Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You a Bystander? | Torah | Genesis 14

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Are you willing to take responsibility for things even if they aren't your responsibility? Would you go the extra mile to help out a neighbor? Or do you find yourself falling into apathy? In today's episode, Patrick uses Abram's protection of Lot in Genesis 14 as an example of how to take initiative to help others. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Passages: Genesis 14 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilman. I'm Jensen Holm McMair. And I'm Patrick Miller. We are exploring the first books of the Bible. Right now, we are in Genesis. If you're like me, you love email newsletters, but most of them don't bring me closer to God.

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In Genesis 14, we read one of those stories that people, really don't quite know how to apply to practical life. The author sets up the drama, and it is a dramatic story. Lot, who you might remember is Abrams' nephew. He's suddenly been taking captive by a group of violent foreign kings. Now, these foreign rulers, they were actually rulers of city states, so don't think about nation states. They had a little city that they ruled over. But what they do in this story is they're attacking different cities. And one of the cities that they attack is the city where Lot, again, Abrams' nephew, was living. And so, Lot is just one of many victims of this violence. Now, these kings, they were engaging in a kind of ancient get-rich-quick scheme.

The idea was, if you raid a smaller city and you steal all of their possessions and you take all their people, you enslave them, and then you sell them off, well, whammo, all of a sudden, you'll become more rich and more powerful. So let's pick up this interesting story in verse 13. A man who escaped from these foreign kings, he came and he reported to Abram, the Hebrew. Now, Abram was living near the great trees of Mamry, the Amorite, a brother of Eshcall and Aner, all of whom were allied with Abram. When Abram heard that his relative had been taking captive, he called out 318 trained men in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan. Now let's just pause here, because maybe you're not surprised by the story, but you should be.

I mean, of course we would all expect that Abrams going to be upset. His nephew was just taken to be sold off into slavery. But remember who Abram is. He's a wandering shepherd. He's not a warrior. He's not a king. What could he possibly do to make things right? We would expect him just to throw his hands up into the air and say, this is terrible, but I can't fix this.

And while we might expect that lot is his personal responsibility, he is his nephew, after all. Surely all these other people who were impacted by these foreign kings, well, they're not his responsibility. But Abram does something surprising. He decides to take responsibility for everyone. He decides to risk life and limb to confront these foreign kings and rescue everyone from slavery. So the story continues in verse 15. During the night, Abram divided his men to attack them and he routed them, pursuing them as far as Hoba, north of Damascus. He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative lot and his possessions together with the women, and the other people. Last summer, I was talking to the Christian singer and songwriter, Justin McRoberts, about his book. It is what you make of it. And in his book, he shares about how he loves to run on the same trail every day, which is near his home. Now, the upside of this trail is, it's one of those rare places in the city that somehow isolated from the sights and the sounds of the city and the suburbs. It's one of those ignored and kind of forgotten places. But the downside is that no one really

takes care of it. No one really takes responsibility for caring for the trail. Every time it rains, one part of the trail is actually completely submerged by a small creek for days afterwards. Now, obviously, no one likes to run with soggy shoes. So whenever this happens and Justin sees this creek going over the top of the trail, he just turns around and cuts his run a little bit short. But one day he found something surprising. Someone, he didn't know who, but someone had built a foot bridge over the part of the trail that the creek would cover whenever it went up. And he was surprised by this. I mean, this was miles into a trail. And so whoever did this had to pull heavy lumber, nails and tools to that point on the trail just to build this footbridge. And whoever did it,

well, they didn't do it because they had an official responsibility. They weren't working for the state or the local parks department. They just did it because they saw a problem. And they decided, I guess I'm going to be the one who's going to fix it. I'll be the one who resolves it. It was a tiny little act of prodigal grace. This anonymous person loved his neighbor so much that he decided he wanted to help them enjoy the beauty of the trail, and the best way to do that was building this footbridge. He took responsibility for a problem that no one expected him to own. Fast forward a month, and the bridge has suddenly disappeared. Justin's looking around for it because the creek was back, and obviously he wants to continue his run and he wanted to get across this little spot of water.

And as he's looking around, about a quarter mile down the creek, he sees the bridge. But it's been vandalized. Someone had rifted apart stud by stud. Man, what a bummer, he's thinking to himself. Well, why do people love to destroy, to take? But without the bridge there, he just had to turn around. And so he did. A few weeks later, though, the bridge was suddenly back.

Whoever built it had apparently come back to the site. They dragged all of the broken pieces. to the original spot and they'd reconstructed this footbridge. Again, Justin is just marveling at this person. Obviously, he personally enjoyed the bridge. But again, wow, what effort this person will go to to help others enjoy the beauty of nature? But then, again, a week later, the cycle repeats. The vandals had now drugged the bridge intact about a half mile away from its original location.

And this thing, it was heavy. And they'd obviously tried to damage it. They hadn't had much success this. time around. And at this point, Justin realized that he had a choice. Was he going to be a bystander? Or would he take responsibility? Would he watch on and shrug as people vandalize what's good and loving and generous and beautiful? Or would he finally step in? Justin decided that God had put him right there in that moment to be someone who takes responsibility, to be someone who restores, to be someone who rebuilds. And so he changed.

chose to take responsibility for all of the other people enjoying the trail, for the welfare of his little running community. He decided to be someone who would resist when his fellow humans vandalized Shalom. And so he trudged through that creek, soggy shoes and all, and he dragged that bridge by himself back to where it belonged. He said, look, I knew I was just going to do what was right. I was going to restore what was good, even though there was a good chance that the vandals would arrive again the next day or the next week and repeat the exact same behavior again. He did it because he knew that's what Jesus did for us. He took responsibility for our sin, despite the fact that we vandalize his creation.

We even vandalize our own lives by rebelling against them again and again and again. But Jesus took responsibility for us when he died for us. He took responsibility for your sins that you committed and he did it so that he could rebuild. and restore what you tore down, what we all tore down. We live in a culture that says you own yourself, and you're ultimately responsible only for yourself. You don't have to worry about other people. You don't have to own restoring the shalom and goodness of your community.

That's why we have elder care facilities, because not even children can be expected to care for their parents. It's why we have the welfare state, because a neighbor can't be expected to care for his neighbor. It's why we move without a, a thought from one city to the next because I don't have any responsibilities to the people in the city that I'm in right now that I've built my life with. I just have responsibility for myself. But Abraham and Jesus and my friend Justin, they suggest that maybe God has something different

planned for us. He wants to restore this world to shalom, to peace, to wholeness, to justice and goodness. And he's chosen to do that through us by the power of his own spirit. In other words, God's called you to be like Abraham, to be a responsibility taker. Yes, no one expected that Abram would take responsibility, not just for law, but for all of these people harm. No one thought that Abraham could do anything to make things right. And yet he steps in and he takes responsibility because he knows that God is restoring this world and he wants to work through us. God's calling you to stop being a bystander. He's calling you to love your neighbor, to put no limits on who qualifies as your neighbor.

Love them all. He's called you to defend and to care for the well-being of those who share your blood and those who don't share your blood. How is God calling you to take responsibility for building Shalom and your community today? It's time to drag the bridge back into place, to resist the vandals and to do so in love. Thanks for listening. By the way, in today's episode, we hit Genesis 14, but we didn't even talk about Melchizadec. Now, he is one of the most strange and interesting figures in the whole Old

Testament. But fear not, we're with you. If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll be able to learn a lot more about Melchizadec. In fact, we're going to look at what his name means in Hebrew because it's super cool. And we'll see how that points in a really shocking way to Jesus. So if you haven't signed up for our newsletter, click the link in our show notes and sign up for the weekly 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter today.