Transcript

The Promises to Abraham

About 4,000 years ago, God appeared to Abraham. He said to him; leave your home, leave your family, leave your country, and go to a land that I'll show you, and if you do this, I will bless you. Those who bless you will be blessed. Those who curse you will be cursed. You'll inherit that land. It will be your possession, and the Earth will be blessed through you.

Receiving this promise, Abraham decided to go. And so he goes and goes and goes until, eventually, he finds himself in the land of Canaan. And God tells him; this is it! This is the land, and not only so, but God says that his descendants would inherit that land, that it would be given to Abraham and then to his children after him and to his children's children. More than that, those descendants would bless the world. Well, years pass, and Abraham is old and has no children.

So he thinks about this promise, and he approaches God and says; you promised me descendants that they would inherit the land, that they would bless the world, and I have no children. So God says to Abraham, go get some animals. Now, that might sound a little obscure to us, but at that time, this was part of an ancient Covenant-making ritual. What would happen is you would take animals, you would divide them in half, and you would separate the halves. Each person who was going to take part in this Covenant would walk through the halves of the animal, and the reason they would do that was to acknowledge that if they broke the Covenant, then what happened to those animals is what should happen to them. It's a very serious kind of business.

So Abraham gets the animals. He divides them, and he's getting ready to walk through them, and when all of a sudden, he feels tired. God puts Abraham in a deep sleep. What happens here is God prevents Abraham from walking through the animals, and instead, God Appears in the form of a smoking furnace and a burning lamp. And God himself passes through the pieces of the animals. Abraham does not. Why does that matter? Why is that significant for us, who are here 4,000 years later?

Well, the reason is because God made the Covenant. You know, when you have a covenant that humans make, humans break promises all the time. We can't live up to them, or we purposefully don't live up to them. That's not how it works with God. God keeps his promises. And so what God does is he walks through the animals and doesn't allow Abraham to. There is no way that Abraham can, on purpose or mistakenly, break the Covenant. This Covenant is unbreakable. Abraham's descendants will inherit the land, and someday, they will bless the world. But when and how?