God on the Block

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.

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This is a message from the series, Beginning with God, Walking Through the Book of Genesis, by Pastor of Teaching and Vision, Don Filsack.

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If you'd like to learn more about Recast or access our sermon archive, please visit us at recastchurch .com.

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Here's Pastor Don. This morning, we're going to hopefully be reminded that God's provision for us goes very much beyond wealth or health or prosperity or what's given in the black box or building buildings and things like that.

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God is certainly the giver of good gifts, but we now encounter for the first time in the text of the book of Genesis and really for the first time in Scripture, the whispers or what

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I might call the echoes of a God who not only gives good things to people, but in a very real sense is going to eventually give himself.

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That's really what we see as the center of our faith, is that we serve a God who is giving and generous and loving, and he does give good gifts, but in the end, it's ultimately the best gift of all, is that he ends up giving himself in a very real way.

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He lays his life on the on the block, if you will, in our text and basically says, may

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I become like an animal sacrifice, God saying that, may I become like an animal sacrifice, if I do not keep up my end of the promise to reconcile and to make things right for a fallen and broken humanity.

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And as strange as that may seem to us, the notion of God's being sacrificed, we know that eventually he will in a very real way become one of us and lay his life down for you and me in the text of Scripture.

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So as we speak from this vantage point of Genesis, we know that we are looking forward from that vantage point to a time when

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Jesus Christ will show up on the scene and make good on the promises of God. As I read the text, it may seem difficult to understand some of the symbolic actions that God undertakes in this text and his interaction with Abram, but as we walk through this,

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I think it will snap into focus that God is in our text making a unilateral, one -sided agreement with humanity.

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He is, again, going to demonstrate sacrifice to us and show us that he is willing to sacrifice himself to make things right.

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And so God gives to Abram two signs to demonstrate how serious he is about his promises.

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So if you can open your Bibles, please, to Genesis chapter 15. And if you take out the Bible in the seat back in front of you, you can find that on page 9.

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So that's an easy way to find it. We're gonna read Genesis chapter 15 in its entirety. And if you don't own a

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Bible, please take that one with you. We do desire for everybody to have a copy of God's Word, so you can take the

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Bible in the seat back in front of you. But the very words of God to us this morning, Genesis chapter 15.

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And Abram said, If you are able to number them.

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And he said to him, And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other.

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But he did not cut the birds in half. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram.

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And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking firepot and flaming torch passed between these pieces.

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On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Let's pray as the band comes to lead us.

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Father, I thank you for the opportunity we have to hear from your Word. We see some pretty obscure and ancient notions here of sacrifice and animals being cut in half, and some things that just seem mysterious and strange and weird.

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But as we walk through this text, I ask that you would open our eyes to see the reality of you putting yourself on the line for us, for our salvation.

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And Father, we know that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, was raised again three days later, and that by faith we can be made right and reconciled with you, and our sins can be washed away and forgiven.

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Father, I ask that you would help us to rejoice in that reality. Let the cross guide us into worship, even this morning, and allow us to focus on the awesome price that was paid for us.

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Father, that you are not a God that is distant and far removed and not connected, but that you connected with us through the sacrifice of your

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Son in order to reconcile us to you. I pray that you would help us to worship you in spirit and in truth, that our hearts would be engaged, that it would not just be an exercise of our vocal cords to sing these songs, but that you would move in us to rejoice in you as you are the

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God who saves. I thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, big thanks to the band for leading us.

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Hopefully you were able to step up before the throne of God and actually worship him this morning. I appreciate Dave stepping in in Josh's absence this morning as well.

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Make sure you have your Bibles open to Genesis chapter 15. It's helpful for you to have that,

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I think, to be able to follow along with the flow of the text and understand kind of where I'm going. But we're going to jump right in.

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Be sure that you get coffee, donuts, juice if you need to at any time during the message, but make yourself at home.

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But let's jump in. Verse 1 makes it clear that these things occurred after the big battle sequence that we saw last week.

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It says in verse 1 of chapter 15, after these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.

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He has another experience with God after this victory that's gone on last week. And we're going to see that God is going to say two words to him right off the bat.

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The first two words that God speaks in this vision to Abram are what in the text? Fear not.

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Okay. Well, what would be a cause for Abram to have fear at this point? Like what could possibly be going on in his mind?

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Well, we saw that God had delivered the entire region of Canaan from the grip of servitude to four foreign kings last week in the text.

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You can go back and listen to that message. It's available online if you want, if you weren't here. But he used Abram to do it.

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And it seemed like a little bit of a side note. But with the remainder of the context, the reminder of the context at the start of verse 1, when it tells us to remember these things after these things, it reminds us of that.

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It's an indicator that we ought to be trying to put ourselves in Abram's shoes and think about how would he be feeling after these events that just happened in order to prepare our hearts for what comes next.

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Now, so put yourself in Abram's shoes. You would just chase down the enemies, the armies of four powerful kings, your enemies, the enemies of your people.

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You fell upon them at night and won back your nephew and all the spoils of war, ended up turning those over, of course, to the king of Sodom.

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But you would probably be feeling pretty good, right? Victorious, strong, powerful, mighty.

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So would the command from God to fear not, doesn't that seem a little bit disjointed? He's like, after those things, after that massive victory,

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God came to Abram and said, don't fear. I mean, you're kind of like, well, I'd be feeling extremely victorious, super awesome.

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Everything's going great, right? But if you're anything like me, if you were to really actually be in Abram's shoes, now it's one thing to kind of think we can kind of try to put ourselves there mentally or something.

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But if you had been there in battle, you would actually conquered these kings. And I find that often after a big victory, there's a little bit of a letdown.

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Have you ever experienced that? Huge, huge mountaintop experience, and the only place to go is down.

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And I think it's just like human nature, and I think Abram being a human just like us, that there's probably a sense of fear in him, that he probably actually has fear that God is trying to dispel from him in the sense of reprisal or something like that.

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So he's gone out and he's conquered these four kings. But how many of you know there's a people group behind those kings?

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And he's like, they're going to raise up another leader. They're going to recoup, and when they recoup, what's going to happen?

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Where are they going to come back to? Where are these bully nations going to come back to when they finally recoup?

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They're going to come back and get him. So there's a sense of fear already in the text that God is going to seek to dispel.

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So God first speaks then in verse one, and we know that he is actually comforting

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Abram who is fearful. He says, don't fear Abram. And how often does God start off with those words?

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Fear not. Don't fear. It's all throughout Scripture. It's Old Testament. It's New Testament. It's all throughout Scripture that he is very concerned with our hearts.

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How many of you, if you're just being honest, you struggle with fear from time to time? Anxiety. How are things going to work? How is this all going to come down?

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There's a complete sermon just in the phrase, do not fear. Maybe some of you already have in that one phrase what

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God wants to communicate to you this morning. Maybe that's the sermon to you in a nutshell, is that he's saying to you by the

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Holy Spirit alive in you, stop fearing. Be at peace. Stop worrying about things.

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It's easy to get wrapped up in the fears of what might happen. How many of you know that today's got enough troubles of its own?

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Jesus said that. And that if you're trying to solve tomorrow's problems and next month's problems and next year's problems, there's no end to the problems that you could be trying to solve.

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Problems that don't even exist. How many of you find yourself solving problems that don't exist? Seven of us and the rest are not telling the truth right now or just didn't feel like raising your hand.

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But we do. We have a tendency to solve problems that don't even exist. It's a trap that I can fall into personally.

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I confess to you that my mind often turns to the worst case scenario. Any of you worst case scenario people, you automatically prepare and plan for that which is unlikely to take place, but you want to be ready.

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Scout's motto, be prepared. And so you can justify it all you want, but it's anxiety and it's worry and it's not placing your life over into the hands of God and saying,

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I trust you with what you bring my direction, but saying, I've got to be the solution. And that's what fear ultimately is, isn't it?

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Saying, I've got to solve it. If anybody's going to solve my problems, it's going to be me. Well, there's

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God there too. And God has something significant to say to us. He comes to Abram and he says, don't fear.

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But then he goes on. And for those of you who are sitting here and you're going, yeah, I acknowledge that. I've got a problem trying to prepare for the worst case scenario.

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This is what God says to him. I am your shield.

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I am your protector. I am your shield. God says that, not me, not Pastor Dunn, but God says,

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I am your shield. Does that provide any encouragement to you? Is that a significant statement that God Almighty, the creator of the universe, is declaring himself to be a shield for his people?

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Now, we know that he's specifically talking to a person of his choosing centuries ago, a guy named

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Abram. But if you are in Christ, he is no less a shield for you than he was for Abram. He is a shield for you.

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And he goes on to promise also a great reward to Abram. Anybody in here that can relate to God promising you a great reward?

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He has promised those who are in Christ a great reward. Two comforts come straight out of the first verse of this text.

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God encountering, coming to Abram, his chosen man. And he says, I will provide you protection, and I will provide for you provision.

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I will give you provision. There's two comforts that come to Abram right from the start.

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Abram, finally, for the first time in the book of Genesis, takes up the conversation with God. I actually had to go back and kind of look again because I was really shocked to realize that this is the first time we have

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Abram speak. Is anybody shocked by that? I mean, really what we have is he hasn't talked to God yet, okay?

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We don't have any recorded words of Abram to God until we get to this text right here. Now, we've been following his life since the very end of chapter 11 was the first place that Abram was mentioned.

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So from end of chapter 11 to the beginning of verse 15, God speaks to Abram a lot.

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And Abram does a lot. Abram follows God and walks after him and moves his family on the basis of God's speech to him.

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But now, for the first time, there's going to be a dialogue rather than a monologue. And there's gonna be something, because we're gonna see

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Abram's heart more. How many of you know when he's speaking in the text, we're seeing something of his heart? Because he's gonna talk to God.

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How many of you know that if I could watch you, if I could be a third party to a conversation between you and God, I'd get to know a lot about you?

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Would you agree with that? And we're gonna get to know a little bit about Abram. We're gonna find out what makes him tick, what's going on inside of his heart.

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By the way that he talks to God. So far, he's only listened up to this point, but now he speaks.

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And the first word he speaks is to identify God as sovereign. Now, you don't get it in the

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English text very well, where he says, Oh, Lord God. That would be very easily and very accurately translated.

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Oh, sovereign God. You are in charge. You are the boss. The word that's used there for Lord is a significant word in Hebrew.

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It means sovereign, director of all things. And he is basically identifying

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God as the one who is in charge. So his first words to speak is to identify the sovereignty of God.

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Oh, sovereign Lord, you are the boss. But then some of you maybe in the room can't relate to this because you don't have a boss that's very approachable.

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But how many of you have ever brought a concern to your boss before? Some of you have brought a concern to your boss and it depends on the type of boss that you have, whether or not you feel comfortable bringing that concern, right?

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Or it depends on the nature of the concern or whatever. But Abram feels comfortable bringing his concern with emotion before the throne of God.

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Before the ruler of all things, he feels comfortable. He's in relationship. I mean, you know, that shows something about his relationship with God that he feels comfortable bringing a concern before him.

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And it's a deep concern. And the way he does it might surprise us because it's not as gentle as we might think you ought to approach

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God. Some of the things he says here as we dig in. Verses two through three, he expresses his deepest heart concern.

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We're learning something about Abram here, what's going on in his mind. And that is that he doesn't have a biological heir.

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Verses two through three. But Abram said, Oh Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless and the heir of my house is

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Eleazar of Damascus. And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring. Lot has been removed from the picture.

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Ultimately has removed himself from the picture of the household of Abram. And so Abram now identifies that the next logical heir is a servant in his household.

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Not even a relative anymore. He no longer has hopes that a relative is going to be his heir.

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It's the servant who serves in his household named Eleazar of Damascus. Well, what we have really in the text is

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God promises Abram a reward in the text. And Abram is going to kind of kick back at that a little bit.

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The word that's used has a military victory twist to it for reward in verse one.

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Your reward shall be very great. And in context, it kind of makes sense that it's talking about military reward because we actually saw

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Abram received, spoils of war, military reward, this very word last chapter.

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So he received this reward and what did he end up doing with the reward? Gave it all away, right?

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He gave it all back. He didn't receive that reward, but he ended up saying to the king of Sodom, for example, I don't want your filthy wealth because you're going to say that I owe you one if I keep it.

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So you take it all back for yourself because you're not the kind of guy I want to owe something to. So we saw that last week.

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So God here is saying, no, no, I'll hook you up, okay? I'm going to hook you up with a great reward because you are my guy, okay?

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And Abram pushes back and says, what good is your reward?

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What good are your spoils? What good is this if I don't have a biological heir? What is this reward you're talking about?

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I don't even have an heir and you're talking about some reward. Verse three says the same thing even more directly towards God.

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Brazen and brash, Abram speaking to the Almighty says, behold, you have given me no offspring.

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Now the word behold is one that we don't use very often, but another way to translate that would be look exclamation point.

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Have you ever said that to somebody? How many of you know that when somebody starts a sentence with look, does that, does that, whatever comes next, are you already defensive?

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Somebody starts, look, look you. Okay, that's what he's saying.

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Behold is like, God is called later in just a couple of chapters, he's going to be called the God who sees.

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This is a title, a divine title self -given for him. He says, I am the God who sees.

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How many of you know that that's a really good title for God? Does he see? He sees everything, right? There's nothing that goes beyond his gaze.

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There's nothing that he doesn't see. And here, Abram with full brazenness says to the

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God who sees, look, look, look at me. Pay attention to me. Does that sound a little bit brash to any of you?

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Anybody getting that from? How many of you, if your kid talked to you that way? Do you know what

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I'm talking about? It's like, I don't know how you guys feel about paddling and all that stuff, but something's going down at the house.

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Look, look, you look at me. You pay attention to me. And then look at the phraseology.

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Who is he blaming for having no offspring? You have given me no offspring.

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You haven't done it. Pretty brash, pretty brazen.

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And so this is key. Notice God's divine and awesome patience.

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His willingness to put up with our complaint. His willingness to put up with our concerns.

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His willingness to listen. Even if it's not brought in a nice, pretty package. Even if we haven't dressed it up real well.

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He can handle the heart of you and me. He can handle us bringing our frustrations and our problems and our difficulties before him.

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I would dare say he delights in that by the way that he responds in the text. Certainly the text, what are we getting to know about Abram?

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His intense angst that he's feeling about this entire air and barrenness business.

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And I would dare say that everybody in this room has something specific that if you could stand before God, there would be a challenge to him from you.

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Am I accurate about that? Can you think of, if you were to stand before God, anybody have any questions? A couple of you, okay.

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I think all of us probably have a couple of questions. Well, could you explain to me where you were when that happened? Or why did this happen?

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Or what is going on here? Or why don't I have this yet? Or why hasn't that happened yet? It's a good thing, right?

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Why is that not in my life yet? And so can you see, put yourself in Abram's shoes. He actually gets an audience with God in a vision and he's having this interaction back and forth.

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And he's bearing his soul before God and saying, his deepest, deepest longing is for a son.

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That's the deepest thing in his heart is that he wants to have an heir rather than coming back at Abram with a harsh judgment for his questions or the way that he's questioned.

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God obliges this chosen man with more words of comfort. Verse four, okay, verse four.

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And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, this man shall not be your heir.

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Your very own son shall be your heir. Definitively, Eleazar will not be the one, but you will have your very own son and he will be your heir, promised to Abram.

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This is where the English, I've mentioned before that the Hebrew language and then the translators love to dodge the terminology because we like to soften it or make it a little bit more comfortable for us.

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They don't pull any punches. The text literally says in Hebrew, that which comes out of your loins. Loins is even a word that we just carry over from old

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English just to be comfortable. So we can all be comfortable about the words that are used here. But in Hebrew, it's just direct.

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There's just no way around this. If Abram is to trust God on this one, then there is no room for him to have an adopted son become his heir.

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Okay, I guess I'm gonna have to go out and adopt one to get a son. This is just very, very direct and graphic.

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He's going to have a son himself. And it's obvious that this interaction between God and Abram was going on at night in the tent.

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You kind of go, what's going on here? How do I know that? Because God takes Abram outside, commands him to look up at the stars and number them.

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Now we're not talking about, some of you live in Portage, some in Kalamazoo or spread all around.

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Some of you are right here in Matawan. But it kind of depends on where you live, what you can see when you look up, right?

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By all the light pollution. If you're in downtown Kalamazoo at night, you're not gonna see as many stars and things like that.

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We're talking about between somewhere, probably around 1700 to 2000 BC in the context here.

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So how many of you are kind of thinking that there were some, when he stepped out of his tent, there was not much light pollution on the planet.

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Are you getting what I'm saying? I mean, he's got a lot of stars to count. God says, get counting, buddy. There they are.

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That is going to be the number of your offspring. That's how many children you are gonna have.

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Just like God promised Abram earlier that his offspring would be like the dust of the earth, here again, he uses an extreme example to emphasize that Abram's offspring will be numerous.

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And without getting into detail, we know that the New Testament uses the same imagery for all the children of Abram, including you and me.

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The implication is that one of those stars that he saw that night was your star, if you're in Christ.

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He looked up at the sky, he saw a multitude that he couldn't count, including you and me, because we are sons and daughters of Abram.

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According to faith, as Paul talks about in the book of Galatians. God lit a star for you, so to speak.

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And Abram looks up and he can't count. And then we have the picture in the end. John, in the book of Revelation, gets a special vision again, just like Abram's getting a vision here.

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And he saw a multitude worshiping around the throne of God on the new earth. A multitude, he says, multiple times in the book of Revelation that no one could count.

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You and me included in that number, if you are in Christ by faith. Verse six is a pivotal point in all of scripture because it identifies how do you get into this promise?

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How is that happening? Verse six, and he believed the Lord, Abram believed the Lord, and he,

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God, counted it to him, Abram, as righteousness. Defines so much about a relationship with God that it's quoted five times in scripture in its entirety by four different authors, including three times completely quoted in the

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New Testament in different books of the Bible. Verse six, Abram trusted, believed by faith that God was telling him the truth.

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At this point, he steps out of the tent, looks up at the sky, and for whatever reason in his heart, he was moved to say,

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I believe you. I'm an old man. I don't have a chance.

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I mean, he's like about 90 years old when this is happening. How many of you go, like, logic and biology and all kinds of things say this isn't gonna happen, okay?

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How many of you know that what he's being called to believe is kind of silly by the world's standards? He says,

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I believe. I believe you, God. I'm gonna trust you that this is actually gonna happen the way that you say it's going to.

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Despite what he could see with his eyes, he believed that God was going to make good on his promise. And here's the central point to a relationship with God.

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This is vital for us to understand as believers. This is so key. And that is that God converts trust in him to righteousness.

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He counted it to him as righteousness. What, did Abram earn righteousness?

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No, it's credited. It's counted to his account, but he didn't earn it. He didn't gain it.

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It's his faith that is counted to him. His belief in God is counted to him as righteousness.

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God converts trust in him to righteousness. He takes faith and reckons it. He takes belief and counts it as righteousness.

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He doesn't take good works. He does not take good works and count those as righteousness.

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He doesn't take church attendance and consider that as righteousness. He doesn't take giving to the poor and reckon that as righteousness.

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What does he take and reckon as righteousness according to the text? Faith, belief, trust.

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By the way, we have a problem in the English language because we separate, we are a dissecting kind of language.

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Our language is great for describing things. So we have multiple words that do various things and have little nuances to them.

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Other languages are not as precise. English is a very precise language. And so we struggle when a word in Hebrew is a sum total of a variety of things.

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We struggle with a word that's generic enough to cover it. Like faith is kind of like maybe it's a little bit kind of like a heart issue, but it's a head issue.

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I mean, you know, like where does belief happen? Point to where belief happens in you. Where does belief happen? Everybody kind of go right here, right?

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I mean, isn't this where belief happens? It happens in your head. You believe in your head. But where does faith happen?

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This happens in your heart. And where does trust happen? You know, so we have a tendency to dissect that out.

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But this is the whole ball of wax. Belief, faith, and trust all wrapped up together. That you actually hear what

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God says and then put your whole weight in it. Then that's why sometimes it's better to put word pictures to these words.

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So I liken it to standing on a dock, okay? And you can say, if I jump in, I'm going to be okay. And then turn around and walk away.

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But faith, belief, trust is like, I'm going to be okay. And then you're all in, okay?

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It's hard to have partial faith. Kind of like, I can't quite reach the water down there on the dock.

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Faith is all the way in. And that's what Abram does here. He says,

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I'm all in. I'm all in with you. And it's counted to him as righteousness. What was the problem in the garden in the first place?

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What was the first thing that Satan said to the woman? Did God indeed say deception?

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Basically driving a wedge between trust between the woman and God. Ultimately then, between the man and God.

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And then even driving a wedge of distrust between the man and the woman. Isn't that ultimately what the first deception was?

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To distrust God. And what is the way back into a relationship with God? Through trust.

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Through faith. Through believing that he is going to fix it. That we trust that God is going to save us and fix this mess is the most important thing about us.

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Certainly it will affect everything about our lives. And if it is absent, if faith is not there, we will not have any righteousness on that final day standing before him.

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The only hope that we have is faith. Well, God is still working to convince Abram. He's basically walked him through that he is indeed going to have offspring.

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He is indeed going to become a great nation. But now he's going to tackle the issue of the land. And indeed, you are going to have a great land.

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So we see that in verse seven. And he said to him, I'm the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.

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He now brings up the second part of the covenant and says, you are indeed going to get the land as well. But one thing that's key is the way that God identifies himself in verse seven.

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I love this. This is beautiful. He said, I am the God who brought you out from Ur of the

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Chaldeans. How does God identify himself? He identifies himself in relationship to Abram. How many of you know, how many of you could spit out some titles for God?

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Some titles that he gives himself. The almighty, the all powerful, the omnipotent, the rock, all of these things.

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But how many of you know there's something unique and special about the fact that he is willing to identify himself here as a title in relationship to Abram, to this human?

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He's in essence saying, if you're asking the question, which God? Like which God met with Abram here? Oh, the

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God who brought Abram out of Ur. Are you getting what I'm saying? It's hard.

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It's hard for me. I think it's hard to communicate this, but this makes me really excited in this passage. It's as if it's appropriate for me, put it in these terms.

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It's appropriate for me to think of God as the God who met me as an eight -year -old in a dark, dank church basement in a

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WANA program in 1981. Which God? The God who met me there in that church basement.

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Again, the same God who called me to repent of living for myself when I was 16 through the fiery preaching of a guy who wasn't very fiery.

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Which God? How has God worked in your history? How has he revealed himself?

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He's the God who met you at that summer camp years ago. He's the God who raised up a godly parent or a godly grandmother who would proclaim the truth to you.

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How has God showed himself in your life? He is a God who is willing to connect his identity with you and me.

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That's significant. That's huge. He is not some distant, removed deity who is just all powerful, lightning bolts.

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He's a God who loves and will title himself according to us.

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Significant. That's huge. But now we learn something interesting about the nature of faith here because Abram still has questions.

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If you look back at verse 6, it's pretty obvious. He believed. He expressed faith. He believes that God is going to actually do this, but he still has questions.

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And I think some think of faith or trust or belief as the absence of questions. How many of you maybe have leaned in that direction for a while?

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Like, if you really have faith, then you have no questions. And I would suggest to you, if you really have faith, then it's important enough to you to have questions.

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You hear the difference? If you have faith, then it's important enough for you to ask questions. If you don't have faith, then it's like, okay, whatever.

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It'll all work out in the end kind of attitude. But once you become a child of faith, you're going to have some questions.

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But the thing is, you're committed to seeking answers, right? You've got to pursue and figure out.

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And Abram does that. He takes him straight to God. He has questions and thoughts. Trying to figure this out.

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Abram has been counted as having righteousness, but he still has questions. And what he has taken by faith, it says in the text, he wants to know for sure.

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And so in verse eight, we come up with this question. He said, oh,

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Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? I mean, God might just, if he was flippant and if he was sarcastic, he might say, because I'm standing here, you know, because I'm God and I'm the one saying it.

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So back off a little bit with all the questioning, Abram. Okay, stop it. I'm here and I'm God and I told you and that's enough.

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Right? Would God be justified in responding that way to Abram? But he's not going to. And I want to suggest to you that some of you are here and you're stressed because you compare your faith to others.

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Like to say, that person seems so sure. I bet she never has doubts or I bet he never has doubts.

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Or I bet we can become isolated in this. But here, Abram has a question for God and he wants to know something.

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And so now God puts himself on the block. God puts himself on the chopping block to prove to Abram that this is a rock solid promise.

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The remainder of the text appears at first glance to be an episode of butchers gone wild. What is happening here?

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God tells Abram to get one of each of the species. There's importance, there's significance in the species of animals that are mentioned here because they are the only animals that we ever see permissible or allowable to be sacrificed in the tabernacle or the temple.

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This is the list of animals. Cows, goats, sheep, doves, and pigeons.

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Those are the only animals ever sacrificed on the altar in Israel that, I mean, legitimately sacrificed. Some pagan guy sacrificed a pig one time.

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That didn't go well for the whole Middle East. That's another deal altogether.

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That's a little history lesson there for you, a little tidbit. But there's significance in these five animals.

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But then, you know, what he does, we don't really know why. We don't really understand.

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God doesn't tell him to cut them in half. He does that and makes an aisle, cuts them in half, separating the parts and makes an aisle between them.

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Does it seem kind of grisly to any of you? Okay, a little bit. Yep, a little bit.

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Kind of what is going on here? There's a lot of details left out. Some of you are like, great,

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I'm glad. He split them this way, he split them this way. What does this look like?

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I mean, I'm certainly hoping that he butchered them first and then, I mean, slaughtered them first and then butchered them.

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But none of the details. The birds weren't cut in half. We're not told why. But we know that Abram obeys and takes the day getting this macabre display together.

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So we're going to see that one night, he's out in his tent, looks up at the stars, and then we're going to see sun go down again.

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So it's taken him a whole day. I mean, you picture this 90 -year -old guy chasing around a turtle dove, trying to get it to land so that he can get that taken care of.

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So he's got to get the cow and all this stuff together. So it takes him a day to put together this really macabre display.

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To demonstrate that this is a literal historical event and more than just a fable, even the details that Abram had to chase away scavenger birds and vultures is included.

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And as the sun went down, Abram goes into a state of unconsciousness. And in this state, he has a vision of God that is accompanied by fear and great darkness.

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Visions are a strange thing. Some prophets have waking dreams. Some visions occur during sleep. And in this vision slash experience of God, it seems like something halfway between sleeping and waking occurs because he's going to interact with God and these animals that are cut in half.

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This may be better related to something of our understanding, maybe the word trance is an appropriate word.

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We don't use that very often, but something along those lines is what's going on. God foretells the future, a literal prophecy.

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More often than not, we tend to think of prophecy as just strictly a future telling thing, but that's what's happening here.

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He details that Abram's offspring, I mean, getting very specific so that he can trust, says your offspring will become servants for 400 years in what we now know will be

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Egypt, but Egypt will be judged and his offspring will come out with great possessions. Do you think that maybe that trips something in Abram's mind or his thinking that his descendants are going to come out of Egypt with great possessions?

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Didn't we just see Abram a few weeks ago come out of Egypt with great possessions? It's like his life is modeling that of his offspring.

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And God graciously offers a personal assurance to Abram that he will have a peaceful demise after a nice, healthy, long life.

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Is that a promise that you guys would love to get from God? Anybody kind of thinking that would be just super awesome if God would just like appear to you and go, you're going to live long and when you die, everything's going to be at peace in your life.

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That sounds like a great offer. Abram gets that. Now, is that what God promises then to you and me? I mean, he just promised it in scripture, so is that what we have to cling to?

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I mean, you know, God wants good for us and I believe that and I trust that, but what is good for us may not be what we think is good for us, and so we've got to keep all things in perspective.

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But Abram gets this awesome promise. And in verse 16, we get a nugget of sovereign grace in the book of Genesis here.

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A really strange way to say things, but look at verse 16 with me. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, fourth generation.

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The word generation is a little bit tricky, so because we use the word generation there, then everybody goes 100 years, what is going on here?

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It means an epoch of time. And so after 100, you know, four 100 -year periods of time.

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For the Amorites, the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. So they're going to have to go off into captivity for 400 years because the

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Amorites haven't sinned enough yet. Anybody kind of like, okay, that's making my brain hurt.

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Like, wait a minute, does God have a quota for the amount of sin that you have to commit before he judges you? Doesn't it almost kind of imply that or sound like that to some degree?

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What we're seeing is God's sovereign grace. Another way to look at this is that God proves himself to be patient with people.

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He is concerned to show himself patient. Certainly, he would be justified in destroying the

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Amorites, but he is patient with them over centuries. Rather than get caught up, and I would suggest to you, we have a tendency to get caught up in the intellectualism of whether or not they could repent if God knows that they're not going to.

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I mean, isn't God here in essence saying they're not going to repent, but I'm giving them 400 years to repent? Does anybody get confused by that?

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I think that, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of wrangling and there's all kinds of intellectualism and there's an attempt to try to reconcile these things.

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Me and Kyle on the way back from a conference one time spent the entire trip from Louisville back to Kalamazoo.

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This is just at it about free will and predestination and all that stuff. And you know where we ended up at the end?

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Kalamazoo. Thank you. You guys stole my thunder, man.

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And no movement at all on the understanding of God's sovereignty, right? Do you know what

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I'm saying? And I think sometimes we get caught up in these intellectual debates and these things because what it really does is it takes the focus off of our sinfulness, it takes the focus off of our need for salvation, it takes the focus off of our sin and all kinds of things.

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I would recommend that instead of getting caught up in that intellectualism, I would recommend that we rejoice in the patience of God.

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We rejoice that he is patient. He's not a God who moves quickly to judgment and that we are all sitting here is a demonstration of the patience of God.

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That he allows me to preach is a demonstration of the patience of God, of his mercy, of his long suffering with me.

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I mean, what we deserve is a lot different than where we live right now, than what we experience on a daily basis because of his mercy, his patience, his grace.

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And I would suggest to you that there's some, there's a way that evangelicals and really conservative

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Christians have viewed the world that they have been quick to dash into judgment. Do you know what

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I'm talking about? Some of you were raised in those churches where it's just a quick lashing out at our culture of judgment and what they deserve and really quick.

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I mean, even some of the things that I heard on the National Day of Prayer were aligned with that, quick judgment.

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No, we should praise God for his long suffering and patience. And God, would you just please, there's a part of me that wants him to come now and then there's another part that wants him to tarry that more might come in.

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Do you understand what I'm saying? It's like both pray. God, would you please come quickly?

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But would you just save a lot? Would you save a lot? Bring a lot into your kingdom.

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And so we delight in the patience of God even with the Amorites in this context, the people who weren't devoted to him or dedicated to him and yet he says,

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I'm gonna give him 400 years. And in the midst of the deep darkness, a smoking fire pod and flaming torch passed down the aisle between these butchered animals.

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I hope it's clear to you that the fire pod and the flaming torch represents the presence of God. Fire is often a symbol of the presence of God.

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What was happening to the bush that Moses saw? It was burning. The pillar of fire by night, the fire on the mountain, on Mount Sinai at the giving of the law, fire often, even the tongues of flame in the book of Acts that fall down on those who were gathered in the upper room when the

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Holy Spirit came upon them. Often fire is a symbol and we see this smoking torch and this burning pot go through the midst of the butchered animals.

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Every scholar I researched, including even the most liberal, identify these as symbolic of the presence of God walking between these broken in half animals.

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One of the only mentions in any ancient text that makes sense of what is going on here. What is this about parting these animals?

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Jeremiah 34, 18 through 19, you can write that down. I'm not going to turn over there. But in that text, there's an indication that this having of the animals, putting them in half and walking through the midst of them is a way of ratifying a covenant, a common cultural occurrence in that time.

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They would have understood this, what's going on here. But it's symbolically showing what is at stake for the parties involved.

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So what would often happen is two kings would gather together. They would make this kind of display and one king would walk down the middle and make his pledge.

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And the other king would walk through and make the pledge. And what they're saying in essence is, may you do to me what these animals look like if I don't carry my end of the bargain.

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You're getting it? Who walks between the animals in our text?

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God and Abram. Who? God. Abram walks through and there is no, the covenant is denied.

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It does not move forward because he cannot keep his end of the bargain. So who goes through and carries both halves of the covenant?

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God Almighty. And he says, may I be torn in pieces if I don't keep this covenant with humanity.

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How much does God love you? How much does God love us to put himself on the block for you and I?

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He's the one who walks through the midst of the animals making his covenant with you and I. I will keep my promises and I'm laying myself.

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Abram, do you see the flow in the text? God promises, I'm going to make you a great nation. Abram goes, I don't know.

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Are you really? Okay, then he eventually believes and then he says, and I'm going to give you a great land. Oh, I don't know. Are you really?

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Boom. I will do it and I will assure you that I'm going to do it by laying my own life on the line. I will seal this promise with my very life, says

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God Almighty. God, the maker, the owner of heaven and earth is laying himself on the chopping block.

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Saying, Abram, you want to know how sure this promise is? I seal it with my very life.

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I will make you into a great nation. I will give you the land I have promised and I will make you into a blessing for all nations.

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Who is this God? Is he the same God that you thought of before we started reading the book of Genesis?

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I'm finding him much more gracious than when I started preaching through this book. I would have told you God was vindictive and angry and pretty quick to judge at the beginning of the book of Genesis.

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You've seen him get angry yet. He's been nothing but loving and patient and kind and working to try to bring about redemption and restoration.

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He's a God who would swear to his own hurt to keep his promise to a rebellious people. And there's a play on words in verse 18 that on that day,

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God cut a covenant with Abram. That's the word that's used in Hebrew there. On that day, he cut a covenant with him.

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He wraps up this covenant ceremony by defining some of the parameters of the land that he's promised to them.

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And under David and Solomon, the land holdings of Israel just reached the parameters that are given here in the text. So a couple of application points as we move forward into this next week for where we live.

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First is dealing with faith and trust in God. This text is full of various angles on that same subject of trust.

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But maybe you're here and you need to trust God as your shield. You're worried and concerned about all of your circumstances.

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You have your eyes on the hardships and trials, but not on the God who is with you. The fact of the matter is he doesn't promise to give us all a perfect life, but he does promise to his children that he will carry us in an ultimate sense to the place of his promises.

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And for us, that is a land of promise much better than anything that was ever promised to Abram. It's a much better promise.

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The second thing, some of you are here and you feel the pressure to act as if you never doubt and never struggle with your faith.

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Some of you are here and you don't think it's appropriate to ask God questions, you don't think it's appropriate to be authentic and honest about the way that you're feeling in your heart regarding faith.

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You're going it alone, you're suffering doubts and silence, and you're afraid to be honest. We want people to be free to share where they are at in their journey of growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service with others.

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Do not suffer in silence, but bring your doubts to light. Faith is not synonymous with knowing, but faith is certainly based on evidences, but at its basic level, it is hope placed in God that he is indeed working it out through his son,

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Jesus Christ, and he's fixing it for all times. That's one of the reasons

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I point this out, the word authenticity up here on the wall. It's very hard to actually receive the help to receive the community that we all need in this walk of faith if we are not being honest with one another.

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If there are deep, dark sins, if there are struggles, if there are doubts in our hearts and in our minds, and we are just trying to go it alone because we fear what others are going to think of us, we are putting a stumbling block towards our own growth in faith in God.

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And by the way, let me speak to you on the flip side. If you know that you're a particularly judgmental person, please start with yourself because that's where a lot of distrust comes in in the church is that I've shared my heart with somebody and I've got nothing but judgment in return.

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And so what do I do? I close myself off. And so please be, I'm speaking to both end of the equation in one person.

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Each one of you needs to consider, how do I receive it when someone shares their crud with me? And then am

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I willing to share my crud with others? And we need to be both contemplating and considering ourselves on both ends of that spectrum.

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Do you guys agree with me on that? You understand what I'm saying? And lastly, lastly, our faith is based on more than just a promise of God who walked through the animal bits saying, may this happen to me if I don't keep my promise.

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But ultimately we know that this was not just an idle offer, but he kept up both sides of the equation.

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What Abram deserved, what you and I deserve on our side of the covenant is to be parted like those animals.

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That's what we deserve. If we were to walk through the middle of that, God would just split us in half, we'd be done.

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Are you getting what I'm saying? Because that's what we deserve. We are broken and fallen, inconsistent people. Raise your hand if you're a fairly inconsistent person, just being honest.

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We all are. In our walk with God, in our relationship with those we love, the people we love the most are often the people we hurt the most.

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And that's pretty jacked up if you think about it. The way we respond to others is not what we want.

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So God kept both ends, and he put his money where his mouth is. He went to the block. His arms were stretched out wide, and he was all but physically, literally cut in two for you and me.

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All but that. He laid himself down for his promise. And this gospel, this good news, is not only for those who have not put their belief in Jesus for salvation, but please be clear that this is the only message

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I have to offer. It's a great message, but it's the only one that I have to offer. And so oftentimes

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I feel like I constantly go back here and that all the Christians in the room tune out for a second because, hey, if there's an unbeliever in the room, then they need to hear the gospel.

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I'm already there. Are you getting what I'm saying? I've been guilty of that, so I'm guessing some of you have as well.

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You hear the gospel and you're like, I know that. That's the initiation stuff, all of that.

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I don't have a message for you about how you can improve yourself. I don't have a message about 10 steps to a better you, or I don't have five steps to your best life now.

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This good news that Jesus dealt with our sins on the cross is more than just initiation material for newbies in the

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Christian faith. As if the gospel is elementary and we've moved on to more mature stuff like tithing and evangelism and daily

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Bible reading. That's not what this is about. The good news, the cross of Christ, is to be the beginning of our relationship with God for sure.

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We encounter the saving work of God at the cross, but then we pour out all of our faith there at the cross.

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All of our hope must be focused on the cross daily, and the power to love God and love others well is only found at the cross.

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It's the only place that that comes from. Because the cross is not elementary.

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Because the cross is everything. We take communion every week. Some people have challenged me, why do we take communion every week?

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Because the cross is worth that. That's what it's all about. If we don't come back to the cross every week,

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I fear we're gonna miss something. That's the point. It's a symbolic, we take communion as a symbolic act where we take the cracker and we break it up to remember that his body was indeed broken for us.

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We take the juice to recall that his blood was spilled like that aisleway running down where the animals were, the animals' blood collected in the middle.

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And his blood was spilled to cover our sins, to make good on that promise. And if you've taken

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Jesus as your king and are believing in his sacrifice to save you, then join together with God's people in communion this morning.

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Let's pray. Father, I stand in awe of your sacrifice.

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Something that is so, I'm just so unworthy of it. And I think about just that macabre display, it's grotesque to think about these animals split in half and walking down the middle.

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And Father, to think that that's what we deserve and you've modeled that and you've imaged that very well for us.

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And yet you are the one who walked through, unilaterally carrying both sides of the covenant on our behalf.

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And Father, I praise you for that, that you are a God who keeps his promises and that indeed all nations have been blessed through the offspring of Abram, your son,

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Jesus Christ. Father, I pray that you would help us to walk in the reality of this fulfilled promise.

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Father, that our steps would be lighter and joy would genuinely be ours because we don't need to earn it, we don't need to work for it, but it's reckoned to us by faith.

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Your righteousness is given to us by faith in that work that Jesus did, in that promise that was made and fulfilled in him.

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Father, I pray as we come to communion that you would be honored and glorified by our remembrance of his sacrifice and that you would transform and change us to walk in your image this week.