Day 3: Genesis 12, 15, 17
After the fall of Adam and Eve in the reading from Day 2, their descendants followed in their path of rebellion. Murder entered the history of humanity when Cain killed Abel; evil rose to the point where God sent the flood, sparing only Noah and his family; and the inhabitants of the earth decided to build a tower to reach the heavens in their own ways.
In the midst of the chaos, God called a man named Abraham to leave his home in Ur and go to a place where God would lead him. God promised that he would bless Abraham and make his descendants into a great nation, even though both he and his wife were well beyond their childbearing years. With this call begins the history of the nation of Israel; with this call begins the idea of a remnant - that though the world is full of evil, God is setting aside a people and a nation for his very own.
Genesis 15 reflects a ritual that is strange to us, but very common in Abraham’s day. Two or more parties who sought to enter into some kind of covenant would “cut” the covenant, what might be similar in our time to signing a contract. The various parties involved would cut animal sacrifices in half and walk through them to indicate, essentially, “May this be done to me if this covenant is broken.”
But in this passage, God puts Abraham into a deep sleep and passes through the cut animals himself in the form of a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. God is taking responsibility for his covenant with Abraham, to make his descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and to bring him into a land to possess. God himself will suffer death before he allows this covenant to fail. For Abraham’s part, he “believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (15:6). For us, on this side of the cross, we believe as well, because we know just how true God was to that word.
As time went on, however, and Abraham saw no evidence of his wife Sarah bearing a son in her old age, he decided to take matters into his own hands and sleep with his servant, Hagar, to try to force God’s promise into fulfillment in his own time and way. When God rebukes him for this, he cries out, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!” (17:18). Abraham wanted the blessing of God, but by his own power and control. God, however, had something different in mind, and promised again that the heir would come by a spiritual promise, not by natural flesh. And to reaffirm this, God instituted the practice of circumcision among the males, an outward sign of an inward covenant with and devotion to God.
From the disaster of humanity’s rebellion, God would reclaim a people for himself according to a spiritual promise and would himself take the responsibility to make sure the covenant would stand. Abraham saw the first glimpses of these truths, and today we can see God’s faithfulness to those promises in our own lives through the finished work of Jesus.
Questions for reflection and discussion: What promises has God made that you either cling to or have trouble believing? How might you be trying to fulfill those promises on your own terms and in your own ways? How does this story of Abraham reflect what Jesus will later do on the cross?
