“I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” But Abram said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” —Gen. 15:7–8
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, dropping a large jug of clear, cool water, at his feet.
Not missing a beat, the man exclaims, “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, how many of us have not found themselves in a place where we made an extreme promise to God because we needed God to come through? Even as a kid, I sensed that my prayers were writing checks that my faithfulness couldn’t cash. Along with the weakness of my will inherited as an exiled son of Adam and Eve, life is filled with distractions that beckon my attention away from faithfulness. I’m not so good at keeping promises with God.
Genesis 15 is one of the most ancient and fundamental texts of the entire Bible, God’s covenant with Abraham, as of yet still using his earlier name 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,” Gen. 15:6. Paul relays the Genesis passage in Romans 4:3 and in Galatians 3:6, while James includes it in his epistle, 2:23.
On one level, this story is about 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. The unvarnished truth of this passage shows how hard depending on God can be, even in times of great faith.
From the very beginning of Genesis 15, the story includes details that tell us it isn’t a story of easy faith. God says 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. 15:1–2).
This isn’t God’s first interaction with Abram about this. Three chapters earlier in Genesis 12, God called Abram out of a place called Ur of the Chaldeans, to leave his home and his kindred to go to the place God would show him. God promised Abram land, to make him into a great nation, and to bless all the nations of the earth through him. This was no small promise, and Abram’s was no small faith.
Abram packed up his stuff, 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 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, well, 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 Genesis 15 picks up, Abram has been roaming around the land for decades, bouncing from king to king, none of whom give way to Abram without a fight. He is a wanderer without connections, landless, and childless. When God shows up, Abram doesn’t hesitate to let him know that things aren’t 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 move from God’s call to our faith to 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, anxiety-inducing. You have no guarantees things are going to work out. You can hear it in Abram’s tone:
“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).
Abram essentially says, God, you called. I answered. After decades roaming the wilderness with a barren wife and my old bones, I have nothing to show for it. If you wanted me to adopt one of my servants as heir, why must I travel so far and give up so much to do it?
God knew Abram’s fears, and knew the risk he had taken. God opens the conversation with words of comfort (“Do not be afraid, Abram”), protection (“I am your shield”), and a promise to provide (“Your reward shall be very great”; Gen. 15:1).
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 (Gen. 15:4–6).
But faith brings us into places of great dependence. For Abram, it’s no different: “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess [the land]?” (15:8). He wants guarantees. He is hanging out like a sheet in the wind, surrounded by kings who would love for him to blow away.
And that’s when things start to get heavy. God then calls Abram to absolute vulnerability and dependence. God says, “Bring me a heifer … a goat … a ram … a dove, and a young pigeon” (Gal. 15:9). God commands Abram to lay the animals out in halves like a path. This pathway, this aisle of animals cut in two, is not just a sacrifice; it’s a promise.
Abram has set up, at God’s command, a ceremony people in the Ancient Near East would use to establish an unbreakable covenant. Like a bloody 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 animal halves, “If I break the terms of this contract, let it be done to me as it was to these animals.”
If 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 fit to back his end of the bargain with collateral, he would walk the bloody path alone. The honor of the greater person was enough to ensure the promise would be kept. So, 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 scene already, and then something truly unexpected happens. “When birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away” (15:11).
Abram has left his home, wandered decades in the desert, lived on a promise, yet unfulfilled. After he takes it to God in prayer, 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 vultures start swooping in. To picture it would almost be funny, an ancient comedy of errors, if it weren’t so familiar to real life.
I want to believe that when I make a commitment to trust God with something, God is going to be with me, holding my hand, making sure things will work out. I like to think that once I say yes to what I think God is calling me to, God will make it easy.
But often God has people of faith walk through the pathway of waiting. 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.
Who likes waiting? It feels like a waste of time.
In these times of waiting, I find that temptations squawk loudest. Those birds of prey threaten to consume the offering I would gladly give to God, if only he would hurry up. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of St. Paul, characterizes these birds as “thoughts hostile to the soul, [which] when they hover over it or perch upon it, not only come down themselves, but also bring downfall to the understanding” (Who Is the Heir, 242). In those times of waiting between God’s promises and fulfillment, my doubts, my fears, my anxieties, my ambition, my hungers, my distractions, become loud.
St. Paul 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 a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 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. 3:17–4:1).
Stand firm. Abram had to wait. In waiting, the vultures circled, and Abram had to fight them off the offering God had 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 if not, I’m done.” 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” (Gen. 15:17). 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 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 their salvation.
Generations, centuries later, the deep meaning of this strange scene in Genesis 15 came into sharp focus. Jesus Christ walked the bloody passage. He secured the covenant for Abraham in utter humility so that through him all the generations of the earth should be blessed. This is how God works. This is the cross; this is Easter. And, in light of Christ’s mustard seed parable in the synoptic gospels, it is not the level of faith we have in him that matters, but that we have any faith in him. What matters is the object of our faith, not the strength thereof. And if our faith, however small and faltering, is in the one who walked that bloody passage and whose promises are trustworthy, then our comfort and our joy is that our lives are hidden in his and we have his peace.
Lent is that time between the thing promised and its fulfillment when we must wait. The task before us 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 work is done. The Son walked the passageway to secure the covenant forever. Our job is to come and present ourselves. Our job is to wait. God keeps his promises.
The Rev. Dr. Paul D. Wheatley is assistant professor of New Testament at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.