“But Abram said, “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 for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.”
‭‭Genesis‬ ‭15:8-13‬

I really enjoyed this bible study for multiple reasons. First, it cleared up confusion on why the Israelites were punished with slavery for Abe’s failure to cut a bird. ” the fruit will be as damaged as the seed”. Pastor put it in a very practical way. Abraham’s failure to take care of the smallest thing, to keep pure, would indeed affect the Israelites. If I’m a father with a habit of cursing, my children will likely pick up that habit as well through osmosis. I wouldn’t have to actively teach them the habit, they would subconsciously learn it from being around me.

If Abe wasn’t pure, Isaac wouldn’t be either, or Jacob, or Joseph and his 11 brothers. The impurity would just trickle down the family line. God taught Abraham a lesson and got him to understand what he was missing.

It’s easy to take care of the big duties in our lives. We can go to church, we can read the bible, but there’s many things that seem so minuscule that we don’t see the importance to cutting it off. I had an atheist friend I would hang out with in an earlier period of my walk, and he enjoyed the secular life. I would go to bible study by day, and be filled with grace, but by night, we would hangout and talk about girls and worldly issues, venting our anger towards things. I didn’t see it as a problem at first, but than I realized i was two different people. It was almost like I wasn’t even Christian around him. I eventually cut ties, and I feel now if we were to be friends, he’d either cut ties from me or just not want to hang as much because I wouldn’t want to talk about the old stuff we once spoke of, or, if we did talk about that, I would quickly bring up courtship as a means for finding a wife, or the lack of God’s love in the world leading to the brokenness in our society.