The Night God Walked Alone

Abram asks a question in verse 8: “how shall I know that I will inherit it?” God's answer fills the rest of the chapter. God does not answer with an argument. He answers with a legal ceremony. Nothing else in Genesis is quite like it.

First, what God asks for. Five animals: a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtledove and a pigeon (15:9). Abram cuts them in two and lays the halves opposite each other (15:10). That leaves a path running down the middle. Then he waits. Verse 11 says the vultures come down, and he drives them away. He asked for certainty, and now he stands in a field all afternoon, chasing birds.

Second, what the path was for. God's Word tells us. The Hebrew for making a covenant is karat berit: to CUT a covenant. Centuries later, Jeremiah describes the same ceremony and tells what it meant. God will judge “the men who have transgressed My covenant… when they cut the calf in two and passed between the parts of it” (Jeremiah 34:18). The two people walked the path together. By walking it, they were saying: if I break this promise, let me be made like these animals. It was the most serious thing a person could say.

Third, what happens to Abram. “Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him” (15:12). The sleep fell upon him. He did not just doze off. The same word is used for Adam's sleep in 2:21. It is a sleep that God sends on a person. By the time the ceremony happens, Abram cannot walk anywhere.

Then verse 17. “There appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces.” Later, smoke and fire will stand over Mount Sinai and lead Israel out of Egypt. The smoke and fire are God. He walks the path on His own.

Two walkers were needed. The ceremony needs two people. One of them is asleep, because God made him sleep. So God walks for both sides. He swears to keep His side, and He swears to carry the penalty if Abram breaks his.

That is why the promise lasts through everything that happens afterwards. Abram lies about his wife in chapter 12 and does it again in chapter 20. In chapter 16 he and Sarai try to get the promised son their own way, and it goes badly. None of it breaks the covenant, because Abram never swore to it. He was asleep.

Six verses before the ceremony comes a quiet verse: “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness” (15:6). Nothing happens when it is said. There is no fire, no voice and no sign. But the New Testament quotes it three times.

Where Abram is standing. He is outside at night. He is old, with no son, and a servant is still named as his heir. Nothing has changed between verse 5 and verse 6, except that God has spoken. The stars do not prove the promise is working. They are a picture of something that has not started yet.

“Accounted” is a bookkeeping word. It means credited, written into someone's account. God is the one doing the writing. Abram did not become right with God by piling up enough good deeds. God credited it to him. What God credited was Abram taking Him at His word.

Paul's argument is about timing. He quotes this verse in Romans 4:3 and then asks when it happened. It was before circumcision, which comes years later in chapter 17. It was also before the law — Galatians 3:17 says four hundred and thirty years before. So Abram was put right with God with no ceremonies, no law and no record of good works. “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” (Romans 4:4-5).

James quotes it too (2:23), to make a different point. The kind of faith God credits is the kind that shows in how you live. Paul and James do not disagree. Paul is answering how is anybody put right with God. James is answering how do you tell real faith from talk.

The two halves of the chapter fit together. In verse 6 God credits righteousness to a man who has done nothing to earn it. In verse 17 God walks the path alone and swears to carry the penalty if that man breaks the agreement. Both halves say the same thing: God carries the weight.

The cross. “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). God swore to take the curse for a partner who would break the promise. We are that partner. At the cross, the One who swore it paid it.

Why did God do it this way? Hebrews tells us: “Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath” (6:17). The heirs of promise are the people who trust God, and that includes you. God gave this strange ceremony so that you would stop wondering whether He is going to change His mind.