And he said to Abram, Know assuredly that thy seed will be a sojourner in a land [that is] not theirs, and they shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years.
Abram has just asked how he can know he will inherit the land, and God answers by cutting a covenant in sacrifice. The first thing He reveals is not the land. It is four hundred years of slavery for Abram's descendants. Why should so sure a promise run through so long a sorrow?
God speaks while Abram lies in a deep sleep, with terror and darkness over him. Two symbols then pass between the pieces of the sacrifice. One writer reads them as a summary of the whole prophecy:
This showed what lay ahead for Israel. The smoking furnace stood for their trial and affliction. The burning lamp that passed between the pieces stood for the hope of the deliverance that would rise out of the darkness. Such was God's dealing with them in righteous government.
God tells Abram to know this "for certain." He named the trouble before it came, and one writer takes that advance notice as proof of who controlled it:
This would seem to stand in the way of their blessing. But the very fact that God foretold it to Abram proves that God had this matter in as full control as He had their coming blessing. In other words, God's promise often means long waiting. That waiting is meant only as a needed trial of faith. God's purpose in blessing is not touched by the affliction.
The opening chapters of Exodus show this prediction coming true, cruelty and all:
This is the history of the first twelve chapters of Exodus… Even the anger of man is tied to the wheels of God's decrees. It was so when Christ was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God," and men crucified and killed Him (Acts 2:23).
The number raises a real problem, because Exodus 12:40 gives 430 years. Commentators differ over where the count starts. One explanation notes what this verse does not say:
Genesis 15:13 and Acts 7:6 say nothing about Egypt: "Your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs." God said this to Abraham. It may cover the whole period from Isaac's birth to the Exodus, which by the count above was four hundred and five years. That agrees with the round number of four hundred years. Exodus 12:40 is worded differently: "The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years." It is better to take the four hundred and thirty years as covering the sojourn of Abraham (after the promise), and of Isaac, and of Jacob.
Another writer reaches the same starting point from the promise of a return in the fourth generation:
God's promise to Abram in Genesis 15:13-16 mentions "four hundred years," and then the assurance that his descendants would return to the land of Canaan in the fourth generation. So the time of the sojourn, or pilgrimage, of the chosen family must be counted from the days of Abraham, and most likely from his entry into the land of Canaan.
Whatever the starting point, the ending was exact:
Verses 40-42 show us how exactly God keeps to His own appointed time. He had mentioned 400 years to Abraham, as we see in Genesis 15:13. We are not told the exact point from which the count of the 430 years starts. But on the very day it ended the people went out of Egypt. They are called "the hosts of the LORD," though to all appearance they were only a large crowd of freed slaves.
This affliction is not a break in the promise. It is part of it:
In God's promise to Abram, the emblems that represent Him as He binds Himself to give the inheritance are the furnace of fire and the burning lamp. This is the pledge that the discipline they need will not be missing, when the "deep sleep" falling on His people may call for it. Later the burning bush answers to this, and it is not burned up because God is in the fire. So the Egyptian oppression, on its other side, was covenant mercy. And this is only one example of a constant principle in God's ways.
This pattern reaches past Israel to every servant of God:
You reach the inheritance only through the furnace. The darker the smoke of the furnace, the brighter and more cheering the lamp of God's salvation will be… Jacob had to endure twenty-one years of hardship in the house of Laban. Joseph found his furnace of affliction in the dungeons of Egypt. Moses spent forty years in the desert. So it must be with all God's servants.
- Certainty — God named the affliction before it came. He held the suffering as surely as He held the blessing.
- Count — "four hundred years" is a round number. Some date it from Isaac's birth, others from Abraham's entry into Canaan. That longer count covers the 430 years of Exodus 12:40.
- Clock — however you measure the years, Israel left Egypt on the very day the time ran out.
- Crucible — the furnace was one of God's own covenant emblems. So Egypt's oppression was, on its other side, covenant mercy.
- Consequence — the pattern holds for every servant of God. The furnace comes first, the lamp after, and the road to the inheritance runs through both.
But also that nation which they shall serve I will judge; and afterwards they shall come out with great property.
God has just told Abram that his descendants will live as strangers and slaves for four hundred years. This verse is His answer to that dark news. He promises two things in advance. He will judge the nation that enslaves them, and He will bring them out rich.
The affliction was not an accident that God later repaired. God described it to Abram in detail, hundreds of years before any Israelite was a slave in Egypt. Exodus 1 opens by reporting that word coming true.
God foretold the condition of the children of Israel in Exodus 1 many years before, when He declared to Abraham... This is the history of the first twelve chapters of Exodus. So the first chapter brings us to the very edge of the fulfilment of God's ways with His people, as He foretold to Abraham. God harnesses even the anger of man to the chariot wheels of His decrees. So it was when He gave Christ up "according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God," to men to crucify and kill (Acts 2:23).
The four hundred years come as plain fact. The hope rests on what God says He will do at the end of them.
No doubt the Israelites were afflicted 400 years by the stranger; but the point of hope was the judgment of that nation, and Abraham's seed coming out with great substance.
This judgment was no side note in Israel's story.
As His mouth had threatened judgments on injurious enslavers, so did His hand perform in due season. And this dealing of the Lord the God of Israel fills the Law, and the Psalms, and the Prophets.
People have called the silver, gold and clothing Israel carried out of Egypt plain theft. Commentators answer that Israel was collecting pay it had already earned.
In truth their wages were long overdue and had never been paid. It is foolish to suppose that even the smallest wrong was done here... They were to plunder their oppressors by God's own authority, and there was no question at all of deceit or dishonesty. The Authorized Version gives the impression of "borrowing," but that impression is not necessary, and the passage does not call for it. Nothing here suggests that they had no right to what they took.
(The ESV says "great possessions." Older translations say "great substance," the phrase several writers use.)
In his vision Abram had seen a smoking furnace and a burning lamp. Both return in Egypt — the furnace is the slavery, the lamp is the rescue.
The smoking furnace had grown very hot under the pressure of the king's command. Here the Lord's own hand puts it out completely. And the burning lamp, which long before had passed in vision before Abram, now shines brighter and brighter, till its full glory breaks out. Now God fulfils the ancient word of promise for the seed of Abram (Gen. 15:14). The thankful, joyful praises of Moses and of Israel confess the love and faithfulness of the God of Abraham.
Two words in the verse carry the promise: afterward, and come out. The darkness was real, and so was the end God had fixed for it.
These children of Abram would suffer badly. They would pass through a horror of great darkness. Yet the end of it would be great substance. "THEY SHALL COME OUT." They were not to be wiped out or crushed in the furnaces. They were to go through it and come out of it, free and enriched. God had pledged Himself to that, and He would be with them to fulfil His pledge.
Commentators differ on where this promise ends. One writer reads the Exodus as a picture of a greater rescue still to come.
God's promise included His judging the nation that oppressed Israel, and not only freeing Israel, but blessing them with great substance. This came true at the exodus (Ex. 12:35-36). It is also a picture of the great blessing Israel will receive when the nation at last receives their Messiah. He will free them from the bondage to sin that has held them for centuries.
- Foretold — God announced the slavery to Abram centuries early. He harnesses even human cruelty to His purposes.
- Judged — God's hand carried out in due season what His mouth had threatened against the enslavers.
- Owed — The wealth was unpaid wages, taken by divine authority, not by deceit.
- Fulfilled — At the Exodus God put out the furnace and let the lamp shine. Israel's praise confessed His faithfulness.
- Afterward — God's people are not consumed in the furnace. They go through it and come out free and enriched — a pattern still to be repeated for Israel.
And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age.
God has just told Abram that his descendants will serve a foreign nation for four hundred years. Then He turns from the nation's future to the man himself, and raises the hardest question in the chapter: what good is a land promise to a man who will die long before God hands the land over?
This promise of a quiet death is part of a longer answer to a man who was unsure. One writer weighs what the vision gives him, and what it does not.
Here is God knowing what He means to do on earth, and giving a doubting friend the certainty of it. He secures and binds Himself, to comfort a faith that wanted unusual support. Yet there would still be affliction for his descendants. They would still serve a foreign nation. But in the end the LORD would bring them out in triumph. The vision is admirable, but it never looks up to the heights of God's glory, and it never goes down into the depths of His grace.
The phrase is God's plain way of telling Abram he will die. He will not be on earth to see any of this happen.
Now in verse 15 the Lord tells Abram himself that he would not remain on earth. He would go the way his fathers had — that is, through death — and be buried in a good old age. Indeed he would have a far better inheritance than his children, Israel.
Abram had been called out of Ur toward a land on earth. This verse and the next tell him he will never hold it. One writer treats that loss as the point where God opens something better to him.
Abraham was called to go out to a place which God would show him. So he had an earthly calling: the prospect set before him was a land on earth... But after he reached the land, God taught him clearly that his offspring would not really own it until the fourth generation (Gen. 15:15-16). He was to die without ever owning it himself. Would he be worse off through dying? No. He had a heavenly hope given him. He learnt that God had prepared for him a city, and he looked for that "city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God."
Genesis later records the exact end God describes here: the peace and the good old age both came true.
The history of Abraham is deeply instructive. It closes with a brief record of his peaceful end at "a good old age," and his burial by his sons Isaac and Ishmael in the cave of Machpelah. In striking contrast to poor Lot, Abraham finishes his pilgrim path with the respect and honour due to one who was "the friend of God" and "the father of all who believe."
That grave in Canaan did not end his claim on the land. One writer sees the burial place as a statement of hope.
In this life of faith and hope, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are one. Each in his day is gathered to his people. Each is "a handful of sacred dust" in the cave in the field of Ephron the Hittite, laid up there in sure and certain hope of a resurrection to life and to the inheritance.
God gives the reason in the next breath: the people living in the land are not yet ripe for judgment. His patience with them runs for centuries.
God is indeed "slow to anger." The evil of the Canaanite nations was great in Abraham's day. Even so, He held back their judgement for 400 years. "For," He said, "the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete" (Gen. 15:16). From Rahab's words to the spies we learn that the guilty nations knew God's executioners were on their way. She said, "I know that the LORD has given you the land... and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you" (Joshua 2:9). They had heard of God's heavy hand on Egypt... Yet there was no repentance on their part.
- Delay. God tells Abram his descendants will serve a foreign nation long before they own the land. The wait is long; the outcome is certain.
- Peace. Into that long delay God drops a personal word. Abram will not live to see it. He will go the way his fathers went, through death, and be buried in a good old age.
- Better. Dying without the land left him no poorer. God gave him a heavenly hope, and he looked for the city whose designer and builder is God.
- Kept. The promise came true to the letter — a peaceful end, a good old age, and burial by his sons, the honour due to the friend of God.
- Patience. God held back judgment until the sin of the Amorites was complete. He is slow to anger, and that patience is why Abram had to die first.
And [in the] fourth generation they shall come hither again; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
God has just told Abram that his family will be slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. Here He explains the delay: judgment on the Amorites in Canaan is certain, but their sin is not yet full.
The delay is not indecision. Older translations read "not yet full," the wording the writers below use. They see God's settled method here. He lets evil grow to its full size, so no one can question the sentence when it falls.
God was going to permit the Amorites to fill up the cup of their iniquity before He drove them out and destroyed them. This is always the way He acts in His holy government. It explains the long-suffering He shows to the guilty world we live in. He knows the full nature of man's evil from the start. But He lets that evil come out in full. So when His judgment falls in full severity, every created being can see that it is right.
God deals the same way with nations that had no covenant with Him. His patience is not idle. It keeps working to bring people back, and it stops only when nothing more will help.
God is far from ending an arrangement as soon as man has failed to fulfil his duty under it. God uses long forbearance. He employs all sorts of means to recall man to his duty, until, as the word puts it, there is no remedy. He has shown this even towards those who had no covenant. He announced to Abraham that his offspring would go down into Egypt. And He added that they would not yet take possession of the promised land, because the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet complete.
This verse gives the moral ground for the later conquest of Canaan. Israel did not earn the land. God evicted the tenants because they had ruined the property.
Every landlord has a perfect right to evict bad tenants. The nations of Canaan had not only failed to pay their rent, as we say. They had also damaged and defiled the property so badly that God could no longer put up with them... The iniquity of the Amorites had reached its highest point. Nothing remained but for judgment to take its course... To bear with them any longer would have meant approving the most terrible evils. That, of course, was morally impossible.
Israel must not read the conquest as a compliment to itself. Moses said so plainly. God also warned that the land itself would turn on any people who defiled it — Israel included.
God clearly told Israel why He judged these nations: "Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out from before you" (Deut. 9:5)... "But you shall keep my statutes... lest the land vomit you out when you make it unclean, as it vomited out the nation that was before you." So God let this people ripen to their full height of wickedness. Then He used them to show His righteous anger and power.
Read with verse 15, this verse tells Abram he will die before the promise arrives. One writer finds the answer to that loss in what God gave him instead.
After he reached the land, God taught him plainly that his offspring would not hold it until the fourth generation appeared (Gen. 15:15-16). He was to die without personally possessing it. Would he be worse off through dying? No. He had a heavenly hope given him. He learnt that God had prepared a city for him. He looked for that "city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God." So he wanted a better country than Canaan — a heavenly one.
How long was Israel in Egypt? The four hundred years of verse 13 and the four generations here do not fit together easily. One writer lines the generations up.
A much shorter period is implied in Gen. 15:16, which says of Israel in Egypt that "they shall come back here in the fourth generation"; and if we turn to Ex. 6:16-20 we find exactly four generations: Jacob's son Levi. Levi's son Kohath. Kohath's son Amram. Amram's son Moses.
Commentators differ on how tightly the phrase should be pressed. One warns against treating it as a headcount of everyone who lived in Egypt:
Nothing could be more fault-finding than to take Gen. 15:16 as limiting the Israelites who sojourned in Egypt to just the fourth step in family birth, or to assume that they had no children beyond those named for special reasons.
Writers apply this verse to our own day. It cuts against the assumption that the world is slowly improving.
A word may be needed on verse 16: "for the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full." So many of the Lord's people today have no idea that God allows iniquity to come to the full. They expect evil to lessen and slowly to stop. If we transfer this principle of the growth of evil from the Old Testament to the New... we may discover how unwilling our minds still are to face the character and growth of the evil described in 2 Thessalonians 2.
- Full, not fast — God does not strike at the first offence. He waits until evil is out in the open, so the sentence is beyond dispute.
- Full means patient — the delay is God's long-suffering toward the guilty. The world still lives under that same patience today.
- Full explains Canaan — God evicted the nations for their wickedness. He did not hand Israel the land as a reward.
- Full costs the faithful — Abram dies before the promise arrives, and God gives him a heavenly city instead of the land he never held.
- Full is still filling — the same pattern runs on today. Evil grows to its limit before judgment, so expect ripening, not improvement.
And it came to pass when the sun had gone down, and it was dark, that behold, there was a smoking furnace, and a flame of fire which passed between those pieces.
Abram had asked how he could know the land would be his. God answered with a ceremony instead of an argument: animals cut in two, a long wait, deep sleep, and then, after dark, fire moving between the pieces.
Where the ESV says "smoking fire pot and flaming torch", older translations say a smoking furnace and a burning lamp. Walking between the pieces of a sacrifice meant pledging yourself to keep the agreement. Here only one side walks.
What sealed all this as a covenant was this: after dark, a smoking furnace and a burning lamp passed between the divided pieces of the sacrifice. God showed His presence in these two ways. There was no thought of Abram passing between the pieces, as if he were pledging himself to anything. It was God pledging Himself to do what He had just said, and to do it unconditionally. This appearance of God, passing between the pieces, was as striking as His appearance to Moses in the burning bush.
Abram is asleep for the decisive moment. Everything therefore rests on one side only.
This is hard to understand, but let me suggest what it means: everything depends on God. God went through the slaughtered animals alone. Everything depends on Him. If we stand on the basis of works of law, then it depends on us, and so it will never work. But when it depends on God alone, He is faithful, and then it all comes true.
God does not just repeat the promise. He answers Abram's question by binding Himself in a covenant of death.
Next, to reassure the weak heart of man, God binds Himself by covenant. This is grace stooping very low. But what does this amazing grace meet? — "How am I to know that I shall possess it?" Then, while nature and man pass through the dark shadow of the power of death (and Christ as man has done this for us), God passes between the pieces. He binds Himself in a covenant of death to fulfil this desire of the believer's heart, according to His own thoughts. And promise lays the sure foundation of it in Christ.
The same principle runs back through Genesis and forward through Scripture: what God gives freely, He gives on a bought basis.
The land is promised to him, but it is by the covenant of Him who passes through the pieces of the sacrifice. No promised blessing that is not a purchased blessing also — no throne of grace, as we have said before, that does not stay itself on the ark of the covenant.
The two fires trace the whole story of Abram's descendants.
One writer has well said that Israel's history could be summed up in two words: "the furnace and the lamp." Egypt was a furnace of testing for the descendants of Abraham. There the fire burned hot, but it was soon followed by "the burning lamp" of God's own deliverance… Satan might enjoy lighting the furnace and making it fiercer, but the blessed God, on the other hand, always delighted to let the rays of His lamp fall on the dark path of His suffering heirs.
The same two fires act as seals on the covenant. Each seal carries its own word:
These seals meant something. They carried the stamp of how God planned to deal with Abram's descendants, and He now revealed this to Abram: "affliction" written, as it were, on the one seal, and "salvation" on the other.
Faith can go slack, and the heart can go dark. The two fires answer both.
If the energy and watchfulness of faith fail, the furnace of trial will not fail as the appointed means of purifying. And for the darkness that unbelief brings, the burning lamp is just as surely provided. How sure the inheritance is for those to whom God has pledged Himself in Christ, to bring them through to enjoy it, and to secure the conditions that His holiness must impose!
The furnace and the lamp meet again at the cross and the tomb.
On the cross, too, He submitted to "the smoking furnace." Under the searching of that fire He vindicated the righteousness of God by the wrath He endured, while offended holiness found its food and satisfaction in the perfection of the offering it consumed… The furnace and the lamp have each done their own work at the cross and the tomb, for "from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour."
after fix: n/a
- Pieces — God made the covenant over slain animals, so the promise of the land stands on sacrifice, not sentiment.
- Alone — God alone passed between the parts while Abram slept. He asked nothing of Abram, so nothing in Abram could break it.
- Furnace — the fire marks affliction: Egypt first, and then the judgment Christ Himself bore in the darkness of the cross.
- Lamp — the light marks deliverance. God gives it for the very darkness that unbelief brings on, and He raised up rescue again and again.
- Inheritance — God pledged Himself, so the outcome is certain. He brings His people through the furnace, by the lamp, into what He promised.
On the same day Jehovah made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates;
That same day, God counted Abram's faith to him as righteousness. Then He went further. He bound Himself by a formal covenant and drew the borders of a land Abram did not own. Two questions follow. Who guaranteed the grant, and has that land ever been held?
The covenant is dated. It falls on the same day recorded earlier in the chapter. One writer shows why that order matters when the New Testament looks back at this scene.
To set out this great truth the Apostle turns again to Abraham's history. He speaks of the promise of the inheritance. God made, or renewed, this promise to Abraham on the same day He counted him righteous, as we read in Genesis 15:18. … God gave this promise of the inheritance long before the law, and it in no way depended upon works of law.
God sealed the covenant with a ceremony. Only one party walked between the divided animals.
After dark, a smoking furnace and a burning lamp passed between the divided pieces of the sacrifice. That is what ratified all this as a covenant. In this twofold way God showed His presence. There was no thought of Abram passing between the pieces, as though he were pledging himself to anything. It was God pledging Himself to do as He had just said, and to do it unconditionally.
The sacrifice was not a formality. One writer links the death of the animals to how God can keep such a promise and stay righteous.
A smoking furnace and a burning lamp passed between the pieces (Gen. 15). This declared that God could keep His covenant of promise to Abram and stay righteous in only one way: through the death of a substitute, and that under awful judgment.
The two rivers are not vague poetry. The word used for "river" rules out a seasonal stream, so one writer can name which waterway is meant.
God promised the whole land of Canaan to Abraham, and a further territory as well: "from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates." Gen. 15:18; Gen. 17:8. The word used here three times for "river" is nahar. It does not apply to a winter stream. So "river of Egypt" almost certainly refers to the most easterly branch of the Nile, called the Pelusiac. These limits of Abraham's promised possession lie to the south-west and north-east. The Mediterranean is the western limit, and the eastern limit is not defined.
God speaks as though the land is already handed over. Yet the verses that follow list ten nations living on it.
Verses 18-21 speak of an unconditional covenant that the Lord made with Abram that day. He told Abram that He has given his descendants all the land from the river of Egypt (the Nile) to the river Euphrates. Ten different nations held part of that land at the time. When Israel came back from Egypt they did not possess anything like that whole territory, and never have. But the promise of God stands, and its fulfilment awaits the millennium.
Israel did once reach the northern boundary, but not for long.
Prophecy marks out the rivers Nile and Euphrates as the limits of the promised land (Gen. 15:18). For a brief season David and Solomon extended the royal authority to the Euphrates (1 Chron. 18:3; 2 Chron. 9:26). The division of the kingdom under Rehoboam cut this wide dominion back sharply.
The covenant was one-sided and confirmed. So what could the law do to it, arriving centuries later?
A later act cannot cancel a solemnly confirmed covenant, even among men. Now God had given the promise to Abraham apart from law, and confirmed it to Christ 430 years before the law came. So the law could not cancel the promise already confirmed, nor change its terms. No one could cancel it, and no one could add to it. It must be fulfilled as it was given.
- Day — God dated the land-covenant to the very day He counted Abram righteous. That was long before the law, so the inheritance never rested on works of law.
- Deed — God alone passed between the pieces. Abram pledged nothing, which makes the covenant unconditional from the first word.
- Death — The divided sacrifices point to a substitute. Only that death let God keep such a promise and stay righteous.
- Domain — The borders are real places: an eastern branch of the Nile, the great river Euphrates, and the Mediterranean on the west.
- Delay — Ten nations held the ground then. David and Solomon reached the Euphrates for only a short season, and Israel has never held the full territory. The promise is unconditional, so it still stands.