Clough Genesis Lesson 49
Justification; the signing of the contract – Genesis 15:1-17
In the Scripture that was just read we have the last part of the vision of Abraham. God, in Genesis 15, is giving a complete visionary revelation to Abraham. And one of our methods of teaching has always been to go back to the historical event itself in Scripture. Then from that we obtain the doctrines that we believe. One can never interpret the Scriptures by the light of a theological system. One must always be fresh and come to the text looking for God to correct his system as we look at the textual data itself. And in no better place can we demonstrate this than in Genesis 15:6, a verse that is the editorial comment introduced into the middle of this vision, for every verse in Genesis 15 is part of God’s vision except verse 6. Verse 6 is an editorial edition by Moses under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as he wrote this text and put in this vision of Abraham.
It says that “Abraham believed in the LORD; and God credited” or counted, or imputed, “it to Abraham for righteousness.” This is the great doctrine of justification by faith, a doctrine that we want to learn to associate with the event of the call of Abraham. But in Protestantism, all the way since the days of Calvin and Luther, there has been a great debate on one little point that has relevance to this issue and that’s this question: Which comes first, regeneration or faith? After Calvin died and Luther died, and the first Protestant reformers passed from the scene, in the 17th century there were a group of men who, under the title of the Reformed position, began to systematize doctrine. And in their system of doctrine they decided that in no way could a totally depraved being ever believe, unless that totally depraved being were regenerated first. And so 17th century Reformed theology kept insisting that regeneration precedes faith and that the sinner who is dead in his sins can’t possible hear because a dead man can’t hear; he must be made alive first, before he can hear. And only after the act of regeneration can a person truly believe. Now this didn’t proceed from any textual Scripture, any reference particularly, it just kind of fell out in the logic of their systematization. It fell out from the metaphor of death, that if dead men can’t hear and dead men can’t speak then dead men can’t believe, and therefore dead men have to be regenerated first.
But others, including mainly the Lutherans, preserved the original Protestant position which was that faith precedes regeneration, that a man must believe and then only after he’s believed is he born again. And so the great debate continued. And this chapter gives us some valuable information to decide the issue. Let’s suppose that the systematizers of the 17th century, the later Calvinists, let’s suppose for just a moment that they’re correct, that regeneration does precede faith. If that’s the case then certain things begin to follow. One of the things that begins to follow is that regeneration is a subconscious thing; that the soul never is aware of believing the gospel until after regeneration has already taken place. And what it does, in effect, is open the door to infant regeneration; that is, an infant can be born again by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit and only later in his life come to believe, and historically that’s why the latter day descendants of Reformed theology in this mode hold to infant baptism, that an infant can be regenerated and only later come to subjective experienced faith. That’s one thing that follows from this position.
Another thing is that it makes regeneration theoretically possible apart from the preached Word of God, that is, obviously if dead men can’t hear and dead men can’t believe and dead men have to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit before they can believe, then conceivable regeneration could take place in a vacuum. Regeneration could take place utterly apart and distinct from a preaching of the Word of God. That’s another door that is opened by this position, and yet the Scriptures everywhere insist, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and then thou shalt be saved.”
A third thing that follows from this position is even more serious; in passages, many passages, particularly Romans 4:5, we read that God justifies the ungodly, He pronounces saved to people who are ungodly or ungodly or under the wrath of God. If that’s the case, it’s strange we don’t read in Romans 4 and these other discussions that God justifies the regenerate; after all, if regeneration takes place first and then there’s belief, then one ought to expect the Scripture to say God justifies those who are regenerate. In other words, we would have R, regeneration causing faith, F which causes justification. We would have that sequence of events. And yet Romans 4 says God justified the ungodly, God justifies those who are under His wrath. Now we’ve got a problem; if God justifies those under His wrath, then it means that those who are regenerated are under His wrath, and therefore the peculiar quirk of this particular system that regenerate people are still under the wrath of God until they have believed and have been justified. And this is indeed quiet a problem.
So let’s look and see if we can resolve
this based on Genesis 15, the passage before us. It says unambiguously in Genesis 15:6 that
Abraham believed, and then God “counted it to him for righteousness.” Clearly Genesis 15 is saying that first one
believes and then there is the point of justification. But then where do we place regeneration. Turn to Romans and watch, for in Romans
Certain things follow from this and those things that follow from this position we want to examine from Genesis 15 this morning. Turn back to Genesis 15 and recall the situation. Always go back to the Scripture; always try to read the Scripture in the time in which it was written. Go back and try to visualize, let your soul soak up the historical sequence of events. In the situation, forgetting all of the theological controversies, putting that aside for a moment, just look at the simple thing that’s happening. There is a man who has been promised that his children will be blessed, but he doesn’t have any children. And so it resolves to a simple thing; a man wants a man-child, he wants a male baby. That’s concretely what the issue is. And we know from what’s happened in Genesis 15:2-4 that he was looking at a gimmick; he was trying to pass the inheritance by a process of legal adoption, over to the manager of his estate, who was Eliezer, verse 2. Now that’s not something Abraham just manufactures out of wholesale cloth; Abraham there is utilizing ancient near eastern law customs. You can check these in Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Text; read those texts, read those texts, read those law codes, see what they say. That could be one way a man who was childless could carry on and protect his household, by adopting someone.
But had Abraham been allowed to do what he proposed in verse 2, then the result of all this would have been that Abraham’s focus and his attention would have been on his ability to handle his own problems with the resources at his own disposal. His eyes would not have looked at the Lord and on His Word; it would have looked at Abraham and on his skill. And so God says no Abraham, verse 4-5, that is not the way to do it, I and I alone will be the source of this promise. So Abraham was called to look outside of himself. He was called to look beyond every circumstance; he was called to look beyond history, everything in history up to that point and to hang everything on one thing, the Word of God, not his skill at manipulating customs, not his legal abilities, not any arrangement, but only on the Word of God.
Now, when we propose this kind of order, that faith precedes, inevitably our hyper-Calvinist friends reply ah, but you’re making faith meritorious; you’re saying that God justifies someone because of what is in someone, namely faith. No, that’s not what we’re saying. Let’s look at this matter of faith a moment and try very hard to see if we can come up with a picture of faith. What is this kind of faith that God justifies? It’s nothing; faith has nothing. Faith, as one person said, is like your eye, it never sees itself; faith beholds something but it never is something in and of itself. Faith isn’t a substance, we have so many grams, 3.5 grams we receive every Sunday morning. It’s not a substance; faith is an orientation of the soul and it’s looking at something. The issue in faith is not faith; the issue is the object of the faith. And this is why God is disciplining Abraham here; Abraham inevitably wants to set his eyes of faith on something, on a gimmick, on something over here, on some circumstance, or over here on wealth or law. Always he wants to be beholding something and God says no, Abraham, that is not the way it’s going to be; no Abraham, that is not the place to look; no Abraham, you can’t look there, look at Me… look at ME and look at My words only! And so the object of faith becomes God and His Word.
This is why the New Testament so carefully says “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Faith is contingent, dependent, receives it nourishment from only one source and that is the Word of God, Christ made known through His Word. Now this has some powerful applications. Let’s draw some conclusions from this view of faith.
First of all it means that you cannot believe apart from receiving information from the Scripture. There is no way you can biblically believe apart from God revealing Himself to you through His Scripture. Apart from the teaching and preaching of the Word of God no one can believe. Now that’s not to say that you need the Bible quoted to you in the King James Version to believe; I didn’t say that. There can be people come up to you and give you pieces and chunks of information they obtained from the Scripture and you respond to that and you believe. But we do insist that you cannot believe unless somewhere our soul comes in contact with the Word of God. It is the preached Word that precipitates faith. That’s the power of the gospel.
Another conclusion: when you talk to a non-Christian friend, and you emphasize your personal testimony more than the content of the gospel, you’re not helping that person to believe. When you give your testimony that might be a bait, it might be a come on, it might be a device to get them interested in the gospel but it isn’t the gospel and by itself no testimony ever can lead anyone to Christ. The testimony, if it does lead someone to Christ, leads them to Christ only because somewhere in the testimony you injected the Word of God. It is not the testimony, it is not your experience, it is not my experience, it’s not someone else’s experience, it is only the Word of God that causes faith to occur. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”
Now another application, this one for a Christian, in our own sanctification. How do we maintain a virile faith? Only one way; our faith has to be nourished on a daily basis from the Word of God. If you are the kind of Christian who thinks that you can get away with a few minutes of exposure to Scripture on Sunday morning between 11:00 o’clock and 12:00 and never open your Bible during the week in your own home to reflect upon it, to study it, to think about it, you are very sadly mistaken and you are going to become, if you are not already, an impotent believer—impotent because your soul is not made to function apart from daily nourishment of the Scripture. That’s God’s ordained means of grace. The soul cannot grow under God’s designed plan apart from exposure to the Scriptures. So let’s remember before we go further in Genesis 15, if that’s true faith is not orientation to the details of life but faith is the orientation to Jesus Christ ascended, occupation with Christ and His cross work. Then what’s the center of our confidence?
Now be careful because in our own fundamental circles there’s a danger right here. The danger is this: to think that because you had, maybe a crisis conversion four years ago, ten years ago, two weeks ago, or because you can remember a fantastic answer to prayer that happened to you two weeks ago or ten days ago or something else. The tendency for you is to become occupied with that; that’s the center of your faith. Wrong! The center of your faith in Jesus Christ in heaven; that always ought to be the center of your faith, not the religious experiences that flow from him. Those are nice, those are encouraging, but they’re not the center of your faith. Remember, faith is like the eye, it never looks at itself. And faith is not interested in looking at faith. Faith is not even interested in looking at religious experience; ultimately faith is only interested in hungering and thirsting after Christ as He’s made known in the Scriptures. And so therefore faith has as its sole object… sole object, the Son of God.
Now that’s the kind of faith that justifies. That’s why, now in verse 6, God says I count that for righteousness. Why does He count it for righteousness? Because it’s looking at the only source of pure righteousness; that’s why that kind of faith can be counted for righteousness, not because it has something, not because it’s 3.5 grams of something, but merely because real justifying faith is occupied with the only one who is perfectly righteous. Real justifying faith doesn’t look at the heart; real justifying faith doesn’t look at experiences. Real justifying faith looks at Christ and the promises of Scripture and that is why God says I count that for righteousness; now Abraham, your eyes are on the right place. We might illustrate it with a very common thing around the home; those of you who have a dog or something in the house; you know what happens when that dog is very hungry and you come out with a dish of food. A dog may be the most perfectly coordinated animal under most situations but I have seen animals trip over themselves because they had their eyes on that dish of food. They were so intense on the dish of food they literally forgot where they were walking. And that’s what an animal will do. Why? Because at that point the animal is totally occupied with what’s in your hand. All of a sudden you become the most important person in the universe. The dog may never have looked at you for the last two days but now all of a sudden you become extremely important. Now there’s a picture, tail wagging and all, there’s a picture of biblical faith. That dog has complete occupation with you and that little thing in your hand. And that’s a picture of the believer looking at Christ and the grace He dispenses. Think of yourself as a little puppy, wagging your fail, and looking at Christ with a dish of grace in His hand. There’s the picture of justifying faith.
Abraham that and now it says, “He counted it to him for righteousness.” Now we’ve got to relate that counting “it to him for righteousness” with what takes place next. After it says Jehovah counts this for righteousness, that doesn’t mean all of a sudden there’s a little computer that ding-dongs in heaven and lights flash and there’s a new record, a tape is cut in heaven that says that Abraham is righteousness. Now that may be, but the rest of Genesis 15 tells you what it means in practice; what it means in practice is… let your eyes drift down to about verse 18, you’ll see that this section that follows the editorial remark is the official signing of the Abrahamic Covenant. God has now brought into existence a legal document. That is what it means to place Abraham in a perfect state of righteousness. It means that one second before Abraham was justified he was out here, looking at the promises. And the next moment, when God counted it for justifying, he was locked into a contract with God. This whole thing, from verse 7 on to the end of the chapter is a legal contract; we’ll develop the details in a few moments but the whole big picture is Abraham’s legal position. Notice, there is nothing said here about Abraham’s experience. There is nothing said about how he felt, with one possible exception in verse 12. There is nothing here that talks about his past answers to prayer. There is nothing here about what he sees or doesn’t see by way of his own depravity. All that is out of the horizon of vision; one thing and only one thing is being taught in these verses: God makes him righteousness and He declares him to be righteousness by entering into a contract with him forever and ever and ever. It’s like the believer who becomes justified in Christ and God puts into contract with Him called the New Contract, the Noahic Covenant, which our communion service commemorates.
Now for added emphasis here turn to Deuteronomy 25:1; here’s the elementary picture of justification. This will explain, if you follow with me and go through this line of reasoning, this will explain, maybe some of you have puzzled about this before: why does the Bible start out with law; the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus and so on are what we call the Pentateuch or the Torah. They are law books; why start the Bible with law, why not start with some juicy experiences? Why start with this dry, mundane, dull law? We’re about to see why. In Deuteronomy 25:1, here’s the normal, every day usage of the word justify. We’ll use it in every day thing, forgetting the theology for a moment. “If there be a controversy between men,” the word “controversy” in the Hebrew is the word rib, and rib means lawsuit, “if there be a lawsuit between men and they come to judgment,” that is come to court, that the judges may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous and condemn the wicked.” Now “justify the righteous” has nothing to do with how the person feels in the courtroom; they may be upset, they may be calm; they may be subjectively convinced of their guilt or they may not be. It is not related to the subjective state or the soul of the person in the trial. The only issue in verse 1 is what does the judge say? The judge justifies the righteous and he condemns the wicked.
There is only one thing in view—what the judge says; not what we feel, not what we’d like to happen but what dies the judge say. That’s justification, that’s the legal connotation. Justification does not have experiential connotations; it has legal connotations. Let’s look at it further: he shall “justify the righteous,” what does that mean? It means two things. In our normal court system today we only think of one thing but I’ll say two things because the two things are important to fill out the theological application. When a judge pronounces somebody righteous he’s saying two things, not one; on one hand he’s saying person X did not disobey the law. He’s saying I find him not guilty at this particular point of accusation. But the judge is also saying something else that seems intuitively obvious when you mention it but in theology it didn’t become intuitively obvious until the Reformation, and that is that person X has positively obeyed the law at this point. He has not disobeyed it and he has positively obeyed it.
Let’s illustrate it by means of a graph for a moment. Let’s visualize Adam and Eve; they start out with a zero, that’s their innocence. They are created in a moment of time at the beginning of history, alone in the garden, facing a command of God. They have an opportunity to obey or disobey that command. If they obey the command they gain righteousness; if they disobey the command they gain sin. And Adam and Eve disobeyed, and we’ll put a scale on it, minus 10, they flunked. At this particular point all is lost; they are now under a sentence, a judicial sentence of God that says in the day that you eat thereof you’re going to die; I don’t care how you feel, I don’t care what your experience is, I say you’re going to die, period. So as Paul develops it in Romans God passes sentences upon them and He credits them with minus 10, say… the illustration. Now they might feel only minus 2, it doesn’t make any difference, God says minus 10, you are utterly in condemnation; I place you under My wrath. So that’s Adam and Eve’s state a second after they’ve sinned.
Now some Christians argue that at the point of salvation you are restored back to zero; in fact for a long time in church history this went on, the idea that justification is forgiveness only, it just restores you back to a zero point, back where you started from. That’s not true. Justification is two things; it means you’re restored here and you’re brought back up here to plus 10. You are brought back where you have had you positively obeyed the law in the first place. That’s justification. It is a crediting to our account of somebody’s perfect obedience. The mystery, of course, over all of history was who is this somebody’s obedience that’s credited to our account. It’s never answered in the Old Testament; only until Christ dies on the cross and the apostles begin to reflect upon it does it dawn on anyone whose righteousness is involved in this positive.
But right now just remember one thing: justification means not just “just as if I’d never sinned.” Justification means more than that; justification means God, the judge, has said you are righteous. I don’t feel righteous. God, the judge, has said you’re righteous. But I don’t feel righteous. God the judge has said it; it’s not how you feel, it’s what the judge said. That’s the flavor of justification.
Now let’s come back to Abraham and we’ll pick up this legal connotation. Abraham, sitting there like that hungry dog, wagging its tail at the promises of God, and God says Abraham, your eyes are on the right place, your eyes are on righteousness, and I count that faith as righteous. And so now he begins the signing of the contract. There’s a lot of pretty thick stuff in this so let’s go through real slow.
Genesis 15:7, “then God said to him, ‘I am
Jehovah, and I brought you out of
And then Abraham retorts, “And he said,
Lord, how shall I know that I will inherit the land?” “How shall I know?” Abraham here betrays something of his
imagehood. You and I and all men, the
Bible says, are made in the image of God.
What does that mean? Theologians
have debated that one for centuries but at least we have an image of something,
it’s a projection of something. Let’s
look at it this way; if the infinite God, who exists, so to speak, in an
infinite number of dimensions, for those of you who think in terms of algebraic
[can’t understand word] of mathematics, if God exists in and infinite number of
dimensions, if you could map God down to a finite scale, He would appear as
man. That’s the significance of why your
body is designed the way it is, two ears, two eyes, two legs and so on. When God becomes incarnate He doesn’t pick a
rock, He doesn’t pick a plant, He doesn’t pick an animal. You say that’s facetious. No it isn’t; in the ancient world all the
gods revealed themselves zoomorphically, that is, they appeared as falcons, they
appeared as winged sphinxes and they appeared as other animals. But in
No matter who you are or what your status is, God who made you made you in His image. And therefore you are conscious of Him, just like that initial baby is conscious of its mother. A young baby lying in its crib has no problem perceiving the difference between the hand of its mother and the post on the crib. Why is that? Who taught the baby to distinguish between the mother’s hand and the side of the crib? The baby came equipped to make those basic categorical differentiations. And so you have come equipped, I’ve come equipped to make the distinction in our hearts between that which is created and that which is the Creator.
And so here Abraham reveals the fact that there’s something in our God-consciousness that says the basis of certainty is that which is legal. Law is what gives certainty and so when he says Lord, how can I know, the immediate response of God is to enter into a legal, binding agreement. Why is this obsession with law in every civilization? It flows out of the fact that God deals lawfully with men, and therefore men, no matter how much they may try to avoid the issue, even communists have laws, no matter how men may avoid the issue, they find themselves inevitably back to making rules and law. It’s just habit because man is made that way.
Now as Abram begins to respond and he thinks of this, God says, Abraham, you and your ancestors are going to have centuries of experience, from this time right here, time T. Experience is going to flow, but says God, the source of your experience is the law. I now am formally going to enter into a lawful agreement. Let’s look at that on a secular scale for a moment; forget the religion and the theology for a moment; let’s look at the debate that goes on between couples who live together and those who are married. The push is on to gain marital experience because we live with one another, but that doesn’t give you marital experience. The marriage isn’t made on the basis of the experience of living with one another; the marriage is made on the basis of the formal oath and covenant, and then the marital experience flows from that. And inevitably society learns this; the pendulum has to swing every century or so and we have to relearn the same old lesson, but a hundred years from now we’ll have learned it, that stable human relationships can only exist if law precedes them. So in the area of marriage we find that, and every time we violate it, basically it takes society a generation or two to recover but you’ve got the chaos of the kids born out of wedlock and you would have a society basically filled with bastards, you have inheritance all screwed up, you have wisdom not transferred from father to son any more and you’ve got chaos. And somebody says, yeah, hey, let’s go back to this better idea of law, and then we’re back to the better idea of law because we’re made that way.
So let’s look at it in another illustration; let’s take a business situation: building. Before you can have the experience of putting together masonry, wood, steel or anything else, what has to take place first? Signed contract, an agreement has to be made in normal situations. The experience, in other words, in marriage, in business, all as we know almost intuitively that it flows out of a legal definition. Now isn’t it strange, that with all of this experience, we suddenly find it hard to believe that God runs His show that way, the same way, that experience follows a legal arrangement.
Now God counts this for righteousness means that God enters into a righteous treaty or contract with Abraham. Genesis 15:9, So “He said to him, take Me a heifer [of three years old], a she goat [of three years old], a ram [of three years old], and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” These are all sacrificial animals; they are all animals that are specified for certain purposes in the Bible. And then it says, [10] “And Abraham took them,” all of them, “and he divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another, but the birds he did not divide.”
Now what’s happening here is he’s taking each of the animals and he’s cutting them in half. Sorry if you’re a little queasy this morning but this is blood and guts, and he’s got a pile of bloody meat on one side and he’s got a pile of bloody meat on the other side. And he’s going to use this as a device for signing a contract. You say this is the strangest way I’ve ever seen of signing contracts. Not in the ancient world it wasn’t. Let me prove it to you.
Turn to Jeremiah 34:18, here’s an example, of later history, of exactly the same bloody piles of meat used in a legal signing of contract. At the price of beef aren’t you glad this doesn’t take place today. God’s accusing the nation here, “I will give the men who have transgressed My contract [covenant], which have not performed the words of the contract which they have made before Me,” now look, look carefully, “which they have made before Me, when they cut the calf in two and passed between the parts thereof.” So that passage clearly tells you the custom of the time; to sign a contract in a formal way was done by cutting animals and walking between them. That is the way you signed; they didn’t have paper, they had to do it some way, and rocks were expensive, that is the ones you could bake clay and so on. So it was done by this. And it was forever commemorated in the Hebrew language because to this day the Hebrew expression [says Hebrew word] is a word which means to cut a covenant. Right in the military sometimes, he cut orders for such and such. That expression is still used to sign a contract, he cut a covenant. It comes from this custom.
But we’ve got one more problem. Where do we get these bloody piles of meat? What’s that got to do with signing a contract and pledging your word to someone? Let’s follow; in Jeremiah 24:19 it says “The princes of Judah, and the princes of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, and the priests, and all the people of the land, who passed between the parts of the calf,” that is who signed the contract, [20] “I will even give them into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of them that seek their life; and their dead bodies shall be for meat unto the fowls of the heaven, and to the beasts of the earth.” When the Scriptures were read this morning did any of you hear the passage? What did Abraham do before the sun set? What was he busy doing? He cut the meat and the piles were there, and he had to shoo away all the vultures and the fowls of the air, the hawks and those of the scavenger birds. Did it ever puzzle you, why did God do that? And then God never did anything until after the sun went down; there was just a few hours there where all Abraham did was just sit there before these two bloody piles of meat, shooing away all the scavenger birds.
Here’s why we go through this elaborate procedure, and when I answer and show you why, this will teach you the source of contracts in history and how very sobering the biblical view of contract it. Maybe it will prevent some of you from prematurely signing on the dotted line when you realize the historical origin of this whole thing that our society is built on.
The purpose of destroying animals and putting them on the side was this: the contract, a solemn heavy contract like this, was accompanied by a self-maledictory oath; that means when you walk between the animals, do you know what you were saying? May God do to me what we just did to those animals if I break contract. How’s that for a sobering signing on the dotted line? May God do that to me if I break this contract, a self-maledictory oath. You see this is why in the Jeremiah passage it is the fowl that come and they eat the dead bodies of the men who broke the oath, just like the fowls try to eat the dead bodies of the animals. The picture of those dead bodies, the carcasses lying there, is a picture of damnation… damned be the one who violates this contract; that’s what it’s saying.
Now, come back to Genesis 15 and see the sobering after effect of this. A self-maledictory oath depends on your
belief in the existence of God, does it not?
Doesn’t an oath take place, not in a vacuum but in a basic theological
environment of belief in God? All right;
this is why in colonial American atheists were not permitted in the courtroom.
Atheists could not give testimony in the early American court, and for the
reason that the colonials saw clearly that if you did not believe in God then
we can’t make you function in the system of the courtroom because there’s
nothing to oath against. George
Washington said this: What is the security for property, for reputation for
life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the
instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us, with caution,
indulge the supposition that morality can ever be maintained in this country
without belief in God.” So they were
sensitive to this and for that reason… it’s always passed off in classroom
situations well tut-tut, those bigots back there, they persecuted the poor
little atheists. It wasn’t that at all;
it was they had a profound understanding what a contract was and they realized
once you knock out belief in God you’ve destroyed the whole basis of human
contract. Contractual law functions only
upon theology because of the oath accompaniment.
So the self-maledictory oath, I will, in other words, be damned, literally, I will be damned if I do not carry out this contract.
Now what happened? Genesis 15:11, it says, “And when the fowls
came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away. [12] And when the sun was going down, a deep
sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him.” The picture there, the “horror of great
darkness” is a picture of the presence of God; the presence of God causes a
horror. [13] “And He said unto Abram,
Know for sure,” and suddenly the voice of God comes into this darkness, and He
says now Abram we are about to sign a legal, binding agreement. And notice the way it says in verse 13, it
says in the King James, “Know of a surety,” that’s just a translator’s way of
saying know for sure. That’s what the
Hebrew language is getting at. Verse 13
is an answer to the question of verse 8. Verse 8 was the question, how do I
know for sure? And the answer is by law.
And then he promises certain things about the destiny of
Now, the striking scene of Genesis
Now think, if the oath means self-malediction, what has God just said? God has said the most fantastic thing about Himself. Here is the eternal omnipotent God saying may I be damned if I do not carry out My Word… may I be damned if I don’t carry out My Word. Abraham, now you know for sure. You see, the self-malediction is applied against God Himself. Now later on there’s something other exciting that comes off of this. This is why, and this is what sets up the cross of Christ; you see, later on there’s another covenant, the Mosaic Covenant. And this self-malediction comes upon the nation as a sign of the covenant, the sin, they violated, and so therefore the oath grinds relentless away in all of the covenant breakers. And all men are covenant breakers, we are in Adam, we’re covenant breakers. The Bible always associates paganism with covenant breakers.
In Romans
And so it goes on, in the verse, [Genesis 15:17] a smoking lamp goes between the pieces and verse 18, “in the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land,” and then certain geographical boundaries are given in verses 19-21 which we’ll deal with at another time. The point of verse 18 is it clearly says a covenant has been made. Verse 6 clearly says at this point Abraham is declared righteousness. Now let’s put the two together.
Genesis 12, 13, 14, Abraham’s being called, being called, being called, being called, being called and finally Abraham… you know, he gets his eyes down, he’s looking at circumstances, every once in a while he looks up and he goes on a little more, he’s still looking at circumstances, every once in a while he looks up until finally in chapter 15 he’s looking up and God says now that’s exactly where I want your eyes, Abraham; up! And now I’m going to justify you and when He justifies He signs the contract, justification is the contract. You see, the fact that God has entered into covenant is the justification; that proves that God perfectly accepts his righteousness.
Let’s make some application to us as Christians. This chapter has taught us that the law precedes your experience. Today it doesn’t make any difference whether you are here memorizing all of your past answers to prayer, all of your religious experiences. Don’t you see from this passage that that doesn’t matter. What matters is what the Judge thinks about you; are you under the wrath of God or are you under the sentence of justification. It doesn’t matter how you feel any more than it would matter how you feel in a secular courtroom; that isn’t the issue. We hope experiences follow, of course, but the issue for you is, and it’s a serious one, you just have to come to grips with yourself: what does the Judge think about you. There’s a sentence of damnation and there’s a sentence of justification and you’re under one or the other this morning. You’re either in Adam and in that legal community we bear the wrath of God, or you’re in the new community in Christ and in that one, in our position in Christ we bear the sentence of justification.
A way of testing this might be to ask these
questions: When you look at your
position, spiritually, where do your eyes go? When you look out at the
spiritual terrain of your soul, what catches your attention first? Is it the things that you’ve done, the sins
of which you’re ashamed, the bad things that have happened in the past where
you’ve felt you let God down? Does that
really form the center of gravity of your faith? If it does, things aren’t right. What ought to form the center of gravity of
your faith is Christ; that’s the center.
All the other things are incidental to that. Jesus Christ or nothing!