Genesis 15, The Triumph and Trial of Trust, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Genesis 15 and the Reading of the Covenant Promise

Genesis chapter 15, be reading the entire chapter, hear the word of the Lord. After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Fear not, Abram. I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great.

But Abram said, O Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus. And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my own household will be my heir.

And behold, the word of the Lord came to him. This man shall not be your heir. Your very own son shall be your heir. And he brought him outside and said, Look toward the heaven and number the stars if you were able to number them.

Then he said to him, So shall your offspring be. And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.

But he said, O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him, Bring me a heifer three years old, and a female goat three years old, and a ram three years old, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon.

And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid them each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. And when the birds to prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and deep darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and will be servants there.

And they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve. And afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace.

You shall be buried in a good old age, and they shall come back here in the fourth generation. For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. When the sun had gone down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.

On that day, Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your offspring, I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Raphaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Gergeshites, and the Jebusites.

May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. What do you trust, or who do you trust? Who would you do something major for, based just on their promise, on their word? Now think about it.

Would you trust someone to take a job somewhere else? You had to move far away from family and friends, with no guarantee that the job would last, just based on, come take a job. Would you trust a seller to give you a car?

I mean, like you would hand over like a couple thousand dollars before you got the title, and there was actually the car in front of you. What if he takes the money and drives off, never to be seen again?

Do you trust someone to give you a house? I mean, would you sign your name to a mortgage or whatever, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to some guy with no proof that he actually owned the house?

What if there were no police or courts to make them do what is right? So you can do some of that stuff, you know, well if he tries to cheat me, I can get the police after him. What if you had none of that?

Who would that change? How would that change? Who you think you trust. I hope you'd never trust some stranger who emails you saying that he has millions of dollars, a Nigerian prince. You just give him your bank account number.

If you do, you can trust him to drain every cent from that bank account. I once trusted a moving company to move all our things from Tennessee, split the movement to Pennsylvania, and I thought I had checked them out.

They had a Better Business Bureau logo on their website. Looked legit, right? It turns out they just weren't part of it. They just copied the logo right there on their website. Who's to stop them from doing that?

They were a scam. They took our down payment and all our furniture and then disappeared. Well, finally, the FBI raided their office in Miami and found where our things were, a record of them. They were in a storage facility in Detroit.

So we got to move out of Detroit without ever having to live there. I trusted total strangers and got burnt. Well, that's why a business, that's why in business we have contracts, we have lawyers and courts and police forces.

That's why we have the FBI to enforce contracts to make people do what is right when we can't really trust them. Oh, someone will say, well, my lord is my bond. You ever ask someone a contract or put it in writing or whatever, and I owe you, and my lord is my bond.

Won't you trust me instead of making me sign a contract? Okay, but if you're really trustworthy, why would you not want to sign a contract? You see, asking for a contract may indeed be a sign of a lack of trust, but being unwilling to sign one is probably a sign of being untrustworthy.

It is saying, I don't want to leave proof that I made this commitment. I'm sure I'm saying, now I'll give you this car or whatever, do this for you, I'll do this job for you, but maybe tomorrow I'll change my mind, especially after I have the money.

I'll change my mind, and I don't want a silly piece of paper reminding me of what I promised. You'll find this with couples who live together without marriage. They'll typically say, you know, they're in love.

They don't need a silly piece of paper like a marriage certificate proving their commitment, but of course, if they're really committed to each other, why wouldn't they be willing to do the wedding ceremony and sign their certificate?

Likely it's because they don't want to leave proof, something they could be held to, which means they're not really committed, are they? In Singapore, where we were married, they made signing the marriage certificate actually a part of the ceremony.

After the vows, we moved to a table, like the vows here, and then we moved to a table up on the platform, sat down, and in front of everyone, signed their certificates, exchanged it, and had the witnesses sign.

We were putting on paper something that we could be held to. Are you willing to be held to your commitments? Are you willing to say, I'm gonna do this, and to prove I mean it, to prove that I just won't change my mind, what is convenient later on, I'll give some evidence.

I'll leave a contract, or ring, or public vows, or a covenant. I'll commit that I'll sell you this, and you only, at this price, or that I'll let you stay in this job, and I won't fire you unless you do something seriously wrong, which we previously agreed to.

I'll be sexually faithful to you, forsaking all others, till death do us part. I'll walk together in Christian love, and not just float about as a Lone Ranger Christian, wherever I feel like going at the time.

We trust and commit ourselves to be trustworthy. We make a covenant. Here in Genesis 15, we see God make a covenant, the Abrahamic covenant. He's made the promises already before. The promises here that he makes are not new.

He makes them again. What's new here is the covenant, sort of making it official. We see that here in two parts, first from verses 1 to 6, the triumph of trust, and then from verses 7 to 21, the trial of trust.

In verse 1, notice it starts, the word of the Lord comes to Abram. Notice God gave Abram his word. He speaks to him. The Lord says, fear not, put away your anxiety. Perhaps Abram's afraid of a retaliatory attack, a counter-attack from the kingdoms that he's just defeated at the end of chapter 14.

Remember that? He rescued his nephew, Lot, and he defeated these kingdoms, so maybe he's afraid they'll come back with bigger forces and attack him. So he's in fear. And so the Lord says, fear not, I'm your shield, your protector.

In other words, I'm the armor that stands between you and whatever it is that will try to attack you, will harm you. It's a promise of insulation from danger. Trust in God that he, not the allies that he's just mentioned in the previous verse at the end of chapter 14.

The Lord, I will be your protector. Then there's a positive promise of obtaining good things. Your reward shall be very great. Bad things will be kept from you. I'm your shield, insulation from danger, and good things will be added to you.

Your reward will be very great. But Abram isn't really buying that. He says, Oh Lord God. And notice, if you read your Bibles, it's Lord, capitalized normally, and God is all capitalized, which means it's combining the title Lord, which in Hebrew is Adonai, means master, with the personal name Yahweh, the Lord, the I Am.

So he's the sovereign Lord, which is the Lord Master, the I Am, of the I Am who rules. But he asked, Oh Lord God, what will you give me? Your rewards will be very great. What do you have for me, God? Have you ever wanted something so much?

Maybe it's a relationship, a marriage, the health of a loved one, be cured of cancer or whatever. Wanted it so much that nothing else really matters. Just that one thing that you think at that moment you absolutely have to have.

That's all you care about, is that. It would matter if Bill Gates called you up himself, says, I would like to wire millions of dollars into your bank account. I just got your name, I got your number.

I want to give you millions of dollars. Your reward should be very great. But you just couldn't care less. You don't care. Unless you get that one thing you really want. That healing, that relationship, whatever it is.

And here Abram, and he's not really unusual at all, what he wants is a child. Abram wants his own child. He's had money, he has property, he has power, he has his own small army. He's already been blessed with an enormous number of things.

He's already very wealthy. And so when he hears from the Lord, your reward will be very great, he's like, oh I don't care. You know, if it's just me, if you're just talking about me having more silver and gold and servants and cattle, or for us, more cars and houses, a bigger bank account, more cash, more trinkets, more things, more cruises, whatever it is.

We think, I don't want any of that. If I can't have that child, I just don't care. If you're not gonna give me that, I don't want anything else. He says in verse 3, I'm childless and will have a mere servant.

He mentions the guy's name, Eleazar Damascus. I guess it's his top servant. He's gonna be my heir. That's all. That's my life. I don't care about any more stuff, any more money. He says, what will you give me, Lord?

And again in verse 4, that same phrase, the Word of the Lord. That's important here. The Word of the Lord came to him in verse 4. Behold, it says. Behold is not just kind of a throwaway, sounds spiritual kind of word.

It means pay attention to this. Don't let this get by you. Pay attention. Make this, I'm making this crystal clear. The servant won't be your heir. Your very own son is the way the ESV puts it. Literally, it's he who comes out of your own loins.

So just to be crystal clear, that's the vivid way the Bible puts it. Very graphic and literal. The heir won't be an adopted son or anything like that, a servant. He will be biologically yours. And in case the words aren't clear enough, the Lord gives him an illustration, leads Abram outside.

You know, say look at the stars in the sky. Look at all those stars. Look at them. Try to count them. You can't really. It's just too many. It's a vast number. Then he says, the Lord says to him, so shall your offspring.

So, in other words, in the same way that you can't count the stars, so you won't be able to count all your offspring. So shall your offspring be. There'll be so many you can't count them. That's how many descendants you will have, inheriting the very great reward.

But for now, he is childless. His wife was infertile even when she was of childbearing age. And how could this happen? But the Word of the Lord has come to him. And even though it sounds unbelievable, he believes it.

He believed the Lord in verse 6. And here is one of the absolute key, I don't know if you made a list of like top ten verses in the whole Bible of important turning points. This would probably be one of them.

Genesis chapter 15, verse 6. He, that is Abram, believed the Lord, and he, that is the Lord, counted it, that is his faith, his believing of the Lord. He counted, the Lord counted it, to him, to Abram.

In other words, to his account. This is accounting language. He puts it into his account, counted to him as righteousness. That is, by believing this word from God, Abram was judged by God as being right because of the faith.

Righteousness was imputed. In other words, it wasn't earned by just Abram doing the right thing, keeping the right laws, making the right choices. It was imputed, counted to him. He was, through faith, put in a right relationship with the Lord.

And notice the faith is in the Word of the Lord. It's not just faith in anything, kind of a positive attitude, whatever promise he wanted to believe in. The Word of the Lord came to him. He believed it.

Abram heard it. He put his faith in that word, even though it seems impossible. I'm already too old, my wife's too old, she was infertile, but before she wasn't too old, how is this gonna happen? It's not something, he just kind of made sense naturally, but he believed the Lord anyway, and so the Lord sees that faith, accounts it to him as righteousness, and that faith is not something that we just kind of muster up.

Where did the faith come from? What if we just willed it? That's the way some people think about faith. You just go, you have to believe. Will yourself to believe. Choose to believe. Make yourself do it.

It depends on your will. No, that's not where faith comes from. True saving faith, faith that puts us right with God, comes through the Lord's Word, comes through, the Lord's Word comes from God, who gives it to you through His Word.

He wants to give you faith, He speaks His Word, you believe that Word, and He counts that to you as righteousness. True saving faith, and faith that puts us right with God, comes through God, through His Word.

In verse 6, and he believed the Lord, he put his trust, had trust in Him, and the word there for believe, the same word, the same root word, similar to the word for amen. When we say amen, we say yes, I believe, I trust in that.

Trust is like you sitting in those chairs. You know, you believe so strongly that they're able to hold you up, that you act on that trust by placing your entire weight on them, comfortably trusting that they will not suddenly collapse on you.

Now, Abram leaned on this word from God. Of course, the difference is that we do that because we sat in these chairs many times and we kind of get experience. Yeah, that's where that trust comes from, from our experience.

Here, his trust in God's Word wouldn't come from his experience, would it? His experience is that he's infertile, his wife is infertile, and she's too old anyway. His trust now is in God's Word, but it's the same in the sense that he's putting his weight on what he trusts in, which is here God's Word.

Putting the weight of his life on it, he's leaning on it. And God saw that dependence on his word and counted, like an accountant counts money, adding up enough to see that if you're out of debt, and he does, God counted the faith as righteousness is sufficient to make Abram right with God.

He was, in New Testament terms, justified. In other words, seen by God, justified, never sinned. Here, the Lord no longer sees Abram's sins against him. You know that thing about lying about his wife being a sister?

He doesn't count that against him anymore. The Lord accepts him. He was in our terms. People today, Christians today, would often say, well, he's saved. There's no longer any condemnation against him, right?

For the Christian, there is therefore now no condemnation. Here, for Abram, he's counted as righteous by God. There's no condemnation against him. He's not being condemned for his sins. Again, what did Abram believe to get saved?

Well, the word of the Lord. And what was that word? Here, you'll have as many descendants as the stars in space, an uncountable number. How is that word fulfilled? You know, is it just that, well, he's gonna have a lot of children, and he believed that, and so, and it's fulfilled by him having a lot of literal children, first through Hagar and Sarah later.

No, no, it's not where it comes from. Not by Ishmael, as we'll see next week, the Son of the Flesh, but not even literally by Isaac, you know, from Sarah, and the Jews. It's not as though he's just, this is just a promise you're gonna have a lot of natural descendants, because sure, there are a lot of Jews around.

There's like 15 million in the world, I think. That's not uncountable. That's not what he's referring to here. He's referring to those who have faith, who believe the Word of God, who are like Abram here, hear the Word of God, and they have faith in it, they trust in it, and so they're sons and daughters of Abraham.

Those are the ones who fulfilled this promise. And how do so many people all over the world for 2 ,000 years now get the faith of Abraham? How do you get the faith that he has here? Is it just by looking up at the night sky like him?

No, faith comes by hearing the Word of Christ, like that verse in Romans 10. Faith comes by hearing and hearing the Word of Christ. Faith comes by hearing the Word of Christ. He heard, he believed, that's how faith came to him.

That's the gospel. Jesus was the offspring of Abram, whose word and work make new sons and daughters of Abraham, fulfilling the promise. Jesus is the one who fulfilled the promise. So when Abraham believed in the promise, he was believing in Jesus.

But another way, Jesus the one offspring made it possible for Abram to have many offspring, like the stars in the sky. So that means when Abram believed the promise here, that promise was fulfilled by Jesus.

When he believed it, he was believing in Jesus. Sometimes people ask, well, how people in the Old Testament saved if they're saved? Well, they're saved the same way we are. The Word here, from God to Abram, was about Jesus.

So when Abram put his trust in it, here he believed the Lord and was counted to him as righteous. When he trusted in it, he was putting his trust in Jesus. That's why he was made righteous. Now, he didn't know the name of Jesus.

He didn't know the details. He didn't know the Gospels, all the things we talk about Jesus. He was looking forward into the future for something that hadn't happened yet. He was looking forward, where we were looking back.

So we have more details, we have more facts, but we have the same object of our faith, the same one we're looking at. When the Word of the Lord came to Abram and Jesus is the Word, Jesus fulfilled the Word, Abram believed in Jesus and so was saved.

That was the triumph of trust. Here's a picture of the source of our salvation. We see it already in Genesis chapter 15. It's the same salvation, okay? There aren't different salvations in the Bible. There's only one.

And here it is being revealed, the source of it. Where does it come from? The Word of the Lord must come to you. Maybe not in a vision is here, but the Lord has to speak to you. The Lord speaks to you perhaps about your sin or your lack of faith, your self-centered life, you're seeking money instead of the kingdom of God.

He speaks most of all about the solution to your sin. The descendant of Abram who can make you a descendant of Abram. And you believe that word. He makes you come alive when before you were dead, what you didn't care about, namely the Lord.

Now you do care about. He who you didn't believe could give you the things you really wanted. What will you give me? Now you trust that everything you want is in Him. Because you believe, you are counted as being right with the Lord.

The Trial of Trust and the Unilateral Covenant

The Lord counts you. You're right. You have experienced you have experienced the triumph of trust. And after the triumph of trust, the Lord is willing to prove himself, willing to leave evidence of his commitment through the trial of trust.

And now Abram wants to know about the security of salvation. First the source of salvation comes to his faith. Now the security of it. That security is questioned. Abram asks for evidence. And so God proves it in a covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant.

Starting in verse 7, the Lord gives Abram another promise in verse 8. I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. And this is another promise. This requires another confirmation.

Right before, confirmation with the stars. That's how many descendants you'll have. But Abram asks, well what about you giving me this promise of land, a place to live peacefully? Before he's just wandering to have a place to live.

Where am I to live? Now he wants a place for him and his descendants to live. Where? And God says, well I'm giving it to you. And Abram asks, how can I know? We could think, well how can he get away with questioning God like that?

But remember, he's now righteous. Which simplified means being right. He's right. He's in a relationship with God. And so he speaks to God as someone he has a relationship with. You know, you showed me the stars before about my descendants.

Now how am I to know I'll get this land, a place to live? The Lord doesn't respond, well how dare you question me like that? Not take me in my word. You should meet me for proof among friends. Why don't you make me sign a contract for her, if you trust me?

That kind of thing. No. The Lord responds by giving proof, leaving evidence. And so the Lord tells Abram, take the right animals in verse 9, the heifer, the goat, the ram, each three years old. That's kind of important.

In other words, they're adult animals in their prime. They're now ready to be productive and reproductive. They're valuable, right? It's not like they're old about ready to die anyway. And Abram knows what to do from here.

Men in that day had a custom called cutting a covenant. They would do this when they wanted to enter into a deal of some kind, and they wanted to be sure the other man would keep the deal. Remember, they had no police forces, they had no lawyers, not much of anything like a real court system to hold them accountable.

So what do you do if you want to make sure somebody else is going to keep a commitment? Well, they would enter into a covenant if they wanted to try the trust of their covenant partner. Try if they were trustworthy.

Now say, for example, two men wanted to be sure their neighbors and their friends, they get along well, they wanted to be sure that if I die, who's gonna take care of my family? Maybe my friend, my neighbor, maybe he will.

You know, there wouldn't be any pensions or Social Security to provide, and there's no police to keep hoodlums and robbers away from taking advantage of their family if the man wasn't around to protect them.

That's why in the Bible you often hear widows and the fatherless of the children without a father, because in other words, there's no man around to protect them, and they're very vulnerable to any kind of criminals.

Well, so maybe two friends could agree, and if you die, I'll take care of your family. If I die, you take care of my family. And to seal the deal, they would cut a covenant. They would take the animals, these animals here he lists, and literally cut them in half, and they'd walk between the pieces saying, may what happened to these animals happen to me if I so much as break one word of this covenant.

This was their trial of trust. They were calling on God to curse them if they break the covenant, for God to hold them into account. Or maybe sometimes kings would come and cut a covenant, making a treaty between two kingdoms.

They would agree to the terms, and then they would have this kind of ceremony with the cut up animals saying, may I be cut like these animals if I break this covenant. Walk between the animals and say that.

May I be cut in half like these animals. Maybe one king was more powerful than the other, like an emperor, and he imposes a covenant onto a small kingdom. And he might make the wicker king go to the animals and say to him, if you break this covenant, this is what will happen to you.

You'll be cut in half like these animals. But here Abram has asked for a trial of trust, and the Lord responds by telling him to set up the covenant cutting ceremony, and Abram does. Now normally Abram would expect to go through the animals too.

That's probably what he's thinking. I'm gonna have to go through those too. Maybe he's expecting to be the only one to go through the animals, that he would be required to do something. He probably thinks God's gonna come to him and say, you do this and that, and you go through the animals to give me me guarantee, and then I'll give you a promise.

Maybe it's something like that. He's told to go through the covenant cutting ceremony as his pledge, that he will do what the Lord requires. But here, and this is important, Abram cuts the animals in half.

So he sets up the ceremony, except for the birds because they're probably too small, and he waits. He has to protect his sacrifice. The birds of prey come down trying to eat from the carcasses, but he shoos them away.

Here Abram's trust, first Abram's trust is being tried. Time goes by. He's waiting. The carcasses are just lying there. Vultures and the like come swooping down. Now if he's given up, he's saying, what is all this for?

The Lord's not doing anything. I give up. I quit. Well then he'll just let them eat, right? He's not gonna eat it himself. He's gonna let the birds of prey eat it. But he drives them away, and that shows that he's expecting the Lord to do something.

He's not sure exactly what yet, but he has faith that the covenant cutting ritual was laid out for something. His scaring off the birds shows his faith. As he's waiting, it gets dark, and something unusual happens.

Says a kind of sleep overcomes him. And notice the way it's put in verse 12. It's not that he drifts off to sleep. Not because he's drowsy after waiting around a while, kind of lying in the hammock, tired of chasing birds away.

It's a deep sleep that comes forcibly on him. It's called a dreadful and deep darkness, and so it shows that this is supernatural. It's from God. That's especially obvious during what comes next, in this deep and unmovable condition, which we probably wouldn't even call it sleep.

Because you think about it, he sees what's going on. He hears God speak. He just can't move. It's a kind of paralysis. And the Lord tells him in verse 13, of the coming captivity in Egypt, your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for 400 years.

That's kind of interesting, 400 years. Then the Lord assures him that he will rescue Abram's offspring, and Abram will personally live peacefully to a ripe old age, but that his descendants won't possess the land until the sins of the Amorites, in other words, for the Canaanites, until those sins are complete for 400 years.

And Abram hears all of this while he is in this dreadful and deep condition, when he sees a fire pot bellowing out smoke, like the cloud that led the way for the Israelites in the desert. Remember? Moses led them out, pillar of cloud by day, out of Egypt.

Then he sees also, Abram does this vision, a flaming torch, a torch go through the middle of the animals, like the pillar of fire that led Israel out of Egypt by night. Symbols of God's holiness and power.

These are symbols for God passing through the pieces of the animals. The Lord God, the great king himself, was making the covenant, while Abram couldn't move a muscle. Abram had likely assumed that he would be going between the pieces, doing something in exchange, but the Lord is determined here that he, he could have just told him to sit still, but that's not enough.

The Lord kind of paralyzes him for a while. The Lord's determined here that he and we understand that this covenant is a one way obligation. It is entirely dependent on the Lord. This is something the Lord is doing.

This is not a contract that the Lord, you know, say, well I'll uphold my end of the bargain if you do your end of the bargains. Quid pro quo. Two partners exchanging promises with different terms. No, not like that at all.

Abram had asked for a trial of trust. How can I know? And here the Lord gives him the most certain testimony of that. Remember what this means. The animals are cut in two. They're cutting a covenant saying, by passing through the animals, may what happened to these animals happen to me if I break this covenant.

But Abram takes no part. The Lord is so determined to make sure we understand that Abram is taking no part that he puts Abram into some kind of catatonic state. Abram can hear and see, but he can't move.

Purely there is a witness to the covenant that the Lord is making. It's a one-way covenant. In theology, monogenistic or monergism, one working. Here the one being God. God is doing all the work. He's here making all the commitment.

The Lord is stating that he, the Lord, would be destroyed if he broke the covenant. And of course he cannot be destroyed. That's impossible. And so he cannot and will not break this covenant. You say, well, God can do anything.

Well, he cannot be unfaithful to himself. He is a faithful God. He will always be faithful. So he keeps his covenants. He keeps his promise. So as we're starting over, think where we are so early in the Bible.

This is just 15 chapters into the Bible. We're starting over from the sin and the death that we've fallen into earlier in Genesis. We are here just 15 chapters into it. We're here given an ironclad promise from the Lord that no matter what happens, he will keep his word.

He will bless all the families of the earth, all the nations through the son of Abraham. The entire rest of the Bible is the story of how he did that. So the rest of the Bible tells us of God's common word in the Old Testament, his steadfast love, hesed in Hebrew, his covenant-keeping love.

He's made of that. He has that. He is that. He's covenant-keeping. The Bible tells us over and over again, it never ceases. It lasts forever. Psalm 136 repeats every other line 26 times. His steadfast love endures forever.

It can endure all our failures because it's not based on us. In Lamentations, the Israelites had put their trust in the wrong thing, in their religion, in their temple, their ancestry. They were sure that God would never allow them to be destroyed, no matter how much they sinned.

They could sin as much as the Canaanites, the Amorites before them. God drove out. They thought, this is what they thought, they could sin that much and God would still protect them because they had his temple there in Jerusalem.

And then when Jerusalem lay in rubble and dead bodies were everywhere because of the Babylonian invasion and they're being hauled off to Babylon, the prophet says, the steadfast love, chesed, his commitment of the Lord never ceases.

We have a work for a blessing given to us that we don't deserve, based entirely on the work of someone else. Grace. And look here at how amazing that grace is. That grace comes to us from a covenant-making God.

Some people, they don't want to make contracts, they don't put their name, their commitments, they don't put their name to commitments on paper that can be used against them. But here God is willing to give proof that he will do what he has committed to do.

The sovereign and free Lord, he didn't have to do this but he does, is willing to do the very thing that so many individualistic, me-centered people today don't want to do. Commit himself. Now understand that today many people, even including church-going people, regard what we do with our church covenant, actually asking members to agree to it.

It was the common, it was the universal practice among Baptists and congregational churches, Puritan churches way back. But now because of the cultures now don't make me commit. Commitment phobia. Now people regard that as just bizarre, almost cultic.

They'll think that grace lets them be free so that now they don't have to be accountable for their commitments. Why be tied down? Why have to commit? But here we see that grace comes to us through a covenant.

Grace comes to us from a covenant-making God. Grace comes to us from a God who was willing to commit himself. Now some could say that this covenant is all about land, so it's not relevant to us. And on one level this covenant was literally fulfilled when Joshua led them to begin to take the promised land, brought them into the promised land, and then finally when David ruled over the entire kingdom, mentions the boundaries of the land, only by the time of David did they finally rule over all the land that is described here in this chapter.

So if people insist on a literal fulfillment, it's got to be all about land, that literal fulfillment, then this promise was indeed literally fulfilled. In fact, seven times the Old Testament states that this promise of land was fulfilled.

It just repeats that. Seven times in the Old Testament, God kept his promise. He did what he committed to do. It's interesting, I just thought this week as looking at this, here God tells Abram, these Amorites, these Canaanites, they have 400 years to repent before I will drive them out, then I'll give the land to your descendants.

If you make the time when Israel fully got the land as the time of David, about 1000 BC, and they were driven out of the land, taken away in exile at 586 BC, that's about 400 years. Perhaps on a new earth, the literal and believing descendants of Abram will literally possess the literal territory, eternally again.

I don't know, and I really don't care that much either. Some topics I figure, this is not so important to me, it's not important to anybody, I'm not even going to spend the time debating it or thinking about it that much.