September 20 2020
Genesis 12:1-3, 15:1-6, 17:1-6, 22:1-14
During this time of the year I always look forward to football. So I’m grateful that at least I can watch NFL games because the college season is so up in the air. Needless to say I was overjoyed that the Big Ten has decided to go ahead and play even if I have to wait until October. Now thinking about the Big Ten, I have to confess that not only did I have a child who was a Buckeye, my son Matt but, get this I also had a child who went to that school up north. Yes, my daughter Sarah went to the University of Michigan. Needless to say Novembers at our house were interesting while she was in school.
As I thought about Sarah getting her Masters Degree from Michigan, I still find it interesting how and why she decided to come back home after finishing up her degree. I mean for the majority of her classmates most of them ended up in a big city not in some rural little town in the middle of Ohio. The reason Sarah made this choice is that while at Michigan she began to realize the importance of having a network to rely upon. When I say network, I mean that connection of friends, acquaintances and coworkers that one has to call upon when you need something. To Sarah, having this network was something she highly valued and she knew that if did move somewhere new she would have to spend a lot of time building up a group of friends so that she didn’t have to go it alone. When she moved back to T-county though she instantly had so many friends, and acquaintances that it was no big deal to find support and help when she needed it. She has ended up with a great job so it seems that moving back here was a pretty wise choice after all.
As I meditated on Sarah and the importance that she placed on having a network, a group of friends and acquaintances to rely upon I couldn’t help but think about Abram living in the town of Haran one day hearing a voice above and beyond him that told him that it was time to get out of town. What this voice was telling Abram was to leave behind the very thing that my daughter Sarah finds so valuable, this network of family, friends and neighbors. Often times when we read the Bible counts of these hero’s of the faith in the Bible we don’t take into account what they gave up to say “Yes” to God. For Abram to say “Yes” to God meant that he had to leave behind friendships, he had to say his last goodbye to the members of his family and cut the ties he had built up over a lifetime with his neighbors. Not only that but when pushed about why he was doing such a drastic measure, Abram just had to answer that he had heard a voice that spoke to him and this voice had told him that if was willing to go then Abram could expect that he would be the beginning of a great nation, he would become a man whose name, his very reputation would be great. Not only that, but this voice also told Abram that he was going to bless him, to show him favor in a world where favors were hard to come by. Now, the reason why Abram would even give this voice the time of day was that by now Abram was seventy five years old. His wife was also no spring chicken as well so to hear that there was still hope that their dream of being parents was not as dead as it seemed came as quite a surprise. What Abram understood is that the voice of God speaks and connects the most with the desperate people of this world. It is those people who find that their hope can not be fulfilled through anything this world has to offer these are the people who are willing to listen to the voice beyond this world to secure their hope. And so it was with Abram and Sarai. Abram heard the voice of God, Abram listened and obeyed the voice of God betting solely on the goodness of the promise of God. Abram leaving his country, his kindred and his father’s house was a costly move if we only stop and think about what living in our country surrounded by kindred hearts and family means to us, how much we value this way of life we often take for granted. What Abram discovered is the truth that you can not go with God and stay where you are at. Faith requires a letting go of what we have in order for us to take hold of the newness of what God has to offer.
This new thing God was doing by speaking to Abram is summed up in the word blessing. As we look at the story that is unfolding in our scripture we have to remember that when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden their status was one of being cursed. Eve’s curse was to be pain in childbirth and Adams curse was that the ground from which he would harvest his crops would bring forth nothing but thistles and thorns. The common denominator to both curses was that pain had entered into life; the pain of childbirth and the pain of living off the land which refused to bear crops needed for life. Now, it wasn’t as if God caused their pain; we should never come to the conclusion that we have a God who is out to get us for our disobedience. No, we should rather understand that what happened when Adam and Eve listened to the voice of their desires instead of listening to the voice of God is that the perfect order with which God his creation was now broken. God created a world of structure and order, a world of harmony and flourishing.Part of that order was that God’s highest creation, people, we were created to bear his image and likeness. As we learned last week to bear God’s image is that like the kings in the pagan nations used to do, we are to bring God’s righteousness to bear wherever is our sphere of influence. In order for us to be people of God’s righteousness we must also be people who listen to God’s voice. The Jewish understanding of how this all works is that God in heaven determines judgment which means God alone decides what is good and what is evil. When God speaks we hear what we know as justice what is a just and right way to live. Then when we obey the justice of God what the world sees is God’s righteousness. This is the way God has so ordered the world. So, when Adam and Eve refused to listen to the voice of God, they went against the order God had made an integral part of his creation. Just like if we refuse to acknowledge the law of gravity and decide to jump off a cliff we know bad things will happen. In the same way bad things happen when we as people decide to ignore God’s moral order and refuse to listen to God as God created us to do. The Bible calls these bad things that result when we refuse to listen to the voice of God a curse. To be cursed is to be literally out-of-order and the result in our lives is pain. So the way that the story of Adam and Eve is written it tells us that the pain we experience in our world is the result of our disobedience and is not some flaw in God’s good creation. God in his infinite goodness and wisdom though takes this pain and uses it to motivate people to turn back to him. As we see with Abram and Sarai, it was the pain of having reached old age and never having a child to love and cherish, this is what made God’s promises seem like a way for their hope to remain alive. It was easy for them to understand when God spoke to them of blessing because it was his voice that was to be the end of their life under the curse of barrenness. God promised to bless them but that was not all; God also said that not only was he going to bless Abram and Sarai but they in turn would be a blessing and not only that but through them all families in the whole earth would be blessed through them. This is an astounding, mind-blowing vision that God held out for Abram and Sarai to behold. What God was telling them was through them and their faith the world that is living under the curse now would have a way for the curse to be reversed and for God’s favor to once again be the norm of God’s creation. This is the truth behind what Paul wrote at the end of the eleventh chapter of Romans where he writes, “For God has consigned all to disobedience that he may have mercy on all.” God views the tragedy of our disobedience as an opportunity for him to demonstrate the depth and richness of his mercy to us. As Paul wrote earlier in Romans in the second chapter, “Or do you presume on the riches of God’s kindness, forbearance and patience not knowing that God’s kindness is to lead you to repentance? This is what God’s mercy is supposed to do is to cause our hearts to once again be willing to listen to the voice of God instead of the voice of our desires, and to not only listen but to obey in faith. This is exactly what is seen in the life of Abram and Sarai. Where once they lived life like everyone else eating, drinking living life for the moment now they turned from that way of life to a life of listening to the voice of God.
When we realize that the kindness of God is what caused Abram and Sarai to turn to God in faith then we can begin to understand just what Paul meant when he wrote in the third chapter of Galatians that “the Scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’ So then, who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.” Now, for most of us when we hear of preaching the gospel we just automatically think of Jesus and him being our personal Savior. But if we go back and look at the beginning of the gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke what the main preaching point of Jesus was for people to repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. So knowing that Abraham, in listening and obeying the voice of God had demonstrated that he had indeed repented we have to wonder if he had entered the kingdom of God by faith as Jesus called people to do. What helps us to figure this out is knowing that in Jewish thought, the great commandment where we are called to love God with all of our heart, with all of our life and with all of our strength and resources, this was called the yoke of the kingdom. The idea is that if we love God with all of our heart, with all of our life and all of our resources then most assuredly God has become our king and we quite naturally are living in his kingdom. So as we look at the life of Abraham we have to ask, does Abraham demonstrate that he loves God with all of his heart with all of his life and with all of his resources? The answer we find is yes, his life story is one where he does indeed, love God with all that he is.
We see Abraham love God with all of his heart when he willingly left behind those things which tug so hard upon our hearts, the love of country, the love of family and neighbor in order to instead listen to God obey and follow him even though the destination was unknown. All that was known to Abraham was that this voice held out a promise and a blessing and this was the foundation of Abrahams love for God. This love continued to grow within Abraham and we hear this in the seventeenth chapter of Genesis where twenty four years after their initial encounter, God speaks to Abraham and tells him, “I am God almighty walk before me and be blameless that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly. Then Abram fell on his face.” To help us further understand what God is asking of Abraham and what was also confirmed is that what is translated here as blameless is better translated as wholeheartedness. God is asking Abraham if he will walk before him with a heart fully devoted to him. Right here we have to pause for a moment and think about what God is asking. Abraham has waited over twenty years for God to make good on his initial promise. He is now ninety nine years old with no children in sight. It’s understandable that God would want to know if Abraham is still on board with trusting the plan and timing of God’s plan. God is asking Abraham, are you still all in with being my partner to bless the world? Abrahams answer wasn’t a verbal answer but rather an answer of great humility for Abraham fell on his face in a gracious act of worship.It was if Abraham was telling God that words could not convey the depths of love he held in his heart for the God he had come to know over these twenty plus years of traveling with him. Even though Abraham still had not received what had been promised, through his journey with God his heart had grown in his love for him so that the certainty of God’s promise was stronger than ever. So, did Abraham love God with all of his heart? This act of worship proved that this was so.
We the then have to ask, did Abraham love God with all that God had given him and when we read what we are told in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis we find that this also to be true. There we read “And the Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him. When he saw them Abraham ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth and said, ‘O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet and rest yourselves under the tree while I bring a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves and after that you may pass on -since you have come to your servant.” In his book “The Discovery of God” David Klinghoffer writes about the life of Abraham giving new insight about him through the use of the oral traditions of the Jewish faith. What he explains about what is happening here in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis is really insightful. The way he tells it, what Abraham and Sarah were doing here at this grove of trees was setting something up akin to our modern day soup kitchens. There at the crossroads they made a little Mom and Pop rest area where weary travelers could stop and eat and drink. As they found refreshment there, these travelers were also entertained by the stories Abraham told of his adventures with the God whose voice had led him there. So, again it is evident that Abraham was using his resources, sharing them with the the weary and tired in order that through them he might tell others about the God he loved.
So then we are left wondering what about loving God with his whole life? What this means is that we give God free reign over our life never demanding to keep our life but rather knowing that if God asks us to give our life, to lay it down as the greatest act of love knowing that we can do so in the faith that the God we serve is a God who can raise the dead. So does Abraham love God like this? Well, I believe that God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is exactly God asking Abraham if he loved him with all of his life. For Abraham, his son Issac was his life, the life he had waited in faith to receive and the life that would carry on after his death. So, in calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac meant that Abraham in effect was laying down his own life to do what God had called him to do. In doing so Abraham revealed that his faith in God was grounded in God’s ability to resurrect the dead. As we read in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son of whom it was said, “Through Isaac your offspring shall be named.” He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.” So, it is true that Abraham most assuredly loved God with his whole life never demanding to hold onto Isaac for himself but trusting God fully with the one who was his whole life.
So, in Abraham’s story we can see that, yes, he had heard and obeyed the gospel. Abraham had repented, turning from a life apart from the voice of God to a life listening and obeying the voice of God. And Abraham had entered into the kingdom of God, putting on the yoke of the kingdom by loving God with all of his heart, with all of his life and with all of his resources. This is why God considered the faith and belief of Abraham as being righteous because God knew that this faith would become an all consuming love for him. considered And as Paul writes in the fourth chapter of Romans, this faith of Abraham, this is the same faith that God expects of us. Just like Abraham, when we have a faith like this, God calls us righteous because God has faith that our faith will likewise blossom into love for him. This will be a love where we will love God with all of our heart, with all of our life and with all our resources. This is the way the curse is reversed and blessings go out to the end of the earth. So are you ready to be blessed and to be a blessing? All it takes to begin is to listen when God is speaking and to go where God is going. May you be a blessing now and always. Amen!
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