Bible Talks - Sunday Night Church
Series: The Book of Promise · Talk No. 8
Sticking to the plan
Sunday, 17 September 2006
Genesis 11:10 – 12:9 ESV or NIV
In the first eleven chapters of Genesis we have seen God create the universe and everything in it as the dwelling place for mankind, who he made in his own image and placed in a Garden with the tasks of stewardship and the gifts of fellowship. We have seen how the first people blew their relationship with God and the harmony they had with each other and the rest of creation. We have seen episode after episode of disorder, destruction and death.
Many times the disorder has been related to human beings trying to become as gods, grasping at a divinity which is not theirs, and flaunting an autonomy which is actually illusory. Adam, Cain, Lamech, the sons of God, and the nomadic settlers in the land of Shinar, each in their own ways tried to raise theselves up to heaven and cross the bounds of their God-given dwelling place.
Throughout these stories there is a pattern. Sin leads to punishment, the results of sin become clear, but there is then a word of divine grace so that in the punishment there is also restraint and preservation. Finally, there is a promise of hope for the future.
In the Garden, Adam and Eve fell into sin, God's word of judgment was spoken against the serpent, against the ground, and against them, then he made them garments of skins and allowed their life to continue outside the Garden. They had become subject to death as God had decreed but there was grace, and there was hope.
In the story of Cain, we read of Cain's murderous sin, and God's word of judgment. Cain was sent away as a fugitive, but in grace God put a mark of protection on him. Civilization began, and once again there was a hint of hope.
In the narrative of the Flood, after God saw the wickedness of mankind in the earth, he brought his deluge as a judgment on evil, but in grace he shut up Noah in an ark of safety. He held on to the reins of the storm and gave the promise of a new creation and a new beginning. The covenant of grace was sealed with a rainbow of hope.
In each case the story leaves us open to God, with the possibility that faith and hope and love might still grow. But, in the story of the Tower of Babel, which Neil told us about last week,we seem to be left with disintegration, scattering, separation and confusion. Once again there has been sin and there has been judgment. There was even a measure of restraint and protection. But where is the hope for the future? How can life now go on?
The genealogies, or tables of descent, have in the past prefaced a story of salvation, and we might have expected the same with the genealogy of chapter 10 leading into some saving action of God in the land of Shinar. But there is no sign salvation in the description of the events there.
It is when we are looking for this pattern of sin and judgment followed by grace and hope, that we realize all the more forcefully that this story in chapter 11 leaves us just with sin and judgment. There seems to be no suggestion of grace and hope.
We might well ask, 'O Lord, what now? Will you, O Lord, leave the people whom we believe are the fruit of your gracious blessing to Noah, in the lurch? Will you leave them scattered, confused and separated from you and from each other? O Lord, what now?'
It is with that question in mind that we come to the genealogy at the end of Chapter 11 and the events of Chpter 12. The primeval story has ended. The account of the people of God in history - a salvation history that is ultimately centred in Christ - can begin. For now God begins to reverse the judgment of Babel. A new community is being built around the man Abraham. Through Abraham, we will be told, all the families of the earth will again receive blessing. Through Abraham the story of the restoration of mankind begins, though at this time he is still called Abram.
But first we have to build a bridge between the story of Babel and the history of Abram and that bridge is the family tree of Shem. We are taken through the descendants of Shem down through the generations to Terah, the father of Abram.
The life-spans are gradually shortening; children are being born when the father is quite a young age. Much as it is today. And these post-diluvian patriarchs are living much shorter lives than guys like Methuselah who lived before the flood. In this genealogy, the spread of the nations across the world, of which we read in chapter 10, is now narrowed down to the single line of Shem, the son of Noah's blessing. All the while the world is experiencing the confusion and scattering described in 11 verse 9, God is quietly, secretly, undramatically working out his purposes. The God who is concerned for all the nations is the God whose purposes for all the nations are to be worked out through his covenant relationship with one particular man and his descendants.
This is the riddle of divine election. This is the mysterious particularity which is part of the story of God's grace. God's plan for all the families of the earth is linked to his blessing of one man, Abram, who came from the line of Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor and Terah. Their importance is not only their link backwards through Noah and Seth to Adam, but onwards through Isaac and Jacob, down the generations to David, and on through David's family tree to one born in Bethlehem in the days of Caesar Augustus.
This genealogy provides the link between the primeval history of Genesis 1 to11 and the actual sacred history of the patriarchs and their families with which the rest of Genesis is concerned. Notice a couple of points.
- Unlike the genealogy of Chapter 5 there isn’t the emphasis on the fact that they each died.
e.g. From Genesis 5:9-10 “When Enosh had lived 90 years, he became the father of Kenan. And after he became the father of Kenan, Enosh lived 815 years and had other sons and daughters. 11Altogether, Enosh lived 905 years, and then he died.”
But from Genesis 11:14-15 “When Shelah had lived 30 years, he became the father of Eber. And after he became the father of Eber, Shelah lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters.”
2. Shem has given his name to the Semites or Shemites which we meet today as the Semitic peoples of the world such as the Jews and the Arabs.
Eber, the great-grandson of Shem has given his name to the Hebrews, another name for the Israelites and similar peoples in the ancient near east.
3. In the alternate listing of the descendants of Shem given in Genesis 10 we have the strange verse 25.
“Two sons were born to Eber: One was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided; his brother was named Joktan.”
Various explanations have been put forward for what the phrase “in his time the earth was divided” means. Peleg by the way is the Hebrew word for “divided”.
Three contenders are:
- The people were scattered and became nomadic.
- The people were divided in language and customs.
- This was when continental drift began and the earth broke up into its present continents.
At the end of Chapter 11, the family history of Terah, Abram's father, is told. It mentions Abram's brothers, nephews, and some of the women of the family. The only one for whom there is an important aside is Abram's wife Sarai: “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” The narrator, almost in passing - but how significantly! - is not only preparing us for the surprise of the promise to Abram that he would be blessed as the father of a great nation, but also for the later miracle story of the birth of Isaac, through whom that blessing would come.
So now we come to the first 9 verses of Genesis 12.
These words mark a fresh start in the narrative of the book of Genesis. Three times in the first eleven chapters God's judgment had fallen: mankind was banished from the garden of God, mankind was destroyed by the Flood and mankind was divided by diverse languages. There were also five primal curses. The serpent was cursed and proclaimed to be the enemy of the woman; the ground was cursed; Cain was condemned to doubtful harvests and anxious wandering and Canaan to servitude; linguistic distinctions ensured chaotic misunderstandings between the nations.
True, there had also been blessing but in relation to God the predominance of divine displeasure, resulting in judgment, made for fear and uncertainty. Now a new perspective is about to be revealed which will remove the doubt about God's intention to bridge the gulf between himself and mankind.
The first step had already been taken under the leadership of Terah, who had taken the family from Ur of the Chaldeans on the decisive stage to Haran. Only four people are named in 11:31, but clearly Nahor and his wife and children were included because they continued to live in Haran (cf. 24:10, 'the city of Nahor'). The extended household may well have numbered many more. It would be interesting to know the circumstances of the removal from Ur, and all that it entailed. The narrative implies that a settled life in the vicinity of a populous area was more congenial than venturing farther into the unknown.
There is no mention of Abraham growing crops, but Isaac and his sons were to do so. We should not think of the patriarchs as typical nomads. The long journeys they made were once-for-all removals, epoch-making events that marked the turning-points in their lives, rather than seasonal wanderings in search of feed for their flocks. The records in Genesis pass over these journeys without comment until the land of Canaan comes into view. The journey’s were incidental to the destination.
The reluctance of Terah and Nahor to proceed beyond Haran highlights the obedience of Abram. Not only was he prepared to take to the road again when the remainder of the family had settled down, but also he was going into the unknown without a map and, as it turned out, was not to enjoy a settled abode again. This was the price of obedience, as it is for many who respond to God's call today. There is, however, this difference, that those who cross national barriers now at the call of God do so in order that others may know the benefits of the gospel; Abram was leaving all in order that there should be a people of God and a Saviour. He was to make a decisive break with the past in order to be open to God's truth.
By leaving Ur and Haran, where moon worship was the dominant cult (the name Terah is related to the Hebrew for 'moon'), Abram would be set free from the drag of a familiar culture which would be positively harmful and detrimental to any new start. The break with his family would minimize the influence of ancestral traditions in so far as these were idolatrous. Foreign gods were amongst the belongings that Jacob's family took with them from Haran to Bethel, and the same was true of those who gathered at Shechem under Joshua. Religious practices are persistent, and some of the Israelites who entered Canaan with Joshua were still clinging to the gods their fathers served 'beyond the River', that is, in Mesopotamia, beyond the Euphrates. Though the leaders were clear about the supremacy of the one true God, popular superstitions were never far below the surface, and emerged in times of crisis.
The wrench of leaving the family and going out into the unknown, with all its uncertainty and associated hardships is familiar to every pioneer. In the case of Abram God was weaning him away from everything that would remind him of his cultural roots. And testing him so he would develop muscle. This could best happen when the softening influences of familiar surroundings had been removed, and every step required dependence on the God who had called him.
The break with the past, then, has a place in the future purposes of God. So far Abram has heard the call of God, but his knowledge of God is still very limited. The place where God will reveal himself in a fuller way is not Haran but in an hitherto unknown country, away to the south-west, on the route to Egypt. Without the separation there will be no further revelation.
In a similar way Jesus called his disciples to 'leave their nets' and follow him (Mk. 1:17—18). There is a sense in which every believer has to abandon the past, make an about turn and start afresh in the service of Jesus. This may not mean a literal journey, and circumstances may remain just as they were before, but nevertheless to forsake all in order to serve the Lord is as decisive a step today as was Abram's move from Haran, and as full of potential for good. So we shouldn’t turn a deaf ear to the insistent promptings through which God speaks, but instead to recognize their source and to act upon them. Terah shows what happened to one man who held back. Having left the moon cult behind him in Ur he came to it again in Haran, and failed to make the decisive break with idolatry. As one commentator says 'Where he halted he also died.'
God disclosed to Abram not only his commands but two far-reaching promises. The land is the first-mentioned promise of God in connection with the blessing, a word that sums up God's great design for the lost to be restored. By anchoring blessing in a land God made the promise tangible. A land has boundaries, geography, inhabitants; it has to be possessed, occupied and fortified against attack; it needs cultivation and conservation if it was to support a population. Indeed every aspect of life was involved with the land. God committed himself to fulfil a programme which could be tabulated; the blessing was not to be in any way nebulous, but measured in relation to crops and stock. Success or failure would be obvious to all. Because the land was expressly God's gift every harvest was his loving supply. If disaster struck, God would be administering a rebuke. Material and spiritual values met in the ordinary events of the workaday world, and God was very close at hand.
The second half of the promise, 'I will make of you a great nation', was equally subject to observation, and seemed as unlikely to be fulfilled as the promise of land. 'Sarai was barren; she had no child' This very disqualification became in God's hand a tool for his purpose. Though Abram was 'as good as dead' As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 4:19, because it looked as if his family was about to die out, the God 'who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist' as Paul said a few verses earlier in Romans 4:17,l taught Abram and all succeeding generations to trust him to fulfil his word, despite all the adverse indications. It is situations of human helplessness that provide occasions for God's power to be demonstrated and recognized.
The next part of the promise of God to Abram is “I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”
According to these words, when God is allowed to be the director of Abram's life the evidence of his working will become obvious to all. In the short term maybe only Abram was aware of it, through an inner reassurance, and he was soon to have that reassurance tested by famine and therefore by hunger; in the course of his lifetime, however, he was to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Lord who had spoken to him was true to his word. He had said, “I will bless you.” Five times in two verses the word 'bless' insists that the Lord is going to shower his goodness upon Abram, and though troubles were sure to come for him as for everyone else, if God was for him, all would ultimately be well. Two aspects of this blessing, land and descendants, had already been named, but the short human lifespan would not permit Abram himself to live to see such outworkings of God's purpose.
How then could Abram recognize the blessing of God in his life? As the narrative unfolds the answers will appear, but they will be of two kinds: personal and private and outward and visible. Abram will make time for communion with God and will find that God frequently speaks to him; what other people would see would be his increasing prosperity and his 'success'. The blessing of God Almighty is not nebulous, but clear and definite.
That Abram's name became great can hardly by denied. Its meaning 'exalted father' probably implies that he came from an exalted family, but it could also draw attention to God as his great Father.
Blessing was not restricted to Abram, the one to whom it was promised. It overflowed onto others. In the first place those who happened to come into contact with Abram were to have a share in the blessing; simply by meeting and knowing him, because he lived close to his God, others would become aware of the living reality of the Lord. 'You will be a blessing.' But there was a special benediction for those who recognized his worth and 'blessed' him with their help and support. They too would experience the enriching touch of the Lord on their lives.
Conversely, any who alienated themselves from Abram, for whatever reason, would find the opposite of prosperity coming their way, so enabling them to conclude that they were on the wrong road, and encouraging them to side with Abram. Both the blessing and the curse were appointed signposts.
But the extent of the blessing was greater yet. It was to embrace all the families of the earth. It anticipates the gospel of Jesus Christ. Abram’s fame will everywhere be associated with all the good things that the blessing of the Lord implies. Abram is thus given a place in the divine scheme of redemption.
From our vantage-point in the Christian era we are well placed to assess the promise to Abram. The letters of Paul overflow with the wonder of the mystery of God's purpose, 'which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth' (Eph. 1:9—10). The obedience of one man was to make possible the beginning of God's cosmic plan of salvation, which in Christ was to open out into undreamed of riches for all who hoped in Christ. The gifts of land and posterity were real blessings, but they were also tokens of blessings as yet unmentioned, which were in store, kept ready by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as love gifts that he alone could bestow.
God’s bounty surpasses all our calculations, rebuking our little faith and halting obedience. But God did not reckon two thousand years too long in order to bring his plan to fulfilment, and Abram had to move forward by taking what must have seemed to him to be a step in the dark. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.
The trek which had taken the family to Haran now had to be continued under Abram's leadership, while Terah remained at the half-way post. And in due course they arrived in Canaan. It wasn’t just Abraham and Lot and sarai and a few others. It was probably a whole tribe amounting to a thousand or so people. After all later on Abram was able to muster a fighting force of 318 men.
When they had arrived we are told, “The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” We don’t know exactly what the LORD appearing means but here is confirmation that Abram has done what the LORd instructed him and the blessing of land is repstated even though the Canaanites occupy the land.
Abram paid formal tribute to the Lord by erecting a special memorial and by worshipping the Lord. He thus claimed on behalf of his posterity the fulfilment of the promise he would not live to see. But he was in the heart of the land which his family would later inhabit, and he could look about him and with the eye of faith appreciate its possibilities.
So the grace and hope that have been the pattern of God's dealings with mankind in the early chapters of Genesis are still present. But instead of them being seen in a short time they are startying to be worked out in the story of a man, his family, a nation and will climax in Abram’s descendent Jesus of Nazareth and will continue in his descendents by faith, that is Christians, and will reach its final fulfillment when Christ returns and god will be our God and we will be his people in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
Let us pray.
