40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 17

Episode Date: May 21, 2015

Faithless Father Abraham.

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament Well, welcome to episode 17 of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. I am Daniel Emery Price, and I am joined by Brandon Hanson and Chad Bird. How are you guys doing? Hey, we're good. We're good. We're recording this on a Monday morning, so good way to start out the week, delving here into the good stuff

of the Torah. How's Brandon? Oh, I am doing well. I'm glad to have this to get me up and going in the morning. Better than a cup of coffee, right? It is. You have coffee, Chad? Hey, I have a body

full of coffee. My blood is mixed with coffee so I'm caffeinated and ready to go. all right if we stood next to you we would receive caffeine simply by osmosis or proximity yeah you won't you walk next to me you wake up immediately out of my pores i i carry that i carry that with me everywhere i go it's my it's part of my vocation to wake everyone up just by walking by

nice you know one of the things that somebody said i saw in a in a review of this particular their program, was they love how we don't do what we're doing right now. We just jump right into it. So let's do that lest we let them down. All right, let's do it. If you're a regular listener and you were part of last week's program, you know we talked about Genesis chapter 11 and the Tower of Babel and talked about how that was connected with Pentecost,

which a number of churches will be celebrating this coming week on Sunday, 50 days after Easter. But we're moving beyond that. We're actually going to skip most of the second half of Chapter 11 because that deals with the genealogy, and we've talked about those before. Really the only part of the last section of Chapter 11, And I think that we need to talk about is what the whole genealogy is leading up to. This is where we get to to Abram or Abraham.

And I'm probably going to I'm probably going to mix it up and call him Abraham half the time, even though that's not his name yet. I'm just used to calling him Abraham. But he starts out just as Abram. And later he gets that name changed to Abraham. But anyway, we got we got 10 generations again from the flood all the way now to Abram. We have this gradual narrowing down that we've talked about before. We started over really again with Noah, and we have his three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. And as I think I talked about last time, we're focusing now once more just upon the line of Shem, and it's come to its acme, its pinnacle with the birth of Abram. And there's a couple of things about Abram that are noted at the last part of chapter 11 that are this significant,

because they're part of the background of the story itself. The first thing is that he's married. He's married to Sarai, whose name will be changed later to Sarah. And we have this one verse that says something that becomes extremely significant in the unfolding narrative of Abram's life. And that is that Sarai is barren. she had no children as the promise is given to abram and as you have him living there in the promised land waiting for the promise to be fulfilled that barrenness of sarah is significant it's also significant because it is really illustrative of a life of faith that abram

and sarai had to live because they had this promise of children and yet they're old they're They're real old, in fact, and they have no children. And yet they have these promises of this great nations that's supposed to come forth from a womb that at least to that point has produced no life. So you have Abram. He's married. He has two brothers.

One brother dies, and the other brother marries. I just learned this this morning. I don't know how I ever missed this, but one of Abram's brothers marries his niece. That's probably a detail that I just skipped over before. But anyway, so they have three brothers, Abram. One of his brothers dies. The other brother marries his deceased brother's daughter.

And that's where the story leaves us at the end of chapter 11. So they're living, and they come out of Ur of the Chaldeans. They settle in the city of Haran, and that's where the story picks up at the beginning of chapter 12. So let's talk about 12 and this amazing entrance of the Word of God into Abram's life and what that means. What that means as far as the word of God goes and the call and the faith of Abraham and what faith is and all this good stuff. There's lots of things that we can talk about here. Just to remind you of how Genesis 12 begins, I'll read those first three verses. Now the Lord said to Abram,

blessed and then i'll throw in a few words in the beginning of verse four so abram went forth as the lord had spoken to him and lot went with him that verse is never misquoted which you mean the the whole section of it or or one in particular i will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you that's never quoted out of context ever no how would how would one use that out of context yeah yeah yeah you tell us fill us in uh i don't know i don't want to get political here um just just saying i hear that quoted quite often by by people that uh really really want to support israel yeah yeah i i was talking i was talking uh to a friend of mine uh at at work the other day who listens to our program hey there gary you're probably listening

right now and he was asking about that in fact uh it's worth saying a couple things uh concerning that it is uh it's extremely important to to emphasize especially especially because you hear words like this misquoted that the modern nation of israel is a political entity that has nothing to do with biblical israel exactly the israel that we hear about in the news that's a a geographical entity in the Middle East. That is not the Israel of the scriptures. It's a nation, just like Germany and the United States and Switzerland and all of these other places are nations.

So it's a confusion when people attribute the promises of the scriptures to the nation of Israel, because the promises in scripture, which are related to Israel are the promises that have come to fulfillment in Israel as a person, that is to say the Messiah. Isaiah talks about Israel as a nation as well as an individual, and that individual is the fulfillment of Israel's promises. So really the promises that are given to Israel come to fulfillment when the Israelite Messiah comes and fulfills them. All God's promises are yes in christ and so all the promises to israel come to fulfillment in christ and and and just kind of to wrap that up i don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole but

um the the scriptures speak of the church as as israel so the promises to israel in the old covenant come to fulfillment in christ and christ gives us the fulfillment of those promises in himself in his body which is which is the church so it's a it's a huge mistake to attribute verses like this or any of the other verses that talk about israel to that political nation called israel called israel today hey wouldn't it also be a uh a huge error a mistake to attribute any of these nationalistic promises given to the nation of Israel at that time, not today, but at that time, to then attribute those to, well, let's say maybe a country like Russia, if you're a bunch of Christians in Russia, or how about a bunch of Christians who

sail across the Atlantic, land on the shores of America, and then create a great country that seems to flourish and be blessed but but the church isn't america is it yeah the promised land of america right yeah we've we've got this occurring i mean so many times throughout history where people people will take the words of scripture and they'll twist them around and and and adapt them and apply them to situations which have absolutely no biblical foundation whatsoever it's it's a confusion of uh god's promises and political aspirations but as we know politicians are adept at uh co-opting scripture to their own advantage and you know people do that all the time yeah yeah it may it makes it one of these that that does that's kind of funky is that

you end up believing things like this because first of all you you end up wanting to bless somebody so that you don't have something bad happen to you so you get all freaked out and say like we better support israel um and everything or else god's gonna beat on our head um that's not a good reason to not it's not a good reason to love your neighbor um and then and then the other thing is that you end up thinking i've heard this like lots of times and i think this is This makes sense if you have been taught and you're in that line of thinking that the only reason, you know, I've heard it lots of times. The only reason that God hasn't wiped America off the face of the earth is because we're still good to Israel. And then you're saying that somehow that you've got God in the corner.

You know, God's obligated to bless you. like you know and like i don't think that that's a good thing either like you know somehow you found the loophole and you're like god ah god i've i've got the blessing tap turned all the way on high and you can't do anything about it because you uh you made this promise yeah national salvation by political funding yes that's that's all that uh all that amounts to okay enough about that Yeah, enough about that. But it was a good parenthesis to throw that out there. So what is it?

I think this is the first question we have to ask. What is it about Abram that attracts God? Or is there anything about Abram that does attract God? I mean, where does he come from? We have him in this genealogy, and he's in a foreign country. What is it, you know, was it that Abram lived some sort of, you know, God-pleasing life, and so God chose him? Was it that he was setting himself apart from everybody else by some sort of, I don't know, he was just living a super holy life, avoiding the pitfalls that everybody else was falling into? What is it that attracted God to Abram?

Why would he choose him? And the answer is that none of that was the case. Absolutely none of that. We have no evidence whatsoever that Abram was any different than anyone else in the ancient world. It's not like he had rejected idolatry. It's not like he had led some sort of great, upright, moral life. It's not that he had prayed to God to call him and choose him and send him forth into this foreign country. In fact, there's no evidence of anything about Abraham prior to his call that would suggest anything other than that he was in a family of idolaters, period.

in fact we we have evidence uh there's this great verse in it's in joshua i've got it i've got it uh noted here i'll read it for you in a second but it this is joshua's speech to to israel after the conquest of the holy land and notice what joshua says about the origins of abraham this is joshua 24, verse 2. From ancient times, your fathers lived beyond the river, namely Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the river and led him through all the land of Canaan. There you have it. So you got But Abraham and his dad and his brothers and their whole family, they lived outside the holy land and they served other gods, period. So what is it about Abram that is attractive or that somehow appealed to God that he would choose him?

Well, nothing. There was nothing in Abram that led God to call him. This is nothing more than God, in his mercy and in his love, calling a man to faith. Yeah, I think that you have God about to bring about the people that he's going to bring about the Messiah through. And it's almost like he's like, I'm going to find myself an idolatrous old dude and a barren woman. just to make sure this is as impossible as it could be because that's how I'm always going to do this thing. So Jesus comes about by a virgin giving birth and the nation that she's a part of comes about through him

taking this idolatrous dude that's too old to have kids and his wife that's too barren and old to have kids and says, yep, that's what I'm going to do right there. Yeah, he sets the pattern right from the beginning. This is the way that God works. As Luther says over and over, God works the same way throughout history as he worked at the beginning. He creates everything out of nothing.

And that's the way that God continues to work among us. He creates everything ex nihilo, out of nothing. So he takes, like you said, this old man and this old woman, and she has a barren womb, and they're both idolaters. And out of this nothingness, God is about to create the family that will become the nation from which the Messiah will be born. That tells us everything there is to know about the way that God works. he's not the god that responds to uh a life of a life of good works and and chooses chooses

someone based upon that he's not the god who takes the something and makes something greater out of it he's the god who takes nothing and from that makes everything that's that's good yeah yeah it's interesting that uh you know adam and adam and eve are like Cain that must be him that must be the guy and uh you know Noah's father's like Noah must be the guy and God's like no I'm gonna start this with this this dude over here that's uh what do you as you have like people in this story that have kids the natural way that you have kids and they assume that well that this this is him this is the promised one um God starts to bring about this through someone who he has to make a promise to that is so unbelievable that and we'll get there

that his wife laughs at it so it's not like she that's not like abraham and sarah were like assuming oh yeah promise he's gonna definitely come through us uh no no not the opposite when when when they said when they're told that it will that's like a laughable thing yeah that's that reminds me of the cap and quote where he says um or capon depending on how you want to say that um but uh where he says like like i preach i preach the gospel all the time because it's hilarious yeah you know i uh if it if it wouldn't offend so many people i i should write something or we should write something sometime about how good friday is the is the biggest joke of all i mean it really is this is like uh it's like the punch line that nobody sees

coming and it really is it's hilarious that here in death in the death of god and the humiliation of god in the defeat of god the seeming defeat of god that out of this comes forth all the good the way I always talk about it. Salvation in heaven and reconciliation, the justification of the ungodly, and all of this out of that which is its exact opposite. It's amazing. Yeah. And it's amazing to the point of hilarity that God would work the way that He does. So, I mean, I love that Sarah laughs because it's laughable in a wonderful way that God would work the way that he does.

He's always shocking us, always surprising us by working the opposite of what we expect. Yeah, and I don't see God getting super upset about this either. When she laughs, he says, you laughed. And she said, I didn't laugh. And this is his response. You laughed. That's it.

You laughed. you did yeah it wasn't it wasn't like go repent or it was just like you did you did you laughed yeah and i see why you laughed because yeah from your perspective yeah i mean you're look at your look at your age there's no way that a woman your age should uh be reading you know what to expect you're expecting this this should not be happening you know yeah that's a weird scene right you see some 75 year old woman reading what you expect when you're expecting everyone around you is like oh right women don't cash their social security checks to buy pampers i mean it just it doesn't happen but that's what happens with that's what happened

with sarah and then and it comes full circle uh with a virgin conceiving it doesn't matter both wombs you have this impossibility occurring so from the from the womb of a 90 year old woman this son of laughter is born and from the womb of a teenage version uh the one who brings about the the greatest joke of all is uh is born as well and it's it's it's great to laugh to laugh with joy not with derision but to laugh with joy because it uh it is it is the greatest joke that was played on the devil he was he the deceiver was deceived and we're the ones who who laugh with joy at the at the result of it so yeah uh this is the way that god works and this is this is the what what luther called the theology of the cross where god works under his opposite

He does that which you don't expect. He works in ways which are contrary to what we think is the good and right and the God-like way of doing things. He calls Abraham out of his dead idolatry. And we'll talk more about this as we go along in the story, but it's worth indicating, too, we're talking a second here about the faith of abraham because god calls him when he's dead in his idolatry and abram responds verse four so abram went forth as the lord had had

spoken to him and lot went with him so god speaks god calls and abram believes and and he he goes forth, which is what faith does. Faith is saying amen to what God has spoken. It's the affirmation that what God says is true. It seems like there's a place to talk about how wonderful faith is and the importance of faith, but at the same time, there's also a temptation to talk too much about faith so i mean it's you look at what abram does and it's a it's a great example of what of how of how faith is created it's created by god speaking forth his word of promise and then what faith does is faith receives this word it echoes back this amen then And it's active in what it does.

But at the same time, if you talk too much about faith, you risk making faith the object of faith itself. And I'm thinking about this because of a conversation I had with a family member of mine not too long ago, struggling with doubt and uncertainty as to her salvation. And it struck me then, talking with her and talking with other people who have faced these same struggles, that if we focus too much on faith as the assurance of our salvation, that we really miss the whole point

that our assurance of salvation is Christ. It's not our faith. It's not something within us, but it's something outside of us. It's not that which resides in the heart, but that which is on the cross that is the assurance of our salvation. So we can talk about the faith of Abraham, but we can also talk too much about the faith of Abraham. And in talking too much about it, we make faith really the primary focus here, whereas it's not. The focus is on God and God's promise, and God's promise to do that for Abraham, which seems impossible to reason. I freaked a guy out the other day and said he was talking about faith, and it was all that kind of stuff, you know?

You've got to have faith, and you've got to believe, and all that stuff. And so I finally, sometimes I'll do that. I'll say something shocking just to, I don't know. Wake up. Make him think different. Just a slap, a verbal slap in the face. And I said, faith never saved anybody. I bet that did shock you.

Just a horrified look at his face. And I was like, I mean, Muslims have faith. People believe all kinds of things You can believe in yourself You can believe in an idol That doesn't save anybody You're saved by grace Through faith

In a certain promise But that promise is what's saving you That person is what's saving you It's the object of the faith That matters We don't want to make faith God Faith is not your savior It's just the

Faith is just the pipeline It's just the tether That connects you To the one Who can actually do something About the situation That you find yourself in Which is a situation riddled by

Sin and death But yeah That's what saves you If it's just a matter of Generic faith Believing in something Well, people believe in all kinds of things. And so I do think that you can talk about faith in this sort of abstract way

that ends up making faith God, ends up making faith your Savior. And that's not what's going on there. Faith is always to believe a promise. It clings to a word spoken to you. A word, it clings to a word by which that faith was first generated in the first place. It clings to its origin. Word of God is the object of our faith or our trust. It is in what we believe.

But you're right, when we talk about faith in an abstract way, it almost, well, speaking from personal experience, years ago, when I wasn't Lutheran, uh there was a time when i had more faith in my own faith than i had in the actual promises of god because that's what was being preached pretty much yeah yeah well what the temptation is to it's a it's a it's a terrible place to be when you don't think that you have enough faith and so you go to you to generate more i just i just gotta believe more i just i gotta muster up more faith from inside i gotta dig down deep and and and i gotta i gotta somehow exercise more faith and faith then becomes your god and ironically that's that's an idol it's it's funny how how faith becomes uh a good work in that respect right we we talk about faith alone and but when

when faith is twisted around to be something that is really something we generate and we keep going and we add to then it becomes nothing more than a work that we ourself do and so that faith is no longer faith but it's uh it's something that we we do ourselves brandon you were gonna you were gonna add something i was just gonna say if you want to make grown men curl up in the fetal position and ball their brains out send them back and down this road of you've got to generate your own faith and and you got to make sure that you're generating enough faith well the fact of the matter is we don't even have the mustard seed of faith without the word of god so why would we continue after receiving faith through the word of god by the holy spirit why would we continue

thinking that now we've got to uh you know prop our own faith up with our faith well that's that's The whole mustard seed thing is interesting because Jesus says if you had the faith of a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, be uprooted and cast into the sea. We take that and we're like, man, just a little bit of faith will go a long way. And I'm always like, do you think that Jesus is saying there, like is he encouraging mountain moving there? Or is he trying to tell you that, look, if you had faith, if you were able to generate faith, you could cast mountains into the sea with a mustard seed amount. Therefore, let me tell you how much faith you have. Less than a mustard seed. Because I don't know about you, but I've not seen anybody doing this.

you know i've not seen anyone casting mountains into seas okay uh so i'm going to assume that in and of yourself like that you have zero faith none like whatsoever um instead faith is a gift from god and god gives you faith and like he does the mountain moving and he takes the mountain of transgression that you've accumulated and he throws it into the sea of forgetfulness and says that's the mountain moving that needs to happen and uh and you're going and that and the faith that that you need to believe this i'm going to supply i don't god i think we have this idea that god like searches the earth for people of faith when in fact he like searches the earth and and supplies faith drops faith creates faith speaks faith into into into the hearts of fallen dead

people yeah and he uh he illustrates that beautifully here in the case of in the case of abraham because he chooses him that we wouldn't have you know if god had come to us and said well i'm looking for someone who's going to be uh the father of a great nation so who do you who do you think i should choose and of course we would have said someone uh young and and uh someone with a wife who was able to bear children and someone who was godly and someone who came from a lineage of poverty. All this is what we would have said, but God does the opposite. He chooses that, which illustrates the fact that he is merciful, that he calls sinners to repentance, and that he creates life out of death. He creates something out of nothing.

He does this all the time throughout the scriptures. He does it still today. And when you think about Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, God did the same thing there. He chose someone who was a persecutor of the church, someone who rejected the Messiah, someone who was out to stamp out the church. And that's the one that he calls. That's the one that he gives faith to. that's the one that he gives life to out of death and makes something out of the nothingness that that saul was i feel in order that he might illustrate that yeah i feel like if you were

to ask saul of tarsus like dude do you even believe the writings of moses he'd been like you're trying to get yourself killed like wait like like like do you do you have do you have faith that uh that the god of in the god of abraham isaac and jacob he'd have looked at you like do you know who you're talking to dark like darn right i got faith you better believe it like i got more i got more faith than the average pharisee he'll tell you that blameless dude of course i believe yeah i can hear the question coming up so i'm gonna ask it for anybody who might want to ask it so they get the answer now they don't have to write us an email but they still can if they want to i can hear the question coming up though well what about the sinful woman

that was forgiven and jesus says your faith has saved you go in peace or what about the passage in romans 117 where paul says the righteous shall live by faith you know isn't this talking about our faith here yeah when jesus says your faith has made you well it's like another way of saying i have made you well my gifts have made you well yeah it's always uh when when you have those passages that come up uh of course we we see them in the context of the whole gospel itself where faith is nothing more than the presence of christ faith is nothing more than the uh the promises of god that are that are present in uh in a believer so it's not uh it's not the faith in and of itself it's not some kind of naked trust that a person has and whatever but it's always

faith is always clothed with christ so faith is never just a naked faith but it's faith that's clothed in christ and so when fate we say we hear that faith saves you or your faith has made you well or your or faith is that by which you are justified that faith is always christ himself and and when it comes right down to it uh our faith is in the messiah who trusted on our behalf so our faith is in the faithful messiah psalm 22 talks about the how how the messiah believes in his father he he trusts in him so even even when you talk about our our struggles with faith Our prayer, Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief. It's ultimately the faithfulness, the faith, the trust of the Messiah, which is for us.

It's part of what he does for us. He believes for us. He gives us the gift of faith, to be sure. But that gift is really the transfer of his faith to us that we might receive him and all the benefits that he's won for us. And it becomes personal the way that any gift becomes personal in the sense that if I give you something that you don't have, it would be correct for you to call it yours. So if I give you something, if I give Chad a car, it's appropriate for him to call it his car. now it doesn't mean that that he somehow acquired it by doing something awesome for me or that he somehow built it or that he uh that he you know earned it or that he made it uh or that he mustered

up enough something within himself to get it um but if i give it to him well then then it's his and uh and so so the bible talks that way so the bible tells us definitively that faith is a gift from god and then proceeds to call it ours and so um salvation is the same way and so um salvation is referred to as something that that is ours that it's it's our salvation but but it's but we didn't come about it uh by or by our own by our own merits or our own working our own abilities or anything like that um it's ours because god gave it to us uh and so so the the Bible was always going to talk about the gifts of God as yours because he gives them.

So this, you know, I mean, you see this even in sacrament. I mean, it's remember your baptism, right? So I remember my baptism, but it wasn't me doing it. It was something given to me, and I was washed, and I was sanctified, and I was justified, and my sins were forgiven. And that's my baptism that God gifted to me. and faith is the same way salvation is it's all it's all gift man all that stuff is gift and it becomes and it's not just like this just gift that is just to my people and in general it it is that

but then it becomes into the individual center your faith your your baptism your salvation because god is god is about the individual center he is it's the for youness of the gospel this is for you this is faith for this person very good and i think we're out of time that was a great way to end okay our 40 minutes is up we didn't get very far chad yeah but we uh sometimes you got to build a foundation before you start building on it right we got a good foundation built now that's it that's it all right well guys thanks for for joining us again and we would love for you to go over to the website and check out other stuff.

And we would really, really love it if you went over to iTunes and rated and reviewed the show. That would be all we asked. So if you could do that for us, it helps keep it a little bit relevant. And we're all about being relevant here. And so if you could help us out to that end, that would be much appreciated.

And we'll see you guys next week. © transcript Emily Beynon