The Blood Path Covenant
Genesis 15
If you have your Bibles open them up to Genesis chapter 15. If you don’t have your Bibles we have provided the verses on the screen so you can follow along. The passage I want to look at today with you, concerns a promise that God made to a guy in the Old Testament named Abraham. Genesis chapter 15 and let’s dive into the passage.
Verses 1-3
After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision:
"Do not be afraid, Abram.
I am your shield, [a]
your very great reward."
2 But Abram said, "O Sovereign LORD, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit [c] my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?" 3 And Abram said, "You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir."
In Genesis 14 (the chapter before) Abraham had just won a battle over several national armies with just 318 men. One often forgotten characteristic of Abraham is that he was warrior. Abraham is the Ultimate Fighting Champion of this royal rumble of kings. All these kings scrapped it out in a king of the hill type of battle and Abraham emerged as the champion. Abraham not only won the battle but he got the spoils and is now extremely wealthy. If I had just won a battle like this I would have been pretty arrogant and confident and talking smack and showing off my stuff.
But we see here that Abraham is not all confident instead he is afraid. God tells Abraham, “do not be afraid.” What could Abraham really be afraid of?
What concerns Abraham is that he has no children, primarily a son. This was a big deal in those days. Having children was seen as the primary way that God blessed you in the Old Testament.
Psalm 127:3
Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.
So if you didn’t have children (especially sons) then God must not be blessing you or rewarding you. So Abraham tells God, I don’t care so much that you gave me victory in battle over the kings or wealth. You haven’t given a son and therefore God you must not care about me. It is human nature to never be satisfied with what God gives us.
Abraham is afraid that he will have to leave his estate to his head servant Eliezer of Damascus. It was a custom that if a man did not have a son he could adopt a servant to be his heir. This was a last resort.
Verse 4 Then the word of the LORD came to him: "This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir." He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
God addresses Abraham’s concern. He promises Abraham a son, a descendant. In fact, he promises not just a son but sons. And he gives him an illustration of how many children he will have. He takes him outside and has him look into the heavens and says count the stars. That’s how many sons you are going have Abraham. How many sons is that?
Discussing the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, astronomer William Keel claims that there are "about as many stars as the number of hamburgers sold by McDonald’s." Then Keel elaborates. The usual way to determine the number of stars in the universe is to consider how many stars there are in the Milky Way, and then to multiply that number by our best guesstimate at the number of galaxies in the universe. He suggests there are probably about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, although "a 50% error either way is quite plausible." As for the number of galaxies in the universe, well that’s a whole separate mathematical puzzle.
NASA alleges there are zillions of uncountable stars.
Jeremiah 33:22 said that God will “make the descendants of David as countless as the stars of the sky.”
I think Abraham got the point. Because verse 6 says, Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
But God isn’t done with his promises to Abraham.
Verses 7-9 He also said to him, "I am the LORD, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it." 8 But Abram said, "O Sovereign LORD, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" 9 So the LORD said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon."
(new slide!) 10 Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half.
God makes a second promise to Abram. He not only promises him a son, he promises him land. And Abraham asks God for a sign that this is all true.
What God does with Abraham is he makes a covenant. Most covenants in those days were not made, they were cut in blood. Whenever a covenant was made, blood was shed. In fact, the phrase “made a covenant” in the Old Testament is often translated “cut a covenant.” It comes from the Hebrew karat which means to cut.
Psalm 105:9 alludes to this. It says:
God has remembered His covenant forever, The covenant he made with Abraham. That would better translated, “cut with Abraham.”
If you are familiar with the book of Genesis up to this point you know that every promise made by God was sealed with the cutting, bloodshed and death of animal. God makes a covenant with Adam and Eve, and then makes them coverings from animal skins. When God made a covenant with Noah, Noah built and altar and took every clean animal and offered them.
All covenants in the Old Testament involved blood. Marriage was a covenant in the Old Testament between a man and woman and the sealing of that covenant took place when the couple consummated the marriage and there was blood from the virgin.
Jeremiah 34 tells that the cutting of a covenant was a commitment of life and death. At the time of the making of the covenant, there was a symbolic death of the covenant maker. When the animals were cut, they represented the covenant-maker himself being cut and put to death. In a covenant, death represented the beginning of the covenant.
The covenant participants also would place a curse upon themselves which was to be carried out in the case of a violation of that covenant.
A covenant also supposed one thing. It supposed that the parties had been previously been in a state of hostility towards each other, and were brought by the covenant into a state of friendship.
Now with this covenant there is going to be a whole lot blood. Abraham cuts a heifer in half. He would have first slit its throat and then saw it is in half. Its innards probably spilled everywhere. I remember the scene from the movie Jaws when the cut open a shark and its insides spill all over the deck. Imagine the blood. Imagine the smell. Then a three year old goat gets cut in half. Same process followed by a ram. He doesn’t cut the birds in two as stipulated in Leviticus 1.17. But he lays one half of the heifer on one side and then lays the other half on the opposite side. He does that with the other animals. The blood would have flowed into a single path.
(picture of blood path on screen)
Rabbi Solomon Jarchi says, "It was a custom with those who entered into covenant with each other to take a heifer and cut it in two, and then the contracting parties passed between the pieces."
This was a very familiar way that ancient cultures made covenants. This was called a blood path covenant. Each party would then walk through the warm blood and by doing so they would be saying: “I will keep my part of this covenant or you can kill me like these animals.” In fact, we know that ancient kings would cut their enemies in two when they violated a covenant. And often once they were cut in two the king would walk through the blood of his enemies signifying the end of the covenant.
Verse 11 Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. There is opposition to the covenant. Perhaps this expresses the presence of evil or even a satanic presence.
Verse 12 As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13 Then the LORD said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years.
(New Slide!) 14 But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15 You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure."
God basically summarizes what is going to happen to Abraham’s descendants in the future. This is a prophecy. It will be four hundred years (403 exactly) from Abraham to when the Israelites will leave Egypt and enter the promise land. And the descendants of Abraham will replace the Amorites in Canaan. The word Amorites is used to describe all the nations who lived in the promised land. All of this prophecy came true. Even the prophecy about Abraham’s death at an old age comes true in Genesis 25.
Old age was considered a blessing from God. God is saying, “Abraham, you are going to be blessed.” You are going to receive a son, land and old age. In those days, that equal extreme success. God will keep the blood path covenant with Abraham. God always fulfills his promises. They are written in blood. God is faithful.
Deuteronomy 7:9 reads, “Know therefore that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousandth generation with those who love him.”
One of the ways we know that God is God is that he keeps his covenants. He keeps his promises.
Verse 17
When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made (cut) a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates- 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites."
The flaming torch and smoking firepot represent the presence of God. And notice who walks the bloodpath? God. We do not read of Abraham walking the bloodpath. Dan Dyke told me that other days that believes that this passage indicates that God walked the bloodpath twice, once for himself and once in Abraham’s place.
Who is this covenant between? God is actually making the covenant with himself. Abraham never walks the path. He can’t walk the path. He is a sinner and he is not able to fully keep his end of the bargain. In fact, in the very next chapter in Genesis, Abraham will sin and fall short. Human beings are ultimately incapable of keeping a covenant with a holy God. And so God has to make a covenant with the only one he can, himself.
Hebrews 6:13
13When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, 14saying, "I will surely bless you and give you many descendants.” 15And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.
That is exactly what we see in the cross. The cross is a covenant that God made with himself. It was a covenant between Jesus and the Father. And the covenant was cut with the blood of Christ. Remember how we said that the blood path covenant always a curse just in case the covenant was broken. Well Jesus even became the curse of the covenant. “Cursed is man who hangs upon a tree.” We are not really involved in the covenant of the cross. It was a covenant that God made with himself.
So what was Abraham’s role in this covenant? Simply, he is to have faith in the promise. Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness. He is to trust the promise of God. He was to trust that God would faithful to this promise.
If you want to define what Biblical faith is, biblical faith is trusting in the covenant promises of God. And in fact, the Bible says when we trust in God’s covenant promises, we are like Abraham. More over, when we trust God and his promises we became one in a line of people just like Abraham. We become one of the stars of Abraham. One of his descendants.
Galatians 3:27
for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, and heirs according to the promise.
