Introduction:
A. Years ago Dr. Seuss published a children’s book entitled “Horton Hears a Who.” It was recently turned into a movie.
1. How many of you have read the book or seen the movie?
2. It’s a story about an elephant named Horton who hears voices coming from a little speck of dust.
3. Horton places the speck of dust on a clover bloom and then does his best to protect the tiny residents inside that speck of dust from the other animals who could not hear the voices rising from the dust particle.
4. As the story develops, Horton learns that the race living inside that speck of dust are the “Who’s.”
a. They lived in a town called Whoville and needed a protector to prevent them from being blown about by the wind, or destroyed by other means.
5. Of course, the other animals in the jungle do not believe Horton and give him a hard time about his belief that a tiny race inhabits a particle of dust.
a. They try to destroy the speck of dust and they even try to tie Horton up.
6. Eventually, all the Who’s in Whoville join their voices and shout in unison so that they might be heard by the animals who have tormented Horton about his strange beliefs.
a. They are finally heard when the tiniest Who of them all, a tiny, yo-yo throwing tike by the name of “Jo Jo” lifts his voice and says “Yupp.”
7. To make a long story short, there are two great moral lessons taught in “Horton Hears a Who.” a. The first is that we should be kind to all people, even when others refuse to be.
b. The second is that even the smallest of the small is an important person.
B. You may be wondering what this has to do with our sermon series on Abraham, but the answer lies in the fact that Horton heard a voice one day that forever changed his life.
1. In today’s segment from the life of Abraham, we will learn that Abraham heard the “Word of the LORD” and this word from God changed his life.
2. In line with the title “Horton Hears a Who,” I could have titled this sermon, “Abraham Hears the Lord.”
3. Abraham needed to have a conversation with the Lord and God came close and they chatted.
C. Compared to the action-packed events of the last sermon on chapter 14, this sermon on chapter 15 could appear boring.
1. In today’s chapter there are no invading armies or villainous kidnappings or daring rescues with nighttime ambushes.
2. Rather, in our chapter for today, we read about a quiet conversation between two close friends.
3. It might be dull reading except for the fact that the two close friends were the Almighty Creator of the universe and an aging patriarch with no children.
4. Direct interchanges between God and individuals don’t occur often in Scripture, nor in life.
5. But here in Genesis 15, this interchange takes the form of a true dialogue, a back-and-forth conversation between friends.
6. Yet, even though Abraham shared this remarkably free exchange with the Lord, Abraham never lost respect for the Lord’s position as the holy, all-powerful, all-knowing God He is.
D. So what did Abraham receive from his conversation with the Lord?
1. God shared with Abraham some vital words concerning his fear, his future and his faith.
2. What Abraham heard that day changed his life forever.
3. And that is the power and importance of the Word of God.
4. Today, each one of us need to learn to listen for God’s voice and hear the Word of God and allow it to revolutionize our lives.
I. The Story
A. Let’s look at the opening verse of chapter 15: After this, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.”
1. The first two words, “After this” are like a speed bump in the narrative.
a. We dare not drive over them too quickly; the author placed them here for a reason.
b. These words indicate that what happens next is linked to previous events.
c. What were the previous things that are indicated by “After this”?
2. Consider what had been going on in Abraham’s life.
a. He had left his previous home in Ur and in Haran, and had followed God to Canaan.
b. When the famine struck, he wrongly headed to Egypt, but got deported back to Canaan.
c. Then Abraham and Lot separated, but the city Lot moved to got attacked and he was taken captive.
d. So, Abraham rallied the 318 men at his disposal and traveled 100 miles and attacked Lot’s captors and returned victorious having recovered Lot and all the people and possessions that the raiding kings from the north and east had taken captive.
3. Wouldn’t you agree that that is a lot of “After this”?
a. And doesn’t that give us some insight into why God says what He said to Abraham?
4. When God appeared to Abraham and His first words are, “Do not be afraid,” what does this tells us about how Abraham was feeling?
a. We must conclude that Abraham’s heart condition at this point included fear.
b. Perhaps, Abraham was having a fitful, sleepless night because of his fear.
5. What was Abraham afraid of at that point?
a. The Bible doesn’t tells us, but there are several obvious possibilities.
b. For starters, this incident took place after Abraham had returned home victorious over Kedorlaomer (Key-door-lay-o-mer), the leader of 3 other kings who had raided Canaan.
1. There is no indication that Kedorlaomer was dead.
2. Abraham had caught him off guard the first time, perhaps Kedorlaomer will come back and get his revenge.
3. That could certainly lead to some anxious thoughts.
c. Add to that the fact that Abraham lives near the king of Sodom whom Abraham may have insulted when he spoke boldly and bluntly to the king about the spoils.
1. Perhaps Abraham was second-guessing himself, thinking, “I should have been more diplomatic. I didn’t have to speak so sharply to him. What if the King of Sodom rallies his troops and comes after me?”
d. At the same time, I’m sure there was a much deeper fear lurking in Abraham’s heart – a gnawing sense that he had somehow misunderstood God.
1. 10 years earlier, God had told Abraham, “All the land that you see, I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.” (Gen. 13:15-16)
2. Ten years of waiting had passed and Abraham still had no offspring.
6. Do you see how God’s words to Abraham would have addressed all of those fears?
a. Why shouldn’t Abraham be afraid? God says, because “I am your shield and your very great reward.”
b. The Bible is clear that God is our shield, our fortress, our strength, and our tower of refuge.
c. As the Psalmist says, “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty” (Psalm 91:1)
d. What reward or treasure is greater than having a relationship with God?
e. If God is for us, who can be against us?!
f. The joy of knowing God and being in relationship with Him is our “very great reward.”
B. Let’s see how Abraham responded to God’s opening statement in their conversation.
1. 2 Abraham said, “O Sovereign LORD , what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit 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.” (Gen. 15:2-3)
2. From these words, we can tell some of what Abraham was worried about.
3. The phrase, “O Sovereign Lord” is unusual because it brings together two of God’s names: Adonai and Yahweh – Master and Lord.
a. This helps to soften Abraham’s challenging yet reasonable question.
4. Abraham basically says: “You keep promising offspring, but I’m closer to death than ever before, and I have no blood heir to receive Your covenant promises. Sarah is too old to get pregnant now, so exactly what reward do You mean?”
C. How do you think God would respond to the statement of Abraham?
1. If God were some power-hungry dictator or employer, He might respond with “How dare you question me! Who do you think you are!”
2. Thankfully, especially for Abraham’s sake, that is not how God is or how God responded.
3. The Bible says: 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.” 5 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.” (Gen. 15:4-5)
4. If you or I could read God’s response in the Hebrew language, we would see how emphatically God said, “This man will NOT be your heir”!!!
a. In today’s terms, God might have said, “Abraham, your heir will come from your DNA.”
5. Then to drive home the point, the Lord took Abraham outside.
a. The verb is active, almost forceful, as though God bodily picked Abraham up and carried him outside so that he could peer up at the nighttime sky.
6. Then the Lord commanded, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars if you can! That is how many descendants you will have!”
a. How many of you enjoy star-gazing?
b. I just spent a week at one of my favorite places to look at the stars – Camp Hunt.
1. Even though it rained at some point every day, every night when I walked back to our room, I was treated to the amazing expanse overhead.
2. Here in the city we can’t see many stars, but out there in the country, a couple thousand feet above sea level, you can see them a lot better!
c. How many stars can a person in a rural area with 20/20 vision see?
1. Too many to count. That’s the point!
2. When we look up at the Milky Way – our local galaxy – there is an estimated 250 billion stars in our galaxy – that’s the same one Abraham was looking at.
3. God used the vastness of the night sky to illustrate how many descendants would come from Abraham’s body, his own flesh and blood.
D. It’s interesting that God had already given Abraham a different illustration to describe how many descendants he would have.
1. The other illustration was the dust of the earth – it works the same way – there is a lot of dust on the earth, right?
2. That’s why your vacuum cleaner is needed and why the shelves in my office need dusting.
3. God could have used other metaphors like the blades of grass on the plain, or grains of wheat in the field, or the sand of the seashore.
4. This time, he encouraged Abraham to crane his neck to look straight up into the vast, mysterious, and immense universe.
5. As Abraham looked up and felt small, he got God’s point: God was saying, “I am God, and even though you are small, I am going to give you many descendants. Trust Me; I’ve got things under control.”
6. Looking back from our vantage point in the 21st century, we can see that God has fulfilled those promises to the letter.
E. Well, as they say down South, “Nuff said!”
1. The Bible says: 6 Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness. (15:6)
2. The Hebrew term translated “believed” means “to be certain; to trust.”
a. Question: Why did God’s words settle the matter for Abraham? Answer: Because no one can argue with the One who made the stars!
3. “Abraham believed the Lord, and he [God] credited it to him as righteousness” - as the narrator inserts this simple comment about Abraham and his faith, the narrator offers one of the most significant verses in the Bible.
a. God declared Abraham as righteous – the Hebrew word means “conformity to an ethical or moral standard.”
b. The same word is used to describe God’s morally perfect nature: “The Lord is righteous in all his ways and loving to all he has made.” (Psalm 145:17)
c. Did Abraham suddenly become a morally flawless person? Did Abraham’s behavior suddenly conform completely to God’s perfect standard? Far from it!
d. What changed was not Abraham, but what changed was God’s declaration about Abraham.
e. God, acting as the supreme Judge, applied all the rights and privileges of righteousness to Abraham despite Abraham’s own inability to be righteous.
f. God declared him to be righteous.
4. From the first book of the Bible to the last, God presents only one way of salvation – the way of faith.
a. We cannot work our way to favor with God, and we cannot earn our salvation.
b. All we can do is receive salvation as a free and undeserved gift from God.
c. Paul explained it in Eph. 2:8-9: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.”
5. “Abraham believed the Lord, and he [God] credited it to him as righteousness” - As we read those words, we need to avoid the mistake of assuming that Abraham was a superior saint who possessed a mighty faith far beyond our ability to attain.
a. As we have already seen in our journey with Abraham so far and as we will continue to see as we journey with him, Abraham was a flesh-and-blood man, and he was prone to the same failings and weaknesses as you and me.
b. Abraham was a weak and faltering human being just like us, and his faith was credited to him as righteousness, and we are his spiritual descendants and God does the same for us.
F. Well, did the conversation end there? Nope, it continued.
1. The Bible says: 7 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.”
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. 11 Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
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. 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.”
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 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.” (Gen. 15:7-21)
2. What takes place at this point in the story is a little unusual to us in our modern times, but not for Abraham and his time.
a. What we see God doing here is providing Abraham with more specific information about the land and the timing of possession.
b. And to ease Abraham’s mind, God formalized a covenant.
c. The Hebrew expression is literally “to cut a covenant” and you can see why it is called that by what takes place here.
3. Today our agreements are preserved with ink on paper, validated by signatures, stamped by notary, stored in courthouses, and are upheld by governments.
a. Not so in other times and cultures for obvious reasons.
4. In ancient times, as covenants were agreed to, the parties took part in an elaborate and somewhat gory ceremony involving animal sacrifice, just like we see in these verses.
a. Abraham knew exactly what to do with the animals because he had undoubtedly been a part of similar ceremonies.
b. He cut the animals and laid the halves a short distance apart and then waited.
c. God appears in the form of the smoking fire pot and the blazing torch and passes between the pieces putting his “signature” to the “pages” of the covenant.
5. God reassures Abraham that he would die in peace after a long and fruitful life with many descendants.
a. Abraham was 85 years old at the time of this conversation, but we know that he lived to the ripe old age of 175 (Gen. 25:7).
b. The passage reveals God’s great patience with the human race.
c. Abraham’s descendants must remain in Egypt for 400 years (our country is not yet even 300 years old!) because of “the sin of the Amorites,” a godless tribe living in Canaan, “has not yet reached its full measure.”
d. In other words, these vicious, ungodly tribes must be allowed to run the full course of their iniquity and depravity so that when God has Israel wipe them out, there will be no questioning of the righteousness of God’s judgement.
e. God is indeed righteous and He knows what He is doing!
II. Application
A. As we look at all that has gone on in Abraham’s journey with God so far and what God promises about Abraham’s future, there are some helpful lessons for us to learn about our relationship with God.
1. First, we learn that God understands our questions and needs and wants to calm our fears.
a. God didn’t begin the conversation with a question: “What’s wrong, Abraham?” God already knew. God knows us.
2. Second, we learn that God knows when to bless and when to delay.
a. He knows the right time for Isaac to be born and the right time for Israel to take the land.
3. Third, we learn that God wants us to trust Him and that faith is most important in our salvation.
4. Fourth, we learn that God wants to communicate with us, but we must learn to listen and take what is said to heart.
B. Back in the 1920s, Broadway producer Jed Harris became convinced he was losing his hearing.
1. He visited a specialist who decided to test his hearing.
2. The specialist pulled out a gold watch and asked, “Can you hear this ticking?”
a. “Of course,” Harris replied.
3. Next, the specialist walked to the door and asked the question again, “Can you hear this ticking?”
a. Harris concentrated and said, “Yes, I can hear it clearly.”
4. Then the specialist walked into the next room and repeated the question a third time.
a. A third time Harris said he could hear the ticking.
5. The specialist concluded saying, “Mr. Harris, there is nothing wrong with your hearing. You just don’t listen.”
C. Is that the case with any of us? Our hearing is just fine, but we don’t use our ability to hear to actually listen.
1. You and I will probably live our whole lives and never hear voices coming from a speck of dust - at least I hope that is the case.
2. Abraham heard a Word from the Lord; he believed that Word and it forever changed his life.
3. I believe that God has a word for our lives – I know God is speaking, but are we listening?
4. God speaks to us in many ways, but He first and foremost speaks to us through His written Word, the Bible and through the Living Word, His Son, Jesus.
a. Additionally, God speaks to our hearts and minds in prayer through the Holy Spirit.
b. And, God also speaks to us through the counsel of fellow believers.
5. God is speaking…are we listening?
6. Has the Lord spoken to some need in our lives this morning?
a. Is there some battle we need peace about?
b. Is there some storm we need calmed?
c. Is there some area of our lives where we need a Sovereign God to move?
d. Has our sin been dealt with biblically?
e. Have we believed and done what the Bible says we must believe and do to be saved – Jesus said: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be savid” (Mk. 16:16).
f. Are we striving to live out the righteousness that has been credited to us?
7. If God has spoken to your heart today, then I pray that you will listen and follow through with God’s direction for you.
8. If you would like to share any decisions, commitments, or requests with the congregation, then you can come forward as we stand and sing.
Resources:
Abraham – One Nomad’s Amazing Journey of Faith, by Charles Swindoll, Tyndale, 2014.
Friend of God – The Legacy of Abraham, Man of Faith, by Ray Stedman, Discovery House, 2010.
