I was listening to the Bible Project this morning. I’m in a study on Abraham. Tim Mackie was teaching on chapter 15 of Genesis.

He highlights two sequences of dialogue between God and Abraham. In the first one, Genesis 15:1-6, God makes a Promise about “Reward.” And Abraham responds with doubt, so God makes a promise about “seed.” He also takes Abraham outside at night and shows him the stars. Abraham believes God, and God regards that as righteous. In other words, God says, “It is good.”

Think Genesis 1 creation language. God is still working on His Image Bearer project. We haven’t seen the Man and Woman ruling the earth after God’s likeness, yet, so Day 6 is incomplete. But we have moved forward some, Abraham has a measure of faith.

But in the second dialogue, God makes a promise about land. Abraham responds with doubt. So, God makes a promise about “seed” and land. He also causes Abraham to sleep a deep sleep.

The last time He did this to a man was to give him a helper. In Genesis 2, God put a deep sleep on Adam, and divided him into two parts.

In this story, God puts Abraham into a deep sleep and He walks through the halved pieces of the offering that Abraham has laid out. God has Abraham in a deep sleep, and “his flesh,”  represented symbolically by the animals he has sacrificed to God, is divided in halves, and God Himself walks between them making His promise not just a promise but a covenant– A legal contract.

It is as if, God knows that Abraham’s faith is too small to believe for all that God wants to give him, so before his doubts can go any further, God puts him to sleep, thus silencing his doubt, while He does something profound within him.

As Tim Mackie was teaching about these two dialogues, and Abraham’s two responses or postures, I was reminded of the two encounters with Gabriel in the Gospel of Luke.

In the first one, Gabriel brings good news to Zechariah, and he responds with doubt, so Gabriel shuts his mouth until the promise is fulfilled. Parallel this with Abraham’s posture of forced silence from Genesis 15:7-21.

During Zechariah’s silence, God is working. He passes between the two halves of Zechariah and Elizabeth and makes life out of barrenness. And He visits Mary.

In the second encounter, Gabriel brings good news? or scary news? to Mary.  Mary responds with faith, as Abraham did in Genesis 15:1-6. The declaration of Gabriel “Greetings highly favored” is God’s accounting of this faith as righteousness.

The two dialogues in Genesis and Luke are in reverse order, perhaps suggesting that God is taking us back to the beginning when we had that childlike faith, before our doubts had time to surface, and He is renewing His dream to make us in His Image, His dream to walk with us and rule the earth as a kind of heaven with us and through us. God is “re-creating.” God is giving us a new beginning.

He is silencing our doubts not just with promises but with a Covenant. A promise written in the flesh. His Word – carved into flesh, His Fire and Spirit passing between our broken pieces. Jesus is God’s promise made legally binding. God has put His promise “in Writing.”

In Genesis God tells Abraham that He is Abraham’s reward. Reward and possession are similar words in Hebrew, using the same letters. God promises the land to Abraham as an inheritance and a Seed to Abraham as a legacy. Jesus is God, Abraham’s reward, made of dust of the earth, His portion in the “land,” and his Seed and legacy of life.

God also promised Abraham that through him all nations would be blessed. Jesus offers Himself, The Covenant of God, to all who would choose Him as their only possession in this life. The “Land” and the hope and the Life that leads to blessing.