Genesis 15.1–21 Hebrews 11.8–16
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 12th January 2025
Abraham received great promises from God, but once he was living in Canaan life was mostly normal, with the occasional exciting interruption. Ten years hadn’t passed and a regional war broke out.
In the days of Amraphel king of Shinar, Arioch king of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer king of Elam, and Tidal king of Goiim, these kings made war with Bera king of Sodom, Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, Shemeber king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela (that is, Zoar). And all these joined forces in the Valley of Siddim (that is, the Salt Sea). Twelve years they had served Chedorlaomer, but in the thirteenth year they rebelled.[1]
How long is it, I wonder, since you chatted with an Elamite? If you nominated Bible at a quiz show and were asked about Shinar, what could you say expect that it is mentioned in the Bible. All these kingdoms have passed away. So too those of the Romans and Carthaginians, Moabites, Ammonites, and Philistines. This is worth pondering in this age of identity politics. “I am, you are, we are Australians”—but for how long?
Israel and the Arabs have a continuous history stretching back four thousand years, and this is unusual. Could their survival have anything to do with this promise God made to Abraham? That is the question.
War erupts. Chedorlaomer has the whole region under tribute, and the kings of the Jordan Valley rebel. A battle is fought and the cities of the Jordan valley are defeated. Chedolaomer and his allies—various raiding parties I would guess—make off with the wealth of Sodom and many slaves, among them Lot, Abraham’s nephew.
Abraham is a nomad. He wanders the open country outside the rich city-states that make up the land of Canaan, grazing his livestock. He is becoming wealthy in terms of his sheep and cattle. In parts of Africa wealth is still measured in numbers of cattle. It has got to the stage where Abraham’s cattle and Lot’s are more than the land can support. They part company, Lot going to the Jordan Valley, which before the great destruction, was fertile, while Abraham stays in the more difficult hill country. Abraham gives Lot the choice of where to go. According to the promise, the whole land was his; you would think he would select the best portion. But he trusts God, and does not need to grab. “Blessed are the meek,” Jesus said. The meek are those who do not insist on their rights; they are content to wait on God.
So Lot went to live in Sodom, a city famous for its wealth, luxurious lifestyle, and sexual immorality. And now he and his wife and daughters are amongst the captives of war on their way to slavery.
Abraham calls out the men in his household—318 of them. We see what a great man he has become. He and his allies set out in pursuit of the raiding party that has his relatives. They catch up, attack, and return with Lot and the rest of the booty from Sodom. The king of Sodom comes to meet him and tells him to take the booty, just give him back his people. He refuses the king’s generosity.
But Abram said to the king of Sodom,
I have lifted my hand to the LORD, God Most High, Owner (qoneh) of heaven and earth, that I would not take a thread or a sandal strap or anything that is yours, lest you should say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’ I will take nothing but what the young men have eaten, and the share of the men who went with me. Let Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre take their share.[2]
He knows that he allows the king of Sodom to enrich him he will beholden to him; he also knows Sodom to be an evil place. No, God is the “owner of heaven and earth;” Abraham will be beholden to none but him.
This was an insult to the king of Sodom. For the moment Abraham is powerful and in favour, but as a landless nomad his position in the future could be dangerous. He was right to be afraid.
It is after this that the word of God came to him again:
After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”
Abraham trusts God, and he can trust God, because God promises to have his back. God is Abraham’s shield.
We should reflect on this. If we have come to share in Abraham’s blessing—we will see that this is the case for followers of Jesus—if we have come to share in Abraham’s blessing, we will see that God has our back. In Australia we are blessed to live in a secure society; we do not have much to fear—but not entirely. We do fear—all sorts of possibilities. We like to have lots of insurances and a good bank balance to keep us safe against the accidents and eventualities, but we are never completely secure. The truth is, at any time our life hangs by a thread.
In 1741 in a famous (or infamous) sermon Jonathan Edwards painted this picture to a hard-hearted congregation in Connecticut. Amazon calls it the most famous sermon in American history:
The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince: and yet ‘tis nothing but his Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every Moment.
Remember the anger that erupted against Israel Folau’s mention of hell, and imagine what the reaction to Edwards would be today in Australia. A sensible people would ask, “Is it true?” But today that question is never asked in our country, which has become ruled by emotional outbursts. There was an emotional outburst in Enfield Connecticut too, but it was people weeping and begging God for mercy. But suppose your life were threatened; what reason could you give God to spare you?
I have deviated a little from the logic of the story. God declares himself as Abraham’s shield and reward. Abraham’s thoughts go at once to his childlessness. We are like this. It is hard to think seriously of ultimate realities like the thread our life hangs on. Our minds swing inevitably to the need which is uppermost for us at the moment.
But Abram said, “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.”[3]
There is a contradiction between what God is telling him and his real-world experience. He was promised descendants, but he doesn’t have even one natural child; he is pushing eighty and his wife seventy. Now God promises him a son from his own body will be his heir; he is quite explicit. He takes him outside and points to the stars. “Such will your offspring be.” And we read that Abraham believed God and he counted it to him as righteousness.”
Here is the thread which runs through this story: whatever God promises, Abraham believes. Which is not to say that he wasn’t troubled by doubts. In the very next chapter, having not heard from God for several years, he thinks he is meant to do something about the promise himself, and takes Hagar as a concubine. Nevertheless, he did not stop believing God, and holding onto the promise, even when humanly speaking it seemed impossible.
And now we read a most remarkable thing: God counted his faith as righteousness. What does this mean? Generally, righteousness means doing the right thing, and often Abraham didn’t. There is enough in his story to show us that he was pretty much like the rest of us. This means he was not a righteous man. But God counts him as righteous nonetheless.
It is as though God has a ledger. We are not as familiar with ledgers as we used to be; everything is done by computers. Every time we pay something off on our home-loan it is computed; and also when we draw on our loan, the balance gets bigger. Once it would all have been entered in a ledger. When it comes to the heavenly ledger, every time we do something wrong the debt-balance grows. If you could get a peek at the final number it would scare the socks off you. You would be asking God if he couldn’t do something. But it would be like asking the bank to wipe out your indebtedness. Yet God seems to have done just that in the case of Abraham. “Abraham believed God, and God reckoned it for righteousness.” In the Book of Life Abraham is right with God—debt free—though he was a sinner like you and me.
This would be nothing more than a curiosity, if it were not for the fact that Paul takes it up, and shows how it is the way God deals with all of us. How can that loathsome spider who has terribly affronted his prince be accepted into his presence as though nothing wrong had ever been done? Because God reckons our faith for righteousness, just as he did Abraham. This is the way Jesus dealt with people—and still does. He knew they were bad people, but befriended them and ate in their homes.
Salvation is by faith; those who trust their own good works to commend them to God remain under the curse of an ever increasing debt balance. Judged by our works, all of us will fail.
We now come to a very strange part of Abraham’s story. For all that he believes God will be true to his promise, Abraham asks for some assurance, and God gives it to him. He orders a kind of sacrificial feast. Animals are slaughtered and their carcasses laid out; Abraham falls into a trance.
When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the LORD cut a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”
What is happening here is that God is enacting a covenant with Abraham, in the same way two kings would make a treaty, binding themselves to keep its terms or become like these slaughtered animals. So far does God stoop to our level! He speaks words of blessing, which, of course, will come true because God does not lie. But then he promises, because that is the way humans assure each other that they really mean what they say. But often even that is not enough. God cuts a covenant with Abraham. It is as though God and Abraham go together to a solicitor and swear oaths and sign documents, and those documents are witnessed and stamped and put away, so that if ever in the future there is a doubt they can be produced and read. We learn from Abraham’s story that God is a covenant-making God, and the terms of this covenant have come down to us through four thousand years. We have it today exactly as it was given, and we can rely on it. Trust God; trust his promises. If you do God will forgive you and count you as his friend; he will count you as righteous even though you are not. And you will come under his protection; he will be your king and shield.
But what is the blessing God has promised us, and what do we need to do to receive it. We learned last week that the blessing God has in store for Abraham and his children is more that the land of Canaan; this was just a foretaste of the full blessing which is a new world, what Jesus called the kingdom of God, wht Peter calls “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” Make no mistake, it is nothing else than the blessing of Abraham, the most important part of which was “I will be their God and they shall be my people.” The greatest part of the blessing is to belong to God; to be his child. Everything else follows as a matter of course—even falling under God’s protection.
As Jesus says,
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.[4]
What do we have to do to receive these blessings? We are promised little in this life, except to know God and to be known by him, but in the age which is coming, everything. But what do we have to do? Again, Jesus helps us when he speaks about the bread of life:
I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.[5]
We have to come to him, and we have to believe. We have to come to him, because he is the giver; the gift is in his hands and only in his hands. We will discover the week after next how that is so. And we have to believe—believe that what he promises he will do, trust because he is trustworthy and good and strong, but also because if we fail to believe, we let go of the only rope that can ultimately secure us. To change Jonathan Edwards’ picture. We are drowning in a raging sea; he throws us a rope and shouts to us to hang on. Faith is believing him and hanging on.
What about Jews and Muslims in Palestine today? Israel is Israel, and remains heir to Abraham’s blessing; Paul makes it clear: “the calling of God is irrevocable.”6 God promised Abraham’s son, Ishmael, would also become a great nation; Hagar th concubine was also blessed and cared for. So Jews and Arabls are in it for the long haul.
Since 1948 Jews have been gathering in Israel in numbers never known since Jerusalem was destroyed in A.D 70, and 132. Could this be the beginning of God fulfilling his promises to regather his historic people? Perhaps, but if it is, it must be accompanied by their returning to Abraham’s God, “the Possessor of heaven and earth,” and that can only be through the Messiah Jesus. For it is not as though God gave a promise to Abraham four thousand years ago and suddenly today we rediscover it. The promise has been unfolding through all these years with the coming about of a nation, its adventures with God, its prophets, and all leading up to the coming of the Messiah and his death and resurrection. So, to be with God today means aligning ourselves with everything he has done in fulfilment of his promise to Abraham, and that means getting in behind Jesus.
When the Jewish nation is ready to do this—I say when and not if. I have no way of knowing whether the time is near or far, but Scripture assures us they will. When they do, they will know that their blessing is not peace in the present land of Palestine, nor the present Jerusalem, but resurrection life in the Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven to earth, when the Messiah Jesus returns to rule openly and visibly, and all things are made new. A resurrection world is the blessing God promised Abraham, and those who believe in it will pray “Your kingdom come,” and “Come Lord Jesus.”
[1] Genesis 14.
[2] Genesis 14.23–24.
[3] Genesis 15.2–3.
[4] John 10.27–29.
[5] John 6.35.
[6] Romans 11.29.