Tag: bible

Nothing strengthens us so much as isolation and transplantation.  What do I mean by that?  Well, let a person be thrown upon their own resources and like McGyver and he or she will be forced to develop ingenuity and powers that would never have developed and of which there would have been no trace under the ease of home.

This is also true of faith.  So long as we are quietly at rest amid favorable and undisturbed surroundings, faith sleeps as an undeveloped sinew within us.  But when we are pushed out from all these comfortable surroundings with nothing but God to look to, then faith grows suddenly into a monarch oak.  As long as the bird lingers by the nest it will not experience the joys of flight.  As long as the trembling boy clings to the bank or toes the bottom, he will never know the delights of swimming.

Abram would never have become Abraham, the father of the faithful, the mighty exemplar of faith, if he had always lived in the comforts of Ur.  No, he had to journey into the unknown and march off the map so that faith could rise up in all its glorious proportions in his soul.

It may not be necessary for you and me to withdraw from home and friends, but we will have to withdraw our dependence upon all earthly props and supports if we are ever to learn what it is to trust simply and absolutely on the eternal God.  It seems, in the life of most Christians that there arise occasions when God benevolently takes away what is precious, even necessary to us, so that we might more fully recognize Him as our most precious possession.

Job knew that God both “gives and takes away.”  He might take away our business, possessions, friends, our influence, our spouse or parent or child, our health—all in an effort to help you find Him to be more precious than it all.  He is most precious of all.  This is the conclusion Asaph came to in Psalm 73.  Looking around at all the good things in life that the wicked were enjoying, he became envious.  But ultimately he “understood their final destiny” (Psa. 73:17, NIV) and came to realize that the nearness of God was his highest good (Psa. 73:28).  Here’s what he says in vv. 25-26, some of my favorite verses in all of Scripture:

25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. 26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

But we don’t often come to this place of valuing God above all things until we have faced the loss of some of life’s good gifts.  Abram left the comforts of Ur, left most of his family behind and all of his friends.  Whatever “job” he had there was a thing of the past.  After 75 years of comfort and ease, now Abram was marching out with nothing but the promises of God—promises for a future destiny with many sons.  As yet he had none.

Developing faith in Abram was important.  Both obedience and faith are vital, but for different reasons.  Jerry Bridges, in his book Trusting God, says: “It is just as important to trust God as it is to obey Him.  When we disobey God we defy His authority and despise His holiness.  But when we fail to trust God we doubt His sovereignty and question His goodness.  In both cases we cast aspersions upon His majesty and His character.  God views our distrust of Him as seriously as He views our disobedience” (Trusting God, p. 18).

So God made Abram into a man of faith.  He wasn’t that always.  He became a man of faith by taking away “all earthly props and supports so that Abraham might learn to trust completely in God alone.” (F. B. Meyer)

There is an old poem by that prolific author Anonymous that goes.

When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man,
And skill a man
When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest part;

When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!

How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
And with mighty blows converts him

Into trial shapes of clay which
Only God understands;
While his tortured heart is crying
And he lifts beseeching hands!

How He bends but never breaks
When his good He undertakes;
How He uses whom He chooses,
And which every purpose fuses him;
By every act induces him
To try His splendor out-
God knows what He’s about.

This is what God did with Abram and what he will do with you and me to help us become men and women of faith.

Abram’s faith and obedience, remember, were based on God’s grace.  It was God’s grace that produced such faith in Abram, just as he does in our lives.  It is a faith that by grace displays itself through obedience and endurance.

“The root and the sap of the Christian life are hidden; but the fruits of this life must be manifest before the world.” (Donald Bloesch)

What does this faith look like?

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen that it is a faith that obeys.  So surrendered to the word of God that he didn’t pause to make sure everything made sense for his future.  When a sinner is transformed by God’s grace and given eternal life as a free gift when a person believes, it is now his heart’s disposition to be devoted to Jesus Christ, to give his complete allegiance, which means following his orders. 

That great old hymn by Charles Wesley says it well: “Long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed Thee.”

When faith is the product of grace, it doesn’t misuse its freedom to live for oneself, but rather it obeys its new, benevolent master, Jesus Christ.

We also noticed that faith produced by grace endures, year after year after year, even through a whole life of not receiving what was promised.  Verse 9 showed us that Abram still lived like a wandering camper even though this land had been promised to him.  The land promise wasn’t even fulfilled in the lives of his son or grandson, not even in Joseph’s life, not for 500 years!

So why didn’t Abram just wash his hands of this thing and pack up the camper and go back to Ur?  The reason is that the land prefigured something else, something greater, it was the “land of promise.”  Abram looked forward to something he considered more sure than the very ground he trod upon.

And that points to the third thing we learned in v. 10 about Abram’s faith, faith produced by God’s grace, is that it is forward looking, it looks heavenward.  That aspect will be developed in even more detail in vv. 13-16.  Abram’s faith was not just tied to the geography inhabited by the Canaanites, but to all the benefits of eternity in the heavenly city.  This was the secret to Abram’s “long obedience in the same direction” in the words of Eugene Peterson.

Genuine, biblical faith is forward looking.  It anticipates the fulfillment of God’s promise.  Luther says “faith is the wedding ring by which we have pledged ourselves to Christ.”  It is more what we would call an engagement ring, something given in anticipation and surety of the best that is yet to come!

Now, in vv. 11-12, we find that genuine faith is a faith that relies—that stakes its confidence on the character of God revealed in the promises of God.

Having explained how Abraham’s faith worked in relation to the promise of the land, the writer now begins to explain Abraham’s faith and the obtaining of a promised son:

11 By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

Some other translations along with the ESV make Sarah and her faith the subject of verse 11—for example, the RSV: “By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive. . . .”  But this is implausible because the phrase “received power to conceive” literally is “power for the deposition of seed/sperm” (dynamin eis katabolen spermatos), a patently male function.  Thus, Abraham has to be the subject of the sentence.

Most believe the misunderstanding is due to a wrong accent mark in the Greek that incorrectly renders “Sarah herself” as a nominative and not as dative.  The corrective dative translation gives the right sense: “By faith he [Abraham] also, together with Sarah, received power to beget a child when he was past age, since he counted him faithful who had promised.”

The NIV reads, “By faith, Abraham, even though he was past age – and Sarah herself was barren – was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise.”

This view also alleviates another problem, namely, that in the account in Genesis 18, Sarah is rebuked for her unbelief rather than commended for her faith.  When the Lord confronts her, she denies, rather than confesses, her unbelief.  Probably, in spite of her initial doubt, she eventually came to believe God’s promise as Abraham did.  But if Abraham is the subject of 11:11, then the emphasis is on his faith, not on Sarah’s faith.

The point is, it was biologically impossible for Abraham, as well as Sarah, to be able to conceive a child at this time.  Abraham was 75 years old when God first promised him a son.  Eleven years later, Abram tries through self-effort, to gain a son for himself through Hagar, but God told him that this was not the son of promise.  And then finally, 13 years later, at age 99, God says, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son” (Gen. 18:10).

The impotence of Abraham was not the only issue.  Sarai had always been barren.  Menopause had come and gone.  Sarah herself says, “I am worn out, and my lord is old” (Genesis 18:12).  These were two major problems!

Abram had been expressing some faith way back when he was 75 because he did believe God’s promise for a son even though he knew Sarah was barren.  But now that Abraham was almost a hundred years old and Sarah almost ninety, the promise seemed totally out of reach.

Sometimes God stacks the odds, just like when he trimmed Gideon’s army down from 32,000 to 300, making it even more impossible to face the mighty Midianite army.  Why did God do that?  So that the Israelites could not boast that their might had defeated the Midianites (Judges 7:2).  And think of the time when Jesus and His disciples received word that Lazarus was sick and dying.  Instead of rushing to his side Jesus waited…and Lazarus died.  In fact, when Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been in the grave four days.  Jewish folklore held that a person dead four days was REALLY DEAD!  But Jesus used this to show His miraculous power and raised Lazarus from the dead.

The assertion that he was “as good as dead” (perfect passive participle) in verse 12 is exactly the same in the Greek as in Romans 4:19, where Paul said that Abraham “considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.”

But God had made promises to Abram.  In Genesis 15:5 God told Abram:

5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

And notice Abram’s response: “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6).

In Genesis 22, after God tested Abram’s faith by asking him to sacrifice that one and only Son, that promised one that he loved so much, God said, “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,” (Gen. 22:17).

Later that promise was fulfilled, but not in Abram’s lifetime.  So, what sustained his faith as he saw each year clip by? 5-10-15-20-25 years.  With each passing year the possibilities were dissipating.

What sustained Abram’s faith?  Not just the fact that there was a promise, but faith in the One who made that promise.  Abram knew God well enough to know that he was trustworthy, that He was faithful.  Notice how verse 11 says that Abram “considered him faithful who had promised.”

You and I can always trust God to keep his promises.

Charles Spurgeon, a preacher in England back in the late 1800’s, had this great insight. “If God had meant to run back from any promise, he would surely have run back from the promise to give his only begotten Son; but having fulfilled that, what promise is there he will ever break?”

Thus, Romans 8:31-32 reads: “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, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”  In other words, if God has already done for us the thing that would have been the hardest for Him to do—sacrificing His own Son for sinners—then we can believe that He will fulfill all His promises and plans for us.

Sure, Abram was a man just like you and me, prone to doubting.  It took time for his faith to grow strong (Romans 4:20).  That promise of a son was first incredible, but over time it became “impossible.”  However, when Abram refocused the eyes of his heart upon the God who had made that promise, all difficulties disappeared.

The word “considered” indicates that Abram came to this conclusion after much thought and careful search.  It wasn’t a leap in the dark.  According to Paul in Romans 4 Abraham “faced the facts.”  He considered the obstacles that were in the way.  And his conclusion didn’t arise based upon any external circumstances or in his own ability to figure out how things might work out.  As Jerry Bridges explains: “God’s plan and His ways of working out His plan are frequently beyond our ability to fathom and understand. We must learn to trust when we don’t understand” (Trusting God, p. 20).  It was still a mystery to Abram but after weighing all the evidence—both the biological impossibility AND what he knew about God, he trusted God that He would and could do it.

Abram weighed the human impossibility of becoming a father against the divine impossibility of God ever being able to break his word and decided that since God is God, nothing is impossible. In other words, he believed that God “exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6b).

We’ve been talking about the faith of Abram, a faith that first obeyed.

8 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. 9 By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.

Secondly, we see from this passage about Abram’s faith that it was a faith that endures.

Abram had been told that he had “an inheritance” (Heb. 11:8) in this land that he was going to.  It was a “land of promise,” promised to him by God himself.  God had said: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.   I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3)

Now, the promise that Abram’s descendants would inherit this land didn’t come until Abram was already in this Promised Land.  Because Abram had responded to God’s Word with believing obedience, God tells him in Genesis 13:14-15, The LORD said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.”  It was reaffirmed to him along with the promise of an heir (Gen. 15:18-21), and again after the bestowal of the covenant of circumcision (Gen. 17:8).  The divine bidding was sufficient for him at his first call, and he went out, “not knowing where he was going.”

But that was never fulfilled in Abram’s lifetime.  He waited all his life for God’s land promise to be fulfilled and it never was.  He waited twenty five years for a son, and that promise was finally fulfilled.  The point is, Abram waited, a long time, for God to fulfill His promise.

Waiting is never easy.  We don’t like to wait.  We don’t like slow lines or traffic.  We don’t like waiting for appointments.  I don’t like waiting.  I find, however, that no matter how short the line I choose for check out, it always takes longer than I wanted.

But I’ve never had to wait 25 years, or never to have received something I waited for.  Some of you have.  Some of you have prayed and hoped and waited for healing of some sickness for a long time, or have prayed and hoped and waited for a mate, and it never happened.

I hope you can find something in Abram’s example to encourage you.

Isaiah, in writing to a nation in exile, who may have thought the day of relief would never come, gave them these encouraging words: “He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.  Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted, but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:29-31).

So, Abram enters the Promised Land armed with this promise from God.  But do all the pagan Canaanites show up at Abram’s doorstep once he settles in and offer him the keys to their cities?  Absolutely not.

There was…

• No “Welcome Abram” sign.
• No discount coupons from the merchants.
• No housewarming party.
• No visit from the Welcome Wagon.  Is that even a thing anymore?
• No mayor offering the key to the city.
• No band playing “Happy Days are Here Again.”
• No ticker-tape parade.

Nobody expected him.  Nobody cared that he had come.  Nobody gave him anything.  Instead,

9 By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.

By divine right this land was his, but he lived in it “as in a foreign land.”

Notice that “by faith” Abram turned his back on Ur and left his homeland.  But faith didn’t stop the moment he stepped into the land of promise.  Like our lives after the faith that receives salvation, we still need faith as we await the fulfillment of all God’s promises.

In fact, going to the promised land thrust Abram into more severe tests than he had experienced just from leaving Ur.  It was going to be harder to live in the land of promise, to live in anticipation of a dream that wouldn’t come true right away.  Somehow, when you know that something is yours, waiting for it becomes even harder.

Imagine that God has promised to you the land of Guatemala.  So you pack up your camper and head south.  But when you arrive there you receive no reception.  You can’t speak the language, use your currency, or eat the food.  All you have is your camper.  That’s where you have to live.  And in this camper you have to move from one place to another.  Your children and your grandchildren also have to buy and live in their own campers too.

But this is your land.  God has promised it to you.

You read Genesis and you see that Abram is always on the move.  “He lived in tents,” symbolizing the transitory, impermeant lifestyle of Abram.  Isaac and Jacob lived the same way, even though they were “heirs of the promise.”

I know lots of people who like to camp out on vacation, but I don’t know anyone who likes to live in a tent as a permanent resident.  All of us have a natural desire to settle down someplace and create a nest of our own.

But 5-10-15, 20, 30 years later, Abram is still living in a camper.

In many ways this is even more remarkable than him leaving Ur in the first place.  As long as he was on the road traveling across the desert, he could dream about his future ranch and his palace.  When he actually got to Canaan, all those illusions disappeared.

Had Abram misheard or misunderstood God? 

John Calvin asks, “Where was the inheritance which he had expected? It might have indeed occurred instantly to his mind, that he had been deceived by God” (Calvin’s Commentaries [Baker], Hebrews, p. 279).

This is quite a natural response that we have when we step out in faith and then don’t receive what we thought we would—when deciding to follow Christ makes life harder than it was before, or not receiving the answers to our prayers for months and even years.

Some of the promises God eventually did fulfill in Abram’s lifetime, but not this one.  This promise for a place to call his own never happened.  When Abraham died, all he owned was a little plot on which he buried Sarah.

Stephen, in Acts 7:4-5 says “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.  Yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot’s length, but promised to give it to him as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child.”

Still, Abram held on to the hope that it would one day be his, that it would one day be enjoyed by his children.  Jacob and Joseph, at their deaths were so sure that this land would one day be theirs, that they told their descendants to take their bones back to that land to be buried.  It wasn’t theirs yet, but they were assured of it.

Again, it proves Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

John Calvin points out that just after Abraham arrived in the land of promise, there was a famine that drove him from the land.  But later he returned and lived in the land by faith alone.

Abram could have thrown up his hands and said, “Why don’t we move back to Ur?  All our friends are there.  We loved the food.  Our money bought things.  They have so much more in the city.”

But when faith is the product of God’s grace, it is willing to endure any inconvenience and wait for God to fulfill His promises.

If the decision had been made on the basis of economics, he would have stayed at home.  If the decision had been made to secure a better quality of life, Ur would have won hands down.  But if the decision was being made on the basis of what was best for Abram’s eternal wellbeing, the Promised Land proved to be the best option.

Faith says, “though I cannot see it now, I stake my destiny and its fullness upon God’s Word.”  Elisha Coles once said, “Faith is your spiritual optic.”  In other words, faith allows you see something that isn’t there yet as if it already exists.

A faith that is the product of God’s grace endures when obedience to the Word of God requires persevering.

• Faithfully persevering in a difficult marriage when other options become attractive occurs only because we believe God’s promises.
• Faithfully enduring as a Christian single when men entice you into sexual relationships is only possible because you hold on to God’s promises.
• Faithfully holding on as a Christian student when the academic world seeks to undermine your faith demands that you must have a firm grip on God’s promises.
• Having a resilient faith as a Christian businessman when opportunities to make more money by compromising your integrity, is only possible by holding out for the better promises of God.

A faith that is the product of grace endures when obedience to the Word of God requires persevering.

How do you know if you’ve experienced God’s saving grace?  How do you know if you’ve been transformed by the sovereign grace of God?  Because you will have faith that obeys and obeys enduringly.

Kent Hughes summarizes:

The word for Abraham’s existence was dissonance —he never fit in.  His religion was different and far above that of the land.  He was a monotheist, and his neighbors were polytheistic pagans.  His standards of morality were rooted in the character of God, while theirs came from the gods they themselves had created.  His worldview invited repeated collisions with that of the inhabitants.  He was always living in conscious dissonance.

What a lesson for us!  The life of faith demands that we live in dissonance with the unbelieving world.  A life of faith is not anti-cultural, but countercultural.  Thus, a vibrant faith is always matched with a sense of dis-ease, a pervasive in-betweenness, a sense of being a camper.  This does not mean, of course, that Abraham was separate from culture.  To the contrary, the Genesis record reveals he was deeply involved in the politics of the land.  But there was always that dissonance.  He was never at home!

The parallels between Abraham’s experience and that of the Christian are easy to see, because the Christian has the promise of an ultimate land.  In fact, every believer is called to step out in faithful obedience and to follow Christ as he leads on to that land.  All of us are, by faith, to obey and go as God directs, though we do not know where the path will take us. All of us are, by faith, to become willing sojourners, living in constant dissonance with the world as we await our final inheritance.  It is a dangerous thing when a Christian begins to feel permanently settled in this world.

Have we stepped out in obedience to our individual call?  Are we living in such a way in this world that there is the discomfort of dissonance?

As Peter says, we are “sojourners and exiles” in this world.  We will not easily “fit in.”  Oh, we might try to live like the world, but we won’t be comfortable doing it, not if we are true followers of Jesus Christ.

Actually, Lot did choose to go out and live like the world.  It didn’t really work out for him, though, did it?

As believers, our homeland is in heaven, and our thoughts and affections should be regularly directed there, as Paul says in Colossians 3.

1 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.  3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Like Abram, we need to keep our eyes on the heavenly city and allow these future promises to produce in us the holiness that pleases God.  Several of the New Testament writers speak of the impact our belief in future promises have upon our current life.

11 Since all these things [heavenly bodies and the earth, creating the new heavens and earth] are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be [today] in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God [like Abram we wait], because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn!  13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. (2 Peter 3)

Or think of what the apostle John said in 1 John 2 and 3.  At the end of chapter 2 John encourages us to live righteous lives…

28 And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming. 29 If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.

Who wants to shrink back from Jesus in shame at his coming?  Wouldn’t we rather be excited at His coming and welcome Him with open arms?  If we prefer not to shrink back in shame, we better watch over our lives now and live in a way that he would be pleased to catch us doing what is right and good and loving when He comes.

Then in chapter 3 John says…

2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. 3 And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.

When Jesus Christ appears we will be suddenly transformed and become like him in righteousness and purity.  But having that hope means that we will purify ourselves now, today.

So let your future hope of being someday with Christ excite your heart to become more and more like Him today.