The Smoking Furnace & Burning Lamp
God made a covenant with Abraham the way kings made covenants: the animals divided, the pieces laid in two rows, and the parties walk between them to bind themselves on pain of death. Then Genesis 15 does something no other covenant does. “A deep sleep fell upon Abram” (15:12), and “a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp... passed between those pieces” (15:17). Abraham never walked. God walked alone.
A covenant with one party binding himself is a promise, not a contract, and Paul builds Romans 4 on the fact. Abraham “believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” (15:6), and Paul asks the question that decides everything: was that reckoned “when he was in circumcision, or in uncircumcision? Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision” (Rom 4:10). Fourteen years before the sign, the righteousness was already his, by believing a God who had bound Himself alone.
- The Seed & the Serpent Genesis 3:15
- Jacob's Ladder Genesis 28:12