The Example of Abraham

In one of my classes we have been translating through Genesis 15. A few things have been highlighted that I thought I would share which have encouraged me and hopefully will do the same for you. First some textual/interpretive notes, then some observations.

This story of God’s promises to Abraham really is made up of 2 units – verses 1-6 and verses 17-21. Both units begin with divine disclosure that has a predicate nominative clause – “I am a shield” and “I am Yahweh.”

Verses 1-6 revolve around zerah – seed or offspring – which is interesting because Abraham has no progeny. This second unit revolves around eretz – land. In the ancient world offspring and land were key elements to stability and prosperity. After all what good is it to be a tribal chieftain with no tribe? Or even more specifically, a nomadic tribal chieftain with no offspring to follow? And if you don’t have seed it doesn’t matter if you have land or cattle or anything.

Verse 6 moves into an omniscient narrator who knows both Abraham’s and God’s thoughts and interprets what has just happened. Finally we find someone who actually believes and follows God and has a continuing line of faithful believers. This is what the reader of Genesis has been looking for.
There are many explicit references to this verse in the NT (Rom. 4:3,9,22; Gal 3:6 James 2:23), also implicitly behind Hab. 2:4. There is also a great deal of debate about how to actually translate and interpret this verse. More than likely, when the text tells us that “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness,” the object of Abram’s faith is Yahweh himself.

In verse 8 Abram asks how he will know that what God says will come to fruition. In verse 13 God gives the answer – “You will certainly know” and God gives a prophecy.

Verse 18 contains a particular usage of the verb natan which might best be translated, “(by this act of speaking) I (hereby) give.” This is the first mention of the word “covenant” and it is out of the mouth of the narrator. Abram already knows he is in the midst of a covenant ceremony, but it is as if the narrator is making sure that the reader gets that this is a covenant. This verse brings all the aspects together – land, seed, and the giving from God.


As I read this passage and similar ones (Genesis 12, 17, Exodus 3), I think we see clearly that divine revelation results in faith. When God discloses God’s self it will produce faith in the human heart, which we might also call discipleship – an ongoing process of growing in the knowledge and faith of God. But this story is not just a nice background story describing God’s covenant with Abraham. Verse 7 has clear parallels with Exodus 20 (and others) describing similar experiences with God. The point is that your experience is supposed to be paralleled with Abram’s. The faith he had should be the same as yours. We aren’t getting theophanies any more, but we have received divine revelation. So is our belief credited as righteousness and faithfulness or not?

Also, we see Abraham was asking for cognitive certainty. Some may see this as unbelief, but that does not seem to be the case. Like any of us, it is not that we don’t believe – we just want to try to understand how it is all going to work out. God responded with a covenant in which God took the consequences of breaking the covenant upon God’s self. God did not lay out exactly how God’s promises would be fulfilled, but God clearly conveyed that the promises would in fact be fulfilled. As Abraham is walking through life he just had the word and the covenant to hold onto.

Again, our story parallels Abraham’s in so many ways. We have a received a word of God. God has revealed God’s self through the word made flesh and through God’s actual word. And God has made promises to us and we often wonder, “How? How will they be fulfilled?” So God responds with a covenant which Christians call a “sacrament”. In communion we experience God making a covenant with us and taking the consequences upon God’s self. And so we go walk through this life with the word and the covenant, and that is what we have to live on until the “not yet”.