But Abram said, “O Sovereign LORD, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?”

So the LORD said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.”

Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half.

Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.

As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the LORD said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— (Genesis 15:8-18)

Abraham decorated the ground with the dead carcasses of animals and birds that he had cut in half. How come? God made Abram a promise that he would have a child. But right after Abram “believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness” Abram wonders how he can know for sure that God will actually do what he said he would do.

Right on the heels of Abram’s belief, came doubt. But God did not berate Abram. Instead, he granted Abram’s request for certainty.

In Abram’s day, when kings made treaties with one another, they would take some animals and cut them in half. They would then lay the pieces out in parallel rows. Together, the two kings would then walk between the carcasses. It was a piece of performance art: the kings were announcing that if they didn’t fulfill the treaty they had just made, then what had happened to the animals would happen to them. So after God passed between the dead animals, Abram knew God would do what he had promised. He’d put his name on the dotted line.

If God and Abram were making a treaty like this today, God would have called in a notary public and signed a thick contract for Abram.

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