Don’t be afraid.  Is it that obvious?  Everyone is struggling with something.  Some hide it better than others, cover the tracks of their worries.  If God says this to Abram—he’s not been renamed Abraham just yet—it’s because Abram is afraid.  Something is gnawing at him, taking away the joy of his faith in this God who has called him and guided him.  He tries to combat this worry, this fear, sometimes with humor, sometimes with reason.  He will berate himself, cajole himself, but the worry remains, the fear, the struggle.  Doubt, maybe.  How can he know?  What do you want to know, beyond any shadow of any doubt?  What do you want to know with absolute, final, entire certainty?

Don’t be afraid, God says.  “I will shield you from danger and give you a great reward” (15:1).  Is Abram afraid of danger, then?  That’s sensible, but of what danger is he afraid: realistic, highly likely danger, or remote, unlikely danger?  A seasoned worrier can take anything and make it over into a danger, real and likely (likely enough).  God says he will shield Abram from danger.  Many psalms sing the same about the faithful.  And sorrow and grief come to us all, accident and illness, loss and hurt.  So, God lied, right?  So, we can’t really trust God who says trust Him.  So, we and Abram worry.

God lied?  God is truth; He does not deceive.  God shields each of us from many things.  Many times, we are barely aware of it; then there are those times, that leave us shaking and aghast, when we see that God has intervened, put His hand between us and danger, mortal danger: a crash, narrowly averted, a fall, narrowly averted.  When God says that He will shield us, protect us, I think what He is saying, at the most basic level, is that He will preserve our lives.  He sends Jesus.  Jesus came, and died, not so that our bodies would never die, but so that, though we die, we shall live.  God shields and protects our God-given lives, not our God-given bodies.  We have these God-given bodies for a blink of time, a time of joy and of sorrow.  In Christ, we have our God-given lives for eternity.  As we turn our thoughts to eternity, as we contemplate it, we may find that, by the Spirit, our thinking about many things begins to change.

Abram fears that God will not, perhaps cannot, protect him: not the way Abram wants, from his limited, time-bound, body-bound perspective.  God doesn’t give us everything we think we want, for ourselves or others.  He doesn’t give us everything for which we pray, for ourselves or others.  Why bother praying, if God doesn’t give us what we ask from Him?

Perhaps prayer ultimately has much more to do with what God is doing in us than what we are wanting from God, in our ignorance and limitation.  Is it alright to say that we are ignorant?  Can you confess that with me?  I have a B.A, an M.A, a PhD, and an MDiv, and I am ignorant, greatly ignorant about the most important things: God, God’s ways, eternity.  I was greatly ignorant not so very many years ago about God’s love; only now am I beginning to believe that I am learning, that I am not so ignorant now as I was then, and I am glad.

My hunch is that Abram is most worried, uncertain, about this reward God mentions.  Beloved, we are promised a very great reward, in Christ.  Have you contemplated it, much?  I hope, as we journey to Calvary and the cross this year, that you might contemplate what God promises us in Jesus Christ, by our faith in Jesus Christ, faith that comes to us not through our own reasoned, willed decision apart from the Spirit, but through the graceful, transforming, healing work of the Holy Spirit in our recalcitrant, ignorant hearts.  God says to Abram, do not be afraid, I will give you a great reward.  Abram wonders.  He isn’t as sure as he would like to be.  How can he know?

The one reward Abram wants most is the one reward God has never given him: a child, a son, a boy.  Abram has tried not to let that emptiness, that unfulfilled hurt, eat away at him, but it’s hard!  He has told himself, often, that God is enough.  He has chastised himself for his lack of gratitude: oh, Abram can be very hard on himself!  But God has withheld; God has denied Abram the one thing he wants most in this life.  Ah!  The one thing he wants most.  Beloved, what does God teach to want most, in this life and always?

God has promised Abram all this land, but what good will it do him?  Let him have all the sheep and all the donkeys and all the gold and all the land in the world—what good is it to him after he is dead?  If he had a son, then it might mean something: Abram could pass all these things on to his child.  If you have many possessions, are quite wealthy, it is probably best if you have only one child, unless the prospect of a probate war appeals to you.

Even if you have only one heir, is there no worry?  No thoughts along the lines of Solomon’s: “Nothing that I had worked for and earned meant a thing to me, because I knew that I would have to leave it to my successor, and he might be wise, or he might be foolish—who knows?  Yet he will own everything I have worked for, everything my wisdom has earned for me in this world” (Eccl 2:18-19).  Abram is right that the reward God speaks of will be something that can be passed on, like belongings, like possessions.  Abram is incorrect in believing that God means a physical, material reward.  Abram, too, is still wrestling with his ignorance, all that he does not yet know about God.  Aren’t we all?  There is always more to learn about God.  I hope that stimulates you, rather than causes you to despair.  “Oh, I know all about him” is not something we typically say about a friend, but about someone we hold in low regard: I don’t need to know anything more about him; I know all I need to know to know what I think about him.  Some think that way about God, too, about Jesus.  I know all I need to know to know what I think.

What is the richest, most beautiful inheritance you can give to those who come after you?  What is the very best thing that you can pass on?  Let me suggest that it is faith; no, you cannot make another believe; you cannot cause others to have faith, but by the example of your faith, its purity, its depth, its constancy, its candor, its fruits, you can have a tremendous influence on those around you.  Pray that the Spirit would increase your faith, and rejoice at the prospect of your reward: here, lives touched by faith; hereafter, eternal life in the presence of God.

God assures Abram he will have a child; Abram has no idea how this will be, or when, but he believes God who makes this promise to him.  “Abram put his trust in the Lord, and because of this the Lord was pleased with him and accepted him” (15:6).  You may also be familiar with the way the NRSV renders that: “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”  Our translation calls attention to the result of righteousness: by it we become acceptable to the Lord.  What is not righteous, then, is unacceptable.  Scripture has many words for what is not righteous, not acceptable to God: evil, wickedness, uncleanness, perversity, sin.

Until, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we are brought to the point when we see ourselves in those words, see and know ourselves as unacceptable to God, we will neither understand nor value what, who, is offered to us in Jesus Christ.  When Abram trusts in God’s promises, God reckons that faith, counts it in favor of Abram, accepts that faith as righteousness, so that by it Abram becomes acceptable to God.  It was as though Abram had done what was pleasing in the sight of the Lord—indeed, he had: what is most pleasing to God is our real, living faith.  Such faith comes through the Spirit, through receiving and loving, cherishing and obeying God’s Word, whose self-offering on the cross offers to all the full righteousness acceptable to God.  Our faith in Christ’s atoning death is regarded by God as righteousness: by faith we become acceptable to Him, not by our works—our ignorant, prideful works—but by our humble, obedient, Spirit-given faith.

God reminds Abram that He has led Abram out of the land of his birth to give him another land (15:7).  God reminds us, in Jesus Christ, that we have been called out of the land of our birth, out of the quicksand of this world and its ways, its thinking, its values, its truths, and promises to give us another land: the land of salvation, of the righteous, our eternal reward.

Still the doubt, the worry, the fear.  “How can I know?” (15:8).  The son I will see, Lord, but the reward?  That I cannot see until I am dead.  After we are dead, what can we see?  There’s the barrier, that great, fearful darkness: “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the poet wept, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  Go we must.  Rage is the way of those who lack faith, who have not treasured up the promises in their hearts, who fear, doubt, and don’t know.

And we cannot know, not in the way the world regards knowing.  God is not of this world, and God’s promises are not of this world, this life.  We walk in light and are blind.  We observe everywhere the Creator’s handiwork, and we speak of mechanical physical forces, undesigned and purposeless.  Our only knowing in this life is the knowing we have by faith: the one knowing that does not count among those who do not believe, who scoff, who groan at the mention of God, who also struggle in the quicksand, knowing the struggling will suck them down, but believing that, somehow, they must fight, rage, rage against the dying of the light.  Because the God whom they reject has implanted it in them to yearn for something, for someone more than undesigned purposelessness.

Abram must have faith.  We must have faith.  Only faith will do; only faith will see us through.  And God makes a covenant: his response to Abram’s worried, fearful doubting “How can I know?”  A covenant: a sacred, solemn pact.  I sign a contract in ink.  To make an oath, I raise my hand and swear by an eternal witness, invoking eternal judgment upon myself should I fail to be fully truthful.  A covenant is cut.  That’s the Hebrew verb for how a covenant is completed, sealed: it is cut.  God has Abram gather all the animals that will be acceptable for sacrifice upon the altar at the Tabernacle, the Temple, all the animals by which the people seek forgiveness, peace, and fellowship with God.  Only, it isn’t the animals themselves, but the blood.  A covenant requires blood.  A covenant is cut.  This covenant, this sacred, solemn pact between God and Abram does not use a bull, or a ram, or a dove, but all the animals: this is a super-covenant.  How can you know?  I’ve sealed it in the blood of every animal that may be sacrificed to me.

Abram, sinful Abram, brought, cut, and placed the animals as God had told him.  At the cross, sinful mankind brought, cut, and placed the atoning sacrifice—in ignorance, in derision, in anger, in self-righteousness, as God had prepared, appointed, and foretold.

Then, in the darkness of the new day, for day begins in darkness for Jews—darkness to light, chaos to creation, imprisonment to freedom, death to salvation—then, “when the sun had set and it was dark,” smoke and fire passed between the animals (15:17).  God guided His people out of Egypt, guided them forty years in the wilderness, by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire.  When God calls Moses up the mountain, the presence of God comes upon the mountain in smoke, in cloud.  When Isaiah has a vision of God in the Temple, God is veiled in the smoke of incense.  Incense was burned upon the altar just outside the Most Holy Place in the Temple, as prayer and as a veil for the glorious presence of God.  The smoke of that mysterious fire pot, the flame of that flaming torch, is the witness of God’s presence.  The blood is God’s signature and seal.  What is this covenant?  A future and a hope—for Abram, for all his descendants: all who put their trust in the Lord, in His power, His promises, in His glory, His grace, in His love.

The Hebrew scholar and Torah commentator Nahum M. Sarna points out how, in this moment between God and Abram, an “oral promise is reinforced by a visual experience.”[1]  O beloved, contemplate the cross.  Contemplate that day of the cross.  And weep.  And rejoice.

Worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!

                [1] Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis.  JPS Torah Commentary.  Jewish Publication Society: Philadelphia, 1989.  113.