The Old testament Story
3. THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM
THE FATHER OF THREE RELIGIONS Gen. 12-25
“I will make from you a great nation and I will bless you / and all the people’s on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)
OT Outline
A. Period One: The Beginnings of Mankind (Genesis 1-11)
B. Period Two: The Foundation of God’s Future Nation (Genesis 12-50)
1. Abraham (Genesis 11-25)
In the little town of Hebron, just south of Jerusalem, in cave under the Moslem Mosque of EI-Haran, you can see (supposedly) the resting place of the bones of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Abraham strands out from all men because three of the great world religions of our day trace their origin back to him - the Jew, the Muslim and the Christian (Galatians 3:7 says we are the spiritual descendants of Abraham.)
A. THE WORLD OF ABRAHAM (Genesis 11)
1. The People of God
1) The Old Testament Scriptures
Around 2000 BC, 1000 miles East of Jerusalem, God contacted a descendent of Seth and Noah and told him to move to Canaan, on the Eastern shore of the Med. Sea, a land he had never seen. God promised to make a great nation out of his descendents (Israel) – a nation that would bless all people on earth. He believed God and obeyed, taking his family, his workers and his herds and flocks on that long journey.
God made Israel His special nation – His chosen people (Exodus 19-21). After communicating with mankind, from the garden of Eden onward, through creation (Romans 1:19ff.); conscience (Romans 2:12-16) and personal contacts with people like Enoch, and Noah, He would now reveal Himself to the nation of Israel.
He interacted with them in all kinds of ways (dreams, visions, miracles, prophets, etc. / Hebrews 11:1-3) and lead them to write an accurate record and interpretation of His dealings. This produced the Old Testament Bible.
They were to share the message of the love and forgiveness they found from Him, to all people on earth. When Jesus was born most of them despised all non-Jews and looked forward to them being thrown into hell. Jesus’ home town church (synagogue –gathering place), became a mob and tried to kill Him when He hinted that God might bless and help Gentiles. (Luke 4:14)
2) The Old Testament Setting (2000 BC)
John Bright says many civilizations had risen and fallen by 2000 BC and Abraham lived near the mid¬point of recorded human history. The “world” was the Fertile Crescent surrounding the Med. Sea on three sides.. And Canaan was a land bridge to all of the great nations -Europe (NW), Russia (N), China (NE) and Africa (S). God put His people in the center of the world so He could bless the world through them.
2. The People of the World (11)
Babylon (E) was the center of knowledge. Egypt (S) developed to the point that several hundred years before Abraham's day, around 2400 B.C., they began to construct the Pyramids, which stand to this very day.
Men and women were wise, like today, but also, like today they were not good. Wherever we go in history or in our world today we find the depravity of man expressing itself in pride, cruelty, selfishness (putting ourselves above others) and self indulgence (sex and material things- money)
The ultimate sin is being “ungodly” (Psalm 1) – living as though God does not exist. Today we call it “secularism” and it was the crowning sin of the "Tower of Babel" (Gen. II). To make a great name for themselves (11:4) and keep their unity and solidarity (11:4) they began to build a great city and a huge pyramid type tower.
Josephus said they built it to escape any other flood that came. Whatever the reasons, God saw it as defiance and pride and he stopped it by confounding their language. Unable to communicate, they split into groups and moved away from each other.
Thus was born the variety of nations, cultures, languages, and perhaps even races that we know today. Sin has divided us, and only redemption, found at the cross where God reaches out to all nations and at Pentecost, the coming of His Spirit, where the confusion of languages was reversed, can make us one again.
B. THE WALK OF ABRAHAM
The story of Israel begins with the stories of four individuals from the line of Seth (Genesis 4) - the Patriarchs (Fathers) – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph.
Human beings never change. Billy Graham said the College trained fighter pilot of our day, trained and ready to kill and the savage headhunter with his spear, trained and ready to kill, both have the same needs, strengths, weaknesses, fears, loves, wants and needs. What God says to these individuals He says to us. Want He wants from them is what He wants from us.
James one says the word of God, the Bible is like a mirror. In it we see ourselves. Reading other books we stand above or outside of it and judge its contents. Reading the Bible we are beneath it or inside of it, and it judges us. Dwight L. Moody said, I believe the Bible is inspired (breathed out by God – 1 Tim. 3:15), because it inspires and reads me.”
1. The First Step (Salvation)
1) Blessing Ourselves
An ancient Chinese proverb says, “The longest journey begins with a single step.” This is true if we go to the grocery store or half way around the world. Abraham’s walk with God, like ours, begins with a first step - CONVERSION. (Luke 3:1-19 / Acts 2:38)
God came to Abraham. Abraham did not come to God. The same is true of us. Romans three eleven says no one “looks” for the God of the Bible. He shows us our sins and “leads” us to be sorry for the things we have cone (2 Cor. 7). He gives us the desire to be better people and we ask for forgiveness and this change of character.
Abraham knew a lot less than we do, but he knew enough. And His turning to, believing in and obeying God. the New Testament says is a picture of what we do.
Romans 4 says he was saved, made a child of God (John 3) by FAITH. He believed God and received “righteousness” – being right with God and being one who hungered to living right for God (Matt. 5:10ff.)
James s two says he was saved by OBEDIENCE (works).In his retirement years, he put away his rocking chair and moved his family, his workers, and his herds 1000 miles away to a land he didn’t really “know” was there.
True faith produces works. If I call you in the middle of the night and tell you your porch is on fire, how do I know you believe me? It is not by your singing a hymn of praise for me or telling me how much you love and trust me. It is when I see you run out the front door in your pajamas with a kid under each arm.
2) Blessing Others
God promised Abraham he would be a blessing to "all people on earth" (12:3). This is strange because Patriarchal religion was so ordinary and quiet and uneventful. Abraham seems to have lived and died in the small country of Canaan, fifty miles wide and 100 miles long. He didn’t part the Sea like Moses or bring down fire like Elijah. Like most of us all he did was walk daily with God, unnoticed by the world on a small strip of planet earth.
But and unnoticed, un-eventual life can have immeasurable consequences for good or for evil. The records in Cornall County, England, show the family tree of a girl named Meg Hodges.
At the age of 16 she became a prostitute, and the history of her descendants reads like this: 200 went on record as criminals; nine of her children served a total of 50 years in state prisons; others were listed as mentally challenged, drunkards, prostitutes and paupers.
But one female descendant met and married a devout Christian young man and became a Christian. At that point the family tree changed drastically. Her descendants listed as follows: 100 became ministers; 7 were college presidents; 60 became medical doctors; 25 were officers in the armed forces; others became mayors, professors and governors.
I did not come from a Christian home, but my three children and my six grandchildren are now building nine Christian homes and out of them, in a few generations will come hundreds more. And it all began when my wife, as a young girl, and me in my early twenties, became followers of Jesus Christ.
2. The Long Walk (Struggle)
1) The Struggles of Christian Living
Abraham walked humbly with God for one hundred years, and the word that summarizes it is “struggle”. He seems always to be enduring some trial, repenting of some sin, facing some enemy or bearing some sorrow.
Walking with God is never easy. Picturing the road we travel Jesus said, “The way is hard.” (Matt. 7). We are “babies” who need to grow (1 Cor. 3:1); “soldiers” who need to fight Satan’s temptations (James one) ; “disciples” who need to learn (Hebrews 6): sinners who need to keep on repenting (I John 1:8-2:4) and forgiven children who need to keep on re-dedicating ourselves to God. (Romans 12:1-3)
2) The Strange ways of God
Another thing that makes it had are the strange ways of God. God is unpredictable. The first “reward” Abraham got for obeying God was that his father died on the trip to Canaan). The second was that the first thing that happened when he arrived in Canaan was a draught. Watching his animals die in the fields he had to wonder “why”.
He promised Abraham a son and made him wait thirty years, until all hope seemed gone. When his son arrived, He told him to kill him. God promised him the whole land but all he ever got was a grave.
We cannot keep God in a neat little box of our “beliefs”. Walking with Him we are often reminded of what He said in Isaiah 55, “My ways are not your ways and My thoughts are not your thoughts: (Is. 55:8). Nothing in this life is simple - not a blade of grass, not a tiny atom and certainly not God
Our task is not to understand God but to trust Him to make “all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28) and to keep walking with Him.
A certain grandfather took his grandson with him much of the time. The two could always seem to find joy in just being together. One day the man asked him to go with him and the lad asked, "Where are we going, Grand¬daddy?"
The grandfather left and to the boy’s surprise, went without him. When the little boy asked him later why he left him behind, his grandfather said, "Because you asked me WHERE we were going. The important thing is not where we go, but that we are together."
The Christian’s joy in suffering is that no matter where life leads us, we want to walk with God. When we cannot see His hand we trust His heart.
3) The Sorrows
Nowhere is this truer than when we suffer and God leaves us in our suffering. To serve God he had to give up his home (12:1).
His life, like ours, was marked by the thousand and one little irritants that spoil our days (13:2-13). He saw his wife in danger (20:1-18) and his nephew give in to greed (13:10-13) and shame (19:30-38). He watched his son Ishmael going away from him (21:9-21). He watched his wife die.(23:1-3).
Suffering is harder for Christians because we have to learn to interpret our sorrows in the light of our commitment to and faith in God. Sorrow has many blessings and what we see in Abraham is that they brought him closer to God. He is called God’s “friend” and that means he saw God as his friend, no matter how bad things got.
4) The Sins
(1) The Fact of them (1 John 5:13 / 1:8-2:2)
Abraham, like Paul, Peter, and the rest of us knew what it was to feel the pain of in times of great moral, ethical and spiritual failure.
He felt it when he went down into Egypt to escape the drought instead of trusting God (12:10). He felt it when he played the coward and placed his wife in the unholy hands of Pharaoh because he was afraid that he would take her and kill him in doing it (12:11-20). Then to make matters worse, he repeated the same sin years later by giving Sarah to Abimelech (Ch. 20).
A pastor informed his people he would preach on “The Man in This Church Who Has Given Me the Most Trouble." To the packed house that Sunday, he named the man - "Myself". D. L. Moody said, "I have more trouble with D. L. Moody than any man alive." We all know what it's like to sing:
"Prone to wander / Lord I feel it
Prone to leave / the God I love."
(2) The Nature of them (Romans 7)
In Romans seven Paul bears his soul about his struggles with sin. He said he did the things he hated; he did not do the good he wanted to do and he did the things he did not want to do. It broke his heart. He said he was a “wretched” person. He cried, “Who will deliver me?”
The mark of a true Christian is not that he does not do wrong. It is that he “hates” it; “fights it” and longs to “be delivered” from it. Paul did not have a girlfriend on the side. He was just painfully aware of how he so often failed to be like Jesus.
Warren Wiersbie says a growing Christian, learning more and more about himself in his walk with God. “Sins less and sells and confesses more and more.”
Oswald Sanders rightly says Abraham’s failures were “incidental and not fundamental in his life. God does not judge us by our isolated failures but by the general tenor of our lives”.
3. The Arrival – Safe at Last (Hebrews 11:10-16)
Abraham, like us, was not walking IN the earth, he was walking THROUGH the earth on his way to the true promised land of heaven. Hebrews eleven says he, “looked for a \city with foundations, whose builder and maker is God," (Heb. 11:10) and that he “desired a better country, a heavenly one" (Heb. 11:16).
We don’t go into a grave, we go through the gates of glory our Lord walked through (Psalm 24). Psalm 22 speaks of His cross. Psalm 23 speaks of the Shepherd’s crook taking him through all the dark valleys. And Psalm 24 speaks of the crown when He was welcomed in heaven.
When I preach a funeral of a faithful child of God, a battle scarred veteran of Jesus, I feel like shouting:
“Ten thousand times ten thousand,
In sparkling raiment bright,
The armies of the ransomed saints,
Throng up the steeps of light.
Tis finished, all is finished,
Their flight with death and sin
Fling open wide the golden gates
And let the victors in.
Hebrews 11 says God’s OT heroes were “pilgrims (aliens) and strangers on earth / (11:13) looking for a country of their own”(11:16). Vance Havner said, "We are not citizens of earth trying to make it to heaven. We are citizens of heaven trying to make it through this earth."
This world is not our home / We are just passing through / Our treasures are laid up / Somewhere beyond the blue
Would you go to heaven? Then cast yourself- for yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day of death and the endless days of eternity - upon Jesus Christ. Listen as Abraham listened. Repent as Abraham repented. Believe as Abraham believed. Fight sin as Abraham fought sin. Face sorrow as Abraham faced sorrow. Do this and you will die as he died and live again as he lives again, in endless fellowship with God and His people.
