Clough Genesis Lesson 47
Why God blessed Abraham; faith exercised – Genesis 15:1-6
Genesis 15 is the chapter when the covenant which God has promised He is going to make with Abraham is actually made. Chapter 15 is one of the crucial chapters in all of God’s Word because it’s material in this chapter that led to the Reformation. The great Reformation passages that “the just shall live by faith,” the passage that one is justified by grace alone, are all passages that basically emanate in the progress of god over the centuries from Genesis 15. Just like chapter 14 was a key chapter in showing that violence is sometimes justified, that it’s false, the common myth of our time that all violence is wrong, and chapter 14 being the key biblical example, chapter 15 is the key one in the doctrine of revelation and justification. One of the evidences that it’s a new chapter and a very key one is the vocabulary. All verses in chapter 15 with the exception of verse 6 and some editorial remarks are of the same inseparable vision; it’s one complete continuous vision throughout chapter 15. It’s not narrative, it’s not history, it’s a statement of something that God spoke to Abraham.
When we look through the chapter and we look at the various parts of it, we notice immediately something’s different. For example, this is the first occurrence of the expression “the Word of God.” It appears in verse 1; it says “the word of Jehovah,” but it is the first time this occurs in Scripture. And whenever something new happens in the progress of dogma we want to ask why? Why does the Holy Spirit introduce the Word of God at this point in history? Surely God has spoken before and He has but yet at this point the special term “Word of God” is first formally used. We look further in verse 1 we see another expression familiar from later in Scripture, and that is “I am,” it’s one of the first cases of God saying “I am” and the word “am” looks like this and the word for Jehovah looks like that, so you can see that the very word for God Himself in the Bible comes from the Hebrew verb to be, or to come to be. But not only that, in verse 1 it’s the first time that God is spoken of as a shield and a reward, words that are very, very prominent in the Psalms later on, words that will have great comfort as we’ll see later.
Moreover, in verse 6 is the first time in the Bible the word “believe” occurs. And this is significant because if it’s also the first time that the Word of God is said to occur, isn’t it interesting that simultaneously with a formal introduction of the Word of God we have the formal introduction of believing, believing that Word of God. Verse 6 is also the first biblical occurrence of the word to impute, from which we get the word imputation, or a crediting of righteousness to our account.
And so because there’s so much new
vocabulary in chapter 15 we have to stop and think why, what’s different,
what’s happened here, what’s changed. To
understand the flow of thought, because this morning we’re only going to be able
to cover the first six verses, to understand the flow of thought we want to go
back to a passage in the New Testament that I believe looks back to Genesis
15. Turn to the Gospel of John, John 8. Here the Lord Jesus Christ is involved in a
vigorous argument. Jesus Christ has said
that you are not necessarily the sons of Abraham just because you happen to be
Jews and the Jews don’t like this. So
therefore in John
But then it goes on and introduces something in John 8:56 and this pertains to this chapter we’re studying this morning. Jesus said halfway through the argument, at the end here He says, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day; he saw it, and was glad.” When did Abraham see Jesus? It says so right here, “he saw My day, and he was glad.” I believe that he saw Jesus’ day in Genesis 15. What it’s saying is that it was Christ who appeared to Abraham 2000 years before He was born, and therefore in verse 57, the Jews, catching something wrong here they said, “Then said the Jews unto Him, You aren’t fifty years old, have you seen Abraham?” And then one of the most amazing statements of the Bible, [58] “Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say to you, Before Abraham came to be, I am.” Notice the verb tense, “before Abraham came into existence, I am,” I was, I am eternal. This is a claim to deity, a bold claim to deity in the face of the very fiery crowd that hates to hear this claim. So Christ refers to His encounter with Abraham back in Genesis 15.
Now turning back to Genesis 15 and looking at some of the details. One of the background issues you want to know to help you enjoy and understand this chapter is to understand the idea of blessing. Many of you have studied, if you have studied the Scriptures at all, you’ve confined your studies mostly to the New Testament. You’re familiar with stories in the Gospels but you’re not too familiar with the stories in the Old Testament and therefore you don’t understand the New Testament. And blessing is one of these words; blessing, if you just study the New Testament will come across like it’s some spiritual thing. Blessing in the Old Testament was money in possession, wealth, that simple, that easy, that physical in constitution; blessing is wealth. That’s the primary picture behind the word “blessing” and it comes up here; it’s a very physical thing. Now it doesn’t mean that all wealth is blessing; it means that blessing will contain wealth. In the Old Testament you were not blessed unless you had wealth, physical riches, material wealth. And this is the topic of Abraham, the topic of Isaac, and the topic of Jacob. Let’s read the text just the way the text says it and let’s not try to read the text through the eyes of the New Testament. This is talking about money, land, capital, wealth. That’s what they want.
But something else, and this is a new idea for us, if the first one wasn’t, and that is that wealth in the Bible is something contained in the family unit. The family is the possessor of wealth in the Bible; not the individual, it isn’t just the father that has the wealth; it’s the father, the mother and the children who inherit it that have the wealth. The wealth is given not to an individual; the wealth is given to the family unit. Hence, one is not considered wealthy if he just has wealth by himself. If you have no children to pass your wealth onto, in the Old Testament you are not wealth; being wealthy includes having a progeny to inherit the wealth. The wealth, in other words, must be transferred down through time; it must be transferred from father to son, father to son. In those days children were regarded as a blessing and not a burden, showing that their generation was a responsible one in contrast to ours.
And therefore since property was so tied to
the family, the property and family rites were guarded. They had detailed laws
of inheritance. Ruth, for example, deals
with this. And the laws of inheritance were very strict against illegitimate
children. The word “bastard” comes
directly from the Scriptures; a bastard is one who is cut out of the wealth of
the family, and they protected true born sons from bastards because the seed of
the father and the mother must be transmitted; we must not allow a bastard to
inherit the family’s wealth and take it away.
The family’s wealth must be guarded and protected in the blood line of
the father and the mother together. And
so there’s this very, very strong protection on the children that inherit
wealth. Today we not only have hostile attacks
against the family but at least, since the 1930s when the socialists took over
both political parties, we have had a constant stream of legislation devoted to
destroying the family, and I refer to inheritance taxes. Inheritance taxes are one of the most
anti-biblical type of taxes on the books and the reason it is is because taxes
in Scripture are to generate revenue for government, not to redistribute wealth
and not to be devices of social engineering.
And so today, because a father is penalized for being wealthy because he
can’t pass his wealth on to his sons without paying tremendous penalties, in
effect, inheritance laws of the modern state have made us all bastards. It has disinherited every family; that and
the progressive income tax. Both of
those are products of the humanists that were the great [can’t understand word]
leaders in
In fact, some of you people I’ve talked to don’t like my criticism of inheritance taxes, and yet some of you are the most excited and some of the motivated people to oppose gun legislation. Now look, you’re inconsistent because gun legislation assumes that because you are the owner of a gun you therefore are an evil person, before you’ve committed an evil act. You’re a potential evil simply because you possess the gun, and therefore the state will take your gun away from you, otherwise known as gun registration. And you don’t like that, and many of you oppose it and yet when it comes over to inheritance tax you don’t seem to see that it’s the same principle, isn’t it. Isn’t the fact that when someone is wealthy, if they possess all this wealth and you say well we’ve got to keep those wealthy families from getting too powerful. Why? Why? Isn’t that the same argument used against guns? We’ve got to keep the guns from being misused so let’s take them away; we’ve got to keep the wealth from being misused by the large families so let’s just take it away. It’s the same kind of thinking. It doesn’t allow a person to sin and then be punished for his sin; it prejudges and says a person is a sinner merely by virtue of possession, not by virtue of deed. So we have, therefore, inheritances taxes today which, thank God they did not have in Abraham’s day or we’d never have our salvation. Wealth was passed down from father to son, father to son, father to son. Now that all comes out in Genesis 15 but just keep in mind, blessing; blessing is physical wealth, physical wealth comes through the family by inheritance.
Genesis 15:1, “After these things,” what
are “these things.” “After these things”
God speaks to Abraham. Now “these
things” we’ve been studying Sunday mornings with chapters 12, 13 and 14. That is “these things.” “These things” include a record of Abraham’s
failures and successes. In chapter 12
Abraham meets a trial like usually male believers get hit, on the job, and then
it carries over into the home, and Abraham is in the ranching business and he
gets hit with famine and he doesn’t respond properly, instead of staying in the
will of God where the trial is he evacuates the area and he’s out of it and
we’ll give him an “F” for that test. And
then in chapter 13 the ranching partnership that Abraham is in dissolves,
Then in chapter 14 there were two tests; there was one test which was the violence test; people had ripped him off and the question was whether he was going to sit back and allow this to happen or whether he was going to take steps and intervene, violently if necessary, against evil, the power of the sword. Now this is not denying government because in that day he was the government. So we have in chapter 14 another “A” for Abraham because he did not sit back, he could have had sour grapes attitude and say well Lot deserved it, he ripped me off from my partnership, so if he wants to go down to Sodom and Gomorrah he can go down to Sodom and Gomorrah and stay there and if he gets ripped off by the kings of Shinar, fine, good riddance Lot, see you around. That could have been his attitude but it wasn’t. Abraham was a man of grace; he forgave him and went on.
Then in chapter 14 at the end, after inheriting, or having in his hands basically $500,000 or $1,000,000, great possessions of the booty of the war, Abraham said no, you take it, I don’t want it. And this is a very phenomenal thing for Abraham to do. Here’s a faith-rest, he is going to trust God to replace the lost assets of the dissolved corporation, and he’s going to do so even casting aside $1,000,000 in booty; we’re just guessing on the quantity on that but a large quantity of money, he’s going to throw it away, as it were, trusting the Lord. So Abraham came out on the whole pretty good, three “A’s” and one “F”.
That is “these things.” “After these things,” after these little trials, “the word of Jehovah comes to Abram in a vision,” now, the Word of God coming to him in a vision means that this is not a dream. Let’s be precise so everybody understands the word vision. Now this is not spaced out on drugs; if some of you watch this glassy-eyed expression of somebody that’s really spaced out you have the idea that he’s in a vision but that’s something else. This is a vision where the person’s empirical senses have been taken over by God so that he can’t see what’s there in front of his face but he sees what God wants him to see. He can’t hear things around him; he hears what God wants him to hear. He can’t feel things around him but he feels what God wants him to feel. Now today in educational circles we’re talking about audio-visual. A vision is one step further behind audio-visual. Instead of just the audio and instead of just the visual, we have tactile, olfactory, and so on, all the five senses are involved in a vision.
So in a vision, this is the first one
recorded in the Bible, it occurs in the daytime. And it is not a dream; careful, this doesn’t
mean a dream, this is a vision in the daytime.
Now later on we’ll see a passage about stars in verse 5. Stars in verse 5, it looks like Abraham is
going around at night, he’s being asked to leave the tent. But, this didn’t occur at night, this
occurred in the daytime. So some scholars
have said the vision must have gone on for hours and hours and hours and
hours. But it didn’t. The vision was
basically a short one, Abraham sleeps toward the end of it but it doesn’t have
to occur at night. The night-ness of verse 5 is in the vision. Bright sun could have been shining, it could
have been at
Now this leads us to a problem and the problem is this: What is revelation? Now I don’t mean the book of Revelation at
the back of the Bible, I mean when God reveals Himself. What is revelation? This revelation came by a vision; other
revelation comes by dreams; some revelation comes by a loud public word from
God, such that if you were there with a tape recorder you could have taped
recorded God’s voice. At
Now all men need revelation, Christian and
non-Christian because you are made in God’s image; you have a desire in your
heart for God. Not only do you have a
desire, you have a need and you have something in your heart that demands God. For example, sovereignty, the fact that
somebody has to be ultimately in charge.
Now every person has a sovereign God; it may be the God of the Bible or
it may be something else but there is some sovereignty in every person’s
worship object. And all people are
worshippers; that’s why the Bible warns, you’re not going to choose not to
worship; an atheist and an agnostic is a deeply religious person. Now that may shock you but it’s true. In Acts 17, when Paul goes into
They’ve got to have this thing. And some of the most vehement anti-Christian, anti-biblical people are some of the strongest moral critics of various social issues. Where are they getting them all from? If you want to test sometime in a conversation with this kind of a person, after they’ve kissed off the Scriptures and basically denied this, that and the other thing, well, that’s fine, how’d you like me to rip you off in your business. Oh, don’t do that, that’s wrong. Why, I thought we just more or less got rid of the rules here, why are you all of a sudden saying something’s wrong. What right do you have to say something’s wrong. Well, I just believe it’s wrong. Correct, you have a system of what is right and what is wrong. So every person has this need and most importantly, from out point of view here, is that every person has needs of comprehensive knowledge at some point. You can’t say something is true unless all is true and so we have this need in men’s hearts for a God.
Now the God of the Bible reveals Himself.
I said at this point God is revealing Himself to Abraham by means of a
vision. Now let me carefully draw two
pictures to show you what I don’t mean and then what I do mean; this is the
difference today between a liberal church and a conservative church. Let’s take Abraham, and put it inside a
box. Let that box be Abraham’s
experience; he was the first Jew; he had lived, he was born probably in
Listen to one of them: “There is no such thing as revealed truth;
there are truths of revelation, that is propositions which express the results
of correct thinking concerning revelation but they are not themselves directly
revealed.” By this he means something
like this: Moses goes up to
Now what is our concept of revelation, the orthodox Christian one that has been
believed by the church fathers for 1900 years and believed by the Jews for
thousands of years before that? That is,
that God speaks into the environment from outside of the environment. God’s Word crashes into the environment,
independently of Abraham’s language, independently of Abraham’s birth place,
Abraham’s experiences, Abraham’s limitations, Abraham’s IQ, Abraham’s
educational background, all of that is disregarded. God’s Word comes crashing in and since the
author is God here and not man it means that down here you are… and when you
receive the Word of God through the Bible that the same God speaks to you both
and the message fits. Now that’s what
we’re talking about revelation.
So let’s look now at what’s described what revelation is. First, it is always verbal. God speaks words, not an ugh, a groan, a feeling, an impression. When God reveals He speaks. Now He hasn’t spoken in 2,000 years but so what. We’re just saying when revelation occurs He speaks words. Here’s why, it’s very simple. If you don’t believe God speaks words, how are you going to tell when God speaks? You can say I believe that’s the act of God. Well, I can go out and say I believe it’s the act of Satan. Now how do we distinguish between the two? You can’t unless God speaks words. So it’s very important that you understand in the Bible, don’t buy this liberal garbage, revelation means words.
Secondly, revelation is always personal; that means that you are forced to respond to it, you can tune it out or accept it but you can’t stay neutral to it. That’s why the famous church historian book, John Montgomery wrote a book recently called Damned Through the Church and his whole point was more people are damned through the Church than blessed. Well, how can he make a statement like that? Because lots of people hear and don’t don anything with it and they harden their hearts to it. That’s the damning themselves through the Church. If you want a piece of advice, kind of odd from the pulpit, but if you’re not interested in responding to the Scripture, don’t listen to it; at least you don’t harden your heart to it. Stay naively ignorant.
Then the third thing is that revelation is always historical. That means it doesn’t occur in every generation, it might occur here with Abraham, a little bit here with Moses, later on with Elijah, later on with Jesus. It occurs sporadically; it is not a constantly occurring thing. For example, no revelation has taken place since the death of the Apostle John approximately 95 AD. So by that we mean it is discreet units through history. And finally, revelation is prophetic, that is, it speaks to us about things yet to come, things that lie out beyond our horizon.
Now in Genesis 15:1 that is what is going on. “After these things the word of God came to Abram in a vision, saying,” now here’s something else. What do we know from that New Testament passage? Do you remember those words, remember we looked it up, John 8, and it said Abraham saw My day and he was glad. And I say that’s Genesis 15. if that’s the case, the Word of God here means more than just the Bible, it means the Lord Jesus Christ, the living Word of God “came to Abraham in a vision, saying,” notice it’s the Word of God that’s speaking, it’s like a person, the Word of God is doing the speaking. “…saying, Fear not Abram: I am thy shield, and they exceeding great reward.” Notice the first introduction, he says stop fearing. Do you remember how Adam and Eve responded in the Garden of Eden; remember when they first heard the voice of God coming? They ducked, they went behind the fig leaves, they went behind the trees, just got out of the way and God had to call, hey, what are you doing there He says, because man naturally is afraid of the Scriptures.
Now here’s a little test you can test yourself on. The test to tell how close your soul is to the Word of God can go this way; if when you read a passage of Scripture you don’t have a sense of its demand and its pull and its tug on your conscience, you’ve got too much slack in the system. Now I’m not saying this is always going to happen, but as a Christian it ought to happen enough till you know what I’m talking about. If this is something strange to you then you may have a little problem. When the Word of God, when you see and understand the Scriptures you ought to feel a tug on the conscience, there ought to be a response, sometimes I don’t like that. That’s good because it’s showing you that the Word of God has got in there; you may not like it but it’s getting in there. But if it’s just kind of oh well, you know… got something else to do, that attitude, then the Word of God hasn’t done a thing except occupy your time.
So He says “Stop fearing, Abraham.” Unlike Adam and Eve, who were hiding because
they were sinful, Abraham’s sinful too but he’s also now the recipient of
grace, so “stop fearing.” And notice He
says, “Abram.” How would you like it if
you could hear God pronounce your personal name? That is how personal the God of the
Scriptures is. When He comes to you He
doesn’t address you by your Social Security number; He addresses you by your
own personal individual name, “Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great
reward.” The word “shield” has reference
to all his trials as a man. He’s got the
trials from his ranching, he’s got trials from war, all these are pressures
that are exerting on him. And God says
Abram, I want to remind you, just something basic, “I am your shield,” not
So He says “I am your shield,” and then what else would you suppose a rancher would be interested in, besides afraid of somebody attacking his business he wants a shield, God also says “I am your money,” the word “reward” here is a word for money. Now this is most interesting; remember how I started out this morning? I said blessing in the Old Testament is to be equated with money and physical wealth. And this is how it was indeed visioned. But notice the first time the word “money” or “wealth” occurs, who is the money? It’s not shekels that you put in your hand; it’s God Himself that is the money. And this gives you a perspective that the great things of the Old Testament, though they said wealth was physical, yes, they were under no illusions that it wasn’t the bare naked physical shekel that they held in their hand; it was the shekel all right but it was the one who gave the shekel—God! “I am thy money!”
Now look at those two words, “shield” and “money” and think of a man who faces pressure in his business. What two promises could be more thrilling to a believer who is on the job, who is under pressure, who faces the problem of making a prophet and it was just as hard to make a prophet then as it is today and God says “I am your shield” and “I am your profit.” Now you see, that orients Abraham so now he begins to get mastery of the details of life. Now all these details that comes his way he opposes them with the faith technique so he becomes a master of the details of life and not a servant to the details of life. The details of life are important but they are not important on an eternal scale, or they’re not as important as the eternal issues. And so this is the point, getting in perspective. “I am your shield, I am your profit.” Now get that straight God says.
Well then you look at verse 2 and you wonder whether he did get it straight. Now I tried to prime you for verse 2 when I said blessing in the Old Testament and wealth is not viewed as wealth unless you’ve got a family to pass the wealth to. And that’s why Abram reacts the way he does in verse 2 when he says “Lord God, what are You going to give me, seeing I go childless. In other words, what kind of wealth is this you’re going to give me Lord, it’s not going to be wealth, I don’t have a son and if don’t have a son you give me all the wealth you want but it’s not real wealth because it doesn’t last in history, I can’t pass it on, “seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?” Under the ancient law this was true, he had to deal with this problem
Genesis 15:3, “And Abram said, Behold, to me You have given no seed: and lo, one born in my house is mine heir.” Well now God answers, and notice the personal nature of it again, a two-way conversation. [4] “And, behold, the word of Jehovah came again to him, saying, This one shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of your own innards [loins] shall be your heir. God amplifies this promise. In the history of Scripture, in fact in the history of the human race the amount of revelation grows with time. In the Garden of Eden, remember the first prophecy? Eve was simply told your baby is going to step on the snake. Well, that didn’t say too much though if you look at mythology, mythological art of tribes and you go back in the ancient East and look at Egyptian art, you’ll always see the fertility goddess and you look down by her feet and you’ll see a serpent, and that is a memory of that protoevangelium. All the human race, all the races, remember that promise; some better than others but they all remember it.
But this promise now gets amplified because now we know that the promise is going to come through Abram in particular and it’s going to be a Jewish baby that is going to step on Satan’s head. And now here it is going to be a baby completely born by Abraham’s house; it’s not going to be an adopted son, it’s going to be his physical son. That’s what it means at the end of verse 4 when it says “he will come forth out of you,” because up to this point, theoretically, it could have been Eliezer; it could have been an adopted son, that would have been counted. So as history goes on God’s Word grows. This has an application to how you read prophecy. In interpreting prophecy reverse the usual rule; the usual rule in interpreting the Bible is if you have two texts and one is hard and one is simple, you know the simple one first, then interpret the hard text from the simple one. But when you come to prophecy you reverse it; you always use the most difficult passage to interpret the simple one and the reason is that prophecy expands with time and therefore those of us who are pretrib, premillennialists, we have the most complex picture of the coming day of the Lord, whereas our amill friends and our posttribulational friends, they want to collapse all these little tiny prophetic events into one big ball of wax because it looks simpler to do it that way. But it flies in the face of interpreting prophecy.
Now it goes on and then God says, Genesis 15:5, “[And He brought him forth abroad, and said,] Look to heaven, and try to count the stars, if you be able to number them: and he said [unto him], So shall thy seed be.” He says “tell [count] the stars, “if you be able to number them,” and the sentence stops in the middle, that’s incomplete; it’s not a complete sentence. Read it again, God tells him, “Go, look toward heaven, tell the stars, and if you be able to number them….” It stops. Why isn’t that sentence completed? It was a grammatical device for emphasis. When you wanted to say you can’t say this or it’s impossible, they’d start what is called a protasis, if this happens… and leave it. So we would interpret verse 5 as you can’t, go number the stars and you can’t, “so shall your seed be.” Now that’s why the seed promise of verse 5 comes after the money promise of verse 1. You must have wealth and it must be passable, it must be inheritable and so therefore “as the stars” means Abraham’s going to have a son, he’s going to have a son, he’s going to have a son, on down through history many sons, he’s going to be the progenitor of a large, large segment of the human race.
And now for the key verse of all, Genesis 25:6, “And he believed in the LORD; and the LORD counted it to him for righteousness.” Now usually in Hebrew narrative we have a construction called the waw consecutive, it looks something like this, a little Hebrew mark for “and,” then you have a verb, and it goes from right to left, and then you can read forward reading from right to left. In Hebrew you have this and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and it’s kind of boring when it’s translated literally. Those of you who have read the King James and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so happened, and you get tired of that. But that’s an accurate reflection of the way the Hebrew thought, and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so. Now the Hebrew had no capital letters, no underlines, no dashes, so when the writers wanted to make a point what did they have to make a point with? They only could do it by syntax and shifting the grammar and here is where they shift the grammar.
This breaks; verse 6 is not part of the vision. Read verse 5 and read verse 7, you can find, if you look at both of those verses carefully you can read quite smoothly from verse 5 to 7 and skip verse 6 and never miss it. Verse 6 is not part of the vision; verse 6 is an editorial edition, it’s an interruption, it’s an explanation by Moses and whoever compiled Genesis. And it’s just injecting at this point so we’ll understand that Abram was a believer. That’s what he’s saying. And he’s using an expression that could translate out as: Abram, it says literally, Abram believed but not at a point in time; it’s Abraham believer, believed, believed, believed, believed, believed, believed, believed, believed and I look at all those points of belief and I sum them up as one “Abraham believed.” And I think the better way because if you translate it “Abram believed” it sounds like it’s one point. So a better way of translating it, I think, is just to say “Abram was a believer.”
“Abram was a believer and God counted it to him for righteousness.” Now the word “believe,” I said is the first time for it in the Bible. Let’s look at this word; there are lots of neat words for faith in the Scriptures and maybe if I take a few minutes to explain this it will help some of you and encourage some of you about this matter of believing. The word “believe” is a very familiar one, in fact it’s the only Hebrew word you all know, and you’ve all used the word and I bet you never even knew that you were using a Hebrew word. Amen; amen is not English; I used to think it was and I was wondering why do you always put an article “a” on a plural noun, because it should be the men, end the prayers the men, and I wondered who the men are. So that didn’t figure out. So amen must be coming from somewhere else, and it was; “amen” is a Hebrew word and it means in its elementary sense a pillar or a support. That’s the primary basic meaning of that stem, a pillar, or support, or rock; it connotes firmness. But when it’s used as a verb it means to become a rock, become supportive, become stable.
So then what does this tell us about faith in verse 6? Faith is the act of becoming stable. By what means? When this verb was used it always had a means and the means is found in the text; this is a Hebrew “b” and this “b” is actually a preposition, it means “in” or it can mean “by means of.” And here it is used with the Lord, and so it says “Abraham became a pillar by means of Jehovah.” Now how did he become a pillar, how did he become strong? By means of Jehovah. It’s simple, by means of Jehovah’s Word, by Jehovah’s promise Abraham became strong.
Now another word in verse 6, we see Abraham, he receives the Word of God, he becomes strong because he trusted, and now “He counted it to him for righteousness.” The word “count” is used in these kinds of contexts economically. Ever think economics had something to do with the Bible. Well here it is; the economic idea of valuing something is wrapped up in this word. Let me give you an example of why this is not understood, ever by people who ought to know. Soon, as the dollar diminishes and diminishes and diminishes because we’ve got 10% inflation now, you are going to hear a very familiar cry; the cry is going to be wage and price controls. Now this has only been tried since Diocletian in 96AD and flunked every time, but this is the monotony of human viewpoint, let’s try the same thing, maybe this time Chance will decide it will work. It’s had a perfect zero score for 1900 years, but in our day we are so different, we are such a brilliant people, that we are going to make it work this time around. Wage and price controls.
Now what’s the idea of wage and price controls? We’ve got to hold down prices, so the government is going to tell you much your car is worth, it’s going to tell you how much your home is worth, how much your toothbrush is worth, how much the toothpaste that goes on the toothbrush is worth—wage and price controls. Now there’s something wrong with it because who decides what something is worth? It is not… the price of this pen is not decided by the government, who’s the government? A bunch of bureaucrats that’s all. What right do they have, they might want to pay a dime for this, I might not give a penny for it. We have different valuations of objects. That’s why you want a free market; that’s why the government can’t determine prices because it doesn’t have enough wisdom to determine prices. You need a lot of consumers going after a product and the consumers will determine the price of the product. That’s free market valuation and that’s imputation or valuation.
But God is the perfect evaluator; we may miss, and there are objects that we consider expensive that God doesn’t. And so we can think of criminal acts, hire a contract man on somebody’s life and that’s $10,500 for this guy, if we can’t get him the first time it goes to $15,000, or this prostitute is worth $100 or $150, or something else. Now there’s a valuation, it’s in its free market but it doesn’t reflect God’s evaluation. So God has a perfect evaluation; if God were to set wage and price controls it’d be perfect, but the claim of the government to set wage and price controls is a claim actually to deity. Now economics, then, gives us the idea of “impute.” To impute something means to value something. When you offer your bucks in the store to buy a product off the shelf you are imputing value to that product.
Look at it another way; the product in the store had no value unless you impute it? Right? Think it through for a minute. If you own a bunch of boxes of soap you say that’s soap’s valuable. No it isn’t, it’s not valuable at all until somebody buys it. And the moment somebody buys it, now it has value. You say well I don’t see it. Well, if every person in town had a ton of soap in their basement would your boxes of soap on the shelf be worth anything? Absolutely nothing, because nobody was valuing your product. You can’t sell it because it can’t be imputed with value.
All right, now the word in verse 6 is that, God credits Abraham’s faith, Abraham’s act of faith, as righteousness. God credits it, He looks down and He says I like the price tag, I’m going to put a price tag on this and the price tag is perfection. Now watch what happens; here’s Abraham’s act of faith. God comes along and He puts a price tag on it and the price tag says +R, absolutely perfect. You say hey, wait a minute, I thought you said Abraham had an F, and he had an A, an A, and an A. That doesn’t look like a perfect score. It isn’t. Well, then what’s God saying it’s perfect for when it isn’t perfect? That’s imputed righteousness. God calls Abraham’s act perfect because of something that’s going to happen in the future.
Let’s see this future orientation by turning in the New Testament to several passages that show us how New Testament authors use Genesis 15:6. First, the epistle to the Romans, it’s a very, very famous verse. Maybe I can use it to convince some of you you ought to do more reading in the Old Testament. But here are very familiar New Testament passages that you’ve read a thousand times if you’re a student of Scripture at all, but do you know where it came from. In Romans 4:2 Paul is talking about how a person is saved. And there are two answers to this; always have been two answers, always will be only two answers and that is I am saved because of things I accomplish; in other words, my product, my acts here not necessarily of faith, just my acts, that has a value which we’ll call “V.” And that value goes up as I do this good work, I do this good work, I do this good work, we have linear economic growth, increasing value. That’s a theory of salvation by works. Only one problem, it’s an infinite curve, it just keeps going up. You can say well I value it at 1,264 good works. All right, I come along and do 1,265 good works, and somebody else does 1,256 good works and it goes on ad infinitum, you just keep on going, going, going, going, going, you never get to perfection; it’s an infinite term. And that’s the problem with salvation by works.
And that’s what Paul says in verse 2, “If Abraham were justified by works, he has something to glory, but not before God,” namely, his own production. [3] “But what saith the Scripture? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness.” In other words, Abraham didn’t have this constantly infinitely ascending curve; Abraham looked forward in time to the promise of God, here it is over here, the promise of God. And that is 100% perfect, and Abraham, because he looked at that, he had his eyes on the future; he had his eyes on what God had promised, not on what he did. Even his little acts of faith he did not have his eyes on. So therefore the object of Abraham’s obsession was perfect. God looks at Abraham looking at that which is perfect and He calls that righteousness. When Abraham will look at a perfect product that itself becomes perfect.
Let’s look at it again, Romans
Let’s look at another reference to Abraham; Galatians 3:6. Here we have quoted out same old passage, same story from Genesis 15. And looking at Galatians 3:5, “He, therefore, that ministers to you the Spirit, and works miracles among you, does he do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” In other words, does God sit here and say oh boy, here’s Abraham down there and he’s got $2,500 worth of good works, now I’m going to bless him; here Abraham, here’s a token of My appreciation. Is it on that basis or is it on another basis. And so then he says [6] “Even as Abraham believed God, it was accounted to him for righteousness. [7] Therefore know, that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.” The idea again is the blessing, the wealth, the seed. You see the wealth that came to Abraham was going to come through Abraham; Abraham and Sarah were going to have a son but that son couldn’t be born on a natural basis. So therefore God couldn’t give wealth unless God also gave a seed here. This had to be by a miracle, it had to be by divine intervention. And this being the case it is of God, not of man.
One further passage; Hebrews 11:8, talking about Abraham, it talks about the same passage. “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, he obeyed; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.” Verse 12, “Therefore…” “Therefore sprang there even from one, and him as good as dead, as man as the stars of the sky,” citation of Genesis 15:6. Why? Because he believed; because God respected his belief.
So we have in Genesis 15:1-6 why God blessed Abraham, we have the faith technique exercised, we see a man facing the details of life and meeting those details of life by faith. The result of this is “amen,” that is, he is strengthened, he becomes a pillar and why is that? Because what is his object? “I am thy shield, and I am thy might.” Why can he do that? Because faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. It all starts with the Word; you cannot believe apart from the Scriptures. You can try to work it up, it’s not going to work, you have got to receive the Scriptures, be exposed to the Scriptures and accept the authority of God’s revelation that crashes in to our environment, an absolute.
We’re going to sing……