He Walked Through It Alone - Sermon Notes

Form my full sermon research (fully-dense): Sermon Research - Genesis 15

Sermon notes written out word for word. This is the first step in my process, so I don't end up preach this exactly, but it's the foundation of the sermon

The Question that Started it

Somewhere out in the desert, about four thousand years ago, an old man is having an argument with God. His name is Abram. He has no children, he is running out of time to have children, and God has just promised him an entire country. So Abram says, and honestly what nerve he has, "I know you said it, but how am I supposed to know I'll actually get it?"

It is a fair question for an old bloke. It might be the best question in the chapter.

And God says right, bring me all these animals. It reads like the start of a joke. A cow, a goat, a ram, a dove and a pigeon walk into a bar. They then all proceed to be chopped in half, because God told Abram to. Not a good joke. He halves them straight down the middle and lays the halves out facing each other so there is an aisle running between them.

And then nothing happens. It is the middle of the day in the Middle East, there is a pile of fresh meat lying in the dirt, so of course the vultures come down. This old man spends his entire afternoon running around a row of carcasses, waving his arms at birds.

So the joke is that he asked a question about the future and what he got was five butchered animals to defend from vultures until sundown. Funny for us. Less funny for him. That is not the answer to the question he asked.

Cutting a Covenant

Before the animals, notice what God does not do in verse 8. He does not tell Abram off for asking. Not once in this chapter. Abram asks a version of that question twice and gets answered twice. God is more patient with doubt than most of us Christians are. Abram is not being difficult here, he is asking for a sign, and God gives him one.

This is the sign. It looks unhinged to us and it was completely ordinary to him. In the ancient Near East, when you made a covenant, you did not sign anything. You killed something. The Hebrew phrase is karat berit, and it literally means to cut a covenant. That is the phrase used down in verse 18:

It is called cutting a covenant because of exactly this: you halve the animals, lay them out opposite each other, and both parties walk down the aisle between the pieces. The walk is the signature. It says may this happen to me if I break my word.

We are not guessing at that, we have the treaties. There is one carved in stone from around 750 BC between two kings, called the Sefire treaty, and the curse reads: "Just as this calf is cut in two, so may Matiel be cut in two, and may his nobles be cut in two." There is an Assyrian version, the vassal treaties of Esarhaddon, which is far too graphic to put in a document people might read over breakfast.

We even see it inside Scripture. In Jeremiah 34 God is furious with the leaders of Judah for breaking an agreement, and the name he gives them is "the men who walked between the parts of the calf." That is what he calls them. The ones who walked. And then he tells them their bodies will be food for the birds. Metal.

That should tell you what a covenant actually is, and I think a lot of us have swapped it for a contract. A contract is about a thing, a covenant is about a person. A contract obliges you to perform: do this task, for this period, and when the term is up the contract is finished. A covenant obliges you to be loyal, to a person rather than to a task, and it has no end date. That is why you cut one over dead animals instead of signing one on paper. The ceremony declares that breaking your word deserves the same fate the animals just got.

So Abram knows exactly what this is. He is now waiting for the moment the two of them walk that aisle together and swear it.

He Walked through it Alone

Verse 12, and he falls asleep. The word is tardemah, the deep sleep word. It's the same one Genesis 2 uses for the sleep God puts Adam under while he builds Eve out of him. Both times, the man is unconscious while God does the important thing. A dread falls on Abram that the verse never bothers to explain, which tells you that whatever God is about to do out in that field is not rainbows and butterflies. It is terrifying, and Abram is out cold for the worst of it.

Then verse 17. The sun is gone, it is properly dark, and then fire and smoke. Fire and smoke in the Bible is so often God himself. The burning bush. The pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness. Sinai with the whole mountain wrapped in smoke. Every Israelite who ever read this knew immediately who was walking out there.

So watch what happens, and watch what does not. God walks the aisle. Abram does not, because Abram is face down in the dirt asleep. Two parties were meant to walk and one did.

Abram slept through his own covenant ceremony.

Think about what that would be like. It would be like being unconscious for your own wedding. You book all four wisdom teeth out on the morning of the ceremony, because the dentist is on the way to the venue, right? Except by the time the music starts you are still completely under, so your groomsmen wheel you in on a hospital bed. The ceremony goes ahead. They put the ring on you, prop you up for the photos, wheel you around for the first dance. Six hours later you come to and ask, "Did the wedding happen?" Yep. "Did I do anything?" Nope.

That is Abram in Genesis 15. He believed God and he prepared the animals, and when the covenant oath was actually made he did not walk the aisle, did not swear the oath, and did not guarantee a single term of it. He woke up to a promise resting entirely on God.

I have to be honest at this point, because I love this reading and it is genuinely contested. Most scholars take that walk as God swearing the death curse on himself: may I be torn in half like these animals if I fail to keep my word. Others push back, because God's oaths in the Old Testament normally sound like "as I live, says the LORD," which is the exact opposite of may I die. I think the traditional reading wins, mostly because Jeremiah 34 describes the same ritual and there it is unmistakably a self-curse. But it is contested, and we study as hard as we can and can still be wrong. Check me on it.

The point survives either way, because the point is that only one party walked, and the other one was unconscious. There is no covenant sign given here. No circumcision yet, no rainbow, nothing, and a sign is usually given to somebody who has something to keep. Nothing is asked of Abram in this entire chapter. Not one thing. He contributes nothing to establishing the covenant, God alone binds himself to fulfilling it, and Abram simply receives it.

God walked through it alone.

The Ones Who Walked it Themselves

Four hundred years later God does this again, and this time it goes very differently. Abram's family have become a nation, they have been slaves in Egypt, and God has hauled them out. Now they are camped at the bottom of Mount Sinai and God makes a covenant with them too. Same idea, different ceremony, mostly because you cannot march two million people between a pile of carcasses. So Moses takes the blood of the sacrifices and throws it over the crowd.

Look at the order. Moses reads out the terms and the people answer, "All that the LORD has spoken we will do." Then the blood goes on them. They swore first and were sealed second. Out in that field with Abram nobody walked but God. Here, everybody walks. Two million people swearing it on themselves. They volunteered for the thing Abram slept through.

Then the terms get spelled out in Deuteronomy 28. Thirteen verses of blessing if they keep it, fifty-three verses of curse if they do not. It is like signing terms and conditions where the penalties section runs four times the length of the benefits. And the curses escalate as they go: disease, drought, siege, and right at the bottom of the list, exile. An entire nation sent away is the death of that nation.

Then watch verse 26.

God is reminding Israel of Abram. Remember what Abram did all afternoon? He frightened the birds away. He stood over those carcasses for an entire day with his arms going, keeping the vultures off the covenant. And now God says to a nation that has just sworn this on itself: the day you break this, that man stops coming. Nobody stands over you. Nobody waves them off.

And then you get to watch that exact curse arrive for a thousand years, house by house, named as it comes. Jeroboam's house. Baasha's. Ahab, and Jezebel in the street at Jezreel. Jeremiah pronounces it three separate times over Judah. And eventually Jerusalem falls to the Babylonians and someone writes Psalm 79: "They have given the dead bodies of your servants for food to the birds of the heavens, and there was no one to bury them."

They knew exactly what they had sworn on themselves. And they stood there and watched it come.

The Curse Lands on the Wrong Man

Six hundred years later Paul writes to a church that has decided the way to be right with God is to perform. Which is the same instinct we run on, isn't it. If I just do this and do that, God will be happy with me.

That is Paul quoting Deuteronomy 27:26. In Deuteronomy 27 the entire nation stands between two mountains shouting curses back and forth at each other, and verse 26 is the one that summarises the lot: cursed is everyone who does not keep all of it. All of it. Not most of it, not the important bits, every single law and instruction. So Paul is brutal here. The curse falls on everyone who does not keep the whole law, nobody keeps the whole law, do the maths.

Three verses later:

Here is the Lore Drop. In verse 13 Paul quotes Deuteronomy 21:23, "cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree." He is quoting the Greek Old Testament, which is the Bible his readers had in their hands, and the Greek Old Testament has one particular word for cursed in that verse. Paul does not use it. He swaps it out and writes epikataratos instead. And epikataratos is the exact word from Deuteronomy 27:26, the summary curse, the one the whole nation shouted off the side of a mountain, the one he quoted three verses earlier. Both words mean cursed. There was no reason to change it. He changed it so you could not possibly miss what he was doing.

Paul is not telling you that Jesus died under some vague cloud of bad luck. He is telling you that the thing which landed on Jesus outside Jerusalem was the covenant curse. The one Israel called down on their own heads at the bottom of that mountain when they said "all that the LORD has spoken we will do." That curse finally caught somebody. And it was the wrong man.

One theologian wrote of this verse, "The language here is startling, almost shocking. We should not have dared to use it." Paul means every word of it.

And do not skip verse 14, because it tells you why he took it. "So that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles." Everything God swore over those carcasses in the dark was jammed up behind a curse. Jesus took the curse so that the promise could get out. And out it went, to bless the nations, which includes Port Stephens.

So go back to that field one more time. God walked that aisle alone, in the dark, over a row of split carcasses, while the man he was making the promise to slept through the entire thing. And when the curse behind that covenant finally fell, God did not send for Abram, or for Israel, or for you and me. He walked through it alone again, this time to death.

Two Things God Cannot Go back on

Here is the difference between the two covenants, and it is the reason for this whole series. The old one ran on their promise, "all that the LORD has spoken we will do," and they could not do it, because nobody is perfect. The new one runs on his promise.

Hebrews takes this exact thing and preaches it to a divided church, and it is smart about how it does it. Hebrews 5 and the first half of Hebrews 6 are all about them: their immaturity, their drifting, a genuinely frightening warning about walking away. By the end of it you feel completely exposed and you are sitting there thinking, so it is all on me then. And then the writer turns.

When we swear an oath we swear by something bigger than ourselves. Swearing on the Bible is a way of saying, that is my authority, hold me to this. God has nothing that outranks him, so he swore by himself. Two things he cannot go back on: he promised, and he swore.

And look at where the writer anchors our hope. Not in us. Not in my hope is anchored in my performance. Our hope is tied off inside the Most Holy Place, the room where God is, and Jesus carried it in there himself.

Why Should This Matter to Me?

So, that question we started with. Abram asked how he could possibly know, and God gave him a ceremony in which Abram had no role except faith.

Why does that matter to us? Because most of us are keeping score without ever having decided to. Have I been good enough this week before I ask God for anything. We hate it when someone tells us we are doing well, because we know what we are actually like the rest of the week. Maybe you have not properly prayed in months, and if you are honest it is because you assume you are behind on the God payments. I do it too, and I am a pastor. I have just found more sophisticated ways to keep count.

Brooke and I have been married ten years and there is no signed document laying out every task. If it were a contract, every bad week would breach it, and every good week would have me tallying it up to offset the bad ones. That is not a marriage. And you know Scripture calls marriage a covenant. So the thing some of us are doing with God this morning is the exact thing we would never dream of doing in our marriages.

You cannot fall behind on payments for an arrangement you did not establish or negotiate. You were not standing there. You did not walk that aisle, you did not negotiate a single term of it, and you did not sign it. Somebody else walked it, and then he walked it again and ended up on a cross. We are not standing at Sinai promising God we will succeed. We are much more like Abram, asleep while Jesus accomplished the covenant before we ever came to him.

And no, none of that means nothing is asked of you. The new covenant is unbreakable because God guarantees it, not because it is indifferent to how we live. God writes his law on your heart precisely so that you will live it.

So, two things to two kinds of people.

If you have been holding up your end of something with God, put it down. You did not get into this by keeping up with God and you will not be thrown out for falling behind. You are in it because Jesus carried you in while you were asleep.

And if you have never actually come into faith, if you have never made the choice to trust Jesus with your eternity, then you are not okay. Left to ourselves, that list in Deuteronomy 28 has our names on it, and it is not unfair, because we have earned every line of it by rejecting God. But the entire point of this message is that the curse landed on somebody else. It landed on Jesus Christ.

So repent, and believe. Repent means turn around and stop trying to be good enough for something you cannot join by being good enough. Believe means trust that when God walked that aisle he meant it, and that when Jesus took the curse he finished it. You do not add to that. You receive it.

Do not walk away thinking you still owe God anything but your faith.