“Cross my heart, and hope to die!”—Do you remember this simple oath from your childhood days? It usually meant that you were really REALLY going to make good on your promise. Children have such good intentions, don’t they?
Now, let’s move into the adult world. Many agreements are completed with a handshake. Sometimes, a document is drawn up and signatures are affixed to the end of it to show a mutually-agreed upon “deal”. Somewhat related, a person in a courtroom swears on a Bible to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And then there is the simple advice of Jesus in Matthew 5 to “let your yes be yes, and your no be no”.
But have you ever heard of the ancient Biblical ritual to show that an oath has been agreed to by two parties? The Books of Genesis and Jeremiah both reference this “weird” ceremony. First, there is the sacrificial cutting of an animal into two parts, and the divided carcass in laid upon the ground. The covenant was completed by having both parties walk through the animal parts together, repeating the oath that they were agreeing to. The symbolism was plain—this covenant was serious enough to be sealed with blood, and breaking the deal would mean that the guilty party was putting his very life on the line.
Recall that God had made a promise to Abram (Abraham) that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, and God would give Abram the land to make this happen. Abram questioned the Lord and asked how he would know that this was really true (Genesis 15: 8). God knew that man had become a sinful creature, and that keeping his part of any two-way covenant would never work. So, the Lord took control of the situation.
He put Abram into a deep sleep, and verse 17 says that “there appeared a smoking firepot and a burning torch that passed between the two pieces on the ground.” The smoking firepot represented God’s presence as He had appeared to the Israel nation in the past. The blazing torch represented the fire that many times God had used to represent His presence. The certainty of this covenant was totally reliant of God, not who Abram was or what Abram would do. The covenant could not fail, because God Himself cannot fail. Abram could only observe, but any efforts on his part to seal the covenant with God would never work.
In many ways, this covenant would be similar to the covenant of God sending His son, Jesus, to die for our sins. There is nothing that we could do as our part of the covenant to deserve His forgiveness, so the body of Jesus was broken into pieces and bloodied on our behalf. And God alone developed the covenant between man and Himself. There is nothing that sinful man could do to add to the covenant. Praise the Lord that we only have to come to Him by faith, and rely on Him to do the rest.