God had already made promises to Abraham. But ten years had elapsed since he bade farewell to his fatherland at God's bidding, yet the hopes with which he entered Canaan seemed as far as ever from being realized. Only twice during these years had God broken silence. The voice which spoke in Haran had spoken once at Moreh on his arrival, and again near Bethel on his return from Egypt. Each successive utterance confirmed what had gone before. Each added a little definiteness to the original promise. In Haran God said: “I will shew thee a land: I will make of thee a great nation.” At Moreh, both the halves of this promise became better defined: “This is the land: I will give it to thy seed.” Still more ample was the third repetition of it. Then Abraham was told to search Canaan through, with the assurance that it should become his own, “in the length of it and in the breadth of it”: while the seed of promise was to be as numerous as the dust of the land beneath his feet. So much, then, and no more, had been given to the man on which to rest his confidence. How such prospects as these were to be realized had not yet been told. Of their ever being realized at all, no sign appeared. Abraham was a childless man. Head of a wide camp, in which were many households, where the merry shouts of little slave boys and girls rang all day long, his own tent stood aloft in the centre solitary and silent. Every year that passed made it the less likely that his union should be blessed with issue. Of what use, then, was it to risk life, as he was doing, in the land's defence if, after all, its possession was in a few years to pass to no blood descendants-no increasing clan to call him in future generations its father-but only to a servile household, with a slave for its future chieftain? Viewed in this temper of mind, the promises by which he had been allured out of Haran certainly looked less bright than they had done at first. They barely seemed to recompense him for the peril into which he had now been brought.
God directly answers the patriarch's complaint, making another and more gracious promise. Its opening words are, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” And this is only the first of three promises, which rise in grace and comprehensiveness. They appear at intervals in the patriarch's history, but we shall obtain a clearer conception of the course of Abraham's spiritual progress if we consider them here:-
(1) The first promise (Gen_15:1-16), opening with the words already quoted, proceeds to the assurance of a son and a very numerous seed. Sarah is not yet named as mother. (2) The second (Gen_15:17-19) is a renewal of the promise of the land. And the oppression in Egypt is foretold. This time the promise is accompanied by a covenant with a solemn rite. (3) The third promise is given in Gen_17:1-27. It is the promise of a son by Sarah. At the same time the covenant is renewed, circumcision is given as the sign of it, and the names of both Abram and Sarai are changed. Now let us consider these three promises one after another.
1. We read in Gen_15:1 : “After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision.” It was no mere dream of the night that clung to his memory when he awoke; a subjective impression, perhaps, but one that was made in waking moments. He is led forth by “the word,” he is bidden look upon the stars, he offers sacrifice. It is a waking vision which is vouchsafed, and it begins with the tender injunction with which angel voices have familiarized us in the New Testament: “Fear not.” The terror which frail man must feel thus brought mysteriously near unto God is subdued by these two words, and the seer is encouraged to listen to the Divine communication. “I am thy shield,” said God;-we need not fear what man can do unto us. The great deliverance lately wrought proved this. “And thy exceeding great reward,” or perhaps better, “thy reward shall be exceeding great.” And Abraham is perplexed and disquieted by these promises, which look to the dim future for accomplishment. He sees not how in his childless condition the word can be fulfilled. “Lord God” (Adonai Jehovah), he sadly cries, combining for the first time these two names, “what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus? To me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir.” With no son of his own, he had conceived the idea of making this dependent the inheritor of his possessions; and it was not a design calculated to satisfy his longings, or to comfort his heart. His loneliness and desolation struck more forcibly on his soul as he heard of rich blessings laid up for him. He would go to his grave childless: what good were they to a solitary man who had none to whom to hand them down but a foreigner and a servant? He may have been a tried and trusty follower, one who had accompanied him from his first arrival in Syria, and had managed his household with skill and honour; yet he was not of the holy race, and in his hands the wealth gotten during these years would pass to aliens, and not help to keep alive his master's name and family; it might, indeed, all be carried away to Damascus, and enrich a godless people far from the promised land.
God had pity on his perplexity, while He made further trial of his faith. The astounding promise is given that his very own son shall be his heir. This aged man, whose wife was barren, should be the father of a male child, from whom should spring a posterity as numberless as the stars of heaven, which he was bidden to go forth and number. Often in his old home, among the Chaldaic astronomers, had he watched the heavens, and acquired large notions of the number and magnitude of the bodies that revolved therein; he is henceforth to see in them a type of his own progeny, no longer compared as before (Gen_13:16) to the dust of the earth, but likened to the glorious lights of the firmament on high. Such promise against all experience and probability could be believed only on the authority of Him who gave it, and in perfect dependence upon His word.
(1) “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield.” The casting out of fear is one of the first elements of the religion of Jesus, and it is cast out only by love. When we love the Highest, we fear nothing below it; we do not fear the Highest itself. We have awe of Him and solemn reverence, but no fear. On all sides we are freed from the curse of fear. There is no fear of man or of nature, for we are in the loving hands of their Master and Maker; no fear of God, for He is our Father. This is the doctrine of Jesus; and though it is not fully given in this ancient utterance, it is there in its noble beginnings. And the world owes a great debt to those among the Jews who here and elsewhere opposed the common view of a God who had to be approached with terror, and coaxed to lay aside His wrath by sacrifices or by the coward's prayer. That double view runs throughout the whole of the Old Testament-the priests maintaining the terror of God, the prophets the love of God. The double view lives still. There are those who dare to make Jesus a supporter of the terrifying aspect of God. There is no lie greater than this, nor one more ruinous to religion. Every thought and act of a religion based on the fear and not on the tenderness of God is a contradiction of Jesus and a curse to mankind.
(2) Abraham is to have a great reward. But it is plain that the reward is not material. He lived and died a pilgrim. He never possessed any land save a burying-place. God Himself, communion with the perfect Love, peace within, faith in his soul, mighty ideas-these are the rewards of Abraham, and they are the only rewards for which we ought to look, or which we should cherish; the only rewards which Jesus offers for our acceptance.
(3) Then see how the tenderness of God deepens. “I brought thee,” God says, “out of Ur of the Chaldees, I led thee into this land; I have always been with thee. I am here with thee now to fulfil the purpose of thy life, that for which I formed and form thee now.” Personal care, personal education, personal communion, personal love-that was the conception of the writer of the story; that was his notion of the relation of God to man. It was the deepest conviction of our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. It may be ours, if we have Abraham's faith; and were it ours completely, this life we lead, in spite of all its pains, nay all the more because of them, were unbroken triumph; ay, more than that, were inward growth in righteousness. For there is one pregnant phrase, well worth a life's thinking, in which the writer of this tale embodies the result of his own spiritual experience and embodies ours; the meaning of which, true and fresh to-day, is of immortal power: “Abraham believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”
The pupil feigned ignorance, and asked: “What is religion?”
“If you do not know from experience or intuition, I cannot explain it to you; in that case it would only seem to you folly. But if you know beforehand, you will be able to receive my explanations, which are many. Religion is connected with the Source or the head-station. But in order to carry on a conversation one must have an earth-current.”
“What is that?”
“That is the draining off of superfluous earthliness to the earth. As one advances in technical knowledge, one learns to speak without a wire. But for that there are necessary strong streams of electricity, clean instruments, and clear air. The electric battery is Faith, which is not merely credence, but an apparatus for receiving and arousing the Divine electricity. Unless you believe in the possibility of success in an undertaking, you will not set to work, and accordingly you acquire no energy. With faith and a good will all is possible.1 [Note: A. Strindberg, Zones of the Spirit (1913), 24.]
2. Thus far there had been no mention made of any covenant. Neither the thing nor the name had as yet entered into the relation of this man to God. The word in which Abraham “believed” was still a bare word, unratified by ceremony or by symbol. But when the celestial voice passed from the greater promise of the seed, to renew the lesser promise of a land for the seed to dwell in, the confidence of Abraham again showed signs of giving way. His wavering did not amount to incredulity. Still it went so far as to beg for a token in confirmation. His desire may have been that, as the promise of a future heir had just been confirmed by a reference to the star-lit sky, so this further promise of the heir's inheritance should be sustained by some parallel token obvious to the senses. If this were his meaning, the craving was natural enough. Weak faith must needs grope after material supports. It is noticeable that it was to such weak faith-real, yet groping-that God granted, what had certainly not been asked for, the magnificent confirmation of a covenant.
The sign given to Abraham was twofold: the smoking furnace and a prediction of the sojourn of his posterity in Egypt. The symbols were similar to those by which on other occasions the presence of God was represented. Fire, cleansing, consuming, and unapproachable, seemed to be the natural emblem of God's holiness. In the present instance it was especially suitable, because the manifestation was made after sundown and when no other could have been seen. The cutting up of the carcases and passing between the pieces was one of the customary forms of contract. It was one of the many devices men have fallen upon to make sure of one another's word. That God should condescend to adopt these modes of pledging Himself to men is significant testimony to His love; a love so resolved on accomplishing the good of men that it resents no slowness of faith and accommodates itself to unworthy suspicions. It makes itself as obvious and pledges itself with as strong guarantees to men as if it were the love of a mortal whose feelings might change and who had not clearly foreseen all consequences and issues.
It is at this point, then, that we first encounter in such a connexion this great Bible term-“covenant”; a term on which henceforth so much of the Divine dealings with mankind was to hinge, and around which the whole of theology has often been made to revolve. Not that it is the earliest occurrence of the word in Scripture. In the record of the Divine promises made to Noah as the head of the race after the Flood, we are told that God established a “covenant,” of which the rainbow was constituted the perpetual “token.” That covenant was an engagement on God's part that thenceforth, till the close of human history, the ordinary course of nature should be suffered to continue, unbroken by any catastrophe on a scale so immense as to threaten the total extinction of human life. It was entered into with the entire race of human beings, considered as a portion of the sentient life on the surface of the globe, and with all other species of animals domesticated by man or serviceable to him. It was thus universal and unalterable. It referred to nothing higher than animal life on earth. It secured no moral or spiritual blessing. Quite a new thing happened when God was pleased to covenant for the second time-not now with all men, but with one man and his posterity; not with man as an earthly animal, but as an immortal spirit; not by mere promise on His own part, but by promise conditioned by religious trust and obedience on the part of man; not for the sake of guaranteeing to all men physical existence, but for the sake of securing to faithful men the spiritual blessing of eternal life. The new covenant now to be made with Abraham was thus in many respects a far higher and more valuable one than had been made with Noah. Still, it fell under the same general idea.
When General Grant came to the border line of Assioot, in Upper Egypt, as he landed from his Nile boat, a bullock was sacrificed in covenant welcome, its head being put on one side of the gang-plank, and its body on the other; while its blood was between the two, so that it should be stepped over in the act of landing. And every year, when the great Hajj procession returns from Meccah to Syria, it is welcomed, as it approaches Damascus, by just such sacrifices as this. Sheep and oxen are sacrificed before the caravan, their blood being poured out in the middle of the road, and their bodies being divided and placed on either side of the way. Then those who approach by the “new and living way,” on the boundary line of their country, renew their covenant with those within, by passing over the blood.
There seems to be a reference to such a mode of boundary sacrifices in the description of the Lord's covenant welcome to Abraham, on the border of the land promised to him for a possession. Abraham was near the southern boundary of Canaan. He had the promise of the Lord, that he and his seed should possess that land; but as yet he was childless, and he had no control over any portion of the land. He naturally desired some tangible assurance, in accordance with the customs of mankind, that the Lord's promises to him would be made good. Therefore when the Lord said to him, “I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it,” Abraham replied with the question, “O Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?”
Then the Lord responded with these directions, apparently in accordance with a well-known mode of covenanting among men, “Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon.” Abraham seems to have understood what was to be done with these victims for sacrifice. “And he took him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each half over against the other; but the birds divided he not.” The blood of the victims was doubtless poured out on the earth where they were sacrificed, midway between the places of the divided portions, as is the present custom.
“And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace [or brazier, or censer], and a flaming torch [a fire and a light as a symbol of the Divine presence] that passed [covenant-crossed the blood on the threshold] between these pieces.” And the record adds: “In that day the Lord made a covenant [a border-altar covenant] with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenite, and the Kenizzite, and the Kadmonite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Rephaim, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Girgashite, and the Jebusite.”
Thus Abraham was assured that the Lord had covenanted to protect his boundaries; as Nebuchadrezzar long afterward desired that his god Nebo would protect his empire boundary or threshold. As to the fact of boundary sacrifices in these lands and elsewhere, in those days and earlier, there would seem to be no room for question.1 [Note: H. C. Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant, 186.]
3. From his birth, Ishmael was regarded by his father as the promised heir. During a period of not less than thirteen years, he grew up as the hope of his parents, and the young master of that vast pastoral household. A free, brave, wilful boy, he must have been, fit lord for a tribe of nomadic herdsmen. At length, and, so far as we know, quite suddenly, there came a day when the long silence of Heaven was once more broken. A second time God appeared, to repeat His promises with greater explicitness than before, and to seal by a sacramental symbol His servant's adhesion to the covenant.
In substance, the earlier promises to which God had bound Himself by the night ceremony thirteen years before were reiterated on this second occasion. But they were reiterated I with an amplitude and completeness which had never been approached. All the three items or factors in the Divine intentions with respect to this man were now disentangled from one another, and expressed with such formal elaborateness of statement as might almost suggest the phraseology of a legal document. These three, to put them most briefly, were the promises of the Seed, of the Land, and of the Blessing. (1) First, a most numerous and wide-branching posterity was secured by the contract. Already it had been again and again promised-first in Haran, next at Bethel, and last at Mamre. The fullest expression was now given to it in these words: “Thou shalt be a father of many nations. I will make thee exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of thee; and kings shall come out of thee.” (2) All the territory of Canaan was once more declared to be the destined possession of his seed. Its limits, indeed, were not again defined with the same geographical minuteness as on the first formation of the covenant, but the tenure of the inheritance was made as enduring as words could make it: “I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.” (3) The third element in the Divine purpose with Abraham had up till this time been only vaguely pointed at as the “Blessing.” It now assumed the shape of a thorough reconciliation betwixt the man and his Maker-such a covenant between the two as gives the man who is faithful to it a claim upon God, entitling him to count upon Him as in a special sense his God. Thus ran the wonderful words: “I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.” There lay the heart and kernel of the whole.
If there is a living God, faithful and true, let us hold His faithfulness. If there is an eternity of bliss, of reward for those who love Him-if He will verily withhold no good thing from those who walk uprightly, let us “hold God's faithfulness,” and walk worthy of Him. Holding His faithfulness, we may face with calm and sober but confident assurance of victory, every difficulty and danger. We may count on grace for the work, on pecuniary aid, on needful facilities, and on ultimate success. Let us not give I Him a partial trust, but daily, hourly serve Him, “holding God's faithfulness.” How many Christians go mourning and lose joy, strength, and opportunities of helping others, because they do not hold God's faithfulness!1 [Note: Hudson Taylor's Choice Sayings, 28.]
Thou hast given me a heart to desire,
Thou hast given me a soul to aspire,
A spirit to question and plead;
I ask not what Thou hast decreed;
I think but of love and of need;
Thou art rich, Thou art kind, Thou art free;
What joy shall be failing to me
Whom Thou lovest? Thy smile and Thy kiss
Can give me back all that I miss;
In Thy presence is fulness of bliss;
I ask not its nature! I know
It is life, it is youth, it is love;
It is all that is wanting below,
It is all that is waiting above.
Is it peace that I crave? Is it rest?
Is it love that would bless and be blest?
All, all that Thou takest away,
Thou canst give me again, in a day,
In an hour, in a moment! Thy hand
Is full, and I open my breast
For the flower of my soul to expand.2 [Note: Dora Greenwell.]
