All right, Genesis chapter 15 is where we're at now, and sometimes, you know, you step back from this book, with sort of a 30,000 foot perspective on it, and we're in the midst of what I think are probably the three most significant chapters in the book. And I know it's, sort of hard to pick out some particular chapters and say that they're more significant than others because this entire book is valuable. But I think if I really had to, if I really had to focus in Genesis in terms of, of where the rest of the Bible flows from, it's 14 and 15 and 16. We've looked at 14 and we saw this connection of Abram to Melchizedek and his capturing of Lot and the parallels that we see in the gospel. And as we turn into chapter 15, we come to this great covenant that God makes with Abram, establishing in him a tremendous promise. And then when we turn into 16, we're going to see that promise unfold into a more specific covenant with Abram in which he is going to be promised a son. So you have these, these three chapters sort of lining up in this sense. And so this morning we're in, back in 15. It's been a few weeks, of course, since we've, we've been here. So my job this morning will be to overview this chapter and try to help you to, to see its value and its depth. Now notice at the beginning of the chapter, it says after these things, so meaning sometime after Abram has completed his rescue of Lot, he's had his encounter with Melchizedek, he's now in a position where he has some power over the kings of the south. It says, after these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. So God appears to him again. Speculation here is which vision is this? Is this the third vision that Abram's had of God? You know, one in Ur and one as he arrived in Canaan, and now another one could very well be. It's hard to really say, but this one is a very specific kind of vision in case God shows up to show him something, which is what the word vision is all about. It's this idea of God said, I want to show you something. I want to have a connection to you in a vision. And he speaks to Abram. Now, what God says first is fear not, Abram. Which implies something, doesn't it? Implies that there was a fear in Abram of some sort. He was afraid of something. And as we step back from what we see here in these verses, it appears that Abram feared that he was going to go to his grave without an heir. That he was not going to have someone to take on the family name, to carry on the family property, the land inheritance and so forth, and so he was afraid, because he didn't have any children, that he would basically leave no legacy. You know, you and I, in our society, aren't so concerned about such things. In our culture, that's not as important. But it was, in 2nd millennium BC, pre-Israelite days. This is a considerable concern, as it would be through even the days of the Israelites. The Israelites, reading this book, would clearly understand Abram's fear to not leave an heir, to not have an heir, someone to leave your stuff to. And so God comes to him and says, fear not, I am your shield, your reward shall be very great. Abram, at this point, as you see in verse two, Abram at this point has to make an assumption about where his stuff is going to go and where his name is going to go. And he's made the assumption that God is going to pass his legacy through a member of his household by the name of Eliezer. Eliezer, it says, is of Damascus, probably a servant of his, probably a significant servant, maybe even the man servant of the house, probably the guy that Abram most relies on, his confidant, if you will. And so he assumes that this is going to have to go through him. Now, I've often found it fascinating, absolutely fascinating, that Abram does not consider Lot to be his heir. You'll notice that Lot's not mentioned at all here. That's why I call him the idiot nephew, because he doesn't really have a place in all of this. He's a bit character in the story. He's not even on the mind of Abram as a possibility. And I think the reason why, obvious from chapter 14, as well as what we'll see coming up. So Abram is in this place where he is living his life. He's here in Canaan. God has brought him here. He's had success over the kings. He's rescued this idiot nephew. And now he's just going through the motions. And so now the question is, what's next? And that's the reason for this particular vision. So God comes to him and makes a certain set of promises to him in verses one to six. He says, starting in verse two, or verse three, I'm sorry, verse two. I can't read this morning. But Abram said, oh Lord God, what will you give me for I continue childless? And the heir of my house is Eleazar of Damascus. And Abram said, behold, you have given me no offspring and a member of my household will be my heir. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him. All right, here is God's response to this fear. This man shall not be your heir. God's very clear. Nope, this is not the guy, so stop thinking like that. Okay, I've got a different plan. Your very own son shall be your heir. Now this is a promise being made to Abram, which stands in stark contrast to the reality of his life. He's an old man, he doesn't have any kids, and God comes to him and says, no, a son from yourself is going to be your heir. And he brought him outside and he said, look towards heaven and number the stars, if you're able to number them. And he said to him, so shall your offspring be. Go outside and try to count the stars in the sky, which you can't. And the reality is, is that your offspring are going to be as numerous as what you can see in the sky. So shall your offspring be. So the The fear that Abram has of not being, of not having an heir, which seems like a rather parochial kind of problem, God comes and does something extraordinary and says, you're not going to have an heir from within your servants. You're going to have an heir from yourself, literally. Now, let me ask you a question. How real is this to Abram at this point? would be his response to that would be yours uh... yeah uh... you're kidding right uh... how you gonna do this uh... what's the deal here we we have a tendency to know to sterilize this a little bit because we're looking at it from to four thousand years later and say well yeah abraham was you know gabor and distrust of god but gotta put yourself try to put yourself in his position try to understand what we're dealing with here we're dealing with a man who is is past his prime his wife is past hers i mean okay menopause is in the rearview mirror here for this woman and you know it's not likely okay this is not a real possibility This is the kind of promise that's concrete in nature. It can be proven. In the sense that, think about it, the other promises, your descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sea. Abraham going to see that? He's not going to see that. He's going to die long before that's going to happen. I mean, it's going to be 400 years before the Israelites become a people of an innumerable number. And he's going to be long dead and gone. He's not going to see that. So God could come to Abram and say, I'm going to make your descendants as numerous as the stars and the sea, which is what he does, right? And Abram can go, OK, whatever. But this one about a son, now that's a different kind of matter. That's a matter of, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now that's something concrete that's going to really happen in my existence, in my life. Okay. So it's important for us to catch the weight of what it is that God says as it comes upon Abram. This would be Tan them out to a brick upside the head, all right? This is something like, boom! This is a reality that God says, I'm not going to make some sort of nebulous promise to you. I'm going to make a promise to you that can be quantifiably proven in your existence, in your life. I'm not going to make just some generic promise. I'm going to come and make a very clear, specific, provable, quantifiable, measurable promise in your life. God promises that. Now, all of this, of course, is coming out of this statement that God makes to him at the beginning of the chapter, and I want you to connect that. Fear not. I am your shield. Your reward shall be great. What is a reward? A reward is something you get for something you have done well or something that you have succeeded in or whatnot. In fact, the reward that you could you could argue is the reward is for what you did in the previous section. Now let's not forget that, the chapter break is a fake thing, okay? I've said this many times, the chapter breaks in the Bible aren't really there. Moses didn't include a big fat 15 at the beginning of these words, right? He's writing about the fact that Abram goes to this man, Melchizedek, gives him a tithe after having successfully conquered some enemies, having risked his men and his fortunes to go and do these things, and God comes to him and says, I'm gonna be your reward. In other words, this reward is not going to come out of what you're doing with the peoples around you, and even through what you're doing with Melchizedek, as important as that is. My reward, your reward, is going to be me. Notice the ontological way that it's put. I am your shield, and your reward shall be great. I'm your reward. What I am and who I am and what I'm doing is your reward. It isn't measured in silver and gold, it's measured in me. That's a very important thing for us to think about as believers. Our reward is not heaven, guys. Our reward is not some nebulous place where we have a mansion on some street made out of gold. That's not the reward. The reward is Christ himself. He is the reward. Being in his presence and being loved by him with an everlasting love and having the eternal joy of knowing who he is and what he has done, that's our reward. The problem that so many Christians have today, I think, is that they have this materialistic view of the end and so concerned about heaven in some sort of materialistic sense. that they forget about what they're really pursuing isn't that, they're pursuing Christ himself. Our reward is him, okay? We gotta get over this idea of the physical, and part of it's our own culture driving that into us, of the materialism and secularism that's all around us. It's driving that into us, and it's taking over the way we think. I don't really care about what heaven looks like. I wanna see Christ. I wanna see him face to face. look into his face and see him and see him look back at me and say, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what matters. All the rest is just, you know, all the rest is just extra. I've gone to prepare a place for you, but that place is me. I've gone to prepare a place for the place is me. What you want is me. And so it's important for us to think about that. That's what God is doing with Abram here. I'm gonna be a reward and I'm gonna make it real to you and that I'm gonna give you a son. I'm gonna give you a reward that is from me. In fact, I'm gonna do something so profound that it'll be obvious it's from me. You'll have no other way of, you'll have nothing else to do but to praise me for what happens. And we come to a verse, and again, one of the reasons why this chapter is so important, we come to a verse that the Apostle Paul quotes at least three times in his writings, and that's verse six. And he believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness. This is a statement of a declaration of something to him. Now, we call this justification. That's the word that Paul uses to describe what's happening here. God justifies Abraham. He gives to Abram a declaration. He declares something to be true about Abram. It's a legal or forensic declaration. It's a statement of fact which sits over Abram as a reality, okay? It's what Paul calls it is justification because it's a sense in which the man now stands before God in a legally upright state that irrespective of his natural condition he is viewed by God legally as being something else. All right, that's important for us to understand. God does not ignore our sin. He does not disguise it from himself. He doesn't hold his hands over his eyes and say, well, I'm not gonna see that he's a sinner. No, what he does is he looks directly at the fact that we are sinners and says, in spite of that, I'm going to call him, I'm going to declare him to be righteous. I'm going to say, this one is righteous. This one is now in my sight and to my perspective, covered with a righteousness from me, my righteousness. Okay. Because it's a legal declaration. It doesn't exist physically per se. It's a declaration. Therefore, it's from the very nature of God himself. And it's God saying, I'm going to give my righteousness. Now, what Paul does, of course, with it in the book of Romans is he takes this concept and says, It is what Christ has done which creates the righteousness that God places upon us. In other words, it's not some sort of, it's not an inherent righteousness in us. It's an alien righteousness to us. And what we mean by alien is that it's outside of us. It's a righteousness we do not possess. It's a righteousness we do not create or cannot create. It is a righteousness that Christ has created, and he created it by taking on sinful flesh. He took on flesh, not sinful flesh. He took on flesh. He took on our state, if you will. And he lived under his own law perfectly in order to stand before God and say, listen, I have done all that your law commands. There is a real righteousness established. It's not some sort of theory. It's real. Christ says, I have lived perfectly under the law to do what no one else could do. You will notice that all of the judgment slash condemnation statements in the New Testament all revolve around what we do. You notice that? They're all about what we do. We're going to be judged for what we do. Man will be judged for what we do. So our problem is that we need a doer who is able to do what we are incapable of doing, because what we need is a set of doings that God will say, ah, acceptable to me. and it's what Christ does in his life, which is the most overlooked part of his ministry. Have you ever noticed that? Everyone wants to talk about his death. Fine, good, but that death doesn't mean a thing if the life he lived wasn't creating the righteousness that could be applied in his death. So when Abram stood before God and said, I believe you, and God said, I'm declaring you righteous, it is the righteousness of Christ that's being placed upon him. Now, you say, but Christ hadn't come yet, he hadn't lived his life. But from God's perspective, who cares? God says, I am going to send my son, he is going to accomplish this righteousness, so I can apply this righteousness to you because it's just as real as if he had already come. In other words, this righteousness of Christ can come 2,000 years before Christ, as well as 2,000 years after. What's the difference? From God's perspective, all things are before him. So he can say, this Christ will come, has come, I've covenanted with him to come and create this righteousness. So we stand before God, as the reformers said, both sinful and righteous simultaneously. We stand before God, both sinful and righteous. Abraham was not made perfect here. He was still a sinner. He still had his doubts. He still had his problems. We're going to see it in 16. In fact, the very next chapter is written to demonstrate this. But yet, what did God do? God said, I've declared you to be righteous. He believed the Lord and he, that is God, counted it to him as righteousness. standing now fully righteous in his sight. And this is the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that Christ comes to take sinners and turn them into people who are righteous, to be righteous. And I was talking with somebody about this just this week. The goal of the Christian life is for us to live out what our nature really is. The goal of the Christian life is to live out what our nature really is. If we are, in fact, righteous in the sight of God, then our pursuit should be a life that matches up with that nature. Plain and simple. If our position before God is that he sees us as holy, then our pursuit should be holy. Our pursuit is not after that which makes us holy. We have that. Christ has done that. We can never pursue those things that will make us holy. What we must pursue is to live in accordance with our own nature. In other words, every time that we sin, after being declared righteous, we are living in direct contradiction to our very nature. We're living opposite of what we really are in the sight of God. So what the Spirit of God is doing in sanctification is he is simply conforming our outward nature to what our inward nature already is, holy and righteous in his sight. That's what the Spirit of God is doing. He is simply taking away all those things that are inconsistent with who we really are before our God, as we have been declared righteous in his sight. I may mention in the lesson of the five solas of the Reformation, sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, sola Christus, and sola Deo gloria, the idea that salvation, the salvation of the Lord is found in scripture alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. And in this particular case, the primary article and the primary article of the Reformation The restoration of the Reformation was to get people back to a place of saying, I'm going to trust in God for my righteousness, rather than pursuing it myself. Because this is the failure of religion, and this is the failure of the Catholic Church. The Church was teaching that it's what you do that makes you righteous before God. Now, I know there are a lot of Catholics that say, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm trusting in the grace of God. No, what you're trusting in is you're trusting in what the Church tells you to do. So you say you have faith, but the object of your faith is not the completed work of Christ. The object of your faith is what you do in relation to the ongoing work of Christ according to the church. It'll never produce a righteousness because it cannot. It has no basis in holiness. The fact is, is that those who truly understand the righteous of God understand it entirely by faith, trusting in what Christ has accomplished. My final trust is not in what I can do. I come before God with an empty hand of faith to stand before God and say, I believe only in one thing, what he did. This is why I can say, when I stand before God, God says, why should I let you into my heaven? My answer will be, Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I'll simply point to the one who will be standing next to me, by the way, advocating on my behalf. Him. In fact, I don't even think God's going to ask me. I think he's going to ask him. And this one is going to say, this one's mine. I paid for this one. He's not going to eat. What's that? He's not going to evangelism explosion? No, no, no. So the bottom line is Abraham trusted God in the midst of this. Now, where we go then is from this then, okay, God says, you believe me, you've trusting me. Now let's move forward from here. All right. So notice verse seven. And he said to him, that is God speaking to him, right? I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. Okay. In other words, what's he saying? I'm the God that brought you out of Ur. Now, why does he say that? It's exactly the same reason that God said to the Israelites standing at Mount Sinai, I'm the God that brought you out of Egypt. Notice, The parallel, okay? The idea is that I'm the God who did something and I'm God who brought you out of something to bring you to this particular place. And what's the goal of that statement? What's the goal of that statement every time it's said? The goal of that statement is for the people to go, yeah, yeah, you're right, you did that. And so we're supposed to listen to you now because you're the one who did this. In other words, God says to him, here's the proof. You already have enough roof in front of you that this is going to be the case. Now the implication then of verse seven is in contrast to verse six. Verse six says that Abram believed God, yet his belief was not yet pure in the sense that he could fully understand everything that God had said was going to happen. I mean, let's be honest. Abram's standing there and going, you know, I'm old, my wife is old, you promised me a son, so I'm gonna take you at your word. I'm just not sure how this is gonna work itself out. Does that imply he's doubting God? Well, not according to verse six. Because according to verse six, he believed God. So there's this sense, I think, that we often think that doubt is contrary to faith. And it doesn't have to be. Yes, I know there are cases where doubt can certainly be contrary to faith. But there's a sense within faith that faith is not always fully yet visible. in the sense that I don't know exactly what it is I'm believing in yet. I'm trusting you, but I'm going to need more to trust in as we go. God is, in other words, let me put it this way. God knows the weakness of the human heart, all right? He's not foolish. He does not go, okay, unless you believe in me perfectly, I'm not gonna save you. Such a thing would be preposterous because God knows that we live in sinful flesh. So God is not in the business of going, either you believe me absolutely without any doubt whatsoever. No, he's not in that case. He's not going to say that. He's going to say, let me take you on this journey of faith and grow that faith in you. I'm more than willing to help your weakness in this area. Because I know I'm asking you to do something far greater than you really have the ability to do in your flesh. I mean, the concept of absolutely trusting with ever doubting again? None of us ever get to that place. I mean, we've all, I mean, if we're honest with ourselves, we've all, at some point in the darkness, wondered whether or not we've really believed rightly and we've believed in the right way and in the right thing and all these sorts of things. Let's not make the mistake of doing what our charismatic friends do, which is say, well, you have to have perfect faith. No. God understands the weakness. So he's going to deal with Abraham's weaknesses here. Notice he doesn't chastise Abram. In fact, he goes even further along to say, let me help you understand this and let me help you believe. So let's be clear. Verse six is not a statement in which Abram believed God perfectly, therefore he was justified. No. He took that initial step of trusting in this God, and God said, I'm going to declare you to be righteous on the basis of that initial step, but I'm not going to be finished with you just because we had that initial moment. I've often said this is one of the biggest problems that we have in Baptist churches. We have this tendency to define faith as a one-time act. Walk down the aisle, say the prayer with the pastor, he pats you on the head with his popish little declaration, and you walk away, you're a believer now, and that's it, there's nothing more you need to do. Baloney! Okay, it's a life spun from hell. Because here's what it does, it hardens men against growing in faith. Our faith is a continuing action. We are trusting in this God, which is fascinating that John 3, 16, for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believeth, or whosoever believeth, should be translated, whoever is continuing to believe. That's how it should be translated. The word pistis in that particular verse is a continuing action verb. Not a one-time action verb. It's those who are continuing to believe, who maintain a continuation. So what you see started in verse seven is God coming to Abraham and saying, let me grow that faith in you. You've made that initial step. You've trusted me in the first thing. You haven't got a clue, and I'm sure you've got a lot of questions in your mind. Good for you. Let's work on that. I'm gonna continue to show you how this works out. Hi, I'm Wayne. Yeah, exactly, yeah. See you 100 years from now. Right. There's building going on there, that's right. And so that's what's going on here. There's not a sense of doubt per se, there's a sense of building of the faith, which includes, of course, moments of doubt, some moments of failure, some moments of, I'm not so sure. Some moments of Sarah coming and saying, hey, see my handmaiden here? Right? And Abraham going, okay. There's work going on here. That's important for us. And to me, I find that very helpful because, to be frank, I struggle with these things. I struggle with understanding all this stuff and fully trusting in this God. And the older you get, as you get closer to your own mortality, you see some of those things come out even more. But you go back and you look at passages like this, and the Lord is showing a man like Abram, who he declares to be righteous, right? And Paul uses a great example of such, and yet, what does he do? He says, I'm gonna help you. What does he do? Bring me a heifer, three years old, a female goat, three years old, a ram, three years old, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon, okay? And Abram brings these, he cuts them in half, and he lays each half over against the other. And when the birds of the prey came, he sort of drove them away. God says, all right, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give an object lesson here. Here's what I'm gonna do. Go get me some animals out of your store and bring them, and I'm gonna show you something. I'm gonna help build this faith in you. I'm gonna help build this faith. So as the sun is going down, it says, a deep sleep fell on Abram. Now we've had, at the beginning of the chapter, we have a vision. And now we have a different kind of vision. So what I can't tell is where these visions overlap. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that when he goes and gets these animals, he's awake, okay? Because he goes and he gets them, he cuts them in half, he puts them out, so there's a sense of awakeness, a sense of awareness, and then he falls into a deep sleep. But it's almost as though the whole chapter is somewhat of a time of Abraham entering into this sort of vision state where he's communing with God in a more direct sense, kind of like, When Isaiah walked into the presence of God in Isaiah 6, he's there. And yet he's not really there. I mean, it's a vision, right? No one goes into the literal presence of God and survives it. So Isaiah is kind of there. I think it's the same sort of thing here. There's a half in and half out of this here. Okay. Bring me these animals, okay, so this deep sleep falls upon him, okay? Now, look at verses 13 and 14. Then the Lord said to Abraham, all right, so now here's God speaking again. Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for 400 years, but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. Okay, let's stop there for a moment. Now notice this is all future tense. Has to do with the people of Israel at some point in the future. Now why does God give these words to Abram? Is Abram going to be a part of any of what God just said in those two verses? Is he gonna go to Egypt? He's gonna be dead long before they go to Egypt. His descendants are gonna do it. So what's the point of God putting that statement before him? And the answer is simple. God's saying, let me show you how detailed this is going to be in order to confirm what I've said to you about you having a son. You're going to have a son. And that son is going to turn you into a nation. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put those people into another land. In fact, in fact, you know what? I'm going to put them there for 400 years. And you know what? After 400 years, I'm gonna bring a bunch of afflictions upon this nation to drive them out of that particular place. Notice the specificity of it. The specificity of the promise is designed to produce faith in Abraham. Abraham would go, okay, okay, so this isn't just some nebulous sun promise you're making me. This is a real sort of promise based on events that will take place in the future. It's designed to say to Abraham, I'm going to accomplish this in very specific terms. Now, of course, we know how this turned out, right? Now, who's reading the book? The very people who are being described in these two verses. What's Moses' purpose of including it? to say to them, listen, you are the progeny of the man to whom these promises are made. You are the children of Abraham. But you're not just the children of Abraham. You're the children of the Creator. He gave the Son to this man through a promise that he made to him. You are the destiny, I'm sorry, you're the ancestry of that promise. Therefore, read verse 6 and do what Abram did, which was trust God. The whole point for the Israelites is trust God and be righteous in his sight by virtue of trust. The idea that the Israelites lived under a different expectation from God, that they lived in a different era, thus they lived in a different expectation is utterly false. Schofield couldn't have been more wrong. when he said that the dispensation of the day of Moses was a dispensation of people living under law, and God accepted them by the keeping of the law. That is utterly wrong, and most fundamentalists, most dispensationalists have excused his perspective now, because they know that's wrong. The fact of the matter is, the Israelites were being told by Moses in a very not so subtle way here, I think, your relationship to the living God is exactly the same as the relationship that Abram did. Your righteousness before this God is based on your trust in him, just as his righteousness before God was based on his trust in him. In other words, all generations of human beings stand before their God, righteous in his sight, by one means only. that one means is to take him at his word. To take him at his word. To believe him when he says, I am the Lord. I brought you out of Ur. I am the Lord. I brought you out of Edom, Egypt. I am the Lord. I brought you out of sin and slavery and death. Trust me. Will you trust me? That's really fundamentally what the gospel is. The gospel is a question. Will you trust in what God has promised to do through what Christ has accomplished. Yes or no? Very simply, yes or no? Because that's what Paul means in Romans 10 when he says you're to call upon the name of the Lord. What I'm doing is I'm calling on the name of the Lord in the sense that I'm saying, okay God, you have a name, your name is trustworthy, you have made promises, I'm gonna believe you. I'm gonna believe you. The basis of all of our relationship with God is simply to trust Him, to believe Him. This is why Adam fell. He did not, in fact, trust the word of the Lord. What did God say to him? On the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. And Adam goes, I don't believe that. I'm not gonna die. Serpent said, you shall not die. Has God really said? Notice how the serpent put it. Has God really said these things? The doubt wasn't in whether you're gonna die. The doubt was in the word of God. And that's the foundational problem that humanity has. Can we believe what God says, yes or no? And that's what confronts us. Are we willing to stand and listen and hear our creator and believe him? So when God writes, when God says these things to Abram, he's bringing greater faith to Abram in a specific way. He's bringing ultimately faith to these Israelites. And you and I, standing back and looking at it 4,000 years later, we're being challenged with exactly the same thing. Will you believe what God has said or not? That's it. That's the fundamental question. I will bring 15. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried in a good old age. He makes a promise to him and says, look, you're not going to die in battle, in war. I'm going to make your life, I'm gonna give you a certain sense of safety for the rest of your life. You're gonna die in peace. You're gonna live to a good old age and be buried here in this land, okay? The fact is that Abram hears all of this and it's all designed to come to him from God and God to say to him, hey, your life is mine, okay? So you trust me, okay? I'm gonna take care of you, I'm gonna protect you. I can't help but think, by the way, that as I read these words, that Abram's fear could very well be that those kings that he attacked to get back Lot may be plotting because they're not going to take it lying down. Remember, he took their stuff. He conquered them. In a sense, he became king over that territory by a military conquest. So he might be thinking to himself, yeah, I'm a sitting duck up here. God says to him, don't worry. I've got you protected. And I think that's exactly what he's saying to the Israelites. He's saying, listen, I've got you protected. You're going to go into Canaan. You're going to go in there, and there's going to be enemies there. And I know what your fear is going to be. Oh, we can't go in there. There's giants in the land. In fact, I would argue that this book was probably written after Caleb and Joshua come back and say, we can do it. And the other guys go, uh-uh. And Moses says, I want you to be reminded of what God said to Abram. God said to Abram, I'm gonna take care of you. And the same promise is coming to you Israelites. God's gonna take care of you. Stop being afraid. Step up and do what God has called you to do. He's going to protect you in the process. And is it fair to say that we have exactly the same promise? What is God going to do? He's going to protect us. Now what's he gonna protect us from? He's going to protect us from falling away, from being taken over by the enemy. God has promised to preserve us. We call it the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints or preservation of the saints. God has not only decided to draw us to Christ, but he's also decided to keep us in Christ. I will be your protection. I'm going to stand behind you. Now he hasn't promised us the same thing he promises here, that you're going to die at a good old age. That promise cannot be extended because you'll notice specifically it says, but for you, but as for you. So he's speaking directly to Abram. But there's a principle behind it and the principle is, I'm going to protect you. I'm going to take care of you. You trust me and I'm going to work it out. So these promises are being extended as not only to Abram, but they're being extended in a general way to all that will come, okay? And then verse 16. And they, now who's the they? Well, the they has to be what's spoken of back in 13 and 14, the people who will be going off into this sojourning for 400 years. They will come back here in the fourth generation, in the fourth generation. for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. Now that's a funny statement stuck on the end. What does that mean? The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. What does that have to do with anything that God is speaking to Abram about here? What is this iniquity? Now let's remember that Abram is living now about 600 years before the Exodus. Based on the timelines that we can draw out of the book of Genesis, it's likely that Abram entered into Canaan around 2000 BC. The Israelites came out of Egypt around 1400, 1440 give or take, this book written around 1400 BC. So there's about 600 years between these two times. And so the Amorites, you remember, are a native people that are living in this territory. These Amorites had no knowledge of the living God. God had not made himself known to the Amorites. He had not revealed himself to the Amorites. He had allowed the Amorites to continue to go down the path that they were going. He allowed them to continue to be what they were, which was, by nature, rebels against him and people who did all sorts of wicked things. Now, what God is doing, in essence, is allowing the Amorites to continue to exist even in the midst of their sin, in their sinfulness. But there's going to come a point when their sinfulness becomes so great that they must be eliminated. And the objection, of course, that you get from many non-believing people as they look at the Bibles, they say, well, your God is some bloodthirsty, genocidal God who kills off entire nations and actually demands that these Israelites, by the way, who are going to come out, to take care of these Amorites. You know, they're just some bloodthirsty people and your God is a bloodthirsty God. The response to that is to understand what is being said here in this context. God is saying there's two tracks here. The one track is the track of a people who belong to me. They're going to know me. They're going to be protected by me. Which means they're going to be righteous in my sight by virtue of being my people. Now, of course, if they really would trust in me, they would be fully righteous individually. But corporately, as a people, they're going to be my people. I'm going to set them aside to myself. This is the promise out of one leg coming out of Abraham. But there's another promise coming out of the leg of Abraham. And that is that God also is passing over another set of people. He's passing over the Amorites. He's not specifically going to them with his grace and with his mercy. And what you have here is the distinction that we talked about on Wednesday night, which is the distinction between the people who are elect and the people who are reprobate. The elect are those who receive specifically the grace of God, salvific grace, a special grace of which God actually considers them and draws them to himself. But what he does with the rest of humanity is he simply allows them to continue on their way. The illustration that I use with someone in the hallway afterwards is, It's like all of humanity is in a river, flowing down this river, unable to get out of the river, and it's going off to destruction. And God is choosing, out of His grace, to pull some from that river of destruction. Not because of something inherently good within them, but because of His own particular purposes of taking this one, and this one, and this one, and simply allowing the rest to continue on. The Amorites are the reprobate. They are being allowed to continue on. But there will come a point when their evil will be dealt with. Now, in this case, in terms of the Amorites, it'll be, of course, when the Israelites show up and God will say, through Saul, get rid of these. Terminate them completely. Kill them off entirely and take all their stuff, eradicate them from the face of the earth. And the reason why is because they're dangerous. What they are doing is infectious and when it infects the whole of humanity, there's, this is what we would call an extinction level event. The very kinds of evil that the Amorites perpetuated through time, and they're being used by the way, it's just a consummate example here, but they're, the kind of evil that they perpetuated is the kind of thing that could be fatal to the human race. When you decide that child sacrifice and human sacrifice becomes normal, what happens to a race of people? It doesn't last. What happens to a race of humans when the entire, imagine if the entire human race embraced child and human sacrifice? We're doomed. This is a purging of something from within this world that needed to be done, not unlike what God did with the flood. purging away evil, saving one particular family in order to sort of restart, if you will. The Amorites are a picture of the reprobate. God allows them to continue, but only to a point. And then at that point, his judgment strikes. So we might be sitting here going, when is God going to act? I mean, this is not what the prophets often asked, right? This is not what Amos asked. When, when, oh God, will your judgment fall? When will you finally take care of the enemies? When will you finally take care of the evil? God says, in my timing, my judgment will fall. and all of what is sinful will be dealt with. So what we need is to be sure that we are on the side of Abraham, not on the side of the Amorites. So we need to be trusting in this God and following after him. Now the good news is that God reveals himself to those that he is expecting them to trust. He never gave the Amorites an opportunity. He never gave them an opportunity. So I say to my Armenian friends, as well-meaning as they are when it comes to the idea that God allows everyone an equal opportunity to come to faith, the fact of the matter is the Amorites never had any such opportunity. The Amorite people never knew who this God was, and they were never given an opportunity to believe. Oh, I know what Paul says in Romans 1, that all creation cried out for the reality of this God, but that became their judgment, not their promise. They had no revelation from God. But the Amharts were living with that. I mean, they could see Abraham and know that, what? Maybe. There's some kind of faith. Something's going on with this guy. Yeah. He defeats all these kings. Correct. Has all these stock. Right. But it didn't. But it wasn't a direct revelation from God. It was a secondary, and probably exactly what Paul is arguing in Romans 1, that they should have known better. They should have looked and said, ha ha. But their hearts were hardened and darkened, and thus they were unable to do so. OK. So all of these statements that you see basically between verse 7 and verse 16 are designed to strengthen Abram's faith, establish the basis upon which a relationship with God is built, to nudge or encourage the Israelites to follow the same path, and ultimately to lay the groundwork for the gospel, which is precisely the same thing for us. Notice all of what's being done in those verses is exactly the same, is all of those things. And I think it's one of the reasons at the beginning of this lecture that I said that these are probably the three most significant chapters in the book of Genesis, because here it is in chapter 15 that you have the closest parallel to the gospel itself. Because you even have a statement, as I said, that Paul uses in the New Testament to describe it. Now you come into verse 17. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. There's a sense of darkness that comes down upon, darkness that passes over Abraham. And I've often wondered what this darkness is. You see it in verse 12. It says that a great darkness fell upon him. He fell into this deep sleep. So verse 17 is simply reflecting this darkness. There's this sense of lack of light. Our problem is we have a tendency to think of God primarily as light, right? We think of God in the sense of a radiance, a glory, often pictured as a light, the light of revelation. We talk about Jesus as the light of the world, bringing knowledge and understanding of the things of God. That's what he means by that. And so we have this picture of a brightness in God. The other sense of darkness is also brought to bear in scripture as reflecting the sense of God as utterly holy and distinct. Darkness is a picture, when it's used of God, of a great dread darkness falling, is a darkness of the fact that God is utterly holy and separate, unique, and that there's none like him. And so the picture of darkness is not to be pictured as a negative. We think of darkness as a negative because we associate darkness with sinfulness. And often that's the metaphor that's used. But when God himself becomes a great darkness, the great darkness is this idea of separation because that's exactly what darkness is, isn't it? It is a separation of light. There's no light in that place, so it's a separation of something. And that's what holiness is. Holiness is an utter separation of God from anything that would be contrary to his nature as God. So in other words, the entire universe and everything in it. So this sense of darkness is this idea of the utter perfection and the utter holiness of God. It's a dread, because we do dread the darkness, don't we? I mean, you know, little kids are afraid of the dark because, you know, it's a fearful kind of thing. We can't see in it, and we don't know what's lurking, and all those sorts of things. And so there's this sense in darkness of this cringing of fear, and that's right. That's right. Because we should fear the holiness of God. We should be in absolute terror of the holiness of God. Because God is so perfect and so great, and we are so not, that we cannot coexist in the presence of a holy God. We will be consumed. You have this picture of fire, for example, consuming, right? Fire is the picture of God consuming holiness. But fire has this sense of darkness in the Old Testament as well as the New, as well as light. Sure, fire brings light, so it brings revelation. And in those days when you didn't have electric light bulbs, fire was the means by which you produced light so you could see. But that didn't produce a very good light, did it? you know didn't produce this kind of brightness it produced a sort of a flickering uh... light in that you see all these pictures of you know eighteenth and nineteenth century america with you know little torches and so forth and it's always seems rather dark even when there's lots of them around that's the picture it's a picture of this dread holiness of god this dread reality that god is holy and he is a consuming fire and he is His presence is so great that he destroys anything that comes into his presence. He comes as a smoking fire pot. He comes as a flaming torch. He comes into the presence of Abraham as holy. Utterly holy. Utterly separate from anything that is evil. But that's good. Because he's bringing his holiness to bear upon this promise that he's made. How do we know that God is going to keep his word? The answer is his utter holiness, his absolute moral perfections, which means he cannot lie. He cannot have the weaknesses of humanity. He cannot hide. truth. He cannot lie. He cannot exaggerate. He cannot stretch the truth. He cannot speak that which is not absolutely and utterly true. So when he comes to Abram and says, I'm going to do this. I'm going to give you a son. I'm going to give you a nation. It's the darkness of this and the fire that makes this real. It's this picture of God himself walking between the animals, the cut animals, His holiness passing between them. And it's though, and this fits with the with the Suzerain covenants of those days, may it be done to me what is done to these animals if my word does not come true. That's the holiness of God walking through there. That's the holiness of God, the absolute perfection of God stepping through and showing Abraham a picture of that. And I'm convinced that the darkness that fell upon the earth when Christ was on the cross was the holiness of God falling down upon the earth. It wasn't the sinfulness of man. Why did it become dark all of a sudden? The holiness of God coming down to say this sacrifice has accomplished what my holiness demands. And so for a few visible, for a few moments in time, there was this sense of God's holiness appearing in Christ. Because this is precisely what Christ has come to do. To make us holy. To make us righteous. Right? Do you think it's also a prophecy of the Passover? Well, that's all the symbolism in it, yeah, sure. Death comes, yeah, all that stuff, exactly. That's all the symbolism in it, right. But that all stems from one specific thing, and that being the very nature of God and His holiness. Why are the Amorites deserving of death? It's because God is holy. It's not because they've sinned. It's because He's holy. Why is it that Abraham is being given this promise? Is it because Abraham deserves something? No, it's because God is holy. Why is it that we've been declared righteous in the sight of God? Is it because we've done something? No, it's because God is holy. It's the holiness of God that stands at the forefront of this picture. So, Abraham comes and says, I'm going to give, God comes to Abraham and says, I'm going to give to you this land from the river of Egypt and all the other places and all these other peoples, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do all these things out of my holiness. So it's part of the whole picture of us understanding, it's part, the whole picture of us understanding what the gospel is all about. The gospel of Jesus Christ isn't about, as I said earlier, isn't about getting us to heaven. The gospel of Jesus Christ is about God making a people holy, separating them from all which is evil and bringing them to himself as a people that can stand in his presence without being destroyed. That's what he's doing. He's making us into a people that are holy. And that's why we must pursue holiness. That's why he says in Leviticus 11, 44, be holy for I am holy. The chief command given in the law isn't don't commit adultery. The chief command in the law is be holy as I am holy. And what the law is designed to do is to drive men to their knees before a holy God and say, I cannot keep this law and be holy. You must give me holiness. And that's what Christ comes to do. To create that holiness for us in that perfect life that he lived, and then to give us that holiness in faith, and then to be held in that holiness and grown in that holiness by the Spirit in life, and then brought into his presence perfect and holy in his sight. That's the key matter. So we gotta, when we teach in the church, we must teach our people, listen, it isn't just about being morally good. That's not the expectation. The expectation is a thousand times higher than that. It's holiness. It's separateness from sin. But the good news is, is that in Christ, the good news is, is for Abraham, I simply need to trust God for this holiness. It's not from me, it's from him. That's the good news. So, is the gospel prevalent in Genesis 15? You betcha. Because it's all about who this God is. Remember, the gospel is not about us. It's about Him. It's about who He is. This chapter is all about what God is doing. It's all about what God has said. It's all about what God has promised. And so we just simply need to fall back into His arms in faith, believe Him, and let Him declare us holy and righteous and draw Him to Himself. So, gentlemen, let's go live like we are. God sees us holy. Let's go be holy, for He is holy.