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Sermons at Trinity Church |
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Genesis 11v27-32 + Acts 7v2-8 PREPARATION OF A SAINT 11th January 2004 Jonny Elvin
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All Bible references in this sermon transcript are taken from the English Standard Version. This can be found at www.biblegateway.com
Well we begin a new series looking at the life of Abraham. We’ve chosen it because it teaches us so much about how to live in an uncertain world with the certain promises of God. As a church I hope we’ll see how trusting in God’s perfect guidance even when things look unclear from our end is all important. Throughout Scripture Abraham is the model par excellence of living by faith in God.
We’ll also see that he and his wife Sarah have a key part to play in God’s unfolding plan. But if we’re going to look at his life and understand what God was doing we need to see the context into which he comes. Let’s do a quick overview of chapters 1-11…
We know chapters 1 and 2 well – the creation accounts of how God made the world and us to live in it under his rule, enjoying his blessings – what was meant to be a wonderful relationship. In ch3 we come across the episode where Adam and Eve decide that they know best and reject God; a pattern that will repeat itself throughout history. They thought that they would be like God. But following this what we actually see is the rapid slide of humanity into all kinds of degradation…
We see the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. We see increasing corruption and the sorrow it brings to God’s heart, leading to the Flood and God’s covenant with Noah. But even then Noah gets out of his tree on booze. Then in ch11 we come across the infamous Tower of Babel. 11.4 tells us what their attitude was like: ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth’.
They want to honour themselves, not God. So God disperses them throughout the earth and confuses their language. By the time we get to the Tower of Babel story we’re left asking the question ‘what hope can there be for humanity in a world so full of potential for love and yet filled with so much hate; so beautiful and yet so ugly; so well structured and yet so disordered?’
The story of salvation history is the answer to that question. And just as time and time again Genesis 1-11 have shown that there is no hope for sinful humanity outside of the blessing of God, so Genesis 12 onwards will give us cause to rejoice in the fact that God promising his blessing. From here we’ll find God’s love in action to restore his world, to bless it by redeeming it. And that history effectively starts with the blessing of Abram (as he was then called). His story is one of God’s great blessing.
· We’ll see that whilst the ground was cursed in 3.17 Abram is promised land to possess. · Cain was cursed and became a wanderer; Abram the wanderer is blessed and given a home. · Cain, the Nephilim and the builders of the Tower of Babel all seek to make a name for themselves; God says to Abram ‘I will make your name great’. · The nations at Babel were scattered; in Abram all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
Well we’ll look more closely at the blessing next week. But before we get there we need to learn a few things about Abram (who we’ll call Abraham from now on) and his family.
1. God prepares Abraham and Sarah through pain and heartache 11.27-30
This is the third genealogy of these early chapters. Now you might think ‘what on earth has this got to teach us?’ Family trees are only ever interesting if they’re yours – and even then they can be pretty dull. But the long-forgotten children of an ancient Mesopotamian family? It’s hardly the stuff to keep the pages turning.
But unless we know some key things about Abraham’s family background we’ll not be ready for the promises that follow in ch12.
As Cilla might have said ‘What’s your name and where do you come from?’
It’s good to remember that these are real people with real lives.
V27 tells us about Abraham’s family: the dad, Terah, has 3 sons – Abram, Nahor and Haran. V28 says that they come from the important political and religious centre Ur in Southern Iraq. So Abraham was an Iraqi.
What else do we know about Ur? Well, Joshua 24.2 says ‘Long ago your fathers lives beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods.’ We know from other sources that the region at this time was a hotbed of multi-faith worship and polytheism of the grossest sort. Texts mention the names of at least 3,000 Sumerian gods.
V28 tells us that Abraham’s brother Haran dies whilst the family is still in Ur. As a result Abraham adopts Haran’s son Lot – who we’ll come to in ch13.
But there’s not just a family funeral, like most families they have their fair share of weddings. We don’t get details of the bride’s dress or the wedding breakfast menu. And sadly there are no snippets from the best man’s speech. But we do get the important facts – v29 tells us who Terah’s two remaining boys married…
29And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah.
Sarai is, according to 20.2 Abraham’s half sister. A bit dodgy to say the least. Strangely that’s not what’s commented on. The key thing that the writer wants us to know comes in v30… 30Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.
It’s is a very unusual thing in any ancient literature to digress within a genealogy. It might look like an incidental detail. But the author intends us to pause and take in the impact of the statement. (By the way, you know the golden rule, don’t you – if it’s there and it’s unusual instead of passing over it you should say to yourself ‘you beauty’, because it could well be the very thing that opens up the Bible passage for you).
In this case it opens up for us the bitter experience for Sarah of being childless – a theme which runs through the next 11 chapters. You can tell it’s important because we’re told it twice in v30 – she was barren – she had no child.
In primitive society children were your future – your social security, your pension plan and your status within the community all rolled into one. Without children the man had no heir to perpetuate his name. The woman had no career to keep her occupied. She was effectively unemployed with no hope of work. To add insult to injury you’d have no one to perform the funeral rites that were regarded as vital to the successful transition to the after-life.
This was a desperate situation for both Sarah and Abraham. You can feel their pain in 15.2 as Abraham responds to God’s promise of reward by saying ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus’ (his servant). An heir is all he can think about. No wonder the promise of 15.4 that his own son will be his heir comes as a great blessing, even if the promised heir didn’t arrive until some 25 years after they set out from Ur. God was teaching Abraham patience and to trust in God whatever the outward appearances. But Sarah’s barrenness was part of God’s plan. In order for her to be the mother of the child of promise it was necessary for her to be unable to bear children without the direct intervention of God.
Death in the family and the bereavement of being barren. This was all part of their painful preparation for what God would do with them later.
Now it’s hard to transfer their story and make it ours. But we might want to say that sometimes the pain we go through is part of God’s preparation of us. Although we don’t understand it at the time – and might not this side of heaven, God is Sovereign and as much in control of our lives as he was of Abraham’s, Sarah’s and Haran’s. If you’re going through a painful time you’ll no doubt know how important it is to pray for a patient faith. You can be sure that God will use even your pain for his great and good purposes.
God prepares Abraham and Sarah through pain and heartache
2. God leads Abraham and Sarah on a journey of faith 11.31-32
Well the family all set off for Canaan together, v31[show map]: 31Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there (in what’s now Syria).
Who decides that the family should up and go? Terah? In Acts 2 Stephen tells his hearers that the journey was determined by God.‘The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran and said to him ‘Go out from your land and from your kindred and go into the land that I will show you.’ Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran. And after his father died God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living.’
We’re not told why they settle in Haran. But it could be a pagan link. Remember that Terah and his forebears ‘served other gods’. Terah’s own name and those of Laban, Sarah and Milcah point towards the moon-god as perhaps the most prominent of these. In addition to this Ur and Haran were both centres of moon worship. So perhaps Haran is the obvious place for moon worshippers to settle after leaving Ur. It could, however, be that the place name brought back memories of Terah’s dead son and he couldn’t bear to leave it. Or it could be the simple reason that Haran was a major trade route – more chance of business flourishing there.
For one reason or another Terah lacked the vision of Abraham and lost the will to persist on the journey and as we’ll see next week Abraham takes the majority of the family with him and heads on down to Canaan. Hebrews 11.9-10 draws the lesson that only faith will stay the course.
To human eyes Ab and his family look no different from the other many landless wanderers travelling in the region. But we’ll soon see that Abraham’s willingness to leave home and family is in response to God’s call. He trusts what God says to him and acts on it. It’s this willingness to obey and trust God that will lead to blessing for the whole world.
But it’s not a journey without its problems. And Abraham’s not a man without fault. As well as God giving some great promises and acting with great generosity we’ll see the fallen human side in gruesome Technicolor: family tensions, some highly dubious ethical decision-making, jealously, mistrust, sex scandals, it’s all there. But through all of it we’ll see a man realising that he can trust God.
So Romans 4.3 echoes Genesis 15.6 when it says that ‘Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness’.
Hebrews 11.8ff tells us that ‘By faith Abraham, obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.’
At least we have the benefit of knowing how the promises to Abraham were worked out in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. But we still walk by faith, not by sight. We don’t see all the blessings that God has yet to reveal to his children. We don’t see Christ face to face, as one day we will. As 1 Corinthians 2.9 says ‘no eyes has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.’
Hebrews 11.13-16 reminds us that faith means acting on promises without seeing them and even dying without seeing them.
The Christian looks forward to things promised but not yet received. That’s why we should be very wary of Christians who say that we get all the blessings now. We don’t. If we did then it wouldn’t be a journey of faith, it would be a journey of sight.
But like Abraham and Sarah we are on a journey of faith. We can be sure that God is at work. Of course we may need many years of preparation. But we will need to believe and obey like Abraham. We will need to trust that God is working, even when we don’t see it.
We’ll need to remember that as we look to move elsewhere in the city. We’ll need to trust that God will guide us to the place where his purposes will be worked out. And hope that we don’t have to wait 75 years!
Of course wherever we end up planting it will only ever be a temporary home. That’s because like Abraham the Christian is ‘looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.’ But in Christ our future home is secure. He has called us out of darkness into his marvellous light – to believe his promises to take all who trust in him home, not to Canaan, but to heaven. Christ has promised it and guaranteed it in his blood shed on the cross. Our part is to keep believing his promises even in the hard times and keep journeying though the road may be long and the end a distant dot on the horizon.
3. God prepares Abraham and Sarah away from the spotlight
We know very little of his first 75 years, but it was all directed by God for a purpose he couldn’t even have dreamed about.
No one becomes a world cup winning rugby player overnight. Jonny Wilkinson spends hours on the training pitch. I’ve heard that he won’t stop training until he’s hit 6 perfect kicks. The hours of practice, the sacrifices that make training possible. But without the practice he’d have never been ready for the big moment in the public eye. Clive Woodward would never have thrown on a complete beginner. He chose players who have been proved over time and spent maybe years out of the limelight so that they’d be equipped for that final game. Jonny Wilkinson’s practice kicks will mostly be done in private with no one looking on.
The same holds true in Christian service. God prepares us before he uses us. How long did Moses spend in the desert herding sheep before God called him to lead his people out of Egypt? 40. And it was the right preparation for the task in hand.
God knows how to prepare his people for the tasks he has prepared for them.
We see it clearly in the life of Abraham.
4. Our preparation
Eph 2.10 says that we are God’s ‘workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them’.
But we don’t always know what plans he has for us. God’s purposes are not always transparent to us at the time. Sometimes it’s only later, many years later in some cases, and with the benefit of hindsight, that we can discern how God has been working in our lives. In the meantime we have to cling to the promises of God and the God of the promises. We must be aware that the situation that God has placed us in may well be a part of his preparation of us for the task to which he will call us at some point in the future. As that plan unfolds we may have to believe it even though we don’t see it or fully understand it.
About 6 months after I became a Christian I was in the youth group and the vicar came and said to the whole group ‘I want you to think about full time Christian ministry and specifically ordination into the Anglican church.’ I’d never thought of such a thing. In fact only months before some non-Christian friends had joked with me about becoming a priest. It was a joke because I was so not good material! But as the vicar said those words I thought ‘now that’s something I’d love to do.’ But it took a further 11 years before I eventually got ordained. I couldn’t understand why it all took so long, and why I had to spend my 20s struggling to make ends meet. But I had to trust that God was working his purposes out in my life.
Can you look back and see how God has been preparing you for something in particular?
Now a word of caution. I’m not saying that we must elevate our reading of God’s working through circumstances into authoritative guidance. We can easily get it wrong! The Bible is the only infallible rule for our lives. However clear God’s guidance may seem to be, we are still called to subject our understanding of it to the Scriptures. The wider body of Christ can be useful too in helping us discern a particular direction or to see how God has been leading us, working all things together for our good.
Whatever age we are we need to go on learning these lessons. Remember that Abraham was still in his early learning stage long after most people have retired! And he had to learn the same lessons over and over again – just like most of us. It takes a while to catch on sometimes, doesn’t it?!
God is in control and will work all things for his glory and our good |