FATHER ABRAHAM (pt. 3)

“I do not think that any human mind can ever grasp the fullness of meaning of these four words, ‘I am thy reward.’ God himself, the reward of his faithful people” (Charles Spurgeon).

When we bring our doubts, God reveals His promise

Just as God walked that aisle alone in the darkness in Genesis, it points directly to a darker afternoon centuries later on a hill called Calvary.

Our assurance doesn’t rest on our perfection; it rests on Jesus

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You're listening to the New Beginnings Church podcast from Delaware, Ohio. To learn more about New Beginnings Church, visit us online at DelawareNewBeginnings.com. Today's message is from Pastor David Porth.

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We're in our third week of talking about Abraham, where we are talking about specific pieces of his life and how it still is relevant and pertains to us, and even how we see it work throughout Scripture. And we're going to see that in the New Testament today, and how it kind of works out under symbolism and how we can see it. But our main theme for this, for this series, is this faith is in a straight line of perfect performance. It's a messy journey of relying entirely on God's grace. Anyone have a messy week? Yeah, we can ask that every Sunday, and I'm hoping everybody raises their hands. It may not feel messy, but compared to perfection, we're a mess. And that's what church is. We're a bunch of messy people, and that's okay. Uh, because we are moving on to perfection. How many of you have ever signed a contract? We we know you have, Kevin. I had to sign that contract too when I went to the Air Force. Uh how many of us have bought a house? Right? You had to sign the contract. How many of us have cell phones? You have to sign the contract. Everything we do anymore, we have to sign the contract. We can even go to the doctor's office, and guess what you do? You sign a contract promising to pay for services given. Why do we do that? Well, when you look at all the legal stuff and all the fine print, we do that basically because of this mutual suspicions. Right? We're suspicious of each other. How many of us trust everybody totally anymore? So we have contracts. We get bound to those contracts. Uh and there's consequences to breaking those contracts because we don't trust each other anymore. If I break my end of a deal, if I break my end of a contract, there are consequences. In America, we call that it's time to sue. How many times do we hear that? I'm suing someone because they broke the contract. I want you to think about contracts more than paper and items. I want you to think about it relationally. What do you think of when we say relationally and contracts or covenants? Marriage. This is why Jesus says, we are the bride. We are married to him relationally. I mean, let's think about marriage a second. Even if you get married outside of the church and you go to the JOP, the justice of the peace, people think, oh, I don't have it's not like a binding contract in the church. No, it is. Because what they say, what we have to say when we officiate any wedding is do you take, which is the same thing as do you promise, do you covenant? Uh we'll say, repeat after me. These are all signs of a covenant that two sides are having. Yet it feels like covenants are broken more and more today. At least it feels that way than ever, but I think covenants have always been broken. Oh, we can just read the Bible and see how covenants are broken throughout the Old Testament and even some places in the New Testament when people go out. During the Old Testament, though, you didn't call a lawyer, you didn't call Shadrach, Meshach, Abendago, and associates. You like the little fire background I put on there for you guys? My little subtle jokes. Right? They didn't call and say, hey, we're gonna sue these people. Uh in the Old Testament, even the New Testament, they didn't email and say, you have to docusign this. You know, you can sign for all your stuff before you go into your appointment now. No, you know what they did? They said, grab a couple animals. Grab a couple animals. We're gonna have an Old Testament covenant. Now, just a little warning, this might be a little gross, so I won't get into too much detail. But they they did what that was called cutting the covenant, which was this that they would take animals, they would cut them in half, and they would lay them parallel to each other down an aisle to make an aisle. And then both people of the party would walk together down the aisle, reciting the covenant together. You know why they did that? Because basically they're saying this if I were to break my my part of the covenant, may the same bloodshed that we are walking through right now happen to me. That's pretty serious. Why don't you think a second? We talked about marriage. Side note, you see any similarities with marriage? Besides the bloody animals. You walk down an aisle. In-laws, outlaws, however you want to look at them. Right? You had one family, one family. You're walking together, or you're up together on the aisle making a covenant. We got some things that go back and forth yet from the Old Testament that we use still in today's thing, in today's society. This is the backdrop to our Abram encounter today. Understanding this cutting the covenant. And so let's let's talk about Abram today. We're gonna be in Genesis chapter 15. If uh uh you use the study that we put in the bulletin, you'll read the two chapters in between where we were last week to kind of get you ready for this week. Um, but let me just kind of summarize it here really quick. First week we talked about God calling Abraham to a land that he wouldn't know about. He would know he was there when God got him there. And Abram went. Last week we talked about how Abram got to this promised land where God sent him, and a famine came, and Abram decided he was gonna leave in order to save himself and the family, which created a mess, which then created another mess with his wife Sarai. We're not gonna get into that whole story. Um, but what ended up happening was him getting kicked out, him and his family kicked out of Egypt and going back to where God sent them. Now, in between then and what we're gonna talk about now, uh Abram and his his nephew Lot, their herds have grown so big that they had to split up. Because if you have too many, too many livestock in one area, what happens? It just tears up the ground. So Lot goes towards Sodom, Abram stays in Canaan. Well, and in the next chapter, chapter 14, there comes this like regional war where Sodom, the king of Sodom, is captured. Lot is living in Sodom, so he's captured. So Abram takes 318 men, puts on his best Chuck Norris outfit, and he goes and defeats this army, rescues Lot, and rescues Sodom. No laughs with the Chuck Norris joke, I see. 318 men, you're gonna beat a whole army. And then the king wants to give Abram all these treasures, and Abram says no, which is interesting because last week he got in trouble because he was trying to save himself to get treasures. Learned a little lesson there. Which now brings us to this time in Genesis chapter 15, after Lot's rescue, that God comes to him and he gives his promise. Uh, let's read the first six verses here, Genesis 15, 1 through 6. I'm reading from the NIV. After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision. Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward. But Abram said, Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remained childless? And the one you who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus. And Abraham said, You have given me no children, because this was a promise from God, if you remember. You have given me no children, so a servant in my household will be my heir. Then the word of the Lord came to him. He took him outside and said, Look up at the sky and count the stars, if indeed you can count them. Then he said, So shall your offspring be. Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness. Well, let's think about this first part here. This begins with God giving Abram a promise that he will be his shield and his very great reward. So think about this promise. What would be God as a shield? His protector. You know, that God's God's gonna let you know, everything that God wants happen is gonna happen. He's gonna protect it, but also his reward. Let that just sink in a little bit, that God's gonna become his reward. Reward for faithfulness is a relationship with God. Charles Spurgeon says this. I do not think that any human mind can ever grasp the fullness of meaning of these four words. I am thy reward. God Himself, the reward of his faithful people. So many times the rewards that we want are earthly rewards. We saw this last week with Sarai. Well, tell him you're my sister, and I'm gonna get these rewards. Well, now God's promising I'm gonna be your great reward. My relationship is going to be your great reward. There's nothing that compares to me as your great reward. And what's what's Abram's response? Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit? And the one who will inherit my state is Eliezer. He's got a little bit of a crisis of faith again. He's basically asking, God, I want you to give me proof. I want you to give me proof that this is gonna happen. Because I'm still childless. You you you promised me a child, and I'm still childless, and because I'm childless, if my wife is barren, the law says, their tradition says, that the servant becomes the heir, which means the heir doesn't become isn't blood related. And so Abram has a little bit of crisis of faith or worry or whatever you might might think, uh, however you might think he's feeling, because I can think how he feels, going, wait a minute, this isn't right. Something doesn't feel right here. So does God scold him? Does God send him away going, oh, there you go again? I just promised you being your shield and your great reward, and you're asking for proof. No, instead, he gives him grace and he gives him a promise. Look at the sky, count the stars, if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be. Friends, when we doubt, when we doubt, we bring our doubts to God. And when we bring our doubts to God and we sit in scripture and we sit in prayer and we come together and we congregate together and we pray with each other and we love each other, God reveals his promise. The promise that was and the promise that is to come. And that's what God is doing here is in the doubt of Abram, God is revealing his promise. For us, our great reward is salvation through Jesus Christ. And so Abram believed. He believed the Lord. Remember what it says here. Abram believed the Lord and he credited to him as righteousness. Abram believed and it was credited to him as righteousness. Here's a fun fact: this is the first time in Scripture that the words believed and righteousness is used in the Bible, and they're used together, which is huge in the faith life of Paul. Paul writes it four times, three times in Romans chapter four. He talks about Abram and his faith and faith being credited to uh for his righteousness, also in Galatians chapter three. This is our Wesleyan theology to its core. This should be Christianity to its core. That we, being sinners, can't save ourselves, but it is by faith through Jesus that we are credited as righteous. Abram believed God, and God saw it as righteousness. It wasn't something Abram did to be righteous, but it was by faith that he was righteous, not by a perfect performance, because Abram's doubting God. He has a crisis of faith, and yet because he believes, God says, Ah, righteousness. You have been made righteous through faith. It is by grace we are saved through faith. Not of ourselves. It is a gift of God, not by work, so that no one can boast. This is a core of our Christianity. This is a core belief of who God is and the grace of Jesus Christ. And yet, as we look at the story of Abraham and maybe even the story of our lives, it's one thing to believe in the promise with the backdrop of a starry sky. But it's another thing when it gets serious. And God wants a covenant. God wants your heart. God wants you to believe and have faith in only Him. Have you ever prayed for a sign? Anybody ever prayed for a sign? God, if I just had a sign, I could make this decision so much easier. God, if I just get a sign. I prayed that a lot when we were discerning for me moving here. Alright, God, I'm not, I know I'm not supposed to pray this, but give me a sign because I don't know what to do. All right, God. All right, God, all right, God. And my sign was after we had a conversation with the leadership team, and Tracy said, I think we're supposed to move. That was my sign. That was my sign. Now, God doesn't always give us a sign, and that took weeks to figure out. But we all pray for signs. Let's let's listen to uh the last verses here, 7 through 21, and hear what happens with between Abraham and or Abram and the Lord. He, God, also said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land and take possession of it. So God's just reminded him, I I'm the same guy who promised to bring you here and to give you this, and I've done that. But, here we go again. But Abram said, Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it? So he believes that God gave it to him, is going to give it to him, but how do I know I'm gonna get possession of it? So the Lord said, This is where it gets serious. So the Lord said to him, Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon. Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two, and arranged the halves opposite each other. The birds, however, he did not cut in half. Now, just a side note, there's a few reasons why we believe he didn't cut it. One is because they were too small. Uh, the second is because they're also a symbolism of wholeness within the covenant, both sides in wholeness. So, uh just a thought there. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and the thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You guys know he's prophesying here, right? Egypt, the Israelites in Egypt, four hundred years later, four. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation, your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, the smoking fire pot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, To your descendants I give this land from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, Kenesites, Cadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Raphaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Gergesites, and the Jebusites. I think I may have butchered every one of those names. Now I want us to think here a second. God's making this covenant with Abraham, and it seems, at least from my perspective, we're going in stages. Kind of simple and kind of moderate, and now we're getting really serious here. God goes, all right, go get some animals. I wonder if if Abram's going, oh, here we go. Because they're gonna have this cutting of a covenant. It's like a blood covenant, right? This covenant is so serious between God and Abram, it needs to be sealed. It needs to be sealed by a cutting covenant with blood. May the same bloodshed come over me if I break this covenant. So Abram does this, and what happens? This this is this is a really uh neat thing to think of here. Birds of prey came over, right? And they were trying to get at it. This is symbolism, this is something, this is so small within a grand text, but I think it's something that we we think about because what's Abram doing by shoeing these birds of prey away? He's protecting the covenant, he's can he's he's protecting this cut of the covenant in the same way with our covenant with God, we will have birds of prey that want to come and pull us away. And we need to shoe them off as well. And so I think even within this grand text, we have something to look forward to. We have something that gives us uh just hope that we know that there will be birds of prey that pulls us from our faith. But God gives us the strength to shoe them off. God hasn't yet arrived on the scene, if you will. I mean, he's there. But when you have this covenant, there's two parties, and yet we all we have is Abraham, and what happens? He falls into a deep sleep. Many theologians believe that God caused him to fall into a deep sleep, and in fact, thid, thick, dreadful. You ever get that feeling of dread in you? Like, oh man, I just know something's gonna happen, or oh, this is such a heavy situation. Well, when God gives this prophecy of what's gonna happen over the 400 years, what he's telling Abraham and what he's telling us is the prophecy may be fulfilled. Your ancestors are gonna come here, but it's not gonna be a walk in the park. It's not gonna be easy, it's not gonna just be handed out to people that that's gonna take work, and it's gonna take faith, it's gonna take understanding, it's gonna take that relationship with God. And now we get drastically darker. The sun sets, it says that darkness settles in all around, and God reveals this prophetic scene: a smoking firepot with a blazing torch coming out of it, passing between the rows, going down the aisle. Let's talk about the smoking pot with the flame. All right, we got some symbolism happening here. We have smoke and we have fire. The presence of God. Think about children of Israel wandering in the wilderness. God led them what pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire. What's the symbolism with fire? What's that? The spirit, yeah. And what's the spirit do? Refines us, refines us, purifies us, fires a way of purification. So this wasn't just the holy presence of God, this is the holy purifying presence of God. And what's it doing? It's going down the aisle by itself. Abram's nowhere, well, he's near, but he's not walking down the aisle with God. Both parties are supposed to walk and experience this together, right? As they say the this covenant together, they recite this covenant together that may this full weight of what we see here, may this blood shed happen here if I break the covenant. And what we see here is God going down alone, taking the full weight of the oath upon himself. He not only signs for himself, but he signs for Abram as well. Because God knows. God knows. God knows in those four hundred years the covenant's gonna be broken. God doesn't want to destroy his people. Let that sink in for a second. If God breaks the covenant, he's saying, May this happen to me. If Abram breaks it, or his descendants break it, God's saying, May this happen to me. Just as God walked that aisle alone in darkness in this book of Genesis, it points directly to a darker afternoon centuries later, on a hill in Calvary. Luke 23. For the sun stopped shining. And the curtain, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. You see it? Jesus called out with a loud voice, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And when he had said this, he breathed his last. The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, Surely this was a righteous man. Jesus walked in between the cutting of the covenants. Every time we sin, we break covenant with God. Every time we sin, we have created, every time we sin, we have taken what we were created in in the image of God. And we have failed to live in perfect love and holiness, how God designed us to be. And according to the ancient law, we need to be held accountable. That a price needs to be paid, that atonement needs to be paid, that blood needs to be paid. But then comes Good Friday. Darkness didn't just cover one person, it covered the land. And it covered the land for the Lord to walk down the aisle. And the firstborn, the only son of God, the perfect sacrificial lamb, hung on the cross for you and for me, carrying the full burden of a broken covenant on our end, on his shoulders, so that we, because we can't bear it, Jesus walked down the aisle himself with the purifying fire of God's holy justice to save us, so we didn't have to be refined by his holy justice. We wouldn't survive that. And so God kept his promise not only to Abraham but to the entire world by allowing his son Jesus to take the place of our unfaithfulness, to atone, to make payment, to shed his blood for our sins. There's been times in my life that way back when I just wasn't sure about this. I needed assurance, right? And I think that's what Abram's asking. God, I just need your assurance. And I think sometimes we fall in that. We need assurance, God. Friends, our assurance doesn't rest on our perfection, it doesn't rest on anything you do, it rests solely on Jesus. Rests solely on Jesus. What about yourself? Or what about your past? Do you think cannot be saved? What is something in your life that you're going, man, God God doesn't want to save me from that? What assurances do you need? Maybe you have to ask yourself, why is it so difficult for me to believe? And maybe you believe it well. Maybe you have a friend or a loved one that doesn't have the assurance and doesn't believe. Maybe your prayer is, Lord, show me why it's so difficult for my loved one to accept and believe. When we feel the weight of our own shortcomings, we don't run from God. We run to God. We run to the cross. Because through Jesus, through Jesus Christ, we can trust, we know that He will uphold His promise no matter how unfaithful we might have been, how unfaithful we may be at this time, and even how unfaithful we will probably be in the future. Jesus signed the deal. He signed the covenant. That's where it begins. God's calling out to us, asking us to believe. We say yes, we have faith. And then we believe and we change. We ask for forgiveness. We repent. We do a 180 and we walk a different way. Jesus says, have faith, believe, and follow me. In a moment, we're gonna come and we're gonna be together with communion, holy communion. I want you to come and remember the new covenant we are under through the blood of Jesus. I want you to be able to come forward and experience the grace and salvation offered to you. Because Jesus passed through death and defeated sin for you. Because he wants everyone to believe and to be saved. As a result of what God has done through the testimony of what we heard in Abram's life and so many other figures in the Old Testament and the gospel of Jesus Christ, we can know, you can know for certain that God's promises are true. So all we do is we believe we're saved, we follow him, and all that you will know that you are loved.

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