This is Connect with Skip Heitzig, and we're so glad you've joined us for today's program. Connect with Skip Heitzig is all about connecting you to the never-changing truth of God's Word through verse-by-verse teaching. Before we get started, we want to invite you to check out connectwithskip.com to find resources like full message series, sermon outlines, and more. While you're at it, be sure to sign up to receive Skip's weekly devotional emails right in your inbox. When you do, we'll send you Skip's booklet, Hell No, Don't Go. This insightful resource will help you gain a deeper understanding of what awaits believers in heaven and unbelievers in hell. It's an encouragement for those who've said yes to Jesus and a sobering picture for those who have not.
Get your copy when you sign up today at connectwithskip.com. Now let's get started with today's message from Pastor Skip Heitzig. Every now and then, it's good just to get perspective because we get so narrowly focused and to look up and go, wow, God did that. God can handle my situation. So he expands on the promise. He clarifies the promise, and he repeats the promise. Verse 6, key verse. So he, Abram, so he believed in the Lord, and he, the Lord God, accounted it to him, Abram, for righteousness. Once again, read that verse. It is one of the key verses in all the Bible. In fact, circle it, underline it, memorize it.
At least memorize it. I won't tell you to write in your Bible, but why not? And he believed in the Lord, and he accounted it to him for righteousness. Now the word believed is in the Hebrew, amen. Same root, amen, amen. God made a promise, and it's like Abram said, amen.
Right on. I believe that. Now this is so important because there is a result that comes from Abram just listening to God's promise after he repeats it, clarifies it, expands it, and he just goes, okay, I believe that promise. I believe it. Because the result is God allows that small act of faith to be counted to Abram as righteousness. Now I'm making a big deal out of this.
You know why? The New Testament makes a huge deal out of this. In Romans chapter 4, in Galatians chapter 3, and in James chapter 2, those three places, this story in this verse is highlighted as the pivotal verse to explain the major doctrine that if you're a Christian you hold too dearly, justification by faith. That we're not saved by good works, we're not saved by keeping rituals, we're not saved by belonging to some Christian organization. We are saved, made right with God, purely by believing God, like Abram, who believed before the law of Moses was in existence, who believed before circumcision was in existence, who certainly believed before there was baptism or churches or any of that. He just believed. Now that's so important, you've got to look at just one of those passages.
You ready? One of those passages. Turn to Romans chapter 4. What Paul is doing is answering a question.
Here's the question. How was Abraham the father of faith, he is called, the father of those who believe, how was Abraham justified, saved, made right with God? Was it by his works? Was it by keeping the law? Was it by being a religious person?
Was it by trying hard and being sincere? Because once we find the answer to that question, we'll be able to answer the second question, how are we made right with God? How are we saved? By the keeping of the law?
By knowing all the law? Or has it come by faith? So he begins, what then shall we say, verse 1, chapter 4 of Romans, that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh. For if Abraham was justified by works, then he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say?
Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace, but as debt. But to him who does not work, but believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness. You know how most people think that we're saved? Most people think that salvation is sort of like putting a frog in a pan full of milk. Here's that poor frog in the milk, and the milk is slippery, and he can't get out of the pan because the sides are too high, so he's struggling and paddling and paddling, but if he paddles long enough, he churns that into butter.
And by his hard work over a long period of time, the frog will be able to get on top of a hardened surface, the butter now, and jump out. That's how people think we're saved. And so what Paul is saying, because it is what happened to Abram, is that's not what happened. He just simply said, amen, I believe that. I truly in my heart believe that promise, and God said, that's all that I will require to make you right with me, to give you a relationship with me.
It's justification by faith, not by works, lest anyone should boast. You know how boring heaven would be if Abram or anybody else got there by working hard and being zealous and being religious? How boring heaven would be. You'd have to listen to that for billions of years. Well, you know, when I used to, and then this happened, and then I, and say, you know what those conversations are like on earth. Imagine in heaven. No, we're all going to go, I'm here by his grace.
He did this. That man with the five wounds, that's how I'm here. There's only two basic religions in the world. There's only two. Every belief system can be divided into one of two systems. I don't care how many cults, I don't care how many different religions and different expressions and different books, it can all be divided into two separate categories. One is the religion of human achievement. I do, I work, I practice, I pray. The second category is the salvation by divine accomplishment.
That's this. Jesus did it all on the cross, paid the debt we could never pay. And he says, do you believe that from your heart, in your heart believe, which means to adhere to, commit to, but it begins by saying, yes, I believe.
Are you willing to do that? Because if so, I will take all of what Jesus did and I will apply it to your account. By the way, the word accounted in Romans 4, laggizimai, it's a banking term. It means to put something to the credit side of your ledger. Okay, so look at your life this way.
Here's a picture of your life. You've got two columns. One is the debit side, one is the credit side. On the debit side, it's our sins, our sins, our sins, and it fills it all up. Our sins, our sins, our sins. We've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. On the credit side, on your own, what do you have to put there that will balance out all of the sin? You know, a lot of people say church, sincerity, good works, rituals, and God will say, I'm sorry. You can pour all sorts of stuff into that category and it won't balance out the debt side. The debit side is too great.
You can never buy your own, cancel out the debt. So what God says, I got the solution. I am willing to count all of the sins ever committed by every person, and I know what they are, and I am willing to declare that anyone and everyone can be made right with God by putting what my son did to their account. And all they have to do is believe that that's the one God sent. Believe in their heart that God raised them from the dead and they will be saved. So Paul really makes a big deal out of this in Romans four and in Galatians chapter three and also James will mention it in chapter two. But I need to get back to Genesis if I'm going to finish one chapter tonight. So he believed in the Lord and he, the Lord, accounted it to him for righteousness.
So just remember this. This is way before the law of Moses. This is way before he could circumcise his children. He hadn't done any good works. He didn't do any ritual. All he did is go, I believe that.
To us it would sound crazy. I'm going to have a child, but I believe that God said, you're right with me. You're righteous with me. Verse seven. And then he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to inherit it. Question. Why in the middle of a dialogue is God introducing himself? In a normal conversation this would seem out of place. If I'm talking to you and we've already had introduction and I've talked to you for years and we're talking one day over lunch and I go, my name is Skip. And you go, what?
Did you just have like a stroke? Why an introduction? They know each other. Well, this is important. You're going to find this a lot in the Bible. You're going to find that in normal conversations after introductions have taken place that God will just sort of say, now I am the Lord who did this and we'll do that. It's called the auto kerygma of God. If you want a theological term for that, the auto kerygma or the self proclamation of God, anytime God wants to underscore a point, it's like me grabbing your face and go look me in the eyes. Now, right now I want to tell you who I am and what I can do for you. That's what God is doing.
It's the auto kerygma, the self proclamation. I want you to know, Abram, who I am, who's talking to you and what I'm able to do. And that's what he does here in verse seven. You're listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before we get back to Skip's teaching, in his book, Is God Real?, Lee Strobel, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Case for Christ, provides a rational exploration of the proof of God's existence and the basis of our eternal hope. Writing to skeptics and believers alike, Strobel turns his critical mind and expert interviewing skills to perennial questions like, how do we know which God is real? And if God is real, why does he seem so hidden?
Is God real? Along with two messages preached by Lee Strobel at Calvary Church are our thanks for your gift of at least $50 today to help share biblical teaching with more people around the world through Connect with Skip Heitzig. Go to connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888 and request your resources when you give at least $50 today to reach people around the world through Connect with Skip Heitzig. Let's continue with today's teaching with Pastor Skip. And verse eight, he said, Lord God, how shall I know that I will inherit it? Okay, now right about now you're thinking, I don't get Abram.
I don't get this dude. God makes a promise to him. He goes, well, I don't have any kids. And then, and then God makes all these promises and goes, well, how will I know? So you're thinking this is not the man of faith. Well, let me complicate it even a little further.
I'm going to just sort of stack the deck against me before I answer that. Do you remember the father of John the Baptist in the New Testament? His name was Zacharias. He was in the temple. He was the guy who would burn incense at the altar of incense.
And it was his turn to do so. And he goes in and he sees the angel of the Lord. It's Gabriel. He doesn't know it yet. Standing there kind of hanging out at the altar as he's going to light incense and he's afraid. And the angel says, don't be afraid. And he says, your wife, Elizabeth, is going to have a child and you're going to name him John and he's going to bring joy to your household. And he's going to go before the Messiah and the power of the Lord and turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and children to the fathers. And he listens to this and he has an apparition. And Zacharias goes, how do I know that this is really going to happen?
The angel says, okay, you want a sign, do you? You won't be able to talk for nine months until your son is born. Now, I don't know what life was like in the household of Zacharias and Elizabeth and their conversations, but I do know that statistically women do outnumber men when it comes to their words.
So now he can't even answer anything back and he would go home and he'd be listening to Elizabeth like, no, no, no, what happened? What did you say? And write that out for me. And you know, this would happen in so nine months go by because the angel said, you didn't believe me, you doubted me.
So you're thinking out. So what's the difference between what happened with Zacharias in the temple to Gabriel who got punished for it and Abram who says, how will I know this is going to happen? This was not unbelief for Abram. It was not unbelief. You know why? Because we're told so in verse six, he believed God and God accounted it to him for righteousness.
So it's not an act of unbelief. He is simply looking for pragmatic solutions because 10 different Canaanite nations, Amorites, et cetera, have settled in the land of Canaan. It is outnumbered. How is this going to happen?
How am I going to take over a land that is already occupied by all of these people groups? That's, that's the question. But he believed, okay, I know I'm going to have a baby.
I know it's going to come from my own body. I believe that the house is all going to work in this land with his nation and all of these nations. So here's the answer. Verse nine, he said, bring a three year old calf fur, a three year old female goat, three year old ram, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. And he brought all these to him and cut them in two down the middle and placed each piece opposite the other.
But he did not cut the birds in two. Now I'm going to warn you what you're about to read sounds like it comes out of the twilight zone. It's in the Bible. It is a weird story. And I write, read this and I picture Rod Serling in the background, you know, picture if you will, bloody carcasses slain in the desert, an aged man looks on. He's just entered the twilight zone. That's what I'm picturing. It's just, it's like, well, what is this all about?
Here's a hint at what's going on. I'll kind of give you the goods before we read it. It's called a covenant, a berit in Hebrew. If you look ahead in verse 18, on the same day, the Lord made a covenant, a pact, an agreement, a testament is another word. And in those days, well, let's read it.
You'll see what they did in those days. And when the vultures came down, verse 11 on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. When the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram and behold horror and a great darkness fell upon him. And he said to Abram, know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs and will serve them. And they will afflict them 400 years. And also the nation whom they serve, I will judge afterward, they will come out with great possessions. Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried at a good old age.
But in the fourth generation, they shall return here for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. And it came to pass when the sun went down and it was dark, that behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces. Today, if you and I want to make a contract, we might shake hands in agreement.
We might sign a document. In a court of law, you might have to put your hand on a Bible and say, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In those days, they cut animals in two and put them in a path, in a road. And the people walked between them. The people making a covenant walked between the carcasses of animals. And because there was shedding of blood, it was more solemn an oath. And as the two parties walked between the pieces of the dead carcasses of animals, they would state the terms of the contract. They would say them out loud, why the dead animals? As if to say, if you or I either break our end of the bargain, may that happen to us.
May that happen to us. Let me read a portion of an ancient Hittite covenant from around the same period of time. They took in this covenant sinews or tendons of an animal and salt and threw it into a pan of hot fire. And here's what they said, and I quote, just as these sinews split into fragments on the hearth, whoever breaks these oaths shows disrespect to the king, let these oaths seize him and let him split into fragments like the sinews. And so they would do that after cutting the animals in two. That's how covenants were made in ancient Canaanite Hittite days. And so the animals were cut. And by the way, some people think that the idea at a ceremony, you know, when you cut the ribbon that is in front of something, you take a decision, you cut the ribbon comes from the cutting of the covenant from way back when. Anyway, he does it. Abram cuts the animals, but he waits a long time.
Seemingly it's early in the morning. You got to get a cow and you got to kill a cow and you got to cut a cow in half and lay one half of the cow here and one half of the cow there, you know, holy cow. It took a long time. So they did that. And then you had to take a three-year-old, a ram, a male sheep who has never been gelded.
You would take these animals. It took some time to dress them and cut them. So he presumably did it early in the morning. And then he waited and he waited and he waited and the sun got hotter and the carcasses started to stink and decompose and birds start to come down.
That's what the story says. So Abram now has to get up and shoo the birds away and he's like looking at his sundial on his wrist and he's going, man, I've been waiting a long time. How come God isn't telling me anything? I'm waiting. Where's God?
He told me to do this. Where's God? And he waited and he waited until it got dark and he's falling asleep and he's falling under this depression and dread again. And finally God shows up when it's dark and he's exhausted.
Question. Why did God wait so long after giving him a command to cut the animals? Why did God wait so long to show up?
Here's the answer, I believe. To make Abraham so exhausted that he was unable to participate in the covenant. He had to watch it. So he's watching as this burning torch just starts drifting between these bloody carcasses. He's just going, whoa, I thought the vision was heavy.
This is really heavy. And a smoking oven, a fire pot, there's smoke coming out of it and a burning torch, they're just sort of hovering and moving. All of that was symbolic of the presence of God. A burning torch was always a symbol of God's presence. The cherubim that guarded the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword. The children of Israel were directed by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire by night.
All of these are symbols of the presence of God. God waited for Abraham to be so exhausted that he couldn't participate and here's why. God was making a unilateral covenant, a promise of the land, not contingent upon Abraham keeping or doing anything at all. God was saying, I'm going to bless you.
I'm going to make your name great. And now God is saying, I'm giving you a land and it's not a bilateral covenant where you keep your term and I keep my term. It's a unilateral covenant.
It's my promise and I'm declaring it. And so that Abraham wouldn't be able to participate in this berit, he's just exhausted and God does it all. It's hard to wait on God.
You know it's true. You hate waiting on him. We all have in our minds a timetable when we think this would be the perfect time for God to do something. And God you discover has his own timetable and we don't like it. And sometimes he will let it drag on and on and on until we're just so exhausted and then God does something and you go, well I never could have done that on my own. That's the lesson you need to learn.
Now I work my way into a corner. I work my way into a problem with this one because if we have a covenant that is an unconditional covenant, here's the problem. In a few books, when God has promised them and promised them and promised Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the 12 tribes, the land called the land of Israel, God makes another covenant, covenant of the law of Moses in which God says, if you obey me, you can stay here. If you disobey me, I'm kicking you out. Does one covenant cancel the other covenant? How can you own the land unconditionally but occupy the land conditionally?
That's the big problem and I'd love to answer that. That was a setup for next week. We're not able to even finish the chapter except to read the rest of it and just pick up on a few thoughts as we tie in the next chapter.
On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying to your descendants, I have given this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Termites, just making sure that you're following along, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, the Jebusites, and the Turn out the Lights. All these ites are there and we'll pick up on this as we get into chapter 16 next time. Thanks for listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig. We hope you've been encouraged in your walk with Christ by today's program. Before we let you go, we want to remind you about this month's resources that will help you confidently respond to questions and challenges to God's existence.
It's Lee Strobel's book, Is God Real?, and two messages he preached on the topic at Calvary Church. Request your resources when you give $50 or more to support Connect with Skip Heitzig. Call 800-922-1888.
That's 800-922-1888. Or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. And did you know that you can get a weekly devotional and other resources from Pastor Skip sent right to your email inbox? Simply visit connectwithskip.com and sign up for emails from Skip. Come back next time for more verse-by-verse teaching of God's Word here on Connect with Skip Heitzig. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.
