Clough Genesis Lesson 61

Abrahamic Covenant reaffirmed; Sarah’s death & burial – Genesis 22:15-23:20

We have been going through Genesis 21 and 22 in the Sunday morning services and last week we finished the first section of Genesis 22. This particular chapter we said, was a very, very powerful one that shows probably the greatest crisis a believer ever faced in the history of Scripture. For a father to have to take his son whom he looked forward to for 25 years, only to be called upon to religiously murder that son on an altar of God, splitting his throat so he would bleed to death in front of his face, was quite a trial. This particular trial was by divine design and we want to understand the power of this and why God did it the way He did it by reviewing something about how we know God. Because we are finite and God is infinite we’ve got some problems when it comes to knowing God. We can’t get inside His mind and look at reality the way He looks at reality because He’s infinite and He can telescope all reality into one viewpoint and we can’t. And so therefore we can only look at parts or pieces of reality but when we do that we can’t get the whole picture. So we do have our problems. Now were it not for the fact that God designed the universe the way He designed it we’d have lot worse problems, but God designed the universe to be analogous to how that universe, how God Himself is.

For example, here’s God and here is the universe; God makes the universe and He makes it with a certain form so that if there is a thought in God’s mind, such as I love My only begotten Son and I’m going to give My only begotten Son to the world, that’s a tremendously deep theological statement. And the average everyday person in the street isn’t going to perceive at all what that statement means because most of us don’t think in terms of systematic theology, and God, in fact, doesn’t want us to; God wants to know us and He wants us to know Him. And He doesn’t want us to have to go through five years of seminary training before we do. In fact, it can be argued that the people who know God the best are the people who are the most real common everyday people and the reason for this is it’s the way God has of you knowing Him. Every person down here in the universe has a certain structure to him. The Bible says that you’re made in God’s image. That means that if God were projected down out of infinity, out of eternity into time, what would He look like if we were to see Him? The answer is He would like us, He’d look like a man, he wouldn’t look like an ape, He wouldn’t look like a hippopotamus like some of the Egyptian gods, He wouldn’t look like a rock or a tree. He wouldn’t look like a vague force in some far distant galaxy. God would look like an earthly man. This is the story of Christmas.

So therefore God doing this, projecting Himself down like this, He takes features of our everyday life, such as a father’s relationship to his earthly son, and every man in the street knows what that’s all about. Every man in the street basically participates in that, he lives in a family, he’s worked through a family situation and he knows the emotions and he knows the problems and he knows the experiences of that. So God says, you know why you have those kinds of relationships, you know the very structure of the father/son relationship and how I’ve designed that? I’ve designed that to be an analog on a finite scale to the analog in the Trinity or to the relationship in the Trinity between God the Father and God the Son, so we know by analogy; we participate every day in earthly father/son relationships and it’s that participation that gives us data for our souls so we then can understand when God says there is a Father and there is a Son in the Triune Godhead. We said last week that Abraham in Genesis 22, this whole episode of the sacrifice of Yitzhak or Isaac or is to bring out into open history that father/son relationship, drawing intense attention to it in a way that any person in history can understand it, and having done all that then preparing men to understand what goes on inside the Trinity.

Now I obtained two questions on the basis of last week; two good ones. The first one you can tell was asked by a woman, not only can you tell from the handwriting but you can tell by the spirit of the question and she has a good question and at least it shows you that what I said last week was seriously thought about and digested, and this woman sees a deep, deep threat in what I said last week about the fact of the primacy of the father/son relationship. She’s got a good question; here it is: The whole book of Hosea and Gomer is to show the unconditional love between husband and wife in analogy with God and Israel. I can’t see you say the strongest love is between father and son when the relationship between Christ and the Church is analogous to marriage, unconditional love, how can it be any stronger. The husband is supposed to cleave to his wife and leaving his father and mother showing where his loyalty must be and the loyalty is love. I think it isn’t good to make statements like that because young men will put the love of their son above love of their wives.

A very interesting question but a question that you need not fear because if you look carefully at what I said last week, the relationship of the father/son, I was saying, is a picture of the relationship that goes on inside the Trinity. The relationship that’s spoken of here, which is a valid one, between God, Jehovah and Israel, or between Christ and the Church is this kind of a relationship; it’s a relationship between God and the creature, not between the Creator and the Creator. There’s the difference. But the girl or the woman has successfully seen one thing here. She has seen that what I indeed was asserting was that the father/son relationship is far more basic to the structure of the universe and God Himself than the relationship of a man to his wife.

Let me go in and explain this a little bit more. Turn to 2 Samuel 1 and we’ll learn here a little bit about the nature of the male and the female, something they never taught you in your sex education course. It always amuses me in the Lubbock independent school district the sex education course is under the same department as the driver education course and I was wondering what the connection was. I could suggest a few but I won’t from the pulpit. 2 Samuel 1, this is David’s eulogy to the dead Jonathan. Jonathan was the crown prince and you remember he was slaughtered with his father and David had a tremendously deep affection for Jonathan and in 2 Samuel 1:26 he says this: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, exceeding the love of women.” “…exceeding the love of women.” Now the modern critic would read homosexuality into that, that is completely missing the mark. It’s not talking anything about that. It is talking about male relationships, when one man genuinely loves another man and what kind of a relationship… if you want to see it read 1 and 2 Samuel, it’s an excellent illustration of this, the affection that one man can have for another. And this is between man and man, it’s not between father and son and it’s a picture of a very stable, a very powerful relationship that as David, under the inspiration of the Spirit, says exceeds that of a man’s relationship with a woman. Why is this? Does this threaten to undo things? No; this is part and parcel of a theme that runs deeply through the Scriptures.

Turn to Proverbs 8 for a moment. Some of the women who have studied the womanhood course in Proverbs will already know of this but in Proverbs 8 we have this theme emerge in another situation. Again, so we all are tracking and everybody is on the same frequency here, here’s what we’re doing. We’re examining the father/son relationship that exists inside the Trinity; we’re comparing it to the God/Church relationship or the husband/wife relationship that exists here between the man/man relationship that exists up here. Interestingly in the Bible the man is more god-like than the woman as far as his creation is concerned. He’s just created… for example, no female angels exist, they’re always pictured as men. All three personalities of the Trinity are never pictured as women; they have motherly and womanly characteristics in God, we’re not to argue that; God has… for example, Jesus toward the end of His career says oh, as a mother hen I would gather you under My wings, so the features of motherhood also come from God, but we’re just saying as far as a label that communicates to us God, the Trinity, are not three women; three men. Now we have to ask ourselves very seriously why is this.

Why is it that God is not pictured as a woman? Is this demeaning the woman? We can’t have that because the Christian faith elevates the woman. But there is a reason for this, in spite of the women’s libber who wants to give our heavenly mother and so on, from whom all blessings flow… that is not Scriptural. It is our heavenly Father. There’s got to be a reason for this and it’s found in Proverbs 8. In all the other passages of the Bible it’s curious; the believer is pictured as female, always the receiver, always the one who is supported and elevated, except in one place and that’s the matter of wisdom. In the role of wisdom the believer is pictured as male and the wisdom is pictured as female and this is to show the man chasing the wisdom and so the believer is always pictured as he who craves wisdom to make himself complete.

In Proverbs 8:22 we have the most grandiose passage of all that deals with the origin of lady wisdom and shows us a very profound thing about the nature of this wisdom and why the category of female is attached to wisdom, whereas the category male is attached to the believer. It says in verse 22, “The LORD possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. [23] I was set up from everlasting,” notice; verse 24, “When there were no depths, I was brought forth—[when there were no fountains abounding with water.”] Verse 25, “Before the hills were settled, I was brought forth.” The point is that wisdom is a product, it is a creation, and we have this peculiar feature that the Church and women and wisdom are all pictured as female because the female, among the two sexes, it is the female that most pictures the uniqueness of creation. It is the male who most pictures the nature of God Himself.

Now what is this? What is this female-ness and this male-ness that seem to be identified on the one hand with God and the one hand with the creature. One of the things shown here and shown throughout the book of Proverbs is that the woman is always spoken of that which completes, that which beautifies and decorates. This is always her function in the Scripture; she’s always the source of life, she’s always the source of beauty and adornment. God, on the other hand, is always the One who is pictured as that which has powerful, the One who is over the creation, who is over nature. It is always God who is immutable; never nature. The Scriptures argue intensely against the ancient Near Eastern idea that nature determines the future. No, God works on nature to determine the future and therefore it’s no accident that our male-ness and our female-ness themselves, that itself is general revelation that tells us volumes about the nature of God and His creation.

So, when we say that the father/son relationship is pictured or is used by God to picture that which is inside Himself, God’s made the choice; I haven’t; all I’m doing is narrating what the Scriptures do and the Scriptures, as a matter of fact, do not picture any female imagery whatsoever in the Godhead; it is all male. And moreover, the relationships between the Trinity are not male/female, they are male/male relationships and the reason for this is, I believe, is because of the attribute of immutability more than any other attribute. The attribute of omnipotence and immutability giving stability and power to God, whereas the creation is dependent and the creature has its ups and downs, and that’s just inherently the part of a woman, ups and downs, again not to demean but just simply to say that’s the way she’s made and that’s why the Scriptures say that she’s the weaker vessel. It’s not something sinful about her character; it’s just her, that’s the way the female has been made in the Scriptures.

And so this is why, when God searches around His creation to find something that will communicate to you and to me about what things are like inside his own very being, He never, never picks out a female quality. He always picks it in male terms. Moreover, that father/son relationship, both of these, father and son genetically have the same character whereas the man and the woman in marriage come into the marriage with a different character. And again, isn’t this a picture of the fact that there’s a difference qualitatively between the Creator and the creature? We’re not to say that men are to be idolized, divine. I’m just saying these are analogous relationships inside the creation that God uses to teach us.

So the father/son imagery, from Genesis 22 on through the rest of the Bible becomes the anchor event which anchors our understanding about what it means in the New Testament when it says God the Father gave up His only begotten Son; it means exactly what Abraham giving up Isaac meant. And if you can understand what it must have been for Abraham to give up Isaac then God says you can understand about what it’s like for Me to give up My Son for you on the cross. If you can’t well then you can’t; if you can’t participate in those normal human everyday relationships then necessarily you’re going to have a very truncated view of God.

So now we come to an interesting conclusion; the person who has the most rich and varied life in God’s creation will have inevitably the richer and more variable understanding of God. And this solves a problem for me as a teacher of the Word of God that I often puzzled about. I often wondered why it was that you can teach doctrine and teach doctrine and teach doctrine and teach doctrine to certain people, who for all their heart are absorbing it and trying to learn it and trying to apply it, versus another person who might come in, learn very little doctrine, and yet have a much deeper relationship with God. Now why is it that it’s not directly correlated? Now there is some correlation, obviously you can’t know God if you don’t know Him and you only know Him through the Word of God. But I’m saying all other things being equal we seem to have another factor that interplays; this is my observation of watching. I’ve had ten years to watch this and I think I’ve got a reservoir of observation and it turns out that some people can latch on to what we’re talking about whereas to others the doctrine still seems mechanical; it’s not like we have a personal relationship with God, it’s more like I have a personal relationship with my notebook, or I have a personal relationship with that particular word.

Now why is this so? I think it has to do with the fact that the people to whom this appears mechanical are basically mechanical in their everyday life. They are mechanical in their personal relationships and being mechanical in their personal relationships they just do not have anything in their creature knowledge that corresponds to what the Word of God is talking about. Take for example somebody who’s had a very bad family background, who knows nothing of the love of a father to his son or who has no one, no family, no godly family nearby that has ever had that experience. Now how’s that person ever going to hope to understand, even with the power of the Holy Spirit, how is that person going to understand what it means when it says God is his Father? First of all he never knew his father, and second of all, he had no model that he could borrow and use as a father image or father model. You can’t, I don’t care how powerful the Holy Spirit is, the Holy Spirit uses general revelation and special revelation and that person’s life is deprived of great hunks for general revelation and until those hunks are filled in they can’t catch it. This is why being in a local church is so important and we still have the lone ranger mentality of a few people that think they can get it on tape and so on, wander all around, walk in here every five weeks or something, put in their appearance. They’re just hurting themselves because only as you have fellowship with real life living Christians in all of our glorious carnality, and all of our problems that’s still where the real thing is. And the real thing can’t be the extracted doctrines divorced from this every day experience.

So we have the answer to this question is: is it true that it isn’t good to make statements like that because young men will put the love of their son above the love of their wife. Not if all of this is put together correctly; no. Would we say, would you dare argue that by over emphasizing God the Father’s love for God the Son’s love, that somehow threatens God’s love for His Church? Does that follow logically? No, it doesn’t follow logically. Why doesn’t it follow logically? Because it all works together in one pattern, that’s why. Yes, I would agree it could be misapplied but I’ve taught many doctrines from the pulpit that have been misapplied. Everything I say can be misapplied. So just because something can be misapplied is not a reason for me not to teach it. So it’s a good question, a very good question, and the answer is simply because the father/son relationship is more basic, more fundamental in God’s view than the husband’s relationship to his wife. Now I’m sorry but the Trinity picks that imagery out and I have to track with it; all I’m doing is reflecting the text.

A second question came in and again an excellent question; it has to do with [can’t understand word/s] if you’ll turn to Genesis 22; in Genesis 22 you remember the phrase in verse 3 and I spent some time trying to illustrate that and elaborate it, I paused and I worked it over four or five times, I think I spent about five minutes going over verse 3 again and again and again. You remember what I kept saying as I kept going over it and over it and over it, I used the illustration of the officer saying yes, sir, and I wasn’t too enthusiastic, but that was an order and I’d carry it out and so forth. Well, again a good question by the same person, at least the handwriting looks the same. Since obedience is supposed to come from the heart and not just the outward, just as Christ asked God for another way, in the end He said, “not My will but Thine be done.” It seems that Jesus had an inner peace and faith in God and not just outward obedience. So this person misconstrued what I was trying to get across in verse 3.

Genesis 22:3 is not talking about mere outward obedience. Verse 3 is talking about obedience that is motivated deeply from within by a conscience but it simply is unaccompanied by any positive enforcing emotion; it is a complete unemotional obedience. Now be careful because here is where our generation totally misreads the Word of God. Now let’s use a physical analogy to get this point across. Let’s suppose that you’re convinced that jogging is good for your health. I’ll use the first class, if and it is so. And if you are convinced that that’s the situation, and it’s zero degrees and the wind is blowing 75 miles an hour out in the morning, you have a tendency you want to maybe jog in side, jog in place if you can stand it, I can’t, I’d rather freeze than jog in place but nevertheless. If you want to jog in place you think of the benefit of this exercise, which is basically to get your circulation system going and your respiration system functioning and so on; suppose you want an easy way of doing it and you say well, I don’t want to get all sweaty doing this so what I’ll do is I’ll tell my respiration system and my circulatory system, hey would you do your thing and really get going, come on pulse, get up there, and if you can stay up there fore 15 or 20 minutes you can exercise the system. Now you can no more tell your lungs and circulatory system to function that way, maybe you’re a [can’t understand words] but most normal people can’t because we don’t have that control. But we do have indirect control.

How? Simply starting to jog and if you’re in real good condition you can jog half a mile, a mile, a mile and a half before your circulatory system really comes up to peaking out and functioning. It takes you that long because your body is simply used to it and it just won’t build up to its maximum functioning for a mile or so. Now if that’s the situation that goes on, now go back and look at the mechanics. That’s easy to see. So you want to start your circulation and your respiration but you can’t start it by any direct action you take, so you take an indirect action; you act on something else that will act on the circulatory and respiration system; you start jogging. So the jogging sets it off; your body is built that way.

Do you wait until you hear your heart pounding, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom before you start jogging? No, you jog first and then your heart starts going like that. Now that’s the same way with spiritual things, with Abraham in Genesis 22:3; he waits and he hears God’s Word and when he hears God’s Word he knows he’s supposed to go over here and obey; his obedience in verse 3 is in the early morning; he doesn’t like what he is told to do. Yes, he has peace and yes he has a deep kind of joy but I’ll bet you he didn’t have any big hairy emotional response to this. And my point, and it’s an important one is when you get over here we enjoy what we’ll call the plus emotion, we have joy though, they’re happy to us, we all love those kinds of emotions, but just observe a fundamental thing about your body and your soul; you cannot spontaneously cause those emotions to happen. What causes those emotions to happen? Obedience to the Scripture, and only when you start to obey do the emotions follow; it’s just like this, you can’t get that heart functioning until you start jogging and you can’t get your emotions in gear until you start obeying.

Now after a while this will change; after a while something happens here and the analogy breaks down and that is when you have trained yourself in a certain area of Christian life so that you’ve got a habit pattern established and then you are going to go out and you’re going to obey at this particular point of doctrine, you’re used to doing this, then you do have emotions that help you want to do it. But what I’m talking about is in these great trials 99% of the time you won’t have those emotions working for you and it’s all up to you and your little conscience and your little volition; that’s it. And if you’re not going to start and if you’re not going to make the first move you can talk God’s sovereignty until hell freezes over and it won’t amount to a hill of beans in your life spiritually; nothing, because the first move is all yours. And our generation is so infatuated with the emotions that we sit back and we say oh, I just can’t do that because I don’t feel led. But what you’re talking about is not the leading of the Spirit; you’re confused. What you’re talking about is you’re waiting for those pleasant emotions to start and when those pleasant emotions start then you take that as the leading of the Spirit and then you go on. But you see, you’re wrong, the Bible doesn’t order life that way.

The Bible emphasizes not your emotions, it emphasizes your conscience, you sense of what you know is right and we’ve got to get off the emotional kick and back onto conscience. And that’s conscience spiritual living right there, and after a while, particularly in a bad trial like Abraham, or if you’re in a bucket of worms in carnality down here and you’ve been down there in the toolies for a long time, you’ve developed a counter set of emotions because your emotions are morally neutral, they don’t care, they’re just a little machine that operates in your body and it just does what you tell it to do. And for, maybe years and months, you’ve gone on negative volition toward the Word of God and you say I enjoy that, I enjoy that, I enjoy that, I enjoy that. And so you’ve got all these emotions; when the emotions see you wanting to do X, Y, Z, whatever it is, they say ah, let’s give him a good kick, let’s get the juices going here, good time. But then all of a sudden there comes that time when you read the Scripture, maybe you’ve heard a message, you’ve listened to a tape or you’ve just prayed about it and you suddenly realize, you know, that’s wrong, it’s time in my life that that ended, right here and right now. And a basic decision is made to advance spiritually.

Now the first time you take that step look what you’re fighting against; you’re fighting against this whole pile of garbage, this complete disordered kind of system that’s been created for all these many moons of disobedience, and I guarantee the first step out of the box is not going to be accompanied by any pleasant emotions. And if you’re going to wait until you get pleasant emotions before you start obeying Scripture, you’re in trouble.

Now this comes out in counseling. Do you know how it usually comes out? People tell this; they say well, I can’t do that because that would be hypocritical, I just don’t feel like that represents the real me. Of course it doesn’t; but you’re mislabeling again. Hypocrisy is when you try to fake something that is wrong. It’s an untruth, but naturally it just feels like foreign to you because you’re most comfortable doing this; by definition it has become natural to you, it has become totally comfortable to you, it has become part and parcel of you. So when you take that first step in a radically new direction of obeying the Scripture it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel any more comfortable than learning how to ride a bicycle the first time, or learning how to drive the car the first time. I have a group of Chinese Christian students that I like very much that I teach on Saturday morning and we had supper with some of them the other night and they had their chopsticks. Well, I can no more get food off a plate with chopsticks than the man in the moon, and I’m so thankful that they gave me some forks and spoons or I would have died of starvation. Well, eating with chopsticks for me is a problem because I’m not used to it. And here this stew looks so good and your mouth starts to water and you get those chopsticks and it falls off and drops all over the place, forget it, I’ll just reach in with my hand and eat it that way because I am used to eating with a fork and spoon.

It’s the same thing; don’t make a big hairy spiritual issue in your soul about the lack of emotions because the moment you do you’re just simply sucking in more of the spirit of this age. The spirit of this age has trained their whole generation to think this way—don’t do anything unless it feels good. And then when we become Christians we’ve got to justify it somehow so we call it hypocrisy when it doesn’t feel good, or some other pious term. All we’ve done is re-label garbage as food; it’s still garbage. And that’s wrong, so I hope I’ve corrected something here. When you read passages like Genesis 22:3, Abraham hasn’t sat around waiting for some emotional response, he has gone out when emotionally the only thing that probably could describe that man in verse 3 is emotionally he is a dead man; he is utterly unmotivated emotionally to do this, but he just knows it’s right and he is going to do it and he’s going to trust God to rebuild a new emotional pattern and until God rebuilds it, it’s just going to be a dead type response. It doesn’t mean it’s not spiritual because spiritual means you’re convinced in your conscience that it is right before God to do. That is different; learn to distinguish between what is right in your conscience and what feels good in your emotions because that’s the battle. You have to and I have to, part of our dominion is to start with ourselves and part of ourselves is our own emotion and we’ve got to subdue those emotions. It doesn’t mean deny them but it means shape them up and train them so they’ll be assets and not liabilities.

Now we continue in Genesis 22:15. Remember we said the angel spoke out of heaven. We don’t know what that sounded like. From time to time in church history we get glimpses of extra-biblical records and the problem is we have no way of evaluating these records to say whether the record is true or false or what. And of course some of you saw the newspapers and the magazines recently and you’ve seen this strange thing called the Shroud of Turin and you wonder what is this Shroud of Turin; it’s a very odd type of thing. Well, one of the things you haven’t heard about but is also in some of the Vatican libraries is a report supposedly made out, and it goes back to 300 AD, a report supposedly made out of an investigating committee that talked to the shepherds on the night in which they heard the angels singing glory to God and so on. Now we can’t tell if this is right or wrong but it is interesting that at least as far back as 300 AD there was this tradition of what it sounded like when in the Christmas stories, the glories of God and so on, peace on earth good will toward men, what it sounded like. In the report the shepherds say the only way they can describe what it sounded was as if you were in a gigantic tent with a tall, tall peak and it is as though the sky just suddenly had a peak in it and along the cone, a gigantic cone looking up into the apex of the cone and along the walled surface of this cone as it went up emanated sounds, so that the sound did not come directly; it came off the surface of this cone all the way up and they just said in this report that it was a deep sound that just kind of extended forever; it wasn’t emanating from any one point and this sounds reasonable when we realize that angels have a physical chemical character to them, they show up as physical phenomena, they can show up as fire, they can show up as wind and they can show up as people; they interchange quite freely. And apparently in this case they showed up by simply vibrating the atmosphere to generate these sound waves that were received by the human ear.

To make a long story short, we can say at least this. When God speaks from heaven there’s no doubt about who it is that’s speaking and the shepherds that night knew very well that they were angels speaking. Now how this happens I don’t know. I don’t think any philosopher or theologian can explain how; it’s something that God has put in our souls to recognize it. So in Genesis 22:15 Abraham did not look up and think well, there’s an airplane up there with a loud speaker in it. This was instantly recognized on his part as being directly from God.

Now God makes an astounding promise, one of the most powerful promises, that incidentally is never repeated again in the Bible. Genesis 22:16, “By Myself I have sworn, saith the LORD; for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, [17] That in blessing I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; [18] And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because thou hast obeyed My voice. [19] And so Abraham returned unto his young men, and they rose up and they went to Beersheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba.”

Now this phraseology, verses 16-17 and 18 is a reaffirmation of the Abrahamic Covenant by oath. You will notice that God swears by Himself; He does not swear by anything higher than Himself. This indicates, again, God claiming total sovereignty. But the interesting thing is in verse 16 and in verse 18 there is a “because.” Notice how it reads: “For because you have done this thing,” and in verse 18, “because thou hast obeyed My voice.” Because! Some people would argue that this nullifies grace, but it’s clearly saying, if we’re to be honest with the text that Abraham is being blessed because of his obedience; that’s obviously there, it’s undeniable. You can play theological handstands with it, you can do what you want to, but the word “because” is there and by all the rules of grammar that’s what, in fact, it is saying, “because.” And here’s the picture; Abraham obeyed and then he was blessed, and God says I bless you here because of what you did here.

This is like in the New Testament we have a doctrine called the doctrine of reward and in the New it is said that believers gain rewards on the basis of our performance; what we have done. And we tend to downgrade this sometimes because we say well, grace is always grace and we are saved and once saved always saved and so on, as though in eternity we’re all going to be exactly the same; as though in eternity God is going to ignore qualitative differences among us; as though in eternity what you’ve done here in time has absolutely no effect. Wrong! In the New Testament the doctrine of rewards affirms that you shape the dimensions your salvation takes in eternity by works done here, now in the present time. And this all, without once violating the principle of grace. Let me show you how it works.

Turn to James 2, the passage that many think conflicts with Paul; it really doesn’t but many think so. Once again the context, James 2:18, “Yea, a man may say, You have faith, and I have works; show me thy faith apart from works, and I will show you my faith with my works. [19] You believe that there is one God, [thou doest well. The demons also believe, and tremble]” fine, so do demons. [20] “But when you know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?” That real saving faith must be manifested in some work some place somewhere at some time. It’s got to, that’s what it’s saying; if you’ve got the genuine thing it’ll give genuine evidences of its own existence. Then he says, it’s a very difficult passage in James 2:21, “Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works, when” time point, “when he had offered Isaac, his son, upon the altar?” Clearly it’s arguing that he is being justified at the point of the offering of Isaac. And then he goes on to say, [21] “See how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made mature?” or complete. [23] “And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness; [and he was called the friend of God.]”

Now let’s work backwards for a moment. Verse 23 is a citation of Genesis 15:6. Verse 23 is the point at which Abraham was justified by faith; it was the point we would say that he had the real thing. In Genesis 15 Abraham showed the existence to God of saving faith. But God saw it, but was that saving faith really visible to historical observation? Did mankind, if he saw Abraham, was he colored differently, did he give off a glow? No. You couldn’t see it, it had to be brought out. This is why, if you look at verse 22 and the first part of verse 23 you’ll notice, particularly in verse 23 it says “the Scripture was fulfilled,” … fulfilled! Now the saving faith existed here but it was brought out into the open, it was fulfilled. God, in other words, was justified in saying Abraham was justified. Up to this point you could argue, God didn’t know what He was talking about, I don’t see that much saving faith in Abraham. God says when we get down here you’ll see it; “the Scripture is fulfilled,” it comes out into the open. This is why in verse 22, “by works faith was made complete,” …faith was made complete!

Genesis 22 in the Old Testament is the end of Abraham’s life basically, his useful life, I’ll show you that in a moment and what it’s saying is that toward the end of our lives, toward the end of many trials, as a result of much growth, then is our faith made mature; perseverance the Reformists called this doctrine. It’s a real faith perseveres and will surely endure and surely come to victorious conclusion. And so then we say at this last point in our lives, toward the end, when we have this great, great trial and Abraham passes it 100%, when Abraham is able to meet that pressure with that kind of faith, then we say that yes, God was right in saying that he was a saved individual; yes, he really has saving faith. Now he had it all the time, he didn’t acquire it here, he got it back here. But it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew until finally it was made manifest and clear.

Now if you’ll turn back to Genesis 22 we can explain those “becauses.” Those becauses are there for a particular reason; God is conditioning the Abrahamic Covenant because if you look at Genesis 22:17, remember the three promises of the Abrahamic Covenant, land, seed, worldwide blessing. Notice the three in verses 17-18; look at the first part of verse 17, “I will bless thee, I will multiply thy seed,” so there’s the seed promise, at the end of verse 17 it says, “and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies,” the gate is the city, the cities of the Canaanites, and so the city of the enemy is the Canaanite land and there’s the land promise. Then it says in verse 18, “And in thy seed shall all the goiim,” or “all the nations of the earth be blessed,” there’s the third promise of worldwide blessing. So clearly what God is reaffirming here is the Abrahamic Covenant, but what is confusing is He seems to make the Abrahamic Covenant conditioned upon Abraham’s faith, and indeed that’s true. The works that Abraham did, and in Genesis 22 we’ll call it “the work,” which was the sacrifice of his son, “the work,” it’s not that the work is meritorious in and of itself, like anybody that does this automatically earns the Abrahamic Covenant for himself, that’s not what it’s talking about. It is talking about the fact that he had saving faith that was finally mature where it produced the work that is evidence of its own existence. And because of this the Abrahamic Covenant is given. You see, back here God also gave him the Abrahamic Covenant, but you could argue well, God gave the Abrahamic Covenant and that gives me license, lots of license to do what I want to because after all, we can’t see that many evidences of his salvation. But by the time you get down here you see titanic, overwhelming evidences of Abraham’s salvation and God says you see, that’s why I’ve given the Abrahamic Covenant, because he has that kind of faith. Now it’s true, God Himself brings about that kind of faith; that’s true, but look at it from the standpoint of history. God doesn’t work with phony products. God works with the genuine thing and the genuine thing will show itself through time, somehow, somewhere, by some means.

All right; so God goes on and He says and you’ve written your history, Abraham, basically, you have been justified, the works have given shape to your faith, this makes it visible. And in Genesis 22:19, after this great test, because remember, he’s still up in the mountain with Isaac, the angel is calling out up on Mount Moriah where I showed you on the slides last week. Verse 19, “So Abraham returned to his young men,” what does that tell us? It tells us this was a very private time he had with his God. It tells us that the world doesn’t observe these quiet times and that’s one thing you want to see, is that one of the most private things you have in your life going for you is your private time with God, the private battles that you personally battle with before the throne of grace, those are yours and those are Gods; they’re not things that you spread around. Now sometimes you might want to share a truth of them but basically they’re all yours, to be kept and cherished by you in the depths of your own soul. So now Abraham comes back, he might have told the young men what happened and he might have not have; we could have gotten the text through Isaac.

Genesis 22:20-24, the end of this chapter, seem to relate an utterly unconnected series of events, and whenever you think that a Scripture is unconnected you’d better just put your brakes on and stop because that isn’t the way the Holy Spirit writes Scripture. Remember we say all these things are like beads on a necklace; they’ve got to fit together. Now as you scan verses 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, can you see any name there that is somehow related to what is about to take place. [“And it came to pass after these things, that it was told Abraham, saying, Behold, Milcah, she has also borne children unto thy brother, Nahor. [21] Uz, his first-born, and Buz, his brother, and Kemuel, the father of Aram, [22] And Chesed, and Hazo, and Pildash, and Jidlaph, and Bethuel. [23] And Bethuel begot Rebekah: these eight Milcah did bear to Nahor, Abraham’s brother. [24] And his concubine, whose name was Reumah, she bore also Tebah, and Gaham, and Tahash, and Ma-acah.”]

If you look very, very carefully, going through all the names individually, about halfway through the passage you’re going to see one that should ring a bell and that will tip you off as to why verses 20-24 are put there. The name is the woman in verse 23, “Bethuel begot Rebekah.” Now this happened a thousand miles away from Mount Moriah. Verses 20-24 are an addendum to the chapter. Abraham’s about to die, his life is about over, he’s given birth to the new life that is going to start now, the promised seed exists, and already God is taking care of providing the right woman for the promised seed. Here Rebekah, her background and so on, the point is that she comes out of the same stock. Notice verse 23, she comes out of the stock of Nahor, Abraham’s brother. That is necessary because God was not going to have His prince, His firstborn seed marry some clod girl; He was going to have him marry a girl that had the proper spiritual training, in order that she would have the right influence on his life. So God is protecting Isaac by developing this theme.

We’re going to rapidly go through chapter 23 because it’s connected and from Genesis 14 on it gets into Isaac. Genesis 23 deals with Sarah, the end of Sarah and it’s interesting that Sarah and her death is mentioned in a unique way. She is the only woman whose death is related in such detail, she’s the only woman in the Bible whose age is given at death, 127. So ladies, if you can live that long you’ve got something going for you too. She [23:2] “died in Kiriath-arba,” which means a city of the four, “the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan; and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, [and to weep for her].” Apparently the word “came” in verse 2 indicates that Abraham wasn’t there when his wife died. Since we would presume that if she was terminally ill he probably would not have gone on a business trip but would have been with her; this may clue us as to how she died; she died very quickly, which shows you the death, which is a very pleasant kind of death, it’s quick, and she died quickly while she was gone and he got word of his wife’s death and he came; he had to come to mourn for her, he had to come back to Hebron.

The death of Sarah has to do with, again, the power of the story; the woman is the womb, the woman is the life-giver. Just look at how the many ways in which the woman is always pictured as the life-giver. Start with Eve, her very name means living; pronounced the Hebrew way it looks like this, Havah, that’s her name, not Eve like we say in English but Havah, and that is the Hebrew verb to live and it was given to her after the gospel; her original name was Isha, the “a” is simply the female ending for a noun form of Ish. Isha was her name, and then only later she was called Havah, because she would be the life-giver. Now look at how this is mirrored physically. Consider which of the two is the more physically viable and the physically strongest, the ovum or the sperm? Obviously the ovum; the ovum is built with a complete cell, the sperm has an aberrant cellular structure to it; it’s less, it’s less strong physically. Consider where, after conception takes place, where does the nourishment take place, male or female? The female. Consider after the baby is born who nourishes it? The woman nourishes it.

Now God designed this with a meaning and we can’t sit here and reject these roles like feminists are saying today without paying severe results. Those roles are designed to reveal something about the nature of God and His relationship with us, and the woman is always picture as the… never the man, the man is not the life-giver, it is the female that is the life-giver, and at this point, when the trial ends and Abraham’s life is at its end as far as his spiritual contribution is concerned, isn’t it interesting the narrator puts in the death of Sarah; the womb is destroyed, the womb has lived long enough to do its thing, to bring into existence the seed of the firstborn, and having done that, and having nourished Isaac to the point where he would be willing to die in his father’s arms, Sarah’s role as mother is over and she dies. And so the rest of the story is the poignant account of her burial.

Before we turn there, however, because Sarah is such a model of womanhood and we won’t see her again, let’s turn to 1 Peter 3; here she’s singled out as one of the great models for all Christian women. We haven’t time to spend great detail in 1 Peter 3:1-6 except to recall your attention to some of the details and then I want to go to verse 6. Notice in 1 Peter 3:1 the situation for those who this text may be cold to, you may not have been here for a while, “Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands that, if any obey not the word, they also may be won without the word by the behavior of the wives.” And what this is talking about is the extreme power that the woman has over the man in the Scripture. Women can destroy or they can edify their men, but have one effect or the other they will; always! God has built them that way, and their weapons are potent; the tragedy is that many Christian women don’t realize their own power. There’s always the evil women that know exactly how to destroy and they know their great arsenal.

And notice in verse 1 where one of the weapons is not; it is not the mouth. The weapon is their total behavior pattern; you could phrase it, if we wanted some earthy way of saying verses 1-5, what we have here is the Christian woman seducing her non-Christian husband to Jesus Christ. That’s how we’d summarize it; how else do you explain verses 3-4. What do you think the beauty is there for? To attract the man. What do you think the seductress does in Proverbs? She attracts the man and then springs the trap on him. And so what is the woman doing in verses 3-4? She is attracting a man but look how she does it in verse 4? What is it that she attracts the man to? She attracts the man to the heart, the meek and quiet spirit. In other words, she puts Christ on display and the guy is so stupid he doesn’t see that that’s Christ, and then finally he does, she’s sprung her trap.

Now 1 Peter 3:5-6 where it ties to Sarah, “For after this manner,” see ladies, you have that urge to seduce and see how you can use it in a very godly way; read 1 Peter 3. “After this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their own husbands,” and then Sarah is isolated. The thing I want you to note here now and I think, if you’ve been here the last 4 or 5 Sundays you’ve been into the story enough in the Old Testament so now you can understand why verse 6 is written the way it is here. Peter understood very well Abraham and Sarah; the tragedy is modern readers of 1 Peter don’t know the Old Testament and they fail to click as to what he’s talking about at the end. Women read this passage and they’re deeply offended by it. They think it’s impractical, it’s naïve, so Peter, knowing this says, [6] “Even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters you are, as long as you do well,” “doing well” in the context is verses 3-4, that’s what “doing well” means, “and are not afraid with any amazement.” Now for a long time I read that and read it very rapidly because I was worried about doing verse 7, and I overlooked this “are not afraid with any amazement” passage.

Now if you have a translation that keys you to the Old Testament quote you’ll see that the last part of 1 Peter 3:6 is a citation from Proverbs. Let’s turn over to the particular proverb he cited; Proverbs 3:25. Keep in mind now, the charge is always made that this passage is impractical, it puts the woman in a position where she can be taken advantage of, and a woman would be crazy to take her position like this. We’ll put “Clod” up here, that’s the non-Christian man, and then we’ll put the Christian woman down here. Now she takes her position underneath Clod and she, as a woman, is obviously going to have a problem because she think this gets kind of dangerous down here in this position, under this Clod. And so what am I going to do? Where is my protection? Well, for the first reason is that she took that position, not because she wanted to, see here’s the emotions again, not because she said oh, I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, I just love to be under this Clod. It’s not that at all; it’s because she knew in her heart this was right to do. And she prayed about it, she knew this was right even though it was going to be hard, so she does it.

Now it doesn’t follow, it can’t follow, that Christ is going to be careless and crass with a woman that puts herself in this position out of obedience to Him, that we would court-martial an officer who sent his soldiers out and to take a position where they had no chance to take the position, it was not militarily justified, no way did it help the mission, it didn’t stop the enemy or anything; that would be a poor decision on the part of a military commander and he’d get court-martialed for letting his soldiers get mincemeat made out of them. Now if we’d do that to a human commander, do you suppose that Jesus Christ would dare order the woman, the weaker vessel, into a position where she’s going to get hurt? Is this the kind of God we worship? It can’t be the kind of God we worship and that’s precisely Peter’s point and that’s why of all verses he cites Proverbs 3:25.

This is the promise He gives to the woman who has assumed this position, not out of the fact she’s emotionally into it, but because she knows it’s right. “Be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it comes, [26] For the LORD shall be thy confidence, and shall keep thy feet from being taken.” Now what talked about there is obviously there’s all sorts of risks here, there’s a financial risk and so on, there’s all sorts of risks and the woman will look at those risks and start sweating because she’s looking at all these things and she thinks wow, that can go wrong, that can go wrong, that can go wrong, that can go wrong. Wait a minute, she took a position because it was right before God and God says… what does He say, “The desolation of the wicked,” in this case suppose the Clod is zapped, what have I promised to you? “The LORD will be your confidence and He will keep your foot from being taken.” So ultimately it comes down to a simple crisis as all these things do—faith, are we going to trust the Lord or aren’t we going to trust the Lord, and that’s the battle. It’s not some hairy theology out off in Timbuktu, it’s not some great evolved doctrine, it’s just the simple old problem of whether we’re going to believe what God has said or we’re going to disbelieve.

Now let’s go back and watch the burial of Sarah, Genesis 23. Sarah trusted the Lord, Peter knew that, and she was cared for, and Genesis 23 shows she was cared for in her death. Now think of this, if Abraham didn’t love Sarah and take care of her, he could have dumped her body anywhere, and Sarah couldn’t even nag him for it. So here’s an obvious situation of Abraham expressing his care and concern for his wife when she can’t possibly respond to him. Why? God drives him to it, that’s why. God drives the man to do this.

Genesis 23:3, “And so Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spoke unto the sons of Heth, saying,” those are Hittites that everybody said didn’t exist until all of a sudden they were found. [5] “And the children of Heth answered Abraham,” and there’s a big long spiel here on a business deal that’s made and the long and the short of it is that Abraham buys land for this graveyard and it’s not some small plot; I don’t want you to visualize some little 6’x 8’ plot some place in a cemetery lawn; this is not that, this is a whole cave. To show you how big it was, Abraham was later buried here, Genesis 25:9, Isaac was buried here, Genesis 35:27; Rebekah was buried here, Genesis 49:29; Leah was buried here, Genesis 49:30 and Jacob was buried here, Genesis 50:13. So when he bought a cave he bought a clave for the whole clan, kit and caboodle. But it started with Sarah and it’s appropriate it started with Sarah because who was the person that gave life to the line. Sarah did, and she’s the one that’s honored, whose body is put there first. And after her body, along with their mother, the mother of Israel, that’s what Sarah is, the mother of Israel.

If you want to get a little spark of how the Jews think of this, did you read this week of the death of Golda Meir, and they called her the old grandmother that ruled Israel. Now if you go back and read this week’s papers, you read back through there and if you get some comments, particularly from Jewish people that know Israel, you’ll see very clearly this mentality. There’s a deep fundamental respect. Now some people think that Golda Meir was an old battleaxe, and yet Golda Meir steered her nation through one of the worst wars it ever saw, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and did it while she was dying of cancer and nobody knew it. See, this is the heritage of the strong woman who gives life to her nation. And here Sarah, the archetype of all, she’s the Golda Meir of all Golda Meirs; she’s the one from whom they all came and it’s her body that’s given.

Finally, in Genesis 23:19-20 we see that the cave that is therein “was made sure,” was made certain; it shows that Abraham, as he phases out, the womb is now gone that gave birth to Israel, it’s sure. The promise is sure. In this last act that’s recorded by this man, basically, the last substantial act, of burying his wife, itself is an act of faith. Where does he bury her? In a foreign land that’s not his. In fact it’s so foreign that…was it four months ago that Chaim Herzog got in the United Nations after the Zionist debate and he has entered Genesis 23 as a document into the annals of the United Nations, saying that we Jews bought our land and here’s the first record of the transaction. One of the rare Scriptures to be in the United Nations archives. But the promise is sure because Abraham’s faith at this point trusts completely that the land will someday be his.

I want to conclude this morning by turning to Romans 12:1, looking at an idea we haven’t looked at in a while but one I think is appropriate at this point. We see this great pioneer sort of gradually phase off the scene into retirement; we see his wife die and be buried. What come so fit all; what made Abraham’s life count? When you get to a passage like this you want to ask yourself a very healthy question; the question sometimes hurts, it sometimes is discomforting, but you’ve got to ask yourself the question: When you get to Abraham’s point in your life can you look back and say your faith was made whole? Can you look back and say that your life really counted for something. It all starts in Romans 12:1-2 which answers a question that some of you have asked.

Let’s read it again, we haven’t read this in a long time. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Now you know what that means; you know what a “reasonable” sacrifice means? It means the mentality of Isaac that day on the top of Mount Moriah, with his father holding a knife inches from his throat, a young boy that had his entire future all ahead of him, who said my life is worth whatever God says it is; I’m not going to sit here and dictate to God, now God give me five years and I can do this, give me ten years and I can do this, give me fifteen years… no, just Lord, my life is yours, in particular my future is yours. Isaac had the mentality to lie down voluntarily on the top of Mount Moriah, allow his own father to tie his hands and watch the blade come down on his throat. That’s the mentality of the sacrifice, and that’s what verse 1 means. You “present your bodies a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable unto God and that’s your spiritual reasonable service.” The whole position there is of dedication and if you are a Christian, that dedicatory spirit ought to be yours. There ought to come those times in your life you go back to Romans 12:1 and think, are you free at this point to say yes to God, whatever… whatever He wants you to do.

Now I know what happens because I’ve gone through this myself, take a single person and they start thinking oh dear, if I give myself to the Lord, He’ll give Miss Ugly to me for a helpmate for the rest of my life, give her ugly pills for ten years and then He drops her in; or if I give my life to God and I really say yes, whatever You say, yes Sir, I’m ready, He’s going to send me out to knock coconuts off the trees of some God-forsaken jungle some place. Now who whispers these thoughts in our mind? Is this a God who authored Romans 12:1, or is it another hissing voice that loves to malign our Lord’s character, than when the creature finally gets into the position of saying yes, my life is a sacrifice to be used however you want to use it; when we get just in that right attitude we become a deep threat to the other side and the spokesman for the other side loves to whisper into our ear these things.

Finally, Romans 12:2, “And stop being conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,” and here’s the answer; how do you know God’s will. Well, you can know it from the Scriptures but then oftentimes you can’t really know it until you’ve dedicated your life, until “you may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” There’s got to be, sort of an agreement that works out between your soul and God. It does like this, that I am willing to do whatever it is You want. Now the battle comes, really what we’d like to know is what God wants us to do first, then we’ll agree on whether we want to do it or not. The deal doesn’t work that way; Romans 12:1-2 says you agree ahead of time to doing whatever it is He wants, then He’ll tell you His will. It doesn’t work the other way around.

We’re going to sing…..