Wednesday, December 7,
2016
Then the Lord told him, “I am the Lord who
brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land as your
possession.” But Abram replied, “O Sovereign Lord,
how can I be sure that I will actually possess it?” The Lord told
him, “Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a
three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” So Abram presented
all these to him and killed them. Then
he cut each animal down the middle and laid the halves side by side; he did
not, however, cut the birds in half. Some vultures swooped down to eat
the carcasses, but Abram chased them away. As the sun was going
down, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a terrifying darkness came down over
him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “You can be sure that your
descendants will be strangers in a foreign land, where they will be oppressed
as slaves for 400 years. But I will punish the nation that enslaves them,
and in the end they will come away with great wealth. (As for you, you
will die in peace and be buried at a ripe old age.) After four
generations your descendants will return here to this land, for the sins of the
Amorites do not yet warrant their destruction.” After the sun went
down and darkness fell, Abram saw a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass
between the halves of the carcasses. So the Lord made a
covenant with Abram that day and said, “I have given this land to your
descendants, all the way from the border of Egypt to the great Euphrates
River— Genesis 15:7-18(NLT)
God promised Abram an heir
to carry on the family name. Like God
had done with Adam when he wanted to bless him with Eve, the Lord put Abram in
a deep sleep. In that state God showed
Abram the future captivity of his descendants in Egypt, and the ensuing
Exodus. To seal this covenant God passed
through the middle of the sacrificial animal halves Abram had prepared at God’s
direction. And the sight that Abram saw
was a smoking censer and torch – a pillar of cloud and fire.
What is so significant about
this is that half a millennium later when all the events of the Exodus took
place fulfilling the vision God gave to Abram, the Lord led the new nation of
Israel through the wilderness as a pillar
of cloud by day and a pillar
of fire by night.
God keeps His covenant
promises!
Sharing the communion feast
this past Sunday was (as it always is for me) a high moment. When offered the bread we hear: The
Body of Christ, broken for you….
When the cup is passed it is: The Blood of Christ shed for you…a new
covenant.
I always hear the promise of
God’s covenantal grace in these – God says: for
YOU! It is good to hear
that; the promise comforts me, but His grace in the promise also humbles me; I
did nothing to deserve God’s thinking of me.
God gave the signs of
pillars of cloud and fire to Abram 500 years before the nation would see their
God’s presence leading the way through a dark wilderness. All the prophets pointed to the “now” and “not
yet” as God is always “working” and “will yet work”. God is always preparing for us. He was preparing His own sacrifice
for our sins before the foundation
of the earth!
And here, now in Advent, we still
hear the words of the prophet who cried in the wilderness that we should prepare
the way of the Lord, even as He is always preparing His grace…for us.
It’s comforting to know the
God who always keeps His promises keeps on promising. And that is starkly so because today we still
live in a wilderness. Nature, economics,
politics, famine, disease and all the wickedness we can devise as human
children of Adam are all part of our chaotic twenty-first century wilderness.
And it’s also humbling to remember
how counter-cultural the promises of God loom.
Our counter-cultural God has promised that the first are going to the
back of the line, the high and powerful will be brought to the ground, the
wicked are going to be uncovered, and every proud knee is eventually going to
bend before the one who was crucified…for
us! And He always keeps His promises.
For You Today
You
and I are created in His image…the image of a God who always keeps His
promises. How is that image in you doing
with your promises?
NOTES
[i]
Title image: By Photo
courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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