When God swears an oath, there is no possible higher level of certainty than that. And so when we struggle with our faith, our struggle with our faith rests upon our wondering if the promises of God are really trustworthy. That's why when I struggle, that's when I am beset that I come back to Genesis 15, 17. And I say, Lord, not only did you promise, but you sealed that promise with this vow by your own nature. You have sworn an oath by yourself.
If R.C. Sproul were to have a life verse, as he told us yesterday, it would have been Genesis 15, 17. It's what he would write down if people asked him to sign a book. And today on this Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, we'll see what was taking place in Genesis 15 and why Dr. Sproul would return to this text again and again. When you struggle as a Christian or when you have doubts, am I really a Christian? How could God save a person like me?
Where do you turn? What truths do you remind yourself? Today's message, concluding a two-day study on Abraham, is a gospel reminder of God's faithfulness. And it's a message you may want to share with family and friends.
So remember, there's a link at renewingyourmind.org, where you can easily share it from your preferred podcast app. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on Genesis 15, 17. In our last session, I think I left you hanging in, I hope, with some degree of suspense about the drama that's recorded in Genesis 15 with respect to Abraham and his question to God, how will I know? He was looking for certainty that God's promises would come to pass. And we remember the strange instructions that God gave to Abraham to go out and get these animals and to cleave them in half and then to place them opposite each other, sort of as a pathway or a gauntlet on the ground.
And then the text that I said was my favorite text occurs in verse 17, where we read, 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. Now, obviously we could read that a thousand times, and if we weren't familiar with the customs of the Old Testament Semites, we would miss the significance of what's going on here. I think we're basically familiar with the concept of theophany. Theophany is a word that is made up of two words that are conjoined. The word theo or theos means God, and the root phoney comes from phoneros, which means to make manifest or manifestation, so that a theophany is a manifestation of God. We know that God is a spirit.
We know He has no body. We cannot perceive Him with our normal vision because He is invisible. But yet there are times in biblical history where He makes Himself visible, as it were, by manifesting Himself through some means of the created order. For example, when God met Moses in the Midianite wilderness, He appears to Moses out of this bush that is burning but is not consumed. During the exodus, the people of God are led by a pillar of cloud and by a pillar of smoke or a pillar of fire. And so often the Scriptures, when it has a manifestation of the invisible God, the medium through which that manifestation comes is some type of fire. That's why in the New Testament God is called an all-consuming fire. So what we have in Genesis 15, 17 is this appearance of the smoking oven and the flaming torch.
These represent God. And what is significant in this appearance before Abraham in the night vision is that the flaming torch and the burning oven go and move between the pieces. And as I said, this is a drama where God is enacting something for Abraham, and He's going through this action in order to give Abraham assurance and certainty of the reliability of His promise to him. And we have the mutilation of the animal. So often covenants in antiquity were ratified by some kind of cutting rite, as we will see later on in the life of Abraham when the sign of the old covenant became the sign of circumcision.
And I'll talk more about that later. But the sign of the old covenant was a cutting rite where the foreskin of the flesh was removed through cutting. And so what's going on here is that God, by moving through these pieces, is dramatizing His promise by doing this. This is what He's saying to Abraham.
He's saying, He's saying, Abram, if I fail to keep my promise to you, may I be ripped apart, may I be cut asunder even as you have cut apart these animals and put them in this pathway. Now, in the New Testament when the author of Hebrews looks back to this moment in time, he says about God that there are two things that are impossible for God. One, it's impossible for God to die because He's immutable, internal, and all of that self-existence. But it's also impossible for God to lie. And he goes on to say, because God could swear by nothing greater, He swore by Himself. God couldn't say to Abraham, if you can't trust me, raise my right hand and put my hand in the Bible and swear to something else, you know, the heavens or the earth or my mother's grave or something like that.
No, there is nothing higher than God. There's nothing above God, and so the highest thing He can swear by is Himself. And this is what He's doing when He makes this promise, this covenant promise to Abraham and to his seed. He's saying, Abraham, if I don't keep my covenant, if I don't keep my promise, may the immutable God have a mutation. May the eternal God fall into temporality.
May the infinite become finite, all of which things are manifestly impossible. And what Abraham is seeing here is that God is saying, Abraham, I'm swearing by my own eternal self-existent holy nature and character. Now when God swears an oath, there is no possible higher level of certainty than that. And so when we struggle with our faith, our struggle with our faith rests upon our wondering if the promises of God are really trustworthy. That's why when I struggle, that's when I am beset that I come back to Genesis 15, 17, and I say, Lord, not only did you promise, but you sealed that promise with this vow by your own nature.
You have sworn an oath by yourself, and there's no higher basis for relying on God or on anybody else than that testimony. That's why the whole principle of covenant is so basic to the Christian life, because the covenant is based upon promises. And we notice in this text, in Genesis 15, Abraham does not walk the gauntlet.
There's no mention of circumcision here. The promise is all one-sided. It is God who said, I will bring these things to pass, Abraham, and I swear it by myself. And so that raises the question over whether the Abrahamic covenant is conditional or unconditional.
Unconditional. We see that Abraham had already exercised and manifest faith, and so people say, well, the promises of God depend upon our having faith. The promises of the new covenant involve the necessity of faith to receive the benefits.
I can't receive any of the benefits of Christ and His covenant without faith. And so in one sense, the promises are conditional. But here's where the Reformed faith has a distinct twist on this, where the Reformed faith teaches the doctrine not only of election, but of unconditional election, meaning that the electing grace that God gives to those whom He saves is not based upon some condition that He sees in them, but it is sovereignly based in the good pleasure of God's will. And even though He assigns the mediating necessity of faith, what He does is that He acts to meet the condition for His own people.
Let me read the Westminster Confession on this point, which may seem strange to you. In chapter 7, section 3, we read, man by his fall, having made himself incapable by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace, whereby He freely offers to sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in Him. There's the requirement, or what we could call a condition, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe.
That God makes the condition for Him, He makes the condition, but He meets the condition graciously to those who are the objects of His electing grace. And we see this pattern throughout the history of Abraham and his family. Now, let's go again back and look at part of the content of the covenant that God makes with Abraham. First of all, God promises to Abraham that Abraham will be a great nation. Now again, for that to happen, Abraham has to have this huge number of descendants or of progeny, which he had no reason to expect he could produce by any power within him or his wife. Second of all, that he is going to possess the land of Canaan, which is not his by any birthright. It is purely gratuitous on God's part that He's going to give this promised land to these strangers, and God promises later to give them a land that they have not tilled or fertilized.
They'll drink from wells that they didn't dig, and they'll pluck the produce from the fields that they didn't seed, and so now we read, second of all, the possession of the land of Canaan, and third, to be the blessing to the world. Now, these three promises are brought to pass on the basis of what we call monergism. That is, monergism is an action or a work.
The word erg is a unit of work. We get the word energy from it, and when we talk about monergism, we're talking about a work that is performed by a single actor, and in this case, the content of the promise that God makes to Abraham is brought to pass not in a joint venture between God and Abraham, not that we have a covenant here of equals, but it's brought to pass sovereignly, supernaturally, by God. God is the one who brings Abraham children. I mean, that's why, again, the story labors the point Abraham was too old to have children, and his wife Sarah was too old, and the amazing thing is that even after God gives this promise to Abraham when he's already an old man, years go by, and the promise isn't fulfilled, so that now both Abraham and his wife Sarah are in a panic, and Sarah comes with a solution to the problem. Why don't you take my handmaiden Hagar?
She's still fertile. I'm barren. So, if we're going to have this promise fulfilled, we have to cooperate with God.
We have to do our work to make that come to pass. And so, Abraham goes with Hagar, and Hagar produces a child, and his name is Ishmael. And God said, no, no, no. That is not the child of promise. My covenant that I've made with you is that one from your own loins and from your wife is going to be your heir, and you think you can work this out with your own scheme, schemes, and plots?
No. Why do you think God made the promise to two people who were past the age of childbearing? To make it absolutely clear that when the child of promise was born, it was God's doing. That's the hardest thing for people to grab in the Christian faith even to this day, that salvation is of the Lord.
It's the Lord who saves. And so, the child is born completely through the power of God. It is God who brings the descendants of Abraham into the promised land. The whole book of Joshua is replete with his references that the conquest of Canaan will be the Lord's work and not the work of the armies of Joshua.
It's supernatural. And again, the blessing is the one that is wrought by God to the descendants of Abraham and those who follow Him. Now, we notice that as the story progresses, Abraham has his son Isaac, and the covenant promise that is given to Abraham is then passed on to Isaac. And it's significant that not every son of Abraham receives the promise because Ishmael is not the child of promise. Again, the Apostle Paul labors that point in the New Testament, that the child of promise is Isaac. In Isaac shall my seed be called. Again, going back to God's electing grace, but still the promise is passed on from the patriarch. This is the patriarchal age, and the word patriarch means the boss or chief or ruling father, and Abraham is the patriarch, and his successor is Isaac, to whom is given the transfer of the covenant promise. And then Isaac, his wife, Rebekah, has twins. Now, it was the custom in the ancient Near East that the familial blessing or the patriarchal blessing would always go to the elder son or the oldest son. He was the male heir of the family blessing. But in the case of Rebekah, she has two sons, Jacob and Esau, and who's the elder? Esau. But who receives the promise of the covenant? It's Jacob.
Why? Why does the custom get overthrown? Why does the human concept, why is that set aside? Well, again, the Apostle Paul labors that point in the ninth chapter of Romans, that the purposes of God according to election might stand. The elder shall serve the younger, and God makes that judgment before each one of those is born, neither having done any good or evil. And again, Paul labors the point that the blessing that is received by Jacob has nothing whatsoever to do with Jacob's earning it, meriting it, or in any otherwise contributing to it. Again, God didn't foresee some difference in behavior between Esau and Jacob.
And you think about people who think that election is based upon foreseen actions. If God were basing His election on foreseen actions, what was there in the life of Jacob that would cause Him to choose Jacob rather than Esau? And Jacob was the liar, the supplanter, the cheater from the beginning. But so that it may be clear it's not of him who runs or not of him who wills, but of God who giveth mercy, that the sovereign grace of God's salvation could be made manifest, the covenant promise is given not to Esau, but to Jacob. And then, of course, Jacob has twelve sons. And you remember at the end of the book of Genesis, again, the elder son does not receive the promise. And not all of Israel are of Israel. And so the promise is not given indiscriminately to a nation, which was what the point of the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees was.
They said, hey, look, I can give you my birth certificate. I can show you my biological generation all the way back to the patriarchs. We're children of Abraham. You're not children of the promise.
This wasn't based on biology. This was based on the divine electing grace of the covenant promise of redemption that God had made to Father Abraham. Now, it's years later that Abraham submits to circumcision. And after the baby Isaac is born, Abraham is circumcised as a sign of this covenant promise when he's an adult. That's very significant.
That's very significant. Isaac, his son, is given the sign of the covenant as an infant. Abraham, after he has faith, Isaac, before he has faith, because the promise of God is given to all who believe, but not simply after they believe. The promise is the promise, whether it's received before you believe it or after you believe it, it's still a promise of God.
And that's what's going on there. And what was the significance of this circumcision? Basically, circumcision in the ancient Near East, because it was not restricted to Jews, was a cleansing rite, a cleansing rite. And it had the significance that the person by nature who was born was born unclean. And so, circumcision was a sign of regeneration, of purification, of sanctification.
Now, those things of which it was a sign were not received automatically through the giving of the sign. That's where, again, the Jewish people went wrong. They said, well, I'm circumcised. I must be saved. Christians did the same thing. I'm baptized.
I must be saved. And that's one of the points of parallel between baptism and circumcision, that both of them are signs of the covenant, and both of them are signs of cleansing. But neither one of them automatically conveys what they signify. But they show the response of those who receive the benefits of the covenant to now swear themselves to fidelity and obedience to the God of all grace, who redeems them not on the grounds of their obedience. And so, our sanctification is supposed to flow out of our justification. Our obedience is to be a response of gratitude to the One who saved us before we did any of the works of the Lord.
That was R.C. Sproul on God's covenant with Abraham. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, a daily outreach of Ligonier Ministries, and I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham.
We will be turning our attention to the new covenant tomorrow, but there are other covenants that R.C. Sproul explores and explains in this series, God's covenant with Noah, with Moses, with David, and others. So request this 14-part series, along with the study guide, when you call us at 800-435-4343, or when you visit renewingyourmind.org, with your donation of any amount. You'll not only receive digital access to the series and study guide, but we'll send you the companion book by Dr. Sproul, The Promises of God. Request this resource package with your gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you click the link in the podcast show notes. Thank you for your generosity as you help fuel the spread of trusted teaching to the nations. We'll be skipping forward tomorrow as R.C. Sproul begins a two-day study of the new covenant, so be sure to join us then here on Renewing Your Mind.
