1486 - "The Abrahamic Covenant" Part 2, Genesis 15

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1486. Today we are looking at the second of the three-part series on the Abrahamic Covenant. Today we're in chapter 15. What a monumental chapter. I'm not overstating this in any way. This is a key chapter of key chapters in the Bible, not just in the Tanakh, the law, the prophets, and the writings, the Torah, the Nebiim, and the Ketuvim, but this is an important chapter in Old and New Covenant. This is the day when God said, Abraham, I'm setting you apart. I'm going to make a promise that will last not only in time but through eternity. It will affect everything that happens from this point on that is revealed in the Word of God. Genesis chapter 15. After these things, what things? All the things that had transpired in chapters 13 and 14, the rescue of Lot, the division of Lot and Abraham, Lot pitching his tent towards Sodom, all of the things happening with Lot and Sodom, the rescue of Lot and everyone from the cities of the plain by Abraham and his trained servants. And it tells you something of the magnitude of the blessing and the largeness of Abraham and how he was able to do this, how he came back that same patriarchal highway along that ridge road that I spoke about in the last podcast. And he had met Melchizedek, the king of righteousness, who was a high priest at Moriah at Moriah, and he was a priest of the Most High God El Elian. And now Abram is in Hebron. And the Bible says that God spoke to him. And he spoke to him in a vision, and he said, Do not be afraid. Now Abram's already had some run-ins. I mean, he's been in the land and he's not always welcome. He's not made good decisions. He's left the land, gone to Egypt, had to be brought back. There's all kinds of things that begin to happen here. The Bible says that Abram was where he needed to be, and God spoke to him and said, Abram, I am your shield and your exceedingly great reward. And so Abram questioned God. Now, by the way, it's okay to question God. Many times people will say, Well, I know you're not supposed to ask why. Who told you that? God didn't. Many times in the Bible, God's people, when God said something, God said, Why? And you know what God did? He told them, You can trust me, and here's the reason, here's what I'm going to do. But sometimes we don't get the answers. Sometimes we don't get to know. But don't say that it's wrong to ask God why. It's just not. I mean, if that's the case, if it's sinful to do that, God forbid, this is what Jesus would have done on the cross, because Jesus from the cross while he was dying as the perfect substitute, as the perfect man, as the God man, when he was dying on the cross, he said, My God, my God, why? Why have you forsaken me? So it's not wrong to ask why. The asking why doesn't keep us when God doesn't answer us right then. It should not keep us from trusting him enough to follow. So Abraham said, God, I hear you. I understand what you're saying, but uh please understand, look at verse 2, that I don't have a child. I really don't, I don't have a child, and Eliezer of Damascus, who is not even one of us, is going to inherit this great blessing that you said you were going to give me, and you're pouring it on. But God, he's going to take over. What's going on here? And God said, He'll not be your heir. Now you just follow along here. And then in verse 5 of chapter 12, the chapter you have already read and that you're going to read again, all of these things, then he that is God, brought him out, Abraham, and said, and I imagine God arranged for a clear night for Abram. And he said, Now look toward the heaven, count the stars. If you're able to number them, he said unto him, So shall your descendants be. Can you imagine looking at all the Milky Way and looking at all of the stars on a clear, crisp night, no earthly lights around? From the mountaintop at Hebron, which is over 3,000 feet tall, clear blue skies, one of the prettiest places you'll ever see on earth. And nothing, I mean, on the east and the west, you can see as far as the eye can see, all the way to the Mediterranean, on the west and all the way to the eastern ridge, which is modern day Jordan today, you can see from Hebron. And God said, Count the stars. Well, of course he couldn't. And he said, You're not going to be able to know how many descendants you have. That's how I'm going to bless you. Didn't I tell you I was going to do that? I refer you to chapter 12. This is how it's going to be. So the scripture says in verse 6, and he that is Abram believed, trusted. The word for belief is the word for trust to commit. It's the idea of saying I do under the hoopa that the Jews get married under, under that covenantal relationship. He said, I commit to this, I believe you. I'm going to act like this is going to happen because you said it. I'm going to trust in this. I'm going to invest in this. This is who I belief is more than intellectual assent. It's more than believing, for instance, in our world that Jesus is the Son of God. It's not enough to believe that Jesus is the Son of God to be accounted righteous in God's book. It is not enough to even believe that Jesus died for your sins personally. You can know all of that and still die and go to hell and not have a life worth living, and most of all, not know God in a personal way. You see, our idea of belief is giving intellectual assent to and making note of and recognizing facts. That's not how a person is saved. The Bible says the demons of hell know about that, but they're not saved. They're not serving God. They're in rebellion against Him. Just like a lot of people living in the West and all over the world who know the facts about God, they can quote verses, but they don't know God from, as my dad used to say, Adam's house cat. So what is this idea of belief? It is trust, it's commitment, it's fiduciary, it is credo, it's giving credibility to what's being said. It is saying, I trust you with everything. I'm putting all of my weight on what you're saying. I mean, if you don't, I I mean, I'm jumping in the deep end. If you don't save me, I'm not going to be saved. It's putting all your trust in him. And he believed God. Isn't it amazing the impact of one word? He trusted in Hashem, that is who he is, what he said, and he, that is, notice it's a capital H, he, that is Hashem, the Lord, God, accounted it, reckoned him, put it down in an accounting fashion to him for righteousness. In other words, it was not Abraham's works and his obedience that saved him. It was the grace of Almighty God, and God's simply saying, Will you trust what I say? Yes, I do. Will you commit to what I'm saying? Yes, I will. Then I'm going to put in my book that you are right before me. The basis of all righteousness in this life is by trusting the words of Almighty God and trusting in what God says. You say, Well, I thought he was trusting in Jesus. He is the word of God. He's the living word of God, but we would not know the living word of God without the written word of God, the Bible. And when the Bible says that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, no one in this life right now was there. That was 2,000 years ago. We trust in what's said, what is in this book, and based on that, we trust God Himself, and therefore we are accounted righteousness. This is the argument that the Apostle Paul gave in the book of Romans, chapter 4. And when you get to the point to where you can, I know some of you are listening to this the way to work, you're lying in bed at night, and this is the last thing you're going to do, and you're not going to get your Bible out. So just let me read it to you. It's in Romans chapter 4 when the Apostle Paul is talking about how man is made right with God, how a man is declared righteous in the great court of God. When we're standing before the judgment bar of God, we don't have a leg to stand on. We don't have standing outside of the grace of God. And so he says in chapter 4, what shall we say then that Abraham, our father, was found according to the flesh? Was he found righteous according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, that is, if he was declared righteous, that's what the word justify means, then he has something to boast about. If Abraham could stand before God and say, Well, you know, God, I followed what you said, I did what you did, and I did all of these great things, and so that's the reason I'm standing here before you, then he's going to brag about that. It's the human nature to do that. But he couldn't before God because he knows standing before God that if it weren't for God giving him the health, the strength, the mind, everything that he is, and bringing him to life, holding his life in his hands, he wouldn't have anything. So the Bible says, but what does the scripture say in verse 3? Here's what it says. Abraham trusted God, he believed God, he relied on God, he committed to God, and it was accounted to him, it was put on his account, righteous. You see, this is Paul in the New Testament. And it was now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but earned. In other words, if Abraham earned his righteousness, if he worked it out, if he made this deal with God, if he somehow had a hand in it, then it's not of grace. That is God's mercy and God's favor and God's divine graciousness in acting toward us, giving us what we do not deserve. It wouldn't be that, it'd be what we deserve. But it's not the case. And he goes on in chapter four to talk about how it is through faith and trust, a commitment, all of those words, talking about that same concept of belief that we have misrepresented. It is that way that we truly are made right with God. You see, I'm going to heaven. Tony Crisp is going to heaven, not because I'm a preacher, not because I've done good things, not because I have helped people, not because I've studied, not because I read the Bible always, and not but no, no, no, no, no. Not a good husband, not because I took care of daddy or mama or anything. None of that. You name it, none of it. The scripture says the prophet Isaiah said, All of our righteousness, the best things that we could do, are as filthy rags. The filthy rags there is an indication that indicates menstrual rags that women would sit on during their menstrual period, and they would become so unclean they could not wash them, they had to burn them. This is what our works, our best works, not our horrible sins that we've all committed, but our best things. Name the best thing you've ever done. What would you stand before God and say, Why should I stand before you? I mean, is it because you went to church, you raised your kids right, you earned a living, you took care of your family? Look at lost people do that. Okay? And so what I'm saying is the best we do is as minstrel rags before God that need to be burned. All of our righteousness is as filthy rags. That's what the prophet Isaiah said. No, we stand before God in need of a Savior. And what we're doing is we're telling everybody, God loves you, God loves you, God, oh, He doesn't mind you. No, we are separated from God, we are enemies of God, and unless God intervenes in our lives, we are lost and we deserve to be lost. It is only the grace of Almighty God that we're saved. The only qualification for being saved is that you understand you're disqualified. You're not qualified. It's the grace of Almighty God. Now back to chapter 15. Because here's the kicker. God said, Okay, Abram, here we go. I'm going to make a covenant with you. I'm going to cut a covenant with you. And you don't make a covenant in the Hebrew language, you cut a covenant, because without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. And so God said in verse 7, then he said to him, I am the Lord, I am YHVH, we don't even know how to pronounce the name, who brought you out of Ur the Chaldees, to give you the land, this land that you're standing on to inherit. And he said, Lord God, how shall I know that I will inherit it? And here's where God said, Ok, I'm make a covenant with you. So he said unto him, Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle dove, a young pigeon. Then Abram he brought all of these to him, to God, and cut them in two down the middle, and placed each piece opposite the other. But he did not cut the two birds, they're too small. And he put one on one side, one on the other. And what I'm saying to you is that he cut up all of these animals. He had to catch them, he had to bleed them, he had to cut them according to specs, and he set half of them on one side, half on the other, and in between was a ditch. That's where all the blood would run. It was a blood ditch. And so this was the way a special covenant was made. And it says that when he did all of this, of course, he was doing this in the daylight, and so he did it, and the buzzards with great eyes, they saw all of this, and so he had to knock those away all day because it was getting night. And it says, But when the sun was going down, this verse 12, that a deep sleep fell on Abram. I'm telling you, he went out like a light because he had been working like a madman. And behold, horror and great darkness, in other words, great awe and dread and terror came upon him. God said unto him, Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in the land that's not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them 400 years. This is the prophecy that God's giving Abraham about when Jacob and his sons would go into Egypt, and they would stay there for 400 plus years, and then God would bring them out, and we'll be talking about that in the next few weeks as we go through Exodus. And this is where that prophecy is made. And this is the promise that it says God told Moses, I remember what I told Abraham outside of Hebron, and you'll read about this in the book of Exodus. This is the covenant he's talking about. This is the promise. He said, I promised Abraham that I would bring up the children of Israel. They prayed to me. Now I'm going to do it. And Moses, you're going to lead them out. And so he said, Also the nation whom they serve, I will judge. Did he judge Egypt? I think so. Afterwards they shall come out with great possessions. Did they come out with grace possessions? Of course they did. God granted them favor to where they went and said, I'd like to have some earrings for this, I would like to have a nose ring for this, I'd like to have a lip ring for this. You say, wait a minute, are those things allowed? Well, they were then. I digress. Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace, but you shall be buried in a good old age, but in the fourth generation, that is four hundred years, then they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. Now moving on time, but please hear me. The Amorites were the people that preceded Abraham. They were there when Abraham arrived in Canaan. That means they had been there probably for a century, maybe two. Whatever the case, they had been there a long time. And God said, I'm going to give them 400 more years. Now the Amorites, if you study about the Amorites and Canaanites, they were the most wicked people you could ever imagine. I mean, the imagination of their heart was evil. And God said, I'm going to spare them. We know for 500 years he spared them. And often people will say to me, now, wait, I'll tell you that our country is so bad, I don't know how God can stand us. Well, God has a great reservoir of wrath, and he holds that back until he says that's enough. I don't know when that limit is, but I want to tell you, God's been merciful to a lot of nations that had wickedness that's like ours, maybe not to the degree, maybe not in this area, that area. But I'm just telling you, let's not get into when God's going to judge America. God will judge America when America's tank of wrath is full, and then when God pours it out, God have mercy on all of us in wrath, remember mercy. But the Bible says that it came to pass, verse 17, that when the sun went down and it was dark, that behold there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch. Now you go through the Bible on your own and you'll find out that God often appears as a flame of fire. He did later to Moses and as a burning torch. That represents the presence of God in the scriptures. And that presence of God, the person of God himself, look at, pass between those pieces. In other words, God walked that blood ditch alone. And I'll tell you in this up in just a moment. And on the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, Now wait just a minute, I thought both people were to pull off their shoes and walk through this blood ditch. Yes, that's the covenant. After the animals were cut and two individuals agreed, what they said was, The promise I'm making you is failsafe. In other words, I will die. My blood will be shed to make sure that this promise is kept. I will die if I have to to keep this promise. God did. In the person of Jesus. He kept his covenant of salvation, of blessing to Abraham. Abram didn't even walk through this blood ditch. He was out of it. He was too tired. He didn't have the energy. God not only walked through it for himself, but he walked through it for Abram, and he said, Not only will I keep my part, but I'm going to see that you keep your part. This is what the Apostle Paul picked up on the New Testament. When he said, I am satisfied, he told Timothy, I am absolutely assured that that which I've committed to God and trust, he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him until the day that I stand before him. This is why he said to the Philippian church in Philippians chapter 1, 6, that he is able. That is, the one who started a good work in us, is able to perform in us what he started. God is able to take us by the hand. When we give our lives, our heart, our hands to him, when we give the totality of our being, God will see that everyone he starts with, he's going to finish with.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen to your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.