Counted Righteous
Genesis 15; Remsen Bible Fellowship; 11/24/2024
Introduction
You are, by nature, a wicked person. You have thought, felt, said, and done things which are offensive to God and deserving of his wrath. You might not like that description of yourself, someone who is by nature wicked, but it is precisely the Bible’s description of you. How can we, who are wicked, be made right with God? This is the question religion seeks to answer. How can you be made right with God? Different religions have different ways to answer that question. Follow this code, partake of these sacraments, attend these special services, undergo these certain rites.
But God’s answer, according to Scripture, is that God pardons repentant sinners. If you humble yourself before the Lord, agreeing that he has every right to condemn you, but plead for his mercy on the basis of his promise and Christ’s blood, then you will be forgiven and welcomed into relationship with him. That is the pattern revealed to us, not only in the New Testament, but even here in Genesis 15. Salvation is given by the forgiving grace of God, and is received through faith.
Text
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.” 2 But Abram said, “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” 4 And behold, the word of the LORD came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” 5 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.” 6 And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.
7 And he said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” 8 But he said, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9 He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. 11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. 13 Then the LORD said to Abram, “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 four hundred years. 14 But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16 And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, 19 the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”
Summary of the Text
This chapter breaks into two basic parts: v1-6, and v7-21.
God’s Promise, Abram’s Question, God’s Assurance, Abram’s Belief (v1-6)
In verse one, we are situated back into the context of Abram’s history. Last week we saw how God had continued to fulfill his promise to make Abram’s name great, and this was displayed through his military might in rescuing his nephew Lot from a coalition of Mesopotamian kings. He then turns down the blessings offered by the King of Sodom - this is not because taking the spoil would be wrong, per se, but because he has determined that this would give the evil king of Sodom leverage over him that he shouldn’t have. And Abram knows he isn’t indebted to Sodom, or Gomorrah, or their allies. He is indebted to the Lord God, God Most High, Maker of Heaven and earth. This God gave him victory, and pronounced blessing over him through the mysterious figure of Melchizidek, priest-king of Salem, king of Righteousness and Peace, giver of bread and wine.
After all of these events, God comes to Abram in a vision. Based on v5, we can assume this vision was at night. And God speaks to Abram: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield.” This language may draw your mind to the places in Psalms that speak of God being a shield, a protection for those who fear him:
Psalms 18:2, The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
Psalms 119:114, You are my hiding place and my shield; I hope in your word.
That’s the kind of reminder Abram may well need at this point. Though he had a victory over the kings of the north, he may well have been concerned that they would regroup and be coming for vengeance. The reminder that God himself would protect him was something Abram would need to hear.
But a further implication of this shield language is hinted at in the rest of v1, “your reward shall be very great.” There is some debate among scholars on this point, but a pretty strong argument can be made that God is not just telling Abram that there is reward coming for him, but that God himself is Abram’s reward. God pledges himself to Abram, as the seal of Abram’s security and blessing. In Psalm 3:3, David expresses this same idea: “You, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head.”
The next movement in the text is Abram’s initial response - how can I understand this, Lord? What can be given, when I don’t have any children? Abram is somewhere between 75 and 86 - we don’t have exact timestamps between the departure from Haran birth of Ishmael - but it’s probably pretty safe to assume that he is in his early 80s. And even by the standards of his day, that’s pretty old to be childless. Some years have passed since God had promised in 12:2 to make Abram into a great nation. So Abram’s question in v3-4 is not an example of doubting God, but of asking a legitimate question: you’ve made this promise, but how will it be fulfilled? You’ve still given me no children, and my heir is a Syrian, Eliezer of Damascus. God speaks, though, with a word of promise and assurance: “this man will not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir” (v4). He then brings Abram outside to look at the stars: can you count the stars Abram? If you can, then you’ll be able to count the number of offspring who will come from you. You’re worried about having one son: I’m promising you a family beyond counting.
How would you respond in Abram’s shoes? But God, give me a sign! Prove it! But that’s not what we read. Instead, we read one of the most important verses in all of the Bible: v6, “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Abram trusted the promise of God, and God counted him righteous on account of that trust, that faith.
So the movement of the first section is from God’s promise, to Abram’s question, to God’s reassurance, and Abram’s faith.
God’s Covenant (v7-21)
The second section, v7-21 follows a similar pattern. It begins with God reminding Abram who he is, who God is - he’s the God who brought Abram out of the land of Ur, and into the land of promise. He is reminding Abram that not only will he have many descendants, but they will possess the land of Canaan. And, as in the first section, Abram responds to God’s self-description and reassurance with a legitimate question: how can I know, Lord?
God responds with another object lesson. But instead of taking Abram out to look at the stars, this time he gives Abram a list: bring a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon. Abram then splits each of the mammals in two, creating, as it were, a center isle.
These aren’t sacrifices that Abram is offering to the Lord. Abram has made altars for the Lord before, we see that in 12:8 & 13:18. But here, there is no altar. God has instructed Abram to prepare for a covenant cutting ceremony. In these covenant ceremonies, a superior king (in this case, God) would make a covenant, or treaty, with a lesser king (in this case, Abram). The covenant was unilateral, it was not an agreement between equals. The great lord would give promises and impose conditions upon the lesser ruler, and then the lesser king, or vassal, would be held to these conditions upon pain of death. That’s what is symbolized by the split animals - if you violate the terms of the covenant, you take on the same penalty as these animals. The covenant is sealed in blood.
And so Abram prepares for this covenant ceremony. Abram has apparently spent all day getting this ready, because in v12 the sun is going down again, and the Lord puts Abram into a deep sleep, and a dreadful and ominous darkness settles over this sleep. Into this darkness, the Lord speaks. The promise he starts into has a nightmarish beginning - know that your offspring will be sojourners in a foreign land, and that they will be mistreated there for four centuries. But the promise continues - out of death and suffering will come salvation: They will be brought up out of the land of their sojournings, blessed with abundant possessions.
Abram certainly would recognize that God is promising to do for his descendants what he had already done for Abram - though Abram sojourned in Egypt, God brought him up out of that land, loaded with great blessings and possessions. He then promises Abram that he himself will live to a good old age, and die in peace. When his offspring are eventually brought back, it will be associated with judgment upon the iniquity of the Amorites.
He promises to give Abram’s descendants all the land from the Euphrates river all the way to “the river of Egypt” - there is some debate as to whether this is the river which forms the border of Egypt, or the Nile which was the heart of the Egyptian empire - but he then spells this out with a list of peoples whose land will become the possession of Abram’s offspring.
And how can Abram be certain all of this will happen? He can be certain, because God does something very unusual: though he is the Great Lord, and Abram the vassal, the lesser, God does not put Abram under the curse of death for breach of covenant. Rather, God makes unilateral promises, and then passes through (symbolized by the smoking fire pot and flaming torch) the cut animals, signifying that God puts himself under pain of death in order to assure Abram of the certainty of these great promises.
God is both the dictator of the terms of the covenant, and the guarantor of their fulfillment. This has profound implications, both for Abram, and for us.
By Grace, Through Faith
As we ponder the shape of this passage, I want to note the direction of all the promises: God is coming to Abram with promises. To circle back to our initial question, how can wicked humans be made right before God? Here is the starting point for the answer: God must do something. On our own, we are destitute, far from God, and worst of all - we want to be far from God. We by nature are children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3) who hate God. If this is to be overcome, God himself must do something.
And friends, that’s precisely what we see in this text. God continues to initiate with Abram. God is not sitting back on his heels, waiting for Abram to figure out what to do. God is pursuing Abram, God is giving promises which Abram then needed to respond to.
Make no mistake, human beings are responsible for how we respond to God. But we must realize that we are responding to his gracious initiation, we are being called to believe the promises he gives, we are called to accept the forgiveness he offers. We are not accomplishing any of this on our own, nor are we even so much as reaching as high as we can in order for him to reach down the rest of the way. We are called to trust what God says, and to act on the basis of that trust.
Where is this coming from in our text? I mentioned earlier that verse 6 is one of the most significant verses in all the Bible. “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Abram, like you and I, needed to be righteous in order to commune with God. Remember that it was disobedience and rebellion - unrighteousness - which had caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from Eden. Does the text tell us that Abram atoned for all of his sin properly through means of sacrifice, and then by achieving a certain state of sinless living that enabled him to be perfectly righteous in God’s sight? No. No, he believed the promises of God. And that believing was counted or reckoned to him as righteousness.
Righteousness before God is something you cannot achieve through good works or law-keeping or rule-following. Because even if you went forward perfectly from this second forward - and you won’t - you would still have the massive debt of your previous sins weighing you down. In Romans 4:3, Paul quotes this verse to prove that salvation is not given as a response to our good works or our merit, but is graciously poured out upon those who place their trust in Jesus. He then quotes Psalm 32, where David rejoices over God’s forgiveness for sin - and David had plenty of reason to be happy about that!
But, Paul anticipates a possible objection: maybe this is only for those who are the physical descendants of Abram, may this is only for the circumcised? Maybe you have to be a Jew in order for God to deal with you in this way. But then Paul’s argument gets a little tighter, and so I want to read verses 9-12.
Romans 4: Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. 10 How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. 11 He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, 12 and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.
Paul’s argument is that circumcision was not efficacious, it did not create the reality it symbolized. Circumcision was given to Abram/Abraham as a sign of God’s covenant with him. But Paul’s point is that the reality of the covenant comes before the covenant symbol. Abram did not receive God’s grace because he had been circumcised, he was circumcised because he had received grace. By what means did he receive this gift of grace, the gift of being declared just or righteous in God’s sight? He received it through faith.
We’re going to talk, Lord willing, about the connection between circumcision and baptism and faith and baptism in a couple of weeks - how do we connect the signs with the realities they symbolize? But for our purposes this morning, the main thing is to notice that Paul separates the sign or symbol from the reality. Circumcision is not a prerequisite for justifying faith, because even Abram was justified by God and brought into covenant relationship with God before he received the sign thereof.
I want to circle back to a specific word used by Moses in verse 6: counted. What does it mean that God counted Abram righteous? I’ve already said that Abram did not achieve righteousness, and we’re going to see in the very next chapter that he continues to make some cataclysmic mistakes - he’s still very much a sinner in terms of his actions. But, nonetheless, God considers or counts him righteous. How can this be?
Because, as Paul explains elsewhere (places like 2 Corinthians 5:21, or back in Romans 3:21-26), justification is not a statement about a truth inside of you. When Abram placed his trust in God to fulfill his promise to bring blessing to all the nations through him, to make his offspring as many as stars in the sky, God counted that faith as righteousness.
This is a pattern pulsing all the way through the Old Testament - God graciously gives salvation to those who trust in him. But throughout the Old Testament, this reality does leave a question - how can a just God, a good God, pardon sinners? Doesn’t this create a contradiction? How can God bless a sinful man like Abram, let alone call him righteous?
Because God had a plan from before the foundation of the world to save sinners. And when we trust what he has revealed to us - for Abram he had the promises of Genesis 3, the story of the flood, were God saved through judgment, and the promises in his own life for the future - God imputes to us a foreign righteousness. A righteousness not accomplished through works, but given as a gift by God.
In the New Testament we find out on what basis God can do this and continue to be a just and holy God. He justifies the ungodly who have faith in Jesus Christ. Paul continues to write in Romans 4:23-25,
23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
Friends, your sins stand between you and God. But if you repent of your sins and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, God will count you righteous. The perfect life and obedience of Jesus Christ are imputed, counted, to everyone who believesin him alone for salvation. He took your sins on the cross - the great exchange. He was counted guilty for us that we might be counted righteous and forgiven. Will you trust him?
There are times when believing that God could forgive my sin, that he could bring salvation to this sin sick soul can be just as hard to believe as a childless man in his 80s would be the father of many nations. But the heart of faith, the heart that receives God’s forgiveness and is clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, is the heart that reflects Abram’s. As Paul puts it in Romans 4:21, he was “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
God has promised to forgive you, save you, and welcome you if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. Do you trust him? Are you convinced that he will deliver on that promise?
