“7 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.”
8 But Abram said, “O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?”
9 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.”
10 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. 11 Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
12 As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13 Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15 You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
17 When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.””
Friendship looks different in different groups. It is marked by different signs. Think about the different age groups within our congregation. Younger men are far more likely than older men to hug their friends. Some older men might think it strange to hug a friend. Some younger men might think it strange to not hug a friend.
Friendship looks different in different cultures. It is marked by different signs. Earlier this week, Bethany and I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood in which Mr. Rogers, played by Tom Hanks, befriends a cynical journalist named Lloyd. At one point in the movie, Mr. Rogers says, ‘You know, Lloyd—Maggie Stewart taught me the most beautiful piece of sign language. [He made a ‘C’ with both of his index fingers and interlocks them.] It means “friend.” Isn’t that perfect?’ Lloyd doesn’t know that Maggie Stewart is a friend who comes on the show to teach sign language. Lloyd thinks Mr. Rogers is just plain weird. Mr. Rogers thinks Lloyd needs a friend, and, of course, Mr. Rogers is right. One of the last scenes of the movie shows Lloyd walking Mr. Rogers to a taxi. Mr. Rogers gets in the back seat, looks through the window, and does the sign for friendship to Lloyd. It certainly means something to Lloyd by then.
Friendship looks different in different cultures. It is marked by different signs. You might not have known sign language for “friend”. I didn’t before I saw that movie. You might hug. You might not.
The marks of friendship look different in different groups and cultures. Some might seem unusual to you. These two rows of animal parts in Genesis 15 might seem unusual to you, but remember: marks of friendship look different in different groups and cultures. This ceremony that we see in Genesis 15 is a covenant between God and Abram. It’s a sign of their relationship. It’s a sign of their friendship.
God was Abram’s friend. Abram was God’s friend. With faith like Abram, you can be a friend of God. God will look at you and do the sign for friendship. By faith, you can be a friend of God. That’s the claim of this sermon: by faith, you can be a friend of God.
We will see this in three points. First: a sign of friendship. Second: a delay in the promise. Third: covenant faithfulness. We see a sign of friendship in verses 7-11. We see a delay in the promise in verses 12-16. We see God’s covenant faithfulness to the promises in verses 17-21.
First: a sign of the friendship. Abram was in relationship with God. That’s what we focused on last week. Such a relationship is rare. Alarmingly few people have an actual relationship with God. If you do, you know how precious it is. Carl Henry—arguably one of the more important American Christian voices of the mid 20th century—knew how precious it was. In his autobiography he wrote, “The big turn came when I was twenty, and received Jesus Christ as personal Savior and Lord of my life. Into the darkness of my young life he put bright stars that still shine and sparkle. After that encounter I walked the world with God as my friend.” Abram walked the world with God as his friend. Carl Henry did so because he had faith like Abram. I hope that you walk the world with God as your friend too.
God began this friendship; verse 7, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.” Abram didn’t find God. God found Abram.
God gave promises to Abram. Now Abram had a question about this promised land. Last week, we studied his question about the promised son; now we see his question about the promised land; verse 8, “O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?”
As with last week, this question arose out of faith. Abram took the promises seriously enough to ask questions about them. If he didn’t take the promises seriously, he would have piously nodded when God spoke and went on in disbelief. That’s not Abram. That’s not faith like Abram. As Brueggemann put it, “Clearly the faith to which Abraham is called is not a peaceful, pious acceptance. It is a hard-fought and deeply argued conviction.”
Abram asked because he trusted God. There is a world of differences between questions that arise out of distrust and questions that arise out of trust. Years ago I led a number of mission trips. One kid came on them all. I learned a lot from this kid. He had a difficult life. For a number of rather tragic reasons, he had a difficult time trusting adults. On the first trip, during our times of travel, he would regularly ask me when and where we were going to stop for food. He wasn’t simply curious. He was asking because he didn’t trust me. He didn’t think I had a plan to keep him fed.
As we got to know each other over the years, he moved from distrust to trust. When he asked where we were going to eat, he was asking the way the other kids asked; he was simply curious. He had transitioned from asking questions out of distrust to asking questions out of trust. I appreciated the transition. God appreciates this transition in you.
Abram trusted, but he had questions; “O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?”
That’s a fair question; verse 9 seems a strange response; ‘“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.’
That seems strange, but remember friendship looks different in different groups and cultures. You might not have known that *this* was sign language for “friend” when you woke up this morning. You might not know that what we are witnessing with these animals is a covenant ceremony. This was a sign of friendship in the Ancient Near East. This was common practice in forming treaties between nations.
This is about relationship. God told Abram that he could trust the promise by way of a ritual about relationship. This ritual is, in some ways, similar to what boys do when they become blood brothers. Boys become blood brothers to underline the seriousness of their friendship. It is a sign that they take their bond seriously. That’s part of what’s going on in this covenant ceremony. God is showing the seriousness with which He takes His relationship with Abram and the seriousness with which the promises on which it is based. This covenant ceremony is all about seriousness. You cut the animals in half and walk between the pieces to say, “May I be like this animal, if I do not fulfil the demands of the covenant.”
This isn’t the only such ceremony we see in Scripture. God refers to this same practice in Jeremiah 34:18 after the people had no regard for the covenant. They had no regard for it generation, and so God said, “Those who have violated my covenant and have not fulfilled the terms of the covenant they made before me, I will treat like the calf they cut in two and then walked between its pieces.” The people in Jeremiah’s day didn’t take the covenant seriously. They didn’t take their relationship with God seriously. God took it seriously. He took it seriously with Abram.
God was cutting a covenant with Abram. The word “covenant” itself is used in verse 18. God’s words in verse 7 also certainly point you in the direction of a covenant; “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.”
Does that sound familiar to anyone? Do the words, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of…” sound familiar to anyone? You’ve heard it hundreds of times. Anyone? “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of…”
Right. “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” In a very real way, Exodus comes before Genesis. These words in Genesis 15 have Mount Sinai in mind. That is where God cut a covenant with Israel. This is where God cuts a covenant with Abram.
This covenant was a sign of friendship with Abram. Abram took it that way. This sign of friendship might seem strange to you, but, “let us,” in the words of John Calvin, “learn meekly to embrace those helps which God offers for the confirmation of our faith.” This is the equivalent of God signing “friends.” Abram embraced the sign. He embraced the friendship.
I do hope that you’ve embraced friendship with God. He offers it. “God loved the world in this way: He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in him might not perish but have everlasting life.” Of course, God’s desire for relationship with humanity didn’t start with the incarnation. That is simply its fullest expression. That’s when He became one of us, but He was forming relationship with people well before Jesus ate with sinners and prostitutes. We are studying this same God’s relationship with Abram.
God gave this sign of friendship to Abram to answer Abram’s question, “O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?” God, as we saw last week, offered Himself to Abram just as He did last week. That’s proof enough. That’s the best that could be hoped for. Perhaps God also offered this sign because there would be a delay in the way He kept the promise. That’s our second point: a delay in the promise.
There would be a four-century delay in the promise of the land. “O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?” ‘You will, but not for four hundred years.’ That’s what God is telling Abram in these verses, and He isn’t sheepish about it. God didn’t have a knot in His stomach thinking, ‘Abram left Ur because I promised him his own land, and now there are people in it. I can’t give him the land for four hundred years and he’ll be long dead by that point. It would have been better for him to stay in Ur. This is turning into a disaster.’ God never has thought, never will think, and is not currently thinking anything along those lines about anyone’s situation, including yours.
God wasn’t sheepish about telling Abram about this delay. Divine sheepishness is never part of any interaction. You see that in the overpowering glory seen in verse 12, “As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him;” then the Lord spoke.
This thick and dreadful darkness is nothing less than the experience of a human in the presence of God. As Victor Hamilton put it, “no illicit action by Abram has prompted this dread… the dread or terror is brought on simply by the presence of God.”
Yes, Abram and God have a relationship. Yes, God was in the midst of performing a ceremony that He had initiated to assure Abram that they were friends, but this doesn’t mean that He and Abram were equals. Abram was called God’s friend, but they were not equals. The mere approach of the presence of God overwhelmed Abram with a thick and dreadful darkness. God was still God, friend though He was.
That’s a good reminder. We can sometimes talk fast and loose about God. We can sometimes talk incredibly fast and loose about His Son. We remember that Jesus is like us. We forget that he is very unlike us. We remember that God came near. We forget that no one can see His face and live.
God is God, and He had more in the works than simply His relationship with Abram. You see that in one of God’s explanations for the reason for delay in verse 16, “the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
The delay in the promise wasn’t primarily about Abram. It seems that it was mostly about the Amorites, and even there you see the remarkable grace of God. As Calvin put it, “Even then the Amorites had become unworthy to occupy the land, yet the Lord not only bore with them for a short time but granted them four centuries for repentance.”
The period of time between God speaking these words of Genesis 15 and Joshua setting foot in the Promised Land was an opportunity for repentance, and, of course, God had already been bearing with the Canaanites for generations by the time He said these words to Abram. God does love the world
God cared about Abram, but God also cared about Rahab who did leave the Canaanites and sin when the sin of the Amorites reached its full measure. God was Abram’s friend, but He was God of the whole world, and we who are God’s friends need to remember that. He has more in the works than simply His relationship with us. That doesn’t mean He is any less of a friend; it is simply another way of saying that He is God.
We need to remember that because there is much about His decisions that we will not understand. Look at verse 13, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions.” That’s the story of the Exodus before the Exodus. Abram knows the sorrows of his offspring before he has any offspring.
Hebrews didn’t understand why God allowed their slavery in Egypt just like we don’t understand all the reasons God allows troubles and trials in our lives.
What these people had for four hundred years was a promise, “I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions.” This promise was doubtlessly passed down. The children of Abram needed to live by the promises just like father Abram lived by the promises. Faith was no different and it is no different today.
Abram, though, would not live for four hundred more years. God told him, “You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age.” Abram wanted to know how he could be certain that he would receive the land. God told Abram that he would need to trust because he wouldn’t see it with his own eyes. Abram would die with only the promise of God to cheer him. That would have to be enough. You have to ask yourself if the promises of God are enough for you because that’s really all you have today and that’s all you will have when you die.
The promises are enough. They are enough because and only because God is faithful. That’s our final point: covenant faithfulness. Having explained the reason for the delay, God returned to the ceremony; verse 17, “When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces.”
In this ceremony, the covenant partners would walk between the pieces of animals as if to say, “may what happened to these animals happen to me if I fail to keep the covenant.”
Notice who passes between the animal pieces in verse 17. It’s God and God alone. The fire and smoke passing between the pieces are a representation of God. Keep the covenant in Sinai in mind. Remember the deep darkness. Remember the smoke. Remember the fire. The God of Mount Sinai passes between the animal pieces, “may what happened to these animals happen to me if I fail to keep the covenant.”
Abram wanted to know for certain that the promises would be kept. God answered with a promise of friendship. God said He would rather be cursed than break His promise to Abram. God is serious about His friendships.
It’s worth noting that Abram didn’t walk through the pieces. Abram will make his own marks of friendship when we come to circumcision. In this moment, however, God makes clear that He and He alone is responsible for the promises. He has promised Abram a child and He alone will make it happen. He has promised Abram the land and He alone will make it happen. God is a promise keeper. There is no one like him.
He promised the land. The dimensions of the land in verses 18-19 are instructive. John Sailhamer has pointed out that they appear to coincide with the dimensions of Eden. The flow of Scripture runs back to Eden, which is grace because the flow of human nature runs away from Eden.
Your only hope for new creation rests on the promise of God. That was true for Abram. That’s true for you. Your only hope for all things made new rests on the fact that a smoking firepot with a blazing torch between pieces of dead animals. Your only hope for new creation rests on the promises of God: “behold I’m making all things new.” Scripture does end with a return to a better Eden.
He is faithful. The rest of Scripture is a testimony to the fact that God meant it when He passed between those animal pieces. Scripture is one long argument for the faithfulness of God.
The incarnation is a lived-out argument for the faithfulness of God. If you want to see God’s faithfulness lived out on the street level, look at Jesus. “Steadfast love and faithfulness—that’s Jesus Christ,” to paraphrase the apostle John.
Jesus is also the invitation to friendship with God. He is the meeting place of God and humanity. You most likely won’t be cutting any animals open as a ceremony of your friendship with God. That’s not the mark of friendship with God now.
*This* isn’t the mark of friendship with God. The sign we tend to use is the cross. It’s not surprising that Christians have taken on the cross as the mark of friendship with God. We’ve taken on the blood of this new covenant as the mark of friendship with God. It underlines the seriousness. It underlines the love. The cross is where you can make friends with God.
Consider how remarkable that possibility is. You know yourself. You know your sins. You know your shortcomings. Yet, if you have met God in Jesus, you can say with Carl Henry, “into the darkness of my life he put…bright stars that still shine and sparkle. After that encounter I walked the world with God as my friend.”
The God of Abram thinks of you as His friend. ‘That’s Abram. That’s my friend.’ ‘That’s ________, that’s my friend.’ ‘That’s ________, that’s my friend.’ ‘That’s ________, that’s my friend.’ ‘“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend,’ wrote James the brother of Jesus. That’s you, or that can be you. Amen.