Fire in the Darkness
... the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, 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, “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” 4 But the word of the Lord came to him, “This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” 5 He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” 6 And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
7 Then he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you 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 He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. 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 upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. ...
17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, 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 descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates ...
This is the strangest covenant making in the Bible. No, it’s beyond strange, isn’t it, it’s bizarre. Creatures slaughtered and cut in two (the birds are too small to cut in two). In the darkness, the Lord causes the gruesome, bloody carnage to be consumed by fire. Sacrifice and promise. Covenant.
Years will go by before God keeps the covenant. By then, God will have made the promise to Abram so many times that it has come to be a joke to both Abraham and Sarah. God promises grandiosly, “yeah, right!” they chuckle and pop-a-top, just another visit from Abraham’s old drinking buddy.
In time, which is insignificant to God but not to mortals, God realizes that everybody is getting older except him, and that he is being welcomed and humored but no longer taken seriously. Annoyed, angry at becoming a laughingstock, God stomps away shouting “OK. We’ll see who has the last laugh.”
It’s one time when a mortal gets the best of God: the following Lent, when a boy is born to by then ninety-year old Sarah, she names him Isaac. Which means laughter.
None of this explains that bloody, gruesome mess of animal carcasses and the smoking fire pot and flaming torch in the terrifying darkness though, does it. By the time Isaac is born many years later, Abraham has forgotten all about it anyway. And he certainly is no longer terrified of God.
TW+