Fr. Stephen De Young: We’ll go ahead and get started. When we get started in just a moment, we will be picking up at the beginning of Genesis 15. By way of recap, because for those sitting here it’s been a couple weeks— Last time we talked about Melchizedek in particular, but of course Abram’s meeting with Melchizedek came after his rescue of Lot and the other captives from Sodom and its neighboring cities who have been taken captive by Chedorlaomer and the other kings in the north in that war. Abram got his 318 men together, and as I mentioned at the time, last Saturday night at vespers we did read that reading before the Sunday of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council. And then it was after that that Melchizedek, the king of Shalem, which would later become Jerusalem, came and brought forth bread and wine as a sacrificial offering in which Abram shared, and Abram gave his tithe. We talked about how Abram refused to take— The king of Sodom sort of offered a reward for having gotten all his stuff back and his people, and Abram refused to take anything from Sodom. We’re going to see, of course, that Lot doesn’t learn his lesson. Lot doesn’t learn a lot over the course of his life. [Laughter] I guess that was bad, I know.

So, that done now, that restored Abram is now returned to the place where his big extended family has made camp, which is out on the plains. That’s where we’re picking up here at the beginning of chapter 15. So unless anybody has any questions, comments, other Hapsburg heirs or claimants that I don’t know about, we’ll go ahead and pick up in Genesis 15:1.

“After these things, the Word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield and will be your exceedingly great reward.’ ” Notice the phrasing there: “The Word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.” So the Word of the Lord is something Abram saw, not heard. We talked about this before, but there’s a lot of this in Abram’s story, that we tend to—and if you watch a lot of bad Bible movies, as I am compelled by a mysterious force to do, you’ll have a prophet or something, and they’ll hear a voice whispering off somewhere, or some sonorous tone that gets some famous voice actor to be the Voice of God, speaking to people. But Abram, as we’ve seen over and over again: God appears to him. He sees God; God comes and speaks with him. The two of them interact as people.

And in this case, as we just saw, the Person he sees, the Person who’s speaking—because the Word of the Lord appears in a vision, so he sees Someone, and that Someone speaks. So the Word of the Lord is Somebody. This added— “Word of the Lord” in Hebrew is Debar Yahweh. Debar gets translated very literally as logos in Greek. But this becomes— So we talked before, and we’ll talk again as we go through the Torah, about how there is this aspect of: there is a God who is seen and there is a God who can’t be seen; there is a God who appears and interacts with people, whom they see and talk to and interact with—we’re going to see later in the Abram story, whom he eats with—and then there’s the Yahweh who cannot be seen or you die. Sometimes in the same chapter there’s both, like we mentioned in Exodus—and we’ll get there eventually.

And so this here at the beginning, 15:1 of Genesis, is one of several places where the God who is seen and who interacts is identified with this added word, “Word”: debar, logos. The word for “word” in Aramaic is memra, and so when I say “gets identified,” when you read the targums, which are the Aramaic— Targum is the Aramaic word for translation. When you read the Aramaic targums, the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, they go through and all the places where someone sees God, talks to God directly, interacts with God directly, they insert the word memra, the word “word,” in places where it isn’t already. Here it’s already there, but they use it as a trope. So any time anybody does that, they go and they insert. So this was a mode of interpretation that was already there in the third, fourth century BC.

Q1: How is that spelled?

Fr. Stephen: Memra? M-e-m-r-a is the phonetic…

So this was an idea, this was a label, this was a name: the Word of the Lord, the Debar Yahweh, the Logos Theou, the Memra. This was a name that was put upon the hypostasis of God, the God who interacted personally with people in the Old Testament. So when St. John picks this up in the first chapter of his gospel, he’s not doing some weird new thing. He’s not inventing the Trinity; he’s not doing any of that. He’s picking up on an already-established— “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God; the Word was God.” Because he is God, but he’s also defined as the Word of God. So the Prologue, the beginning of St. John’s gospel, is sort of a meditation on this idea, and an identification of Jesus of Nazareth as this Logos Theou, as the Debar Yahweh, as… And that’s why he says within that Prologue: “No one has seen God at any time,” which is not a ret-con of the Old Testament, where people see God all the time. He says, “No one has seen God at any time, but the unique God who is in the bosom of the Father has made him known,” referring to the Logos that he’s just been talking about. So St. John is just taking this already-existing, thoroughly Jewish way of reading the Hebrew Bible and applying it to the Logos become flesh in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth.

And so this—it’s especially clear in St. John, but I think it’s everywhere in the New Testament—is identifying the Person whom Abram is talking to as Jesus. That’s the short version, that that’s who this is, whom Abram sees and who is talking to him.

And he says, “Do not be afraid. I am your shield and will be your exceedingly great reward.” The first part, shield, don’t be afraid: What is he talking about? Well, what is the one problem we’ve seen Abram has so far? We’ve only been with him for three chapters, but what is the one place where he kind of went wrong? When he went to Egypt, and he said, “Oh no. They’re going to take a liking to my wife. They’re going to kill me so they can marry her. I’ll say she’s my sister.” What’s that about? Fear.

So he’s saying, “You don’t have to be afraid,” because God is protection, and then, number two, “will be your exceedingly great reward.” What’s the story we’re just coming off of? King of Sodom offering Abram this reward, this sort of earthly reward, the riches of this world, which he rightly did not accept. So he’s saying, “I will be your reward.”

Now, if we consider that this is Christ, there’s sort of a deeper level of meaning there, because he’s about to reiterate the promise to Abram that he’s going to have a seed in the future. So Christ can be seen as Abram’s reward in a very literal sense also. I’ll talk about it more when we get to another episode in the life of Abraham, but we also have to take Christ’s comments into account, that he had met Abraham.

So he says this. Verse two, Abram responds. “But Abram said, ‘Lord, what will you give me, seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus, the son of Masek, my domestic maidservant?’ ” As we mentioned, this is— At this point in history, we have these big extended families, and that includes household servants and slaves and hired hands, and their families, who are all part of this big unit. So he had a female servant, gave birth to this Eliezer, so this is generational. Eliezer has become sort of his right-hand man, his chief advisor, his chief person, and since he doesn’t have a son, he’s saying, “I don’t have a son, so when I die, he’s the one who’s going to inherit everything; he’s going to take my place on the top of the family, because I don’t have another heir.”

Q2: Is that a common thing? Because, I mean, why wouldn’t he do something like a monarchy, where it’s like the next brother or—

Q3: The next-of-kin.

Q2: Yeah, the next-of-kin.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well you sort of— Well, Lot, for example, has separated. He’s gone off, and he’s starting his own, separate unit. So it’s based on sort of the hierarchical structure of this social unit, this big family, this mishpacha in Hebrew, the big extended family unit. This is the next guy, the next male, in the hierarchy.

Q2: So if he had other family members, they just weren’t important enough or not confident enough…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, or aren’t with him, because he’s gone to the other side of— We’re going to find out, later on, after Isaac is born, when they’re looking for a wife for Isaac, they’re going to go back to the cousins, but they’re back in Mesopotamia.

Q2: So we can pretty much assume that there’s no— Abram doesn’t have any other relatives, like Lot, with him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that are part of his— Yeah. So the relationships, the social units at this point are not primarily based on blood descent. There’s a lot of adoption and incorporation that takes place, and social units separate. It’s more like cells, that they sort of divide, like Lot separated off. Lot was part of Abram’s social unit, and might have been the heir if he’d stuck around, as the nephew, but he’s split off and formed his own. We of course don’t have nation-states. This is a clan unit that’s living nomadically. So it’s its own sort of social structure, regardless of blood relation.

If— For example, when a father died—let’s say he has three sons—the second and third son could choose to stay a part of their father’s family unit, which would now be led by the firstborn son, or they might strike out on their own. They might take their servants and start their own nomadic clan unit, or they might move to a city, or might do something else, become merchants, become— So there were options, sort of options there. But if they did leave, the fact that they were brothers wouldn’t mean anything. So if the firstborn— If they left and the firstborn son died, they couldn’t come back and take over the clan, because they had left.

Q2: This is hard for me. I guess it’s just our ideas are so wrapped up in blood relatives, that the idea of adoption or—

Fr. Stephen: English common law, you go find the next-of-kin, yeah. [Laughter]

Q3: Damascus: does this mean that he is urban? What does it—? These people don’t seem to be living in cities, so…

Fr. Stephen: No. Well, wherever his mother, who was a hired servant, her family is from— It’s interesting it doesn’t say who his father was. It may not have been known who his father was. But she was from that area. “Damascus” included not just the city-state of Damascus, but all the farmland around it. That’s the region her family is from, so that’s just identifying him from other Eliezers, which we wouldn’t have to do, but they did. It’s like folks’ last names. When I was a kid, every once in a while I’d end up in a class somewhere with another guy named Steve, so it was Steve D and Steve R. [Laughter] This is the equivalent of that, except they didn’t have last names, so it’s just: that Eliezer, the one whose family is from Damascus.

So that’s the current situation, but it is important that we get into this, because we make those assumptions. Once we get into Exodus, that’s going to be really important, because people have this assumption that the Israelites are all blood-descended from Abraham, and they’re not. Huge chunks of them aren’t, but they’re still Israelites, because they get incorporated into clans and tribes, and that happens ritually. There were rituals surrounding you becoming part of a household and you leaving a household. For Abram now, this includes circumcision.

At the current point, [the] Word of God says to Abram, “I’m going to be your great reward,” and he says, “Well, you know, I’m getting up there in years, and I don’t have a son, so this guy, my servant, he’s a great guy and all, but he’s going to inherit everything. What do you mean, reward? What you talking about, reward?” [Laughter]

Verse three: “Then Abram said, ‘Look, you have given me no offspring. Indeed, my household servant is my heir.’ ” Verse four: “And immediately the voice of the Lord came to him, saying, ‘This one shall not be your heir, but the one who will come from your own body shall be your heir.’ ” So he says, “No… Someone from your own body. You are going to reproduce and have a son who will be your heir,” which, again, the ages we’re talking about: he’s in his 80s, he’s pushing 90, I think, at this point: seems unlikely. And his wife is 80: seems unlikely, if not impossible. They did understand how these things— They didn’t have the name “menopause” and know how all the biology worked, but they figured out that, past a certain age, women didn’t get pregnant. It was not a usual thing.

“Then he brought him outside.” So God leads him outside. “And said to him, ‘Look now toward heaven, and count the stars, if you are able to number them.’ And he said to him, ‘So shall your seed be.’ ” So there are two parts to that statement, and the wording is important. So he says, “Look toward heaven. Count the stars, if you’re able to number them.” Look at all the stars. Now, previously, he made a promise talking about the sand of the seashore, and said, “So will the number of your seed be.” But here he doesn’t say, “So many shall your seed be”; he says, “So shall your seed be.” Literally in the Hebrew, “Your seed will be like them, like the stars.”

This isn’t just— There is a quantitative element to the promises to Abram: “You’re going to have a lot of descendants, as it’s already been expressed. Nations, plural, are going to be descended from you.” He’s going to become the father of many nations. There’s also here, though, a qualitative promise, about his seed, his descendants, being like the stars. Yes, ma’am.

Q1: I don’t have a reference, but maybe one of the prophetic books, it shines.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Daniel. You’re getting ahead of me, but you’re tracking with me.

Q1: I’m sorry.

Fr. Stephen: It’s okay! You’re tracking with me; that’s good. You see where I’m going! [Laughter] So: Abram, Mesopotamian from Ur, 2000 BC. What are stars for Abram?

Q4: They’re gods, prophets to people in his society.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Stars are not balls of plasma, burning in space; they’re gods, lowercase-g gods. And God know how Abram thinks, so he’s expressing himself in terms that Abram will understand. So he’s telling him: your descendants will become like gods. What question is he answering?

Q4: The reward.

Fr. Stephen: The question from Abram is: What is going to be the reward? What is going to be in the future? In the future, not only will you have a lot of offspring, but they will become like the stars of heaven; they’ll become like gods. So this is talking about theosis. This is talking about theosis. And we’ll see this develop, but this imagery, just in the Hebrew Bible, as Joan mentioned, book of Daniel and the resurrection: the righteous will shine like the stars of heaven. Christ says the children of the resurrection will be sons of God, equal to the angels, in St. Luke’s gospel. They’re appealing back to this imagery in the Torah that is being laid out here.

So this is where the Orthodox concept of theosis in terms of salvation comes from. This isn’t some Platonic or Neo-Platonic thing that somebody comes up with in the fourth or fifth century. This isn’t something St. Athanasius invents. This is something that’s already there in the Torah; the very first layer of the Scriptures, it’s already there. It’s already built in there, that this is the reward.

And we’re going to see this resurrection language applied to Abram in terms of his hope, in Hebrews, in other places. And as this is— There are several times—this is one of them; we’ve already seen a couple; there will be more—where these promises are reiterated to Abram and Abraham, as he becomes. And each time they’re reiterated, it’s not just a repeat; it’s not just God saying, “No, no, really, I’m going to do this. No, no, really, I’m going to do this.” Each time it’s said differently, with different emphases and different points being made, to sort of— It’s fleshing out what God is doing.

As we said, the structure of Genesis, when we started the story of Abram— Genesis 1-11, we have these three problems, of death, sin, and the powers of evil, the demonic powers, that are set up in those first eleven chapters. And we said when we started the story of Abram, Abram is where God begins to deal with those problems, and so the answer to this reward question is addressing death, mortality, sin, the demonic powers. These promises are over against that. So this is the beginning also of the Gospel unfolding here in Genesis.

Verse six: “And Abram believed God, and he accounted it to him for righteousness.” So this, of course, gets famously quoted by St. Paul in Romans, and many of our Protestant friends who are of a Calvinist bent especially, but our Protestant friends in general, light on this and never go back to the context. If you remember, a few years ago when we were working through St. Paul’s epistles, how much I hammered on: when St. Paul quotes a verse, you should go back and read the context it’s in, because St. Paul knew the Bible really well and didn’t quote things out of context and misquote things. St. Paul knew what he was doing, so if you want to understand what St. Paul is saying, you need to understand the passages he’s quoting. That’ll tell you what he’s saying.

So, first of all, if you pull that out of context— “Abram believed”—“Abram had faith” is how we get it in English in Romans—“and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Now if you take that out of the context: Faith in what? Faith in whom? Whereas, if we take it in context, this refers to the promise he was just given: This is the reward. This is the reward. What had God already told Abram was his job? He said, “Walk before me and be righteous.”

So Abram receives this promise here from God, and he believes it. That doesn’t just mean: “Oh. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I believe it.” As we said back before when he left Ur, he didn’t just say, “Oh, yeah, God, I believe you. You’re going to give me that land over there,” and then sit and dream. He got up, and he traveled across the known world. So the same way here, the issue was—what? Abram was afraid, and he didn’t have hope, because he didn’t have an heir. So he felt like he didn’t have a future. And when that’s true, you live in a certain way. We saw that in Egypt. We saw that fear come out in Egypt. Whereas, when he believed that God was going to give him the land of Canaan, he did something: he went and traveled across the known world.

And so here, having this hope, believing that that’s true is going to transform how he lives. It’s going to transform how he lives. And so righteousness or justice, as we’ve said before, is being in proper order. So by Abram believing this and living accordingly, being faithful to it, his life is put now into better order than it was, when his life was being ordered by fear, doubt, worry about the future. That’s what this is getting at. And I won’t go all into what St. Paul is doing in Romans, but the core of what St. Paul is doing in Romans is he’s pointing out that this happened before circumcision, before there were Jewish people and Gentiles. Abram’s still a Gentile at this point.

And so the point St. Paul is trying to make is that these promises and our faithfulness to the promises to God has nothing to do with being a Jew or a Gentile, because Abram’s still a Gentile. That’s what St. Paul is saying. He’s not talking about how people get saved. If you asked him, “Hey, St. Paul, how do people get saved?” he wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, just for the record. [Laughter] He would probably look at you and say, “You mean, what do you need to do to be saved?” [Laughter] Told you to repent, be faithful to Christ… But he’s not speaking about some kind of theology there, and he’s using this in exactly these terms. He’s like: All of this is happening before that.

And that also means that St. Paul is taking for granted that this promise is a promise about salvation, not just a promise about having a lot of kids. So St. Paul is keeping with that already existing Jewish understanding that this, “as the stars of heaven,” this is talking about salvation, which includes glorification. This is talking about theosis. And that promise of salvation comes to Abram while he’s still a Gentile. And so whether you’re a Jew or a Gentile has nothing to do with it. But we won’t go— Again, we went through Romans. These recordings are still available. [Laughter]