Sermon Research: Genesis 15

New Covenant series. Wk 1 opener. Goal = "what is covenant and why does it matter for us?"

What the Chapter is Doing before Any Animals Show up

• Two matching panels, not one scene. Splits at v. 7. Same shape both halves - God reveals + promises, Abram complains + questions, God confirms + expands.
  • Panel 1 (vv. 1-6) = seed. Panel 2 (vv. 7-21) = land.
  • Both open with self-identification. V. 1 forward ("I am your shield"), v. 7 backward ("I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur"). V. 7 near-identical to Exod 20:2 = historical prologue of Sinai. Deliberate. God grounds obligation in what he's already done.
  • Preachable: Abram asks the same kind of question twice, answered twice, never told off. Chapter is structurally patient with doubt.
• "After these things" - ties back to Gen 14. Just beat the eastern kings, refused Sodom's plunder.
  • So "fear not" isn't obviously about danger. Two options - reprisal next season, or ordinary terror of a divine encounter. One commentary says it's the juxtaposition of the chapters. Think that's right. Less frightening to meet an enemy on a battlefield than to meet God in a vision.
  • "Reward" reads naturally against the refusal of Sodom's spoils. Turned down one benefactor, God says he'll be paid elsewhere.
• Translation call in v. 1 changes the question. KJV/NKJV/NIV = one clause, "I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward." Hebrew has no connective → two separate verbless clauses. (1) I am your shield. (2) your reward will be very great.
  • Abram's reply settles it. "What will you give me?" not "How will you be my reward?" He heard gift, not God himself.
  • Note: "God himself is your reward" is a really common devotional misquote. Warm thought, not what the verse says. Could be a short honesty beat if it earns its place.
• Eliezer + the inheritance problem (vv. 2-3). Fear isn't childlessness as grief - it's childlessness as legal dead end. Nobody to carry the line, hold the inheritance, do the funerary rites.
  • Hebrew of v. 2 (ûḇen-mešeq bêṯî hûʾ dammeśeq ʾĕlîʿezer) is a notorious crux. 6+ serious reconstructions, several just delete mešeq as a ghost word. Don't build anything from the pulpit on the detail.
  • Nuzi background - handle carefully. Tablets attest childless couple adopting a servant as heir in exchange for care in old age + burial, adopted son demoted if a natural son shows up. Preachers assert this constantly. Genuinely contested.
    • Against pressing it: Nuzi combines slavery/adoption/inheritance in ways Gen 15 doesn't, text never uses adoption language, critics have been going after Nuzi parallels for dating the patriarchs for decades and have mostly won. Prov 17:2 alone shows a servant could inherit with no adoption framework.
    • Safe version: servants could inherit, and Abram's trying to solve a legal problem himself because God hasn't yet.
• Star-count (v. 5) = night vision. God takes him outside. Genesis returns to it 3x (15:5; 22:17; 26:4), plus sand (22:17; 32:12) and dust (13:16; 28:14).
• "How am I to know?" (v. 8) isn't doubt. Same interrogative elsewhere asks for confirming evidence, not unbelief (cf. Exod 33:16; Mal 1:2). Asks for a sign, gets one. God isn't annoyed.

The Verse Paul Built a Doctrine on

• First hiphil of ʾāman in the Bible (v. 6). "Trusted" > "believed" in the modern cognitive sense. Abram considered God true, reliable, trustworthy. Only twice more in Genesis (42:20; 45:26).
  • Action of faith came before the vocabulary of faith. He was already trusting in ch. 12. What's new = the narrator stops to comment on it.
• Live grammatical debate, has preaching consequences. Verb form (waw + perfect) diverges from standard past-narrative pattern.
  • A: marks ongoing/repeated faith carried in from before - narrator editorialising, not reporting a new event in the chain. One commentary: Abram as a general rule still strapped into the roller-coaster and holding on.
  • B: imperfective aspect marks pragmatic prominence → v. 6 is the climax of the panel.
  • Either way not a conversion moment. Narrator's assessment of a life, not a datable decision.
• "Counted to him as righteousness." Not God recognising something Abram already had.

Detailed examination of the context has repeatedly shown that God is depicted as accounting to Abraham "a righteousness that does not inherently belong to him."

• G. K. Beale (ed.), Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament

Normally righteousness results in acquittal by the divine judge. Here faith, the right response to God's revelation, counts instead.

• Gordon Wenham, quoted in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament

• Parallel constructions confirm the accounting sense. "Your offering will be reckoned to you as grain from the threshing floor" (Num 18:27); "He who blesses his neighbour with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing" (Prov 27:14). Something credited as something else on an account.
• The Second Temple reading Paul's arguing against - matters because it's the exact instinct in the room on a Sunday.
  • Jewish tradition widely held Abraham kept the whole Torah before it was given (Sir 44:19-22; Jub 15.1-2; 23.10; CD III; 1 Macc 2:50-52; 2 Bar 57.1-3).
  • 1 Macc 2:52 attaches the back half of Gen 15:6 out of sequence to Isaac in Gen 22 - "Was not Abraham found faithful when tested, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness?" Crediting moves from the moment of trust to the moment of performance.
  • Sir 44:19-22 implies the Gen 12 promises were given because he'd kept God's law.
  • One tradition all but reads his faith as his faithfulness in keeping the whole Torah in advance.
  • Ancient version of the contract instinct. Not a straw man, not a modern problem. Worth naming from the platform.
• Paul reads the story from the front, not the back. Apostolic argument implies Abraham is among the ungodly God justifies (Rom 4:5) - startling if you read Genesis backwards from 26:5. Abram enters straight after Babel, solitary/weak/childless/homeless, the anti-Adam. And justifying the ungodly is the one thing God explicitly forbids human judges to do (Exod 23:7; Prov 17:15; Isa 5:23).
• Circumcision came later + Paul makes that load-bearing (Rom 4:9-12). Reckoning in Gen 15 is ~14 yrs before the sign in Gen 17. Sequence is the argument.
• Gen 15:6 across the NT - how the three uses relate.
  • Rom 4 / Gal 3: faith counted apart from works, circumcision, law.
  • Heb 11:8-12: same faith, described by what it produced ("by faith Abraham obeyed").
  • Jas 2:23: reads Gen 22 back into Gen 15:6, in the company of a tradition (1 Macc 2:52) Paul opposes.
  • Resolution: James isn't saying the faith was itself a meritorious deed - saying it was completed in the obedience at Moriah. Timing of the crediting isn't his concern. Inseparability of genuine faith from completing obedience is. Distance between the two apostles is smaller than it looks, esp. since Paul won't recognise any faith that leaves conduct unchanged.
  • Don't preach this as a problem to be solved. One sentence if the room needs it.

Cutting a Covenant: what Abram Was Actually Being Shown

• "To cut a covenant" (kārat bĕrît) in v. 18 - idiom almost certainly comes from this ritual. Gen 15 = first place in Scripture the phrase appears with God as a party.
• Mechanics: animals slaughtered, halved, halves laid opposite, parties walk between. The walk says: may this happen to me if I break faith.
• Primary evidence by date - dating matters for the next section.

• The two explicit first-millennium texts - quote from the platform if the moment carries it.
  • Sefire I.A, lines 39-41: "[Just as] this calf is cut in two, so may Matîʿel be cut in two, and may his nobles be cut in two!"
  • Esarhaddon: "Just as male and female kids and male and female lambs are slit open and their entrails fall down upon their feet, so may the entrails of your sons and daughters roll down over your feet."
• Alalakh = where the translation fight sits. One rendering: Abban swears "(Let me so die) if I take back that which I gave thee!" → 2nd-millennium example of a superior party under sanction. More literal rendering: "Abba-AN is under oath to Yarimlim and also he cut the neck of a lamb. (He swore): I shall never take back what I gave thee" → slaughter is ratification, no acted-out curse. Don't lean on Alalakh either way.
• Jer 34:18-20 = the OT's own commentary. Carries a widely repeated error worth correcting.
  • Text calls the covenant-breakers "the passers-through" (hāʿōḇĕrîm) who "walked between the parts of the calf," threatens corpses fed to birds.
  • The error: preachers regularly claim only one party passed through in Jer 34, same as Gen 15. Misreading. In Jer 34 the covenant is between leaders and people before God (v. 15), not between them and God - so all parties walked. Slaves were beneficiaries, not parties.
  • So: the remarkable thing in Gen 15 isn't that one party walked. It's that the party who walked was God and the other party was asleep.
• The peculiar details + what to make of them. Heifer, goat, ram, each 3 yrs old, + turtledove + young pigeon. Birds not halved. Abram spends the afternoon driving off birds of prey.
  • Every species = clean, sacrificial, from Israel's later worship.
  • One influential reading: animals = Israel, three years = generations in Egypt, birds of prey = nations that will attack (esp. Egypt), Abram driving them off = patriarch defending his descendants. Fire passing through = God walking in the midst of his people (cf. Lev 26:12).
  • Support for birds-as-nations: birds of prey (ʿayiṭ) are a distinct + unclean category from the general word in v. 10, and elsewhere stand for foreign nations (Ezek 17:3, 7; Zech 5:9).
  • Support from context: vv. 13-16 is precisely about Egypt, oppression, return.
  • Not mutually exclusive with the self-maledictory reading. Rite can be an oath form and a prophetic tableau. Several treatments hold both.
• Abram looks like a priest here too. Prepares the sacrifices, guards the holy place where God's presence will pass, drives off what would defile it = the two functions later given to the Levites. Add the vision (v. 1) + prophecy (vv. 13-16) → Abram as prophet and priest, surrounding chapters have him as king-figure. Lore Drop sitting here. Probably one thread too many for this sermon.

Did God Swear a Death-curse on Himself?

Risky claim - contested, not settled.

• Consensus reading: God alone passes between the pieces, invoking on himself the covenant curse of dismemberment if he fails.

According to extant ancient Near Eastern texts, passing between the slain animals is a ritual that invokes a curse on the participants if they break the covenant. To walk between the carcasses is to submit oneself to the fate of the slaughtered animals as a penalty for covenant breaking. Note that only God walks between the carcasses.

• Bruce Waltke, quoted in Oren Martin, Bound for the Promised Land

This strange ritual has generally been interpreted as a self-maledictory oath akin to Jeremiah 34:18… it remains the current consensus and is thus reflected in most of the commentaries.

• Paul Williamson, Sealed with an Oath

• The case against, at its strongest. Six objections. Want them in full, every one is reasonable.
  1. Doesn't explain the choice of these particular animals.
  2. Doesn't explain why only sacrificial types.
  3. Doesn't explain why 3 yrs old.
  4. Doesn't explain why the birds aren't halved.
  5. Doesn't explain why Abram drives off the birds of prey.
  6. Theological objection - the strongest. Divine oaths in the OT characteristically take the form "As I live, says the LORD" (e.g. Num 14:21). Exact inverse of a death-curse.

Finally it must be asked whether a divine self-imprecation is really likely. Is it compatible with OT theology for God to say "May I die, if I do not keep my word"?

• Gordon Wenham, quoted in Peter J. Gentry & Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant

• Second, independent line of dissent - based on the verb. ʿāḇar ("passed between") in v. 17 is a theophany verb. Gen 15, Exod 33-34 and Josh 3-4 share six structural features: proclamation of God's name, something "cut" (covenant / tablets / Jordan's waters), God's appearance expressed with ʿāḇar, a stated justification for the theophany answering someone's "how shall I know?", a list of nations to be expelled, covenant or covenant-renewal setting.

We may deduce, then, that these three passages provide support for positing a covenant ritual ceremony which involved a theophany that was expressed by the verb ʿāḇar. It is not necessary to read into Gen. 15:17 any sanctions or self-curse to which Yahweh exposes himself. Rather, it is a confirmation of Yahweh's promise of land to Abram's descendants.

• Victor P. Hamilton, Genesis

• Third variant - grants the self-imprecation may be implied if read via Jer 34, but calls it theologically difficult and impossible to explain how it could ever be carried out. Prefers the Alalakh promissory-oath model.
• Rebuttal. Three moves, all good.
  1. Jer 34 counter-evidence collapses once you get the parties right (above). All parties walked there. Only God walked here.
  2. Constant features of covenant-making across 1,600 yrs of OT evidence = exactly what a narrator assumes rather than explains. Gen 15 gives the details because something unusual happened, and the unusual thing is that one party didn't walk.
  3. On the theological objection:

The fact that the idea of God taking a self-maledictory oath is difficult theologically only shows that we should exercise restraint in imposing upon the text our notions of what is possible and right for God. It is also difficult to reconcile theologically that God asks Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice in Genesis 22. May not a critical approach to the text preclude the narrator's right to build mystery and tension into his story line?

• Peter J. Gentry & Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom Through Covenant

• Verdict: preach the self-maledictory reading, flag from the platform that it's contested.
  • Majority position, it's what the only clear OT parallel describes, and the two unambiguous extrabiblical treaty texts describe the same thing.
  • Dissent is strongest on the peculiar features of the rite, weakest on the standard ones. Best account = standard features are an oath form, peculiar features are prophetic symbolism. Several treatments already do this.
  • Theological objection deserves a straight answer not a dodge - an oath God can't literally suffer isn't an empty oath, because the point of a self-maledictory oath is the weight the swearer puts on his word. And the narrator is clearly willing to build tension he won't resolve for another 7 chapters.
• The fallback survives on every reading, and it's what the sermon actually needs. God alone passed between the pieces. Abram unconscious throughout. No obligation laid on him at this point, no covenant sign given. Whatever the fire meant, the arrangement rests on God.
  • Fallback = load-bearing claim. Self-curse = the vivid one. If someone goes home and reads Wenham the sermon doesn't collapse.

Abram Asleep, God Alone Walking

• Tardēmâ (v. 12) = the deep-sleep word from Gen 2:21, used of Adam while God builds Eve. Both cases - man unconscious while God does the decisive thing. Verbal link is real and it's available.
• ʾÊmâ - dread with no moral cause. Normally describes terror produced by God's presence (Exod 15:16; 23:27; Deut 32:25; Ps 88:16; Job 9:34).
  • Adam, Jacob, Moses all afraid in God's presence - but the first two were conscious and had guilt in the background. Abram's dread arrives while asleep, nothing in the narrative has gone wrong.
  • Wouldn't know this terror happened at all if v. 12 hadn't said so. Nothing Abram does motivates it. No plot function. Just what it's like when God draws near.
• Firepot + torch = theophany. Smoke and fire are the consistent markers - burning bush (Exod 3:2), pillar of cloud and fire (Exod 13:21), Sinai in smoke and fire (Exod 19:18; 20:18). A book given to Israel on the edge of Canaan - they'd make that connection instantly.
• Two textual supports for the unilateral conclusion. Should go together.
  • Chapter states no human obligation anywhere.
  • No covenant sign - striking absence, since Noah gets a rainbow and Abraham himself gets circumcision two chapters later. Most economical explanation: a sign is unnecessary where the human party has nothing to keep.

The important point to note is that God alone (represented by the theophanic imagery of fire and smoke) passed between the dissected animals, indicating the unilateral nature of this particular covenant. Indeed, the fact that there is no 'sign' associated with this particular covenant is probably explained by the complete absence of human obligations.

• Paul Williamson, Sealed with an Oath

• Translation suggestion worth knowing. Since nothing is imposed on Abram, one line of scholarship says bĕrît in v. 18 shouldn't be "covenant" at all but something broader - "On that day Yahweh gave Abraham the solemn assurance…" Not a change to make in the pulpit, but tells you where the emphasis sits.
• Prophecy in vv. 13-16 is doing more than filling time.
  • 400 yrs vs Exod 12:40's 430 - round figure in prospect, precise figure in retrospect. The 400 covers sojourning + enslavement together.
  • "Fourth generation" (v. 16) - dôr in archaic usage = "lifetime" not "generation." Resolves the apparent conflict with 400.
  • "The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" = the theologically loaded line. Morality fixes the timing of the conquest, not necessity. Israel waits four centuries because God hasn't finished being patient with the Canaanites. Also frames Joshua's invasion as judicial rather than a land grab - serviceable answer to the conquest objection if a sceptic raises it. Tangent in this sermon though.
• What the chapter does not say. Doesn't say Abram was passive in general, that his obedience was irrelevant, or that nothing would ever be asked of him. See next section. Gen 15 = snapshot of a covenant transaction, not a complete doctrine of the Christian life.

One Covenant or Two? Genesis 15 against Genesis 17 and 22

Another dispute - need this to avoid preaching an obligation-free gospel by accident.

• Two-covenant position: Gen 15 and Gen 17 are distinct covenants, different frameworks.
  • Gen 15: unilateral, no sign, no human obligation, national in scope (offspring + defined territory), never called everlasting.
  • Gen 17: bilateral and openly so. Opens "Walk before me and be blameless so that I may establish my covenant" (17:1-2), then structured "As for me… As for you…" (17:4, 9). Adds circumcision as its sign, adds an ethical prerequisite, called everlasting, shifts emphasis to Abraham's international significance.
  • Framework difference presented as decisive - one carries obligations + a sign, the other carries neither.
• One-covenant position: single Abrahamic covenant carrying both unconditional and conditional elements, and the standard conditional/unconditional taxonomy needs overhauling.
  • Decisive text = Gen 22:17. Oath promises offspring "as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore." Stars = the language of 15:5, and the double comparison is unique to 22:17. Then the whole promise is grounded in "because you have obeyed my voice" (22:18).
  • Ties the Gen 15 promise directly to Abraham's obedience. Hard to sustain if Gen 15 is a separate, purely unilateral covenant.
  • Gen 26:5 repeats the logic - Isaac gets the promises because his father obeyed.
• Where the two positions actually agree - more than the debate suggests.
  • Obligations of Gen 17 arrive after the promises of Gen 15 and presuppose a covenant relationship already in place. Grace before command in the narrative order.
  • "Blameless" (tāmîm) ≠ sinless. Root = complete/whole, sense is undivided devotion. Narrator makes it unmissable by showing Abraham failing at integrity repeatedly after the command (ch. 20 second sister deception; ch. 21 dispute with Abimelech).
  • Obedience isn't the basis of the blessing. It's the means and timing of its outworking. Helpful formulation - the obligations "condition the how and when of the blessing," not the fundamental intention to bless.
• Verdict: one-covenant. Keep the Gen 15 / Gen 17 distinction as a distinction of emphasis, not of covenants.
  • Gen 22:17 is hard to get around, two-covenant reading has to work to explain it.
  • Framework difference between 15 and 17 is real and I should still preach it. Gen 15 genuinely imposes nothing on Abram - that's the point of the sermon. Just doesn't follow that the covenant as a whole asks nothing of him ever.
  • Cost to the sermon: almost none, as long as one guard sentence goes in. See guardrails at the end.

From Passing between the Pieces to Blood on the People

• Exod 24:3-8 = Sinai ratification. Inverts Gen 15.
  • Order matters - Moses reads the book, people say "All that the LORD has spoken we will do" (v. 7), then the blood is applied. Commit first, sealed second.
  • Half the blood on the altar, half on the people. Twofold application says it plainly - what's ratified is bilateral.
  • Rite in Exod 24:6 is nowhere else repeated in the OT, so its precise sense is genuinely uncertain.
• The reading that connects it back to Gen 15.

Apparently the blood-sprinkling ritual described in Exodus 24:8 substituted for the literal "passing between the pieces" of Genesis 15… Sheer statistical considerations may have occasioned the substitution. An entire nation hardly could be paraded between the pieces of slain animals. But an equally significant ceremony of blood-sprinkling could be instituted.

• Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants

• Honest alternative: blood may simply consecrate the human party, as in priestly ordination (Exod 29; Lev 8). Both live. Bilateral conclusion holds either way - twofold application + the people's verbal commitment establish it independently.
• Covenant meal (Exod 24:9-11) = third element, underused. Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, 70 elders eat and drink in God's presence on the mountain and survive the sight of him.
  • In the ANE the meal wasn't the celebration after the signing. The meal was the signing. Covenant meals both celebrated and ratified.
  • Strongest available bridge to communion, if the Lord's Supper is in the service. See application.
• Deut 27-28 = the sanctions, and the imbalance is the message.
  • Deut 28: 13 verses of blessing, 53 of curse. Lev 26 same. Hammurabi ~16 lines of blessing to 280 of curse, so the shape is culturally conventional. The content isn't.
  • Final curse = exile = death of the nation.
  • The imbalance itself anticipates covenant violation. Drawn up expecting to be broken.
  • Curses framed as discipline aimed at restoration not annihilation, and only if they rebel. Worth one sentence so the room doesn't hear pure vindictiveness.
• The vulture curse runs the whole length of Israel's history. If I carry only one biblical-theology thread into the sermon, this is it.
  • Gen 15:11 - Abram drives the birds of prey off the carcasses.
  • Deut 28:26 - "Your carcasses shall be food to all birds of the sky… and there shall be no one to frighten them away."
  • Then lands by name on house after house - Jeroboam (1 Kgs 14:11), Baasha (1 Kgs 16:4), Ahab (1 Kgs 21:24), Jezebel (2 Kgs 9:10).
  • Then Jeremiah 3x (7:33; 16:4; 19:7).
  • Then the lament over the ruins of Jerusalem - "They have given the dead bodies of Thy servants for food to the birds of the heavens… and there was no one to bury them" (Ps 79:2-3).
  • Point: covenant self-consciousness never lapsed in Israel. They knew exactly what they'd sworn on themselves and they watched the specific curse arrive.
• On the "new" in "new covenant." The word presupposes failure. Fresh sealing in covenant blood implies something went wrong with the first sealing, and the prophetic background locates that failure in the covenant-breaking that produced exile (Ezek 16:59-63 maps the whole sequence - breach → judgment → everlasting covenant God will establish).

The Curse Lands on the Wrong Man

• Gal 3:10-14 as three syllogisms.
  1. Deut 27:26 curses everyone who doesn't keep the whole law. Nobody keeps it. → everyone related to the law is under a curse.
  2. Hab 2:4 - the righteous live by faith. Law isn't of faith. → nobody is justified by law.
  3. Lev 18:5 promises life to those who keep the law. Nobody keeps it. → nobody receives life that way.
• The word-swap. This is the Lore Drop I'd build the Golgotha movement on.
  • Paul quotes Deut 21:23 ("cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree"). LXX there reads kekatēramenos. Paul writes epikataratos instead.
  • Epikataratos = the word in Deut 27:26, the summative curse over the entire covenant, the one the tribes shouted from Mt Ebal.
  • Both mean "cursed." Paul swapped one for the other so the verbal link couldn't be missed. The curse Jesus bore on the tree isn't generic. It's the covenant curse.
• What Paul's claiming. Plainest statement of substitution in the NT, and it's always made readers flinch.

The language here is startling, almost shocking. We should not have dared to use it.

• A. W. F. Blunt, quoted in John Stott, The Cross of Christ

This is probably the plainest statement in the New Testament of substitution. The curse of the broken law rested on us; Christ redeemed us from it by becoming a curse in our place. The curse that lay on us was transferred to him. He assumed it, that we might escape it.

• John Stott, The Cross of Christ

• Luther's paraphrase is preachable almost verbatim. Read it out rather than summarise:

Our most merciful Father, seeing us to be oppressed and overwhelmed with the curse of the law… sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying: Be thou Peter that denier; Paul that persecutor, blasphemer and cruel oppressor; David that adulterer… and briefly, be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them.

• Martin Luther, quoted in John Stott, The Cross of Christ

• Three attempted softenings of Gal 3:13 + why each fails.
  • That Paul depersonalised it by writing "the curse of the law" - Deut 21:23 says "God's curse," and Paul isn't contradicting Scripture.
  • That "becoming a curse" = Christ's sympathy with lawbreakers rather than objective acceptance of judgment - doesn't do justice to the words.
  • That "a curse" falls short of "cursed" - "curse" here is a metonym for "the cursed one," parallel to "made him to be sin" in 2 Cor 5:21.
• V. 14 is the structural hinge, mustn't skip it. He bore the curse "in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles." Curse had to be cleared before the Abrahamic promise could flow outward. Gen 15 and Golgotha are wired together by the apostle, not by the preacher.
• The "us" question. Some read "Christ redeemed us" as Jews only, since the law was given to Israel. Against - the indefinite "all who" in v. 10 brings anyone using the law for justification under the curse; present tense ("are under a curse") addresses the Galatians' current situation not Israel's past; Paul's first "we" in the letter (2:4) already includes Gentiles; and the Gentiles have already received the Spirit (3:1-6), which is the second half of v. 14's purpose.

Typology Guardrail: how far the Genesis 15 / Cross Link Can Be Pushed

Matters given my commitment that typology has to be textually indicated or canonically affirmed.

• Solid ground: the Gal 3 link. Paul explicitly connects the curse borne at the cross with the covenant curse and with the Abrahamic blessing. Apostolic, does the whole job.
• Solid ground: Exod 24 / Last Supper. "Blood of the covenant" is a direct verbal echo, and Jesus makes it himself.
• Defensible but inferential: that at Golgotha God passes through the judgment he swore on himself in Gen 15. No NT writer makes this explicitly. Legitimate correspondence-in-history reading, and it depends on the self-maledictory interpretation being right. Say it as a connection I'm drawing, not a claim the text makes.
• Weakest link, use with care: darkness at the crucifixion as fulfilment of the Gen 15 darkness. Golgotha's darkness has a well-established OT background - plague on Egypt (Exod 10:21-23), day-of-the-Lord judgment (Isa 13:9-11; Amos 8:9; Joel 2), and the covenant curse of Deut 28:29 where Israel gropes at noon. That last one is genuinely relevant to a covenant-curse sermon. But the dread darkness of Gen 15:12 is a different word doing a different job. Linking them is a preacher's flourish, not an exegetical result. If I use it, I say so.
• Governing principle for the whole move:

We must resist superimposing Christian theology on Old Testament texts and should feel no compulsion to give every Old Testament text, or even most of them, a christological conclusion. But we will have failed if we do not ask how Old Testament texts function in the whole context of Scripture… I have become convinced that the concept of correspondence in history is particularly valuable to interpretation.

• Klyne Snodgrass, quoted in George H. Guthrie, Hebrews (NIVAC)

Two Unchangeable Things

• Heb 6:13-20 = the NT's own pastoral use of the Abrahamic oath. Its structural position is exactly the emotional arc this sermon needs.
  • Heb 5:11-6:12 puts all the weight on human responsibility - immaturity, severe warning about apostasy, exhortation to diligence. Honest reader finishes that feeling exposed.

All of this may lead to our feeling somewhat insecure. The reader of this commentary may have ended our treatment of 6:4-12 asking, "Then is it all up to me? Where is the provision of God in all of this?"… Beginning with 6:13 the discussion turns back with full force toward God's provision of a superior basis for Christian perseverance.

• George H. Guthrie, Hebrews (NIVAC)

• God swore by himself because there was nobody greater (Heb 6:13, from Gen 22:16). Point of the oath isn't that God's bare word needed shoring up. It's that he chose to bind himself by his own character so doubt would be excluded.
  • Human oaths appeal to someone greater. God has no such option → self-referential by necessity.
  • Greek for God's purpose as "unchanging" (ametathetos) = vocabulary of wills and contracts, used of terms that can't be annulled. Heirs don't need to worry the terms will change.
• What are the "two unchangeable things"? Most likely the promise + the oath (vv. 13, 17). Minority take them as the two divine oaths structuring Hebrews (Gen 22:16 + Ps 110:4), or the two declarations of Ps 2:7 + 110:4. Promise-and-oath fits the immediate context best. Not worth adjudicating from the pulpit - say "two things God can't go back on" and move.
• Anchor image (v. 19). Ankyra was a stock metaphor in Greco-Roman moral writing for whatever gives life stability. Author's twist - this anchor doesn't hold in the seabed but inside the curtain, in the Most Holy Place, where under the old covenant only the high priest went once a year, and where Jesus has now gone as forerunner.
  • "Forerunner" (prodromos) used of a military vanguard and of the first runner in a race. Always implies the rest of the company is following.
• Rom 4:23-25 = the apostolic warrant for preaching Gen 15 at Port Stephens. "It was not written for him only… but also for us." The crediting language of Gen 15:6 was written for the sake of people who'd be counted righteous later.
  • Continuity - Abraham believed in the God who gives life to the dead, Christians believe in the God who raised Jesus. Same God, same kind of faith.
  • Discontinuity, keep this - Abraham didn't believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Couldn't. History has filled out the object of faith. Hasn't swapped it.
• Sentence I'd land on:

The old covenant depended on Israel's promise to keep the covenant's laws, but the new covenant is based on God's will to implant those laws on the heart. This switching of the obligee from unfaithful Israel to the faithful God in connection with regeneration is such a great transaction that God put aside forever the former mode of administering his covenant.

• Bruce Waltke, An Old Testament Theology

Impact on Us Today

The Formational Aim

• Target = assurance. Primary dimensions affective (right feeling about God) + cognitive (right thinking about God). Secondary scriptural aim - teach people to read an OT narrative inside the covenant storyline.
• Felt payoff: if God alone walked the aisle, then a person's standing doesn't rest on their consistency, because they were never a party to the arrangement. They were the beneficiary.
• Identity before consequence. Application isn't "therefore try harder" or "therefore relax." It's "this is what kind of people you are, because of what kind of covenant you're in." NT's own logic, and it aims higher than a behavioural ask.

The Preachable Tension

• Abram asked for evidence and God gave him a knife. He wanted a guarantee about land and descendants. Got an afternoon chasing vultures off carcasses, a terrifying darkness, and a promise his family would be enslaved for 400 yrs before any of it came good. Chapter refuses to make the guarantee feel comfortable. That's the sermon's engine - don't resolve it too early.

Need to Be Careful about These:

• Antinomian drift. Whole argument is that nothing was asked of Abram in Gen 15 - true of that chapter, untrue of the covenant as a whole (Gen 17:1, 22:18, 26:5). One guard sentence required. Should say the new covenant is unbreakable because God guarantees it, not because it asks nothing.
• Abraham as the hero of faith. Genesis isn't holding him up as a moral exemplar and neither should I. Narrator deliberately records him lying about his wife twice, taking matters into his own hands with Hagar, behaving poorly with Abimelech. These chapters are about God's faithfulness in spite of the promise-bearer, not a great man's great trust.
• Turning assurance into presumption. Assurance isn't one thing and doubt isn't one thing. Doubt of someone who thinks they're not good enough to be forgiven / doubt of someone sitting in unconfessed sin / false confidence of someone with no evidence of the Spirit's work - all need different words. A blanket reassurance to the whole room lands wrongly on at least one of them. Address distinct groups in the closing prayer, which is what I usually do anyway.
• Over-reading Nuzi + Alalakh. Both contested. Background, not proof.

Sources

• Genesis - Victor P. Hamilton
• Genesis 1-15 (WBC) - Gordon J. Wenham
• Genesis 16-50 (WBC) - Gordon J. Wenham
• Kingdom Through Covenant - Peter J. Gentry & Stephen J. Wellum
• Sealed with an Oath - Covenant in God's Unfolding Purpose (NSBT) - Paul Williamson
• The Christ of the Covenants - Palmer Robertson
• An Old Testament Theology - Bruce K. Waltke
• Bound for the Promised Land - The Land Promise in God's Redemptive Plan (NSBT) - Oren Martin
• Righteous by Promise - A Biblical Theology of Circumcision (NSBT) - Karl Deenick
• The Royal Priest - Psalm 110 in Biblical Theology (NSBT) - Matthew Emadi
• Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament - G. K. Beale (ed.)
• Galatians (BECNT) - Douglas J. Moo
• Biblical Theology According to the Apostles (NSBT) - Chris Bruno, Jared Compton & Kevin McFadden
• Paul and the Law - Keeping the Commandments of God (NSBT) - Brian Rosner
• Christ, Our Righteousness - Paul's Theology of Justification (NSBT) - Mark Seifrid
• The Cross of Christ - John Stott
• Pierced for Our Transgressions - Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey & Andrew Sach
• Hebrews 1-8 (WBC) - William Lane
• Hebrews 9-13 (WBC) - William Lane
• Hebrews - NIVAC - George H. Guthrie
• The Cross from a Distance - Atonement in Mark's Gospel (NSBT) - Peter Bolt
• The IVP Bible Background Commentary - New Testament - Craig Keener
• Dictionary of Paul and His Letters - IVP
• Deuteronomy - Daniel I. Block
• Still Sovereign - Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace - Thomas Schreiner & Bruce Ware
• Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, Third Edition - Klein, Blomberg & Hubbard

Related Notes

• The Abrahamic Covenant
• Penal Substitution
• Justification by Faith
• Good Friday 2026 - overlap