Assurance of Salvation with R. C. Sproul, “Salvation Guaranteed” (part 2), 2

Justification by Faith Alone in Genesis 15

Verse 6 is one of the reasons why I'd like to have Genesis chapter 15 in my prison cell. Because verse 6 makes this declaration, then he believed in the Lord, and He, that is God, reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Here is the gospel, ladies and gentlemen. Here in the 15th chapter of Genesis is the most succinct capsule summation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Abraham believed God, and there's no merit in that.

Abraham should believe God because God is eminently believable. Abraham should trust God because God is altogether trustworthy. But Abraham believed God, and God counted him. He reckoned him as righteous.

Not on the basis of any works that Abraham had performed, but on the basis of his faith and of his faith alone in the promise of God. Abraham believed God. And I think it's important that we understand that what it was that pleased God was not that Abraham believed in God.

James tells us that, you know, that the demons believe that there is a God, and they tremble. They at least have the sense to be afraid of God. But if you're sure that there's a God, and if you're scared of God, all that does is qualify you to be a demon.

They don't trust God. They don't believe God. Abraham said, I will put my life on the line by trusting you. I believe you. Do you see why it is that the Scriptures go back to this account and tell us later on that Abraham is the father of the faithful, that he is the supreme example in the Scriptures of faith in a human being?

By faith, Abraham trusted the promise of God. Then God said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess it. Now, if the story ended there, maybe we would have legends about the great faithfulness of Abraham, like the great truth-telling of George Washington, as if Abraham was such a man of faith that he never, ever, ever in his life thereafter had the slightest bit of doubt or struggle or lack of confidence.

But that would be a myth, wouldn't it? That wouldn't be authentic faith. That would be the faith of legend. And verse 8 continues the narrative and disposes any idea of a mythical faith. One of the things I love about the Old Testament is that when the Old Testament paints the portraits of biblical heroes, it does it with the warts and all.

I don't think there's ever been a history of a nation where the heroes of that nation were shown as nakedly as the history of the Jewish heroes are portrayed. Their sins are as great as their most heroic exploits, and they are set in the chronicles of Israel for anyone to read.

Abraham says to God, O Lord God, how may I know that I shall possess it? He just got done saying, I believe. And it's like in the New Testament, I believe, Lord, help thou my unbelief. Now it seems that Abraham's belief is more hope.

It's more wishful thinking than it is confidence to live by, doesn't it? He said, Lord, it's like I believe you, I think. But it's awfully hard for me to believe that I'm going to be the father of a great nation, and it's a little tough for me to believe that my descendants are going to be more numerous than the stars in the sky and the granules of sand along the sea, because I'm an old man and have you seen my wife?

My wife has no hope of conceiving a baby. So Lord, how can I know it? Not just hope it, not just pray for it and hang on by my fingernails, how can I know for sure? Do you ever feel like that? Your Christian life is only as strong as your faith.

And the profession of faith is not the same thing as actual faith. Faith means you live by trusting what God says. And that's not always easy, particularly when nobody else around you believes it. And we tend to have the intensity and the power and the strength of our faith either made more secure or less secure by the confidence or skepticism of those around us.

Fear is contagious. Doubt is contagious. And faith is contagious. And Abraham says, God, I want to believe this. How can I know for sure? Now, as I said, this is one of the warts of Abraham, because if the God Almighty came and to you and said, look, this is what's going to happen, you have to be stupid to say prove it.

If you know that that's God and God says this is going to take place, who's going to doubt it? Abraham struggled, you know. He said, I need a little more. How can I know for sure? I'll tell you, if you knew for sure that every promise that you have read or heard that comes from the mouth of God is absolutely true, your life would change so recklessly and so dramatically, nobody would recognize you starting tomorrow.

Nobody would recognize me if I fully believed every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God. But you see, with our faith, there's always a mixture of unbelief, of insecurity. And Abraham said it before God, how can I know?

The Covenant Cut in Genesis 15

And again, it's because of God's answer to that question that I want this book with me in jail. Not that I'm expecting to go to jail. I keep talking like this. I may end up, okay, let's see how you do in solitary confinement in prison.

I don't ever want to have to prove that experience. I'm not asking for the opportunity. I'm not volunteering for that episode to take place. But again, if I'm there, the reason I use the prison image is that I would think that in solitary confinement, if I were experiencing loneliness and the sense of having been abandoned, that I would feel a sense of not only helplessness, but as every prisoner has to fight, a sense of hopelessness.

Solzhenitsyn made the comment that he wasn't able really to resist the torment of the gulag until he abandoned all hope of surviving. As long as he had hope of surviving, he was at the mercy of his captives.

But when he abandoned hope of surviving and said the one thing they can't take from me is my soul, and he was able to say, whether I live or whether I die, if I never walk out of here, if I never taste freedom again, I have a relationship with God that no mortal can steal from me.

Then he was able to stand. So here it comes, the thing I want in prison. This is incredible. This is one of the most exciting passages in all of Bible Now, and I know that as soon as you hear it, you know, you're going to be breaking out in hives.

You're going to have goose bumps up and down your spine. You're going to be so excited. You'll throw your hat in the air. Listen to what he says. God said to him, bring me a three-year-old heifer, and a three-year-old female goat, and a three-year-old ram, and a turtle dove, and a young pigeon.

Isn't that incredible? You know, what is this, the farmer in the dell? You know, I owe the dairy, you know, they give me the heifers and the turtle doves and all of this stuff. He said, I want a heifer, not only does it have to be a heifer, but it has to be three years old.

I want a three-year-old heifer, three-year-old female goat, not a male goat, female goat, and a three-year-old ram, a turtle dove, a young pigeon. God, I didn't want to start a farm or a menagerie.

I just want to know, how can I know for sure that I'm going to have a son? But if that's what you want me to do, I'll go collect these animals. So we read that Abraham brought all of these animals to God, and he cut them in two, and he laid each half opposite the other, but he didn't cut the birds.

And then the birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. Now, when we read this as sophisticated twentieth-century people, we say, what kind of primitive, bizarre, obscene type of animistic religion is recorded in this text?

It sounds like savagery, where these animals are brought forth, and then Abraham hacks them to pieces, cutting them asunder, tearing them in half, and then this macabre scene of setting the pieces opposite each other, sort of a pathway in between one half of the he-goat and the other half of the he-goat, one half of the three-year-old heifer and the other half of the three-year-old heifer.

Doesn't that sound almost like witches and goblins mixing up batch brains and lizard guts and so on to cast some kind of magical potion? Well, that's not what's going on. Something far more significant than that.

The birds of prey were attracted to this holy liturgy to disturb it, to defile it, to destroy it, and Abraham, all he was able to do was to shoo away the vultures and the buzzards. Then verse 12 said, when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham, and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him.

They don't give this narration in terms of modern clinical psychology, but is there anybody who's ever experienced what physicians call an acute anxiety attack, where this sense of terror descends upon you, making you sick in the pit of your stomach, afraid to take another step?

What the saints called the experience of the dark night of the soul? So what the Scriptures are describing here in Abraham's life is as the sun goes down and he's left with this scene of carnage around him, he is suddenly overcome and virtually vanquished by terror that descends upon him in his sleep.

And while he was asleep, in this terror, God spoke to him, saying, Abraham, know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years.

But then will I also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions, and as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace, and you shall be buried at a good old age.

And then in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete. Now I have saved the best for last. If I ever am in prison, remember the one book is the Bible, the one book of the Bible is Hebrews, the one chapter of the Bible is Genesis 15, if I'm only allowed one verse, okay?

And you bring it to me. Make it paste up in block letters so that I can hang it on the ceiling or on the wall so that I have it in front of me every waking moment in my cell. If I can only have one verse of the Bible, this is it, Genesis 15, 17.

Don't look at it. Let me surprise you. Sit back and enjoy it, you know. Feast upon it. This is delicious. And it came about that when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these pieces in the midst of terror, in the midst of fear and uncertainty.

Suddenly in his vision of the night, Abraham sees a smoking oven, a flaming torch rise, and this torch that no human being was carrying moved and came near and came to this corridor of carnage of these animals that had been torn asunder.

And in that path between the bodies that were mangled on the ground, this flaming torch, this burning oven, moved down the middle of them. So what? Right. Sproul, have you lost your mind? You know, what's the big deal?

Here's the big deal. In the ancient world, when truth was at stake and when a promise was to be made that was to be absolutely binding, sacrosanct, that promise was made and sealed in the form of a covenant.

And in those days, you didn't write a covenant so much as you cut a covenant. Because when the terms of the covenant were made, beloved, and promises were uttered and declared, those promises were not absolutely binding on the persons involved in this agreement until those promises were ratified by a cutting right.

God said to Abraham, Abraham, I will be your God, you will be my people, I will make a covenant with you, and you're going to make the mark of that covenant in your body and in your son's body. I'm going to cut off the foreskin of your flesh so that in your very manhood you will be cut.

And the symbol of that cut, the purpose of the knife, will be to remind you that I have cut you off from the rest of this world that is perishing. I have set you apart. I have consecrated you. I have made you holy.

And that's the blessing of which I spoke. And the sign of that blessing will be seen in this cutting right of circumcision. But the sanctions of this covenant, Abraham, are twofold. That sign will also be a sign of the curse to anyone who breaks the terms of this covenant.

And the sign of circumcision will mean to you, Abraham, and to your seed forever, that if you ever violate this agreement, that you are saying in your own body, may I be cut off from all of the blessings of God if I fail to obey Him.

And so every Jew who entered into the covenant with God was forced to go through this liturgy of cutting to ratify the promise. But the point, beloved, is that God did not ask His people to ratify their oath without being willing to do it Himself.

God Swears by Himself in Hebrews 6

Now what happened? How did God swear an oath? Meredith Klein, the Old Testament theologian that's been, contributed so much to modern scholarship once wrote a book called By Oath Consigned, calling attention to the fact that at the heart of our relationship to God is the oath, is the vow, is the promise on both sides of the equation.

My promise to God, God's promise to me. Now how does God swear an oath? How does God make a promise? What does God say? Did you reach out to God and put a Bible in His hand and say, raise your right hand, God, and say it to me?

I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me me. We don't do that. How does God take an oath? How does God swear a vow? What we've read here with this strange description of the furnace and the smoke passing through these bloody pieces is a theophany.

And a theophany is one of these technical theological terms, the Greek word theos for God and phono, which means to manifest. The word theophany means a visible manifestation of the invisible God. And when God appears visibly in the Bible, His favorite way of doing it is in some form of fire, the bush that burns but is not consumed, the pillar of smoke that leads the people of Israel through the wilderness.

Do you see, in Hebrew terms, what is happening in this night vision is that Abraham sees that flaming torch moving through those pieces. That flaming torch represents the very presence of God. And here God is stooping to human level.

God is condescending to swear a sacred, eternal vow to His people. And the meaning of that vow, when God passes between those pieces of the animal, what God is saying to Abraham is, Abraham, do you want to know if I'm going to keep my word?

Do you want to know if I'm going to keep my promise to you? Well, let me tell you what I'm going to put on the line. I am swearing by myself. There's nothing higher than myself. I can't swear by the heavens.

I made the heavens. I can't swear by the earth. I made the earth. The only thing I can swear by, not the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, the only thing I can swear by, Abraham, is my eternal character, my immutable being.

And what I am dramatizing to you in this action, Abraham, is this. If I ever fail to keep a promise to you, I am saying, may I, the immutable, eternal, self-existent being, suffer a mutation. May I, who am immortal, become mortal.

May I, who cannot die, perish. I'm swearing by my deity, and I'm saying that just as you have cut these animals in half, if I ever lie to you, if I ever break a promise to you, may I be cut in half and destroyed.

One of the most poignant moments of my ministry was when I was a young teacher at a seminary in Boston and got to know a man in the administration, who has a dear friend whose name was Deke Ketchum. And Deke got cancer that was terminal, died an inch at a time, and in the last weeks of his life, he was alone in the hospital room in Mass General there in Boston, and I used to go down and visit him at the hospital.

I remember I was with him the day he died, and one of the things that bothered me was that there was so little I could do for this man. He was emaciated. He was weak. He could hardly speak. It was a tender thing.

I could take the ice from the jar next to his bedside and take little pieces and fragments of ice and put them on his parched lips, and his eyes would speak to me of appreciation. But what Deke wanted more than anything else was for me to read to him from the Scriptures.

And on the day he died, here's what I read to him. I turned to the book of Hebrews, and I read this. I said, Deke, here's where the Word of God says,. For God is not unjust to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints.

And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end, that you may not be sluggish but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promise.

For when God made the promise to Abraham, since He could swear by none greater, He swore by Himself. And then verse 16,. For men swear by one greater than themselves, and with them an oath given as confirmation as an end of every dispute.

In the same way, God desiring even more to show the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of the purpose, He interposed it with an oath in order that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have strong encouragement.

We who have fled for refuge in laying hold of the hope that is set before us. George Washington could tell a lie, but it's impossible for God to lie. And it is impossible for God to break a promise, for He has taken an oath, and He has sworn by Himself.