It was, looking back, the beginning of my “ministry” training as a snake oil salesman. When school was out, we headed off to Nashville for a week to learn to sell. We took over several floors of an old downtown hotel for the week. Everywhere I turned, there were posters and banners with “REMEMBER THE PONY!” It was like a mystery that none of the leaders would explain.

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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.”

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.

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!

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Now all these decades later, I am back with Zeke once more. His message is more beautiful and clearer than ever! The words are those of author Robert O’Rourke, and the simple illustrations are mine.

Read and Enjoy!

As you can see, this is not your typical “Born Again” story. It is a simple story of our transformation from takers to givers planned long ago by God. The journey from our selfish-selves to our true-selves by the power of the Spirit. Our destiny is to change into what we are in the character and nature of God from within!

Go and do likewise!!!

What God Did For
ZEKE The Fuzzy Caterpillar

Standard Publishing – Cincinnati, Ohio – ISBN: 0-87239-406-9
Written by Robert O’Rourke Illustrated by John Ham

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The Puzzle Pieces

However, we have left out one of the most critical puzzle pieces: the box top. Can you imagine doing the puzzle without it? There would be little joy or fun without an image! The box top puts everything in perspective, in context. It gives meaning and relationship to every piece. It enables the joy and fellowship of discovery as we scramble to find the rest of the skater’s face on the frozen pond. The friendly competition, excitement, and laughter come as we search for the missing pieces, and someone else beats us to them!

What if we started with no box top at all? The pieces just poured out of a brown paper bag. Or, even worse, what if it was the wrong box top? A winter scene, but not the one that fits the pieces you have? Perhaps one of the older folks in the group would say, “I know how that one goes together,” and goes on to describe it to you. For me, this illustrates much of the first half of my life. Life does not come with a box top! We don’t even start with all the pieces, but with plenty of folks out there telling us they know how it all fits together. There are great moments of joy when something resonates with us, and we collect another piece. Even more, when some of the disjointed pieces began to fit together.

My Story

Filling in a little more of my story may be helpful here to illustrate my point. My father was a Methodist, and my mother, a Baptist. And I was infant baptized into the Presbyterian church, go figure, and one called Trinity at that! Baptism has turned out to be a significant road map of my life’s journey. I would go on to spend my youth among the “frozen chosen.” Collecting perfect attendance pins along the way.

In our denomination, at the age of twelve, we would begin our confirmation process. We would memorize the Westminster Catechism and go before the elders and answer questions about its content. Much of the cause for my latter demise came from only memorizing the shorter one. My mother was weary after working with my two older brothers through the full one. They turned out great, Ha-ha, both ordained Presbyterian ministers, but then there was me! I walked the aisle and received a Bible with my name engraved in gold, and the deal was done, confirming my baptism at the age of consent!being

To say that there was not a connection here to the bullet list of doctrines I claimed to believe would be a gross understatement. I was told this god had chosen and elected me yet was unknown to me in any relational way. This god was Zeus, an old man with a white beard on a distant and grand throne of judgment. My best understanding of the Trinity was as water, liquid, steam, and ice. This Trinity was somehow of the same substance in different forms or something like that? This was a really unhelpful understanding as I moved into my teen years into alcohol, drugs, and sex. For me, this god was not hard to leave behind because I had no connection to it anyway.

My Many Baptisms

I would be twenty before I would hear an evangelical message on being “born again.” The message would happen at a pool party where a young hippy type with a guitar singing and preaching would lead me to baptism number two, a “believers” baptism. This new set of doctrines would create a whole new box top, an entirely different one from my childhood. A god who was angrier and more frightening, one to be feared and appeased!

Two more baptisms closely followed this one. I became involved in the charismatic movement, and they taught a baptism in the Holy Spirit and a baptism of “repentance.” These I was told did not happen with the hippy in the pool or the elders at the baptismal font.

Let me say that I’m not against any of these. Each in time, I would come to realize was roads on my journey’s map. All of them containing similar puzzle pieces, but pointing to very different images of god. I am in my late twenties now, and I’ve been sprinkled, poured, and dunked, so I’ve been spot, wet, and dry cleaned. Again, no put down intended; these reflect my attempts to connect with a God I had not met face-to-face.

The Questions

Let me jump forward here and pick up the narrative some dozen years later. I’m in my early forties and have left the “ministry” and have returned to sign painting fulltime. The last few years have been devastating. Wendy and I have had a full-term stillborn son Nathan, followed by an early-term miscarriage and a beautiful fourth child. To put it bluntly, I no longer had any idea who God was. Who I was or how anything was supposed to work! I had gathered a few puzzle pieces along the way and believed God existed, but not much else. My cry was, “Can we start over?”

I knew a lot of ex-preacher boys like myself, and we were meeting in homes. We were trying to decide if we should start “another” church? It was Sunday morning, and we had a house full of families and an open forum. I did what I’ve always done and still do; I popped up and popped off, speaking about not knowing the answers, but coming to understand where the answers lay. The answers were before Genesis one, one. They originate in the Trinity’s character, nature, purpose, intent, and heart’s motivation in creation and redemption. Who are they? Why did They create? And what end did They seek

The Paradigm Shift

After the meeting, I was in the kitchen getting some food when a new person I had not met before approached. He said, “I don’t meet too many people who talk like that, or are asking those questions and seeking those answers.” His name was Baxter Kruger. Baxter is a scholar and theologian who lives in my home town and was writing a book “The Great Dance” about these exact questions at that time.

Needless to say, this was one of those divine appointments! We would become friends, and through the prophetic use of words, Baxter would paint a picture of the box top that would change my inner world! He would take liquid, steam, and ice to a level I would have never imagined. The Trinity and the dance of Life and Love would transform my disjointed puzzle pieces into the Triune God’s image! The Divine Life engaged me in a way I had never experienced before. I allowed the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to embrace me in a way I never thought possible.No longer just knowing things about God, but meeting my heavenly Father face-to-face!

Meeting The Father

Everything did not become peaches and light. Far from it! But I had a foundation, a relationship, a God that was big enough to trust. I could begin to let go. The reality that God was not distant, but present and I was not alone was transforming! It was not all up to me. We were in life together. I, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were one! I could not have done this, but They had done this for me, to me, and in me! What a paradigm shift; what an amazing context in which to live.

Kruger and I have continued our love/hate relationship for some three decades now! I owe Kruger a debt I cannot pay. I have his boot prints all over my body, soul, and spirit. It would be impossible to know the extent of his influence on my life. As C.S. Lewis said of MacDonald, “…indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.” Baxter introduced me to MacDonald, and between the two of them, it would be impossible to acknowledge their contributions in “quotes.”

My Final Baptism

Thanks to Baxter, I would have one more baptism. It was two thousand years ago in a muddy river called the Jordan. The Incarnate Son and I, with His Father and the Spirit present, went down into those waters together. Jesus needed no baptism, no believing, no repentance, and no Spirit’s filling, but I did! They fulfilled “all righteousness,” and through Their vicarious baptism, that is in my place and in my name, I received my final baptism. They did this for me, to me, and in me what I could have never done for myself! I, brothers and sisters, no longer trust in anything I have done, but only in Their faithfulness, Their finished work, Their gift of Life!

I can say with Paul, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20 KJV

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