The Bible mentions several meetings between Abraham and God, but only two of them are described in detail. During the first, God makes an alliance-covenant with Abraham, promising to give his descendants the land where he is now wandering. His descendants will be on this...
The Bible mentions several meetings between Abraham and God, but only two of them are described in detail. During the first, God makes an alliance-covenant with Abraham, promising to give his descendants the land where he is now wandering. His descendants will be settled inhabitants on this land, no longer nomads, and they will possess the land on which Abraham is only a sojourner. These are serious promises, and Abraham quite naturally wants proof.
Words alone are not enough here. "How am I to know that everything will be as You say?" he asks God. The answer comes without delay: God tells Abraham to prepare for the making and consecration of an alliance, a covenant that will bind him to God in obligatory relations. God does not need obligations; Abraham needs them, because he wants the reliability of a real alliance-covenant, the kind that is made for years or even for centuries.
Then God tells Abraham to cut open the carcasses of sacrificial animals and lay these split carcasses on the ground. In those days, alliances were consecrated by passing between the two halves of the split carcasses of sacrificial animals. Abraham waits, and God does not delay: at sunset lightning struck the wood prepared for the sacrificial fire; it is described as a fiery tongue that fell from heaven. Lightning was a manifestation of power; it marked the place of a deity's presence, and Abraham, like any person of that time, knew this perfectly well. He understood that his God had come to make an alliance with him. Yet lightning was not the only sign of God's presence.
Another such sign was the spiritual experience Abraham lived through in His presence. Abraham experiences it in a state that in Russian is usually called deep sleep, although the corresponding Hebrew word denotes something between sleep and wakefulness, when a person can hear God's voice or see a vision.
At first glance Abraham's vision may appear strange: the Hebrew text speaks of a great and terrible darkness, or, in another reading, of the terror that seized Abraham as the descending darkness approached him. In substance the difference is small, but such a theophany can indeed seem strange: a dark God from whom terror breathes - how is this to be understood? The answer, meanwhile, is not so complicated.
A person cannot see God as He is, and everything invisible, when a person looks at it, appears impenetrably black, dark, like precisely that fathomless darkness before which Abraham found himself. That terror breathes from this darkness is understandable: here there is not simply sacred awe, but an awareness of one's own nothingness, one's own nonexistence before the One Who Is. God would have remained forever like this for man if He Himself had not chosen to fill the abyss that separates man from Him. But to fill it, time is needed; here there is only the beginning of the path, God's first step toward man. The first, but not the last; others will follow it.
15 In this chapter we have a solemn treaty between God and Abram,
15:6 And he believed in the Lord - That is, believed the truth of that promise which God had now made him, resting upon the power, and faithfulness of him that made it: see how the apostle magnifies this faith of Abram, and makes it a standing example, Rom 4:19-21. He was not weak in faith; he staggered not at the promise: he was strong in faith; he was fully persuaded. The Lord work such a faith in every one of us. And he counted it to him for righteousness - That is, upon the score of this he was accepted of God, and, by faith he obtained witness that he was righteous, Heb 11:4. This is urged in the New Testament to prove, that we are justified by faith without the works of the law, Rom 4:3, Gal 3:6, for Abram was so justified, while he was yet uncircumcised. If Abram, that was so rich in good works, was not justified by them, but by his faith, much less can we. This faith, which was imputed to Abram for righteousness, had newly struggled with unbelief, Gen 15:2, and coming off, conqueror, it was thus crowned, thus honoured.