There’s an old joke about a man, lost and dying of thirst in a desert, who bargains with God: “God, I promise you, if you will save me from this situation, I will give all I have to the poor, and I will become a priest.” Just then, a bird flew over his head, carrying a large jug of clear, cool water, dropping it at his feet. Not missing a beat, the man quickly exclaimed, “Never mind, God, I got this.”
Promises, how God provides, and how we respond are fundamental issues of faith. As a boy, when I was starting to make sense of how faith works, my biggest question was, “If you make a promise to God, can you break it?”
This was no simply academic thought experiment. Like the man in the desert, who among us hasn’t found themselves in a place where we have made an extreme promise to God when we needed him to come through? But even as a young kid, I was confronted with an inconvenient truth concerning my promises to God: My prayers were writing checks that my faithfulness couldn’t cash. I wasn’t good at keeping the promises I made.
In our Old Testament reading from Genesis today, we come upon one of the most ancient and fundamental texts of the entire Bible, God’s covenant with Abraham, still going by his earlier name of Abram. It’s so fundamental to our faith that the words are almost a trope of all faith: “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
On one level this story is about divine promises, how God establishes promises, and how we walk by faith in God’s trustworthiness to keep promises. But on another level this story has some of the most deeply human moments of any story in Scripture, exposing the difficulty of living a life of true faith, and showing unvarnished truth about what it’s like to depend on God. As we look at this honest picture, we’ll see how faith in God’s promises brings us to vulnerable places where God’s mercy, his care, and his radical faithfulness are all we have to depend on.
From the very beginning of our reading from Genesis, the story includes details that tell us it isn’t just a simple story of easy faith. It begins with God saying to Abram, “‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?’” (Gen. 15:2).
It is helpful to note here that this isn’t God’s first interaction with Abram about this. Three chapters earlier in Genesis 12, God called Abram seemingly out of nowhere, from a place called Ur of the Chaldeans, to leave his home and his kindred to go to the place where God would show him. There God would give Abram a promised land, make him into a great nation, and bless all the nations of the earth through him. This was no small promise, and Abram’s was no small faith.
Abram packed up all his possessions, and moved with his wife, his nephew, and his livestock and entourage to travel to a place only God knew. The promise was a little farfetched: Abram was no spring chicken, already in his 70s, with a wife well past childbearing age who had never given birth. The land was nothing but a hope staked on God’s Word. The nation and the blessing — let’s just say that Abram must have known that God was in the miracle business, because that wasn’t going to happen any other way.
Where we pick up in our reading today, Abram has been away from home for decades, roaming in the land God had promised, bouncing from king to king, none of whom give way to let Abram possess it without a fight. Abram is a wanderer without connections or protections, landless, and childless. When God shows up, Abram doesn’t hesitate in letting him know that things might not be working out as God seemed to have promised.
If you’ve ever taken a big step of faith before, you know that it doesn’t always work out in such a one-to-one, direct correlation between God’s call, our faith, and God’s providence. Even when things go well enough, there’s often that moment when — after that step of faith — things are more fragile than they used to be, less secure. It’s unpredictable, scary, anxiety-inducing. You don’t have any guarantees it’s all going to be okay. You can hear it in Abram’s tone: He’s taken the risk, and he has nothing to show for it.
“O lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” In other words, God, you called, and I answered. I’ve been traveling through the wilderness for decades with a barren wife and my old, tired bones, trusting in a promise, but with nothing to show for it. If you were going to ask me to adopt one of my servants as heir, why did I have to travel so far and give up so much to do it?
God knew Abram’s fears, and knew the risk Abram had taken. God opens the conversation with words of comfort, protection, and providence: “Do not be afraid, Abram.” There’s the comfort. “I am your shield.” There’s the protection. “Your reward shall be very great.” There’s the promise to provide. But God isn’t done: “This man shall not be your heir … your own issue shall be your heir.”
God doubles down on the promise: “Look toward heaven and count the stars. … So shall your descendants be.” And Abram believed, and the Lord counted it as righteousness.
But big faith brings us into places of great dependence, and that is God’s path for Abram, the father of faith, as well.
“O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess [the land]?” He wants assurances, guarantees. He is hanging out there like a sheet in the wind, surrounded by kings who would love for him to blow away. He’s exposed, helpless without the help of the Lord his God.
And that’s when things start to get heavy. God takes Abram’s faith and calls him beyond faith to absolute vulnerability and dependence. God says, “Bring me a heifer … a goat … a ram … a dove, and a young pigeon.” God commands Abram to lay the animals out in halves like a path. The pathway, this aisle of animals cut in two, is not just a sacrifice; it’s a promise.
What Abram has set up, at God’s command, is a ceremony people in the Ancient Near East would use to establish an unbreakable covenant. Like a graphic and utterly vivid way of saying “cross my heart and hope to die,” the two people making a covenant in this way are saying to one another as they pass together through the divided animal halves, “If I break the terms of this contract, let it be done to me as it was to these animals.”
The way it worked, if the two people were of equal social status, they would each make their vows and then walk through the animals, but if one person were of a lower social status, less able to put up sufficient collateral, he would have to walk the bloody path alone. The honor of the greater person was enough to ensure the promise would be kept. Abram prepares the animals in the daylight, and lays them out according to the ritual. He lays the carcasses out for the covenant God commanded.
It’s a bloody, disturbing scene already, and then something truly unexpected happens. Listen to what it says happened next: “When birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.” What an odd detail!
Abram has left his home, wandered in the desert for decades, lived on nothing but a promise that has yet been unfulfilled. When he brings it to God in prayer, when God makes a big promise and asks for a big show of faith in return, in the middle of that sacred moment, a bunch of nasty old vultures start swooping in. To picture it would almost be funny, an Old Testament comedy of errors, if it weren’t so eerily similar to things I’ve felt, and true to what I fear.
You see, I want to believe that when I make a commitment to trust God with something, to take a step of faith, that God is going to be with me, right there holding my hand, making sure everything is going to work out according to his plan and will. And I like to think that once I say yes to what I think God is calling me to, then he will make it easy.
What I find instead is that sometimes the pathway that God has people of faith walk is the journey of waiting, and nothing at all seems to happen. Jacob waits 14 years to receive Rachel as a bride. After God’s promise to Abraham, the Israelites go into captivity in Egypt for 400 years, and even after they get out it takes 40 years of wandering in the wilderness with Moses before the promise God makes to Abraham on this night comes through.
Nobody likes waiting. I want what I want, and I want it now. Waiting feels like a waste, a waste of good time and a waste of faith. And it is in those times of waiting that temptations come, those birds of prey, those vultures that would eat up the offering I would gladly give to God, if only he would hurry up. In those times of waiting between God’s promises and his fulfillment, my doubts, my fears, my anxieties, my desire for achievement, my hungers, my distractions become loud.
This is what St. Paul is talking about in our Epistle reading when he talks about those whose “god is their belly,” whose “minds are set on earthly things.” Our journey now is to wait: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting [waiting for] a Savior … He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory … Therefore … stand firm in the Lord in this way” (Phil 3:20–4:1).
Stand firm. Abram had to wait. In waiting, the vultures circled, and Abram had to fight them away from the offering Godhad called him to make. We have every reason not to wait, every reason, when the birds of prey start to feed on the offering, to throw up our hands and say, “God, this was your idea! I was fine where I was before you called me out here all alone. If you want this sacrifice, come get it, but I’m out of here.” We have every reason but one.
“When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces.” God passed through the bloody passageway alone, taking the position of the lower one. The covenant would be unilateral. God takes all the responsibility of the oath and all the cost of the promise. It wouldn’t be about Abram’s ability to keep a promise, or his descendants’ faithfulness to the covenant, but on God’s radical faithfulness to this promise that would bring the people home and birth our salvation.
Generations, centuries later, Jesus Christ would walk the bloody passage, would secure the covenant for Abraham in utter humility, that through him all the generations of the earth should be blessed. This is how God works. This is the cross; this is Easter.
Lent is that time between the thing promised and its fulfillment when we must wait. Our job is to prepare the offering, to offer ourselves, to wait, to keep the birds from tearing us away as we present ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. God’s job is done, as the Son walked the passageway to secure the covenant forever. Let us come. Let us wait. God keeps his promises.
Jesus said, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.”
The Rev. Dr. Paul D. Wheatley is assistant professor of New Testament at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.
