Genesis 15:1-16:16: Faith Counted as Righteousness

Genesis 15:1-16:16: Faith Counted as Righteousness

We’ve been working our way passage by passage through the book of Genesis, and today the next passage we come to is Genesis 15:1 – 16:16, so I’ll be reading a selection of verses from that passage. It says,

1 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” 2 But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” 4 And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” 5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 6 And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. 7 And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” 8 But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9 He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. 11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. 12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him…. 17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, 19 the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”… 1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. 2 And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. 3 So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. 4 And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress…. 15 And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. 

May God bless the reading of his Word.

Let’s pray: Father, what a blessing it is to be gathered together around your Word with the opportunity to immerse ourselves in it this morning. We pray that your Spirit would be present and at work in our midst, causing the truths and teachings we encounter to find a place in our hearts. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray, amen. 

If you’ve lived very long at all, you’ve undoubtedly had people make promises to you but then fail to follow through on those promises. I remember one time, when I was a high school student working at a supermarket bagging groceries, this lady brought a huge cartful of groceries to one of the checkout counters. And as we were in the process of scanning all the items that she wanted to purchase and putting them into bags, she told us that she’d forgotten her credit card in her car and needed to go out and get it real quick and would be right back. So, we finished ringing up her groceries and bagging them and were waiting for her to come back inside and pay for them. 

But, after a couple of minutes had gone by, she still hadn’t come back into the supermarket yet. So, we figured she was probably still looking around in her car for the credit card. But, then, after a few more minutes had gone by without her coming back, we started to wonder where she was—because the groceries were just sitting there on the counter and the cashier was having to direct customers to other checkout lanes and we were just waiting for her. Then, after several more minutes of us waiting for her to come back, the thought finally dawned on us, “You know, maybe she’s not coming back.” And, sure enough, she never came back. I guess she was too embarrassed to tell us that she didn’t have her credit card, and so she just left her groceries at the checkout counter and went home. Needless to say, we weren’t all that thrilled about having to put her cartful of groceries back on the shelves. But that’s just a part of life, right? People make promises and, unfortunately, don’t always keep those promises. 

And in our main passage here in Genesis, that’s what Abram was starting to wonder about the promise God had made to him. Back in chapter 12, God had promised several things to Abram, including that he’d make Abram into a “great nation.” Yet, for years and years, Abram and his wife Sarai continued to be childless. So Abram started to wonder about whether God was going to come through on his promise. 

And that’s where the story picks up in Genesis 15:1-3. It says, 1 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” 2 But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” 

Now, let’s just pause here and acknowledge that this is a very understandable concern for Abram to have. God had promised to make of him a “great nation,” yet it’s kind of hard to become a great nation if you don’t even have a single child. So, I can definitely understand why Abram’s struggling with doubt about whether God would come through on his promise. 

And maybe you’ve been there as well—or maybe you’re there right now. Perhaps you’re experiencing something in your life that’s incredibly difficult or is even bringing you close to your breaking point, and you’re struggling with doubt about God’s promises. Maybe you know, for example, how Romans 8:28 says that all things work together for good for those who love God, but you honestly don’t see how anything good could come out of what you’re currently experiencing. Maybe you’re like, “I know what God’s said in the Bible, but I just don’t see it right now—or see how it could even be possible.” Well, that’s where Abram was as well. 

We then find God’s reply in verses 4-5: 4 And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” 5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” So, God reaffirms his promise to Abram and even gives him a visual illustration of how numerous his descendants will be—as numerous as the stars in the sky. 

Verse 6 then records Abram’s response. It says, “And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” And that statement brings us to the main idea of this passage, which is that Abram believed God’s promise and was therefore counted as righteous. Again, Abram believed God’s promise and was therefore counted as righteous. You see, Abram trusted God even when he had no idea what God was up to and saw no definitive evidence, up to that point, of God acting to keep his promise. To borrow language from 2 Corinthians 5:7, Abram was walking by faith, not by sight. He believed God for what his eyes couldn’t see. 

So what situation do you need to give to the Lord this morning and say, “Lord, I entrust this situation to you. I believe that you’re good and wise and faithful, and I believe that your promises are true, even though I can’t understand why this is happening to me right now or why I’m having to suffer in this way.” That’s what real faith looks like. It looks like trusting God for what’s not yet a visible reality. 

Then, still in verse 6, how did God respond to Abram’s faith? It says that Abram “believed the Lord” and what? The Lord “counted it to him as righteousness.” Now, this verse is actually one of the most important verses in the Old Testament—if not the most important verse—that teaches us about how a person is saved from their sins and made right with God. It’s quoted no less than four times in the New Testament—in Romans 4:3, Romans 4:22, Galatians 3:6, and James 2:23. 

And the key word in the verse is that word “counted.” God “counted” Abram’s faith to him as righteousness. Other translations say that God “credited” it to him or “reckoned” it to him as righteousness. The Greek version of the Old Testament uses a word here that was often used of financial transactions, where a certain amount of money would be credited to someone’s account. For example, not that long ago, I signed up for a new checking account that offered a $300 bonus for new customers. Although I didn’t earn that $300, it was nevertheless credited to my account. Or, at least I hope it was. I should probably check on that. But that’s the sense in which Abram’s faith was credited as righteousness. 

So, understand that it’s not that Abram was considered righteous because he acted righteously and demonstrated righteousness through a lifestyle of righteous deeds. Rather, he simply “believed” God, and God “counted” that belief to him as righteousness. Just like I didn’t earn that $300. It was, instead, credited to my account…hopefully. 

This sense of the term “counted” or “credited” is brought out very emphatically by Paul in Romans 4:1-5. He writes, 1 What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. So Abram’s righteous status was imparted to him not as a wage that was deserved but rather as a gift that was undeserved. 

And that’s a great reminder for us that faith is not only the means by which people are saved today, in New Testament times, but also the way people were saved back in the Old Testament. You know, as a new Christian, I used to think that people in the New Testament are saved from their sin through faith, while people in the Old Testament were saved by keeping the Old Testament Law. Yet, I eventually learned that that’s not true at all. The only way anyone in the Bible is saved from the judgment their sins deserve and is able to be right with God and enter into a relationship with God is through faith.

Now, in the Old Testament, they obviously didn’t yet have all the details about Jesus and his death on the cross to pay for our sins and his subsequent resurrection, so their faith was more general in nature. They simply had faith in whatever God had revealed about himself so far at that point in history. So, for example, Adam had faith that the same God who provided a physical covering for Adam’s physical nakedness in Genesis 3:21 would also provide some sort of spiritual covering for his sin. Then, all the rest of the patriarchs in Genesis such as Abram in our main passage and also those after him like Isaac and Jacob and Joseph likewise had a very general faith in God’s goodness and mercy and the various promises God made to them. And that very general faith was sufficient to save them.

Then, several hundred years later, Moses had a faith in God that was more specific. For example, the Old Testament Law that God revealed to Moses included a sacrificial system in which the blood of animals sacrificed on an altar atoned for the sins of God’s people—at least, symbolically. So this means that Moses had faith in God to save him not only on the basis of God’s general mercy and grace but specifically on the basis of blood sacrifice.

And you could go on and on throughout the rest of the Old Testament. Nobody in the Old Testament was saved by law-keeping but rather though faith in God—a faith that incorporated whatever revelation about God was available at that time. Although they didn’t yet know the name of Jesus or have all the details about Jesus’s ministry, they were still able to be saved simply by trusting in whatever God revealed to them. This is what the Apostle Paul meant when he told the Athenians in Acts 17:30 about the “times of ignorance [that] God overlooked.” God didn’t require people in the Old Testament to have faith in things that hadn’t been revealed yet but simply required a faith that was of a more general nature.

However, now that Jesus has come, our faith has to be a very specific faith. We need to have faith in Jesus to save us from our sins because he paid the price for those sins when he died on the cross and because he then defeated sin entirely when he resurrected from the dead. General faith is no longer sufficient. Rather, our faith has to be directed toward Jesus specifically. As Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”—and I think we could paraphrase that “except through faith in me.”

So, again, the point is that, wherever you look in the Bible, nobody’s ever saved by trying to be good enough for God or attempting to earn his favor through their own moral accomplishments. That’s impossible—because in order to do that, you’d have to be absolutely perfect. You see, James 2:10 states that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.” Think about that. That means if you keep 99.9% of God’s moral standards but fail to keep .1% of those standards, then you’re just as guilty and just as disqualified from heaven as the person who doesn’t do anything right and who rebels against every single one of God’s laws.  

I once heard it compared to a chain. A chain is only as strong as…what? Its weakest link, right? If you’re using a chain to pull something and one of the links on that chain breaks, then whatever you’re pulling isn’t going to be pulled any longer. If one link on that chain fails, the whole chain fails. Similarly, if we fail to reach God’s standards of moral perfection in even one area, it’s as if we’ve failed in every area. That’s why nobody’s ever saved by their own efforts at being good enough for God. Rather, it’s only through faith—and, nowadays, faith in Jesus specifically—that people are saved. 

We have to believe that, when Jesus died on the cross, he was dying in our place and for our sins. God’s justice demands that sin be punished, but the good news of the gospel is that Jesus suffered that punishment so we wouldn’t have to. He then resurrected from the dead in order to demonstrate that God the Father had indeed accepted his sacrifice. And, in order to be saved from our sins and receive eternal life, we have to believe that and put our trust in Jesus as our all-sufficient Savior. 

Then, returning to our main passage in Genesis, the fact that we’re saved by faith is emphasized even further in the subsequent verses. Look with me at Genesis 15:7-12: 7 And he [God] said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.” 8 But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9 He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. 11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. 12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. 

Then, look down at verses 17-21: 17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, 19 the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.” 

So, you might be wondering, what in the world’s going on here? Cutting animals in half, arranging the halves in two lines—like, what on earth? It definitely sounds like the kind of thing that would make the neighbors call the cops. In fact, I’d probably call the cops if I saw someone doing something like this in their backyard. So, what’s going on? 

Well, there was a custom back in ancient Mesopotamia that, whenever two parties wanted to solemnize a covenant or enter into a very formal agreement with each other, they would kill an animal, cut it into two pieces, and then separate those pieces so that both parties could walk through the two pieces together. And the point of that ritual was to illustrate in a very dramatic way that both parties were calling down a curse upon themselves if either of them should violate whatever covenant they were making. By walking in between the two halves of the animal, each of the parties was essentially saying, “If I don’t follow through with my part of this covenant, then let me be like this butchered animal.” So…yeah, that’s pretty intense. 

However, if you notice, what we see here in Genesis 15 deviates from that pattern. God and Abram don’t walk through those animal halves together. Instead, in verse 12, God puts Abram into a deep sleep. So, Abram’s not doing anything. He’s completely passive. Then, in verse 17, God passes through the animal pieces by himself. That’s what the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch represent. In the Bible, God’s presence is often symbolized by fire. So, while Abram’s sleeping, God passes through the animal pieces alone. 

It’s a graphic picture of how God was taking it upon himself to fulfill this covenant and keep the promise he had made to Abram. God had promised on several occasions to make Abram into a great nation and also to give his descendants the land of Canaan. And, in case there was any doubt, God now makes it very clear in these verses that that promise is unconditional. It’s not dependent on Abram being worthy of the promise or achieving a certain level of moral excellence. Instead it’s a promise that’s based not on Abram but on God alone. It’s what theologians often call an unconditional or a unilateral covenant. The covenant would be kept because God himself would make sure it was kept. He was even willing to call down a curse on himself if it wasn’t kept. 

Yet, that’s not all, because this unilateral covenant points forward in time to another unilateral covenant that we now know as the gospel. In the gospel, we play a role that’s similar to Abram’s role in Genesis 15 when he was fast asleep. We have nothing of value to offer God and no ability whatsoever to make ourselves acceptable in his sight. Ephesians 2:1 actually states that we’re dead in our sins—with no spiritual vital signs of any kind.  Yet, Jesus does for us what we can never do or ourselves. He accomplishes everything that needs to be accomplished in his sinless life, sacrificial death, and victorious resurrection. 

So, have you yet put your trust entirely in Jesus for rescue? Have you humbly acknowledged before God that, as Jonathan Edwards says, the only contribution you can make to your salvation is the sin that made it necessary, and that you therefore stand in desperate need of Jesus and Jesus alone? And have you come to rest in his finished work on your behalf? 

Then, having been made right with God through faith, we’re subsequently called to walk in this mentality for the rest of our lives, reminding ourselves each day that God loves and accepts us not because of what we do but because of what Jesus has already done. Through Jesus, the Bible says, we’ve been adopted into God’s family—and nothing we do can ever change that. Yet, for some reason, it seems that we have trouble wrapping our minds around this reality. It seems like we’re frequently tempted to revert back to that mentality of God’s love and acceptance being based not on Jesus but on us and on how good of a Christian we manage to be on any given day. 

Dane Ortlund, in his book Gentle and Lowly, compares it to a boy trying to earn his place in the family. He writes, “Picture a twelve-year-old boy growing up in a healthy, loving family. As he matures, through no fault of his parents he finds himself trying to figure out how to really assure himself a place in the family. One week he tries to create a new birth certificate for himself. The next week he determines to spend all his extra time scrubbing the kitchen clean. The following week he determines to do all he can to imitate his dad. One day his parents question his strange behavior. [And he replies,] ‘I’m just doing all I can to secure my place in the family, guys!’ How would his father respond? ‘Calm yourself, my dear son! There’s nothing you could possibly do to earn your place among us. You are our son. Period. You didn’t do anything at the start to get into our family, and you can’t do anything now to get out of our family. Live your life knowing your sonship is settled and irreversible.’”

Brothers and sisters, we don’t have to earn our place in God’s family or maintain God’s love and acceptance by being really good Christians. Instead, because of what Jesus has done on our behalf, we can rest in the fact that God loves us just as much on our worst days as he does on our best days. 

And, sometimes, we really do have some pretty bad days. Sometimes, there are even entire seasons when we’re just not what we should be spiritually. We see one of those times in Abram and Sarai’s lives in the next chapter. In Genesis 16, they waver in their faith and doubt that God will come through on his promise all on his own and therefore try to take things into their own hands. 

Look with me at Genesis 16:1-4: 1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. 2 And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. 3 So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife. 4 And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived…. It then says at the end of the chapter in verses 15-16, 15 And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. 

So, yet again, we find Abram taking things into his own hands. He had done so in Egypt back in chapter 12, and now he does so again. God had promised him offspring, and since Sarai wasn’t conceiving, Abram tries to obtain offspring through Hagar. In spite of the faith he had exhibited in the previous chapter, he now experiences at least a partial lapse of faith. 

By the way, don’t we so often have that same oscillating tendency? One day we’re hot, the next day we’re cold. One day we’re enjoying an exhilarating experience of God’s presence on a spiritual mountaintop, the next we’re struggling in a spiritual valley. One day we’re walking in faith, the next we’re wrestling with doubt. I don’t know about you, but I just find Abram incredibly relatable. 

Yet, even when we struggle and stumble, God still loves us. Even when we take our lives in our own hands and disobey God’s commands and disregard his word, he’s still committed to fulfilling his promises to us. As we’ll see in the subsequent chapters of Genesis, God’s promises to Abram were still valid even when Abram experienced lapses in his faith. Remember, it was a unilateral covenant, right?—just as it is for us. That means we might waver, but God never does. No matter how much we stumble, how much we fail, or how inconsistent we are, God continues to love those of us who are Christians as his own children. 

In fact, his love is such that it actually goes out to us all the more when we sin against him. We catch a glimpse of this reality in Jeremiah 31:20. Speaking of Israel during a time when Israel was very rebellious, God says, “Is [Israel] my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, declares the Lord.” Think about that. “My heart yearns for him,” God says. Even in our sin, that’s the disposition of God’s heart toward us. 

The seventeenth-century Puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin writes, with reference to this verse, “There is comfort….in that your very sins move [God] to pity more than to anger…Christ takes part with you, and is far from being provoked against you, as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it; [indeed], his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that has some loathsome disease, or as one is to a member of his body that has leprosy, he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected [all] the more. What shall not [be to our benefit], when our sins…against Christ…shall be turned as motives to him to pity us [all] the more?” So, again, contrary to what we often assume, God doesn’t hold us at arm’s length when we sin against him or make us endure some sort of probationary period before we can come back to him. Instead, his heart of love actually goes out to us all the more when we stumble and fall. Do you see how the gospel is such good news for sinners like you and me? 

We can also take great comfort in the words of Jesus in John 6:37, where he states, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” Consider those last words, “I will never cast out.” Not, “I won’t cast them out as long as they don’t do anything that’s too terrible” or “I won’t cast them out as long as I don’t find anything in their hearts that’s too ugly” or “I won’t cast them out as long as they don’t surpass the limit of what I’m willing to put up with.” No, Jesus says, “whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” As Dane Ortlund writes, “We cannot present a reason for Christ to finally close off his heart to his own sheep. No such reason exists. Every human friend has a limit. If we offend enough, if a relationship gets damaged enough, if we betray enough times, we are cast out. The walls go up. With Christ, our sins and weaknesses are the very resume items that qualify us to approach him. Nothing but coming to him is required—first at conversion and [then] a thousand times thereafter….”

Friends, this is the love God has for his children. It’s the love he had for Abram back in Genesis that caused him to remain faithful to his promises even throughout all of Abram’s floundering and failing. And it’s the love he has for us today.