God Builds a Nation
Genesis 11-24 & Genesis 17
Today our message is for anyone over the age of sixty five. This does not mean that if you’re under that age that you can leave or ignore the message - quite the contrary.
In fact if you are over sixty five years of age this message will be a special blessing as you come to realize that our God sees greatness in you that is yet to be realized.
I’m not sure how God is going to work that out in your life. It may be that God will use you to influence a child or grand-child or great-grandchild. It may be that you are going to write a poem or letter that will touch the heart of a Prime minister or King or Queen. It may be that by faith God is going to call you to experience his miracle working power in your life.
The one thing I do know is that God is not finished with you yet and he has something important and significant that he wants to accomplish in and with your life before he calls you home.
This world may have put you out to pasture, this world may see you as someone who needs to retire but God does not see you the same way that the world does and how wonderful that is.
Isaiah 55:9
"As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”
So this morning I say to the younger people listen up and learn, understand that God is not a respecter of persons – our God has done great and marvelous things in and through senior citizens all through the Bible and God does not change he is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. So respect and honor our seniors amongst us and seek out their wisdom and counsel because God is still using them for his great purposes.
Acts 10:34 KJV Then Peter opened his mouth, and said; Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons:
This year we are going through the story of the Bible as one continuous chronological story. We have looked at Creation and Adam and Eve and we looked a Noah and the flood and we come to the next big part of the story where God builds a nation.
After the flood of the earth the nations of the world once again began to develop and grow but people did not know or honor their creator instead they had made for themselves all manner of gods from wood and stone. Nations worshiped the sun and moon and the stars but the living God they did not acknowledge until God called out to Abram. Abram as we know is Abraham. (Genesis 10 & 11)
Now ten generations have come and gone since Noah to Abram and twenty generations since Adam to Abram.
Once again our Heavenly Father reaches out to us as his creation to give us yet another chance. It’s another chance to have a relationship with him and another chance to know God intimately.
This time God is going to build a nation, a nation that is different from all others on the face of the earth. God is going to cause a people to be born who are set apart as his own.
He calls Abraham and Sarah to leave behind the country they were born in and to wander into the desert to a place that He will show them. They travel with their entire family some 1,400 miles to a new land called Canaan present day Jerusalem.
Is God calling you to leave behind your old ways, your old familiar places and to follow Him to a new and wonderful place a new and wonderful life?
If you were in God’s shoes how would you have started this new nation? You might have chosen two young people who were strong and virile who had the capacity to have a lot of children.
But here we must remember that God’s ways are not mans ways. Isaiah 55:9
"As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”
God does something that makes no sense to us God uses a man who is seventy five years old and a woman who is sixty five years old to start this process. To make it even more remarkable Sarah is barren and has been all her life yet God will use her to birth a nation.
This is an important point that we should spend some time meditating on. We see here that God wants to remove all human influence from the creation of his new nation. This promised child will arrive not by human resolve but by divine interaction. It reminds us of the Nativity story of Jesus.
It is as if our God is saying - look I want you to understand that I do not need you to make my plan work but rather I have chosen you to be a part of my plan so that you can begin to understand my great love for you. I long to see you and whoever will come back to me your Creator come back by your own free will so that you will love and honor me as your God and creator once again. (Italics mine)
We see in this process how our God has tested the faith of Abraham and Sarah as they wait years for this miracle child to arrive.
Hebrews 11:1 KJV
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
At this point Abraham and Sarah have waited for 10 years but no child has come to them. Abraham is now 85 and Sarah is now 75 years old. So they like so many of us decide to take matters into their own hands.
Sarah thinks that maybe she is not as big a part of this nation building plan as Abraham is and so she suggest to her husband that he should use their servant woman Hagar to be a surrogate mother to this promised child. Hagar is young enough to have children and so Sarah thinks that the child of promise can not come from her.
So that is exactly what happens and the result is a son called Ishmael. He is not the son of the promise but is a human substitute. But since Ishmael is a son of Abraham Ishmael will be blessed to become the father of a great nation but it will not be God’s chosen nation. Ishmael becomes the father of what we know as the Arab nations of today.
The Bible says of him…Genesis 16:11-12
11 The angel of the LORD also said to her: "You are now with child and you will have a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the LORD has heard of your misery. 12 He will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers."
To this day we see that truth being lived out in our present world. We see clearly how catastrophic the results of messing with God’s plans can be and just like in the Garden of Eden we reap what we sow.
Have you ever tried to help God out with the plans of your life or your loved ones?
I know I have been guilty of that same thinking and action in my life and the results were often worse than if I had just waited on God. It was like tying off my problem with a rope that was being held by someone I wasn’t sure that I could trust.
Waiting on God does not mean that the answer is not coming it just means we are not yet ready to receive it.
Numbers 23:19
19 God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?
Our God always keeps His word.
The story has a happy and miraculous ending as we see that God carries out his promise to Abraham and Sarah despite their lack of faith. Abraham at the age of 100 becomes the father to Isaac and at the age of 90 Sarah becomes a mother for the first time in her life.
God has kept his promise and through this promised son Isaac many generations will come and the chosen nation of Israel will be born through him.
It is no accident that this story of Abraham and Sarah has parallels to the story of Mary and Joseph. Our God is the God of miracles and the God of promise for the young and the old.
All we need is the faith to believe in His word. – If you think that God is finished with using you think again. - Amen.
