Clough Genesis Lesson 42

Election; Abraham’s response to election – Genesis 12:4-9

Remember that beginning with Genesis 12 we have a change in dispensations. Prior to Abraham we have universal primitive revelation, that is, all tribes of men on all parts of the earth, somehow, in some way, receive revelation. We’re not sure how it took place. We’re not sure of the channels. Genesis 24, Genesis 14 gives us an example of this, Melchizedek, the king-priest. In some way, though, nations received information. After Abraham we have local revelation and it is advanced. And so there’s a definite shift in history, and the date of this shift, depending on the chronology that you follow, is either around 1800 BC or 2000 BC, most people think about 2000 BC. So that being so, that year, approximately 4,000 years from this time in history, we had a major shift in the way God works with man. And that major shift introduces a major new doctrine, and a doctrine which modern man finds probably more offensive than any other doctrine the Bible teaches, and that is the doctrine of election, that God chooses by His sovereign will, independently of our opinion, independently of how we think, of our advice, of our merit. God chooses to develop history the way he chooses to develop history.

Going back to God’s character, God has certain attributes. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is loving, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, and because God is all of these things, particularly because He is sovereign, God has the right, God has the authority, God has the power to shape history the way he chooses to shape it. This point, when revelation is now contracted down and limited only to one channel, that is, it comes to man only through Abraham, means that Abraham, though he began in idolatry as Joshua 24:2 says, Abraham was no better than anyone else in the world. In fact, the Bible tells us of one man who probably was more spiritual than Abraham and his name was Melchizedek and we meet him in two more chapters.

So in spite of the fact that Abraham was not number one he was picked. Why was he picked? I have not idea why he was picked. The Bible wonders at this many times; in fact, if you turn to Deuteronomy 4:37, you’ll see that Israel reminded herself of this sovereign picking, this sovereign election, sovereign choice, many times. It was a tendency on the part of the nation to get fatheaded because God had chosen them, therefore the implication was that they were better than everyone else. Yet in Deuteronomy 4:37 it says “because God loved thy fathers, therefore He chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in His sight [with His mighty power out of Egypt.]” Deuteronomy 7:8 teaches the same thing: because “The LORD loved you, and because He would kept the oath which He had sworn unto your fathers, therefore hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand,” and the word “love” is a word in the Hebrew language, it looks like this, ahabah, and ahabah is used of a sovereign choice; it’s not the other word, chesed, that we’ve seen used in the other books of the Bible. This is ahabah, and it is God chooses whom He loves, how He wants, and where.

We don’t like that, because this means that we are, so to speak, vulnerable. We are totally vulnerable to God’s sovereignty. The sinful creature particularly dislikes to be vulnerable to the interference of God, but nevertheless, this is what God’s doctrine of election teaches. Let’s watch what this did in the nationhood of the world. Let’s take two criteria that we can use to compare nations and let’s compare a few nations on the face of the earth at that time. Let’s say here’s Abraham and his nation to be, Israel, and then we have n1, n2, n3, n4, these are other nations on the face of the earth. Now let’s watch the difference, in history, between how God interacts with Israel versus how He interacts with other nations.

As of the time that God chose Abraham, He had His restraining grace applied across the board to all nations. Restraining grace means that God keeps depravity controlled. In other words, if there weren’t such a thing as restraining grace, the physical creation would tear itself up quickly into chaos, the physical laws would begin to deteriorate, the rate of mutations would speed up, you would have a wholesale destruction. In human society you would have the sin nature begin, on its own, to simply tear up and shred everything. Everything would crater, everything would deteriorate. And the fact that this is not so is due to God’s restraining grace.

Now restraining grace has a function. Restraining grace is to cause the human race to survive and be savable, therefore. You can’t save people who are dead; the gospel is going to do no good to people who are dying. So therefore we have to keep people alive and restraining grace is what keeps all nations functioning in history; its great expression is the Noahic Covenant. The Noahic Covenant is made on the basis of the atonement of Christ to both believers and unbeliever, elect and non-elect. It is a universal covenant, and it is a covenant produced by the anticipation of Christ dying on the cross. Restraining grace is a byproduct also of the cross of Christ.

Now we also have an addition to God’s restraining grace; we have His redeeming grace or His saving grace, and as of the moment you’re observing in Genesis 12, that occurs only in Israel. And that means that all the other nations, the sons of Japheth, the other sons of Shem, and all the sons of Ham are left without any direct saving grace. Well what does this mean then? That means that with the election of Abraham we have the rise of the missionary imperative, that revelation must now be communicated horizontally through history from man to man from the originating point. Now this strikes people as offensive. You mean, they’re right and everybody else is wrong? Yes, that’s exactly what we mean, and we would further say why shouldn’t it be that way; if God has chosen one race, one country, one people to choose to be the channel of revelation, why not? Why do you insist that revelation always comes through all people all the time? On what basis do you make that claim and on what basis do you, on the basis of that claim, charge that it is wrong or something morally distasteful about their being revelation canned and localized in one zone or one area?

Election means that God’s plan is worthy of praise; the fact that it is this system involving missionary work, involving localized revelation, the fact that this is so means that we have the right to be not ashamed of God’s works; this is God’s sovereign plan by God’s design without our consultation, and we can either be ashamed of it or we can be proud of it. And this is why no Christian who really knows the Scripture ought to be ashamed of the gospel of Christ. The gospel of Christ is the handiwork of God. Why be ashamed of the handiwork of God. And yet we have men on the Texas Tech Board of Regents who want to do away with prayer at the football games. Now there might be other reasons for doing away with prayer but I find it interesting the one being proposed is that Texas Tech might receive a bad reputation nationwide because the home games are broadcast on nationwide TV and after all, what would people think of a major university offering prayer before a football game before the nation. We have outstanding men in the town on the Texas Board of Regents who think this way. It’s because they, as men, are ashamed of praying to God in the name of Christ. Now since when are a group of men, supposedly, ashamed of praying to God in the name of Christ? This is a sinful attitude and it’s a rebellion against the revelation of God.

So we come now to study the doctrine of election. We’ve studied this several times but let’s go through it again and then we’ll study the text of watching Abraham respond to this election.

Election, first of all means that it starts with a divine viewpoint foundation. You cannot appreciate or even discuss the doctrine of election without understanding first creation and the fall. Here’s why. If God created the world the way the Bible says and we have God standing off, outside of creation, and He creates the finite creature, then it means that the creature can never totally grasp the Creator. God is omniscient; that means God knows everything. It also means immediately that because the creation is finite the creation cannot know everything. It means, therefore, that we will never be able to get to a point of understanding how God influences history. This cause/effect relationship that exists between the Creator and the creation cannot be comprehended by the creature at the other end of the line. God can comprehend it but we can’t. It is comprehendible, it is rational, it is not irrational, it is totally rational but God alone has the brain power to see this through. All we can do, as Christians, is to say this statement about it, that statement about it, that statement about it, render them in a non-contradictory way and leave it there; we cannot comprehend the election of God. I have no idea how God influences history without negating human volition, but He does and He does it continually.

If you would like a little test example to go home and think about sometime in your spare time, think about this: Can you determine how you, as a spirit, influence your body. That’s a classic mind/body problem; philosophy has never solved this one either. Why is it that a thought in your mind, when you decide to raise your hand… we know that the nervous system makes the muscles go in your body but how do you, in your human spirit, interface with your central nervous system? Where’s the connection? Where’s the plug? Where’s the wire? No one has yet found it and for 2000 the sharpest minds in the West have worked on this problem and they’re no closer to it today than they were with Aristotle and Plato; not at all, the classic mind/body problem.

Now if we’re having trouble trying to figure out what the interface is between the human spirit and the human body, what kind of trouble are we going to have by trying to study how God influences us? We can’t. So election, though it rests on creation, from creation we understand that we can’t understand it, we can only understand some statements about it and that’s it. Moreover, if we would understand the fall, that all men have sinned, and so we have here a large sector of creation, we have all possible people in the human race that have ever lived and we consider them as part of the creation, then God’s plan of salvation includes some and it does not include others; and the boundary are those who receive Christ. Now why did God design a plan that would only reach some people whom He knew would go to hell without Christ? Why is His plan of salvation not universal? Why doesn’t it include all men? Why does it include only some men? He could have made it that way. Why? I have no idea; God sovereignly chose to create history the way He created it, period. No words are ever given in the Bible to tell us why God excludes people. Election rests upon this foundation.

The second point in the doctrine of election is that election is God’s basic promise to you. If you’re a Christian, then you have a basic promise that underlies all the promises that God has given you. It works this way: if God has promised where you are going to be in the future and here you are in the present, then every little step, from the present until the future, is also guaranteed by promising you the end state. Now if this weren’t so and God promised you and said okay, I’ll promise to get you to here, well then the question would come up, what happens one second after that point is reached? One second after that time interval is reached, then where am I, I don’t have any more promises. So you see, election, then, becomes a promise of every other promise.

The third thing to appreciate about the doctrine of election is that it is a 100% certain thing; nothing is going to break God’s election. It is sovereign, it is sure. It is not a forecast of something, God is not somebody who stands outside of the universe and says let’s see, knowing all the factors I think that’ll happen, that’ll happen and that’ll happen. It’s not that, that would make God a passive observer to the machine. Rather, the sovereign election that’s talking about God as the One who chooses us and tells us His intent. So by saying that election is 100% certain we mean God declares His intent.

What importance is this; let’s give a modern application. Two of the greatest powers in history in our own generation are communism and Islam. Both communism and Islam are conquering the world; the west is not. You have in your bulletin today Solzhenitsyn’s remark about the West and he’s absolutely right. What the West has never understood is that communism is a Christian heresy and a heresy involving a very critical doctrine, worked out early in the 19^th century by Marx, reiterated later in the early 20^th century by Lenin, and the doctrine is that the forces of economic determinism determine their victory. How else do you think the little rag-tag North Vietnam army could sit there as the B-52’s carpet bombed them and kept on coming back for more—because they had indoctrination in the communist ideology that no matter how many people died we are on the winning side. Yes, it’s fanaticism; yes, it’s a false doctrine of election, but look what it does to people. Take Islam; Islam, that is now gaining a hold at mission station after mission station after mission station in Africa, we’ve never seen an onslaught of Islam, since the days of Mohammed himself. What is making this; it’s the fatalism, Allah determines that we shall be victors, and they are. This gives them a fanatical zeal. Now just imagine what it would be like if the twenty or thirty million evangelical Christians in the United States had recovered their spiritual heritage, and like Calvin and Luther, believed in election, and believed that Christ was on the victorious side; imagine if we recovered the faith of the Pilgrims who came to this country, the Puritans who came to this country; imagine where we’d be today if we had that kind of vigor. Just imagine that, and then later when you get home this Sunday read Solzhenitsyn’s remarks from the bulletin. What a contrast and it’s a contrast that has directly to do with this doctrine of election.

Now we know that election is God’s free choice; by “free choice” we mean God does not consult anything outside of Himself. It’s not the picture that God is here and He’s got a stage in back of Himself and written on this screen are all sorts of things that God has to do, and He looks back and he says should I do this, should I do this, and then He says I’ll do this, I’ll do this. That means that God would be determined from outside of Himself. But God is choosing within Himself; He doesn’t ask anything outside of Himself. So we say it is the holy free choice of God. Again, we don’t like this, it’s threatening to us, that’s why we don’t like it. It’s very threatening to be living in a universe ran by a God who is totally sovereign, who doesn’t consult us, necessarily, for His will and His plan.

And then finally we have the last thing that makes it balanced, and that is, that the doctrine of election or election shows up in history as behavior that conforms to the Word of God. In other words, there has to be some sign of faith in the Word of God, otherwise we have no right to say there is the work of the Spirit. How do you measure the work of the Spirit? How do you identify that the Spirit is at work here, or the Spirit is at work there, or the Spirit is at work somewhere else? Simple; go to the text of Scripture and find out whether you see increasing conformity with the standards of Scripture. It’s not that hard to do. All right, so we then find election must be manifested.

Now let’s turn to Romans 9:18, here we have one of the classic passages on the sovereign election of God. Oh does this chaff some people, but I didn’t write it, don’t blame me, I’m just the teacher. “Therefore, has He mercy on whom He has mercy, and on whom He will He hardens.” Now you can’t get much more of a blatant statement of sovereignty than that, that God shapes history and he does it according to His will. Now verse 19, some people say, “You will then say unto me,” Paul says, “Why does He find fault?” In other words, if it’s determined what I do why am I held responsible? Why does God judge me for rebelling against Christ if it’s in the cards? And if this is the way history is supposed to flow, I’m just part of the flow of history. “Why does He yet find fault? For who can resist His will?” And so Paul gives the answer, and the answer doesn’t sound like it’s an answer, and this has troubled a lot of people over the years. Paul raises the question, verse 19, and when you first read verse 20 it doesn’t sound like that’s an answer at all, and in one sense it’s not; it’s not an answer in the sense that he explains why God is sovereign; it’s just an answer that you have to as a creature understand He is sovereign.

Look at Romans 9:20, “Nay but, O man, who are you that replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why have you made me thus?” That’s where the Bible leaves it. Discomforting isn’t it, to think that God has deliberately made thousands and millions of people who will eventually wind up in hell. Now they are there humanly on a responsible plain because they’re rejected Christ; they have chosen to forsake the means of grace that God has given them. But you can always say well God, if He knew He was going to [?] why’d He go ahead and make ‘em. Because He made them. Why? He hasn’t told us why, God is sovereign.

Verse 21, “Has not the potter power over the clay, over the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another to dishonor? [22] What if God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction. [23] That He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He has before prepared unto glory.” Again, God’s sovereign electing grace, and we see it expressed many times in the Scripture. It does not mean that we are irresponsible. What it means is that within the creature, though we have responsibility, human responsibility or volition, that this volition is a product of God and His sovereign creation. And we are held accountable for our sins, we are held accountable for our rebellion, it is our choice, He doesn’t compel us in the determinative sense, yet history is run the way God wants it to run.

Now let’s go back to Abraham and look at the text; that’s the awe-inspiring doctrine of election. Now Abraham has been given a promise, a covenant, here, that gives three promises. Let’s draw a circle and let this circle represent the position of Abraham in God’s plan. Abraham has been promised that he will have a seed; that he will be a worldwide blessing, and that he will have certain land, the real estate boundaries of which are given in Genesis 15. These are three sovereign elective promises of God. It doesn’t make any difference who is in the land, it doesn’t make any difference who doesn’t like it, these are three promises given to Abraham and they are going to come to pass, period. So let’s watch what Abraham does.

Now the question comes, will Abraham respond to this, because remember, election is a statement of what shall come to pass. Will it? Will Abraham respond to the call of God? Let’s see. In Genesis 12:4, after the death, “Abram departed as the LORD had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed out of Haran.” Now on the feedback card one of you asked how Abraham can be 75, his father died 205 and have him at 70. And I grant you that that would be a mathematical problem but that’s what the text says. Here’s his father, his father is 205 years old; he has Abraham when he’s 70, Abram is 75 when his father dies, we’ve got a problem. Yes, that would be, except, as always when you read the fine print you notice it didn’t say that. Go back to Genesis 11:26; this is in the context of a genealogy. Now every other verse before verse 26, all the even numbered verses have the formula of the genealogy. Look at Genesis 11:24, “And Nahor lived nine and twenty years, and begot Terah.” Verse 22, “Serug lived thirty years, and begat Nahor.” Verse 20, “Reu lived two and thirty years, and begot Serug.” Do you see the formula? It repeats and repeats and repeats over and over and over and over and over again. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that when we come to verse 26 the formula breaks? That isn’t the repetition of the formula. When we come to verse 26 it says, “Terah lived seventy years, and begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran.” They aren’t triplets. That means at 70 years he began to beget his family, he was a very potent old man, and here at 70 years old he starts to have his sons. If he died at 205 he must have been 130 when he begat Abraham. Now you infer that from the text but verse 26 is a break in the formula, so verse 26 doesn’t teach that Terah was 70 years old when he begat Abraham. It says he was 70 years old, and he begat, he began to have children at that age. The reason it’s designed this way is because Terah was unusual, all the other men began to have children at 30; he lived to 70 before he begat children. Why? We don’t know, just a matter of history. So that answers the feedback question about the age problem.

Now let’s come to Genesis 12:5 about his wife’s name. We’ve got a little problem here and I tried to do a word study to help you, to go beyond where we taught this before and I still can’t get any further. Let’s look at this; this woman had two names, Sarai and Sarah. Later on God calls her Sarah, her husband calls her Sarai. Now we know what the word “Sarah” means because again in the Hebrew it looks like this, it’s the word for princess, and it comes from a Hebrew verb, saw, to rule, Saw-rah, the girl who rules or the princess. And she is God’s princess; she is royalty in the family of God. That’s a very elegant name when you know the biblical basis for the word Sarah.

But this Sarai is another problem; this ending is the problem and grammarians differ from this ending and it’s not clear as to what this ending was. It has lots of interesting possibilities. One of them, it could be literally translated “my old lady,” in the sense that she bosses me around. Now there are some indication that Sarah was this; early in her career she pushed Abraham in all sorts of gimmicks and Abraham was fool enough to listen to her and got burned every time and there was a problem. But it’s dubious that he actually named his wife his old lady; this just doesn’t quite fit the spirit of the text. So we have to go to some other means to explain this name. The a-i ending may be an old Arabic name which means the same as a-h, namely, princess. Well, the problem with that is, why did God make a big deal about changing this woman’s name from Sarai to Sarah? I would guess this, it’s only a guess, because as I say, the language data here is hard. All I can guess is that if that’s so, then what the text appears to be saying is that this woman was named Princess in a natural way, she was physically an attractive woman, she had a noble character, she had regal bearing and so therefore she was named Sarai, under the old way of naming a princess. But when she later became a believer and began to absorb the Word of God and get her life squared away, God called her Sarah, in the new language of Hebrew, the new version of the Semitic language here, and then He called her this because she was a princess spiritually. This transition of name means she had all the natural assets to be a noble woman, and now she has the spiritual assets to go with it.

Who is she? Well, you heard this morning when the text was read that Abraham does some funny things to his wife when he goes down to Egypt; he doesn’t protect her very well, it doesn’t seem like it. Turn to Genesis 20:12 he makes a very interesting statement about his wife’s background and this explains, at least partly, why Abraham did what he did. He defends his action for passing her off as his sister, everywhere he goes and some guy’s starting to look at his wife he passes her off as his sister. This isn’t quite the knight in shining armor that’s supposed to protect his lady. But in Genesis 12:20 he says this: “Yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.” So the heritage of Sarah is that she is half-sister to Abraham. Remember, after the days of the flood there aren’t that many people on the earth; you’re getting intermarriage within the family unit. It’s all right then because you don’t have an accumulated genetical mutations and all the rest of it that’s accumulated over a long history of time. The human bodies were more virile then, as for example indicated by the lifespan.

Now the rabbis of ancient Israel had an idea how this happened; it’s just an idea, it’s just a speculation but they argue that what happened is that Terah, who is Abraham’s father, had an older brother, Haran, in other words, Abraham’s uncle. Abraham’s uncle produced these two daughters, Milcah and Iscah, and the rabbis say that the name Iscah is Sarah. And they say this for various reasons; number one, they say that what happened is that Haran died and when the uncle died in this area of the country it was tradition that the other brother would take care of the daughters of the dead man, and these daughters would come over, as unmarried they would come over and they’d be adopted by this man, and so when Abraham says “she is my sister, she is the daughter of my father,” he refers to she is the adopted daughter of my father. This sounds attractive except that doesn’t really explain verse 12, because it doesn’t sound right to say she is the adopted daughter of my father, but she is not the adopted daughter of my mother. It’s easier to take that physically. And so we come to the suggestion that has been made time and again, that what obviously has happened is that Terah, his first wife died, and his second wife gave birth to Sarah, or Abraham, either way you want to say whoever’s older in the relationship, presumably Abraham. So verse 12 shows you there is a sister relationship going on between Abraham and his wife.

Now back to Genesis 12 and we follow the story. Keep in mind the big picture; don’t get lost in the details. The big picture is that Abraham has been called sovereignly by God and he is responding to this, he is believing it by faith so you have the use of the faith technique here, and this is the most basic thing that a Christian can learn. That’s why in the flow of history this story, and a dozen others like it, are going to occur before the end of Genesis, Genesis 50. And all of the stories deal basically with the same idea, again and again and again and again and again and again, over and over. What’s the story? Do you or do you not take God at His Word. Only after this, and in fact only four centuries after this do you get the details, do this, don’t do this, do this, don’t do this, don’t do this, do this, do this, don’t do this, and all the fine points of the will of God. Before the fine points of the will of God are made He wants to get the big point across, do you trust Me?

Now this is a picture of how the Holy Spirit will work in your life if you are here today and you are a Christian. It means that when the Holy Spirit works in your life the very first lesson He is going to pound into your soul, until you hurt, and that is do you trust God at His Word or don’t you. Do you trust that all things work together for good, or don’t you? Do you cast your care upon Him for He cares for you, or don’t you? Do you, in other words, rely upon God’s promises or are you going to try you little human gimmicks. That’s the basic lesson in the Christian life, then we start talking about the fine points after that.

So Abraham responds. In Genesis 12:5 he breaks up his business and he begins to move. Don’t minimize verse 5; that is asking a man to do an awful lot, to take his money, to take his capital holdings, to take his family, to go to a land he’s never been before. He “took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan; and they came into the land of Canaan.” This is a picture of a man reaching spiritual maturity and making decisions on the basis of the Word. Abraham’s controlling decision is not just advancement in his company; it is not just a furtherance of his career. His ultimate criteria is where is there greater spiritual blessing for me; am I going to follow the calling of God in my life. Now oftentimes, obviously, that means to progress in your career or your chosen profession, your job, but the point here is that even when it looks like you’re going to crater, when it looks like everything’s going to go wrong, when it looks like you’re giving up the most fantastic opportunity because you believe on the basis of factual objective data that God is leading you over here and it looks like all the prosperity is over here. Just remember Abraham, he’s the father of all them that believe.

And then, as an interesting side note, halfway through verse 5, in the King James it reads, “the souls that they had gotten in Haran,” and for all the dozens of active young couples populating our nursery at an ever increasing rate, I point out in verse 5 it says, “the souls that they had made.” You’ve heard the expression making babies; that’s exactly where it comes from, “all the babies they made.” And the interesting thing is, why is that verse in there? How many babies did Abraham make? None. And so what this verse is saying here, here’s Abraham, the center of all the action, and everybody’s having babies except he and Sarah, a real great feeling, but they go anyway because God has called them to do this.

And it says in Genesis 12:6 that they, “passed through the land unto the plain of Shechem, unto the plain [oak] or Moreh. And the Canaanites was then in the land.” Now here’s something for those of you who have that attitude, well, this bad thing has happened to me because of discipline in my life and because I’ve sinned somewhere along the line, God’s punishing me and so on. That may be, but that’s not always the cause of trouble and here it isn’t. The last clause in verse 6, “the Canaanite was then in the land,” is a parenthesis in the original language; it’s just stuck there. You’ve got the narrative; it flows, and then boom, it just stops, “the Canaanite was in the land.” Now what’s the Canaanite? The Canaanite is the worst of all possible people in history. They are the worst spiritually at that point. Now isn’t this striking, Abraham obeys God, centering in the will of God, straight as an arrow, and where does he get led? To the worst group of clods on the face of the earth, the Canaanites.

Now try that one on for size for some of you who think every time you get in trouble it’s because God is punishing you. God isn’t punishing you all the time; here’s an example of it. Abraham is running smack into a pit, socially speaking, the Canaanites, the most degenerate, foul, awful people that have ever lived on the face of the earth. They are the only race that God makes a case out of that they must die; there must be genocide, holy genocide until this race is totally eliminated from history. They are an awful people, and a few great ones among them, Rahab, the prostitute and a few others graduated, but apart from them every one of them was slaughtered in the holy wars in the book of Joshua and Judges, and when I say slaughtered I mean it; the Jews were to go in there and kill the wives, kill the children, kill the babies, kill the animals, tear up their homes, destroy them, surgically remove this group of people, these degenerates, from history. Now it’s that choice group that Abraham meets while he is in the will of God. “…the Canaanites were then in the land.” So take heart, you maybe having trouble because you are in the will of God and that that trouble, that obstacle that God has put across your plate is that you are going to have a ministry to the forces involved in that obstacle. Abraham certainly is because you know what Abraham is going to do, and he’s going to do it real quickly, in the next few verses? Abraham is going to go to this group of degenerate people and they are going to hear the good news of the gospel. He is going to witness and he is the last person to witness to them before they are damned. He gives them the last chance they have to hear the gospel of Christ. So Abraham is vectored into an area of high slop, deliberately, while he is in the will of God.

Now let’s go on and see what he does when he gets there. Genesis 12:7, “And the LORD appeared unto” him. Now that’s interesting. Abraham goes into the conflict; God has appeared to him in Ur, God apparently, may have appeared to him in Haran, and now God, for the third time, appears in Canaan. Do you know what this means, what the significance of this is? You can’t believe if God isn’t going to speak. Now if we don’t know the promise, how under heaven are we ever going to believe the promise? You’ve got to read it, you’ve got to comprehend it before you can trust it. And that’s the point here. Abraham cannot follow a totally non-communicating God. It’s not the thought of God, people say oh, what a magnificent thing, Abraham just thought all by himself of monotheism. That’s how our high school textbooks had it, Abraham just dreamed the idea up and it was such a powerful idea, he just was motivated the rest of his life because of this idea. Nonsense. If God had not have spoken, had crashed into history with revelation, Abraham could never have hacked it; he could never have responded. He had to know that God was there because now he is involved in a holy war; he has got to cut through this Canaanite mess. He has got to, while he’s cutting through it, not become sidetracked; he’s got to testify to the gospel of Christ, he’s got to do all these other wonderful things but he can’t become contaminated by the Canaanites.

In other words, it is holy war, a kind of war that in our own generation is occurring. In April, when I was in California with Rushdoony at the Christian school conference, he got up and made this statement: I believe that the rest of this century will see the issues come to a focus; the Christian school movement is the key. I mentioned in the previous hour that by indirect regulation, and by other means, every attempt is being made to limit the Christian schools, the Christian church, and Christian organizations. Step by step we will either push the state back and destroy its humanism and Christianize it or the state will destroy the Church and humanize it. It’s either the Word of God or the word of man and there is no compromise between the two. The question that will be asked of you when it is over is: where were you when we were fighting this battle and winning it? On the Lord’s side or on the sidelines? I believe that hell is full of people who sit on the sidelines.”

So Abraham is involved in a war with the Canaanites. And when he gets there he declares war by building an altar. Notice Genesis 12:7-8, “And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land:” that reconfirms Genesis 12:1-3, “and Abram built an altar unto the LORD, who appeared unto him.” Now an altar is sort of a flag; it’s a sort of monument. The Jews still do this; everywhere in Israel there’s a monument. Go to this road and the crossroad and we had this battle in 1948 and here is fourteen soldiers that lost their life and there is the tank they were killed in, still preserved, right there at the crossroad. Then you go down the road another piece and here are three teenagers that tried to cross across here and they were gunned down right in that field over their, their names were Shalom Ben so and so, so and so and so and so, a monument. You go down the road further, another monument. One of the most poignant monuments in all of the world is in Jerusalem, it’s called Yad Vashem, and you walk into Yad Vashem and they’ve got the name of every single Jew that died in the holocaust that they can find, all there, indexed, the names, families, uncles, aunts, children, because history will never be forgotten, history is the sacred story and it must be memorialized. So they still do it, Abraham, the first Jew began it; he built an altar.

The altar is a declaration; a declaration that this territory belongs to God and it belongs to Abraham as God’s man. It’s like the statue that you often see of the Marines erecting the flag at Iwo Jima. That’s the picture you want to get here, Abram walking into the most degenerate group of people on the face of the earth and there in the middle of them, flying his colors for the Lord Jesus Christ, building an altar. You see Abraham, because he’s a man of faith, he’s using the faith technique, he takes those three promises, one of which was to be a worldwide blessing, and he’s starting to be a worldwide blessing by not being ashamed of the gospel of Christ, going ahead with it.

Now let’s look at some of the places in the land where Abraham went, give you an idea of some of the places he went to, and maybe you can read the Bible with more appreciation after we see this. [he shows slides] Once again the map, you have the ridgeline running north/south here, particularly in Judea and Samaria, and the cut, the great rift that runs down north of the Sea of Galilee, down to the Dead Sea, and of course the highland over here. Abraham came from the northeast area, from Damascus, came down apparently south of the Sea of Galilee and entered across the Jordan River and started heading south to this area, around Shechem it says, on the Plain of Morah. Coming in closer we find the modern city of Nablus, it’s located between two hills, one hill on the south called Mount Gerizim, one hill on the north called Mount Ebal. These mountains were used as worship centers for the Samaritans after they came along. Incidentally the New Testament story of the woman at the well occurred right there. So this gives you a location point. Looking now from Mount Gerizim north to Mount Ebal there is the city of Nablus and Jacob’s well right there. Somewhere in this vicinity Abraham set up his first altar. Then we come from the city of Nablus up to the top of Mount Gerizim, and it was somewhere within this zone that Abraham did his thing.

The Bible says he later on came south, we’ll read about it in a moment, and he came on this road, the road goes all the way down, the road still goes down north/south. Here’s Jerusalem, here’s a piece of the Dead Sea, up here is Ramah, the home of Samuel. Over here is where Jeremiah lived and then up here on the top of the slide is a little Arab village called Beitin; Beitin preserved in its spelling the word Bethel and that’s a little town that looks like this today. Abraham kept on going south until the Bible says he went into the Negev. This is an area of grassland and desert; reminds you of the high plains of Texas, nothing there, just flat. That’s apparently when he went first when he got into the land to graze his flocks; there was very little to graze up in here, he came down here and I presume the climate was better then than it is today because here’s where it looks today.

You are standing on the Tel of Arad; Arad is the southern part of the Negev where it’s defended; this is the place that the Jews tried to assault when they made their unfortunate foray into the lands of the south and were defeated. This picture looks southeast over this area of the Negev. This is south; you begin to see here the tel which is the tel on which the Canaanite village was built, a village that existed there in the time of Abraham. Looking to the southwest here’s part of the tel that shows you the size of it; it also shows you how stupid it was for the Jews to try to assault this thing; no way can you sneak up on it, no cover. Here’s to the north and this cut is where the Israelite village was later built in the times of the book of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 Kings. That was a little house in the city and it gives you a sense of the height of the ceiling; apparently it was small people because there’s the top of the roof line. Here’s one of the local inhabitants and this gives you an idea of the tremendous and fertile grass. Obviously it was a lot more rich and fertile in the days of Abraham. That gives you a perspective geographically on the text; let’s watch Abraham as he reaches the bottom point.

Genesis 12:8, “And he removed from there,” that is the area of the first altar; the first altar is by those two mountains you saw, “he removed from there unto a mountain on the east of Bethel, that’s the little Arab village of Beitin today, just north of Jerusalem, “and he pitched his tent, Bethel on the west, and Hai on the east:” that means he’s right on that road that runs north/south, just out of the city of Jerusalem, “and there he built an altar unto the LORD, [and called upon the name of the LORD].” now what’s the significance of that in verse 8? Here’s where if you paid attention to the map you see something that most people that read the Bible don’t. What did I say was this whole road here that was north of Jerusalem? You saw that red line on the map and I said there’s Ramah, that’s where Samuel lived, Jeremiah lived over here, and Beitin was here and if you look at verse 8 it says Bethel was on its west, Hai on the east, so Abraham is camped right over here. What is he near? He’s near the main artery; that’s where all the trade went, up and down the route, and the northern terminus of that road is Shechem. So, by knowing the geography verses 7-8 take on new form. What he’s done is set up a monument to the doctrines of the Word of God on the main trade route of the country. At the northern terminus he’s built an altar; he goes halfway down, he sets up another altar, near here, Bethel, Jerusalem wasn’t a big city then, and then he goes down where this thing terminates in the Negev. So this main north/south route he is thoroughly evangelizing.

What does that remind you of? Paul; where did Paul go? The main trade route. In other words, they kept the gospel in the mainstream of the people they were trying to reach. I don’t know what it takes but in some fundamental circles it seems like you have to pull teeth to make fundamentalists realize that you have got to communicate the gospel in an educated way, with the facts, with at least some cultural development in the arts and sciences and music or you aren’t going to get anywhere. Oh, that’s not being separated. Well then would you please tell me why Abraham set up his monuments on the main road through Canaan. That’s a wrong idea fundamentalists have of separation. Abraham was separated but he wanted to reach the heart, he wanted to touch the arteries of the society and he did, literally.

Then in Genesis 12:9 it concludes how journeyed, going still south, “And Abram journeyed, going on still toward the Negev.” All this shows us, one man and his response; it tells us, particularly in verse 8 how he called on the name of the Lord. One concluding note; what did Abraham do when he made his monument, and on the monument he must have inscribed something, and then it says he “called upon the name of the LORD.” Now we think oh, he just sat there and prayed. Well, yeah, he was praying but that’s not the force of “call upon the name of the Lord.” “Call on the name of the Lord” means at least these three things. First, it means that in order to call upon the name of the Lord you need to know the Lord’s name, which means that Abraham began with verbal revelation, not an experience. Abraham did not go around saying I’ve had this great religious experience in my heart. He might have, but that’s not where you start; you start with the Word of God. You’ve got to know the name before you can call on the name.

Next, after knowing the name of God from verbal revelation, and calling on the name of the Lord, that meant that Abraham gained entrée to God’s presence. If you want to see how this is used, 1 Kings 18:24 is a good illustration, of how calling on the name of the Lord means fling open the doors, it means I want access to God.

And finally, a third thing, and you have to get this by a modern translation, not the King James, a modern translation of the passage in Psalm 49:11, because in Psalm 49:11 in the Hebrew if reads… it’s talking about people claiming ownership of the land, and in the Hebrew it reads, “they called their name over the land.” In other words, the picture is they walked on the land and as they walked over the land they called their name over it, they said my name is Yoseph Ben [?], okay, he’d go around the land, Yoseph Ben [?], Yoseph Ben [?] and he’d call his name over the land. Now what does that mean? Claiming ownership of the land, that’s what it means. So when Abraham calls on the name of the Lord, and he’s got a monument in the land, what’s he doing? He’s calling Yahweh’s name over the land that Yahweh has promised him. So calling on God’s name at these altar points along the north/south highway he is claiming he owns the highway, his God does. Now if you want to get the force this must have had on people living right there, let’s pretend you are a Canaanite, and old grandpa has worked hard and he’s given you your family inheritance and he gave you acreage, so you’ve got all of your grandfather’s acreage and you’ve farmed this for 200 years in your family it was your land. All of a sudden one day this clown comes down the road, and he builds this building right across from your house. You say hey, what are you doing? I’m building an altar to God, to Jehovah. Oh, that’s interesting. And then you see him starting to put his hands over your land saying “Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh,” hey, wait a minute, what are you doing to my land. That’s my God’s land; He’s going to give it to me. Your God is going to give you this land? That’s our family’s land. It’s my God’s land; He’s going to give it to me.

Now don’t think that the gospel of Christ in Abraham’s day did not have offense. Put yourself in the shoes of a Canaanite land holder and here comes this single guy down the road, building altars everywhere he goes, and calling Yahweh’s name over it all. That caused deep offense. We have an expression in our language called pulling the carpet out from somebody; this pulled the land out from somebody, and that’s what he was doing. And it’s the first picture you see of missionary evangelism. Doesn’t it strike you as powerful; he walks into a most hostile territory to the Word and literally pulls the land out from under them. How audacious… how audacious of an individual to dare do that. Why did he dare do that? Because he believed in election, that’s how he dared to do that.

So God called, Abraham responded. Do you? If you’re a Christian God calls you to a destiny in Christ and He calls you to do certain things. He calls you to feed on the Word of God daily in Christ. He calls you to a life of prayer, to a life of application of the Scriptures. These are the things that He calls you to and if you’re really elect, if you’re really a possessor of saving faith, some of this fruit has got to show.

We’re going to sing…..