Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“When the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. Now terror and great darkness fell on him.”
(Genesis 15:12)

Our conscious minds and our physical bodies, having fallen from the perfection in which they were created, are not capable of handling the presence of God face to face: “He said, “You cannot see my face, for man may not see me and live.”” (Exodus 33:20). In fact, when ANGELS appear – who only REFLECT the Glory of God – our physical and natural response is to fall on our faces. Even John, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, fell on his face unable to function when Jesus appeared to him in Glory (Revelation 1:17). Whenever God was going to do something physically in the Old Covenant, He tended to put us asleep and reveal it to us in a vision (which may have been physical in some way). In the New Covenant we have the advantage of being made new and having Holy Spirit indwell us, but we still cannot take the full Glory of the Lord. We must wait until we are fully perfected (2 Corinthians 3:18).

In the Hebrew, this ‘deep sleep’ was the same as Adam experienced when Eve was separated from him (Genesis 2:21).

This experience with God started the previous night (Genesis 15:5) and is continuing now on a second day. This took trust on Abram’s part. This took discipline. Abram had do choose to put God first and hand onto the trust that he had in the Lord. We are to DWELL in God’s place, not check in from time to time (Psalm 91:1). This takes EFFORT on our part (Proverbs 6:6-8), but our reward is the Lord (Psalm 91:2-13).

Scholars have said they believe that the horror Abram experienced was prophetic knowledge of the various captivities that his descendants would experience – Egypt, Babylon, etc. I think a case could be made that this was a last ditch effort by the devil to divert Abram. Fear is of the devil and this was terror. A terror of misery. When the sleep came down, the devil may have thrown a last fiery dart at Abram to get him to abandon his watch over the sacrifices and leave before God arrived. It is often at the cusp of our overcoming that the devil launches his harshest attacks.

The sage Ramban writes: ‘AND LO, A DREAD, EVEN A GREAT DARKNESS FELL UPON HIM. The Rabbis in the Midrash have interpreted this fourfold expression to be an allusion to the servitude of the four exiles, for the prophet Abraham found his soul overtaken by “a dread,” followed by “darkness,” which in turn became “a great darkness,” and then he felt as if an overwhelmingly heavy load “fell” upon him. Thus the Rabbis have said: “A dread, this is Babylon. Darkness, this is Media that darkened the eyes of Israel with fasting and affliction. Great, this is the kingdom of Antiochus. Fell upon him, this is Edom.
This experience came to Abraham because when the Holy One, blessed be He, made a covenant with him to give the land to his children as an everlasting possession, He said to him, by way of a residuary of His gift, that during the four exiles the nations will subjugate his children and rule in their land, subject to the condition that they sin before Him. Following this general allusion, He then informed him explicitly concerning another exile into which they will first go, namely, the Egyptian exile with which he had already been punished, as I have explained.’

The sage Chizkuni writes: ‘ויהי השמש לבא, “when the sun was about to set;” in other words, it was still full daylight, not yet time to lie down and sleep.’

The sage Radak writes: ‘ויהי השמש לבא, this verse proves that this whole paragraph describes a prophetic vision, that the entire sequence is a continuous vision, uninterrupted. Both the story about G’d taking Avraham out of his tent to gaze at the stars (did not have to have occurred at night) and the time frame mentioned here, i.e. the sun setting, did not have to refer to 12 hours having elapsed since the earlier reported part of this vision. The Torah reports matters in the sequence in which they appeared to Avram in the vision. The reason why “evening” “night” and, by implication, the preceding “daylight” is mentioned, is because they symbolise periods in Jewish history. Daylight symbolises when the fortune smiled on the Jewish people, whereas “sunset” symbolises the decline of the fortunes of the Jewish people, and “night, darkness” symbolises the periods during which the Jewish people are in exile. The approaching evening mentioned in our verse refers to the first Jewish exile in Egypt. ותרדמה נפלה על אברם, this exhaustion was due to the marshalling of all of Avram’s spiritual resources to receive these prophetic visions. We have evidence of these reactions in Daniel 8,18 who describes these physically debilitating reactions when he involuntarily went to sleep on the very ground on which he had been standing. (he did not have time to lie down on a bed) He had to be revived by the angel. He referred to such weakness also in verse 17 of that same chapter. Avram, at least at the beginning of his prophetic vision, did not experience such a weakness. The reason was that at the beginning of the visions G’d showed him there were only positive developments. Now when G’d showed him the downside, he was overcome with the impact of what G’d showed him.’

The sage Steinsaltz writes: ‘This episode involved three stages: First came the initial prophetic vision, which Abram apparently experienced at night; this was followed by the preparations for the covenantal ritual and the descent of the birds of prey upon the carcasses, which occurred during the day. Then came the third and final stage, which is described in this verse: It was when the sun was setting; a deep sleep fell upon Abram. This was not an ordinary sleep due to tiredness, but an absolute inability to stay awake, as though an external factor put him in a trance. And behold, together with the deep sleep, a dread, a great darkness, a terrible fear devoid of specific content or meaning, fell upon him.‘