God’s gift to us!
God’s covenant with Abraham was a covenant of faith, a gift to us! Let’s look at blood covenant in general and Abraham’s covenant specifically. Abraham is called “our first father in the faith.” It is hard to overstate the significance of Abraham and his role in God’s dealing with humanity. He is by far the most significant figure in the Old Testament. God chooses and calls Abram out of the land of Ur with the promise to make him and his descendants a great people.
Read Part 1 – if you haven’t?
Abram believes God and leaves his home and family trusting in God’s promise to him to his credit. Abram, like all Biblical characters, is portrayed as fully human. Complete with moments of great character and moments of great shame. The Bible is one of the most honest and unique sacred books ever written. It shows the good, the bad, and the ugly in all of its heroes. Whether it’s Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Peter, or Paul, they are all shown as flawed people, not holy saints. We get to see the struggles between the creator and his creatures unredacted.
Cut a Covenant
The word covenant means “to cut or to cut in pieces.” Making covenant was called the “walk of death.” In its footnotes, the New American Bible says, “Cutting up animals was a well-attested way of making a treaty in antiquity. In Jeremiah thirty-four, the Scriptures show the rite is a form of self-imprecation (a spoken curse) in which violators invoke the fate of the animals upon themselves.”
“Therefore, this is what the Lord says: Since you have not obeyed me by setting your countrymen free, I will set you free to be destroyed by war, disease, and famine… Because you have broken the terms of our covenant, I will cut you apart just as you cut apart the calf when you walked between its halves to solemnize your vows… for you have broken your oath.” Jeremiah 34:17-20 NLT
This walk of death meant that all the assets and liabilities, responsibilities, and obligations of those making the covenant bond were “exchanged.” The poor and weak always wanted to make a covenant with the powerful and rich! But to break the covenant meant to have done to us what was done to the animals if broken.
Covenant with Abraham
When Abram asks, “O Sovereign Lord, how can I be sure that I will actually possess it?” God’s answer was to make a covenant. Lets’ read the story in Genesis.
1 Sometime later, the Lord spoke to Abram in a vision and said to him, “Do not be afraid, Abram, for I will protect you, and your reward will be great.”. . .
6 And Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith. . . .
9-11 The Lord told him, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” So Abram presented all these to him and killed them. Then he cut each animal down the middle and laid the halves side by side; he did not, however, cut the birds in half. Some vultures swooped down to eat the carcasses, but Abram chased them away. . . .
12-16 As the sun was going down, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a terrifying darkness came down over him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “You can be sure that your descendants will be strangers in a foreign land, where they will be oppressed as slaves for 400 years. But I will punish the nation that enslaves them, and in the end they will come away with great wealth. (As for you, you will die in peace and be buried at a ripe old age.) After four generations your descendants will return here to this land, for the sins of the Amorites do not yet warrant their destruction.”. . .
17-18 After the sun went down and darkness fell, Abram saw a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between the halves of the carcasses. So the Lord made a covenant with Abram that day and said, “I have given this land to your descendants, all the way from the border of Egypt to the great Euphrates River. . . (Genesis 15:1-21 NLT)
Abram prepares the animals for the covenant walk, “the walk of death,” the walk between the pieces, and he waits. Waits to walk the pieces with God and make the covenant. But that is not what happens. Lets’ look closely here, “After the sun went down and darkness fell, Abram saw a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between the halves of the carcasses.So the Lord made a covenant with Abram.“
Covenant of Faith
Jesus is described like this in a similar way in Revelations 1:14-15, “His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as flames of fire; And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.”
This story of the Covenant with Abram is perhaps one of the most significant places where we read into the Bible what we think is there, instead of reading out of the Bible what is plainly there. It takes two to make a covenant, and Abram is definitely not one of them! His contribution to this covenant is to sleep through it. He sees it as a vision, but he does not participate. The two, the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch, are definitely not Abram. The Father and the Son walk the pieces. They make the covenant on Abram’s behalf. They take all the responsibilities for keeping the covenant and give Abram all the promises. This approach makes perfect sense! If God wants to be sure that His promises are kept – and he definitely does – He needs a reliable partner. Abram or us for that matter, are not that partner!
Does this not sound familiar to us in the New Covenant? Where were we on that faithful day, if not asleep, when the Father and the Son made the New Covenant for us? “…that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Since Abram did not make the covenant, he could not break it. Abraham’s part was to trust God to do what He had promised to do. So, as Abram’s life unfolds, we know he entered into what God had done for him! Likewise, is this not also true of us in the New Covenant! Is not our response to trust in their faithfulness as well?
This is The Higher Faith!