Genesis 15

God called Abram and sent him on a great journey. Along the way, the Lord blessed Abram, but God had not yet fulfilled all his promises to this chosen man. When the Lord came to Abram in a vision, God said, “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But Abram was concerned. How long would he live? God was going to make a great nation from his family, but so far Abram did not have even one child, and he was getting older.

God did several things to help Abram trust Him. First, He renewed His words of promise to Abram. He said, “Your very own son shall be your heir.” Second, God gave Abram a visible reminder of His promise. He brought him outside and said to him, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” And then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Third, when Abram believed the Lord, God credited it to him as righteousness. This was a very exciting announcement. One would have assumed that for any person to be counted as righteous or obedient in God's accounting of men, that person would have to do all the righteousness that God required by himself or forfeit the Lord's approval. This announcement of a crediting of righteousness to Abram's account said something very different than what men naturally assume about the workings of God with people. God determined that Abram's trust in the Lord, his belief, was all that He required in order to credit Abram's account with a verdict of “righteousness.” This is a tremendous revelation: God intended to credit righteousness to a man, Abraham, despite that man's own level of partial obedience. Even Abram's faith, as we might observe it, seemed imperfect. Notice that when God reiterated to Abram His promise to give Abram a special land, Abram said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” He asks for help in believing.

The Lord understands our weakness. He has Abram bring before Him animals in order to cut a covenant with Abram. This covenant is a solemn promise of God, and He puts Abram to sleep in order to emphasize that the blessings that will surely come to Abram will be from the Lord's own sovereign hand, and not from the merit of the man He has determined to bless. What Abraham will receive is grace, and not wages.

According to the cutting rituals of Abram's day, a great king would make this kind of covenant with a defeated lesser king in order to publicly display His authority over the subjugated inferior. Animals were cut in two, and the lesser king had to walk through the slain victims in order to publicly acknowledge that such a punishment of a brutal death would happen to him if he violated the stipulations of the great superior king.

But now the Lord put Abram to sleep. Instead of Abram, the inferior, going through the animal pieces, God, in miniature form, walks through the cut up flesh. This after God speaks to Abram in his deep sleep, in the midst of a dreadful darkness, of the sufferings that will come to Abram's descendants before they will be given the land. But the greatest suffering would be God's. The One who would be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night for His people in the wilderness, appeared as a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch in Abram's dream, and He went through the slain animals.

God took the place of the vanquished and inferior king. What was He saying? “My promise to you is secured by My own suffering, and not by yours. I am willing to be cut in order that My promise to you is kept.” 2000 years later, the Son of God would fulfill this vision when He took the curse of the covenant on the cross. Because of that sacrificial love, we have been given a much better kingdom than the land of Canaan.

Meanwhile the offspring of Abram would live as strangers and even slaves in a foreign land for hundreds of years before they were given even the partial earthly fulfillment of God's great promise in His gift of the Promised Land to the Jews. God announces to Abraham that His descendants would be afflicted for four hundred years. We need to be patient when it appears that evil is winning and that the Lord's kingdom is losing. We are not the first servants of God to be instructed in the art of waiting upon the Lord. We are not the first ones to be told that the key to our life comes in believing the sure Word of the Almighty.

God knows how to afflict those who trouble His people now. Vengeance is in His hands. Sometimes we have great difficulty in even distinguishing between the righteous and the wicked. The Lord will judge. We need to trust Him. We need to sleep peacefully at night, resting in His goodness, and then rise up every new morning with an ear for His Voice. It is enough for us to know that He was willing to take the pain that has secured His promise toward Abram and his seed forever. If we doubt the promise, we need only look to the One who was cut off for our transgressions, and who rose again for our justification.

God knows when the iniquity of His adversaries has reached the tipping point. Whether that is forty years from now or four hundred is His concern, and not ours. We need to believe in Christ and lay hold of the promise made to Abram so long ago. It is enough that we have been credited with a righteousness that is not our own through faith in Christ. It is enough that Jesus has promised us a land of eternal blessing, and that He will be with us forever.