.
      4. Now he is asking for assurance of salvation
      5. He believes, but he knows he must be assured again and again of this glorious promise to which no earthly evidence attests.
  2. The "Cutting" of the Covenant
    1. Strangeness of the Scene
      1. God tells Abram to bring him a 3 yr old heifer, a 3 yr old female goat, a 3 yr old ram, a turtledove and a young pigeon.
        1. These are all animals designated as clean in the Mosaic law
        2. obviously some sort of ritual or sacrifice is taking place
        3. But there is no altar
      2. Abram knows what to do next (perhaps because God told him, but that part is not recorded)
        1. He cuts the large animals in half and lays their pieces opposite each other
        2. The birds he kills and tosses in the mess as well
        3. So what he has, spread out before him is a bloody walkway, its borders defined by these slaughtered animals
      3. And vultures naturally gather
        1. Where there are carcasses of dead meat, these birds which only eat dead things will arrive
        2. They have come to this grim scene supposing there is a feast
        3. These birds, remember, are declared unclean in the Law
        4. Abram drives them away, protecting this walkway of blood and hacked up flesh
      4. Night falls; darkness comes
      5. Abram falls into a deep sleep — not a natural sleep, but one imposed on him by God
        1. The same kind of sleep that Adam fell into when the Lord took one of his ribs and made the woman
        2. The same kind of sleep that Jacob will later fall into and see the vision of the angels ascending and descending from heaven
        3. Abram is about to experience an appearance of God more powerful than anything he has ever known
      6. Great dread comes upon him; he is like a rabbit caught in the headlights that cannot run away for fear. Only there is no light here but thick darkness comes with this wild and uncontrollable fear.
      7. It is in this context that God arrives to restate his promise to Abram.
      8. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first…
      9. Having restated the promise, more weird things happen
      10. In the midst of this darkness an oven appears
        1. Not like a modern oven, but a large clay pot that was used for baking food.
        2. And the oven is spewing forth smoke
        3. And with it comes a torch, a burning torch
        4. And these two together, levitating slightly above the earth or scudding along its surface, pass down the bloody walkway between the bloody bits of flesh
      11. Even before we understand what all this means, there can be no doubt that this is designed to make a lasting impression.
      12. This is a frightening, weird, memorable scene.
      13. And it is in the context of the scene that God chooses to renew his promise to Abram
    2. Renewal of the Promise
      1. God does not immediately renew the promise
      2. Rather, he assures Abram that his descendants will suffer first
        1. They will leave Canaan to be strangers in another land (Egypt) (13)
        2. They will be slaves there (14)
        3. And they will be afflicted, oppressed (14)
      3. But God will reverse all that
        1. He will afflict those who afflicted them
          1. Just as he promised
          2. So he will bring plagues on Egypt, judging them
        2. He will free them from the Egyptians and make them rich (just as he brought Abram out of Egypt with many possessions)
        3. And although Abram will not live to see it, he will die in peace at an old age, a sign of God’s favor resting upon him even in death.
        4. And after 4 generations (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Children of Israel) they will return to the land they left, the promised land
        5. God says that this delay is necessary "because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."
          1. The Amorites are dwellers in the land of Canaan, and really God doesn’t just mean them but all the Canaanites
          2. Abram’s offspring will return to this land not to take it by right of brute force, for that would not be righteous
          3. But they will return as the instruments of God’s judgment against the wicked who have possessed the land
        6. Indeed, God again expands the promise
          1. ch. 12 — Land of Canaan
          2. ch. 13 — Everything his eye can see, including Sodom which Lot had chosen as his inheritance
          3. ch. 15 — Farther than the eye can see, from the edge of Egypt (far south and west) to the Euphrates (far north and east)
          4. When we saw this before, we noted the glorious expansion of the gospel promise in which God always gives more than he promised
          5. For this reason, Paul calls this promise to Abram the promise that he would be "heir of the world"
          6. So the promise will expand until Christ, the seed of Abram, inherits the entire new creation, the new heavens and the new earth, and dwells there with is people as a king of righteousness and peace, the true Melchizedek, king of Salem.
      4. The history of Abraham and his children is a picture of the history of the world
        1. Adam in paradise, driven out
        2. He is promised that a seed will come to crush the serpent and he will regain entry
        3. His son Cain proves to be the child of the devil, and he kills the child of faith, Abel
        4. And so it goes — The children of the devil grow powerful, they build cities, they walk about as giants in the earth.
        5. The children of faith live, bear children in hope that the promised seed will come, and die in faith, not having received the promise but having looked at it as those who are far off.
        6. They ought to have dominion over the earth, instead it is the devil’s children who have all the power
        7. And the children of faith must wait until their iniquity has been "filled up" has been completed and God responds in final wrath, making them, making us, the instruments of his judgment and then the objects of his blessing
        8. Here is a picture of your eschatology, your destiny
          1. Christ, the seed has come
          2. He triumphed over sin in his resurrection and you have been brought out from sin as from a foreign land into the kingdom of heaven
          3. He has inherited that land, heaven
          4. And you, by faith in him, have inherited the land with him
          5. And so he reigns, and you reign with him
          6. all this, you know by faith
          7. One day it will be revealed
    3. Parallels to Sinai
      1. Remember again the original audience
      2. The children of Israel have been primed to expect parallels between Abram’s experience and their own.
      3. We’ve already seen how "I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans" sets up this expectation
      4. So it was that Mount Sinai, where God gave the law as a covenant to his people, that was characterized by fire and smoke and thick darkness as well.
      5. The mountain was surrounded by fire, and clouds descended upon it making it pitch dark
      6. The mountain, Deuteronomy says, "was blazing up to the heavens" and God spoke to them out of the midst of the fire, just as he here speaks to Abram out of fire and smoke
      7. And like Abram, the people were filled with terror and dread in the presence of God
      8. They trembled with fear and told Moses "You go up. For if we go up, we will die."
  3. What It All Means
    1. Call to Faith
      1. We have seen parallels to Sinai and the giving of the Law.
      2. But we must also see differences
      3. There, he said "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt" therefore do these things
        1. And those 10 commandments were the principle by which they were to retain the promised land.
        2. And if they didn’t keep the law, they were told a people they did not know would come and enslave them and take them away again.
        3. These … impossible … works were what was required of them for the fulfillment of the Mosaic covenant
      4. Yet hear, more than 600 years prior, God places no such requirement of law upon Abram
      5. Having made the prologue "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans" he does not follow with a list of stipulations about how Abram will retain his favor
      6. Rather, he simply says "To give you this land to inherit it."
      7. It is a simple promise
      8. What is required of Abram to receive it is no work of his, simply faith
      9. This is how Abram enters into life — believing the promise God makes him — the gospel promise of Christ and Heaven
      10. So can the Law come so many years later and add conditions to this promise? God forbid!
        1. The Law is not a way of entering into life; it can only bring death to sinners
        2. Rather the Law drives Israel back to the promise and so forward to Christ
        3. For they realize, "I can’t keep this law and thus retain the land. What am I going to do?"
        4. A: "God gave the land to Abram by a promise; I will rely on that and trust that even though by sin I have forfetited the land, yet God will be faithful to that initial promise."
        5. And since that promise was a promise of Christ, all Israel comes to realize, we need Christ who alone can inherit the true promised land on our behalf.
      11. So it is with us.
    2. Self-Maledictory Oath
      1. Explain term
      2. Jeremiah prophesies at one point against Jews who had made a covenant to free their slaves in the 7th year (as the law required)
        1. Jer 34:18-20 — And those who transgressed my covenant and did not keep the terms of the covenant that they made before me, I will make like the calf when they cut it in two and passed between its parts: 19 the officials of Judah, the officials of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf 20 shall be handed over to their enemies and to those who seek their lives. Their corpses shall become food for the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth.
        2. You see what it means to pass through the pieces.
      3. So who is passing through these pieces? God!
      4. It is God himself who is undertaking to fulfill this covenant and grant Abram this heavenly land of blessing and favor
      5. He is saying, "May it be done thus to me if I fail."
      6. God is putting his own life on the line
      7. How may Abram know that God will do this? God says, "May I die if I don’t"
      8. Of Abram, he requires nothing
      9. Of himself, he undertakes to accomplish everything, upon pain of death.
      10. How unthinkable it is that God should die!
      11. yet he is saying that is what must happen to me if I break my promise
      12. How could Abram know that the unthinkable event would occur?
    3. The Cross of Christ
      1. If God does not fulfill his covenant, he must die; yet to fulfill it, he must die as well
      2. Jesus, the eternal Son of God, was put to death to fulfill this covenant
      3. As Paul says, They crucified the Lord of Glory
      4. The impossible occurred, and without it we could not be saved.
      5. It was Christ, the son of God, upon whom all those curses came.
      6. It happened to him just as it happened to that bloody walkway of dead flesh
      7. He himself was wounded, bruised, and whipped. He had nails driven through his hands and feet. He hung in agony.
      8. And he died.
      9. What wondrous love is this?
        1. God is the great king, the one with the right to make demands.
        2. Why didn’t he make Abram pass through those pieces, saying "Thus I will do to you if you fail to live up to this covenant"
        3. Instead he made his own son become the object of that curse
        4. He himself bore our sins and the wrath due to them in his body on the tree
        5. We should have been hacked up and cruelly destroyed
        6. Instead, in our place, Christ was.

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