GENESIS 15
Read Genesis 15:1-21
We have seen that on several occasions that God came to Abram and made promises of land and descendants to him. In this chapter God reiterates those promises and crystallises them in a formal way by what is known as a covenant. A covenant is an agreement cast in almost legal language between parties, like a contract in modern terms. In ancient times it was normally made by a stronger party setting out what was expected between the two parties. For example, if a strong nation conquered a weaker one, the strong nation may promise to defend the weaker against attack from a third party, and the weaker nation may agree to pay taxes and provide soldiers for the army. The covenant would normally be ratified with an oath and a symbolic action such as a feast.
God made several covenants with his people in the Old Testament and they generally follow a similar pattern to the secular covenant outlined above. God is the stronger party and he makes the promises and sets out the terms and conditions.
In this meeting between God and Abram in a vision, Abram starts by voicing his concerns to God. Despite God’s previous words to him, Abram is concerned that he won’t have any children and any inheritance will pass outside the immediate family. God repeats again his promise that Abram will have a child and more than that, he will have descendants – so many, in fact, that they will be as many as the stars above (and there was little light pollution in those days (v8)). Abrams response was to believe the Lord leading to one of the most famous verses in the Old Testament, ‘Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness’ (v9). The Lord also repeated the promise of Land to Abram’s descendants, but we don’t see that until the end of the chapter (v18) and this time the land of promise is given a bit more geographical detail.
After the promise of offspring there is this curious episode where the Lord tells Abram to arrange some sacrificed animals in a sort of corridor. At night we read that ‘a smoking brazier with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces’ of the sacrificed animals (v17). What is going on here? In the Old Testament God is often represented by smoke and/or fire – think of the Children of Israel being led through the desert at the Exodus by a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night. It could be that the picture here is of God sealing these promises of the covenant by making an oath, a sort of ‘if I don’t keep my promise may this fate happen to me’ (that of the sacrificed creatures) – an equivalent of the modern day, ‘cross my heart and hope to die’. Another strange thing is that while this is going on, Abram is fast asleep (v12). This could be God’s grace in action because if Abram were awake when God made the formal covenant promises, then Abram might make promises – promises that he could not possibly keep, and that would break the covenant almost as soon as it was put in place.