Sermon Notes + Quotes:
Transcript:
We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel, and it’s my delight to be leading us through Genesis Chapter 15 today. We’re going to call our study “The covenant-making, covenant-keeping God of the Bible.”
Whenever we do Bible studies here at The Village Chapel, we’re always asking several questions:
- What can we learn about God? How does God reveal himself here?
- What can we learn about ourselves? What can we learn about our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses, our need for God, our need for redemption here?
- How’s the gospel displayed in this passage?
- What response of faith is God looking for as we study this particular passage?
And so, we’re coming here to Chapter 15 of Genesis, and it really is a remarkable chapter, and it gets us in that position of letting God open himself up or reveal himself to us.
Now, some would say, “How is it that we can know anything at all about God?” And the study of such things is typically called theological epistemology. If we can know something about God, what can we know? How can we know it? And with what level of certainty can we know it? And a lot of people in the world in which we live are probably in the category of agnostic, that is they’re not sure whether we can know much about God or not.
There are basically two different routes that people take when it comes to discussing God or believing in God. One is human discovery, where we make an attempt to discover God on our own. And most religions really are based on that sort of thing, but the three major religions that are on the planet right now anyway—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—those are all claiming to be based on divine revelation. God making himself known to us through inspiration of prophets and/or a written text that is sacred.
And so, the question of “Is there a way to know anything about God at all?” is certainly worth asking because we are all longing for some knowledge of where we came from and where everything came from. Is there some entity that has set the boundaries for true, good, and beautiful? Is there some entity to whom we can appeal when we have needs, when we are in pain, when we have suffered injustice of some sort? Is there any place to go with our cries for help and for mercy? And those are great, and honest, and real questions. And I love the way that John Gerstner, and R.C. Sproul, and Arthur Lindsley put it in their book, Classical Apologetics:
“The fact that God is infinite and we are finite does not make finite knowledge of the infinite impossible.”
–R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner & Arthur Lindsley; Classical Apologetics
Now, that’s a little bit of a brain twister, I understand. I mean, think about those words for just a second. As a matter of fact, would you read it aloud with me even in your own home? “The fact that God is infinite and we are finite does not make finite knowledge of the infinite impossible.”
All right, with that hope in mind, let’s take a look at Genesis Chapter 15 and see what we learned here. We just pick up after last week’s study of Chapter 14. Pastor Tommy led us through the description of some military maneuvers that Abram and his 318 men had to go through to rescue Abram’s nephew, Lot, and a bunch of others. And so, that’s just happened. And it’s almost as if you’re picking up the storyline right when they’re just dusting themselves off. And the trauma of war, even though they were victorious, the trauma and the strain and the difficulties of all of that are still very real and present.
And here’s what Chapter 15 says. “After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision saying, ‘Do not fear, Abram, I am a shield to you. Your reward shall be very great.'” I love this verse. It’s just rich. It overflows with firsts. It’s the first time we hear the phrase, “The word of the Lord.” And it’s used over and over and over again through Scripture. And the idea is that the God of the Bible speaks, the God of the Bible uses words to communicate to His people. And this is the first use also of the idea of a vision. And so, here’s God appearing to Abram somehow or another in a vision and speaking at the very least. What was he seeing? I don’t know, but the word of the Lord came to him in this vision.
Here’s another verse. The very first thing He says is, “Do not fear.” I’ve got to tell you, that’s the first time that beautiful command shows up in our Bibles. What I love about the Bible is that that’s the most often repeated negative command in the entire Bible. That’s right. The most often repeated positive command is “Sing/praise the Lord/worship”, but the most often repeated negative command, “Do not fear.” It shows you what the God of the Bible wants for you and He wants for me, that we would not be afraid.
And then God goes on to say, “I’m a shield to you. Your reward shall be very great.” And of course, Abram’s taking all of this in this vision, and he responds to the Lord this way in verse 2, “Oh Lord God, what will you give me since I’m childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And that sounds kind of strange. “And Abram said, ‘Since you haven’t given me any offspring, one born in my house is my heir.'” And so, for Abram, he takes this in, this command, this commitment from God to be a shield to him and then this promise of reward. He takes all of that in and assesses his own life and he sees that he doesn’t have any children and they wouldn’t have anybody to leave all of that too. And that’s the first thing that’s on his mind. Remember, Abram is 75 or 80 years of age right now. His wife, Sarah, is 10 years younger than he is, so they’re both advanced in years. And he is saying to God, ‘I hear you, I don’t want to be afraid of you, and I do want to believe your promises, but I’m scratching my head a little bit here.’ And he asks his questions. So, what’s God’s response?
Of course, some people might think to themselves, ‘That’s quite bodacious, the audacity of Abram to even question God at all.’ And yet, here’s what God does. This is really awesome. “Then the word of the Lord came to him,” (the second time) “saying, ‘This man will not be your heir.'” In other words, this person that isn’t of your household, this man named Eliezer, and even though God hasn’t given him any offspring, this one isn’t going to be his heir. “But there’s one who will come forth from your own body, and he will be your heir.” “And then God took him outside, verse 5 says, “Took Abram outside, so it goes outside the tent. And he says, ‘Now look toward the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ And God said to Abram, ‘So shall your descendants be.'”
And then, here’s the response of Abram that just echoes through the pages of scripture all the way into the New Testament. “Then Abram believed in the Lord and God reckoned it to Abram as righteousness.” Oh wow. Beautiful New Testament doctrine of justification by faith. So beautiful, wonderful, rich, deep, such good news for us that it’s not about our works, it’s not about us being in a certain behavior mode that somehow or another balances out the moral scales. But no, our New Testament, looking back through the New Testament into the Old Testament, here’s where we see, this whole idea of justification by faith. That God knowing Abram’s heart, even in spite of his questions, that God says as He takes him outside, ‘Look up at the heavens. You see all those stars? And if you could count them, that’s how many descendants you’re going to actually have.’ And Abram’s sitting there going, ‘Man, I’m an old dude. My wife’s no spring chicken. We don’t have any kids right now. I just don’t understand how that’s going to happen.’
And yet with that illustration, verse 6, “Abram believed in the Lord and he reckoned it to him as righteous.” Verse 7: So “God said to Abram, ‘I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess it.” So not only is God promising him a progeny, a child, and then many descendants, but as well God is promising a place, so a progeny and a place, a land if you will, as God had already said. And now He’s reiterating that, re-articulating it. And I don’t know about you, but I sometimes need to hear the promises of God more than once. I sometimes need to be reassured, maybe you do as well. And so, God reminds Abram, ‘I brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, that pagan land where you were living, and I promise to give you this land.’
And then Abram’s response again is a question just like you, just like me would ask. “Oh Lord God, how may I know that I will possess it?” Oh man, there he is just like us, with sort of a wobbly faith and asking questions. And again, how remarkable the way God is responding to him. The first question Abram asks is, ‘I don’t have any kids. I don’t know what you’re talking about. This doesn’t make any sense that I would get a great reward.’ And God’s response is not to just smite him or reduce him to his cinder but to tell him that he’s going to have as many descendants as there are stars in the heavens. That’s just brilliant. And now here’s God’s response to the second question, which was in verse 8, “How will I know that I’ll possess it?” And God says in verse 9, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, and a three-year-old ram, and a turtledove and a young pigeon.”
In other words, ‘Let’s take a look at the barnyard.’ I love it that the first question and the first answer is “Let’s look at the heavens and look at those vast number of stars up all there and how beautiful that is.” And we’ve all seen nights like that where we’re just blown away by the majesty of the heavens declaring the glory of God. It’s so beautiful. But as far away as all of that is, and as majestic and transcendent and infinite as the number of stars are and uncountable, look right here in the barnyard, here’s some other evidence of God’s faithfulness to His promises that He’s a covenant-making, covenant-keeping God. And so, he looks at the barnyard basically, and the command is about this sort of symbol, the cutting of a covenant. And that’s what’s going to happen here. And it’s a little graphic, so hang in there with me, if you will.
“But he brought all of these to Him, brought them to the Lord, he cut the animals in two and laid each half opposite the other, but he did not cut the birds. And the birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away.” That’s an interesting verse right there, too. Here is God taking the initiative and all of this appearing in a vision to Abram, communicating to him His promises, His covenant that He’s going to keep. And here’s Abram responding with these questions. And then God is giving him this instruction about this illustration that Abram’s actually going to participate in, because with the stars, all you can do is look at them. With the barnyard animals, God says, ‘Bring these to me.’ And so, Abram participates. And I love that about our God.
See, He gives us the dignity of participation in our faith, in our journey with Him, in our walking with Him. I love that. He even shoos away our drives away the birds of prey that come to take the carcasses away. And it’s almost symbolic of the way that our faith needs to be. We need to nurture it, we need to walk in the spiritual disciplines ourselves and participate. God’s not just going to sort of turn your heart light on—although He does regenerate us and then all of a sudden we believe in Him—but that maintenance, that ongoing concurrence where we participate in the life of faith with God too, I think is important. And some of that is driving away the birds of prey. And I remember that old quote, I think it was Martin Luther, he used to say that temptation was like birds that were sort of attacking you. And he would say, ‘I can’t keep the birds from flying over my head, but I can keep them from making a nest in my hair.’ And that’s the same kind of participation that we have.
Anyway, verse 12: “Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram and behold, terror and a great darkness fell upon him.” And sometimes it happens. We have a victory like Chapter 14, maybe we even have an encounter with God like Chapter 15 so far, and sometimes we’re feasting on the promises of God and His Word, and all of a sudden some kind of darkness comes over us and some kind of terror and some kind of testing or trial comes into our lives. But notice what happened. God said to Abram—in the darkness, in the trial, in the testing, in the terror, in the middle of all of it, God takes the initiative, God speaks again to Abram—“’Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs.’”
Now he’s talking about what’s going to happen in the future. Abram has Isaac, Isaac has Jacob, and Jacob becomes Israel, Israel becomes the nation of Israel, the 12 tribes. And Israel and his sons end up in Egypt 400 years in slavery. And so here it is predicted all the way back here in Genesis Chapter 15, “’Your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed 400 years. But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve,’” and God does indeed do that. “’And afterward they,’” meaning God’s people, “’Will come out with many possessions.’” These descendants of Abram will. “’And as for you personally, you shall go to your fathers in peace.’” In other words, you’ll be buried with your fathers in peace. “’You shall be buried at a good old age.’” That’s a bit of good news. “’And then in the fourth generation they,’” that is the ones who are in Egypt, “’Will return here for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.’”
And that is a curious little piece of Scripture right there, the last half of verse 16. And it just reminds us that God is involved in all of His creation—including every nation, God’s involved, even with the Amorites. He’s got a stopwatch going and He can see the trajectory of the Amorites. They’re just headed deeper and deeper into sin, deeper and deeper into worshiping false gods, deeper and deeper into kinds of self-destructive worship, self-destructive behavior to the point with many of these pagan nations where they’re actually sacrificing their own children to their false gods trying to appease those false gods. And so, in verse 16, there’s a reference here to the inequity of the Amorites not yet being complete. That is, the trajectory will be completed at one point and God will determine when that is. And then God will use the Israelites to drive out the Amorites. Before you get all upset and think that God’s just playing favorites in some way, God will also judge the Israelites later in their storyline of their life and their history using pagan nations to judge them for their spiritual idolatry and for their unfaithful to Yahweh.
Well, verse 17: “It came about that when the sun had set,” this is back to Abram now, “that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these pieces.” And so, you can see the animal parts are still there, the covenant, the cutting covenant is still going on. And as it gets darker and darker, what happens is perhaps still in a vision or dreamlike state, I don’t know. But Abram sees this oven kind of going through and this flaming torch going through, and it’s kind of foreshadowing the kinds of images we see when the children of Israel do come out of Egypt during the Exodus when at Mount Sinai there’s smoke, and thunder, and lightning, and a loud voice of God.
And when they wander through the wilderness and there’s a pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night as they’re traveling following the Lord. And so, in this sealing of this covenant, God shows up and this smoking oven and flaming torch go right between these pieces as if God is saying, ‘This is a covenant I’m making with you, Abram, and I’m a covenant-making, covenant-keeping God.’
Well, “On that day,” verse 18, “The Lord made a covenant with Abrams saying,” and by the way, the word covenant appears 300 times at least in our Bibles. This in verse 18 is number 9, so there’ve already been 8 times. And there will be yet another 291 times where it will appear. So, this is, like I say, a covenant-making, covenant-keeping God. So, “On that day, the Lord made this covenant with Abraham saying, ‘To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates.’” And then he’ll list a group of nations and people groups that are living in that area. So, the idea is that their land will become the land of your descendants as well, “’the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’” And that’s the end of what we call chapter 15.
What do we learn here about God? What do we see here as it relates to our ourselves? How’s God teaching us something about Himself, teaching us something about who we are as His people? Well, there’s tons to learn.
First of all, let me remind you that the God of the Bible, this covenant-making, covenant-keeping God, has revealed himself in at least three different ways. There’s the general revelation of creation. Abram was pulled outside the tent, to look upon the sky, and this is just a symbol of the fact that God can not only create all of that beauty but hold it and balance it all—and I mean, just a sheer number of stars just blowing Abram’s mind, and he doesn’t even have any kind of a telescope or anything like that, but he also doesn’t have the bright lights of a city muting the sky in such a way that he can’t see. He’s seeing the most brilliant display, I’m sure that night, that he could possibly see—the most brilliant display of stars. And so, creation itself is this general revelation of God. We aren’t left in the dark, there is a universe full of evidence. And it’s as far away as the stars and it’s as up close as the barnyard animals. And I even say it’s closer. It’s as close as your fingerprint and mine, it’s as close as your eyeball and mine. It’s as close as the number of hairs on our head. There’s a general revelation throughout creation that gives us an idea that there is some kind of a Creator responsible for all of this.
Secondly, there’s the Written Word of God, the ancient Scriptures filled with historical narrative, propositional statements, all inspired by God, written down by the prophets, the songwriters, the disciples, the apostles, all kinds of people from all kinds of walks of life writing all kinds of scripture, all different kinds of genres of literature, so that no matter how you’re wired to think or to perceive or to learn, this God of the Bible has made sure that He’s communicating to you and to me. The question is, are we listening? Jesus used to say it this way, “He who has eyes to see, let him see. He has ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mark 4:9; Luke 8:8) And the question for me is always, “Do I have my ears on him? Am I listening? Am I looking for the Lord to show me, to teach me something?”
From the beginning to the end of the Bible, we find that the God of the Bible is a God of verbal propositional revelation, uses phrases like “the Word of the Lord” that we just saw here in verse 1 and also in verse 4. And that phrase, that very phrase, appears depending on which English translation of the Bible you have, but in mine anyway, 257 times I pulled it up on my computer. That’s how I did it, I didn’t go through and count each one. But on my computer the phrase “Word of God” appears 47 times, the phrase “God said” appears 46 times, “the Lord said” appears 234 times, “God spoke” appears 12 times, and “the Lord spoke” appears 133 times. Are you getting the idea? Hundreds of times. And by the way, that doesn’t count any of the description of the kinds of things that God said. For instance, Psalm 1:19, which talks about the precepts of the Lord, the laws of the Lord, using multiple different words to describe propositional statements of God, the law of the Lord, all these different phrases to remind us that this is a God who speaks.
He hasn’t left us alone to figure this out by ourselves because human discovery will never get us very far, and human discovery is actually a little bit run through the filters of our own imagination, run through the filters of our own ambitions, our own fears and anxieties as well. We need God revealing Himself to us so that we don’t just create a God of our own making who just happens to like what we like, and not like what we don’t like.
Thirdly, we also have throughout scripture, all of it pointing forward to and finding its fulfillment in the personal work of Jesus, the Living Word of God. And this is how the Apostle John, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, closest friends, in the first chapter of John’s Gospel says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and goes on to describe Jesus, and that Jesus is the living Word of God. And John Chapter 5 even quotes Jesus as saying, “These scriptures, they bear witness to me.” And in Luke’s gospel in Chapter 24, I think it’s verse 44, Jesus says, “The Psalms, the Proverbs, the whole Old Testament scriptures, they all find their fulfillment in me.” And so, you find this really interesting reciprocal testimony of the Written Word to the Living Word, and the Living Word of the Written Word—Jesus validating all of the Scriptures. And being this central message of the New Testament, there it is right there. We have the person and work of Jesus in the four gospels, eyewitness accounts or near eyewitness accounts. And then of course, all of the writings of the apostles, eyewitnesses again to Jesus, to his majesty, to the Savior, to the Son of God who came to earth to be the ultimate revelation of God and God’s character and nature to us. I love this about the Bible. It doesn’t leave it up to the imagination who God is.
I love the way Tim Keller says it:
“If your God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.”
–Tim Keller
And I’ll tell you, that’s not the kind of God that’s worth believing and trusting. And you can’t trust in something smaller than your imagination. Your imagination is limited; so is mine. And again, we’ll go astray if we worship or believe in a God that is subject to our imagination. We’ll go astray because we just can’t help ourselves. We’ll create a God in our own image instead of being created in God’s image.
All right, so I want to also take a look though, if all of that’s true, at what does Genesis 15 reveal to us about God Himself? First of all, that he offers a command in verse 1, “Do not fear.” And I love it that that’s the first time that phrase appears and that it’s just over, and over, and over again used throughout Scripture to remind us God doesn’t want us to be afraid. And I don’t know if you’re afraid of anything right now, so often the way that our relationships become torn, the way that we even see ourselves in such a negative light, the way that we see the world outside as despairing and just horrific, so many times that’s a result of some kind of fear in our hearts. And the Lord has not given us a spirit of fear or timidity (2 Timothy 1:7); He actually doesn’t want us to be afraid. Is the world a scary place sometimes? Yes, it is, but if you have a healthy fear of God, you don’t need to have an unhealthy fear of anything else.
Scripture says the fear of the Lord leads to life (Proverbs 19:23). Scripture says in the Book of Proverb, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” (Proverbs 9:10) The fear of the Lord is what we need, but when we have that, we don’t need to be afraid of anything else. And that’s his command to Abram, ‘Don’t be afraid. I know you’re feeling kind of old, I know that you just came back from that battle. You’re probably worn out and tired and all that sort of thing, and afraid that somebody else is going to come for you tomorrow, but don’t be afraid. I am a shield to you,’ He says. I love this, this is so awesome. So, there’s this command, then there’s this commitment from God.
The commitment from God is, “I am.” Not, “I will be,” not “I might be,” not “I was.” “I am.” In the present tense, and God is always in the present tense. He’s the same yesterday, today, and forever. And He is a present-tense God, whatever you’re going through, whatever I’m going through at any given point in time in our life, God’s promise is to be our shield, to be our protector. No matter what happens, including the worst thing that can happen to us, He remains yet our shield. This is the God that can turn a crucifixion into a resurrection, so even if we should die a physical death here, that’s not the end. It’s not all over. Why? Because God is our shield. He’s our shield. Ah, it’s a beautiful thing.
And then thirdly, there’s this covenant promise. “Your reward will be great,” is verse 1, that’s the way it ends there. “Your reward shall be very great.” Abram gets a little puzzled about all of that, but here’s this promise and it’s unfolded in more detail throughout the rest of the chapter. We saw it, it’s a progeny and a place. Here’s this number of descendants that you can’t even count, and then here’s this place for you all to live. This is going to be awesome. It’s going to be a land. And yet even though it’s occupied by others right now, their cultures and societies are declining because they’re godless, they’re sacrificing their own kids, their own children to their false gods, and God’s going to drive them out. That’s His intent, you see. And if we love justice at all, if we have any consideration whatsoever for justice, we would acknowledge that sacrificing their own babies has to stop, the most vulnerable among them were being killed wholesale all the time in trying to appease these false gods.
And so, God’s going to drive those nations out and He’ll use Israel to do it. It’s a foreshadowing, a prediction, as I say, of the Exodus and of God, Yahweh, bringing the Jewish people into the promised land. It also foreshadows what Jesus is going to do because he’s the greater Abram, he’s the greater Moses, he’s the greater of all the prophets. Jesus is the one who comes and sets us free, delivers us, if you will, from the power of our own sin and the penalty of our own sin. See, we are being saved. We have been saved from the penalty of sin, we are being saved from the power of sin, and we will eventually be saved from the presence of sin. So all three tenses, we have been saved, we are being saved, we will be saved. And that’s all because Jesus is the ultimate hero of all of Scripture.
Fourthly, and finally there is here in Genesis 15, I think, a curious paradox. Almighty, holy, righteous, God, so high and above everything as to have placed uncountable stars in the sky and designed everything that Abram can possibly even see can be questioned. Yeah, we see it right here, don’t we? Wow. He questions God twice. Verse 2, ‘What will you give me? I don’t know what you can give me, I don’t know how you could possibly give me anything. I don’t have anybody to leave it to, it doesn’t make any sense. Seems like a fruitless thing for you to give me something.’ And so many people are like that. They just can’t believe that God would want to forgive them their sins or that God would want to bless them in any way or cause their soul to flourish if they would rest their soul in God. And I want to invite you to believe in the God of the Bible, especially if you have trouble with guilt and shame. If you confess your sins, 1 John 1:9, “If you confess your sins, He’s faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.” Let Him be God and you believe in Him, you trust in Him, okay? And your faith in Him, see, is all He’s looking for as a response. He’s not looking for you to be leading a perfect life, He already knows that’s your sinner, He already knows I’m a sinner, He already knows I’m going to blow it again, He already knows you’re going to do the same thing. You believe in the God of the Bible, don’t believe in the God of your own imagination. Your own imagination would create gods that require you, they’re stern, they’re harsh, they’re performance-oriented, they are under the bridge waiting for you to cross the bridge so they can smash you or scare you, or they’re waiting for you to have a good time in life or to feel like your soul is flourishing or to be blessed in some way, and they want to make sure to make you feel guilty in that way. That’s not the God of the Bible, that’s the accuser of the brethren, that’s the enemy of our souls and the enemy of our faith.
There’s a curious paradox here. You can bring your questions to God like Abram did in verse 2 and in verse 8 where he says, ‘How can I know that? I mean, give me some kind of physical sign about this promise of the land, and the progeny,’ and all that. And then God has him do this sort of Old Testament ritual whit the cutting covenant thing and it’s a physical display and God even shows up in the oven and the torch and all that. And then Abram has this dream and God just responds to his questions, not by slapping him down for asking questions, but God who can see into his heart and know that he isn’t an unwilling believer. He’s not a resistant questioner; he’s an honest seeker, an honest doubter just like John the Baptist, just like you, just like me sometimes. We have questions just like Thomas after the risen Christ had appeared to the other disciples and they told Thomas about it and he said, ‘Oh, I won’t believe unless I can touch the nail prints in his hand or the hole in his side.’ And Jesus appears to him and says, ‘Look, touch right here.’ And then he believed and he said, “Look, my Lord, my God.” (John 20:27-28) And that’s just so amazing, isn’t it? Curious paradox that the Almighty God of the Bible invites you to come and to bring your questions along with you. ‘Look at the stars, Abram.’ I love it.
We have all the more evidence in our own day and time. I’m a little bit of a NASA geek, I like to go on the website all the time and look at the pictures. A simple search online of some of the NASA stuff estimates that there are at least a hundred billion stars. That’s a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, folks. I mean, we can’t even see them all. As a matter of fact, our little solar system that earth is actually 25,000 light years away from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy that has at least a hundred billion stars in it. So, we’re living in the suburbs. I mean, we’re on the outside of the Milky Way galaxy 25,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And it’s a crowded galaxy, but NASA has even gone further—if if you really want your mind blown—than that. They estimate our cosmological horizon, which is another way of saying the observable universe, our cosmological horizon actually suggests that there’re somewhere between 100 billion to 10 trillion other galaxies that contain millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions of stars. ‘Look at the stars, Abram, Jim, you. Look at the stars, be filled with the wonder of how the heavens declare the glory of God.’ If that’s just too big and too awesome for you to get your head around, go out in the barnyard, go out in your front yard, go out in the backyard, look at what God has done in his creation. Look at your fingerprint, look at your eye.
Oh, it’s just, there’s so many. There’s so much evidence for God in our universe. And here comes the God of the Bible revealing himself as one that you can actually come to with your questions, and I find that to be paradoxical. How can the Almighty, holy, righteous God even permit sinners like us to come forward with our questions and dare to even sort of want to understand more and ask him for more? Well, this is one of the reasons I love Genesis 15. It’s all about the covenant-making, covenant-keeping God. Makes promises, keeps promises. We continue to see it all the way through Scripture.
I want to quote from Ellen Davis right now. She’s a professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School. I don’t quote from her a lot, but I love the way she thinks about the Old Testament. She says:
“That the Old Testament represents God chiefly as an angry Judge or victorious Warrior is a false stereotype. While these images are not absent, they are more than balanced by striking portrayals of God as lover or Husband, infatuated with Israel beyond all reason or deserving. God is not too proud to grieve terribly over Israel’s unfaithful, nor to be giddy over her return home…. “[This covenant’s] (and she’s talking about the Old Testament here) primary quality is love at the highest pitch of intensity.”
–Ellen Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament
I love the way the Ellen Davis describes the Old Testament God, this covenant-making, covenant-keeping God who really loves you with an intense love, so intense that He wanted to have a relationship with you, and He’s made everything that is necessary, He’s made it possible for you to have that relationship.
Lord Jonathan Henry Sachs, Baron Sachs was a member of the British House of Lords, orthodox rabbi, philosopher, theologian, author. He’s quoted in David Brooks’ book, The Second Mountain. Some of you will have read that, I’ve quoted that book before as well. But Rabbi Sacks, who passed away last year, he said this about the covenant to help us to understand it as a Jewish rabbi. He said,
“A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently, a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an us. And that’s why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”
–Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Folks, I want to introduce you, if you haven’t met him, I want to introduce you to the God of the Bible. He’s a covenant-making, covenant-keeping God. And the personal work of Jesus, as we place our faith in Him, we are united with Christ, not only in His death and burial, but in His resurrection to new life. So, when we baptize someone who’s just come to faith and they’re professing their faith, they go down in the water, it’s like being united with Christ in His death and burial, come up out of the water to newness of life in Christ. And it is a transformation. Why? Because it’s a covenant that God has made with us, the new covenant and its new life on offer to you, new life on offer to me, a new heart on offer to you.
You may find your heart and your desires running the wrong way, self-destructive even, as with the ancient pagan peoples. And that happens to a lot of people in our day and time as well, but the Lord can redirect our affections, the Lord can give us a new heart, a new set of eyes to see Him, to trust Him, to hope in Him, to trust in His promises. And I want to encourage you to do that as well. He’s such a beautiful and a redeeming Savior and Lord. Please understand that placing your faith in Jesus, placing your faith in this God of the Bible, this one who appeared to Abram so many years ago, this one who through one of Abrams seed, Jesus, has offered salvation, wholeness of life to you and to me. This is way more than mere wishful thinking on a human level. This is way more than human discovery can get us.
This is God revealing himself to us and using propositional language to call us by name and call us to Himself and give us these kinds of beautiful promises that we find in the person and work of Jesus. More than wishful thinking, more than drumming up a better positive self-image, or even more than stealing ourselves from all of what’s going on in the world or all that frustrates us or makes us angry. It’s not just about stealing yourself because when you do that, see, you don’t become more human, you become less human and more steel-like or wooden. And the Lord Jesus wants to come along, even transform our view and our understanding of suffering itself. As He went to the cross, it changes our view of the cross. As He went into the tomb, it changes our view of death itself because he came out of the tomb. And the resurrection is literally a part of every single preachment in the early church. Wow.
Well, J.I. Packer sums it up beautifully. He says,
“Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God…. Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God’s own commitment, that the best is yet to come.”
–J.I. Packer
I don’t know where you’re at in your life and your life with God, but I want to persuade you to trust and believe in this great covenant-making, covenant-keeping God, that he is on your side and offering you life, that He’s trustworthy and faithful. And that when you trust in Him, your options are always more numerous than you might be able to see on the horizon. Abram saw himself as old and his wife as barren, so what he could see if he trusted in that, he never would’ve believed God. And yet here comes God with promises and it’s going to be, by the way, another 15 years or so before these promises that are made in chapter 15 are actually fulfilled in Abram’s life and in Sarah’s life. So think about that.
But faith is a journey, faith is a walk. It’s compared to a race in the New Testament, that’s true, but for most of our lives it’s a journey and a walk. And we’re trusting, we’re walking with Him, He’s walking with us. And He’s promised to never leave us, nor forsake us, and to always bring us to life in His name.
(Edited for Reading)
