Building a Family

By my count, up to this point in Genesis, we've heard the name 'Abram' forty-five times. The name Sarai? Six times. But now is her time in the spotlight. When first we heard that “the name of Abram's wife was Sarai,” the very next line let us know that “she had no child” (Genesis 11:29-30). When the two married somewhere near Ur, neither expected that they'd not be expecting. But a year went by, two years, and Sarai wasn't pregnant. Then Terah had them pack their bags for Harran; but when they got there, still Sarai didn't conceive with Abram. Ah, but then Abram got that stunning call, with a promise that in Canaan he'd at last be blessed (Genesis 12:2-3). God kept talking there to Abram: his seed this, his seed that; Abram must have wondered if there were a hidden meaning. Only once Abram cracked open his despairing heart did a ray of clarifying light fall therein: “One from your own innards, he will be your heir” (Genesis 15:4). And time marched on. Here we are, “after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 16:3), “and Sarai, wife of Abram, had not birthed for him” (Genesis 16:1). “Sarai was barren” (Genesis 11:30), suffering from primary infertility.

That's a heavy burden for anyone to bear – and common, with about one in seven American couples these days struggling to conceive. The stress of coping with infertility has been known to bring “depression, anger, mood swings, anxiety, guilt, and isolation.”¹ It's a safe bet that Sarai has gotten on a first-name basis with all six woes. “The barren womb” is “never satisfied” (Proverbs 30:15-16). She's also no doubt caught glimpses through these years of her husband Abram's anguish, even if he's tried to hide it for her sake (Genesis 15:2). And if infertility is a troubling burden naturally to anybody, it was all the more so in Sarai's world. Although in reality men and women are equally likely to contribute to fertility issues,² in her world the default assumption was that childlessness was a woman's issue and negated her value. In the ancient world, “infertile marriages ended in divorce” all the time, a prospect which “was devastating for the woman.”³ 

And in her case, much more was at stake. Sarai's surely heard Abram recount his encounters with his God, so Sarai knows Abram's seed will get the land of Canaan, multiply like the dust, and inherit a future by the terms of a solemn covenant (Genesis 12:7; 13:15-16; 15:13-14). And Sarai knows that this seed, once it's a great nation, has the responsibility to mediate divine blessing to all families of the earth (Genesis 12:2-3). Sarai has an inkling that the fate of the world rests on Abram's seed. So maybe Sarai wonders: Is she in the way of the world's salvation?

Hard-pressed by weights natural, cultural, and covenantal, Sarai has probably long been vexed; maybe she's tried out some of the many medical solutions of the ancient cultures, not that they could've been effective in the slightest.⁴ But now Sarai is, if we do our math, apparently seventy-five years old. Now, the Bible attributes big lives to our Genesis friends, and we can argue about whether the ages are always literal or not; but biblically, Sarai is now 59% of the way through her natural life (Genesis 23:1), and so now she's hit menopause.⁵ She's a smart woman; she knows her body. So she declares: “The LORD has restrained me from bearing” (Genesis 16:2). As she sees things, God chose never to open the locked door, and now the chance is gone.⁶

All this time, it occurs to her, a question has gone unspoken. Abram now knows, since God swore on God's life, that the coming heir must be Abram's biological child (Genesis 15:4). But there's been zero mention of who the mother is to be.⁷ They've surely always assumed it'd be Abram's life-long wife, but Sarai now sees reason, in the absence of a specific promise to her, whether she fits into that blurry little spot on the covenant. But Sarai is a determined woman; if she can't get through the locked door, she'll throw bricks through the window.

That's why we hear, as this story opens, that “Sarai had a maidservant, an Egyptian, and her name was Hagar” (Genesis 16:1). It's not hard to piece together how she got there. Four chapters earlier, there was a famine, and Abram took Sarai on the run for Egypt (Genesis 12:10). Imagining danger from lustful Egyptian men and their lethal jealousies, Abram talked Sarai into passing herself off as his little sister for his protection (Genesis 12:11-13). A harrowing dalliance with Pharaoh himself, staved off only by the hand of God, led to Sarai's safe return but also the deportation of the pair (Genesis 12:15-20). Yet Pharaoh didn't take back his gifts to Abram, which had included “slaves and maidservants” (Genesis 12:16). Now we get to meet one.⁸ And the repeated note that Hagar is Egyptian “was that we might refer back to that incident” that brought them together.⁹ Hagar's Egyptian eyes are a constant reminder. How did Sarai really feel about Abram's plan and its outcome? Hurt, betrayed, used, exploited? Has she forgiven? Or is resentment lurking still in the shadows?

That we don't know, but we do know that Egypt was proverbial for its fertile soil, a reference point for other places that were “well-watered... like the land of Egypt” (Genesis 13:10). It was Egypt's fertile soil that solved their last problem; now Sarai sees Hagar as a portable patch of fertile Egyptian soil,¹⁰ which suggests “an easy solution to Sarai's dilemma.”¹¹ Sarai suggests “surrogate motherhood” as the plan.¹² Hagar's living womb, a surrogate for Sarai's dead one, will be her brick through the window. “Go in to my maidservant,” she decrees (Genesis 16:2). Abram must inseminate Hagar the old-fashioned way, who, if all goes well, will conceive a child who, while biologically Abram's and Hagar's, will be legally Sarai's. Thus, as Eve was “built” out of the raw matter of Adam's side, Sarai hopes “maybe I'll be built up from her” (Genesis 16:2).¹³ This procedure of traditional surrogacy “may be the oldest form of assisted reproduction” known to man – or to woman.¹⁴

To Sarai, and to Abram too, it all makes perfect sense. The laws they knew often had stipulations where if a man's wife didn't provide him with children, he was entitled to take a secondary wife.¹⁵ Archaeologists have dug up Middle Eastern marriage contracts that outright stipulate that if a wife didn't bear her husband a son in a certain number of years, then it was her responsibility to get a slave girl to do the job, and the slave girl's son would count as the son of the first-ranked wife.¹⁶ In their culture, this was normal, understandable, ordinary, to use a maidservant as a surrogate; it's almost surprising it's taken them this long to try it.¹⁷ And some readers stop with that observation: it was accepted custom, so that's that. But I can't help but wonder: Was this a good idea? Was this a good plan? It might be normal, it might be effective, it might even be the only thing they can do. But does that justify it morally? Does this surrogacy scheme pass ethical muster? Is it wise, is it godly?

The very fact that Sarai's proposed tool is an Egyptian woman – a person, not a thing, though Sarai's forgotten that – should make us pay close attention to how this story compares with the one from four chapters back.¹⁸ Then, the problem was an infertile land, and Abram found an Egyptian solution; now, the problem is an infertile body, and Abram's wife finds an Egyptian solution. On the border of Egypt was the first place we heard Abram speak to Sarai; now is the first time we hear Sarai speak to Abram. Both even open with the same words, “Behold, please,” though where Abram invites Sarah to behold her own beauty, Sarai invites Abram to behold her barrenness. In each story, “behold, please,” is followed by a problem and a plan of action. Abram's plan involved obscuring the nature of his relationship to Sarai – and isn't that ultimately what Sarai's plan would do, obscure her wifehood and Abram's husbandhood (Genesis 12:11-13; 16:2)?

Abram, of course, thought his plan was quite crafty: he could outsmart the men of Egypt and leverage their lust to his advantage, all without really surrendering what mattered to him. But Abram hadn't foreseen all the real-life consequences of his choice. When Egypt's king entered the picture, Sarai was just 'the woman' taken into the house of Pharaoh (Genesis 12:15). Sarai thinks her plan very crafty: she can leverage Hagar's Egyptian fertility to her advantage, all without really surrendering what matters to her. But we have to wonder if Sarai's realy foreseen the real-life consequences of her choice after all (Genesis 16:4-5). And the deepest irony is that in Egypt, Sarai was objectified as a thing to be gazed on and owned; hence she was taken, without a voice, and we still haven't resolved how she feels about that. But now she's objectifying Hagar, treating her as a pawn or even a commodity, giving her no voice or choice whether to share her body with the 85-year-old patriarch.¹⁹ Sarai is just “repeating the treatment she received at her husband's hands in Egypt,”²⁰ and maybe subconsciously giving Abram “measure-for-measure payback” for having put her in a precarious position then.²¹

That doesn't look good, but it gets worse. Take away the names, and picture a story where a woman takes and gives something to her man and the man hearkens to the voice of his wife. All those words show up in this passage; they also show up in the Garden. There, the woman took fruit from the forbidden tree, and she offered it to the man (Genesis 3:6), and God charged him with it: “You have hearkened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree” (Genesis 3:17). Now, “Sarai the woman of Abram took” a woman, “and she gave her to Abram her man” (Genesis 16:3), for “Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai” (Genesis 16:2). That can be no coincidence; Sarai and Abram are reenacting the tragedy of Eden.²² Adam tasted the fruit that wasn't his; Abram “went in to Hagar” (Genesis 16:4). His motivation wasn't lust, but to please and appease his wife and assent to her goals.²³ So “he went in to Hagar, and she conceived” promptly (Genesis 16:4).

Abram's ploy in Egypt led Egypt's princes setting eyes on Sarai (Genesis 12:14), and after Adam tasted the fruit “then the eyes of both were opened” (Genesis 3:7). The result of this reenactment is that “when Hagar saw that she had conceived, her mistress was lessened in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4). This sparked a fall and a fallout, “a breakdown in the expected relationship dynamics,”²⁴ for which Sarai curses at Abram (Genesis 16:5). Like Eve and Adam (Genesis 3:9-13), now Sarai and Abram play the blame game (Genesis 16:5-6). But we should have seen trouble coming from the story's start, a sentence beginning in Sarai's name and ending in Hagar's, catching Abram literarily between his two women (Genesis 16:1).²⁵ Where Sarai describes her action as having given “my maidservant into your lap” (Genesis 16:5), the narrator describes her giving Hagar “to Abram her husband as a wife” (Genesis 16:3). Now there's a third person in this marriage. Sarai hadn't foreseen Abram's courteous care for Hagar for the sake of his unborn child in her womb. Now she wonders if she's altered their relational dynamic forever.²⁶ In Sarai's eyes, Hagar “had now become her rival wife.”²⁷

As if that weren't enough, “when she saw that she had conceived, I was lessened in her eyes” (Genesis 16:5). Hagar, now functionally a wife of Abram, is no longer looking up at Sarai with reverent fear; she's barely seeing Sarai at all, and when she does, Sarai feels like Hagar is looking down on her, boasting over her as completion to incompletion and as the new to the old. Sarai thinks that Hagar thinks she can stake a claim to be at least Sarai's equal, if not now her social superior in the household. Ancient laws from the time noted how a servant girl who bore her master's children might aspire to equal status with her mistress,²⁸ and sages ranked “a maidservant when she displaces her mistress” on their list of the most intolerable things (Proverbs 30:23). And maybe Hagar now even thinks that, when the baby is born, she can refuse to surrender parental rights to Sarai.²⁹

Now, since Abram had his own tent and Sarai and Hagar each had theirs, Abram could be totally oblivious to all the drama playing out behind his back.³⁰ It's not for nothing that one Jewish philosopher quips that Abram was “clearly inept in the matter of women, wives, and marriage” – a perfect sitcom husband, leaving Sarai to roll her eyes and nag like a sitcom wife.³¹ This story is a cautionary tale for husbands and wives not to let things fester behind closed doors, and instead to strive for sound communication, for confession, for forgiveness.³² But Abram and Sarai hadn't yet learned that lesson, and from the harshness of Sarai's words to him now, it's obvious there's a long-stewing grievance rendered rancid with age – how Sarai forsook her roots to join Abram's journey, how Sarai risked her purity to save Abram's bacon, how she'd put up with his thoughtlessness, how she'd now swallowed her pride and abased herself in giving him Hagar, and how Abram hadn't safeguarded her status but instead enabled Hagar's seeming threats to Sarai's position and dignity.³³ It's little wonder she charges Abram with guilt for the 'violence' or 'savagery' meted out by Hagar's judgmental Egyptian eyes, which have brought back on her the memory also of Egyptian eyes undressing her in an unsafe foreign land.³⁴ If she's being unfair, well, this whole episode is a toxic byproduct of Abram's past missteps, the delayed consequences of the faithlessness without which Hagar wouldn't have been with them to begin with.³⁵

So now Sarai is fed up. She wants Abram to step in as the man of action he's been for others but never for her, and to make his loyalties plain and clear. She wants belated reparations for what he'd talked her into doing for him in Egypt. She wants him to put Hagar back in her place and to fix the situation.³⁶ And she closes her tirade by appealing over her husband's head: “May the LORD judge between you and me!” (Genesis 16:5). Of course, Sarai might regret those words. In Genesis 3, the LORD did judge the situation – that's why Sarai could find herself with so much agony in the quest to conceive in the first place (Genesis 3:16)!

Ultimately, the surrogacy scheme Sarai concocted to implement through Hagar has proven a bit of a boondoggle.³⁷ Sarai acted from a heartfelt desperation that cries out for a compassionate eye, and it worked in the sense that there now exists a magnificently precious unborn child who will be born as an effect of her plan (Genesis 16:15). But the experience has been acid thrown in the face of their marital health; in the end, it will lower Sarai down rather than build her up (Genesis 16:16); and through this ordeal, “the entire household loses.”³⁸ Sarai's plan was “neither necessary nor correct..., not what God willed,”³⁹ but it remains for Abram and Sarai to see what the LORD will judge.

Whatever excuses we might try making for Abram and Sarai, what they've done doesn't at all match a Christian vision of marriage. Building on the Edenic proclamation of humanity as the image of God, Jesus spoke of man and wife as “no longer two but one flesh” (Mark 10:8), while Paul adds that “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the Church” (Ephesians 5:29). A Christian mentality developed that the marriage union is consummated in an act where husband and wife make “a total and mutual exchange of persons” which activates their unity as one flesh and includes their offering of their fertility to each other; it both unites the couple and invites new life, because it's an earthly mirror of God “who is both one and life-giving.”⁴⁰ In this mystery, the man and woman acknowledge each other as made in God's image with an irreducible dignity, and at the same time they affirm the equal human dignity of any child whose life the Lord will give as a gift to crown their marital act. And from that vision, from these principles, Christians listened as the Holy Spirit showed the Church how to honor love, honor marriage, and honor life.

But over the past century, that listening has been in free-fall. The churches began to compromise the Christian mentality with a new vision, one that suggested couples could unite as one flesh while actively refusing to offer their fertility, could keep sex's unifying aspect without its procreative dimension. That competing contraceptive mentality is what Planned Parenthood was founded to advance, and in 1965 the Supreme Court (in Griswold v. Connecticut) ripped away the barriers between that mentality and the law, laying precedent for all later decisions redefining marriage and enshrining an alleged right to abort children in the womb. Yet thanks to those first steps of compromise a century ago, many churches took little notice of the foundational change in vision; we certainly didn't. But the few who did notice still warn that a marital act contracepted, rendered deliberately sterile, “undermines the integrity of the gift of self” so that the couple are effectively “lying to each other with their bodies” and, whatever their best intentions may be, “inevitably treat one another as objects to be used rather than as persons to be loved and mysteries to be contemplated.”⁴¹

But there's a third vision that's emerged with even less notice, posing (under its guise of pronatalism) as the opposite of the contraceptive vision and making a persuasive plea from a heart of compassion for those burdened not by fertility but by infertility. We now have hopes Sarai couldn't dream of. A modern Sarai, consulting the doctors of today, could make use of our shiny new assisted reproductive technologies. She could have Abram's sperm and her own egg, or sperm or egg cells from a third-party donor, combined in a laboratory through in vitro fertilization; and a few of the resulting embryos, after being screened for health through preimplantation genetic testing, could then be implanted in either the modern Sarai's own womb or that of a gestational surrogate (a modern Hagar). The process seems as if it must work reasonably well, since over a million IVF-conceived babies have been born so far just in this country.⁴² And it sounds so pro-life that the current president has issued an executive order celebrating it and promising to “ensure reliable access to IVF treatment.”⁴³  (And no wonder, when his wealthiest friend is an enthusiastic user of IVF for producing a multitude of sons with a number of women.)

But this third vision actually isn't so far from the second one. For if the second vision wanted union without procreation, this mentality wants procreation that doesn't proceed from the act that unites man and woman as one flesh, displacing “the way indicated by nature” with “artificial methods of procreation.”⁴⁴ Even this vision's defenders may freely admit that “our medical technologies have outstripped our cultural understandings” of life and pregnancy and parenthood,⁴⁵ and notoriously the United States has fewer regulations on assisted reproduction than any other advanced nation on the planet.⁴⁶ Procreation thereby becomes production, a personal project whereby a Sarai can build herself up using the agency and maybe the matter of others (Genesis 16:2).

In Sarai's day, surrogacy was enabled by slavery. Today, it's more often enabled by the power of the dollar, as commercial surrogacy,⁴⁷ but Hagar would probably have nodded sadly to one bioethicist's warning that “surrogacy contracts create the conditions for abuse,”⁴⁸ and to one feminist scholar's objection that the surrogate's “labor is alienated, because she must suppress her emotional ties with her own child... She is degraded, because her independent ethical perspective is... demoted to the status of a cash sum. She is exploited, because her emotional needs and vulnerabilities are not treated as characteristics which call for consideration, but as factors which may be manipulated” for the advantage of others like Sarai and Abram.⁴⁹ Case in point, various custody battles between surrogates and intended parents, or legal cases of intended parents suing to coerce surrogates into abortions when circumstances change.⁵⁰

Just like Sarai with Hagar, modern assisted reproduction always “introduces a third person... into the intimacy of marital life,” whether that's a surrogate, a sperm or egg donor, or a lab technician.⁵¹ One modern philosopher sees here that in these methods, “the man and woman no longer procreate through the act that is proper to them as man and woman,” and so the intended parents “assume a secondary and inferior role in the procreation of their own children,” effacing their own human dignity.⁵² No wonder another ethicist's reflections on Genesis led him to conclude that “concubinage and surrogacy are incompatible with marriage rightly understood.”⁵³

Even some secular experts recognize that everyone involved in a child's coming-to-be thereby acquires some non-transferrable obligations of relationship to that child, and that includes sperm and egg donors, surrogates, even the lab techs – obligations which are never honored in these processes as realistically carried out.⁵⁴ And those who uphold the original Christian vision urge that a child has an even deeper right to be conceived as a fruit of parents' love expressed maritally, and that every child conceived otherwise has been deprived of something he or she had a right to.⁵⁵ Instead, these processes treat “the child as a product, the result of a project they have undertaken,”⁵⁶ “like an object of market exchange, something manufactured, sold, and bought.”⁵⁷ That's a betrayal of each child's “equal personal dignity” by which he or she exists for his or her own sake, not to please his or her manufacturers or sellers or buyers.⁵⁸

This new vision, as much as the contraceptive mentality it pretends to oppose, feeds on a philosophy of “the freedom of the unencumbered self... for whom relationships are... always instrumental” in “enabling the projects of the will” without concern for “the natural functioning of the organism” of the human body, and its winsome appeals to compassion feed a massive industry that kills more 'excess' embryos than abortion each year (via 'selective reduction') and has another million children lingering in the limbo of the freezer.⁵⁹ One Lutheran ethicist remarks that once we've separated unity from procreation in marriage and made reproduction no longer the natural outcome of marital love, then “we enter a world in which it is hard not to think of children,” all children, “as products we produce to satisfy our desires,” and “a society that allows itself to begin to think of children this way is one that, over time, may find it difficult to affirm the equal dignity of all of its members. For, after all, some of them exist to satisfy the desires of others.”⁶⁰ And that is not a pretty picture; it is not a good world we're making.

That's the thing with Hagars new and old, in this sense: they're “fraught with ethical and psychological problems.”⁶¹ We need to look at the problems of our day with a Christian vision, not one of its familiar competitors. We need to be ready to say yes to options the world finds unthinkable and no to options the world deems obvious.⁶² And that means we need a thoughtful faith, a faith that reflects and thinks clearly and doesn't blindly endorse custom in the way that Abram and Sarai did in facing their burden of infertility.

But even had their custom not been unethical (and it was), the root of Sarai's wrong would still have been this: she acted as though God's promise needed her plan, her help, her works. Judging that God had withheld children from her womb, Sarai sought to circumvent the roadblock God had placed; judging that God's promise was imperiled by God's non-provision, Sarai sought to supplement God's work with her own “human resourcefulness”; judging that God's work was waylaid on the road, Sarai sought to hasten it by seizing God's initiative and making things happen her way.⁶³ She and Abram “do not wait for God to fulfill the promise,” but strive “to manufacture an heir” for themselves.⁶⁴

St. Paul asked the Galatians, who were tempted by a false gospel, whether, “having begun in the Spirit, now in the flesh will you be made complete?” (Galatians 3:3). He wants to know whether they think that their efforts in the flesh, their wit and skill and strength, are what's required to bring God's promises and purposes to pass. Do we expect that, on the foundation of a supernatural faith, we must build with the blocks of nature a fleshly Babel?⁶⁵ Is it nature that perfects grace, and not the other way around?

That's what the Galatians implied, and it's what Sarai and Abram are here assuming and enacting. Sarai, with her husband meekly following her lead, is trying to perfect faith by a project of flesh rather than yielding to the work of the Spirit.⁶⁶ The result is a “spiritual disaster” for them, as we can already tell and as the sequels will tend to show.⁶⁷ Now, in their case, it's one God allowed for a prophetic purpose. The Apostle shows us that “allegorically, these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar” (Galatians 4:24). Hagar's role foreshadows the Old Testament itself. As Sarai tried to solve her plight through the flesh, so Hagar boasts over Sarai in her pregnant flesh, much as the nations were all too often demeaned in Sinai eyes that “boast according to the flesh” and its works of the Law (Romans 2:17-20; 1 Corinthians 11:8). Sinai was bearing fleshly children for slavery because the people became so impatient for the promise that, with Sarai-style initiative, they supplied their own golden calf (Exodus 32:1), and so much of the Law was “added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made” (Galatians 3:19). Hagar shows us that the Old Testament, for all its youth and beauty and vigor and fertility, would not be able to complete what Abram's faith had begun; the Spirit would have to do a new thing.

We know that a new creation has come, because Christ has been born, not to Sarai's handmaid, but to the Lord's – Mary, whose supernatural fertility in virginity was just as initially perplexing to Joseph as Sarai's barrenness in marriage was vexing to Abram. In Christ, those who share the burden of Abram and Sarai can recognize that burden no longer as just a burden but as a cross; and, even as they pursue legitimate medical options for healing, they can raise their cross up with the cross of Christ, embracing it and turning it to profound spiritual good for the sake of others.⁶⁸ For the bigger catastrophe is not the infertility of the body but the infertility of the soul, a soul that bears no spiritual offspring for its Heavenly Bridegroom. And when we find our souls barren, we have to know that there are no surrogates who can bear for us. There are no techniques by which we can outsource our need for holiness. We must cry out, treating ourselves with salutary spiritual disciplines, and knowing that the flesh can avail nothing here, but the Spirit of God alone can set our longed-for Hagars aside and make us spiritually fertile and fruitful in and for Christ. May he so take away all barrenness of soul from us. Amen.

Between the Pieces

Hail Abram, rescuer of Canaan from the invader (Genesis 14:1-16)! For he received the ministrations of Melchizedek, and tithed to him from all the plunder; he surrendered all the remainder as a witness to the king of Sodom (Genesis 14:17-24). And now, his camp brought back together, he's dared to dialogue with the LORD, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, who has pledged to make elderly Abram a biological father of his future heir. So that Abram might credit such a tale, God led him outside his tent, beneath the starry skies, and issued a challenge. From these stars, Abram realized the magnitude of God's fecundity. He believed, assenting to the promise as true; he believed God, accepting God as the authority whose every word is truth; he believed in God, leaning on God's own goodness; he believed in God with all his being, committing himself to live in faith with God. All of this God saw, and he credited it to Abram as righteousness (Genesis 15:1-6).

Centuries later, when the zeal of Aaron's grandson Phinehas would save his whole people from destruction, we read that “that was counted to him as righteousness from generation to generation forever” (Psalm 106:30), for “it shall be to him and to his seed after him the covenant of a perpetual priesthood” (Numbers 25:13). And so also now: if Abram's faith is counted as righteousness, it would surely lead to something like that.

Now the dialogue starts up anew, as a new day seems to be dawning; but as for its events, one commentary calls it “perplexing from start to finish,” so if you find it so, you aren't alone.¹ “And he said to him, 'I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit'” (Genesis 15:7). He introduces himself in a new way, a fresh 'I Am' statement: 'I am the God of your new birth, I am the one with a purpose on your life.' Everything Abram's been through, from his departure from Ur to Harran to this moment, has been steered by the Lord toward one goal: that Abram should inherit and possess this very land he's now in.

But here Abram pushes back. “He said to him, 'O Sovereign LORD, how am I to know that I shall inherit it?'” (Genesis 15:8). At first glance, we might want to frown here; didn't Abram just get praised for believing God's pure say-so as sufficient? Yes, and so it makes more sense if Abram “did not question if it would come to pass, but asked how it would come to pass.”² Those are the sorts of questions that are totally natural to the life of faith itself.³ Abram believes, but his faith is eager to be made sight; his is a faith seeking understanding.⁴ Since Abram is supposed to inherit this land, Abram wants to know what sign he should be looking out for to know that it's time, and he wants to know what the method of its acquisition is meant to be.

God's answer to his question is to prescribe a ritual: “Bring me a heifer three years old and a she-goat three years old and a ram three years old and a turtledove and a young pigeon” (Genesis 15:9). The three mammals are fully grown, more so than the usual offering; but here we have a total of five different creatures. But Abram doesn't complain: “He brought him all these.” And if we're confused, apparently Abram knew what God meant for him to do.⁵ Abram “cut them in half down the middle,” having slaughtered all the animals, “and he placed each piece of a man toward its companion; but the birds he did not cut in half” (Genesis 15:10). All this careful picking and butchering and arranging would've taken Abram from dawn into late morning or noon, no doubt.⁶

But Abram wasn't heaping these on a sacrificial altar, where the meat would be promptly shrouded in flame; he's laying these out in the open country, and then waiting on God. Apparently God's in no great hurry, but the birds of prey that scavenge eagerly on this raw mess certainly are. By the time Abram's laid them out, the vultures or buzzards or whatever they are “came down on the carcasses,” probably by the dozens, as was typical then. But “Abram drove them away” (Genesis 15:10). Given their numbers and relentlessness, picture Abram having to work constantly, running back and forth with sticks or whatever else he's got at hand, to keep each animal piece from being picked apart and devoured before God's sign comes. The result is one of the most exhausting days in Abram's life, one which must tempt him hour by hour to give up as his muscles cry for mercy.⁷ And despite being fiercely outnumbered and kept in constant motion while risking the beaks and talons of predatory birds, “he did not let the birds touch them,” not more than a fleeting scratch here or nibble there.⁸

Abram kept this up all afternoon as the day dragged on, until “the sun was going down” in the evening, and the birds of prey, all diurnal raptors, were giving up their unsuccessful foraging to go roost for the night. His work was done; the animal pieces were safe for God's plans. Worn out by everything, at sunset “a deep sleep fell on Abram” (Genesis 15:12). It's the same word for the stupor some prophets endured when overwhelmed by a heavenly presence (Daniel 8:18) – “a trance,” one reader commented, “not like derangement but wonderment and the change from visible things to invisible.”⁹ It's also the same as the “deep sleep” God put Adam in before he built a companion for the man (Genesis 2:21), much as each meat-half faces its companion.¹⁰

But this was no restful slumber rewarding Abram for a day's work. “Behold! A great terror of darkness fell upon him” (Genesis 15:12). Silent night, scary night – even the stars that remind Abram of hope have been blotted out. It feels to Abram like he's plunged into a nightmare, the extinction of all things; and yet then came the voice of God, whispering through the inky void to Abram's twitching mind. “Knowingly you shall know,” God begins. Somehow, this experience will resolve Abram's questions (Genesis 15:13), now that Abram has, like a Moses before Moses, entered into “the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21).

God speaks: “Your seed will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and they will serve them” (Genesis 15:13). If what Abram wants to know is how he'll recognize that he's entering his inheritance of the land God planned for him, God's answer is, “It all starts with your descendants finding themselves lost in somebody else's land; it begins in the wrong place.” God doesn't tell Abram which foreign land it's supposed to be, though we know in hindsight that Abram is hearing the fate of “the sons of Israel who came to Egypt” (Exodus 1:1), becoming resident-alien strangers in the Egyptians' midst (Leviticus 19:34). There the Egyptians eventually exploited them, “ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves, made their lives bitter with hard service” (Exodus 1:13-14) – it was an even baser servitude than Sodom had to the emperors of the east (Genesis 14:4). Abram doesn't need a map to realize that this whole sentence is a bunch of bad news.¹¹

But God goes on, informing Abram that “they will afflict them four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13), for four generations of the maximum human lifespan (Genesis 15:16).¹² And that's what later books will tell us, that “the time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years” (Exodus 12:40). This is even worse news. Abram's seed which he's waiting for will contain whole generations born in the belly of oppression, who will toil and slave for foreign masters in a land that's not theirs, and then will die without ever so much as glimpsing the place that ought to be home. What Abram's hearing through this oppressive darkness is a horror, a tragedy, that his seed will slave from womb to tomb and still not inherit what they're born for!¹³

But on the heels of these forty decades of woe, “the nation whom they serve, I will judge!” (Genesis 15:14). In the last chapter, to save a relative who wasn't his seed, Abram “went in pursuit as far as Dan” (Genesis 14:14), though it wasn't really called that yet; now, for Abram's seed, God declares, 'I will judge,' 'I dan!'¹⁴ God will run in pursuit to at last put down the captors who've made slaves of Abram's seed. With hindsight, of course, we know God's promise to “strike Egypt with all the wonders” (Exodus 3:20), to “redeem you with... great acts of judgment” (Exodus 6:6), that “on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments” (Exodus 12:12). There's a rather famous list of them. The first judgment: turning water to blood (Exodus 7:20-21); a second judgment: a sudden swarm of frogs from the river (Exodus 8:6); third and fourth acts, swarms of gnats and flies (Exodus 8:17, 24); fifth and sixth acts, diseases killing off livestock and afflicting people with boils and sores (Exodus 9:6, 10); a seventh act, a thunderstorm bringing lightning and heavy hail (Exodus 9:23-25); an eighth, a swarm of locusts to devour what's left of Egypt's crops (Exodus 10:13-15); a ninth, “pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt three days” (Exodus 10:22); and then the tenth and final act of judgment: “at midnight, the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:29). Judgment was complete. Centuries of Egypt's casual acceptance of Israel's victimhood would be balanced out in a single devastating season, and those who oppress the seed of Abram would understand that those who curse him, God will curse (Genesis 12:3).

Then, “afterward they shall come out with great possessions,” God tells Abram now (Genesis 15:14). After ten acts of judgment, “the Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste,” and so, when the Hebrews did as Moses said and asked for valuables as reparations, “they let them have what they asked; thus they plundered the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:33-36). They'll end up with more, I'd wager, than Abram himself would have had if he'd kept the plunder from his great victory instead of giving it up.¹⁵ And so Abram's Hebrew seed will pass on “from desperate straits to optimistic prospects.”¹⁶

What's more, “they shall come back here in the fourth generation” (Genesis 15:16), and – as a Jewish historian added – “they would overcome their foes, vanquish the Canaanites in battle, and take possession of their land and their cities.”¹⁷ This whole prophesied process, generations of humiliation leading to eventual liberation and triumphal entry, is how God means to fulfill his pledge to turn Abram into a great nation (Genesis 12:2).¹⁸ John the Baptist's dad recalls this as a prophecy “that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve [God] without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:74-75); and Stephen also paraphrases God's promise as, “They shall come out and worship me in this place” (Acts 7:7). Abram's call was for the sake of giving them land, and the land is for the purpose of worshipping God in holiness and peace as a great nation. But Abram's seed would have to wait for that land until they'd suffered. Only through peril and persecution could they prepare to prosper as a people. Only through humiliation would they conquer, only through darkness would they see light, only by suffering could they know and love peace.

Later in the dialogue, God sketches out the shape of their inheritance in two ways. First is by borders: “this land... from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18), showing “how far his descendants would be distributed.”¹⁹ It sounds a lot like how God describes it to Joshua, as “from the desert and this Lebanon as far as the great river, the River Euphrates” (Joshua 1:4). But the other way is by a list of ten people groups: “the Kenite and the Kenizzite and the Kadmonite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Rephaim and the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Girgashite and the Jebusite” (Genesis 15:19-21). It's a big list of ten peoples, though Moses will later sum them up as “seven nations more numerous and mightier than you” (Deuteronomy 7:1). Compared to the geographic version, these peoples only live in the parts where Israel will mainly settle,²⁰ and by the end of Joshua's days, he preached that “the LORD drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land” (Joshua 24:18).

But “as for you,” Abram, “you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age” – that's the message God reserves for him out of the darkness (Genesis 15:15). “He himself,” in his days on the earth, “would experience none of this” that he's just heard.²¹ Abram will live a long life, and his eyes will be spared all these discomforts as well as their eventual joyful fruits; the same will be true of his immediate children and grandchildren.²² Where his seed will triumph only through enslavement and affliction, Abram will close his life as a gray-haired and happy man, dying in peace and trusting that his heir will give him an honorable burial. The promise here of dying 'in peace' is interesting, since Abram was just speaking with Melchizedek king of Salem, 'king of peace'; leaving this world, Abram will join his ancestors 'in Salem' beyond this life.²³

But why does Abram have to wait? Why can't Abram himself inherit now, bypassing this sojourn of slavery for his seed? Because, God adds, “the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). Abram knows it can't be, since he's had good relations with the three Amorite brothers with whom he's in covenant (Genesis 14:13). What God is telling him is that he won't give the land over to Abram's seed in a way that's unfair to the people who are already there; he will not deprive them of their tenancy until they've forfeited it. God will not make a way for Abram's seed to take the land except by “the wickedness of these nations” who are presently in it (Deuteronomy 9:4).²⁴ And they aren't there yet, they aren't ripe yet. Until that day arrives, the locals get a few more centuries to live full lives in the land, to make of it what they will; for, as earlier readers remarked, “it is after reproving, encouraging, and doing everything towards repentance that God inflicts punishment.”²⁵

But equally certainly, the Amorites will fill up the measure of their iniquity, making the rod for their own back.²⁶ And the word God uses for 'complete' here is shalem again, same as 'peace,' same as Melchizedek's Salem.²⁷ In the very land where Melchizedek reigns over the City of Completeness, Abram is destined for one kind of shalom, a peaceful afterlife gathered to his loved ones; but the Amorites are destined to a different shalem, a wholesale corruption, a perfect fitness to punishment that leaves no further grounds for delay. And then – only then – will the seed of Abram enter “peace in the land,” finding untroubled rest in their inheritance (Leviticus 26:6), until they too journey onward to be gathered to the bosom of Father Abraham in peace (Luke 16:22).

Confronted with the frightful darkness of death, Abram can now give up his fear, assured his seed will inherit on the timetable set forth by God.²⁸ Abram will rest in the grave, gathered to his fathers in the darkness, but “have you not read what was said to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham...'? He is not God of the dead, but of the living!” (Matthew 22:32). So Abram may “die in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar” (Hebrews 11:13). All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Looking back at the ritual actions during the day, now we can see how the slain animals probably “represent the nation of Israel” during their condition of vulnerability as strangers in a strange land.²⁹ The birds of prey, then, were “a figure” of the multitude of people “wanting to afflict” the seed of Abram,³⁰ first and foremost showing “the murderous intention of the Egyptians” who pursued Moses and the Hebrews to the sea.³¹ Egyptians in fact identified the living pharaoh with the god whose symbol was a bird of prey, the falcon.³² But the birds of prey couldn't do more than peck at the meat, because Abram kept chasing them away. Early readers of the story took this as a sign that “through the merit of that man, Israel was often freed from trials,”³³ for when “the kingdoms of the earth... plot evil counsel against the house of Israel, in the merits of their father Abram they find delivery.”³⁴ Even at their worst, Paul said, they'd be “beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Romans 11:28), and so even in their stay in Egypt, they would find “rescue through the merit of the patriarch.”³⁵

As for the dreadful darkness that then fell, Israel was shielded by “the cloud and the darkness” when backed up against the sea (Exodus 14:20), and on the other side, they'd sing how “terror and dread fall upon [the Egyptians]; because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone, till your people, O LORD, pass by” (Exodus 15:16). And the foreshadowing goes on as we get deeper into the vision. “When the sun had gone down and it was dark,” what did Abram see? “Behold, a smoking oven and a flaming torch” (Genesis 15:17). If all these things have been allegory and prophecy of Israel's enslavement and exodus, we know that once they made it to the mountain, “the LORD descended on it in fire; the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln” (Exodus 19:18), “while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness and cloud and gloom” (Deuteronomy 4:11). The smoke and flame Abram now sees is the same divine presence his seed, Moses and the people, behold on the desert mountain.³⁶

And what will they hear from that mountain? “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Exodus 20:2) – the opening line to the Ten Commandments. It neatly fits its counterpart for Abram: “I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans” (Genesis 15:7). That very preamble should have clued Abram in to expect that covenant time was coming.³⁷ At the mountain, the fire and gloom issued in animal sacrifices and “the covenant that the LORD has made with you”; and so here, the same fiery presence shows that “on that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram” (Genesis 15:18). John the Baptist's dad refers to it as “his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham” (Luke 1:72-73). So far, the only covenant Abram's known is with three human brothers; now, he'll enter covenant with God himself.

But to make it happen, they'd have to “pass through the pieces” (Genesis 15:17). Dividing animal parts and then walking between them was a common element of rituals in Abram's world. If an army lost a battle, there was a ritual where they'd cut prescribed animals in half – plus a human being – and then line up the halves facing each other, burn fires on both sides of a gate, and march through it, purifying themselves in a river.³⁸ It was also used in treaties between kings. We have one where the junior king, Mati'el, had to cut a calf in half and say, “Just as this calf is cut in two, so shall Mati'el be divided and his nobles be divided.”³⁹ In another treaty granting land, the senior king slew an animal and proclaimed, “If I take back what I gave you!”⁴⁰ The idea was, the ceremony was a visual self-curse: “May the fate of this split animal by my fate if I don't keep the covenant!” We know the Jews knew this ritual because Jeremiah tells us they used it, having sworn to free their slaves, a covenant they signed with “a calf they cut in two and passed between its parts” (Jeremiah 34:18). But since they then betrayed that covenant, God pledges through Jeremiah that “I will make them like the calf that they cut in two..., and their carcasses shall be food for the birds of the air” (Jeremiah 34:18-20).

But notice that, when it comes to this covenant, Abram doesn't pass between the pieces. In fact, he can't pass between them, because he's in that deep sleep (Genesis 15:12)!⁴¹ It's ironic, because a chapter ago we heard about “Abram the Hebrew” (Genesis 14:13), and 'Hebrew' comes from the word for 'pass through.'⁴² So Abram the Hebrew suddenly can't 'hebrew' when he most needs to! Immobilized, he's 100% passive, 100% receptive. Instead, only “a smoking oven and a flaming torch passed between these pieces” (Genesis 15:17). Abram has no skin in the game in this covenant, but God steps down into it. “For when God made a promise to Abraham,” the New Testament chimes, “since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself” (Hebrews 6:13). “When God desired to show more convincingly... the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that, by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie,” Abram “might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before” him (Hebrews 6:17-18).

That's what's going on here. And think about the magnitude of this sign! God – Being itself, the Ground of all existence, the Creator of heaven and earth, the One Who Is, the Life of Life – is swearing an oath on his own infinity, his own eternity, his own being. He's saying to Abram, “I'm not asking anything of you in this; I am setting forth no conditions. I am promising. I'm more than promising. If I'm overstepping my bounds in this, if I should fail in anything I've just said to you – in other words, Abram, if I the Lord God am lying to you (which is impossible), then may that be the death of me. May I die, may I be butchered, may I be ripped piece from piece (which is also impossible), if I don't keep my word to you, Abram!” How seriously does God take this covenant he's making? God would sooner commit divine suicide than fall even one percent short.⁴³ Abram has no mandate to go between the pieces; God declares that this covenant is more certain than the skies above or the earth below, because these things are contingent, but this covenant is sworn on the very life of Life Itself!

And it'd be easy to see these prophesies and promises as all neatly wrapped up in what we can read unfolding from Exodus through Judges. But later readers yearned to get more out of it, especially since only arguably in the days of David did Israel actually have control over even most of the land from Egypt to Euphrates, and never yet since.⁴⁴ So ancient Jews expanded the prophecy to cover “God's plan in its full, completed form,”⁴⁵ an introductory sketch of the kingdoms of world history.⁴⁶ They rewrote the story as if God had pledged that “in this sacrifice I will place the ages; I will announce to you the guarded things,” even “what your tribe will encounter in the last days.”⁴⁷ No wonder early Christian teachers advised us to “give a thought to the question as to whether this passage touches on the sojourn of the saints.”⁴⁸

When the covenant mediated by Moses proved all too breakable, God sent a prophet to urge people to look for a future “new covenant” which would be much different (Jeremiah 31:31-32). But little more could be said until the arrival of “the mediator of a new covenant,” Jesus Christ (Hebrews 9:15), the Son who's the exact imprint of his Father's nature (Hebrews 1:3). At table with his disciples, Christ announced that the new covenant was then on the verge of being cut – only the flesh and blood would have to be his (Mark 14:24). As Abram plunged into the terrible darkness, so Christ accepted “the power of darkness” at his arrest (Luke 22:53), and as he hung on the cross, “there was darkness over the whole land” (Mark 15:33). There, in that darkness, the Lord God incarnate entered into death, “becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). He accepted the fate of the animals torn asunder. In some mysterious way, the new covenant is cut by the death of God in the flesh and blood of man.

As the fleshly seed of Abraham was persecuted by that vulture Pharaoh, the New Testament makes clear that “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12), treated like prey by the worldly powers that peck at our vulnerabilities. But as if that weren't enough, Jewish readers sometimes saw the bird of prey as “an unclean bird..., Azazel,” the devil coming to tempt and deceive Abram.⁴⁹ Christians saw the vultures as symbolic of “the spirits of this lower air, seeking their own kind of food from the division of carnal creatures.”⁵⁰ That kind of talk comes from St. Paul, who warns against “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2), and “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12), “seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

But by now, Christ has risen from the dead, he “whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke... long ago” (Acts 3:21). Christ, having resurrected and ascended, “always lives to make intercession” for his people remaining here below – that's how Christ reigns as a royal priest in heaven (Hebrews 7:25). Meanwhile, those who've persevered in sharing Christ's suffering “came to life,” in spirit if not yet in the body, “and reigned with Christ” as “priests of God and of Christ” in heaven – the New Testament says so (Revelation 20:5-6). So it's no wonder Christians always expected that our fellow saints who reign with Christ as his co-priests in heaven would also reign by interceding for the Church below. St. Paul, while yet on earth, celebrated that “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his Body, that is, the Church” (Colossians 1:24), that somehow his suffering would merit to be of benefit for the Church after St. Paul had departed to be with Christ above. Maybe it's a strange and unfamiliar idea, but Abram is a picture: Christ and his heavenly priests defending the Church from spiritual attack by their merits and prayers.

But “what if,” asks St. Paul, “God, desiring to show his wrath” against our persecutors “and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” for the sake of his plan (Romans 9:22)? For the New Testament explains the delay of the end in three ways: first, it's “until the fullness of the nations has come in” (Romans 11:25); second, it's until sinners “fill up the measure of their sins” (1 Thessalonians 2:16); third, it's until the number of martyrs “should be complete” (Revelation 6:11). But at last, when the world's “sins are heaped high as heaven,” then “her plagues will come in a single day... and she will be burned up with fire, for mighty is the Lord God who has judged her” (Revelation 18:5-8). Some Jews said that in his vision, “Abram looked while... thrones were erected, and behold, Gehenna which is like a furnace... into which the wicked fall... – all was thus shown to Abram.”⁵¹ Early Christians likewise took Abram's fearful darkness as “the mighty terror of judgment day,” whose “nightfall signifies the end of the world,”⁵² when – as biblically expressed in the vivid language of apocalypse – “the sun shall be turned to darkness” (Acts 2:20). If the darkness in the land of Egypt long ago was a sign, however, that deliverance for the captives was at hand, then all this suggests that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11).

And if the road remaining is hard and the scavengers are many, what is Abram's vision but the way of the cross? Only by toiling as slaves could Israel become a great nation; only by carrying our crosses can Christians receive the crown of life, if we but live as the undivided turtledove and pigeon which “represent spiritual persons” who “do not splinter into schisms and heresies,”⁵³ but are “being rooted by the immense power of charity upon the solid rock of unity.”⁵⁴ This long delay has a purpose, “to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy which he has prepared beforehand for glory” (Romans 9:23), “for this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Here, then, is the fuller “promise to Abraham and his seed that he would be heir of the world” (Romans 4:13), the worldwide “land given to the holy man's spiritual descendants.”⁵⁵ “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5), and when we're reborn as Abram's spiritual seed through Abrahamic faith, when we share in his meekness by waiting patiently on the covenant promises of God, then we have a certain hope of inheriting “a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

There lies a final peace, a Perfect Salem, where “many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham... in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11), and shall be made complete forever. There, together with our father Abraham, we will stand up in the land of the living for eternal days. There, together with our father Abraham, we will worship the same LORD God Most High in holiness and righteousness, never again to know fear or dread. Like Abram, in the present we cannot see the vision of this ultimate deliverance unless we first step into the frightful, dreadful darkness of the cross of Christ and open our ears to the night. But that's just what Lent is for. Beholding the gracious entrance of God into profound covenant with us at the cross, making the fact of the Church's inheritance firmer than creation, may we make much of this holy opportunity! Amen.

The Righteousness of Faith

Abram, called out from familiar land and father's house, journeyed the whole of the Fertile Crescent to the south of Canaan, building altars through the land he where he was summoned. Pressed to Egypt by a famine, he nearly lost his wife Sarai to the king's clutches, if not for the hand of God to set matters to rights. Emerging laden with the treasures of a foreign land, he soon found coexistence with his nephew Lot to be troubled; their abundance required distance between them to support it. Yet time and again through this, the LORD God directed him by speech and by appearance, building up a lavish picture of promise. When invaders swept around the land and stole his estranged nephew away, he dropped everything and rode to the rescue, aided by more than beginner's luck. Returning, he met King Melchizedek of Salem, a priest who communed with him in holy bread and wine and offered him a blessing, and to whom Abram tithed from the booty of the battle. But he met also King Bera of Sodom, whose seeming generosity hid a smiling temptation which Abram sagely caught and defused by a stunning act of self-denial, hurling away from himself all his share in the fruits of victory.

We want to remind ourselves of what's been happening in Genesis, because today's passage opens with the line “after these things...,” or “after these words...” (Genesis 15:1). It matters that what we just read comes on the heels of chapter 14's action and drama; the lessons given and learned all shape what's now to come. Because, judging from the opening line, Abram must have been afraid. But what could he have to fear?

He could, of course, fear reprisal. Having chased Elam and Sumer and barbarian hordes out of Canaan, he can fairly assume that he's just made the world's mightiest men his personal enemy – and they seem the grudge-holding type. Even if it should take a few years, surely “many legions will be allied with them, and they will come against me and kill me,” Abram might fear.¹ Or, he could be fearful now that he's tasted battle because, for the first time, he's seen violent human death firsthand. He wasn't piloting drones out there; in the dark of the night and beyond, he was up close and personal. He probably had spears miss him by inches. He maybe walked home with someone's blood on his hands. At an age of “finding himself at the very gates of death,” as one bishop put it, his thoughts have turned to his short and fragile future as he wrestles with his own mortality.²

Third, Abram has made the call to relinquish all profit from the battle, and maybe some of his servants expected more for their investment than he let them take. On top of that, Abram must have nearly a thousand mouths to feed, and the resources he gained in Egypt won't last forever. Abram's burdened by responsibility and pressed by scarcity, maybe. And what's he gotten for it all? Did lost Lot even say thank you before he traipsed back to Sodom? Maybe Abram marched to battle with dreams of a warm reconciliation. But if Abram was counting on that, the door just got slammed shut from the other side, leaving Abram now to stew in “the irrevocability of Lot's separation.”³ Now he definitively knows his family network is himself and Sarai, full stop. And as if that weren't enough, this chapter begins with Abram's night interrupted by a close encounter of the divine kind. We can imagine that's a precious blessing, and it is; but throughout the Bible, such encounters with the servants of heaven, let alone its Master, tend to be... unsettling, to say the least. Could it be his encounter he's afraid of?⁴

For “after these words, the Word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision” (Genesis 15:1). Among the events of earthly reality, the Divine Word crashes like a meteorite from the sky.⁵ This is the first reference in the Bible to a 'vision,' and also the first use of the phrase 'the Word of the Lord came to' somebody (e.g., Jonah 1:1). After a chapter full of kings and priests, it's only fitting that now Abram be cast as a prophet (cf. Genesis 20:7). So what we're about to read has all the importance of Jeremiah or Isaiah or Zechariah's back-and-forths with God.

“Fear not, Abram!” come the personal words. God's here to help, not to harm. Whatever it is that's been on Abram's mind, this message seems intended to soothe Abram's heart. “I am your shield,” God pledges (Genesis 15:1). That links back to the last chapter, where Melchizedek preached a “God Most High who has delivered your foes into your hand” (Genesis 14:20), since his word for 'delivered' is literally 'shielded.'⁶ If Abram really is worried about Chedorlaomer and cronies staging a comeback, he needn't so fret himself. The same God who kept Abram safe amid swords and spears will shield him from them again and again. As the psalmists will borrow his hope, “the LORD is my strength and my shield” (Psalm 28:7), “my shield... who subdues peoples under me” (Psalm 144:2). “Our soul waits for the LORD; he is our help and our shield” (Psalm 33:20).

But God goes on with three more words for a total of nine, and so he adds, “Your reward shall be very great” (Genesis 15:1). This is a reward “for all the love with which he had wholeheartedly served the Lord” through these last chapters.⁷ There, we kept hearing about 'the possessions,' 'the goods,' a word deliberately misspelled in Hebrew all chapter long so it's the word for 'reward' backwards.⁸ This word 'reward' is elsewhere usually translated 'wages,' like what you'd earn by a day's labor for hire (1 Kings 5:6) – and it could include what a soldier would get for participating in military service.⁹ Abram gave up his share of plunder for the sake of witness, but God will compensate Abram with vastly more. Some early readers took this materially, as a blessing that “your wealth and your property will increase enormously.”¹⁰ But is that really what Abram wants?

See, we the readers aren't actually sure what's bothering Abram, what's on his heart and mind. So with clever Abram, God will show himself clever (cf. Psalm 18:25-26). He assures Abram about this and that as bait, to lure Abram into probing what's actually in his heart. And boy, does it ever work! Abram opens up, in the first time we've heard him talk to God – not to mention this is the Bible's first two-way dialogue between God and man since Cain.¹¹ He starts out well: “O Sovereign LORD!” Very respectful, very reverential. Then he asks a question which calls into question the meaning or even value of everything God's just said – but we'll get back to that. Because he's got to explain where he's coming from.

Your Bible might read, “I continue childless,” or even “I die childless” (Genesis 15:2). We don't know how long Abram's been married to Sarai, who happens to be barren. But we know that Abram has heard God hint and tease about making a great nation of him, about being kind and generous to Abram's non-existent seed, and so on. And now that's been maybe as much as a decade ago. Their fulfillment has been so long delayed that to Abram it might as well be too late.¹² More literally, Abram says here, “I go stripped,” like “a fallen soldier stripped of all valuables and even of clothing,” like some of the dead men Abram left behind on the battlefield.¹³ The Hebrew word here even sounds like its sister-word for 'curse,' which feels like it's taken the place of the blessing. Because Abram's eyes have been opened, and he knows that he is naked without family.

Spurred perhaps by his confrontation with his mortality, this is outwardly the very first time Abram “expresses an interest in having children.”¹⁴ But now that the need has been brought into the open, it's all Abram can think about. What use in silver or sheep, what good in cattle or Canaan, if he lives and dies childless and has nobody to follow him? He might as well be a pauper, in his world. The result of his thinking is a lament “bordering on utter despair.”¹⁵ What exactly Abram says in that lament is... well, the gentle way one commentary puts it is that “the subtleties of the text escape us.”¹⁶ That's the nuanced academic way of pointing out that the Hebrew text here is barely one step up from gibberish. Literally, we read that “the son of mesheq my house, Dammaseq Eliezer” (Genesis 15:2). Readers and translators have tried for over two thousand years now to tidy this up and make sense of it, whether by making 'Mesheq' the name of Eliezer's dad, or an archaic name for Damascus, or suggesting it means Eliezer is a wine-server or butler or household manager for Abram.¹⁷ But some experts wonder if it isn't on purpose – maybe Abram's so emotional he's stumbling over his words, not making sense.¹⁸

What is clear is that there's somebody named Eliezer, apparently connected with the area of Damascus in Syria. We just heard about Damascus, because it's where Abram's battle ended (Genesis 14:15). And it's weird that a man named Eliezer shows up here. Hebrew doesn't have separate letters and numbers, so every word has a number value. The ancient rabbis loved exploiting that in a quest to uncover word substitutions that unlocked secret messages in the Bible, but here they had a good point in observing that the name 'Eliezer' adds up to the number 318 – which, you might remember, was how many trained men Abram poured out in the last chapter (Genesis 14:14).¹⁹ Eliezer is the very embodiment of Abram's trained servants; perhaps, like one ancient reader thought, he emerged as the champion of the Battle of Damascus.²⁰ Eliezer represents the human forces on whom Abram's victory relied. Yet 'Eliezer' means 'God is my help' – has Abram internalized that message yet?

Having babbled something or other about this Eliezer, Abram comes to a stop. There's a stretch of silence – maybe a minute, maybe a month. But eventually, Abram collects himself and tries to make more sense in articulating his point. “Behold, to me you have given no seed!” (Genesis 15:3). Over and over, God had talked about magnifying Abram's seed (Genesis 12:7; 13:16), but now Abram has watched for years as his household staff were given seed. All 318 soldiers, like Eliezer, were “born in his house,” after all (Genesis 14:14). These servants had no promise, yet God blessed them with abundant seed, such as Eliezer, the last three letters of whose name are even an anagram for 'seed.'²¹ But Abram, who has a specific promise about seed, has to watch over and over again as others receive his own promised blessing, while he persists under an apparent curse.

So Abram concludes in resignation: “And behold, a son of my house will be my heir” (Genesis 15:3). Aging in the ancient world was no fun; there were no retirement homes or funeral homes, so family was everything. It wasn't unusual for older childless men to make a legal contract to adopt another man as a son, in a kind of trade of property for security: the adopted son would look after his elder, live with him, commit to giving him a nice funeral and fulfilling the obligations necessary for a decent afterlife; in return, the adopted son would be entitled to inherit from the elder when the elder died.²² So Abram has on the verge of choosing to adopt his household servant Eliezer, a son not yet of Abram but already of Abram's house, to become Abram's legal heir.

Back, then, to Abram's question: “O Sovereign LORD, what will you give me?” (Genesis 15:2). God mentioned a great reward, but that only pushed Abram's buttons. He has dearer priorities now than matter or space. There was a king around this time, who wrote a letter to his god, grateful for having “acquired an everlasting name,” but questioning the god, “Why did you take a son from me?” I don't know if the king had a son who died, or if the king was childless like Abram, but the king went on: “Former kings requested large territory from you, but I myself request from you only health and heir.”²³ Abram's asking if he can even have half that. What does God really mean by 'reward'? For as a later psalmist will say, “the fruit of the womb is a reward” (Psalm 127:3).²⁴

So now Abram has spoken twice – “and behold, the Word of the LORD came to him” yet again, to contradict what Abram's gotten wrong, to cut him off at the pass: “It's not so that your heir shall be this one!” Abram may think he's got to resort to this type of adoption, but that work wouldn't work. God has other plans in store. It's not Eliezer's rightful place to inherit all Abram's legacy for himself and his sons after him. “For rather, one who comes out of your innards, he will be your heir” (Genesis 15:4). Clarity at last! Abram's life and mission and destiny will be carried on biologically, not merely legally.²⁵ Abram will yet hold a newborn child who shares half his DNA, will look into his own two eyes in another's face. And that son, emerging from Abram's matter, gaining life in the world through Abram's instrumental causality, is the one Abram must wait for. That child, that son, will sustain Abram in old age, will be the heir to his property and legacy.

At this point, of course, “the promise was beyond nature and surpassed human reasoning.”²⁶ Even to have one biological child to be an heir, which is all Abram's been hoping for, seems unlikely for his age and condition; as Paul puts it ever so delicately, “his own body was as good as dead” (Romans 4:19). Thanks for being sensitive, Paul. Because the promise has become that much more outlandish, God needs to do a little show-and-tell. So just like he brought Abram from a far-off city (Genesis 15:7), now “he brought him outside” his tent into the night (Genesis 15:5). Abram needs an experience, Abram needs a change, Abram needs a fresh point of view.

And the point of a new point of view is to view it, isn't it? So just like Abram took two turns to talk, now God stakes a second stab at saying something: “Look!” he says, “Look!” Before the battle, the LORD bade Abram lift his eyes and perceive what was around him; now, he bids Abram gaze, study, consider, contemplate, not the land, but the sky: “Look, please, at the heavens!” (Genesis 15:5). And, look, when we're in crisis like Abram, when we can't see the way forward, when we can't figure out how things add up, isn't this so often the solution we're needing? It's one thing to take in the facts on the ground, and to broaden our horizons; it's another to raise our contemplation beyond the horizons of earth.²⁷ Like Paul says: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth” (Colossians 3:5).

But what does God want Abram to please see in the sky above? The stars that shine in the night. And God isn't just encouraging Abram to see the stars. God is giving Abram an active challenge: “Number the stars, if you are able to number them” (Genesis 15:5). And then God becomes silent, pausing to yield space for Abram to tackle this challenge if he dares.²⁸ Now, in a modern age of light pollution, you might step out your front door at midnight and have no trouble counting the few stars that aren't hidden from you. But Abram lived before electric lights, and while the people of Babylon named thirty-six major stars, they could see that there were obviously a lot that didn't make that list.²⁹ It's estimated that from where he was standing, Abram could have seen as many as 2500 stars with the naked eye on a sufficiently clear night. Even as a patient man, would he really be able to count them accurately without accidentally double counting? Do Abram's math skills hold out? The beauty of the challenge here is that, even from what he can see, Abram shouldn't have to try too hard before he realizes that the only way to win is not to play – to confess inability as his starting point, to admit that the only proper response is that “there is no possible response.”³⁰ And, of course, even ancient readers of Genesis realized that “some stars are hidden from even the keenest eyes.”³¹ With our telescopes and satellites, we've catalogued about 1.7 billion stars so far – good luck, Abram! – but our Milky Way alone is estimated to have about a hundred billion stars in total – and ours is one galaxy among untold numbers.

So what's the point of this challenge, then? Well, two things to keep in mind. First, what did Melchizedek call God? “God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:19). We take that for granted, but Abram had a pagan background. We can't assume that, when the LORD first called him, Abram had any sense that this god he was hearing from was the God of creation. But now he confesses a Lord who created the skies over Abram's head. So when Abram tries to tally those dots of light both faint and bright, he knows that “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1).

Second, you and I probably think of stars in modern scientific terms, as balls of burning plasma which generate energy through nuclear fusion, thus emitting both heat and light into space. Abram was a clever man, but he lived nearly four thousand years ago. To many of the Sumerians he grew up among, stars were as alive as me and you. They treated the stars as visible manifestations of the gods, both the well-known ones and the 'junior watchers,' and even prayed to these “gods of night.”³² That's why they were so convinced that the movements of the stars could communicate the intentions of the gods to astrologers skilled to understand. But it means that when Abram is counting stars, he might wonder if he's counting the children the LORD created for himself.

And now comes God's third and final remark for this encounter: “So shall your seed be” (Genesis 15:5). God is claiming to Abram that, if Abram sees God's starry seed as plentiful beyond his ability to measure, so God can give the same prolific seed to Abram. If the stars number in their thousands and millions and billions, so shall the seed of Abram – and that despite the fact that the current forecast, based on experience, is zero. Yet when all is said and done, God's telling Abram that if Abram rises up on the last day and goes to his family reunion, he'll be as mathematically taxed as if he were cataloguing the stars overhead. He'll as soon exhaust the galaxy as his genealogy. That's God's claim here, and it's a mighty big claim, beyond what Abram can ever verify in his days.

Now comes the vital moment. How will Abram respond? Simply this: “He believed in the LORD” (Genesis 15:6). That's the narrator's pithy two-word remark here in the wake of this exchange. Abram believed – and this is the first time the word 'believe,' or 'faith,' shows up in the Bible. Of course, it's been observed that “the action of faith preceded the vocabulary of faith.”³³ When God first called Abram in chapter 12 to leave behind the familiar and the familial in exchange for the foreign, the New Testament leaves no doubt that “Abram obeyed... by faith” (Hebrews 11:8). And when he deferred to Lot in partitioning the land, he surely acted from faith; when he waged war to save someone he loved, don't you think he had faith that God would see him through? Or when he cited his reliance on God in his witness to the king of Sodom, wasn't that surely an act of faith? Through these all, Abram conducted himself in accordance with faith.³⁴

And atop it all, confronted by God's mighty big claim, Abram “saw the Lord's promise and discarded every human consideration.”³⁵ If this LORD is the same God Most High who was Creator of heaven and earth, which means that he populated this vast family of stars across the wide sky, then doesn't it stand to reason, by way of analogy, that a God like that could create an equally vast family for Abram?³⁶ It would be positively irrational to acknowledge God as the Creator of countless stars and then conclude that he can't create seed for Abram, for “God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Luke 3:8)! Ultimately, clever Abram is just too reasonable not to have faith. Hence, “Abram believed with great promptness of spirit.”³⁷

So what is Abram's faith? It's Abram's response to natural and verbal revelation, God's self-presentation to the intellect through specific claims of truth.³⁸ That's at least part of faith: “giving assent to the promises of God and concluding that they are true.”³⁹ He believes the mighty big claim, he believes this good news meant just for him; you almost hear his “grateful sigh of relief” as he absorbs the thought that, just when he was most worried, God will come through bigger than he ever dared dream. Astoundingly, Abram “believed in a matter that was so difficult that few would have believed.”⁴⁰

But in believing that, Abram doesn't just assent to a proposition. Abram assents to lots of things. He believes that two and two make four. He believes that sheep don't do as well when you feed them gold as when you feed them grass. He believes that God is the creator of the stars over his head. Now he believes that his seed will one day be similarly difficult to count, and that this will be the work of God. All those are propositions. But Abram is doing more than just adding more propositions to his list. Abram is engaged in a relationship. Abram is accepting these propositions, not because he independently verifies each of them, but because of who proposes them. Abram latches on to what God's revealed precisely because God has revealed it; he receives and grasps “the witness given by First Truth.”⁴¹ He doesn't just believe statements; he trusts the Speaker, he trusts God. He chooses to accept God as an authority on what's possible and what's actual – indeed, as a greater authority than his own experience-conditioned expectations. He trusts God more than he trusts himself. And so – as St. Paul put it – “no unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God” given here (Romans 4:20).

And therefore, he entrusts himself to God. He depends on God. Abram leans on God and places his hopes and dreams in God's hands. That's more than merely trusting as an authority. I can believe what somebody says to be true and yet not trust them as a rule, since a broken clock is right twice a day. And I can even trust somebody on a given subject, like a scientist, and yet not want them dictating policy in general, because wisdom is greater than knowledge. But Abram entrusts himself to God, accepting that God is not just right but good. No wonder one of history's greatest theologians called faith “the first beginning of the heart's purifying.”⁴²

Ultimately, in the Old Testament, any time someone 'believes in' somebody, especially God, the focus is on the believer's behavior: it's a matter of “personal investment and a decision to abide by” the one in whom faith has been placed.⁴³ So Abram not only assents to the truth of the claim, he not only trusts the speaker of the claim, he not only entrusts himself to God, but he makes a choice to invest in God. He commits to involve himself more deeply with God, to engage more closely with the Lord. In the midst of Abram's crisis of childlessness, Abram now approaches rather than retreats, because he's judged that God's word is true, he's judged that God is trustworthy, he's entrusted his cares to God, and he's opting to “conduct himself accordingly” moving forward.⁴⁴ He makes it his aim to act out of his faith, to make it the governing principle of how he handles himself.

And that makes Abram a man of faith. His string of prior acts of faith have shaped faith in him as an enduring habit, a “disposition of faith” buried among “the secrets of the heart.”⁴⁵ Exercising that habit now in the face of every natural temptation to doubt, Abram has assented to the word of the Lord, admitting it as true and reliable, although he wasn't strictly compelled to believe it but rather was persuaded by well-grounded hope.⁴⁶ Abram believes now in God as the Creator of heaven and earth, and so as the Father of the countless stars dancing in their courses above. Abram believes that a God who can father stars beyond counting can make him a father of seed beyond counting. In accepting that promise, Abram has trusted God as a friend. He's entrusted his destiny to God all over again, both in having left Ur and Harran and now in looking to the LORD to supply his seed, trusting that this will be a great reward that pulls the ground out from beneath his fear. As a result, Abram is making a personal commitment “simply to live by trust in God's promising word” and to act faithfully in keeping with his faith. Abram thus forswears now any plan that has as its basis the assumption that God won't do for Abram everything which God has spoken and shown. So Abram cancels contemplation of the adoption of Eliezer, because faith precludes such hedging. Abram also redoubles his intention to continue exercising this habit of faith wherever he finds the chance. His is a faith “not neutral and bare, but... ready to work by love.”⁴⁷ As St. Jerome added, Abram here “found favor with God by loving him, not fearing him.”⁴⁸

And so Abram was “found faithful in trial” (1 Maccabees 2:52), “passing a critical test” concerning the faith he already had.⁴⁹ In overcoming this crisis by throwing himself onto God's truth and God's goodness, Abram's faith has transcended itself, achieved a new maturity and purity, so that “in this occurrence, his entire faith was gathered together” into one single act of faith.⁵⁰ And in that act, Nehemiah says, God “found his heart faithful before” him (Nehemiah 9:8). God has drawn out “the tested genuineness of [Abram's] faith” (1 Peter 1:7), through a trial that turned his formerly implicit faith into explicit faith.⁵¹

And God approves of the result: “he counted it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). God reckoned Abram believing him as righteousness, God thought of it as righteousness, God computed it as righteousness, God credited Abram's faith in the plus column on the balance sheet. In Israel, it mattered a lot what was credited to you. If somebody sacrificed wrongly, “bloodguilt shall be credited to that man,” a big red blot on the ledger (Leviticus 17:4); no wonder David said, “Blessed is the man to whom the LORD credits no iniquity” (Psalm 32:2). And if you mishandled the meat from a sacrifice, “he who offers it shall not be accepted, neither shall it be credited to him” (Leviticus 7:18) – which implies that, when sacrifices were carried out correctly, then they were credited to you, entered in your account as a good thing. And it might be that the priests had the job of issuing the authoritative declaration that such-and-such a gift had been credited before the LORD.⁵²

But this is the first time in the Bible we've heard that noun 'righteousness,' although we were twice told that Noah was “a righteous one” (Genesis 6:9; 7:1) and the word 'righteous' is literally part of Melchizedek's name.⁵³ So Abram, having been prepared by his mentoring from the king of righteousness, exercises a faith of such quality that God takes it all it, weighs it up, and credits it as equivalent to righteousness, as a worthy habit and attitude and action. This latest crowning act of faith, in particular, God accepts as “a meritorious deed.”⁵⁴ How much more, then, will God look favorably on the whole of it, and impute righteousness to it? God accepts Abram's faith as a holy offering, a sacrifice rendered worthily on the altar of Abram's heart. God enters Abram's faith on the balance sheets of Abram's life and calculates a surplus of virtue from it, a righteousness that occludes and erases Abram's pagan past. God smiles on Abram's faith as a jubilee of the soul, and makes it now “the deciding factor in his relationship with Abram.”⁵⁵ So Abram was “considered just... because of his faith.”⁵⁶

Hence, Abram can rest his faithful heart in peace behind the LORD his Shield, and Abram can fix his faithful heart on the hope that the very great reward of which the LORD has spoken will be rich in all the right blessings (Genesis 15:1). Like his ancestor Noah, Abram here “became an heir of the righteousness according to faith” (Hebrews 11:7), for in faith “he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:20-21). And following the priest Melchizedek, Abram found a way to assimilate his blessing and to imitate his sanctity, and so to reach “the righteousness of faith” (Romans 4:13).

And that's all the more amazing when we consider the indirect object of his faith: his seed. Earlier, God had spoken of Abram's seed in terms of the dust of the land – and we know it came true, because Israel was defined by the prophets as “the seed of Abraham” (Isaiah 41:8). But when he was invited to gaze on the stars, he glimpsed beyond the matters of the earth. There above, he saw “a posterity exalted in heavenly bliss.”⁵⁷ Accordingly, the New Testament shows us that, beyond just the biological seed he was promised, “it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham” (Galatians 3:7). And “if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed” (Galatians 3:29). So when the LORD encouraged Abram to please look to the skies, and challenged him to count the uncountable? One of those many stars was shining there to stand for you.

That is, if you're in Christ. Because, in the final picture, “it does not say, 'And to seeds,' referring to many, but, referring to one, 'And to your Seed,' who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). Think about that. In Genesis 15, what does Abram believe when he believes in the Lord? He believes that God will supply the Seed of Abraham, a gift that will take a miracle from the God “who gives life to the dead,” hence why Abram “in hope believed against hope” (Romans 4:17-18). This Seed will outshine the starry skies and will receive in full all Abram leaves so as to make good on Abram's mission to spread blessing through the earth. Abram “believed with a faith that deserves praise that through a single son he would become the father of the world.”⁵⁸ What is that but an advance faith in “the Christ who was to be manifested?”⁵⁹ By a faith in a God of resurrections, Abram “prefiguratively believed that Christ through the incarnation would become his heir,”⁶⁰ “appointed the heir of all things” (Hebrews 1:2). No wonder St. Paul celebrates Abram's story as the righteousness of faith!

“What does the Scripture say? 'Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness'” (Romans 4:3). St. Paul teaches us that “the words 'it was counted to him' were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” (Romans 4:23-24). “There can never be any other way to be saved except through Christ alone,”⁶¹ and “because he makes the sinner righteous, the faith of one who believes in him may be counted as righteousness.”⁶²

St. Paul points out that “to the one who works, his reward isn't counted as a gift but as his due; yet to the one who doesn't work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness” (Romans 4:4-5). By chapter 15, Abram “had done many things well,” and yet through it all, Abram hadn't been laboring for his reward, as though it were to be the due wages he'd be strictly owed. God was never obligated to compensate Abram for what he'd left, for what he'd risked, for what he'd given away.⁶³ Instead, God saw Abram living by this meritorious faith out of gratitude for freedom from the ungodliness of Ur and Harran. Therefore, when Abram assented to the truth and trusted the promise and committed to God, that faith can be counted as righteousness, because it humbly submits to God's freedom to judge a fitting but free gift.⁶⁴

And in just the same way, God has intervened in the ungodliness we had in Adam, original sin as compounded by “the futile ways inherited from our forefathers” (1 Peter 1:18). We must accept we can't put God in our debt, can't make ourselves righteous by our finest natural virtues. But we don't have to spend our nights counting the stars; we can confess our inability and repose in the Maker. We can assent to and accept the truths of the gospel, submitting to the righteousness of God's judgment and taking his side against our sin.⁶⁵ We can accept the promises of a God “who can also lavish upon us what is beyond the limits of nature.”⁶⁶ We can receive the infusion of a supernatural habit of faith from God, and then begin to act out of it. We can trust God for a growing grace that changes us from the inside out, and make a personal commitment to live on its basis. And that faith will be “the foundation and root of all justification.”⁶⁷ For “without faith it is impossible to please [God], for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). And so “from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward” (Colossians 3:24), “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you who by God's power are being guarded through faith” (1 Peter 1:4-5). We will be what Abram saw, for in the end, “the faithful are assimilated to heaven, made comparable to the angels, equal to the stars.”⁶⁸ So praise God “who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light” (Colossians 1:12)! Amen.