Abraham and the Covenant: Believing God's Impossible Promise

Today's Scripture

Genesis 15 contains the verse Paul called the foundation of the gospel — and one of the strangest ceremonies in the Bible. Read the whole chapter; these verses carry its weight.

Genesis 15:1 — "After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: 'Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.'"

Genesis 15:5-6 — "And he brought him outside and said, 'Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.' Then he said to him, 'So shall your offspring be.' And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness."

Hebrews 6:17-18 — "So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us."

The Big Idea

Abraham believed God's impossible promise, and God counted that trust as righteousness — full acceptance, right standing, nothing owed. Then God sealed the promise with a ceremony in which he alone took the oath while Abraham slept. Today is about the Bible's most freeing idea: your relationship with God rests on his faithfulness to you, not your performance for him.

Reflection

An honest doubter under the stars

Genesis 15 opens with God speaking comfort: "Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great" (Genesis 15:1). And Abram — the great hero of faith — answers with something close to a complaint. Genesis 15:2-3 — "O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless...? Behold, you have given me no offspring." Translation: Lord, the promise is years old, I am still old, and the nursery is still empty. What good is "great reward" to a man with no heir?

Stop and notice what kind of believer Abram is. He does not fake serenity. He brings his doubt directly to God, by name, out loud. And God does not scold him for it. Faith in the Bible is not the absence of hard questions; it is the habit of carrying them to the right address.

God's response is not an argument but a view. He takes the old man outside the tent, under the desert night: "Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them... So shall your offspring be" (Genesis 15:5). Abram stands there, neck craned, counting until counting fails. God reframes the size of the problem with the size of the Promiser.

Then comes the sentence the rest of the Bible never stops quoting. Genesis 15:6 — "And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness."

The verse underneath the gospel

"Righteousness" is a churchy word, so let's define it: being counted fully right with God — accepted, approved, nothing held against you. Every religion on earth has a theory of how you get it. Climb. Perform. Improve. Offset your bad with enough good. Genesis 15:6 announces something else entirely: Abram believed, and God counted it to him as righteousness. Not earned. Credited — the way a deposit lands in an account from someone else's funds.

Paul saw that this one verse undercuts every ladder humans have ever built. Romans 4:3 — "For what does the Scripture say? 'Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.'" Notice when this happened: before Abraham's greatest acts of obedience, before circumcision, before Mount Moriah, centuries before the law of Moses existed. Right standing with God came first, by trust alone. Everything else grew out of it.

This is the discovery that turned Martin Luther's world — and then Europe — upside down:

"Faith is a living, daring confidence in God's grace, so sure and certain that the believer could stake his life on it a thousand times." — Martin Luther, Preface to the Epistle to the Romans

Notice that for Luther, faith is not crossing your fingers. It is confidence in a person's grace — sure enough to bet your life on. John Calvin defined it with a watchmaker's precision:

"Faith is a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Read that slowly. Faith is knowledge of God's benevolence — his kindness toward you — founded on a freely given promise. Abram under the stars had exactly that and nothing else. No track record. No law kept. Just a promise, and a God who makes them.

Be careful, though, not to turn faith itself into a new kind of work — as if God rewards us for the quality of our believing. Faith saves only because of what it holds on to. Charles Spurgeon made the point unforgettable:

"It is not thy hold of Christ that saves thee; it is Christ. It is not thy joy in Christ that saves thee; it is Christ. It is not even faith in Christ, though that be the instrument; it is Christ's blood and merit." — Charles Spurgeon

A weak hand can hold a strong rope. What matters is not the strength of your grip but the strength of what you are gripping.

Was Abraham's faith perfect after this? Hardly — next chapter he is taking shortcuts with Hagar. Yet Paul can still write, Romans 4:20-21 — "No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised." Faith is not a flawless feeling. It is a direction of trust that keeps recovering its footing — because its footing is God.

The night God walked alone

Then Genesis 15 gets strange. Abram asks, "How am I to know?" — and God answers with a ceremony. Animals are cut in two and laid in halves with a path between them. This was the ancient world's most serious contract signing. The parties would walk between the pieces, and the walk meant: may what happened to these animals happen to me if I break my word. The prophet Jeremiah describes exactly this custom: Jeremiah 34:18 — "the covenant that they made before me, I will make them like the calf that they cut in two and passed between its parts."

A covenant — another old word worth defining — is a binding relationship sealed by promises, stronger than a contract, more like a marriage than a deal. So here is the question: who walks between the pieces?

Genesis 15:17-18 — "When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram." Fire and smoke are God's calling cards — think of the burning bush, the pillar of fire. God walks the path of death. Alone. Abram is asleep on the ground, contributing nothing but unconsciousness.

Let the picture sink in. God binds himself with an oath that says: may I be torn apart if this covenant fails — and he does not require Abram to take the same oath. The whole arrangement rests on one party's faithfulness. The writer of Hebrews says this was the point: God "guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we... might have strong encouragement" (Hebrews 6:17-18).

Tim Keller spent his ministry showing how this one-way covenant separates the gospel from every other operating system:

"Religion operates on the principle 'I obey — therefore I am accepted by God.' But the operating principle of the gospel is 'I am accepted by God through what Christ has done — therefore I obey.'" — Tim Keller, The Reason for God

Religion makes you walk the path of death and hope you do it well enough. The gospel says God already walked it for you. Acceptance comes first; obedience grows out of it — the fruit, never the root. Augustine said the same thing fourteen centuries earlier:

"Grace is given not because we have done good works, but in order that we may be able to do them." — Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter

The covenant kept at the cross

But a one-sided covenant raises a dark question. Abram's descendants — and we — would break faith. Lies, idols, shortcuts, rebellion: the human half of every covenant ends up in pieces. If God swore "may I be torn if this fails," what happens when we are the ones who fail?

The New Testament's answer is Good Friday. At the cross, the covenant-making God took the covenant-breaker's penalty — torn, in the dark, while the people he loved slept or scattered. The smoking fire pot that passed between the pieces was a preview. God kept both sides of the covenant at the cost of his own Son. That is why Paul can promise, Galatians 3:26 — "for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith."

Sons and daughters — not just acquitted defendants. J.I. Packer insists we not stop short of this:

"Adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Justification gets you out of the courtroom; adoption gets you into the family. The covenant God cut with Abram under the stars ends with you at the Father's table.

So tonight, if you can, do what Abram did: go outside and look up. Every star is still preaching the same sermon. The God who made them makes promises — and he has never once needed his people's strength to keep them. Horatius Bonar taught the church to sing where that leaves us:

"Not what my hands have done can save my guilty soul; not what my toiling flesh has borne can make my spirit whole." — Horatius Bonar, 'Not What My Hands Have Done'

Not your hands. His. That is the covenant. Believe the LORD — and it is counted to you as righteousness.

Going Deeper

Tonight, step outside and find the stars (even two or three through city haze will do). Stand there for two full minutes — longer than feels natural — and name to God the one promise of his that you have the hardest time believing. Then say Genesis 15:6 out loud, slowly, with your own name in it: "______ believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness." Let the night sky do what it did for Abram: shrink the doubt by enlarging the Promiser.