Clough Genesis Lesson 45

The third trial of Abraham, the problem of war – Genesis 13:1-16

He has not consulted with you and He has not consulted with me; He has simply stated that history is going to operate in a certain direction, period. And as part of His election plan He has decided to focus evangelism and missions and the dissemination of the Word of God through one nation, Israel. Israel is to be God’s chosen nation. No force of history will eliminate Israel, though many people have tried and will yet try again to eliminate the Jew; the Jew will always remain by virtue of God’s sovereign election. And it’s that sovereign election that we’ve seen as the basis of comfort, for us to believe and to relax in the promises of God we have to trust that God has full control over all the factors operating in our environment. Now you can’t sit and believe and claim God’s promises if you don’t have that faith; it’s just that simple because if you believe God is only partially sovereign then there will always be some area where He is not in charge. What are you going to do when you have a child that’s involved in one of those areas? Are you going to claim the promise of God then? No you’re not, you can’t possibly claim the promise of God then because if you do you’re not quite sure it’ll ever work. So this is why a totally sovereign electing God in a prerequisite of faith.

Now to review once again the doctrine of faith, we said that faith requires belief in creation and the fall; it also requires belief in verbal revelation. These things are qualities which you have to have. Now you can talk faith and you can pretend faith, and you can go through the motions of faith but you don’t have it if you don’t believe that the universe was created the way God says it was; if you don’t believe that we are depraved beings in total need of God’s grace; if you don’t believe that God has given to us His own verbal promises. Now these have just got to exist or you can’t believe, I can’t believe.

We come to a second point in the doctrine of faith where we say that faith is an invisible commodity, you can’t measure it in grams, centimeters, seconds; you have to measure it by one thing and one thing only and that is behavior. You can only tell in your own life and the lives of others where faith exists if you see behavior measured by the standards of the Word of God, that that behavior is coming to greater and greater conformity; not perfect but at least moving to greater and greater conformity with the Scriptures. That’s the only way. Even the apostles, who were infallible spiritual dictators in the church, had no way of telling whether the people to whom they preached were real Christians or fakes. They had no way; no way of telling whatsoever. The only way that they could tell was by long-term behavior. Now sovereignty is one of the great attributes of God and this too is behind this; God has given us the Word and He has told us that that Word is sufficient for all things.

Faith also has two dimensions, resting and doing. And sometimes you can exercise the greatest faith you will ever exercise in your life by doing absolutely nothing, by simply faith-resting, simple turning a problem over to the Lord and leaving it in His hands. “Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.” Knowing that “all things work together for good to them that loved God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.” And so because of these truths we know that we exercise faith sometimes when we do absolutely nothing. There are other times, however, when to exercise faith we have to do. Two things, resting and doing. Abraham does both of these and we’re going to watch that as it flows today in the text.

Finally, we said that faith is orientation to God’s grace. Uptight tense people cannot believe the Scriptures. If you’re one of these people and I come up to you and go boom [he bangs something], you’d jump 3 or 4 feet in the air, well, you’re not relaxed. You can’t relax because you’re uptight over something, some detail of life that’s got you bugged, some person that’s irritating you and you can’t think anything except thoughts about that person and even though you can’t stand that person your life right now is just completely wrapped around their axle and that’s where you are. Now if you’re that kind of person you’re not oriented to God’s grace. Uptight people, unless it’s a case of drugs or something, uptight people generally are unbelieving people. Here’s why; if I am a person who accepts the grace of God, I know I have a good old sin nature and I know you do, and so I’m not going to be shocked when you come out with something and you shouldn’t be shocked when I do. It’s not to condone, it’s simply to admit what we are and that is depraved fallen creatures and to just forget some of the façade that passes for good. And where you find the emphasis on God’s grace you’ll find a relaxed group of people that don’t have to get uptight, that can enjoy one another, they can forgive, and they can forget and they can move on. Now that’s the quality that shows whether you’re grace oriented or not.

These are qualities of faith; Abraham is the model of faith. Now let’s look at Abraham as he operates. We’ve already seen in Genesis 12 that his first trial, a trial as a man, remember from the manhood series, the man is going to be tried most severely, not in the home, the man will receive his greatest trials from his job and from his calling. And it’s the women, who in her biblical role as the homemaker, gets it, in connection with childbearing and childrearing and all that relationship with her husband at home. That’s Genesis 3, that’s the cursing of God. He curses the man in a certain way and He curses the woman in a certain way, and He doesn’t treat them as sinner persons; He treats them as sinner men and sinner women; there’s no blurring of the categories in God’s mind.

Now we come to a situation where Abram faces his first test, his first cursing. Guess what? The worst possible thing for a rancher, that was his business, he was a rancher. So as a male where does he pick up the flack? Right here. And we found out Abraham didn’t handle his first trial too well, he tried a human gimmick, wound up in Egypt, almost ruined the plan of God for his life, got his wife stuck in Pharaoh’s harem, and this was the womb that was supposed to produce the Messianic seed, so that was a brilliant accomplishment of the first part of his life. That’s just to show you what goof-balls we all are, that Abraham was considered the model. He screwed up. So don’t be so uptight about your own failures as a Christian. The time is not to cry about what happened yesterday. The time is to pick it up and go today and tomorrow and move on; don’t get pinned down by your past failures; Satan loves that. He loves to bring guilt into your life so that he can immobilize you; that’s all he has to do, it’s a simple tactic. Back off and look what he does. He doesn’t have to get you to sin today; all he has to do is to get you to fuss about what you did yesterday, that’s sufficient; he doesn’t have to bother you beyond that point. He’s got you totally under his wrap the moment you’re focusing on yesterday, not in the sense of not learning from yesterday but just in the sense of worrying and guilt and so on. That has completely tubed you out as far as being an active believer.

Abraham had a second trial and that was in the trial of his business partnership; that’s also a great problem with men in business. Remember he was in the ranching business with Lot, Lot decided to split and they had to break of their partnership and Lot got a lot of the good assets; he took the herds that he had down to irrigated land, basically, where he wouldn’t have to have a lot of hands to function so he reduced his employees down to a minimum compared to the assets that the employees were to work with, a very efficient choice, apparently, on the surface.

Well now in Genesis 14 Abraham comes to his third great trial and we want to watch that. Abraham, incidentally, last time functioned very well; God graced Abraham out because at this point, in Genesis 13, Abraham is faith-resting; he can’t do anything about it, there’s nothing he can try by virtue of a gimmick. This man has walked off with, say 40% of his assets, and he’s gone to invest them in area where he can become a competitor and out-compete with Abram and his ranching business. So from the human point of view it looks like he made a bad business decision, but God said no, Abram, in the light of what I have invested in your future, your calling, that was an excellent business decision, you just relax and stand back and you watch how wise Lot really was and you watch how I’m going to bless you.

So we come now to the third trial of Abraham and that is the problem of war. War is a topic that most people do not like to discuss. It’s understandable, particularly for Americans who have not won a war since 1945. When you’re on the losing side you don’t like to talk about it. Well, war is something that is taught in the Scriptures, and we are, this morning, in one of the classic passages on believers in war, Genesis 14. The Bible distinguishes different kinds of war and I want to go through some of the theories, some of the doctrines so you can appreciate the pressure on Abram and what he did; the significance of what this one man did.

First let’s go back to the divine institutions; God has divided the human race up into various tribes, tribal units; we call this the fifth divine institution. We know from the tower of Babel judgment that there is to be no global international law; there’s today. Now yes, there are treaties; yes, there are international precedents, but those can’t really be called law in the tight sense because there is no global law-making body; there is no global law enforcement agency and where you don’t have a legislature and where you don’t have an executive and judiciary, even though you have a world court, basically you don’t have functional international law. Now that’s by God’s design, contrary to all the sentimentalists and the humanists today, we do not want global unity… we do not want global unity because before Christ returns the only kind of global unity we can ever get is a global unity that is basically human good and promoting Satan. So this is why I may shock you with the next statement, but faced with the choice the Christian will always choose nationalism and war to internationalism and apostasy. I would much rather have a war than I would like to have some sort of gooed up peace, where we ruin, for example, the missionary freedom to go evangelize, where we ruin the freedom to worship the Lord Jesus Christ as THE one and only Savior and Lord. Faced with those choices I’ll take war, even nuclear war any day of the week.

War is not the worst of all possible evils. In our day, because Christian doctrine is so weak and because we have so many fools, we are in a situation where most people think war is the worst evil. Do you know why they think that? Because they don’t think in terms of good and evil; what they really are thinking of are terms of survival, I want to survive, and so survival I will call good; God doesn’t necessarily call survival good but I’ll call it good. So in my new freshly constructed and manufactured scale of values, something I, my autonomous man, just worked out, on my scale of values war is the worst of all possible evils. And as Bible-believing Christians, absolutely not… absolutely not, war is not the worst of all possible evils. When Jesus Christ returns He’s going to make war; is Christ wrong? You see, violence is not always wrong.

And in Genesis 14 we are faced with godly violence. Violence, armed intervention against evil is not wrong; it is a blessing; it is commanded of God. It is something that the believer has to undertake by faith, not out of personal vengeance but he has to undergo it as a trial. Abram faces, as a male believer, the functioning of the fifth divine institution; there are going to be wars because there is no basic overall government, by divine design. We are apostate as a human race and God cannot trust us with the power of one global government; it’s just that simple. We are not up to having a world government at this time in our history and therefore God is going to see to it we don’t.

Now to show you the ethics of nations let’s conceive of a desert island, it’s in the middle of a vast ocean. There’s no government on this island, there is no law and there is no law enforcement. There are four people that occupy this island, you and three others. As you live together on this desert island you discover a situation develop where two of your three neighbors attack the other one. You find this to be unjust, you find this to be operation bully and they think they’re going to get away with it. Now remember, there is no law, there is no police, what we’ve got is basically, legally, an anarchy on this desert island. In this situation, if you are here, they are attacking your neighbor, how do you love your neighbor? There’s only one answer to the question; you love your neighbor by going to the defense of your neighbor. Love is expressed in a violent armed intervention. Now let’s run that by again, I want you to see it. This is a basic moral problem. In this situation, for me to execute love toward my neighbor is to mean I go and by force I intervene in the evil that is assaulting my neighbor; it is an act of love, it is an act of righteousness and I do not apologize for it.

This is what Abram faces in Genesis 14; it’s not a desert island but it is a similar situation. There is no broad scale government over all the other little governments, you’ve got Abram here, you’ve got the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah here, and you’ve got this vast world conspiracy, assaulting and taking over the area. Abram loves his neighbor. Abram could say, if he were thinking like a lot of the slushy-minded pacifists of our own generation, well I don’t want to get involved, war is so horrible, why, that is the unpardonable sin, why I can’t even think of that, I am going to sit and brother, I will pray for peace. Now Abram could have been that way, but you see, unlike our slushy-minded pacifist friend, Abram had values that were worth fighting for.

Just run this one by again. There are your classical pacifists, whom I deeply respect; they’re the people who have been against war for centuries. One thinks, for example, of the Mennonites and how they drove ambulances and operated first-aid stations in World War I, and they did it in World War II. Now these are your classical pacifists; we have no quarrel… I believe they’re wrong but I have respect for them because they’re operating their life out of what they believe to be the Scriptures and the will of God. Where we cannot have respect is for the flakey humanist pacifist that you’ve seen in the Korean and Vietnam era. These people are against war, not because they’re against war; they’re against war because they don’t have any value worth fighting for. A clod also doesn’t like war because he’s lazy because he’s some sort of moral invertebrate that hasn’t got to the point in his life where there’s anything worth standing up for. That is also a reason to avoid conflict. So don’t be snowed when someone very piously says to you, oh, I don’t get involved in violence. Well maybe you just don’t give a damn; maybe there’s nothing in your life that’s worth anything so that’s why you’re just sitting there like a bump on a log when evil reigns all around you. On this desert island analogy you sit there and you watch these two people beat up and kill your neighbor…that’s an act of love? You call that an expression of the second commandment? I don’t and the Scriptures don’t. The Scriptures say you get out there and you get involved and use force if necessary.

So with that introduction let’s go to Genesis 14:1 and watch Abram loving his neighbor. “In the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar, Arioch, king of Ellasar, [Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, and Tidal, king of nations],” they go through the various names which I’m not going to twist and turn. First of all, there’s no mutually agreed upon system of pronouncing some of the names. So they go through the various areas, you’ll see that in verse 1 there’s obviously an alliance. [2] “These made war with the king of Sodom,” and the king of Gomorrah, and the kings around the southern end of the Dead Sea. [3] “All these were joined together in the valley of Siddim, which is by the salt sea. [4] Twelve years they served Chedorlaomer,” who was the king, notice, in the area of Shinar, Elam, that area, that’s significant, notice where he’s coming from, “and in the thirteenth year they rebelled. [5] And in the fourteenth year came Chedorlaomer, and the kings that were with him, and they smote…” these people. There are three names to notice in verse 5, “the Rephaim,” the “im” is the Hebrew plural, Rephaim, Zuzim, and the Emim. These are all giants which I’ll come back to later; they are actually the fathers and the grandfathers of Goliath. [6] “And the Horites in their Mount Seir, unto El-paran, which is by the wilderness.”

[7] “And they returned, and came to En-mishpat,” which is the spring of judgment, “which is Kadesh, and smote all the country of the Amalekites, and also the Amorites, that dwelt in Hazazon-tamar. [8] And there went out the king of Sodom, and the king of Gomorrah,” and this is the whole pentapolis, “and they joined battle with them in the vale of Siddim.” And they prevailed, verse 10, “And the valley of Siddim was full of wells of bitumen [slime pits],” or wells of asphalt, “and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, and fell there; and they that remained fled to the mountain. [11] And they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all their victuals [foot supplies], and went their way. [12] And they took Lot, Abram’s brother’s son, who dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and departed. [13] And there came one that escaped, and told Abram, the Hebrew; for he dwelt in the plan of Mamre, the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and brother of Aner: and they were confederate with Abram.”

[14] “And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan. [15] And he divided his men against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote the, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus. [16] And he brought back all the goods, and also brought back his brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.”

Now this chapter shows Abraham in another trial that men face; men have as one of their jobs, righteous godly men, to physically protect their society. That’s one of the functions that the Word of God commands. God never calls for moral invertebrates; God calls for men who will stand in the gap and speak up and oppose when evil threatens. Now the evil, verse 1, comes from the area of the tower of Babel. Here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea coming up here, and the Sinai Peninsula, here we have the Persian Gulf, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley coming down into it. Over here, in what is now Iraq, was Babel. It was the valley of Shinar, mentioned in Genesis 11, and it was in that place that the first scheme for the United Nations was constructed; the first U.N. building was built and destroyed in Genesis 11. The attempt was an attempt to bring peace and order to the world but peace and order on man’s humanistic basis, not on God’s Word; therefore God destroyed the first United Nations building. So we have, through this Shinar, after the revolt, the dream still lingers.

And we have these kings that want to centralize everything, and so we are going to subdue human society under us. And notice their titles, in verse 1, “Amraphel, king of Shinar,” that’s directly in the area, “Arioch, king of Ellasar,” this is one of the cities there, “Chedorlaomer, King of Elam, and Tidal, king of Gentiles,” apparently there was a loose cluster of nations and they were all joined together in this confederacy. [2] And they “made war with” Sodom and Gomorrah, so they tried to extend their power southwest toward the Sinai Peninsula, and in doing so, there was these trade routes which I’ve shown you before, one of those trade routes occupied the area around the Dead Sea, the reason being there were mineral deposits and so on there, and they wanted to hold those, and by conquering that area they could exercise control over the trade route. Now it’s a very simple matter of money; if I control the trade route I charge for people to go up and down my road, tariffs and tolls. They become convenient sources of revenue, so besides controlling trade I also have a marvelous income. The more prosperous the merchants, the more prosperous I am because I tax the merchant on what he’s producing. So they wanted economic and political power.

They “made war” and they subdued the area, as it says, for twelve years. The first battle was “joined together” according to verse 3 “in the valley of Siddim, which is the salt sea.” Now if you read verse 3 carefully you’ll see that it’s an editorial comment because they couldn’t be gathered together in the sea and at the same time have it on dry land. The valley of Siddim, notice they “were joined,” past tense, “they were joined in the valley of Siddim, which is now the salt sea.” That “which is now the salt sea” is an editorial remark that looks at the area after the awesome judgment of Genesis 19. Once again, the Dead Sea today looks like this; it has a little prominence out there and every area south of that prominence is a place where the water is only about 15-20 feet deep, no more than that. North of that prominence is a very deep sea. So we think that this is the area where Sodom and Gomorrah were and this was known in ancient times, when it was a valley instead of a lake, it was known in ancient times as the valley of Siddim. That’s where the battle occurred. And historians tell us from ancient history that in Christ’s day you could take a boat across here, look down through the waters and see some of the debris left over from the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah; today it’s probably all ruined because it’s so very, very salty. But that in the area was the part that God broke open, the waters from the north part of that lake, which is really all it is, moved south across this prominence and flooded this area. So that’s the valley of Siddim.

The first battle occurred there and for “twelve years they served,” the word “served” refers to economic taxes; they paid revenues to these kings, and this is why the kings wanted power. But “in the thirteenth year they rebelled.” And in the fourteenth year the kings from this conspiracy, this confederacy came down and they wanted to teach everyone a lesson. Now what you have described here sounds like a waste of time. Why in the Scriptures do we have all these military maneuvers; for example verse 5, the elimination of the Rephaim, the Zuzim, the Emim; isn’t that kind of superfluous, after all, what’s that got to do with Abraham? And in verse 6, “the Horites in Mount Seir, unto El-paran, which is by the wilderness,” who cares about that? [7] “And the returned, and came to En-mishpat, which is Kadesh, and they smote all the country of the Amalekites,” and then they defeated again, in verse 8, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Why do we have all these details in this thing? Well, you know the Holy Spirit doesn’t waste time with words so there’s got to be a reason why these military maneuvers are mentioned, and sure enough, we can tell by just looking at a map. Here’s the Sea of Galilee, here’s the Dead Sea, and let’s visualize what’s happened. Down here, in those days, Sodom and Gomorrah; there’s where Lot is, south end of the then shorter Dead Sea. Here’s Hebron and Hebron is the place where Abram is. The business is split, half of it here, half of it here. We’re in a war and these kings come down this trade route and they eliminate the Rephaim, the Zuzim and the Emim. That’s this whole area. They bring this under dominion; all those people that end in “im” are people who are giants. You can trace this in Deuteronomy 2; you can trace this in the book of Joshua. Later on some of them flee finally, they destroy, David is the one that finally eliminates them, and they run down here in this area and a few survive at Gath.

And it’s interesting that that’s precisely the city from which later Goliath and his brothers come from. So there was some genetic peculiarity with these people. Now Goliath actually, though a giant, he was just a pipsqueak compared to some of them. Goliath was only 9 feet something; these guys, at least the iron bed that historians say was King Og’s bed was 13 feet long; in fact, Og was so big that extra-biblical tradition says he was sitting on the wall when Moses brought the Hebrews up against the wall and they thought it was part of the wall from a distance, and scouts came back and said hey, overnight they built this new thing on the wall and they got up close and that wasn’t a new thing they built on the wall, it was a guy sitting on it; that’s how large he was. And the bedpost was said, the length of his bed, which was made of metal, was 13 feet. So whether the guy was 13 feet actually or 12 feet or something, he was a good basketball player in any case. These people had a fantastic physique, and they were all eliminated by this episode that you see described in Genesis 14. All these people are eliminated. All right, that is verse 5.

Now verse 6 is another area, Mount Seir; now where is Mount Seir? South of the Dead Sea the Sinai Peninsula cuts up here, you have a little port city, the Gulf of Aqaba if you’re an Arab and if you’re a Jew you call it the Gulf of Eilat because there’s a city, an Arab city there and there’s a Jewish city there; the Jewish city is Eilat and the Arab city is Aqaba, and both sides refuse to call the gulf by the other one. So there are two names for this one body of water. Now as you proceed on this route by them, and go down here, all this area, which is now Saudi Arabia, in that day was what would become the area of Edom. And in Mount Seir, the Horites, verse 6, are the inhabitants of that area. That’s verse 6.

Now Genesis 14:7, they turned around, the word in verse 7 is they turned their army around, did a 180, and they came back to a place called Kadesh, and they smote the Amalekites. Well, the Amalekites were Arab tribes that lived out in this area. Now let’s just plot all these areas on the map and notice what’s happened. What do you think, from what you know of military tactics, what do you think is going on here? Why does the Holy Spirit have verses 5-7 listed? It is to show that Abraham is getting surrounded. These men are smart; they’ve maneuvered themselves in a position where they’ve got a rebellion here and they know if I’ve got one rebellion I’m going to get another rebellion, and I can’t trust the area so we’re going to perform what in nice language is called a sterilization operation so we won’t have any trouble again with these rebels. So they eliminate every possible ally that the kings here could have in their rebellion. Notice, every one of these wars, there’s nothing out here, just desert, so the only possible location for supplies from any flank would be these three areas and those are the three areas of verse 5, 6 and 7, that are hit and eliminated. Now they close in and draw the noose on the confederacy mentioned in verse 8.

They close, verse 10, in the valley of Siddim for the second great battle, and they eliminate them. The note, “slime pits” in verse 10 prepares you for what’s going to happen later on. They are pools of asphalt, and most of you know that asphalt can’t flow unless it’s hot, and htat’s one of the keys that this place was geologically unstable, and you’ll see how geologically unstable it was when we get in Genesis 10 and God decides I want to eliminate all these five cities. And so He just blows the rift; this rift valley runs all the way through eastern Turkey down into eastern Africa and the rift runs all through Israel right here, and so it’s along that rift valley that the Sodom and Gomorrah judgment takes place. So they’re surrounded, sound military maneuver, they’ve surrounded all the areas, they’ve eliminated any allies and now they completely destroy this area. They “fell there” it says in verse 10, and there were a few survivors that went into the mountains. They [11] “took all the goods,” [12] “And they took Lot,” the sad destiny of believers who think they can have the best of both possible worlds; he got the worst of both possible worlds.

All right, Genesis 14:12, “And they took Lot, Abram’s brother’s son, who dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and they departed.” Now what we have got here is what moral theologians or ethical theologians call a casus belli, a cause of war. Now the Bible describes two kinds of war; one war is holy war which is beside the point today; we do not wage holy war physically, though as Christians we do wage it spiritually. That’s why we had reading from Ephesians 6 this morning. But in the political area we have the doctrine of just war. It’s a tragedy that the chaplains of the United States Army, Air Force and Marines do not teach the doctrine of just war. I cannot conceive of a man vested with the responsibility of providing moral leadership in the military establishment not dealing with this doctrine. So what happens? Time and again in this service I’ve been here 10 years, I’ve seen this happen out at Reese, some young Christian guy all gung ho to fly, and he’s never oriented to what it’s all about in the military; they think of Reese as sort of a college graduate flying club. That’s great, a P-38 is a beautiful plane, great to fly; only one problem. Some of them later on go out and maybe they start with big stuff, they have four and they go on the range and they drop napalm and they look down at that stuff and they hey, I could fry somebody with that stuff, gee, this is dangerous, I wonder if I ought to be doing this as a Christian, and they have all these second thoughts and sometimes they even quit the program out of conscientious objection. This has happened two or three times, and I sit here, boy, you know, you guys are real great testimonies to the country. The country pays $100,000 or more for your training and you suddenly decide it’s immoral, after you got the training. Why didn’t you think about that before you got the training? Answer? Because the doctrine of just war is never even discussed.

Let’s at the doctrine of just war for just a moment. Turn to Deuteronomy 20, one of the major passages on the doctrine of just war. There are righteous wars and it certainly behooves a military officer to be able to tell what is a just war? In Deuteronomy 20:10-15, this is just one of several passages so don’t think I’m giving a comprehensive exposition. I just want to introduce you to the fact that the Bible does speak to the issue. Would to God that somebody had thought this through before Vietnam and Korea.

“When you come near to a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.” The idea here is that up to the very last moment you permit repentance on the part of the enemy. Now the reason that they’re fighting with the city is because the city has first attacked them; it’s defensive war, and that’s one of the axioms of just war, is that it has to be justified as a defense of the homeland and the homeland’s interest, that the homeland’s very survival is at stake. This is one of the axioms. So conceivably the city mentioned in verse 10 has first attacked Israel. Now Israel is responding and they’re coming to the city and they proclaim peace to it. And when they proclaim peace to it it has to be a credible proclamation; the peace that is proclaimed cannot be the peace of a loudmouth and a small stick. It’s got to be something that is credible. I’ll give you an example from the newspapers very recently. Two or three weeks ago the Syrian had the Christians walled up in East Beirut, nobody was coming to their aid, all the organizations that are for human rights, they cried great crocodile tears for the oppressed of the world and oh, these poor minorities that are so deeply oppressed. I was waiting to hear somebody speaking up on behalf of the beleaguered Christians in Beirut, Lebanon; I failed to hear any comment because these hypocrites and fools are not for ethical principles; they are simply Bolsheviks that are supporting any revolt against the West, and they use morals to manipulate the Christian western conscience.

But in this case one little nation, Israel, decided they were going to communicate. You know, sometimes you have get people’s attention to communicate. Israel had a very interesting device that you read about in the papers, it took six or seven of their supersonic fighters and they told them go and break the sound barrier, go mock right over their rooftops, all of you together. Now if you have been around one of these phenomena, it tends to get your attention very rapidly. And I would sure suspect it did when you had six of them doing it. And for some strange reason the Syrian army said hey, we’d better stop this. No shots were fired, no war was conducted, just six or seven planes flew over and they gave them a message and they said you’re bad; be good boys and you won’t get hurt. Now that’s the thing that is being proclaimed here in verse 10. “When you come to a city … proclaim peace to it,” it doesn’t mean you compromise.

Deuteronomy 20:11, “And it shall be, if it make thee an answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be that all the people who are found therein shell be tributaries [bond servants unto thee, and they shall serve thee],” that is, since they were the ones that started the war and they don’t want to fight the war, then fine, you can pay us your taxes. “But if it will make no peace with you, you will make war against it, and then you shall besiege it.” There is just war. [13] And when the LORD thy God has delivered it into thine hands, you shall kill every male thereof with the edge of sword.” We would say today that is destroying their war making capabilities. They are destroying the possibility of that city-state building an army again. Today we wouldn’t have to be so brutal because today sophisticated weapons are needed to make this, but in that day just the mere appearance of a man was enough to cause war. So we have the destruction of their military power in verse 13.

Verse 14, “But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, shall be the spoil thereof,” in other words, we would say today reparations, something incidentally, the world has never thanked the United States of America for doing. We have never demanded reparations from Japan and Germany after World War II; that’s been forgotten by all the little self-proclaimed critics of how the big evil Uncle Sam with his CIA, his tearing apart the world. We are one of the few nations in history that never in grace… it was a gracious act on the part of this country, we did not demand reparations. You see very clearly by verse 14 that legally we could have; that too is a corollary of just war; make the defeated power pay for the war so you won’t be in debt.

Verses 19-20 are two other verses talking about just war, “When you shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, you will not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them; for you may eat of them, and you will not cut them down (for the tree of the orchard is man’s life)…. [21] But the trees which you know that they are not trees for food, you will destroy,” now phrased in modern terminology, verses 19-20 are simply saying that even just war by the Christian must be waged with a long-term in mind. You don’t go in and totally scorch earth everything. There is an element of mercy in the execution of just war and the element of mercy is you understand that after the war is over people do have to live. So you try to leave the fountains of life and productive land unscathed in war. You make an attempt, like by the way, the United States did in Vietnam, contrary to Jane Fonda and her ilk.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 14. Abram is now faced with a casus belli, he is going to go to war on behalf of his neighbors. He is going to annihilate the evil; now as far as he personally is concerned it’s just Lot and his possessions. Now Abram had enough money that he could have ransomed Lot very easily; there could have been negotiations and he could have got a secured release for the hostage, no problem. The fact that Abram goes all the way to war, and I’ll show you how far he goes in the text, to totally deal with this problem of evil, shows you that he is loving his neighbor. We’ll even find out who his neighbors are here. Notice in Genesis 14:13, “And there came one that escaped, and told Abram, the Hebrew; for he dwelt” not in the plain of Mamre, but “in the oaks of Mamre.” Now I promised I’d show you a slide of this area and I want to give you a feel of why Abram took his flocks and put them in the oaks of Mamre; this is just one of those little Bible details that you might not think much of but here is a photograph taken today where there are trees and the Arabs will herd their flocks into the forested areas and in Abram’s day there were a lot more forests here, particularly up in the highlands, than there are today. The reason for this is conservation; it’s actually an ecological reason because those herds would tear up the cultivated land, and there’s cultivated land outside of those forested areas. So where you see Abram rested by the oaks of Mamre, don’t think of it as one or two trees and he’s kind of leaning back like back like Isaac Newton waiting for the apple to drop down. It’s not that picture. The picture is that he’s going into quite an extensive forested area and he’s letting his goats and his sheep graze at the roots in the forest floor. That’s the proper picture of Genesis 14 and the oaks of Mamre.

All right, there it says that he was friends of this man, “Mamre, the Amorite,” and he was “confederate with him.” Now that’s an eye-opener; wasn’t Abram supposed to be separate from the people? And it says he was in treaty, that’s legal contract, in treaty with these people. Well, what this is saying is that Abram wanted law and order, and he entered into lateral business agreements with his neighbors. He’s not compromising the Bible, he’s not saying that I believe their god but he is saying look, we have to dwell in peace, so let’s get some arrangements here and agreements so we can have a peaceful neighborhood. These are his neighbors.

Genesis 14:14, “And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants,” now a correction here, let’s look at the map and get the situation so we won’t lose it. The army has just destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah; they are now on their way north, they’re probably well north of Jerusalem by the time Abram hears this. He has some limited neighbors around here, the Amorites, and that’s all the allies he has. All the rest of the allies have been destroyed. Now Abram is going to be a righteous godly man who has at his disposal power. And he is going to use that power in a just war to eliminate evil from his environment; and he is going to do so, not just because of his brother, but because there’s evil. Now watch what he does.

He arms his trained servants, or his employees, the hands on his ranch, except the Hebrew doesn’t say he “armed them;” the Hebrew says he literally pulled them out; it’s the word to pull a sword out of a sheaf. He pulls them out, because they’re already trained; remember when he moved his flocks who protected him from flanking attacks. Who guarded his perimeter? These armed trained servants. So they’re already trained and they’re already armed. What he’s doing now is he’s deploying them. And there are only 318. Well you see, the Bible here is giving us something. It’s showing us the magnitude of this man’s faith. He could say well, Lord, you know really I don’t have a chance; look at these guys, thousands of them all over here, they just conquered thousands of miles of territory and here I am with my little company, my ranching company and I’ve got 318 employees, I give everyone a .357 and we’re going to go out chasing them. Now this doesn’t look like it’s going to be too fruitful Lord, can’t we just pull a deal and we’ll be peaceful and I’ll mind my own business and they’ll mind their business and everybody will be happy. No, there is evil here, these people have no right to do this.

And so Abram gets involved, unlike those of whom Frances Schaeffer spoke of, the peace and the affluent people that fuss, fuss, fuss, fuss, but never do anything about it. Well Abram’s going to do something about it. Notice, he “pursued them unto Dan.” He didn’t engage them yet, he pursued them, so here they go, all the way up here, he chases them all the way up to Dan. Here’s where Dan is, just northeast of the Sea of Galilee. You notice he doesn’t engage them at any point. Now what do you suppose he’s doing here? Well all during this time he’s pursuing them he’s reconnoitering them, reconnaissance, he’s getting data, what are their habits of camp, how do they set up their camp defenses, can I penetrate those defenses, when do their guards change duty, how many guards do they have? Where do they keep their prisoners because I want to definitely hit that area? So he’s gathering material.

Another point about war, remember this when you hear the criticism against the CIA and so on, there is room perhaps for legitimate criticism but when you hear these nitwits say we’ve got to dismantle the FBI, we’ve got to dismantle the CIA, we’ve got to dismantle everything else, isn’t it funny, you never hear them talking about all the Soviet agents that are crawling all over the place, including the Soviet agents that come go Lubbock, Texas in the agricultural [?] program every year; isn’t it funny we never hear criticism of those MKG people. We only hear criticism of the CIA. When you see that kind of thing you ought to smell a rat because this criticism is not born of ethics; this criticism is a sinister Bolshevik plot to manipulate the ethical concerns of a Christian America and use our sensitive conscience to dismantle our side while they just keep right on building. It is sheer manipulation and they are laughing at us; they’re manipulating us. An intelligent service is always needed; it is one of the most valuable components of any nation. One of the reasons, humanly speaking, why the American armies won the battles they did in the American War of Independence is because there was one man by the name of George Washington who knew the value of good intelligence. You’ve read the story of Nathan Hale, I have but one life to give for my country and I regret this, who was the great school teacher on Long Island who was captured by the British when they controlled Long Island; they hung him. He was one of the most successful spies in the American army. Washington didn’t have much of a force but one thing he did, wherever those British armies went in Boston harbor, wherever they went on Long Island, wherever they crossed over to Manhattan, wherever they were on the Delaware, Washington knew where they were, he knew their commanders, he knew how many men he was facing at all times. Washington had… it’s one of the unsung stories of the American War of Independence, the fine spy system that George Washington built because he recognized…. He didn’t dismantle his services; he knew survival depended on it.

Well during this pursuing to Dan I would imagine Abraham is doing extensive spying. He clobbers them at this point because of several things which I didn’t understand until I visited the place. Dan is like going along west Texas and driving and seeing absolutely nothing for mile after mile after mile after mile, all of a sudden you come to a rest stop and it’s got trees, greenery. It’s even got water. And there’s just a resting spot and it does something to you, you begin to relax, you rest, and that’s what Dan is; it was a vast resting spot. To this day, there are beautiful falls and spring and fresh mountain water in this area, it’s just like an oasis in the middle of the desert, and here you have these army soldiers, they’ve marched thousands of miles across, over here they’ve conducted several campaigns, they’ve carried heavy booty, they’re burdened down with prisoners, they’re tired. And what happens; they come to Dan, and what are you going to do with a tired army when you get to the resting station? You’re going to let your guard down.

And so Abraham, in Genesis 14:15 divides himself against them, he splits his small force into many smaller forces, you can cause maximum chaos this way. “[And he divided his men against them] he and his servants, by night,” when they are most tired, most relaxed, “and he smote them, and he pursued them … even to Damascus.” Well, that shows you right there that Abram was out to annihilate them; he wasn’t just getting Lot back. He pursued them until every piece of property was returned and if he had to destroy all of them to do it, he would, and if he had to chase them 100 miles he would. Abram got involved, a righteous man using the faith-doing approach. Of course the text ends with a successful recovery in verse 16, “And he brought back all the goods, and also brought back again his brother, Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.”

Lot didn’t deserve this, did he? Hadn’t he tried to undo Abram? But Abram was a grace oriented believer, he forgave Lot. He didn’t get bitter attitudes and sour grapes and ruin the rest of his life because “Lot cheated me.” Yeah, he cheated you, and really you’ve never been cheated until you’ve been cheated by a believer. That’s a thrilling experience but it’ll happen, and I tell you in advance, for those of you who haven’t had it happen, it will happen to you. In fact, believers can often do it better than unbelievers. They have a sin nature just like you do and just like non-Christians do. But Lot cheated, he butted in, and Abram said all right, I forgive, I forgive, I forget, I’m not going to bring it up again, God is sovereign, whatever hurt Lot did to me God can make up and I’m moving on. And he did, and when something happened to Lot Abram loved him, and the sign of his love was that he got involved and he went out and he destroyed evil where he saw that evil.

Some applications of this passage to us: there are always times and pressures around us. Of course there’s an infinite amount of evil around us; we can use that in a creaturely way, just a seemingly unlimited amount of evil in our environment but as Christian people, if we are functioning as ambassadors for Christ my contention is we fundamentalists are going to have to stop this sitting in our church pews all the time and talking Bible and never showing the community outside that we believe it. Moreover, that we are citizens of this city just as much as our heathen friends and we have just as much right to articulate our values into the system as they do theirs, and they are. Are we active or are we passive, and not just because we’re arrogant but because that’s our duty. How else is the person down the street ever going to see that the Jesus profess to love and to follow means anything. The only time it’s going to become credible to that person down the street is when he sees you executing time, energy and effort, undergoing things that you don’t have to do, but you’re doing it because you believe the Scriptures to be the standard and you have zeal to promote that standard in public. When people begin to see that the Bible takes on credibility.

But as long as we hide in our Bible classes, taking all the notes we want to take, which is fine, but never letting it leak out around us, the Bible simply isn’t credible. If I were a non-Christian I wouldn’t want an impotent Jesus. And that’s, for many years when I was a non-Christian, that’s exactly the impression I had. I looked at Christians and thought good God, I don’t want to be around them, because I was exposed to some sad sacks. And these kind of people gave a horrible impression, it was always the flaky ones in the classroom that were the Christians. When there was an argument, never would the Christians stand up to argue, and that carries an image, that carries a connotation. You may not want to but that communicates in itself your Christ that you claim to follow.

Can you imagine what must have gone on in the minds of these people after they said hey, look at that guy Abram, that guy’s a fanatic, he takes 318 people and he chases people 200 miles to get his property back; righteousness counts with that guy, doesn’t it. Yeah, because he worships the God of righteousness. So let’s sing ….