Plant a Tree in the Desert

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Plant a Tree in the Desert

Genesis 21

June 13, 2021 • Tyler Burns • Genesis 21

Audio Transcript:

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Good morning church, and welcome to Mosaic Boston Brookline. My name is Tyler. As Pastor Andy said in the beginning, I am the teen's director here. And it is an honor and privilege to be preaching God's Word to all of us today. And if you will with me, we're going to go on a quick journey back to get a glimpse into high school Tyler's life. It's a dark and scary place. Only be real quick, we're going to get out real fast, but we're going to go there for a second.

And when I was in high school, I had a good friend, his name was Rich. And Rich loved working out. And he wanted me to start working out with him. I was, at that time, 150 pounds soaking wet, scrawny kid. And he was like, "You like theology, though. So in Revelation, it says that we're going to fight a war with Jesus. And so you need to get buffed for that war." First off, it's bad theology. That's not how bodies work in heaven and that's not how the war works. It says that a flaming sword comes out of Jesus' mouth and all his enemies are gone.

So, that's bad theology, but it convinced me. I started working out. And again, I was super light, just wanted to get working out, wanted to have a good time, get stronger. And I was doing that... Sorry, my mic's falling off, I could tell. And then a friend of ours, Greg, started also coming in and working out with us. And we were having a good time. And he was also about my weight. We were the same size. And so we started competing with one another.

And we set up a benching competition, because we are high school boys, all you care about is benching, you don't care about anything else. And so we were like, "Let's have a competition who can bench the most weight, just straight up most weight. If you do the same weight, then we'll go to reps, like whoever does more reps, then they win." So we give ourselves a week to train. We start preparing. We start working out. He's taking pre-workout. He's taking creatine. He's doing all that stuff. I'm not, I don't care.

And he's a trash talker. I don't know if you know trash talkers. I'm not a trash talker. If you ever want to shut down a trash talker, all you do, you smile, you nod, and you say, "Okay." Trash talkers feed off of trash-talking. If you give it to them, they give it back and they grow and they get amped and they get excited. So my friend Greg, I just said, "Okay, let's see." He's talking trash saying, "I'm going to beat you. I'm stronger than you. I'm better than you," all this. "Okay."

He goes first. I said, "Honor, honor first, you go first." He starts benching. Okay, we're both around 150 pounds. "I know Tyler can do his own weight, so I'm going to do 175, 175, that's what I'm doing." He goes, he pushes one and he pushes two. And he's jacked. He's like, "Yeah, I did two over my own body weight. Let's see you beat that." Now this is going to date myself a little bit. But if you remember the old Tootsie Roll Pop commercials, yeah, I channeled that owl in my reps. I went one, a two, a three. And that's right, I crushed it, I had three reps at 175. I destroyed him by a whole rep.

And my friend Rich who was the one who brought us together was like, "All right guys, come on. Now let's actually work out." And he goes to bench. And I spot him because I'm a good friend. And he starts throwing up to 225 10 reps, three sets of 10 reps. It was deflating. I just spent everything I could doing, the moment there was a week of build up to this moment that I was so excited for. It was a joyous victory. It was a victory, nonetheless. But I was completely overshadowed by someone who wasn't even trying to overshadow us.

And I realized in that moment, yes, I had a victory, but what he was doing was better than what I was doing. And that's really the story of this text that we see. We see a great highlight, a great moment that we are celebrated, but it gets completely overshadowed by someone else. And we will be spending our time in Genesis chapter 21. And it's the story of the birth of Isaac. We have been waiting since Genesis chapter 12 to have this birth happen. We have been waiting for this moment. And it's an exciting one.

But we're going to see that the story is not about Isaac. It's not about Abraham. It's not about Sarah. Someone else overshadows them. Will you pray with me over the preaching of God's Word? Heavenly Father, Lord, we come to you now knowing that all is for you, all is for your glory. You are the one, true, everlasting God. In this time, help us to learn and study from your word, your inerrant, infallible, authoritative word. Help us to love it, to cherish it, to see who you are through this text and turn that knowledge and understanding about you and to praise because, Lord, you alone are worthy of our praise. Lord, bless this time and speak through me and to all of us. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
Again in Genesis chapter 21, it's a long one. So we're going to read it in sections as we go along, but we're going to be spending that time in three points. The first point is God is precise, God is protector, and God is praiseworthy. Again, you will notice there are no points about Abraham, Sarah, or Isaac, because the story is not about them. The story is about God. So will you read with me either on the screens or in your Bibles?

Genesis chapter 21 verses 1 through 7, it says, the Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was 100 years old when his son Isaac was born to him. And Sarah said, "God has made laughter for me. Everyone who hears will laugh over me." And she said, "Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age."

Again, we've been waiting for this moment since chapter 12. Abraham has been holding on to this promise that God has given him waiting for this moment. And we get seven verses. Now I want to be clear, I guarantee you there was celebration in Abraham and Sarah's life and in their family and their household. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying the text isn't emphasizing that. The text is emphasizing the Lord in Hebrew, word order is important, but it's important because the sooner it comes up, the more important it is. If it comes first in a sentence, it's saying this is the important thing, let's pay attention to it.

And to us, the sentence "The Lord visited Sarah," seems, okay, that's just good English grammar. But in Hebrew, it could go any way you want it to go, but the first word is Yahweh, starting the text saying, "Pay attention to the Lord." And five times in seven verses, we get the name of God, we get the Lord. Only three times do we get Isaac. It's saying, "Pay attention to God here, pay attention to God here." And in the Hebrew, the end of verse 2, we say at the time God had appointed, it ends with the word God. It ends with God.

It's making this loop. God was there in the beginning, God is there at the end, he is also there in the middle in case you don't get it. This is all about God. And so the thing we have to be thinking is what can we learn from this text about who God is? What is God revealing to us about his nature? And the first thing we learn is that God is precise. He is precise in his words and in his actions. It says the Lord visited Sarah, as he had said in the exact way in which he had told her that she would be the one to bear a son. God did that, he visited her.

And the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. Again, he had promised this multiple times to them, to remind them, "You need to remember, this is me who's doing this." And he does it. As he said, word and in deed, and specifically, it says at the time in which God had appointed. So this was in Genesis chapter 18 verse 10, God said, "This time next year she will conceive and bear Son." God did everything exactly as he said it. And it's intentional.

God didn't say, "Oh, you have a kid. I said it would be a son but it's really a daughter. I said, it would be through Sarah, but Ishmael is good, you should take Hagar. And Ishmael, that'll be your son." No, Abraham pleads that to God and God says, "No, it's Isaac." He is precise in his promises. And what we see is Abraham's response to God's precision is to be precise back. In verse 3, it says, "Abraham called on the name of his son who was born to him who Sarah bore him, Isaac." Why is this? God told him to name his son Isaac.

Abraham didn't say, "Oh yeah, but I like Abraham Jr. better. So I'm going to go with Abraham Jr." No, he followed God's saying. Abraham didn't say, "Well, I'm not actually Jewish," Jewish people, like he's the founder of it. So they weren't thinking of it. I'm from Chaldeans. I'm going to go to Ugaritic which is my native language and I'm going to call Isaac laughter in Ugaritic, whatever that word may be," because it means the same thing.

No, he is precise. He does exactly what God says. And in verse 4, "And Abraham circumcised his son when he was eight days old, as God commanded." God said eight days. Abraham didn't say, "Oh, eight days is close enough to a week. Seven days, I'll do seven days." No, eight. He didn't say, "Oh, God, I just woke up. It's the ninth day. I'm sorry. I just had a newborn child. I lost track of all time and I don't know what day it is. I thought it was the eighth day. It's the ninth today. Lord, will you forgive me? I'm going to circumcise him." No. No, he was precise in his actions and in his words.

And this is something that our culture of Christianity has oftentimes lost and it's really sad, because God is precise and we need to be precise back. And there's this old story from the 16th century of a pastor named Richard Rogers. I like to think of him as Mr. Rogers. I picture him with a sweater. And he was riding around on a horse, as all pastors do. I'm not a pastor because I'm not up here on a horse. If I was up here on a horse, you would know I was a pastor. That's not true, sorry. He's riding around on a horse with the lord of the land. Oh boy, what time to be alive.

He's riding around with the lord of the land, and the lord of the land goes to him, Mr. Rogers riding on a horse, and says, "Why are you so precise?" He recognized in his language and what he was saying he's being precise about life, precise about theology, precise about God, and Richard Rogers' response is. "Oh, Sir, I serve a precise God. And when we serve a precise God, he calls us to be precise back." And J. I. Packer has a book called the Puritan Papers. And in this he commentates on a lot of the Puritan movement, but he also commentates on that exact story.

And on that exact story, J. I. Packer says, "A precise God, a God, that is, who has made precise disclosure of his mind and will in Scripture, and who expects from his servants a corresponding preciseness of belief and behavior, it was this view of God that created and controlled the historic Puritan outlook." I'm not here to say Puritans are perfect. They all had their issues. Every human being has their issues.

But one thing we can learn from the puritanical movement, he said, they cared about the precision of God's word about exactly as how God disclosed himself to be. And that we should desire to be just as precise in our beliefs and behaviors or in our words and our deeds. Now, what does that look like? That could be easy to say, but what does that look like? Precise in behavior, I think, is the easier one to start with.

A lot of times you ask people about their life, how are they. Oh, I tried to be a good person. Our behavior is we try to be good people. That's very general, it's not precise. As Christians, we can be precise. It's not that we're trying to be good people. We're trying to do the will of the Lord. It's very precise. It's very specific. And we can be precise. And when we want to get even more precise, we don't say, well, when certain situations come up, I try and understand like what do I feel is best to do.

Now, we can be precise. God has given us his word, where he is precise with what we are to do and what we are not to do. And so we can be precise, where do I need to grow in my life, where do I need to change my behavior? Well, what does Scripture say? The Scripture says, "Thou shalt not murder." So good, done, I'm good to go. But it gets more precise. "Thou shall not hate your brother in your heart." How many of us are perfect at that? None of us. We got to work on that.

And so when we want to know how to be precise in our behavior, we go to Scripture, to see what we are to do. Now, how do we be precise in our words? I want to be clear first off wit, this is not. This is not arguing about semantics. In 2 Timothy chapter 2 verse 14 and 15, it says, "Remind them of these things and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who needs not to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth."

So it's not quarreling over words. It's not semantics. It's not about that. But what it is about is rightly handling the word of truth. Are we handling truth? Are we speaking truth when we are talking about God? When we are talking about spirituality, are we truthful? Are we accurate in our truth? And again, none of us are perfect. But is this even a desire? Is this even something that we are striving for? This is something we have lost and I want us to all grow back. And I need to grow back on this. None of us are perfect but we need to desire to be precise and speaking truth about God.

And when I was thinking about an exact example of this, the first thing came to mind is an example that we hear all the time. And you will see in storefront windows and in signs in front of people's houses, there's usually a sign with a lot of things. It says, "We believe." And it has a lot of things listed. But the largest letters is always love is love. Is that a true or false statement? It's true. It's true. The law of identity says that something is the same thing as itself. Love is love.

I am Tyler. That is a correct statement. But the issue we should have as Christians is it's not precise. It's not precise. And Scripture is precise about what love is. This comes from the Book of 1 John. If you ask anyone, "Describe an attribute of God," or, "How can you describe love?" the first thing most Christians say is God is love. That is true. That comes from 1 John chapter 4 verse 16. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love. And whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.

Great. God is love. That's true. It's also not that precise. But John is precise. He gives surrounding texts to be precise. He says that abiding in love is the same as abiding in God. Those are the same things. Abiding in love, what does that mean? I think that one's pretty obvious and John explains it in the surrounding text. It's to be loving and to understand what love is. He says, by this we know love. So to talk about abiding love is love. This is his definition of love, to abide in God.

What does it mean to abide in God? Again, John is precise. He tells us in the verse before... I hid it until now, so little surprise. But in John chapter 4 verse 15, right before this, he says, "Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God." This is called a parallelism. It's the same exact phrase. It's whoever confesses Jesus is God, the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God. Then it's the same thing.

Abiding in love is God abiding in him and he in God. It's the same thing. It's not saying it's good to do both. It's saying abiding in love starts and is foremost confessing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Why? John says that by this we know love that God sent his son into the world to die for our sins. The only way we know what love is, is through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of love, and he showed that love is sacrificial.

And so when we speak of love, we have to understand we are directly speaking about Jesus. We are directly speaking about an attribute of God. So we need to be precise. We need to be precise. This isn't semantics. It's upholding truth. We need to be precise, lest we be found guilty of speaking falsely against God when we speak about his character of love. And I know that this is a specific example and I want you to understand this was just truly faithfully praying about the text, this is what came to mind. I have no agenda with this.

But we need to be precise in our words and in our actions, because God is precise. But we also see that God is protector. God is precise and he is protector. And in verses 8 through 21, we see two big stories of God's protection, two separate ones. So we'll start in verses 8 through 14 where we see the first example. It says, "And the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar, the Egyptian woman, and she had borne to Abraham, laughing."

"So she said to Abraham, cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac. And the thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman. Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your offspring be named. And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring. So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba."

First thing, if you are a father who has an infant who is nursing, just finished nursing, or if going to have a child that is nursing, throw your wife a party. It's biblical. She did a lot of work. It was hard. Throw her a party, celebrate that. But what we see first and foremost here is that God is protecting Abraham's family. But the question if you are like me, first and foremost is, "God, how can you do this to Hagar and Ishmael? You sent them away? Doesn't a child need to grow up with their father?" And the answer is yes.

And what we need to understand is that in Genesis, we are told that when Ishmael is born, Abraham is 86 years old. And when Isaac is born, he is 100 years old. And then Isaac was weaned and it was after this that Ishmael was sent away with Hagar. And so, Ishmael, depending on the time of the weaning and the nursing, culturally different back then, it could be anywhere from a year to three years. And so, Ishmael is somewhere between 14 and 17 years old. This is an adult in that culture.

He's a young adult. He is a child, but God is not abandoning a child without a father. God's perfect sovereign timing works so that way Ishmael can still grow up with a father and then be ready to go. So that's first and foremost, it isn't a harmful banishment, unjust by God. He is faithful even in this. But he is, first and foremost, protecting Abraham's family and specifically protecting Isaac. In the Book of Galatians, Paul gives a commentary on this.

In Galatians chapter 4, it says, "For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born according through promise." So, Ishmael is born of the flesh, is symbolic of the flesh. Isaac is symbolic of the spirit, of the promise. And he continues, "Now, you brothers, Christians, like Isaac are children of promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now."

Paul calls Ishmael's laughter persecution. Whether it's just that one laughter, likely there was some sort of mentality that was throughout everyday life where Ishmael was persecuting, mocking, making fun of Isaac. But Paul says that was persecution. And God was protecting Isaac from that. But also this is a message showing forth as Paul's point is that this applies to us today, as Christians, as God's people, God promises to protect us, not just from persecution but in persecution.

It says the as it is happening now, those who are born of the flesh, the world, those who are not of God are persecuting Christians around the world still today. And God promises to protect us even through persecution, not just that God is also protecting Abraham and Sarah's marriage. If you remember, this thing has happened kind of before Hagar ran away the last time because Sarah was mad and was treating Hagar poorly.

Sarah said to Abraham, when Ishmael was born, in Genesis 16 verses 5 through 6, "May the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my servant to your embrace and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with content. May the Lord judge between you and me." But Abraham said to Sarah, "Behold, your servant is in your power. Do to her as you please." And Sarah dealt harshly with her and she fled from her.

This is what happened last time, and it caused division between Abraham and Sarah. She says, "You have done this wrong to me. You have sinned against me, and may the Lord judge between you." She's saying, "We're on opposite sides. I'm the prosecution, you're the defense. There is a division between us." And God wanted to protect their marriage. God did not want division in their marriage. Why, because marriage is a symbol of God's love for his church.

God desires for unity in marriage and God wanted to protect it, but how does God protect this marriage? It's not primarily by sending Hagar and Ishmael away. But what you'll notice is in Genesis 21, God comes to Abraham and tells him what to do. You see, the first time Abraham was passive, when we talked about the failure of him as a father in leading, because he was passive and he's like, "Sarah, she's your servant. You do whatever you want to do." And it led to this division. Whereas now he is displeased, it says he loves Ishmael. Ishmael is 14 to 17 years old.

He loves him. He cares for him. He doesn't want to send him away. But God comes to him and tells him, "It's okay. I'm going to protect them as well. I'm going to protect you. It's okay to send them away." And Abraham, even though it's contrary to his own desires, does what God says. He becomes a leader. We see the change happening in Abraham that he is no longer a passive leader. He is an active leader. He's doing what God has told him to do. And God loves to protect families through men who lead.

And this is what God is doing here. God protects Abraham and Sarah. But it's not just that. God does care for Hagar and Ishmael as well. God is protecting Hagar and Ishmael. This is in verses 15 through 21, where it says, "When the water in the skin was gone, she, being Hagar, put the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off about the distance of a bowshot for she said, let me not look on the death of the child. And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept."

"And God heard the voice of the boy and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, what troubles you, Hagar? Fear not for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is up. Lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make him into a great nation. And then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. And God was with the boy. And he grew up. He lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran. And his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt."

So again, this is parallel to the passage in chapter 16 where Hagar ran away. And in chapter 16, we are told that she was between Kadesh and Shur and she ran into the wilderness. Well, if you go into the back of a physical Bible or you look online for a map of the time, you will see that directly between Kadesh and Shur and Egypt where she is headed is the wilderness of Beersheba where in verse 14, we are told she is currently. And what likely is happening, she is in the same exact wilderness she was before. And she knew, "God, you came to me last time." And it says she lifts up her voice as she sees Ishmael dying. As she believes Ishmael is going to die, there's no hope, she lifts up her voice, she cries out to God saying, "God, you came to me before when I was here. Lord, will you come to me now?"

And what happens? God answers. And God doesn't just answer and say, "Yeah, I'm here." He answers by showing her, opening her eyes to a well of water that will give her life. Friends, this is the gospel. This is the gospel. Well, in the book of John in chapter 4 verses 13 through 14, Jesus is meeting a woman at the well and he tells her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." This is the gospel.

We recognize that we are sinners and we are dying in the barren wasteland of our sin. We are dying. And we need to cry out to God and say, "God, I need you to save me now. I can't do it on my own. There is no hope. We're both ready to die." And what God does is he opens our eyes to see the well that was already there. It was always there, but we needed God to show it to us. And just in that same way, Jesus is always there. He tells us that he is ever present. He is there with us. Anyone who is in time of trouble, they call on him, he will answer.

If you cry out to Jesus asking him to save you, he is there and he wants to save you. He wants to give you this well of eternal life, not just save you temporarily from thirst and dehydration, but to save you eternally from the penalty of our sins. Where's Jesus in Genesis in this text? Right here, right here. This is the gospel. We all need to cry out to God. He's the only one who can save us. We can do nothing of our own. And God protects Hagar and Ishmael. Ishmael grows up and he lives in the wilderness of Beersheba. He lives in the wilderness of Paran. Paran, by the way, is where Mount Sinai is.

It's just interesting. They stay in a place where God had revealed himself to them. And God continues to reveal himself throughout history. This is where they built their life around. And this is also the after part of the gospel. We don't say okay, "God, I'm saved, I'm good," and do whatever we want. We plant our lives around where he is and where he is spoken to us. We do according to what he has said. We build our lives around Jesus around who he is.

So we see that God is precise. We see that he is protector. And now we're going to see that God is praiseworthy. He is worthy of our praise. And this is verses 22 through the end, where it says, "At that time Abimelech and Phicol, the commander of his army, said to Abraham, God is with you in all that you do, now therefore, swear to me here by God that you will not deal falsely with me or with my descendants or with my posterity, but I have dealt kindly with you so you will deal with me, and with the land where you have sojourned. And Abraham said, I will swear."

"When Abraham reproved of Abimelech about a well of water that Abimelech servants had seized, Abimelech said, I do not know who has done this thing. You did not tell me and I have not heard of it until today. So Abraham took sheep and oxen and gave them to Abimelech and the two men made a covenant. Abraham set seven ewe lambs of the flock apart. And Abimelech said to Abraham, what is the meaning of these seven ewe lambs that you have set apart? He said, these seven ewe lambs you will take from my hand and that this may be witnessed for me that I dug this well."

"Therefore that place was called Beersheba, because there both of them sworn an oath. So they made a covenant at Beersheba. Then Abimelech and Phicol, the commander of his army, rose up and returned to the land of the Philistines. Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba and called there on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God. And Abraham sojourned many days in the land of the Philistines."

So, what's going on? Recap from last week. Abimelech is the king that Abraham was like, "Yeah, Sarah is my sister. You could take her as your wife." So he takes her as his wife and in his sleep, God says, "I'm going to kill you unless you give Sarah back." So Abimelech is like, "Abraham, it's clear God is with you, even when you are clearly in the wrong. So let's make a covenant that you will no longer deal falsely with me so your God does not try to kill me in my sleep again."

That is what Abimelech is thinking. And Abraham is like, "Yeah, sure. I'll do that. I'll swear that. It makes sense. I'll go for it." And it says that we won't deal falsely with each other for our descendants or also the land that we are in. And so Abraham is thinking, he's like, "Oh, we're not dealing falsely about land. Speaking of not dealing falsely about land, Abimelech, your servants captured my well. And I'm not allowed to use it anymore because of them. Can we not deal falsely with each other in this?"

Abimelech is like, "I have no idea. What are you talking about? Yeah, sure. We'll fix this. We'll fix this. I don't want your God to kill me. So yeah, we'll fix it." But the word that I think is really important is in verse 25 it says that Abraham reproved Abimelech. And this word reprove is one that we often think of like rebuking, we think of like telling him he is wrong. But actually, it's kind of the converse of that it means to be found in the right. So it's saying Abraham was found to be right to Abimelech about this well.

So yes, Abimelech didn't know but it came out to be true that Abraham was dealing truthfully with him. And we see, again, that Abraham has started to change. Abraham is being active and leading his family, but now he is also dealing truthfully with others. He is not dealing falsely with them. God has already been working on his heart. And so they're like, "Okay, we settle this. You get your well back. Why are you giving me sheep?" And he's like, "Well, remember all that silver you gave Sarah to prove that she's innocent? I'm giving you these lambs back to be like this is my well, but I'm not holding it against you that you took it. You're fine. We're good now as long as you don't take it."

And Abimelech leaves. Why does Abimelech leave? Because he was there for a transaction. He was there to say, "I don't want your God to kill me. So let's do this thing so your God doesn't kill me." It happens. He's done and he's good to go. Is that how we view God sometimes, as a transaction? As I come to God, I don't want you to hurt me. I don't want you to judge me for my sin. I don't want you to do this or that or whatever. So I'm going to come to you. Can we be good? Can we set the record straight? We're good. And now I'm going to go on. I'm going to leave and do whatever I want.

Or are we like Abraham who sticks around and plants a tree? What's going on with planting a tree, guys? It's not Earth Day. That was back before all this climate change stuff. So he didn't need to plant a tree. Why is he planting a tree? It says he plants a tree in the name of the Everlasting God. And this verse 33, I believe, is the crux. It's the whole thing that this whole text wraps around. There's three distinct stories that in and of themselves you're like, "What is going on here? Birth of Isaac, Hagar, Abimelech, what's happening?" Verse 33 sums it all up.

Verse 33, "Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beersheba and called there on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God." Throughout the Scripture, when people name God, they do so based off of God first revealing something to them about his nature and then responding by calling him the thing that he revealed. Think back to Hagar, again, in chapter 16, in Genesis 16 verse 13, it says, "So she, Hagar, called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, you are a God of seeing, for she said, truly here I have seen him who looks after me."

God revealed to her that he was a God who cared for her, looked after her even when she was running away. And her response is to give God a name, which means you are a God of seeing. So what did God reveal about his nature to Abraham that made Abraham say, "You are an Everlasting God?" Just killed some animals, made a covenant, and then went their way. What is about an Everlasting God? It really goes back to that first statement of Abimelech, where he said, "God is with you in all that you do."

And God loves to use people that maybe we don't even think fear him. Remember, last week, Abraham was like, "You don't fear the Lord, so I deceived you." God loves to use people that we don't expect to speak truth into our lives. And I remember my freshman year of college. I had freshmen roommates because I changed roommates because I'm scared of the first one. But that first one, he told me, he was like, "You need to find the girl you are going to marry by your junior year, otherwise you will never get married."

I was like, "Man, I'm a freshman. I've never had a girlfriend. It's taken me this long I haven't found anyone. I really need to get started now, because I'm going to have no hope of getting married if I don't find her by then." I don't know why I believed him, though, silly. It's not sound biblical. But anyway, so I was worried about my future marriage. And also, I was at that time studying chemistry and my goal was to do forensics to work for the FBI. That's what I wanted.

And I got my first ever D on a test. And I was like, "Oh Lord, I'm never going to make it into the FBI. What am I going to do? I have no hope in my future." And I was complaining about all of this to my friend Jeremy. Jarebear, if you're watching, love you, man. Jarebear. Anyway, but Jeremy is not a Christian. He's not a Christian. He loves to talk about God. We have great conversations, but he's not a Christian.
And I was telling him these things. And he said, "Dude, you believe God is going to take care of it, so stop complaining." And then he moved on and started talking about sports and video games. And that was it for him. And clearly, that moment had an impact on me that I remember it today and I bring it up today. And every time I'm stressed and worried about my future, I look back to that moment, because God used someone I didn't expect to speak truth to me, to reveal something about who God is.

God is in control. That is who God is. I don't need to worry. I don't need to be stressed out. I can trust in him. That's what Abimelech does to Abraham. He says God is with you in all that you do. Abraham is like, "Oh yeah, he is. He is." We see the birth of Isaac is important, and it is great and it is huge. But immediately after, we see the hints of Abraham's past failures coming up, and God is saying, "Hey, remember this whole situation with Hagar and Ishmael? Remember when you sinned in that? But also remember the strife it caused in your family? Remember all that? I was still with you then. I was still with you then. Remember that time you pimped your wife off to Abimelech? Oh, and don't forget about to Pharaoh as well. I was with you then. I was with you in all that you did, even when you were wrong and I'm with you. Now, can you believe that I'm with you now? I've given you the son that I've promised you. I've precisely fulfilled my promise. I've been protecting you. Do you believe I'm with you now?"

And Abraham says, "Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I see it." And Abraham is not just looking at the past and in his present, he looks forward to the future and sees, I can see how God is fulfilling his promise to make me a great nation. I can see how God is going to be faithful in the future as well because of how he has been faithful in the past and how he's been faithful right now. So Abraham understands truly God is an Everlasting God. God has always been there. He is there now and he will always be there.

And his response to that is praise. And this is why the points are all about God here is because as we grow in an understanding of who God is, we can grow in praise of him. He is the object of our praise. And so the greater understanding we have of God, the greater praise we can have for him. And Abraham praises God by planting a tamarisk tree. If you don't know a tamarisk tree is, it's an evergreen, it's an evergreen tree that grows in deserts with high salt content in the soil. In other words, where trees aren't supposed to grow, this can grow.

Abraham plants this tree in the desert, it's an evergreen, saying, "Lord, you are an everlasting God. Like this tree's needles that never fade, that never die, that never wash out, you are an Everlasting God, you will never fade, you will always be here. But he also is remembering Sarah, the barrenness of her womb, their barrenness as a couple, they were not able to have child and say, "God, even out of the barrenness of this desert land, you can bring life to this tree. And out of the barrenness of our lives, you can bring life."

God is in control of all things. He is everlasting. He has always been there with Abraham. He will always be there. He's in control of all. And the response is praise. And so, our response, as we grow knowledge of God, is to praise. Have you ever thought about why we sing songs at church? Have you thought about why? It's because just like Abraham's form of praise was relevant to who God is, God, you're an everlasting God, so I'm going to worship you in a form that shows who you are. So, worship through song is a form of praises that is glorifying to God.

In the Book of Revelation, we are told that angels will sing for all eternity to the Lord, but that also we will join them in singing. We will have jobs. We will do work and we will sing songs to praise to God in heaven. So oftentimes, when I talk about praise through song, the pushback I get is, well, I praise God with my life. Good. Hallelujah, praise God, do that. We need to praise God with our life. We will be doing that in heaven. All of heaven will spend working to the glory of God. We need to do that. But we also need to praise in song, because we will also be doing that in heaven for all of eternity.

And if you say, "Ah, I don't Christian music and singing is just not for me," get practice now. We're going to be doing it for all eternity. So let's build it up now. It's not about talent. I am a terrible singer. I am the worst singer in this church. People hear me sing and they're like, "Even Pastor Jan sings better than him." No offense and none taken. But it's not about that. It's about worshiping the Lord. He is worthy of our praise because of who he is. And so we respond in praise in the way that he desires to be praised.

And I want to end with this, verse 34 says, "And Abraham sojourned many days in the land of the Philistines." Every time we have seen Abraham or Lot in this text sojourning, it was followed by sin. It was a story about how they were not trusting God and they were sojourning and they sent... Abraham sojourned in Egypt, he gave his wife to Pharaoh. Lot sojourned, he ended up in Sodom. Abraham sojourned in Gerar, that's what happened with Abimelech. Every time they sojourn they sinned.

The issue wasn't the sojourning. The issue was the not trusting God. And now we see Abraham is trusting God. And now we see he's still sojourning. So the question that we need to be thinking about as we go into next week's sermon is, is Abraham still going to trust God, or is he going to fall back into his old ways of sojourning? And the question all of us need to think about is, as we're here today, we just heard the revelation of God that he is praiseworthy in this text. Are we just going to praise him now or when we leave and we are sojourning through Boston? That's the only way to describe living in Boston, sojourning.

As we sojourn through Boston, are we still going to remain faithful and trust that God is an everlasting God, he is in control of all? Will you pray with me? Heavenly Father, Lord, we come to you encouraged that you have always been you are now and you will always be. Lord, help us to grow in our love and understanding of who you are so we can praise you as you rightfully deserve. In this time, strengthen us, encourage us, stir your spirit in us to lift up our voices praising you because you are worthy. Lord, we love you and we thank you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sarah's Death and Burial

June 27, 2021 • Andy Hoot • Genesis 23

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. Well, good morning. My name is Andy. I'm one of the pastors here at Mosaic, and pastor Jan is getting some vacation time to celebrate his anniversary with Tanya. And so, we're thrilled for him to get that time, thrilled for both of them to get that time after this long season of the past year and a half. Today if you are new, it looks like there's a lot of new faces. We still can't really tell who is new all the time, and praise God, we have that problem. Welcome to Mosaic. If you do want to connect with us, again, we plug our connection cards. And sorry, if you're a regular and we repeat this over and over, it's because over half of the congregation shows up 10 minutes, 15 minutes into the service. So we're just trying to get those stragglers the news, and we want to connect with you. If you have questions, if you want to build community here, fill out the connection card. You can bring it to the Welcome Center, and we'll have some helpers and a gift for you. Today, we are finishing our Jesus in Genesis series. We've been here for, I think the past 12 weeks. This is the 12th week. We started at Genesis 12. We're closing with Genesis 23, and we've been trying to pull out all the ways that this first book of the Bible talking about the patriarch and matriarch of the faith, Abraham and Sarah, how Jesus, the name of Jesus is whispered, and sometimes outright just yelling out of the passages of this ancient book. And it points us to Jesus' coming, going to the cross, being our Lord and Savior for us. We hope this is a good time. I think of my life in forms of periods of Mosaic sermon series. Every sermon series has a tone. Every series hits me in a certain way, and I remember that. I can go back, it was almost 10 years ago this month, that I arrived at Mosaic. And I've been through basically all of them, some from afar as I moved away at some point, but this is a good time in addition to meditating upon today's sermon this week, it's a good time to think about, "Lord, what have you shown me in this season? What have you taught me?" How do I see Jesus Christ being spread, being mentioned, being acknowledged and whispered or typified in this Old Testament book? And so, today we have a funeral. This is a pivotal moment in the text. Why are we stopping here at Genesis 23? This is literally a pivotal moment in the text. Genesis 22, the last few verses mention the line that formed Rebecca from which Rebecca came, the wife of Isaac, Abraham's son, soon to be wife of Isaac in Genesis 24. And this is the last day that Abraham and Sarah are together. And so, it's fitting that we end the series here. We should be reflecting upon just the work that the Lord has done in them and through them. And I'll do that more as we approach our text. So with all that said, I'm going to read Genesis 23 and then I'll pray. Sarah lived 127 years; these were the years of the life of Sarah. And Sarah died at Kiriath-arba (that is Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. And Abraham rose up from before his dead and said to the Hittites, “I am a sojourner and foreigner among you; give me property among you for a burying place, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.” The Hittites answered Abraham, “Hear us, my lord; you are a prince of God among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our tombs. None of us will withhold from you his tomb to hinder you from burying your dead.” Abraham rose and bowed to the Hittites, the people of the land. And he said to them, “If you are willing that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear me and entreat for me Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he owns; it is at the end of his field. For the full price let him give it to me in your presence as property for a burying place.” Now Ephron was sitting among the Hittites, and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the hearing of the Hittites, of all who went in at the gate of his city, “No, my lord, hear me: I give you the field, and I give you the cave that is in it. In the sight of the sons of my people I give it to you. Bury your dead.” Then Abraham bowed down before the people of the land. And he said to Ephron in the hearing of the people of the land, “But if you will, hear me: I give the price of the field. Accept it from me, that I may bury my dead there.” Ephron answered Abraham, “My lord, listen to me: a piece of land worth 400 shekels of silver, what is that between you and me? Bury your dead.” Abraham listened to Ephron, and Abraham weighed out for Ephron the silver that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites, 400 shekels of silver, according to the weights current among the merchants. So the field of Ephron in Machpelah, which was to the east of Mamre, the field with the cave that was in it and all the trees that were in the field, throughout its whole area, was made over to Abraham as a possession in the presence of the Hittites, before all who went in at the gate of his city. After this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah east of Mamre (that is Hebron) in the land of Canaan. The field and the cave that is in it were made over to Abraham as property for a burying place by the Hittites." This is the word of our Lord. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we praise you for your Holy Word. We praise you that all of it is for our edification, for our sanctification, for our growth in the faith. And we praise you for this word about a patriarch and matriarch of our faith. We thank you for the season that you've appointed for us to learn from them to learn from about the grace that you showed to them, about the faithfulness that you showed to them and their faithfulness, about the ways that they prefigured the coming of Jesus Christ. Lord, I pray that you imprint the lessons that we need to hear today, and those that we heard already throughout this season upon our hearts as we go forward as sojourners in this land that is not our home. As we go forth, still facing this death, still facing the thorns and thistles of life that you appointed as the curse for our sin. Holy Spirit, we pray, give us lessons for how we can more faithfully face these challenges as we await to receive our full inheritance that we have through our faith in Jesus Christ. I pray these things in Jesus name. Amen. Well, a month ago, I didn't know I was preaching on this text. I thought I was entering into a calm period. With vacation coming up, my anniversary coming up, my son's five-year-old birthday, my daughter's one-year-old birthday, but the Lord had different things in plan. I had to do Mosaic's officiate Mosaic's first funeral. I ended up purchasing an apartment with my wife, which was labeled by our attorney as the worst closing since 2003. And what was the issue? It was over the appraisal of the property. And you're welcome. You're welcome that I went through that. The Lord put me through that to prepare me for this topic. But if you haven't been with us, and it's okay to laugh a little bit, Sarah, there is a theme in her life of laughter. We can chuckle, and praise God for that, that he is a God of laughter. And he will get the last laugh. But if you haven't been with us, today we're talking about Abraham and Sarah. The book of Isaiah 51:1-2 talk about both Abraham as the patriarch and even Sarah as the matriarch of those in the faith, those upon whom the Church of Jesus Christ is built. From Genesis 12, where we began to where we are today, their life has spanned 62 years. They waited 25 years for their son to be born, and now he's 37 years of age. So we've gotten the highlights when they've been faithful to God. We've gotten the lowlights when they've been unfaithful. In their best moments, as I've said, they've prefigured Christ and the role that he will do for us, and going to the cross and bearing our sins on the cross, and paving the way of faith, walking it perfectly. And we've seen in their low lights, just that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone. And the last time today, we're talking about Sarah's death, the last time we heard about her, Isaac was born. Upon her death now she is 127 years old. We don't know anything about her from these last 37 years. And then so, what we have to be asking what then is the point of Genesis 23? What does this passage teach? The scripture zooms in and out of various points of history of redemptive history for specific lessons, and we have to figure that out today. So today I'm going to break this passage down in three sections. I'm going to talk about Abraham's sorrow, Abraham's sojourn, and Abraham's slice, slice of land. And so first, talking about Abraham sorrow. And notice point three about Abraham's slice that covers verses three through 20, three though the end of this chapter. There's a lot of emphasis on this just engagement between Abraham and the Hittites, and it's a cultural dance as Abraham acquires the land, but we have to ask why is so much emphasis placed on the purchase of this land? So point one, Abraham's sorrow, we have to talk about his sorrow. In verses one and two we read, "Sarah lived 127 years. These were the years of the life of Sarah, and Sarah died at Kiriath Arba that is Hebron in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went into mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. I just want to make a couple observations about this sorrowful moment. Notice, first, Abraham and Sarah, as important as they were to the fulfillment of God's redemptive purposes, we're not exempt from the curse of death that has come upon all mankind as a result of Adam and Eve's fall. And this is important because this is a message for all of us who have faith in Jesus Christ. We are not excused from the curses that were applied to Adam and Eve. We inherit them. And what are those curses? We see them in the life of Abraham and Sarah. To the woman, God says, "I'm going to give you pain in childbearing." Your desire shall be for your husband. You're going to try to challenge his headship over you. The husband, you're going to have trouble producing fruit. You're going to have trouble in your labor no matter how much you love your work, no matter how much you love your family, there's going to be toil that is a part of that process. And Abraham and Sarah, compared to Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve, they represent the fall. They bring us into sin and misery. Abraham and Sarah bring us into blessing and promise, but life of faith that they exhibit is still tinged by death, the penalty for sin, it's still tinged by the thorns and thistles of life, and we still face them today. And particularly as we reflect upon Sarah's death, we have to pause and think that death comes to all of us. And I really have to just force you to think about this today, because we are a young crowd. Some of you here are greying a little bit, but even you are not that old. A good measure of how, whether a membership of the congregation is prepared to understand death, to face it, is to compare the amount of funerals with the amount of weddings and childbirth. And we did have one. We lost our brother Jim, who we grieved and celebrated his life in the past month, but we are about 30:1, I think when it comes to marriage and child rearing compared to death, and that is not normal. I looked across the internet for urban churches that preached on this topic, you see them preach through Genesis 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25. We don't talk about death a lot, and we don't see it. We don't engage with people who are older than us. We're oftentimes just younger than us and... I remember I moved here out of college in 2010, and I was here for two and a half years. And in that period of life, that whole time I was in Boston, I don't remember engaging one senior citizen or one child, and that's pathetic. But for a lot of you that is realistic. A lot of you had your first baby, and that's the first baby you've ever touched. And we don't come near... Where we are, we avoid a lot of phases of life. We have to see our church. We have a bias towards youth. And as pastors, we are relatively young, too. And so, we need to be realistic that our perspective is limited, and we need to think about death. And it's reality. It is coming whether we think about it or not, whether we are prepared for it or not, it is coming. Our brother Jim was 30 years old, and he went relatively suddenly last month. And we have to be prepared for it. And I prepared my sermon, I avoided this section. I didn't want to talk about it, but we really need to be thinking about death. And at Mosaic, we want to be known for good teaching. We want to be known for great life-giving community, care and accountability, membership that builds one another up and loves one another as Christ taught us. But we want to be able to grieve with each other and mourn with each other well. We want to show that to the world. And so, are you prepared to do that if you're honest with yourself? When you think about, Am I ready to meet my maker? Am I ready to face death? If other people in my life died? Am I prepared for their loss? If somebody close to me had someone close to them die, would I know how to support them? Would I be able to minister to them in the name of Jesus Christ in such a period. And we need to be building ourselves up. We need to be studying this. We need to be asking the Lord for wisdom and preparing our hearts for these moments, these situations. He providentially prepared me for this sermon, and we need to be doing that. And I am an intense dude. I grew up in a family with a mom who was sick. Before I was born, my dad survived at cancer that one in 30 people survive. Then he had a heart attack the year I was born. I was the fourth child. My siblings blame me. After that, since then, my mom had four bouts with cancer between age zero and 20 for me. I grew up just with this newness, just a lot of sickness, and praise God, they're both still alive and really thriving by God's grace. A lot of you can't say that about your parents who've had similar struggles. But there's a closeness to death that I actually know. And I actually like to embrace it, and sometimes I can get on the edge of morbidity. Like when you're close to death, you see life as it really is. You see that life is fleeting. That your health is going to come and go, that you can't count on tomorrow. And there's a freedom in that, and it's the emotions that you experience are pure. The grief, the sadness, the fear of it. And to a degree, we need to embrace that, because this is like a valley of vision for us. When we focus upon the inevitability of death, we see who we are as sinners before a mighty holy God. And there's benefit to staying there, to embracing it. And we need to do that. And when we as those who claim to have hope in Jesus Christ, when we have people who we know loved ones have losses in their family, but they don't have the hope of Jesus Christ. Imagine going through that valley, being in that valley without that hope. And that's where we can step in. The best times in my life of the past 10 or 15 years have been engagement with my family. That's best periods of communication with my family have been around death. The conversations are not shallow, they're real. And that's a time for us to give gospel hope. And so, we need to be thinking about this. We need to be able to grieve ourselves and to support. As Christians, we should be able to face this grief a little better. And so, I just want to pause and look. Abraham in verse two, it says "He went in to mourn for Sarah and weep for her." This is a beautiful scene. Here we see Abraham's love for Sarah, and his grief for her loss put on display, and this is after a lot. Remember Egypt, Abraham gave her to Pharaoh. He gave her away to Abimelech. The struggles with Hagar, the struggles getting pregnant, living intense the last six decades. We don't know at this point what happened between them the last 37 years since Isaac's birth. But what we see here is a beautiful picture of them together on their last day, and they made it, and we see Abraham grieving. We live in a society that places so much emphasis on the first day, but very little on the last day. A key theme of Scripture is that in Christianity, it doesn't matter where you come from, or where you started, but where you're headed in relationship with Jesus Christ. The same is certainly true for marriage. How many of you are working and preparing for the last day together with your spouse? How many of you are working on yourselves as individuals within a marriage in order to help your marriage mature and grow and be prepared for these stages of life? And singles, you're not excluded. You need to see that the habits, the devotional life, the person you're praying to become in the power of the Lord, all of that work you're doing now could impact a relationship for eternity. And so, it's clear Abraham truly loves his wife. He mourns the loss of his wife. And men, we need to take note here. Who is this guy? He's a guy who charged into battle, a man who has after age 75, a man who is the head of a huge household, a guy who got stuff done. He exhibits that he's both tough and tender. He's okay with crying. He's okay going through the proper grieving process. Just personal story with one of my earliest encounters with grief was when one of my dogs died. And I remember my dad picked me up from baseball, and we unexpectedly, we're driving a teammate home. And my dad's like, just breaking down, his voice is quivering. I can see him shaking. And I'm embarrassed, my dad hold it together. And he's just crying because our dog died, the family dog died. I was embarrassed at the time, but I'm thankful that as a young man, I had a dad who cried at appropriate times. As Christian men, we can't be breeding a form of stoicism and women, some women fall into this. But we can't be breeding a form of stoicism. Go to the Psalms, see the balance in the emotions of King David's life. Look at Abraham here. And just with grief, the best approach is, get it out. In the appointed season when you have time, get it out. And if we don't get it out, our grief tends to come out and project itself in different ways. Anger, anxiety, bitterness, fatigue, depression, addiction. So we need to get it out. I know before I get away from talking about the last day, I need to emphasize that we can't be surprised by death financially. As part of the grieving process, there are a lot of costs and practical elements to funerals, and we just don't process this stuff here at Mosaic that often. Paying for a burial plot, a tombstone, preparation and embalming of the body. If you get cremated, that's a substantial cost. Clothing, transportation of the body, limo services, funeral home fees and services, fees for a service venue, memorial service venue, bulletins, picture pronounce. What's your theology of life insurance? What's your plan for inheritance distribution? I am saying here, I am not ready with all of this stuff, but we need to be preparing ourselves for that, and that is a part. The more prepared we are, the more we can actually grieve in the moment at the appointed season. And before we leave the section, I have to bring out one really important point. Scripture doesn't forbid us from mourning. That's what I'm hammering home. But the scriptures warn us against grieving as those who have no hope. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 says, "But we do not want you to be uninformed brothers about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do, who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep." We need to grieve, but we can't overindulge ourselves in it. The best way to just protect against that is grieve within the context of community. Invite loving. Don't be beyond the loving nudges and gentle correction in your period of grief. A lot of people assume a position of self-pity. I don't need to listen to anyone. We need to trust our loving brothers and sisters in Christ as they help support us and coach us in the season, and you can coach them too. So just Abraham's sorrow, we must process sorrow. He gives us a good example of it here. We want to do so as one who has hope set firmly and our Lord. Next, I'm going to talk about Abraham sojourn. We've considered the sorrow, but verses three and four go into, "And Abraham rose up from before his dead and said to the Hittites, "I'm a sojourner and foreigner among you. Give me property among you for burying place that I may bury my dead out of my sight." So the Hittites, they were the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, the land that God had promised to Abraham. And notice that when Sarah died, Abraham had to ask them for a place to bury his dead. He was a 137-year-old foreigner who didn't have a single piece of land in Canaan. Some of us panic. We think about, we're married, we have families here in Brooklyn. We won't have a property for another 10 years. And then what are the prices going to be? God didn't give Abraham a piece of land until later in this passage at 137. Just what faith, what patience in the Lord. This is significant that Abraham doesn't have land. When we consider the promises that God made to him concerning land. God promised that he would have many descendants. He provided Isaac. God promised his descendants would possess Canaan. But as of yet, he's a sojourn. So the thing to point about Abraham, is that God's promises were enough. Last chapter, the sacrifice scene of Isaac, he didn't get sacrificed, but Abraham was willing to go forward with the sacrifice of his son according to God's command, because he trusted that God could raise him from the dead. That's what Scripture tells us. Abraham showed he had a firm faith in God's power to raise the dead. And now, just Abraham was a sojourner, an alien. And God didn't give him a piece of land, but he believed his promises didn't end with his wife. Do you believe that? So many of you wait for something from God for a day. I prayed about it. He didn't ask. I'm going to step in and make my plan. I do that. Abraham still waiting, and he believed God was going to do far more for him in the future and eternity. As the author of Hebrews says, "Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, these patriarchs, matriarchs of the church were waiting, they were desiring a better country that is a heavenly one. That's in Hebrews 11:16. Abraham, he was looking for the city which has foundations whose architect and builder is God. Abraham's faith, he looked beyond the grave to the promises of God to send the Savior and through him to bless the nations. And what's important to point out is that Abraham makes this decision to pursue a plot of land in the land of Canaan while his relatives in his homeland were thriving. Remember last week, the end of chapter 22, there's this seemingly confusing section. Now after these things, it was told to Abraham, behold Milcah, that's his sister-in-law also is born children to your brother, Nahor. Huz his firstborn, Buz his brother, Kemuel the father of Aram." Ultimately, these verses say that Rebecca was born. But in this piece Scripture, it also reveals Abraham could have gone back to his family, but at this moment, though God's promises haven't come fully true, he doubles down and pursues this grave site in God's promised land in the land that God has provided for him. Sometimes a lot of us, he's renouncing those ties. This is a final step in saying, God, I am fully on board with you. And some of us we like to leave escape routes in our life. And to go forward in faith we need to just get ourselves implanted. And that we see that every year this time of year at Mosaic with the transience of the city changing of the school year. You're driven by the academic calendar, but if you've been here, the Lord is raising you up. He's maturing you. He's converted you here growing you in the faith, giving you a church community where you're being sharpened and challenged and serving. I challenge you, get rid of those escape routes, trust him. I can't say that's the will of God. But a lot of us need that challenge. As Abraham was a sojourner, as our father, all of us in Christ are sojourners. I think a lot of us here in Boston get this, but we need to be careful, just being among the minority, the extreme minority of people who believe the Bible that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. We get this, but we spend a lot of time sitting around and licking our wounds, talking about how hard it is, talking about how there aren't any singles to choose from, talking about how raising kids in the faith here is so difficult. I'm guilty of that in the past week. Listen to Peter's words. 1 Peter two, "Beloved, I urge you sojourners and exile to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation." We don't just seek to accept the position of sojourner begrudgingly. We need to own it. This doesn't mean we're forbidden from acquiring property or building wealth. But it does mean that we're to live in a way on this earth, always aware that this is not our home, where to store up our treasures, not on Earth, but on heaven. If we get too close and comfortable with the world, we should check ourselves. James 4:47 says, "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?" Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the scripture says he yearns jealously over the Spirit that He has made to dwell in us. But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves therefore, to God. We need to ask God to give us that Dally Grace to abound in every good work for his name for His glory to live in this tension between heaven and earth. And when we accept that there's freedom in that, the expectations, the lofty expectations of keeping up with the world and their expectations for the nuclear family go away. Accruing wealth is not the solution to all of our problems, but an abiding, steadfast faith in the Lord is what satisfies, and just trusting him day-to-day. He cares for the lilies of the field, the birds of the air, how much more will he care for his children? Lastly, I want to talk about Abraham's Slice. And again, I said earlier, the acquisition of this slice of land in Caanan is described in verses three through 20. I'm not going to read all this out loud again. It's really redundant, which is just characteristic of the language. But the thing that Moses the author of this book wants to highlight, these are only precursors to the story here in this chapter. Notice the respect Abraham show to the Hittites. We have great lessons here to learn how to sojourn from our Father in the faith. There's a nuance to the way in which We sojourn, to the way in which we pursue holiness in God and live in the world. We can be in the world but not of it. Abraham models this for us. Romans 12:14 says "Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord." That's what we're to pursue. That's what Abraham pursues here. 1 Peter 3:13-17 says, "Now, who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is good. But even if you should suffer for righteousness sake, you will be blessed." Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts, honor Christ the Lord as holy. Always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. Yet do with gentleness and respect having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good if that should be God's will, than for doing evil. Christian sojourners are to give a reason for the hope that is in them yet do it with respect and gentleness. Or even have a good conscience in our treatment of the non-Christians around us, and even those who persecute us. Abraham in this verse six, he shows us this, notice the honor that he shows to them, the respect he shows from them, and the honor that they showed to him. Verse six, "Here as my Lord, you're a prince of God among us. Bury your dead in the choices of our tombs." They view him as a prince of God. They know his reputation that precedes him in the land, and they offer him this generous offer. No one will withhold from you his tomb to hinder you from burying your dead. And again, in verse 11 Ephron says, "No, my Lord. Hear me, I give you the field and I give you the cave that isn't it. In the sight of the sons of my people, I give it to you. Bury your dead." And this is a bit of a cultural dance. This is haggling at the gate with the elders and theologians do argue over whether these were sincere offers for him to take the field freely. Really, the honorable way for him to respond was not to accept the field for free. But all the commentaries agree that this treatment that they are giving him, the way that they are engaging him, according to their cultural norms was an acknowledgement of who he was. They were paying respect to the reputation that preceded him. They see him as a blessed man, a prince of God. They saw that he treated him with respect and they therefore treated him as they did. And we need to learn from that, especially in this season where our society is polarized in a lot of different ways and has been for a couple of years now. There's a narrow path that we as Christians can walk between those poles that we see in the world. We stand on the truth. Notice Abraham spoke with sincerity. What did he say he wanted? He just said he wanted a plot to bury his wife, his dead. We as the church, what do we say we want? We say we want to be able to worship our Lord freely, partake in the elements freely, engage in church disciplines for more holy body freely, and we stand on that. And then we pray that the Lord uses our witness. We pray that the Lord sees our love for one another, and that we are soft and light where we are. And Abraham is a model for that in his faith. There is this nuanced way of walking. And here's how it resulted. In verse 11 we read, "He bowed down before the people in land, he said, he found in the hearing of the people and but if you'll hear me, I give you the price of the field. Accept it from me that I may bury my dead there." Ephron mentioned named a price 400 shekels of silver. It's hard to know that if this was a good price or not, but very likely that this was an exorbitant price. But we see here Abraham, regardless of the price respectfully pays to be at peace with Ephron and all of the people of his city. He valued this opportunity to bury his wife properly, and in the midst of his grief, he was by pursuing the tomb this aggressively, he was making a statement I believe in a God who is going to resurrect me and my wife one day. I want to buy this outright to procure it so that you don't trick me later and take it from me. But this is an act of faith for him before the Hittites. This is his witness to them showing his face to the Lord. And he's able to do this peacefully at relatively little cost to him as a rich wealthy man. So think about the ways, how are you engaging with the world? are you engaging in this polarized state? Or are you finding ways to be at peace but still be holy before the world? And it's hard. And this is, we need wisdom. There's anxiety that just arises when we process what does that look like, especially today, especially in this season, after the past year and a half. But the Lord promises to meet us Dally, and that we need to trust Him. We need to abide in Him. We need to saturate our lives with his word and just keep walking. We can do over activity just trying to enforce our mark in the world. We can be paralyzed under activity, or we can just walk forward with abiding faith, trusting that the Lord will care for us, provide for us, meet our needs, follow through on all of his promises and use us for His glory as we stand on his word. And so, I think about how does this impact how you engage with the world? And so, Abraham, he does in the end, get this field and this is a very specific description of it. It just emphasizing God gives him a slice. So the field of Ephron in Machpelah, which was to the East of Mamre, the field with the cave that was in it, and all the trees that were in the field throughout this whole area was made over to Abraham as a possession in the presence of the Hittites, before all who went at in at the gate of a city. After this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah, East of Mamre the same as Hebron in the land of Canaan. The field in the cave that is in it was made to Abraham, deeded to Abraham as a property for a burying place by the Hittite." And so, Abraham at this point, God promised him that his descendants would be like the stars in the heavens, the sand on the seashore, the dust on Earth, nations would come from him. But what did he see? He only saw his son Isaac. He was promised that the land of Canaan would be his. But what did he get possession of? Only one sliver of land to be used as a burial ground. We could emphasize how little of the fulfillment of God's promises that Abraham saw. But we must also emphasize the fact that the Lord did give him something. He blessed him. He gave him at least a taste of his fulfillment. And you got to think Moses wrote this text before the Israelites were going into the promised land engaging the natives, the locals to conquer this land that was promised to them. God has given Abraham an assurance of, "I am going to follow through and give you your eternal inheritance. I'm going to give you this piece. Your family will get this land." He's communicated to the Israelites, "You will see I gave Abraham this land. I will give you a piece of. I will follow through my promises." And to us, he's saying to us through your faith in Jesus Christ, you will get there. And this is how God, he chooses to accomplish His plan of redemption and little additions over time, little snippets of history. It's like a farmer sowing seed. God gave the promise to Abraham. It's like a farmer scattering seed on the field and on the earth. And when Abraham sees Isaac, he's blessed to see this fruit come about. Just imagine how exciting, how just any of you who garden, just how invigorating it is to see these little elements of the Lord's promises come true, and how invigorating in the faith to continue to strive forward through the sorrow, through the thorns and thistles of death, of life through the sojourning. And it gave Abraham hope to continue on and gave the Israelites hope to continue on, gives us hope to continue on. And this is how the Lord has treated us. God gave Abraham a slice. He saw a slice of land, a tiny fulfillment, tiny taste, but the Lord has done the same for us. This is true and that Christ has come. We haven't received our final inheritance or final fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham to us, but he's given the down payment, a deposit Ephesians 1:13-14 says, "In him, you also when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory." And we need to have seen the first fruits of new creation, when Christ rose from the... And furthermore, we have given for all those who know that the Holy Spirit has awakened our heart and hearts to see our sincere need for Jesus as our Lord and Savior. We know that as a deposit of the promises to be fulfilled. Furthermore, we've seen the first fruits of the new creation, the resurrection when Jesus rose from the grave. The application for us is just like father Abraham. We get to see the new heaven and earth on the last day, and just as he did for Abraham, the Lord has graciously provided us with a foretaste at down payment. When we have our sorrowful days, when sojourning gets difficult, when the reality of death gives us fear and anxiety, we need to believe that the Lord will fulfill those promises. We need to look up from our sorrow and gaze upon the gospel that tells us that Jesus Christ did come and die for us and he did rise from our dead and delivered death its final blow. While we may face challenges in this life, our eternity in the presence of God is secured. What do we have as a reward for our faith? And what do we have access to right now in a spiritual sense to close. Hebrews 12:18 "For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken, you've come to the presence of God as depicted on Mount Zion. But you have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels and festal gathering and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous, made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel." Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that like our father, Abraham, that your promises would be enough. We pray that we would be encouraged by your generous, just sprinklings of reminders of what our inheritance will look like. We thank you for the courage that you gave Abraham and Sarah to walk faithfully until the end. Lord, we pray, give us courage. Give us faith. Give us a biding faith, trust in you, to guide us day-to-day that we may persevere until the end to your glory. We pray all these things in Jesus name. Amen.

Faith Under Pressure

June 20, 2021 • Genesis 22

Audio Transcript: This media has been available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. Good morning. Welcome to Mosaic. My name is Jan, one of the pastors here at Mosaic. If you're new, if your visiting, we'd love to connect with you. We do that through the connection card either virtually in the app or in the website. If you fill it out, we'll be sure to get in touch with you over the course of the week. We also have an app that you can just grab in the back. If you fill it out, just toss it on the white box or leave it at the Welcome Center. Happy Father's Day to all the fathers in the house. Any fathers in the house? Raise your hand. Happy Father's Day. Three. That's many Mosaic for you, many Mosaic. I love Father's Day. I've got four daughters. Praise God. I love Father's Day very much because I don't have to do anything except get one person a gift, and that's different from all the other holidays. One question word before we get into the sermon. So, when we prepare our sermon calendar, we do it about six months in advance. What's important to us is just going through the text. The text is what sets up our preaching calendar. We just go chapter by chapter, verse by verse. That's what we do. We are not a church that plans their sermon calendar around fake hallmark holidays. No offense, none taken, but we get to Father's Day and we're at Genesis 22, and it's the story of Abraham being told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. What does that have to do with Father's Day? You're about to see everything. I just mentioned that because I see God's divine orchestration and little details like this like when we were at Genesis 19 the week right before Pride Month starts. It's just God showing, "I'm with you, guys. I'm with this church. The Holy Spirit is working in and through you." So, for me, that's really encouraging. I just wanted to share that with you. Would you please pray with me over the preaching of God's holy word? Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are a good Father and we love you for that. We thank you that your goodness is poured out on us and your grace and your mercy, but not only. You pour out your grace and mercy on us often in a way that doesn't feel like grace and mercy, doesn't feel like a blessing because, often, you train us. You test us in order to train us to make us stronger, stronger in life, stronger in spiritual warfare, stronger when the next battle comes. We are even more prepared. Therefore, we can have greater victories, therefore, bringing you greater glory. We thank you Lord that you love us so much that you gave your son Jesus Christ for us, that you yourself, you didn't just allow this to happen. You weren't just a passive bystander as your son was being crucified. No, no. You personally evolved, that you put your son to death because that was the only way that we rebels could be forgiven, could be reconciled with you, could be adopted in to your family. It's the only way that the orphans could be named. We thank you Jesus that you were willing to do that, that you submitted perfectly to the will of God. You are the only one who perfectly did that. We thank you Holy Spirit that you take that gospel, that you take that truth and you make us so alive today that our hearts are on fire. I pray Holy Spirit, set more hearts on fire today. Draw people to yourself. Continue to build your church here in this desolate place. We pray that your kingdom flourishes. Bless our time in the holy scriptures. Pray all of this in the beautiful of Jesus Christ. Amen. Title of sermon is Faith Under Pressure. A reality of life, a truth of the universe, and a truth of holy scripture that's at the center of everything is that God is. God is. Whether you like it or not, God is. Whether you like it or not, God does what God wills. Whether you like it or not, God is God over you, and God has demands over you. He demands things of you. What he demands of you is faith in him, a true faith that works itself out in true love. He demands faith. He demands love. He demands obedience. Whether you like it or not, God requires our faith be demonstrated to him in particular when it's the hardest, in particular when we are under pressure. This is the kind of faith that overcomes the world. Faith and obedience are two sides of the same coin. If you believe in God, you have to love God because true faith always leads to true love in God, and you can't say, "I believe in God and I love God," if you don't obey God in particular when it's the hardest. You don't need to exercise faith when things are easy. Thou shalt eat chocolate. You don't need to exercise faith. Thou shalt live any way you want. Thou shalt be the ruler of giving guideline and moral laws for yourself. Thou shalt decide for yourself what is the right thing for you. Thou shalt do what feels good to yourself. Thou shalt live however you want and you will still inherit heaven however you define it. That's not true, and that doesn't need true faith. Now, true faith is exercised when the God of universe demands that we sacrifice that which we love most, and he demands that we sacrifice ourselves, self-denial, our own passions, our own dreams for ourselves, denial of personal desires, and that's what we have with Abraham. Abraham begins to understand that God is God, that God is God. I'll give you an SAT word, maybe a GRE, I don't know. God is peremptory, peremptory. God does not allow room for refusing or denying his will. No. If you do refuse or deny his will, he is going to bring consequences upon you. That's where we are beginning, and that's really the only way of understanding what's about to happen. What's about to happen, it seems cruel. What's about to happen, it seems incredulous. How could you God take a man Abraham, promise him a son, make him wait 25 years and then give him that son, and watch him love that son for over a dozen years as the most precious thing, the apple of his eye, and then go to him and say, "Abraham, I want you to take your son and I want you to offer him up as an offering to me." To really understand this text, you need to understand that Abraham loves God. That's really where we are. Now, what does this have to do with Father's Day? Absolutely everything. I'll tell you just from my personal experience of having a dad and being a dad, four daughters, the absolute most important thing that I can do, the absolute greatest gift that I can give to my daughters is to love God more than them, is to love God more than their mom, more than my wife, is to love God more than anything, and obey him because when I love God and I obey him, they see me making sacrifices because I love God and because I want to obey him and they're like, "You know what, Dad? Your words actually mean something, and I'm going to listen. You have an authority and a respect that you have earned with me, your child, because you are a great child of God the Father." Absolutely, every fathers, the moms or the dads, that's how you become a great parent by submitting to God the Father, walking with God the Father, and then doing what God the Father does to you with your kids. With that said, we're going to read Genesis 22. I'm going to read the whole text because this is one of the greatest text in all of human literature. As you read it, it feels like we're standing on a holy ground. Would you look at the text with me? Genesis 22:1. "After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, 'Abraham!' and he said, 'Here am I.' He said, 'Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.' So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to the young men, 'Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.' And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, 'My father!' And he said, 'Here am I, my son.' He said, 'Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?' Abraham said, 'God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.' So they went both of them together. When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand, and took the knife to slaughter his son, but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, 'Abraham, Abraham!' And he said, 'Here am I.' 'Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.' And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked up, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place The Lord will provide; as it is said to this day, 'On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.' The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said, 'By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth bless because you have obeyed my voice.' So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham lived in Beer-sheba. Now after these things it was told to Abraham, 'Behold, Milcah also has borne children to your brother Nahor: Uz his first-born, Buz his brother, Kemu′el the father of Aram, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethu′el.' Bethu′el, father of Rebekah. These eight Milcah bore to Nahor, Abraham's brother. Moreover, his concubine, whose name was Reumah, bore Tebah, Gaham, Tahash, and Ma′acah." This is the reading of God's holy, inherent and fallible authoritative word. May he write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Three points to frame up our time: the test, the test passed, and the test rewarded. In verse one, we're told that God has come to test Abraham, "After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, 'Abraham!' and he said, 'Here I am.' After these things, after what things? After Abraham has walked with God for two and a half decades waiting for the promised son. Finally, the son is born, Isaac. Here, Abraham and Sarah are laughing. Isaac's name means laughter. They're having a good time. They plant a tree, meaning that they're settling down. They're rooted in their community. It feels like Abraham has retired. It feels like Abraham has finally arrived, has finally passed all the tests that God has for him. No. That was just a setup. That was just a preparation for the ultimate test. "After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, 'Abraham!' and he said, 'Here I am." Information about this is communicated to us by the narrator. It's not communicated to Abraham. Abraham doesn't know it's a test. It's not communicated to him that God never really intended for Abraham to actually kill his son, to actually burn his son's body on the altar. We're told that God does test. Why does God test? God tests us. He tests us to grow our faith. There's a difference between testing and temptation. God tests us to grow our faith. Satan tempts us to destroy our faith. Often, it's the same event. Whatever the event is in our life, God is using, trying to use that event to test us in order to train us, you pass the test, you just got trained, you're stronger now, and Satan is trying to destroy our faith with a temptation. What temptation? To not take the test and say, "God, I don't want the test. It's too hard. I don't want to endure this pain. I want to take the easy way out." Verse two he said, "Take your son." This is the test. "Take your son, your only son, whom you love." God the Father knows that Abraham is a good father who love this son, been waiting for this son, "whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah." By the way, this just came to me. More teenagers in the United States have cellphones than have fathers. It's a fact. That's a fact, that have fathers that love them. To be a father that loves your children it starts with fidelity to the Lord and fidelity to your wife. That's where it starts. "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you." None of this really makes sense. This text doesn't really make sense unless you understand the hidden secret in the wording, in the Hebrew wording to show you that this isn't just an account in Abraham's life, that this is the culmination of everything that God has been teaching Abraham. How do we know that? Because twice God comes and tells Abraham the same phrase, "Go there forth. Go forth." Twice that's used in the Hebrew bible, once when God calls Abraham for the first time in Genesis 12:1 and the second time here in Genesis 22, "Go forth to the land I'll show you." This is Genesis 12:1. Now, the Lord said to Abraham, "Go from your country, and your kindred, and your father's house to the land that I will show you." In Genesis 22, it's the same exact language. These are the bookends of the biography of the faith of Abraham. This underscores the deliberate use of parallelism here, that God is calling Abraham to do the same thing that he did that time just on a greater scale. Abraham was called in chapter 12 to go from his father's house and not told precisely where. Here, God says, "Go. I'm going to you. Just keep going." The drama is heightened by a series of terms. In chapter 12, Abraham was told to, "Leave your country." He's told to, "Leave your family and leave your father." God said, "I want to see, Abraham, if you love me more than your family, if you love me more than your country, if you love me more than your father, go. I'll be a father to you." Here, Abraham in chapter 22 was told, "Leave. Take your son, your only son, the son you love. Abraham, do you love me more than your father? Abraham, do you love me more than your son?" That's the test here. In both cases, we see Abraham responds in faith and was rewarded with the promise of glorious posterity. In both cases, we have the record of Abraham building an altar at the end. The word son is used 10 times in the chapter and together with only son and the son whom you love. It just emphasizes the severity of the test. This is a real test. Abraham understands, understands that he needs to act. One of the reasons why a lot of people don't understand Christianity is because a lot of people try to take Christianity like they take a class in college that they audit. There's different class levels. So, in my college, there's a class that you take and you're graded. You can also take classes for pass/fail if it's for a grade. Obviously, you're working harder in any class. You're trying to absorb every single piece of information in the class, in the reading because you don't know what the test will try to expose from your knowledge base. You're paying attention to absolutely everything because you know you will have to use this information. Pass/fail, it would be foolish for you to do slightly more than just enough to pass. Then audit the class, you just go for the entertainment. You just go for the little piece where the professor just goes off the cuff and just tells war stories and jokes and you do that. Then when your mind actually has to focus and you have to do the hard work of learning material, your mind is gone. A lot of people, the problem you don't get what you're supposed to from Christianity, from the faith, and from following God is because you're trying to audit. You show up to church just for a good time or perhaps you'll meet somebody, and then perhaps you'll get the group of friends, you're trying to audit. Then when God's like, "Hey, auditors, you got to take a test," all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, I wasn't ready for that one," and then your faith, it crashes and burns. So, that's my little rant. You're welcome. Abraham was ready for the test. He was ready because he's been walking with God for 25 years. The Lord isn't asking him here. He's telling him, "Take your son." How old was Isaac at this time? The word for boy is the same word that's used of Ishmael in the previous chapter in verse five and 12. He's probably older. He's probably 15-17. The Lord says, "Take this son of your old age " life form, the son whose birth was a miracle, the son for whom you're willing to do everything and anything. He's the apple of your eye, the son upon whom you put all of your hopes and dreams for the future, 'You are all my hopes and dreams. You are the fulfillment of everything.'" God shows up and says, "Take the son. I want you to sacrifice him," to a man who's already lost a son. God's already told him, "Send Ishmael away." So, because of God, he's already lost one son and it looks like he's going to lose a second son. How does Abraham feel? The text doesn't say. It doesn't tell us one detail of how he feels. Obviously, his heart break. Obviously, his heart is torn asunder. Obviously, there's shock and there's numbness. "What on earth, Lord, are you feeling? How can you call me to do this?" Are you calling me to child sacrifice like the Canaanite gods, like the American gods, sacrificing millions of babies in abortion? Is that what you're calling me to, God?" No, no. Abraham knows deep inside no. No. The first word that God game me, and there's a second word that God gave me, and there's the middle that I just don't understand. The first word that God gave me is it's through Isaac that your offspring is going to be blessed. He is the child of the promised. He gets that. Then he gets to another word and says, "You need to sacrifice the son." Abraham looks here and says, "I don't understand the connection between the two, but you, God, have always been faithful and fulfilling, all of your promises. I'll do what you tell me to do. You've given me marching orders, and I'm going to start marching." What a sleepless, troubled, tortured night he must have had. God probably came to him in a dream. How did he know it was God? He's heard God's voice. He's walked with God for 25 years. He knows what GOd's voice sounds like. Here, we see Abraham at night, get a glimpse of the awful struggle of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he's under so much duress, so much pressure, so much anxiety of what's about to happen, praying to God, "Let this cup pass from me." So much pressure that the capillaries on his face are bursting, and he's sweating blood. Jesus Christ, he knows what's coming. He said, "God, don't ask me to do this. There's got to be another way. Not my will but yours be done." In Genesis 22:3, "Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey." Rising early shows promptness, a resolution despite the gut-wrenching, heartbreaking difficult of the assignment, he said, "God told me to do it. I'm going to do it." "Saddles his donkey. Took two of his men and his son Isaac and cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him." We can see in the order of what's happening how distraught he is. We see a glimpse of his mind. First, he saddles the donkey, then he calls the servants, the young men, and then he cuts the wood. It should be the other way around. It should be you call the to help you chop the wood and then you saddle the donkey. What we see is perhaps he's so distraught he can't think straight or perhaps he's postponing the most painful part of the preparation, but what we don't see here is him pushing back at God. What we don't see here is the Abraham that's debating God, negotiating with God. When God told him, "I'm going to punish and condemn Sodom and Gomorrah," we don't see any negotiation. This right here, I'm going to give you a working definition of God because everybody worships. Everybody worships. Everybody has a god or a lot of gods. Working definition of god is what's your non-negotiable. What's your non-negotiable? What's that one thing you can't touch this. If God tells you, "Hey, I want you to sacrifice that thing from your life. I want you to cut that thing out of your life. I want you to mortify that thing in your life," and you say, "God, no." Well, that's your real god. It could be sex. It could be power. It could be a relationship. It could be your career. It could be money. Whatever it is, that's your real god. What we see with Abraham here is God has finally become his non-negotiable. When God speaks, I'm not even going to negotiate. Do I understand? I do not understand, but I do understand that his ways are above my ways, greater than my ways, and often counterintuitive to my ways. God's mind isn't just higher than ours. God loves to do the counterintuitive. God's wisdom is the opposite of human wisdom. So, he does it, and he gets the marching orders and he kept going. Verse four, "On the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar." Just think about this. Just go there. Three days. Three days with your son. You know what you have decided to do. You're walking with your beloved son for three days just having conversations with him about life, about God, "Dad, isn't God so great? Dad, isn't God just so incredible on how much he's blessed us?" Sitting around the campfire at night before they go to sleep while looking at the stars. Abraham's thinking, "God, you promised me, I'm going to have more descendants than the stars in the heavens, and the one descendant that you've given me, you're telling me to kill." Having that conversation, savoring the last moments together, protracted, sustain obedience, step after step after step after step. Finally, he gets to this place. We're not told how he knows this. Perhaps divine intuition that God gives him or a sign. Verse five, "Then Abraham said to his young men, 'Stay here with the donkey. I and the boy will go over there and worship and come back to you.'" You read this and you don't notice much going on here if you just read it from the perspective of the Old Testament, but the New Testament commenting on this verse points out the fact that Abraham had said to his servants, "I and the boy. We together are going to go up to the mountain. We together are going to worship and we together are going to come back." It's not even just faith. It's faith that's morphed in the knowledge, "I know this is fact that we're coming back together, and unless we're together, we're not coming back." Hebrews 11:17-19, the commentary, "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 shall your offspring be named." He considered that God was able to raise him from the dead, from which figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. Abraham, he knew. He didn't know all the details, but he knew God was going to work it out. He knew that even if he actually killed his son Isaac, which he had decided to do in his heart, he knew that God could bring him back. He believed in the resurrection. This is before he had the witness of the New Testament that God brought his son back from the dead, that God brought Lazarus back from the dead, that God brought people back from the dead. Abraham had no witness, he just had the fact the omnipotent God of the universe can do whatever he wants. He has the power. Also, he's faithful to his word. Abraham had been told by God more than once, "It's Isaac. It's Isaac. He is the fulfillment of the promise, and Abraham's faith was like those of who believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead as Hebrews tells us. Did Abraham understand what God had ordered him to do? No. He didn't understand at all. He couldn't know what was about to pass, but he knew that God is good and God is great. It's one thing to sacrifice your son, to pierce his heart with your knife because you know that is the most painless way to go. To torch the wood and to see your son going up in flames and with him all of your hopes and dreams. That's one thing. It's another thing of doing, of making the greatest sacrifice that God calls you to make knowing that the resurrection is true, and because the resurrection is true, every single sacrifice that we make for God is absolutely worth. This is the Christian life, trusting God to be true to his word no matter the circumstance, no matter your bafflement at God, "How can this be the plan?" No matter your bafflement at God of how you're managing the things in the world, no matter your ability to explain. You know who he is. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your understanding. God often does things that are difficult for us to train us, to strengthen us, to make us better servants of him, and he does that because he's good father. He believes in us. A good father who believes in his kids will make his kids do hard things. It's the father who has no faith in their children and says, "Do whatever you want. I don't care. You want to eat whatever? You eat whatever you want. You don't want to do your homework? Don't do your homework because I don't believe in you." That's not love, that's hate. It's the loving the father. I was with my daughter. We got four daughters. So, I've been putting this stuff into practice for a while, for a decade, actually, so I've got two PhDs on being a dad. I was with my daughter doing Math and because of online school, her teacher basically stopped teaching. That's what happened. Then they went back from remote and in-person and her teacher said, "You know what? I still don't feel comfortable going back in-person." So, they started piping her teacher into the class and no one learned anything. So, I'm doing Math with my daughter. We were doing two numbers times two numbers like 22 times 22, whatever. I'm showing her how to do that, and then she said, "Let's do three number times three numbers." I said, "Oh, great." As soon as we wrote down the number, she starts crying. I said, "Baby," I took a napkin. I said, "Baby, I love you. Look me in the eyes. I love you. Wipe off your tears. This isn't time for emotion. Emotion has nothing to do with Math. Turn off your emotion and turn on your brain." You know what? It worked. It worked. I always thought because I got raised by a Russian dad. My dad's name is Vladimir Viktorovich Vezikov. I thought his parenting style was just Russian, where he made me do hard things. Five years old, I'm like, "Pops, can I have some money for ice cream?" "No, but you can come paint with me in my painting company," at five years old. "Here's a paintbrush. Here's a little roller. Here's a little scraper." He got me the smallest versions of each. "I'm going to make you do hard things." I look back now and it's not because it wasn't a loving thing. It was a Christian thing. He knew God the Father. God the Father sometimes, it feels like he's cruel with us, calls us to do things that are punishingly difficult, and then you do them, and you look back and you say, "Thank you. Thank you, Dad." I think that's what's missing with American parenting, by the way. We cuddle our kids, and then we wonder why when the kids graduate college they have absolutely zero life skills. They're just grown man child, especially with the men. So, free parenting lesson from here. Make your kids do hard things. Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans for welfare and not for evil to give you a future and a hope." A lot of modern American church loves this verse. This is on so many mugs and bumper stickers. We love this church. God has great plan for us, a plan to prosper for us. It's for our welfare, et cetera. Hey, by the way, is God blessing Abraham here in the story? It doesn't feel like a blessing, but he is. It doesn't feel like a blessing. Often, God's greatest blessings don't feel like blessings at the moment. One of the reasons why the American church is where it is is because we've got to the point where feelings overrule faith, that if it doesn't feel good, I don't have to believe it. If I don't like it, then I can cut it out of my bible, and now it's feelings that are really God instead of God telling us to believe and that faith is what controls our feelings. Faith says, "I don't get it." Faith can even say, "I don't like it, but God told me to do it. I'm going to do it because he is God. I'm going to put another one foot in front of the other in obedience nevertheless." Verse six, "Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife so they went both of them together." Here, you can't but think about Jesus Christ with the cross, wooden cross on his back and Isaac here is walking with the wood on his back like a condemned man carrying his cross and Abraham walking along side of him carrying the instruments of death, the fire and the knife. You see the father and the son together as they approach the time and place of sacrifice. Verse seven, "Isaac said to his father Abraham, 'My father,' and he said, 'Here I am, my son,' and he said, 'Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?'" Isaac is thinking. He breaks the oppressive silence and the narrator emphasizes the sacred precious relationship between father and son, where Isaac says, "My father," and these words must have cut and pierced to the heart of Abraham sharper and more painful than Abraham's knife into the heart of Isaac, "My father." Abraham said to him, "God will provide for himself the lamb for burnt offering, my son." So they went both of them together. When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar and there laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. We don't know if there was a conversation here, but Isaac is probably a smart guy and he understands exactly what's happening, "Oh, we're building the altar. There's no lamb. Oh, the wood is there. Oh, it's in order. The fire is ready. Oh, there's ropes. Oh, those ropes are for me." It's fascinating here that Isaac could have run away. We know he's strong enough to run away, old enough to run away because he carried the wood off the mountain. So, if he carried the wood off the mountain, then he's stronger than 100-year-old guy, probably 115-year-old guy. He doesn't do any of that. I used to wrestle with my dad. My dad loves wrestling. He loves combat sports. He's savage, Soviet savage. That's my dad. We used to wrestle all the time. We used to wrestle all through elementary school, just wrestle every day. Then I started high school wrestling. Then 10th grade, my dad just stopped wrestling me, just done. "Pops, you want to wrestle?" "Nope, nope," because what? Because he understood it's changed. The power has changed. Isaac doesn't run away and Isaac doesn't fight his dad. Isaac submits to his father because he sees Abraham submitting to his father. That's what's happening here. So, this isn't just for Abraham. This is for God to show Isaac, "Hey, look how much your dad loves me. Your dad loves me more than he loves you." Now, if you are going to understand what it means to walk with God, you Isaac need to have your own faith where you love me above all else. You see Isaac surrendering himself to death in submission to his father, and in submission to God, and this is nothing short of heroic. Verse 10, "Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son." Takes the knife, most likely the same knife that he used to circumcise his son eight days after he was born. Takes that knife and he's about to plunge it into the heart of his son. Both of them weeping, Abraham willing to sacrifice what he love most, whom he love most, for whom he love most, and then the culmination of the text, the culmination of this whole episode, the story of Abraham, the greatest moment of Abraham's life, but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham," and he said, "Here I am." The angel of the Lord definite article, other times in the narrative where we've seen this we know it's a theophany. It could be argued. It's a Christophany. It could be argued. This is Jesus Christ himself stopping Abraham as he's about to offer up his son. Abraham's passed the test. Verse 12, "He said, 'Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him for now I know that you fear God seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son from me.'" Abraham lifted up his eyes and he looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in the thicket by his horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. "For now I know that you fear God." It doesn't say, "Now I know that you love God more than anything." It says fear God because, ultimately, the way that you love God is to fear God. You can't love God without fearing him with this awe and a reverence because you understand who he is. The more you love him, the more you know who he is. The more you know who he is, the more you fear him. Do you love him? Do you fear him? Do you obey him? That's the connection. Then the key phrase of this text is instead of his son, he takes the ram and he offers it, instead of his son. The ram dies, the son goes free, and this is the very first explicit explanation of substitutionary atonement in all of scripture. Scripture says substitutionary atonement is one life dying for the sake of another, sacrifice of one life for the sake of another or others. The scriptures are about God's work in the life of people. That's true. The scriptures are about obedience to God's commandments. That's true. The scriptures are about how we ought to live by faith to God and obedience. Even if you're not familiar with Christianity, even if you have never read the bible, even if you think that the first books of the bible are Genesis, exorcism, Leviathan, and do the right thing, and if you didn't laugh, then you really don't know the bible. This just proves it. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy. You know that Christianity is about morality, doing the right things, right? You know that. Everybody knows that because that's from the sheer volume of teaching of scripture. That's the thing that's repeated more than anything else, but that's looking at a house and saying, "The most important thing about this house is the house." False. None of that matters without the foundation. The foundation of God's divine intervention in the world to save people. God intervenes and there's various ways to talk about God's intervention, salvation of the world, divine election, regeneration of sinful human hearts by the Holy Spirit, consummation of all things at the second coming of Christ, but central to divine intervention is the work of God on behalf of sinful, unworthy human beings through substitutionary atonement. It's embedded in the religious practices of the law of Moses, of the people of Israel. It was a regular, highly organized essential feature of the Israel's religious life. Sacrifices explicitly for the purpose of atonement to remove sin, achieved through the death of an animal. You literally, you bring an animal to the high priest at the temple and you put your hands on that animal, and you just feel in that moment that this animal is about to be slaughtered because of my sin. You put your hands there. Transfer of guilt goes on that animal that did nothing wrong, did nothing wrong. The animal is slaughtered because of your guilt, because your guilt, your sin, my sin, it deserves death. That's what we deserve. The penalty for sin is death. Then the blood was taken, sprinkled, splashed on the people. So, just graphically emblazoning on their minds that this is what we deserve. As time passes, revelation of reality of substitutionary atonement is advanced. As it's advanced, it reaches its Old Testament culmination, Isaiah 53, but the suffering servant and it reads as if it had been written beneath the cross of Calvary. Isaiah 53:6, "All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him singular the inequity of us." So, a historical person who would bear the weight of the penalty for sin of every single person who would trust in him, who in all of human history could do that? Who's that one person who could do that for absolutely everyone? That's our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. The only one who's truly perfect, the son of God and the son of man who came to reconcile us with God. Verse 14, "So Abraham called the name of that place The Lord will provide; as it is said to this day, 'On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.'" This right here is the first incident of substitutionary atonement that is developed later in Isaiah 53, but, ultimately, we see this culminating in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ comes, starts as ministry. John the Baptizer, his cousin, points to Jesus Christ and said, "That's the Lamb of God who will take on the sins of the world." Jesus lives a sinless life, perfect life, perfect submission to God, perfect fear and reverence to God and love toward people. Then he goes and he's crucified because he claimed to be God. He kept claiming to be God. Finally, he's crucified for that claim, and on the cross, Jesus Christ is bearing the wrath of God that we deserve. He is our substitutionary atonement. He is the Lamb of God that dies instead of us. Jesus in my place, that's the heart of Christianity. So, Christianity isn't what you do for God. That's not where it starts. Christianity is what God did for you. That's always been like that. God goes to Israel and said, "I'm the one that led you out of captivity. Therefore, here's the 10 commandments. I saved you, now this is how to live." What's fascinating here is Abraham is at the absolute righteousness pinnacle of his life. His faith has never been stronger. His obedience has never been more resolute, and even at his greatest moment, he needs substitutionary atonement, which shows us that every single one, no matter how good you are, you can't save yourself from God's wrath for the sin you deserve by atoning for your own sins. Even if you say, "From now on I'm going to live a perfect life and I'm going to do everything I possibly can to atone for all my past sins," that's not Christianity. It's not atonement. It's substitutionary atonement. We need someone else to die for us, and the only one who did it perfectly was Jesus Christ. Then we see point three, the test rewarded. Verse 15, "But the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, 'By myself I have sworn.'" That's fascinating. So, the angel says from the Lord, "The Lord is swearing by himself." Why is the Lord swearing by himself? Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you you?" That's going on. "I swear to me." That's what God is doing. Why is God doing that? Because there is no higher authority than God. God is the highest authority that there is, "By myself I have sworn," declares the Lord. "Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, as the sand that is on the seashore, and your offspring has possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice, because you have obeyed my voice." That's where the stress is laid here. This is how the text ends. The narrative ends with this, "Because you've obeyed my voice." Promise of God's covenant had to be claimed by an obedient faith, which is fascinating because you look at this promise. Word for word, it's the same thing as in Genesis 12. Genesis 12, God came before Abraham had done everything and God made him a promise, "I'm going to promise to bless you. I promise to bless your family. I promise to give you a promised child. I promise to bless the nations. I promise." At the end he says, "Oh, yeah. I'm going to do all of that because you have obeyed my voice." I thought we were saved by grace, through faith, not by works. It's together, friends. If you're saved by grace through faith, then you truly will have works. We're saved grace through faith, but work out your salvation with fear and trembling. The gift is given and it's guaranteed, but you still have to obey and live with obedient faith. My first job out of college was working for a consulting firm in Washington, D. C. My consulting firm, long story, they hired me, but they hired me when one company bought another company and then they hired. So, CGI bought AMS, and then they fired all the people in the internals of AMS and then they realized, "Well, we can't merge. We need these people back." So, I got hired at a time where my boss is like, "Hey, I got fired and then rehired, and I know I'm going to get fired as soon as the transition happens. They hired more people to help with the transition, but, yeah, I don't have any work for you because we're going to just work for a few months." So, long story short. So, I had a lot of time on my hands. So, I started, and I got out of school. I started a painting business on the side. I would clock in to work, come in, shake some hands, drink some coffee, and then I would change my clothes, get in to my paint truck and then go paint some houses. So, I had this tremendous little gig going. It's like people getting multiple jobs during COVID because everyone is working from home. So, I'll just tell you this one story. One guy is like, "Hey, I like you and I trust you. I'm going away. Here's a check for the total amount of what it's going to take to paint my house. It's $4,500. Here's the check right away. I'm leaving. I'll be back in a few weeks." I'm like, "Okay." I just met the guy two days ago. I didn't have a website because I didn't really register my business with anybody. I was like, "I could literally take this check right now and just put it in my account and do nothing." Then I realized, "No. I'm a Christian. I'm not going to do that." I think that's what a lot of people do with Christianity. You're saved by grace through faith. Great. I got the check. My turn to be secure. All my sins are forgiven past, present, and future. You still got to paint the house. That's the point. The point is payment is guaranteed. We got to do the work. It's not just because God demands it, but he does, but it's also because the more that we do, the more that we train our own lives, the more people we can bless, and that's what happened with Abraham. That's what happened with Isaac and later on. The other thing I want to point is where's Jesus in this text. Obviously, Jesus is everywhere in this text. The whole story is a depiction of the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. Actually, the story doesn't make sense apart from the New Testament and apart from the gospel. Apart from the New Testament, God here telling Abraham to literally sacrifice his child, which sounds capricious. This is all to point to Jesus Christ. Where do I see that? I see it in multiple places, but just talking about geography. God says, "Go to the mountain of Moriah." Why is that significant? Where do we see the mountain of Moriah in other places of the scripture. Mountain of Moriah is the place King David buys a threshing floor in Araunah for the temple, the site of the temple. He has a dream to build the temple of God himself. He buys the land. He has all the materials ready and God said, "No, you're not doing it. Your son Solomon will do it." 2 Chronicles 3:1, "Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to David his father at the place that David had appointed on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite." Mount Moriah is the place that King David wanted to build a temple. Finally, Solomon builds the temple, and this is the place where hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of animals are sacrificed, where there were rivers of animal blood sacrifice. Blood was coming from the river. This is the same place where Calvary was, except Calvary was just outside of the gate of the temple. So, as you see, Isaac going with his father, son and father going up the mountain, you can see Jesus Christ on the Via Dolorosa and he's not just carrying the cross by himself. He's carrying the cross with his father. His father is right there with him. Why did God have to do this cruel thing to Abraham? Why did God have to do this? He does this to show us the glimpse of God's great love for us, and that he was willing to endure the cruelty of the cross, and not just that, but endure the tension and the relationships, the severing of the relationship in the Holy Trinity. God the Father, God the Son on the cross. God the Father isn't just a passive bystander. He's the one with the knife over his son, piercing his son's heart. How does God the Father pierce the heart of God the Son? God the Son cries out and says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" God the Father silent. With the silence, he pierces the son's heart and the son dies, and that's the penalty. That's God bearing the penalty that we deserve. We deserve God the Father to never speak to us again and leave us to ourselves in a place called hell. Jesus Christ experienced that for us. Why? Because that's what it took and he was willing to take it because he loves us. Romans 8:31-32, what then shall we say to these things. If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Jesus Christ goes to the place of sacrifice as a son of God, and there is no substitute for him. There is no ram caught in the thicket because Jesus Christ was the substitute. I wonder what happened with Abraham and Isaac when they got home. I wonder if Abraham told Sarah any of this. I definitely wouldn't. "Honey, how was your camping trip?" "Oh, it was wonderful. It was wonderful." Both of them aged 80 years. "It was wonderful. It was great." You know and I know when all of this was said and done that Abraham looked back and he would have never traded that experience for anything. He wouldn't have traded the experience of him walking up the mountain of Moriah, the preparing of the altar, the preparing of the knife, hearing Christ himself stop him because Christ himself would take the knife himself. He would never have traded those experiences for a few more uneventful days at home. Difficult as they were, these were the greatest days of his life. What are our favorite stories? My favorite stories are war stories, and not made up war stories. War stories from people who have gone to war, those are my favorite war stories. My dad, all the time, he served in the Soviet Army because you had to, and that's what made my dad my dad. All the time just war stories, not real war, but it's like, "Yeah. You know who still holds the Soviet record for pullups with boots on and a coat? Yeah, I do. Yeah." I think he does. I don't know. He could have made that up. We never fact checked him, Vlad. I don't know about that. I don't know. You know what it takes to get war stories? It takes going to war. It takes going through events like this. Then you come out and you're stronger. You're just a different person. Pascal said in his Ponce, he said, "There's some pleasure in being onboard a ship battered by storms when one is certain of not perishing." I think Abraham became a much better dad after this because he realized, "You know what? Isaac's not my son. Isaac is a gift. I need to steward this gift well, and then God will do whatever he wants with the gift." What's most important here and this is the last text, verse 20 to verse 24, what we see here is a transition from the story of Abraham to the story of Isaac, a transition from one generation to the next, a transition not just of life, but of faith. I won't read the whole text, but I'll just point out verse 23, "Bethu′el father of Rebekah." This is important because Rebekah then becomes the wife of Isaac, but all this is showing us that now there's a transition. Now, the camera is fading from Abraham to Isaac. "Abraham, you've done your job. You've fathered well. You've been a son to God the Father and you've done a great job, and you've fathered your son well. Time for your son to take over." In conclusion, given the great sacrifice of God for us, what are you just unwilling to sacrifice right now? What is there in your life that you are just clinging on to and you know that God is calling you to sacrifice this? What is it? It might be a sin. It might be a good thing. It might be a dream that God has given you and this dream is from God, but you've begun to love this dream more than God himself. Perhaps you got to sacrifice that dream or that desire or that wish. What is God's calling you to lay on the altar in obedience to his will, to his plan? He knows best, and the resurrection makes every sacrifice worth it. Few verses from the gospels, and then we'll close with prayer. Matthew 10:37, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Matthew 19:27-30, "Then Peter said in reply, 'See, we've left everything and followed you. What then will we have?' Jesus said to him, 'Truly I say to you, in the new world, when the son of man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will sit on 12 thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel. Everyone who has left houses,'" with parking lot, with parking space, "'or brother or sisters or mother or father or mother or children or lands, backyards, for my name's sake will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life, but many who are firsts will be last, and lasts first." If you're not a Christian, if you're not a believer, today we call you. Repent of your sin. Repent of your rebellion, and look to the cross of Jesus Christ where God the Father was willing to do in giving up God the Son, bore the penalty for your sin. Repent of your sin and turn to him in faith. If you are a Christian, ask now for the Lord in prayer and worship to search in you and give you discernment if there's any area of life that you haven't really offered up to the Lord, that you haven't consecrated to the Lord. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this holy scripture. It seems like we're standing on holy ground seeing Abraham, the pinnacle of his faith, the culmination of his faith, that he was willing to sacrifice what or whom he loved most for you because you're worthy of this love. You're deserving of this love. You're deserving of the greatest amount of love that we can muster. You're deserving of it. By the power of the Holy Spirit, expend our hearts to love you more and to love neighbor as self. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Déjà vu All Over Again

June 6, 2021 • Genesis 20

Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston in our neighborhood churches or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. Good morning. Welcome to Mosaic Church. My name is Jan. We're the pastors here at Mosaic along with Pastor Shane and Pastor Andy. And if you're new or visiting we'd love to connect with you. We do that through the connection card in the worship guide. The physical one or you can also get the digital version in our app or on our website. And if you fill it out we'll be sure to get in touch with you over the course of the week. Happy summer. And happy bring an iced beverage to church day. If you see my last station back there I've got 18 water bottles back there. Stay hydrated my friends. Stay hydrated. Oh, that said would you please pray with me with the preaching of God's Holy Word. Heavenly Father we thank you that you are good God and you are a great God. Although our sins, our rebellion, our transgressions deserve punishment. Instead, you poured out that punishment upon your Son Jesus Christ. The Lamb of God, the Son of God. Jesus on the cross, you got what we deserved so that you could offer to us what you earned. We thank you for the gift of salvation. We thank you for the gift of grace that just doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that? You did that because you are God who is love. We thank you for the Holy Scriptures. We thank you for the story and the example of Abraham that often he was not a hero, he was actually an anti hero. And yet you came in and you worked with him and he poured out your love upon him and you kept sculpting him, kept molding him, kept shaping and sanctifying him and I pray that you do the same with us. If there are habitual sins in our lives. If there is recidivism in our lives where we fall back into patterns of sin I pray today pull us out by your grace and give us a vision for our lives to be people who are a blessing to many. Bless our time the holy word. Holy Spirit we welcome you into the space. We love you and we love your presence. We pray that you today convict us and encourage us where we need to be encouraged. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. We are in a sermon series. Going through parts of the book of Genesis. We're calling it Jesus in Genesis. And we're in particular looking at the story of Abraham and how our story relates to his story and more importantly how his story and our story points to the story of Jesus Christ and our need for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The title of the sermon today is Déjà vu All Over Again. And we see Abraham committing his greatest sin that he's ever committed. And he does it again. In chapter 19 we saw the story of God's punishment coming down on Sodom and Gomorrah. God pulls through the angels Lot out and ends the story in a very hopeless situation. So now we're done with Lot and we'll hear nothing more of him. And after the promise that God made in chapter 18, where Jesus Christ as a Kristoff and he shows up. He's flanked with angels. And he comes to Abraham and Sarah and promises that in a year you will have the promised son. You've been waiting for over two decades. Probably 25 years but next year he's coming. And what we're expecting after chapter 19, is that in chapter 20 Isaac is born. Why do we expect that? We expect that because Abraham has been winning. He's been growing in his faith. God called him in chapter 12. He said I'm going to bless you, I'm going to make your name great, I'm going to bless those who bless you. And I'm going to bless the nation's through you Abraham. He follows God and we see him early on his walk with the Lord was serpentine. It was wandering. Kind of like Storrow Drive. Just wavering back and forth. And what we see with Abraham is now he's beginning to string wins together. We see that beginning with Lot and goes to his nephew Lot and he gives him a pic of the land generously. And then after Lot is taken into captivity by a coalition of kings, Abraham the great warrior gets his 318 trained men and they together go to war to save Lot and he comes out victorious. He's recognized by Melchizedek as a man of God. He resists temptation. When the king of Sodom offers him financial profit, the Lord appeared to him twice to reaffirm and elaborate the covenant. And God said here's a sign of the covenant. You need to circumcise yourself. And Abraham in his '90s probably his greatest act of faith promptly obeys, circumcised himself with a flint knife and does the same to 318 trained men. You see just his faith guides everything that he does. Win after win after win after win and apparently he got tired of all that winning. So after Abraham wins, now Abraham sins. And in chapter 20, Abraham takes his 90-year old wife. He's 100. He takes his 90-year old wife and passes her off to King Abimelech. And she's taken into his harem. He pimps off his 90-year old wife. Apparent grandma was really good looking. I don't know what it was. A different oxygen, different food levels, no GMO, Pilates. I have no idea. But apparently at 90 she was still smoking hot and King Abimelech takes her into his hands. So we'll get into that. The worst part is. The worst part that as I sat down and I'm like chapter 20. I'm writing this sermon. I'm crestfallen. I'm like, "Oh, no. Not again." The worst part of this whole situation is he's done this before. He pimped off his wife who was a little younger to the king of Egypt back in chapter 12. And God intervened and God saved him. And now he does the same thing again. Big lesson for us is dear Christian sin clings so closely. And time with the Lord does not make you impervious to sin. It doesn't make you impervious to falling back into old patterns of sin. Into tragic recidivism where you relapse. The point of the whole text is Abraham's a sinner saved by grace. Still remains a sinner. He's a saint, he was a sinner and a sinner who's a saint. So never lose sight dear Christian. That we have to be aware of sin and that we are to fight the good fight of faith. We'll do the same thing we've done in the past weeks. We're going to walk through the text verse by verse. But three big sections. Three points to frame up our time. Point one is Abimelech restrained. Second is Abraham rebuked and third is Abimelech restored. First Abimelech restrained. Genesis 20:1. And from there Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb and lived between Kadesh and Shur. And he sojourned into Gerar. So Abraham was called by God to go to the land of Canaan. That's the promised land. The first time he sinned against his wife and against God, he went from the promised land to Egypt. Now he goes from the promised land to Kadesh and Shur into Gerar. He's traveling from the extremely southern point of Palestine. Shur was on the border of Egypt. And he visits the royal city of Gerar which is just above the Gulf of Suez on the way to Egypt. Suez we've heard recently in the news. The Suez Canal. That's where the container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. This is the general vicinity where Abraham goes. It's hostile territory. We're not told why he goes. Perhaps he went because there was famine in the land or perhaps he went because he was afraid of God who judged Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham watched him judge Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps he was afraid of retaliation from the neighbors of Sodom and Gomorrah, that they will retaliate against Abraham in order to retaliate against God or perhaps he was bitter. Later on the text he says God made me go from my hometown to land of Canaan. There's a bitterness. Perhaps it's because he expected that when he interceded for Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah that God would answer him. And he didn't get what he wanted from God. Perhaps he's... But we're not sure. So now we see him going into hostile territory with his flocks, with his herds, with the people he has with him. He's a chieftain. There's over 300 people with him. So it's a huge caravan. And he's going into hostile territory as a believer. These are different people, they worship different gods. It's kind of moving to Boston from somewhere where it's acceptable to be a Christian. You move up to Boston and you keep your bumper stickers on your car. You keep the little fish on your car. Why do you keep the fish on your car? Because you're a Christian. That's why. Why'd you put the fish in your car in the first place? Because back in Mississippi when Christian police officers pull you over, they're going to let you go. You're a Christian. Up here no one cares. I remember when Pastor Shane moved up here, he had a little Toyota Camry. And he had a little Jesus fish on the back of his car. And after an evening service, we show up this car and the back windshield was just mis shattered. Someone threw a brick through the back of his car. Why? I don't know. Jesus fish maybe. So if you've got Jesus fish on your car, man congratulations. You are a very bold Christian. And now you have to drive like a hostile territory. He goes there. He knows that he is not like these people. That he believes unlike these people. These are enemies of Israel. We'll learn later on. The Philistines come from this general land. So what happens? Well, Genesis 20:2. Abraham said of Sarah his wife. So now people are asking, "Hey Abraham. Who's that woman next to you? She's apparently very good looking." And the tradition of that land was the king could take any unmarried woman into his harem or the king could kill any husband of the married woman to take her into his harem. So that's why Abraham said of his wife Sarah. She is my sister. And Abimelech King of Gerar sent and took Sarah. He takes Sarah the wife of Abraham. First thing Abraham does is exactly the same thing he did 30 years ago. Why? What's he motivated by? Motivated by fear. Fear for his life. And he gives up his dear wife Sarah. Decades they've been married. Gives her up to a King Abimelech into his harem. Now I've been married by God's grace and my wife Tanya. It's going to be 15 years this week. Someone came up to me. Praise... Yea, clap for her. Good job. Thanks, Edgar. And I've made some faux pas. Some mea culpa. Some my bads in my life in my marriage. I have some bad ones. The first one I think is first year married. I forgot it was her birthday. I just forgot her birthday. Show up at home, she's dressed up, makeup on. It's dinner on the table. Beautiful. And I'm like, "What's the occasion? Of course I know. Well, I forgot your present in the car." So I run down. And I go to the nearest store that was next our apartment building. It was TJ Maxx or Marshalls. And I went to the first thing I could find. And it was a little wooden bucket with soap stuff. And some country CDs. So that's what I grabbed for. I was like, "You're from Ukraine. You like country music." No, she did not. That was a... So still to this day I'm recovering. I've made some bad mistakes in my marriage. But I've never pimped off my wife. Praise God. And the lesson here gentlemen is don't pimp off your wife. That's number one. Number two, is Abraham the great father of the faith does this. And he does it twice. And what's the lesson here? The lesson here is under pressure, under stress, under anxiety. When motivated by fear, it's so easy to relapse the former sins. It's so easy to go back to old patterns of life. So the question for us today is what sins from your past are you prone to return to? Especially when under stress. And when are you prone to return to them? And you need to know that. You need to reverse engineer your walk with the Lord and you need to know yourself and when you're tempted so that you do not make provision for the flesh. Don't put yourself in positions where your flesh takes over. And instead of walking by the spear you walk by flesh. Speaking of harems. The custom of the land. You have power, you have money, you can make yourself a harem. A harem is just a group of women that you sleep with. Your concubines. Perhaps you don't have the money and the power and the opportunity to build yourself a harem. But we live in a day and age when people are building not physical harems but definitely digital ones. And Jesus spoke right into that. And he said whoever looks upon a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Abimelech committed the sin of adultery when he just looked at another man's wife. And so we see Abraham sinned and we see Abimelech sins and there's a lesson for us that we are to fight our sin and protect in particular sexual sin. So the question is what's going to happen? Who will protect Sarah from being defiled? Because God promised that Sarah is going to have a child with Abraham. God promised a unilateral covenant that he's not going to break his word. That's exactly what we see God coming to the rescue. This is verse three. But God. I love that phrase because that's the same phrase that's used in Ephesians when it says that you are dead in your sins and your trespasses. All of us are on our way to hell but God intervenes but God sent his Son. But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you've taken for she is a man's wife. Now Abimelech had not approached her. So he said Lord, will you kill an innocent people? Did he not himself say to me she is my sister and she herself said he is my brother. In the integrity of my heart. And the innocence of my hands I have done this. God speaks, God intervenes. Speaks to him in a dream. Does God still speak in dreams? Yeah, he does. And sometimes to you, sometimes to your loved ones. This week I was sitting at home in my basement. It was 11:00 PM and I smell something burning. And I run around. I ran upstairs and make sure it's nothing upstairs. And then I ran back downstairs and one of my outlets was on fire. I had to pull out a plug and sparks were flying. I was like, "Whoa, that was weird." The next day my daughter Elizabeth wakes up and says to my wife, "Hey, Mom. I had a dream that our basement set on fire." Sounds trippy. She had no idea. And I was like, "Did we make it on alive?" She said yeah. I was like, "All right. Praise God." It's just once a month. So sometimes God speaks in prophetic dreams. Sometimes it's just to reaffirm yes, I'm with you. Yes, I'm here to protect you. Sometimes it encourage, sometimes is to sanctify. So God speaks to an unbeliever through a dream. Can God speak to unbelievers? Yeah. God can do whatever he want with whomever he wants. He sovereign speaks to this guy in a dream and says you're a dead man. The same God who set Sodom and Gomorrah on fire, judgment, fire, brimstone comes to King Abimelech who's definitely heard about what went on Sodom and Gomorrah. And he says you are a dead man. I'm going to kill you. Does God have the authority to take our life? Yeah. The God of the universe who gives us life can take it at any single moment. And God says that you're dead. Maybe you've taken another man's wife. Why? Because God cares about marriage. He cares about marriage a lot. Abimelech says I haven't approached her yet. And Abimelech says Lord, that's a great start. Lord, he knows that this is God and he speaks of innocence. He's like, "God, I'm innocent." Actually a relative term. He's sinful in other ways. But from this perspective, he's innocent. He did what he did without knowing the full story. And Abimelech makes the same argument to God that Abraham made to God as He was interceding for Sodom and Gomorrah. He says will not the just God of the universe do what is right. And he's got a case. What he's really saying is, God I didn't deserve this. If anyone does deserve it, who is it? If anyone does deserve to get whacked for the situation that they're in, who deserves to get whacked? Abraham. God why aren't you coming after Abraham? Why are you coming after Sarah? Who also isn't a total victim. Apparently they played this con whenever they've when because that's what Abraham says later on the text. I asked my wife. I was still talking about this text. And she's like, "You know what? I bet Sarah wanted to leave." I was like, "Why did you say that?" She's like, "Just imagine you have the option of being a princess. You were living in a tent. Now you get to live in a mansion. She's not completely innocent either. You get a black American Express Card. You get your hair's done and your nails done, your hair done and all that done like everyone's pampering. Who knows. But she went along with this plan." And what's fascinating about this text is Abimelech the pagan king is more righteous. Presented as more righteous in this text than the man of God. In chapter 18, God said about Abraham. I've called him. He's mine. I've chosen him to be righteous, teach righteousness to his children. And we see the unbeliever behaving more moral than the believer. And that's often the case. Unbelievers are sometimes some of the most moral people just really, really good people. Generous people, caring people, loving people. And then on the flip side, it's the believers that are sometimes the most mischievous and the most sinful. You ever do business with a Christian? With an unbeliever, you got to sign one contract. With believers, two. At least two. Because of the Christian, when they became a Christian, they understand how wicked they are. That's what makes them a Christian. What makes you a Christian is I have sinned against God, I need to repent. It's really bad. Every Christian that you see is a really bad person. But the difference is they know they're a bad person. Sometimes the moral people are very moral people to get away from God. Abimelech is the moral person in this text. At the end of the text, he's very generous but he never becomes a Christian. He never loves God. You can do a lot of good things. And you can be a very moral person and not be a believer not go to heaven because you are doing all the great things not for God but for self. Back to Abraham. What was motivating him? What motivated him to sin again? It might have been bitterness against God. It might have been just time has elapsed. It's been 30 years since chapter 12 and chapter 20. It might have been that he knows just how lavish God's grace is. Did Abraham deserve to be called by God? No. Did Abraham deserve to get a word from God? No. Did Abraham deserve for God to speak to him and show him the covenant? No, no, no, no. Did Abraham deserve for God to tell him I'm making a unilateral covenant with you even if you break your end of the bargain, I'm still going to hold up mine? He didn't deserve that. Abraham also knew that God saved him once. I sinned you save me again. You also promised me that within a year I'm going to have a son. So clearly, you are going to work out your plan. And you might not need me in the process. This whole idea of I can sin because God will come to the rescue. This idea is called cheap grace. Where you say Jesus died on the cross for all my sins past, present and future. So why not continue to sin? God will forgive me. It's his job. I think part of that is going on in this idea of cheap grace. And yet God will forgive. Dear Christian, if you are in your sins. If you sin, God will forgive you if you repent of that sin. But it doesn't mean you won't bear the consequences of that sin. And it definitely doesn't mean that God won't discipline you like a loving father. Does God discipline Abraham in this text for this sin? Oh, yeah. He publicly shames Abraham through Abimelech. And he publicly shames Abraham for 1,000s of years by including this text in the Bible. So we look at this guy like, "You're a loser. You're a loser twice." God does discipline. Look at Hebrews 12:5-11. Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? My son do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline. If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the father of spirits and live. For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them. But he disciplines us for our good. That we may share his holiness. For he disciplines us for our good that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant. But later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Shows us that we're saved not by a morality. This is what the text shows us. But just by sheer grace. We're saved by sheer grace not because we're better. We're not Christians because we're better. We're Christians because we're saved, forgiven. And we're not saved because we're good. We're not forgiven because we're good. We're saved because God is good. That's really what this chapter is highlighting. That despite Abraham's sin, how great God's grace is to intervene and help him. God intervenes just like in chapter 12 showing you that God is the only hero of the story and of the book of Genesis of the whole Bible. And God intervenes his work in the marriage of Abraham and Sarah, right? And that's what God is doing. He's exposing sin in their marriage. He's exposing deception in their marriage. A lack of faith prior to the child coming. And this is important lesson that before you have a child, you need to know that whatever sin there is, you got to work through and repent of it and do the hard work because when children come, everything just gets magnified. It's just exponentially harder. Not only does your wife see your sin but the kids see your sin and oh, your sin then impacts your kids. And imagine Isaac wakes up and he says, "Abraham. Dad. Daddy, where's mommy?" And then Abraham's like, "Oh, long story. Hear I pimped her out to King Abimelech. You want cereal for breakfast." That would scar the kid for life. So God is working on their marriage exposing the sin. So there's repentance prior to when the child comes. Verse six. God speaking to Abimelech. Then God said to him in the dream. Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart. And it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore, I did not let you touch her. Now then return the man's wife for he is a prophet so that he will pray for you. And you shall live but if you do not return her, know that you shall surely die. You and all who are hers. So I didn't touch her. You wanted to obviously. That's why you married her. I don't let you consummate the marriage. So God here is sovereign even over sin. He's the one that keeps Abimelech from sinning and the part of the Lord's Prayer is Lord, lead us not into temptation. God I beg you please keep me from sin. Prevent me from sin. And God does that with Abimelech. And then God gives Abimelech a choice. You can either return her and live or if you don't, you'll die. And that's the same choice that God gives every single human being. Either repent and that's turning from sin and you will live. Repent and believe in Jesus Christ. You will live if not, you shall surely die. The decision is yours. If Sarah had stayed even one night with Abimelech, there would have always been a question of is Abraham Isaac's dad? And the other thing I want to point out is this is the first use of the word prophet in scripture. And which is very ironical though. We're prophets messenger for God. And the first time the word prophet is used is in the context of the Prophet's sin. Showing that every single human prophet is fallible and sinful and it points to our need for a greater profit who's never sinned. And Abraham will pray for you. And at this point, Abimelech is got to be thinking what in the world? The guy sinned against me, lied to me. And now it turns out he's a prophet. And it turns out he needs to pray for me so that I can get saved. It doesn't make any sense. Just from a human perspective from a societal justice perspective. It doesn't make any sense. We'll leave that hanging until point three. Point two. Abraham rebuked. We see this in verse eight. So Abimelech rose early in the morning which is contrast to Lot when God warned him through the angels. Hey, get out of Sodom and Gomorrah because fire and brimstone coming. Lot slept on it woke up had breakfast. Finally, the angels had to drag him out. Here Abimelech wakes up first thing in the morning. This what he does. Called all his servants and told them all these things. And the men were very much afraid. Abimelech fears God. His servants fear God. And yet they don't become believers at the end. They fear God like children fear a stranger. Please I don't know what you're going to do with me. I'm afraid of you. Abraham fears God as a child. There's a difference. There's a loving relationship. Here Abimelech never becomes a Christian. His father's never become Christian. They're just afraid of punishment. Whereas a real child of God fears disappointing God which obviously Abraham did in this situation. So he too needs to grow in fear of God. Verse nine. Then Abimelech called Abraham and said to him, "What have you done to us? How have I sinned against you?" That's interesting. Because the very first time that the word sin is used in this chapter is from God talking to Abimelech. I kept you from sinning. So now Abimelech has an understanding of sin. That sin is transgressing God's law. How have I sinned against you that you brought on me and my kingdom of great sin? You have done to me things that ought not to be done. And here what's fascinating is Abimelech preaches a sermon to Abraham. Abimelech gets everyone to get the whole court together. Puts Abraham in front. It just lights them up with the words that God gave them. So this is God speaking through Abimelech that you Abraham are a hypocrite. Your witness is terrible. Your witness to God. If God didn't intervene, all of us would have perished. You would have brought great sin on me and the kingdom. You did what ought not to have been done. And that's a fascinating term. Abimelech how did you know what ought to be done? How do you know? God told him. Abraham, did you know what ought to be done? Yeah. So you sinned against me. And this is a fascinating idea. And every single person you ask that's alive and a christian or non Christian. You ask them is the world as it ought to be? And every single person says no, the world is not as ought to be. There's a lot of crime and there's a lot of evil and there's a lot of terrible things in the world. Corruption in the world. The world is not as it ought to be. Are you as you ought to be? No, I'm not. Well, how do you know? Because there's a moral law written on your heart. A moral compass. Is it calibrated perfectly? No, it takes God's word brought in to recalibrate Abimelech's moral compass here. Abimelech's concern isn't just for himself but for his kingdom. Which shows that he's a good ruler and again shows that he's a good person despite the norms of the day. Verse 10, Abimelech said to Abraham. What did you see that you did this thing? Abraham said I did it because I thought there is no fear of God at all in this place and they will kill me because of my wife. So Abimelech is like, "Why do you do this?" And Abraham says I did this because you guys don't fear God. And here Abraham is the hypocrite of Matthew seven where Jesus says before you pull out the speck in your brother's eye, make sure there's not a log in your own eye. So Abraham to Abimelech. He's like, "I did this because you don't love God. You don't fear God. I did this because you have a toothpick in your eye." As Abraham has a two by four in one eye and a telephone pole in the other. He's just the biggest hypocrite of this whole text. You guys don't fear God. I just knew all of you guys are perverts and sickos and weirdos. You kill me to take my wife. So I decided to pimp her out before you did that. Just the logic is so warped. I knew you were so sinful. So I'm going to sin to prevent you sinning against me. And this just shows a lack of faith. He didn't go into the place on mission to share the gospel. He went to the place selfishly to preserve his wealth, kind of like Lot did when he went to Sodom. And apparently there was more fear of God in Abimelech than there was in Abraham. That's the contrast. Verse 12. Besides. So now Abraham is... He knows he's caught. But he lawyers up and he just... Oh, what a text. Besides, he pathetically tries to make excuses. He's caught in sin and he's like, "Besides." He's like, "I knew you don't fear God. And besides she is indeed my sister. Cue the country music. She is indeed my sister." Like a pro. Why are you even...? Don't even bring that up. Why did you marry your sister? Oh, because it was easier. We didn't have to change last names. You're a pervert. Don't do that. This is pathetic. It's like you get caught in a sin and then you try to excuse it and the excuse is even worse than the sin. You get pulled over by a cop and the cop is like, "Why are you speeding? Why are you speeding?" And you say, "I swear to drunk. I'm not God. I'm not God." The first service nobody got it. Here, a couple... The excuses are worse than the sin itself. Kids do this all the time. Where you get caught in a sin and then you just try to excuse it. That's what Abraham is doing. He knows he's caught. He's caught by daddy, he's caught by Abimelech. And then he starts saying this is my sister that I married her. My father though not the daughter of my mother and she became that way. And when God caused me to wander from my father's place that's it. That's the verse. God caused me to wander. When God forced me to wander. Remember last week I was talking about Lot. He got saved but he wasn't happy about it. It's like a high schooler getting saved before they start freshman year in college. And like, "Don't save me yet I want frat parties." That was Lot. That's Abraham. He wants to sin right now. And he's just caught in the sin. And then who does he blame for this whole situation? Oh, God caused it. Same thing Adam did. Adam sins, eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God comes looking for him. Adam where are you? And what does Adam say? The wife whom you gave me. She forced me. You see the past 70. You see he's trying to shirk his responsibility. Pass it off. There's bitterness toward God. And I said to her this is the kindness you must do to me at every place to which we come. Say of me he is my brother. And he's saying this is the kindness you got to do me. This is how you need to love me. That's what we're doing. Instead of saying how can I love my wife and sacrifice myself to protect her, he goes to his wife and says this is how you must love me and sacrifice yourself to protect me. He's just got everything back. And remember last week I was talking about Abraham was a great patriarch and Lot was a soytriarch. Where here Abraham, he's back to soytriarch land. He loses his spine. His faith spine and he goes to his wife and he says I want you to sacrifice yourself for me anti gospel. What is the gospel? The gospel is Jesus Christ sacrificing himself for his bride. And then Jesus says to husbands. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Abraham is doing the opposite here and technically was Sarah his sister. Yes, technically yes. But it's not the full truth. She was also his wife. His sister wife. A half truth masquerading as the full truth is a full lie. And we need to know this. If you are going to grow in discernment and understanding of reality, you need to understand that this is the thing. People lie with facts. Just like Abraham lies with facts. People lie with statistics all the time. Your head could be in the oven and your feet in the freezer and on average, very comfortable temperature. You're not comfortable. Statistic lie all the time. If you want to understand politics and you understand the news. You need to understand that people all the time spin one fact and present one fact which is half truth as the full truth. And they do it for click bait and they do it for eyeballs and they do it to persuade us with a narrative et cetera. So we as believers need to grow in discernment knowing that people lie all the time with facts. And this is what Abraham was doing. Abraham's behavior is pathetic, it's an excusable, it's deeply disappointing. He's here no different than Lot was in last chapter. Last chapter Lot takes the angels into his house, shows them hospitality and then an order protect himself and the angels, he passes off his daughters to the gang rapers. And he says, "Hey, take my virgin daughters instead of the angels." He's sacrificing his beloved ones for himself. Abraham's doing the same exact thing here. The worst part he's in the middle of his Christian life. It should be expected that he would do better but he suffers from what something that all of us suffer from is thing called spiritual amnesia. And once again he falls on his face, fails in his faith. We see cowardice, selfishness, indifference. He stumbles badly. So will his son Isaac. Who will do the same thing. And then his great, great grandsons will sin as well Judah in particular. Abraham stumbled, so have I. And so have you. And this just shows the fallibility of the saints. And when you become a Christian, you're still a sinner. You're a sinner saint and a saint sinner. And the privileged position doesn't preclude him from failure. It doesn't preclude him from floundering. Genesis 20:14. Then Abimelech took sheep and oxen and male servants and female servants and gave them to Abraham and returned Sarah his wife to him. And Abimelech said, behold my land is before you, dwell where it pleases you. To Sarah he said, behold I've given your brother... Tremendous Abimelech. Tremendous little jab. Behold I've given your brother 1,000 pieces of silver. It's a sign of your innocence in the eyes of all who are with you before everyone you were vindicated. What in the world just happened? Abraham sins against Abimelech. Abimelech is the one giving gifts to Abraham. This makes no sense. It should have been Abraham saying here Abimelech. I'm sorry. My bad man. Here's some animals. Here's some silver. Instead, Abimelech is the guy. He's like, "Take the animals, take any real estate you want. Here's 1,000 pieces of silver. Half a piece of silver was a monthly wage of an average worker. Half. So that means 1,000 pieces is working 167 years. That's like if our average salary is 40 grand. He's given him $7 million. Just incredible wealth. On top of that, this is what Abimelech is doing. This why I think he's a funny guy. When you get married, the price of a bride was 50 shekels and he's like Abraham I'm not just going to give you 50 shekels. I'm going to give you the price of 20 brides. 1,000 shekels. It's boss right here. And part of what he's doing is, he's vindicating the honor of Sarah. He cares more about her reputation than Abraham did himself. So Abraham was a complete anti hero here. Abimelech takes God's warning seriously. Abraham doesn't. Story continues. These are point three. Abimelech restore. Genesis 20:17. Then Abraham prayed to God and God healed Abimelech and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. Apparently part of what happened with Abimelech was there was a curse put on all the people for Abraham's sin. And the wombs of the people were closed. And what's ironic is... Oh, and this is verse 18. For the Lord had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham's wife. The irony is that in order to open Sarah's womb for the promised son, God closed the wombs of many other women. Here the Lord is Lord of Abraham's sin. He's the Lord of Abimelech's non sin and he's the lord of childbirth. And he's the Lord over everything. A question here that I want to wrestle with at the end in closing is why is this text here? Why is this here? It teaches the lesson that we all stumble, that we all fall. We have a proclivity to relapse into sin. But is that all it's teaching us? I think it is teaching us more. Because by the end of the chapter, despite Abraham's sin. Abraham is a better man for it. He's learned from this sin. In a sense he's been sanctified by his sin and he's been blessed through the process of the sin. So there's a deeper lesson going on here. And I think there's a doctrine here. A doctrine that's taught by theologians in their books not often taught out loud. Because of the danger of this doctrine being twisted to justify sin. The doctrine's called O felix culpa in the Latin. O happy fault. And the phrase goes back to Gregory the Great in the end of the sixth century. And he got it from Augustine. And who got it from St. Paul in Romans seven. That yes, we wrestle with sin undeniably. But at the end, it brings glory to God because our sin... It turns our attention to Christ like nothing else does. Sin is undeniably ugly is disreputable, inexcusable, it's harmful. It's an abomination before God. But sin is also an occasion often to learn the absolute deepest lessons of our lives. Life changing discoveries. Now sometimes you know what true. You know a truth. I'm a sinner saved by grace. You know a truth. And then you sin. You commit a sin that scares you. Why I did that. And you walk out of that sin by God's grace pulls you out. And you have such a deep awareness of sin like you never have a deeper fear of God. A deeper love for God and more zeal to fight the good fight of faith without the fall, without the sin of Adam and Eve, we would have never had the incarnation. We would have never had the death of Christ on the cross. The resurrection. We wouldn't have had some of the most incredible victories in the spiritual warfare. One theologian says there would certainly have been no display of some of the divine attributes of God had sin not been. They would have been conserved forever and the depth of the Godhead. So in a sense, we get to know more of God, the depth of God, the greatness of God because sin entered the world. And obviously, we can't use that as an excuse to excuse our sin, to justify our sin. God hates sin. Sin is wickedness. But there is this undeniable reality. As John Owen says the greatest evil in the world is sin. And the greatest sin was the first. And yet Gregory feared not to cry O happy fault which found such a redeemer. And I think we can't deny that. Some of the greatest lesson we've ever learned in our lives about God, about the truth, the reality of good and of evil, of God and of Satan, we've done through the sin. Romans 7:14-25. This is the text that Augustine points to. For we know that the law is spiritual but I am of the flesh sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me that is in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies closer and for I delight in the law of God in my inner being. But I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from the body of death. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. The logic is irresistible. I'm wrestling with sin. St. Paul says he struggled with sin. If he was always finding himself flat on his face even near the end of his life mourning his great moral weakness then there's hope for me and there's hope for you. His sin pointed him to the glory of the Savior Christ. And Christ gets glory from saving us from sin. And then God uses our sin in the process of sanctification because we realize what it took for Jesus to turn my sin into sanctification. What did it take? It took the cross of Jesus Christ. There on the cross of Jesus Christ, Jesus got what we deserved. Punishment for our sin to extend to us where he earned. Kind of like Abraham and Abimelech. Abraham sins, God goes to Abimelech and says you're a dead man. Abraham gets what he didn't deserve. And then Abimelech gives to Abraham... So Abimelech gets what he didn't deserve. Abimelech gives to Abraham what Abraham didn't deserve. It's a double imputation. This is what happens when we believe in Jesus Christ. That our sins get counted to him. His righteousness gets counted to us. He who knew no sin became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. Obviously the danger here is that we can sin as a way to get more grace and Romans six deals with that. And obviously that's false. In Romans two, St. Paul sternly condemns that idea that doing evil may bring about good. Does God want us to be complacent with sin? Does God want us to sin? Of course not. But this chapter's showing that God is greater than our sin. Whatever the things in your path, God is greater than our sins and God can use those sins as a sculptor. We're all block of marble and Jesus is sitting here with a hammer and chisel and just chiseling away the sinful parts of who we are so that we can be more faithful to him. And the final analysis Abraham is a better man. He's prepared for the rest of his life to live a life of faithfulness. 2 Timothy 2:13. If we are faithless he remains faithful for he cannot deny himself. Did Abraham betray the covenant? Yes, he did. But God did not. Abraham gave God reason to withdraw the promise but God would not. Abraham dishonored the Lord's name, dishonored his word but the Lord not only forgave him not only rescued him but blessed him abundantly with land, with animals, restored his marriage and gave him $7 million. God used Abraham's misbehavior then to create peace and harmony with the people in the land. Now back to the question. Is this fair? Was this text fair? Was it fair that Abimelech almost gets whacked for doing something that he didn't know he was doing? Oh, it's not fair. Is it fair that Abraham who commits the sin is called a prophet and has to intercede for the guy that didn't do anything wrong? Is that fair? No. Is it fair that Abimelech then gives the sinner Abraham $7 million, land and vehicles? Is that fair? No, it's not fair. Is it fair that Jesus Christ dies on the cross for my sin? That's not fair. It's not fair. God is greater than fair. That's not fair. But that's grace. And that's why grace makes us so... Makes God so great. Look, you might be a great person. Good person. You might be much better person than I am. You might recycle much better than I do. Sometimes a plastic bottle goes in the garbage in my house. It's terrible. You might drive an electric vehicle. You're much better than I am. You might waive the right flags and you might go the right parades and be an activist for the right things. You might be a great moral person. Being a good person doesn't get you into heaven. It doesn't. That's the point with Abimelech. It's not about being a good person. It's about being a perfect person. And there's only one perfect person and that's Jesus Christ. And the only way we can be reconciled with God and have our sins forgiven is to believe in Jesus Christ and ask for his righteousness to be counted on to us. And that's the beauty of the gospel. That through faith in Jesus Christ, God sees Christ's righteousness in you. It's as if Jesus Christ is interceding for us. Abimelech needed Abraham to intercede for him but Abraham died. So who can intercede for us? There's one who can intercede for us who is not dead. He's sitting at the right hand of God interceding for us. Isaiah 53:12. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the many and he shall divide the spoil with a strong because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors yet he bore the sin of many. It makes intercession for whom transgressors. This one means to be a Christian you say God I am a transgressor. I have sinned. God I need you to intercede for me. Jesus intercede for me. And Hebrews 7:25. Consequently, he is able to save the uttermost those who draw near to God through him since he always lives to make intercession for them. If you are not a Christian we welcome you to become a Christian today by repenting of sin and believing in Jesus Christ. If you do that you are welcome and partake in communion. Today for homeless communion it's for repentant Christians. How do you become a Christian? You repent of sin and turn to Jesus Christ is for repenting Christian. So if you're Christian, if you have repented of sin but are currently living in habitual sin, you know that our sins in your life that you have not repented of them you have not turned from then right now is the opportunity to repent of those sins and partake in Holy Communion. If you don't repent today, if you don't become a Christian today, we ask that you refrain from this part of the service per 1 Corinthians 11. Right now we're going to pray for Holy Communion. If you haven't received a cup and you'd like to partake in communion, raise your hand and the ushers will pass them out as I'm praying. Let's pray. Heavenly Father we thank you for the gift of grace. What a gift it is. We thank you that you are more than fair. That you are also a loving God, a gracious God, a merciful God, a God that's long suffering. A God that longs to bless us not just in our lives but to the third, the fourth, the 10th, the 10,000s generation that comes from us. Lord we thank you for the story of Abraham. We thank you that you didn't give up on him when he was faithless but you remained faithful. In our own lives Lord, we repent of sin and we ask you to forgive us for all those times we've been faithless. And fill us with the spirit to fight the good fight of faith. Continue to sanctify us Lord and make us people who not only wage war against sin but our daily victories over. Lord Jesus we thank you for pouring out your blood and we thank you for your broken body. And I pray that you cleanse us through your blood and that you heal us through the brokenness of your body. I pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Take off the first piece of plastic, take the bread and then peel off the second piece of plastic which opens up the cup. And the night Jesus Christ was betrayed he took the bread and after breaking he said this is my body broken for you. Take eat and do this remembrance of me. Then proceeded to take the cup. And he said this cup is the cup of new covenant of my blood was poured out for the sins of many. Take drink and do this in remembrance of me. Lord Jesus we thank you for your intercession on our behalf as you sit the right hand of the throne of God the Father. We thank you not just for forgiveness of sin but that you use even our past sins to shape us and sanctify us and to sculpt us into the people that you have created us to be. I pray Lord Jesus that you send us the Holy Spirit and fill us and empower us. Give us the wisdom and the power and the strength to live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ and use us here in the city to share the gospel with many so that many are saved. Draw the elect into your kingdom. And please use us in the process. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.