Israel’s Title Deed: Understanding God's Covenant in Genesis 15

Welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick, a 30-minute walk through the Scriptures, teaching in-depth Bible truths that change people's lives. Now, here's your host, Les Feldick. Good evening once again, and as usual, we'll go right back and pick up where we left off. We're going to buy up the time, as it were. Back to Genesis chapter 15. Now, those of you who have been watching on television, if you will remember, last week we said, well, I didn't want to start something unless I had the whole half hour. Well, here it is, and I call it Israel's Deed. In fact, you might want to write it in the margin of chapter 15, somewhere between verse 9 and the end of the chapter. This is Israel's Deed, and it's just as valid in 1992 as it was the day that God issued it. All right, let's see what it says. Genesis 15, let's begin with verse 7. And he, Abram, said unto him, that is the Lord, I'm sorry, it's the Lord speaking, and he said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees to give thee this land to inherit it. Verse 8. Now, here I think it is so obvious that Abram was just as human as we are. And even though we sometimes take the promises of God by faith, yet when we're human, what do we say? Well, now God did just prove it. And I don't think it's all that wrong. But here is Abram now, all these promises, and God has just said, I'm going to give you the land. What's his question? How do I know? See? Verse 8, and he said, Lord God wherewith shall I know that I shall inherit the land, implied in the word it. Now, verse 9. You know what God does here? Very few people realize this, that in the things that take place with these sacrificial animals being parted, this was exactly the customary way of transferring real estate back in the ancients. Now, you want to remember, ever since the Tower of Babel, everything is steeped in paganism, and paganism is steeped in a constant animal sacrifice. That wasn't unique just to Israel. The pagans were constantly sacrificing their animals. And so their system of transferring title deed was exactly what God is doing here on behalf of Abram. Because what's the reason? To prove to Abram that God meant what he said. And so now God answers Abram, and he says, Take me a heifer of three years old, a she-goat of three, a ram of three, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon. And what were they to do? They were to divide the carcasses and lay them off with a space in between them. In other words, like I would say, just sort of like an alleyway between these carcasses. And he took unto him, verse 10, all these, and he divided them in the midst. In other words, he split the carcass, even as you do when the slaughterhouse hangs the beef on the rail, they split it right down the middle. And he did this, and he laid each piece one against another. But the birds he divided not. Now, verse 11. You can just about imagine, in that hot Middle East, as these carcasses were laying out there in the open air, what happened? Oh, the birds of prey started coming in, and the vultures, see? And so when the fowls came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away. Now, I don't think I'm being facetious when I say that every once in a while you'll find a rather humorous situation, even though it's certainly very serious. But knowing what was at stake, here was the whole idea of transferring title deed, and the very thing necessary to it, the birds were beginning to devour it. What do you suppose Abraham thought? Oh, it was all going to get mottled up, and so what does he do? And so he drove them away. Can't you see him? Oh, he's just going up and down. I can picture him trying to scare these birds away, because after all, this is what he had to have for God to transfer deed. But God takes care of the situation, and He just puts Abram to sleep. And so when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram. Lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. In other words, he was just simply zapped out. Verse 13, And God said unto Abram... Now, it becomes a vision experience for Abram, but that doesn't take away the reality of it. So God said unto Abram, Know of a surety. What does that mean? Just what it says. This is absolute, that thy seed, your children, your children's children, shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs. Now, I usually refer to this as the very first statement of prophecy in your Bible. God is telling something before it happens. What's He talking about? Their sojourn in Egypt. And here He hasn't even got the first child. But God is already telling them that at some point in time, generations of them would be in Egypt. Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them. They'd be in servitude. And they shall, that is the Egyptians, shall afflict them, the Israelites, how long? 400 years. How long was Israel in Egypt? 400 years. Verse 14, And God says, Also that nation, whom they shall serve, which we know was Egypt, I will judge. Now, I'll admit, if there's anything in Scripture that I have a hard time comprehending or understanding, and I don't try, but all I do is say, God is sovereign, He can make no mistakes, and that is how God can raise up a nation to punish the nation of Israel, and He turns right around then and reveals His wrath to that nation for misusing the Jew. I can't comprehend it. When did it happen again? Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar came on the scene, got the whole empire of Babylon rolling, and he was the one that God used to take Israel out of the land, which He had been promising from His prophets for years would happen if they didn't straighten up, and they didn't, and along comes Nebuchadnezzar, takes them out, takes all the temple wealth with him, and what did God do to Nebuchadnezzar? Oh, He came down on him with His wrath. Why? Because He misused Israel. I can't explain it. Now, the same way here. Egypt was the fulfillment of this prophetic statement. Egypt misused the Jew, and then the Jew got in that place because of the bad deportment of the eleven brothers, remember, or at least ten of them, and yet God comes back then and literally destroys the nation of Egypt for the way they handled the Jew. I can't explain it, but God's sovereign. He makes no mistakes. So then verse 14, reading it again, And that nation whom they shall serve I will judge. Afterward they, the children of Israel, shall come out with great substance. Did they? Why, they spoiled Egypt. You know that. And all in God's sovereign plan. Verse 15, Thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace. Thou shalt be buried in a good old age. And we know Abraham lived a long time. Then verse 16, Here's some more prophecy now from Abraham's point in time. But in the fourth generation, now we have to think of a generation, I guess, in terms of 100 years here because it's 400 years, 430 to be exact. But in the fourth generation they, the children of Israel, shall come hither, Canaan, because that's where they are. The children of Israel shall come back here to Canaan again. And here comes a statement that unless you understand the whole economy of God, it won't know what you're talking about. For, he says, the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. What's he talking about? Well, let's put a makeshift map up here and maybe it'll help us a little bit. Here again is our Mediterranean sea coast and of course down here is Egypt and the Nile River and right up along the Nile was Goshen. But up here, over to the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea is the nation or the land of Canaan. Now, remember Abram came down from up here at Haran in Syria and Abraham came down into the land of Canaan and he sojourned more or less up and down the highland. Lot, of course, went down to the area of Sodom. But as Abram is now receiving title deed to the land of Canaan, God is telling him it's going to be 400 and some years before they can actually come in and occupy it because the Canaanites, referred to here as the Amorites, God could not permit the Amorites or the Canaanites to be removed from the land until the 400 years had gone by for a purpose. And what was it? Their iniquity had not yet reached the full. Now, here again we can't comprehend the patience of God. But God gives these Canaanite people, and remember who was their forefather? Ham and his son Canaan. And these Canaanites now started right off the bat on an immoral plane, and they keep going down and down and down. And so now God is telling Abram, I'm going to give them 400 years, and by that time they're going to have gone down so far that I'll be able to, in all justice, tell the children of Israel, clean them out, don't spare one, and the land is yours. Did God do it? Yes. Do you remember when Joshua came in before? And Joshua, you remember, came in from the east. He makes that circuitous route out of their wilderness journey down here, and they come in from the east, and they cross the Jordan River just above the Dead Sea, and the first city they come up against, you remember, is Jericho. But ere they crossed the River Jordan, God gave explicit instructions to the nation of Israel, don't leave a single Canaanite alive. Unfair? Unjust? No. Because they've had 400 years to clean up their act. But instead of cleaning up their act, they degenerated down, down, down, until finally God, in justice, could tell Israel, don't spare a one. Unless you cleanse the land of them in just a little while, you'll be just like them. Well, what happened? Israel got soft-hearted. Israel just couldn't put those people to death, and they saw the better part of making servants of them. And so they incorporated the Canaanites into their very lifestyle. How long was it? A couple generations, and Israel had turned her back on Jehovah and was headlong after the gods of the Canaanites. We usually know it as Baal. And unless you can understand, maybe let's just look at one for example. Turn with me to Jeremiah. I mean, this is just absolutely unbelievable that Israel, this covenant people, with all the miracle working of God as a fabric of their lifestyle, and yet they come to this place. It's Jeremiah chapter 44, I think it is. Jeremiah 44, and this is exactly what God knew would happen if they spared the Canaanite. In Jeremiah 44, verse 16, the Israelites are responding to Jeremiah's flee to come back to Jehovah. As for the word, verse 16 of Jeremiah 44, As for the word that thou hast spoken unto us in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee, but we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth to burn incense unto the queen of heaven. Now, when you see the term queen of heaven, that immediately tells you it was the worship of the female goddesses. And whenever it got into the worship, remember, of the female goddesses, the immorality hit new lows for some reason or other. And to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings, our princes in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. For then, while they were in active worship of these female goddesses, for then we had plenty of victuals and were well and saw no evil. Now, that was a lie. It was just the opposite. Now, verse 18, But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, have been consumed by the sword and the famine. And when we burned incense to the queen of heaven and poured out drink offerings unto her, we did make cakes to worship her and poured out drink offerings unto her without our men. And oh, then Jeremiah goes on and almost bewails the fact. How could Israel think to such a low spiritual condition that they would burn incense and pour out drink offerings to this female goddess? And then, not too much later than that, they got so involved in idolatry that they actually offered their own little children into the fire as offerings and sacrifices to these pagan gods. Oh, so that's why, now if you're back in Genesis, that's why God tells Israel or Abraham here that the children of Israel would have to wait 400 years so that these Canaanites would finally reach the epitome of their wickedness and then God in justice could tell Joshua, don't spare a one. But the Jews did, and that was the result then as we saw here in Jeremiah 44. All right, let's continue on. Verse 17 of Genesis 15, And now it came to pass that when the sun went down, it was dark. Behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp passed between those pieces. Who is that burning lamp? Well, it was the Lord. And he goes down between those halves of those carcasses, and by it he is fulfilling the ancient ceremony of transferring title deed. And so when Israel tonight says, but the land has been deeded to us, this is what they come back to. Now the present day leadership hasn't done it so much. I haven't heard Shamir say anything about it. But when old Prime Minister Begin was in power, he would constantly refer to the fact this land has been deeded to us. It's ours. And I agree. You cannot refute the word of God. This is God's title deed to the Middle East for the nation of Israel. Now verse 18. In the same day, in other words, as God consummated this transfer of title deed to Abraham, in the same day the Lord, Jehovah again, made a covenant with Abram saying, unto thy seed I have given. What kind of a verb is that? Past tense. It's done. It was accomplished back here in these previous verses. But look what God has deeded to Abraham. I have given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river Euphrates. And all of these tribes geographically at that time, the Parasites, the Amorites, and the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. Now we know from archaeology and ancient history that all these tribes, now I'll have to erase some of this in order to give me some room for a little bit more of geography. But now you are acquainted with the Middle East of the last few months. You know the Euphrates River runs out here into the Persian Gulf and the Tigris comes down near something like this. And up here is northern Lebanon and right up here somewhere is Mount Hermon. According to these tribes listed in this chapter then, Israel will have everything from northern Lebanon out to the Euphrates River cutting across the Arabian Peninsula and all the way over to the river of Egypt. Now I don't think it's referring to the Nile. I think there was another river a little further east, but it doesn't make that much difference. But you see, how much of the Middle East God deeded to Abraham? This whole shebang, not just to the Jordan River, not just without the West Bank, but it has all already been deeded. It's theirs. But you see, Israel will not enjoy this to the full until the Millennial Kingdom when Christ returns and Israel will finally get all the land that's been promised to them. They're not going to get it all now. I think they'll be lucky to hang on to everything west of the Jordan River in the foreseeable future. But nevertheless, don't lose sight of the fact that when it's all done, Israel is going to have a homeland that goes all the way to the Euphrates River and all the way down to the River of Egypt and all the way up to northern Lebanon. It's all been deeded. Never lose sight of the fact that God never goes back on His Word. This is a covenant that He made with Abraham that is all part and parcel of that Abrahamic covenant that we studied several weeks ago. So as you watch the Middle East, and right now tonight, with all the pressure to get Israel to come to a so-called peace conference, listen, there can be no peace in the Middle East until Christ returns. There may be a pseudo-peace. There may be a makeshift of some kind. But listen, there's not going to be any genuine peace in the Middle East. It is absolutely unforeseeable in the light of Scripture. Israel is going to have to stand her ground. And the Arabs can do all they want. And like I've said many, many times before, we can identify, we can empathize with the Arab people. It's home to them now. We know that. But the fact remains that it is promised, it is deeded to the nation of Israel. All right, now in the few minutes that we've got left, we're going to go on into chapter 16. But again, we don't want to go too far because the main thrust of this lesson between Ishmael and Isaac is going to take a full half hour. I wish I had an hour. But anyways, we go into chapter 16, verse 1. Now, Sarai, Abram's wife, barium, no children. And she had a handmaid, and what? An Egyptian. Now, file that in your computer because this is going to tell us something with regard to the present-day Middle East situation. Hagar is an Egyptian. Verse 2, and Sarai, now I'm using that pronunciation because see, her name is going to change to A-H in a little while. But Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now the Lord, and here, of course, the term is Jehovah. Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing. I pray thee, go in unto my maid, and it may be that I may obtain children by her. Now, today we call it surrogate motherhood. Nothing new. And again, it was a custom very prevalent in the Orient because never lose sight of the fact in the ancient cultures to be childless was anathema. I mean, there was nothing a woman dreaded more than to be left childless. And so to compensate for it, their custom allowed, and if a woman could not bear on her own, then she could have a slave girl actually bear a child on her behalf. And so this is exactly what happens. It isn't that they were being unduly sinful or immoral, but they were acting according to custom even as we saw the title deed transfer according to custom in our last chapter. And so Sarah has the idea. Now, there's one thing I want to emphasize. Who have they left out? God. God has not said one word about having a child by way of a slave girl. This is all what we call the energy of the flesh. This was Sarah's idea. And so she says, Go into my handmaid that I may have children by her. And Abram hearkened, or he listened, and he agreed to the voice of Sarai. So she took Sarai, took Abram's wife, took Hagar. I'm sorry, read it over, verse 3. And so Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, her maid, the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan. Now again, you can see the human side, can't you? For ten years now, they've been waiting for God's promise to come to fruition. Ten years ago, God promised that Abram and Sarai would have a child by which the nation of Israel would come on the scene. Nothing's happened. And so they take things into their own hand. And so verse 4, Abram goes in unto Hagar and she conceived. And when she saw, that is when Hagar realized that she was now pregnant, her mistress, Sarai, was despised in her eyes. Now again, you've got to get the mentality of those people. When this little slave girl realized that she had accomplished something that her mistress could not, boy, she got puffed up, she got arrogant, and she got impossible. Now verse 5, and so Sarai says unto Abram, My wrong be upon thee. She saw what a horrible mistake she made. She says, I have given my maid into thy bosom, and when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes. Now Sarai says, The Lord judge between me and thee. Verse 6, but Abram's going to pass the buck right back, isn't he? But Abram said, Behold, thy maid is in thy hand. Do to her as it pleaseth thee. And so when Sarai dealt hardly or harshly with her, she fled from her face. Now Sarai must have really made life miserable for that little Egyptian girl, and she has to flee in order to get out from under Sarai's harsh behavior. Then verse 7, and here we're going to have to quit, I'm afraid. And the angel of the Lord. Now whenever you see that term, the angel of the Lord, again, it's Jehovah. And the reason I stick by that is that at a later point, I think it's back in chapter 46, we haven't got time to look now, but the term is used, the angel of the Lord who redeemeth me. Now there's only one Redeemer in Scripture, and it's God the Son, Jehovah in the Old Testament, Christ in the New. So whenever you see that term, angel of the Lord, or the angel of God, it is God the Son. It's the Redeemer. And never lose sight of that, because it'll come up every once in a while. Thank you for watching Through the Bible with Les Feldick. 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