ABRAHAM DID PASS THROUGH.
By Alonzo T. Jones
THAT statement was wrong that I made two weeks ago in connection with God’s covenant with Abraham, in saying that “only God passed through” between the parts of the sacrifices offered by Abraham. Abraham also passed through. This fact, however, is not stated in Genesis. It is given in Jer. 34:18: “I will give the men that have transgressed my covenant, which have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made before me, where they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof, the princes of Judah, and the princes of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, and the priests, and all the people of the land, which passed between the parts of the calf.” This was spoken to the people in the days of Zedekiah; and the only way in which it was possible for them to have passed “between the parts of the calf” was in the fact of Abraham’s having passed through; just as in Heb. 7:9, 10, it is said that Levi, “who receiveth tithes, paid tithes in Abraham.” I have many a time used Jer. 34:18 to show that the people in the days of Zedekiah were included in God’s covenant with Abraham: I do not know how it slipped my mind in the article of two weeks ago, unless it was that my mind was just then absorbed in discovering and describing what God had put into that blessed covenant. This is the more singular, too, from the fact that many a time I have read, even in the galley-proofs, the words in “Patriarchs and Prophets,” to which a brother in Illinois has just now called my attention, that, when Abraham had arranged the sacrifices according to the divine direction, “This being done, he reverently passed between the parts of the sacrifice, making a solemn vow to God of perpetual obedience;” and “as a pledge of this covenant of God with men, a smoking furnace and a burning lamp, symbols of the divine presence, passed between the severed victims, totally consuming them.”—Page 137. Since writing that article, I have found the following account of an incident in the journey of General Grant around the world, which more fully, and in great beauty, illustrates the meaning of the “passing between the pieces.” The General was to be entertained at the house of an official, Wassef Khayat, at Assiout, in Egypt; and the account says: “When General Grant alighted at the consul’s house, he was detained from entering until a beef, beautifully garlanded with flowers, had been brought out. It was killed, and cut into two pieces, which were laid on either side of the doorway. Then the consul invited General Grant to enter his home with him. They stepped over the blood on the threshold, and between the pieces. By this act they entered into the most solemn covenant known to the Oriental,—the blood covenant,—and thus became “blood brothers,” a relation which outranks every other relation in life. One blood brother can not ask anything that the other will refuse.” These things show that Abraham “passed between the pieces;” that when he did so, all his children also passed between them; and that since we, being Christ’s, are Abraham’s seed, WE PASSED BETWEEN THE PIECES, and thus became “blood brothers” with the Lord; that we can not ask of him anything that he will refuse, and that he can not ask anything of us that we will refuse. John 14:13, 14; 15:7, 16.