Faith and Waiting - Genesis 15:7-21

Bible Study Lesson for August 19

Genesis 15:7-21

Last week we found Abram doubting and God reassuring. Abram was questioning the point of all of the rewards God had given him, because he didn’t have anyone to hand them down to. This is a constant challenge for people and organizations today: the question of legacy. God promised Abram that he would indeed produce an heir, and Abram “believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” This week, we turn to the second part of God’s promise to Abram. God promised to make Abram’s offspring into a nation. The first thing that would require was that Abram have a child or children. The second part of the promise was the gift of land. If anything, this promise would have been even more difficult for Abram to believe. Coming to the Promised Land, he found it already occupied. How would his small but prosperous household come to “possess” this land?

V. 7-11: Acting Out the Covenant

Scholars believe that verses 7-11 recount an old type of ritual that would signify an important commitment between two people. I remember in my Hebrew classes in seminary, I learned that the Hebrew phrase for “making a covenant” was literally “cutting a covenant.” The covenant ceremony served to give weight to the words of promise between two people. It is a ritual sign that acts out the commitment. We still do things like this today.

Consider a modern marriage ceremony. At a wedding, two people stand in front of a group of family, friends, and the community, and promise to live their lives together. They promise to be faithful to each other. At their best, the rituals of a wedding give weight to the promises that the two people have already made to each other privately. Those two can look back on their marriage vows in hard times and remember the promises that they have made. Properly understood, the ceremony of marriage binds together people who might otherwise go their separate ways.

So Abram expresses a question to God. God begins the exchange by reviewing Abram’s history in relation to God: “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” This is how God speaks throughout the Bible, and especially in the Torah. God says, “this is what I’ve done, and this is what I will do.” But Abram asks: “how am I to know that I shall possess it?” Again, just like in a marriage relationship, Abram needs a tangible commitment from God. So God gives Abram a ritual of sacrifice, to symbolize the union of Abram and God.

One of the striking things about the ritual is that it doesn’t really “prove” anything. Abram’s cooperation indicates to us that he’s not really looking for logical proof that he will possess the land. But what the ritual does is begin to teach Abram patience in waiting. Abram cuts the covenant with God, sacrificing the animals and cutting the larger ones in two. He then spends the rest of the day defending the sacrifices from vultures, waiting for God to take the next step.

V. 12-16: The Promise and the Patience

Finally, at the end of the day God begins to speak to Abram in a deep sleep. This vision is important because it lays out the history that the children of Abram will have to endure. God’s promise will not come to fulfillment in a single generation. God reveals to Abram that his offspring will have to go to another land and spend four hundred years oppressed and enslaved, but that God will liberate them and bless them with material wealth on the way out.

God’s delay in keeping promises always presents us with theological problems. That is part of the challenge of believing in a God who acts in history, but also understanding that not everything that happens in history is a direct act of God or a revelation of God’s will. If we assume every act in history is a direct act of God, we end up worshipping a monstrous God. This is why the promises of God are so important: they reveal God’s true character and will for the world. Even when we understand this, it doesn’t make history more pleasant. In fact it often leads us, like Abram, to ask “How do we know?” or “How long?” or “Where have You been?” 

God doesn’t give Abram all the answers, but he says “Know this for certain.” What are we to know? We are to know that God is working in and through and behind and in spite of these historical tragedies. God will bring about the fulfillment of the promise. We just have to wait.

V. 17-21: God’s Part of the Covenant

At this point in the story it is well and truly dark outside. In the darkness, God appears in the covenant ceremony. Abram has been waiting. God shows up as a “smoking fire pot and a flaming torch,” and confirms the promise.

The thing that strikes me is how God promises to get rid of a lot of people already living in Abram’s promised land. On the one hand this shows us how big God’s promise is. God will build Israel into a nation capable of inheriting the land of all these people. It is a bold promise to make to a man who is pushing 90 and has yet to have a child. The household of Abram will become a nation capable of displacing ten nations. On the other hand, we should not ignore the cost of the Israelites inheriting God’s promised land. 

The story gives us one explanation for why the people in the land were destroyed when God speaks of “the iniquity of the Amorites” in verse 16. We know from Biblical accounts and archeological data that the nations in Canaan frequently sacrificed humans, even children. Because of this and other abominable practices,  these nations in the Biblical account of history are destined to fail. However, I caution you to remember that Christianity approaches such problems from a different perspective. When we encounter corruption and darkness in the world, we are to call those in the wrong to repentance, not to subject them to conquest and displacement. We bear witness to a better way of life.

Conclusion: Waiting

This story teaches us that an important part of living faithfully to God is waiting. Abram has not always modeled a patient faith and will not even in the next story. But Abram and his descendants must wait for the fulfillment of the promise. Attempts to secure it for themselves result in pain, distress, and failure. In 12:10-20, we saw the cost of Abram’s attempt to secure his own future by bargaining his wife’s safety. God intervened and Pharaoh paid the cost. In chapter 16, Sarai and Abram will attempt to fulfill the promise of an heir by their own power and the cost will be far greater and more personal.

Israel will continue to learn how to have a patient faith as they suffer and wait on God’s deliverance in Egypt for four hundred years. God works in history, but often far more slowly than we are able to see.

More than a thousand years later, the people formed by this story, the nations of Israel and Judah, would see the whole project of God’s promise falling apart. Wickedness and injustice prevailed. The wealthy were using their power to withhold justice. The prophet Habakkuk issued a warning to the people: God is going to send the Babylonians as punishment. Habakkuk complained that the Babylonians, who were building a vast empire by their military power, were unfit to bring the justice of God into the world. They were themselves oppressive and wicked and worshipped idols and their own power. God tells Habakkuk not to worry, the Babylonians will meet justice in due time: “For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay” (Habakkuk 2:3). God’s people do not know the schedule, sometimes we just have to wait.

Here we sit, two and half millennia after Habakkuk’s time, and we are waiting for God’s promise just the same. In the book of Revelation, Jesus says three times in the last chapter, “I am coming soon” (Rev 22:7, 12, 20). When Jesus comes, he will put everything right and restore all those who trust in him. This is the basic promise of faith that the church teaches to all of our children and that we hold on to with everything we have. But we are left, in the meantime, waiting. Waiting is hard. But like Abram, we have to remember that we cannot fulfill the promise for ourselves. Many have tried and failed. Usually those who try to establish the Kingdom of God by their own power wind up guilty of injustice. The New Testament gives us a different strategy. Instead of conquering, we wait for Jesus to come and set things right. “The one who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:13). Ultimately, waiting for the fulfillment of the promise creates patient endurance. This teaches us not to rely on our own power, but to rely on God.