(Genesis) Genesis 12-13 — Joe Focht

Abraham’s Origins in Ur and the Call of God

Genesis chapter 12 will back up and take a running start in it from verse 27 of chapter 11. These are the generations of Terah, Abraham's father. Terah begot Abram and as we go his name will be changed to Abraham.

Abram has two brothers Nahor and Haran. Haran is the father of Lot it says. But Haran died before his father Terah. He died early. He died in the land of his nativity in Ur of the Chaldees. Now this is where this family is drawn from.

October 26th 1922 Sir Leonard Woolley was drafted by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania right here in town to excavate Ur of the Chaldees. And if you are a buff on that kind of thing you're interested Sir Leonard Woolley is the one who's done the greatest work and excavation in Ur of the Chaldees.

University of Pennsylvania Museum is wonderful here in Philadelphia if you ever get a chance to visit. Their library and bookstore is wonderful. He excavated Ur of the Chaldees to a great extent and found evidence of tremendous things.

He found evidence of human sacrifice there as part of their worship. He found great wealth and servants buried with the rulers of that place. They believe that Ur of the Chaldees was in existence hundreds of years before Abraham was ever born there.

There was canals, there was irrigation, trigonometry, an advanced civilization, a set of laws that they live by similar to the law of Hammurabi and some of the ancient codes that we've discovered in the semi-informed tablets.

So Abraham is being drawn from a place where he has grown up in the city. He's grown up around civilization. He has grown up exposed to not being a shepherd somewhere on the side of a hill, but science of the day, technology, architecture, geometry.

They had medicine. A lot of the things they did were bizarre. No doubt if you were congested in your lungs you would chew up a mouse or they'd put a ground mouse in your mouth or a live mouse in your mouth for a while.

You know some of the things they did, cheaper than a prescription, but some of their medical things are very interesting. In fact in the laws of Hammurabi they tell what a doctor should do if he does brain surgery on someone and works on a tumor and the patient isn't healed, the things that need to happen.

And this is two thousand years before Christ. So very interesting to look at some of these cultures. This is where Abraham comes from and he is called again in Acts chapter 7 is where it tells us the God of glory appeared to him when he was still in Ur of the Chaldees, revealed himself to Abraham.

And Acts 7 too. So Abraham is called out of civilization and he is called to come into this land of Canaan. His father Terah comes with with Nahor. Haran, his brother, died. Lot, his nephew, comes with.

Verse 29 says Abram and Nahor took them wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, the name of Nahor's wife Milca. She was the daughter of Haran, the father of Milca, the father of Isca. Sarai was barren.

Very important verse that will come to play all through this record of Abraham. She had no child by design. I know that there are many in the church that struggle and there seems to be, you know, as Christians oftentimes we look at the world we see 34 million abortions in the last 15 to 20 years and we see people who abuse their children and care so little.

And we see Christian families right here in church that struggle with infertility and their hearts are broken and they and they pray and they desire to have children. There are times and we find them in the scripture when it is through the hand of God that the conception is is at least delayed and sometimes withheld according to his plan.

And this is a very important verse here that Sarai was barren. God would wait until it was beyond human reason and possibility for conception to take place so that this child would be a reflection of the one who would come who would be the Messiah.

It would be a miraculous birth, a child of promise. So God is withholding at this point in time. She is barren. And Terah took Abram, his son, Enlot, the son of Haran, his son's son, Terah's grandson, and Sarai, his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan.

And they came unto Haran, which is not the same Hebrew word as his son Haran. It's written the same in English. And they dwelt there. And that's about an 800 mile journey from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran.

Now you can take your strongs and look up Haran and it tells you there that it means parched. And again, it was the last way station for some of the caravans before they headed across the desert was this oasis, this town of Haran.

So it took the name of parched because it was a long desert journey from that point across towards what would become the Viamari over towards the Mediterranean. So they take this 800 mile trek now from Ur of the Chaldees and they come to Haran, the Bible tells us.

And they dwelt there, which is a mistake. God had called him to come into Canaan. The days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran. Now again, by the way, as we go there are those who struggle.

There's some seem to be some difficulties with the genealogy. Those of you love to dig those things up Haran would have to have been about 130 to 135 when Abram was born. Abram is named first in his sons because he is the preeminence.

It doesn't seem though that he was the firstborn. Haran died before him. He probably was the oldest and if we line it up that way it works out perfectly when we find out about the death of Terah. For those of you who have been digging and wrestling there, most of you don't know what in the world I am talking about.

Abraham Learns to Follow God’s Calling

Now the journey, hundreds of miles again from Haran to Canaan. They are in Haran for over five years, at least five years. And again, very interesting, Terah means delay, Haran means parched, and Abram is called by the Lord and again to leave his country, to leave his family, and to come to Canaan.

Now he's got one out of three, he's left his country. He took his family with him and he went to the wrong place. And we'll find out as we study this man's life that he's human. He makes errors, he makes mistakes, he has struggles like us, but again, remarkably they are all in relationship to heaven.

His struggles all seem to be attached to God's calling on his life and how he is trying to process this encounter now with a new and living God. As Moses writes, he tells us about Abram's relationship with the Lord and Moses uses the term that he knows of Yahweh.

We get the sense though as we study that it was El Shaddai that Abraham knew, that he didn't know the Yahweh God that would be revealed to Moses and to Israel, that he knew God as the Almighty. And he went through a process of learning who he was.

Now Jesus does tell us, Abraham rejoiced to see my day and he saw it. And it does tell us in Galatians that the Gospels communicated a fourth time to Abraham. So he had no doubt great insight into the person of God.

He was the one who was walking with the true and living God, unlike the world that was around him. Now God had destroyed the world in Noah's day. God had sworn he would never destroy all the earth with a flood again.

The world had become idolatrous and now instead of destroying it, he calls a man out of it and he draws Abraham to himself to continue the Messianic line and to begin the nation of Israel. Abraham is not a Jew.

There are no Jews. When we use the word Jew, it was assigned to the Israelites later, around 2 ,000 years ago, and it's really a shortened version of Judah, the tribe. That is where we get our idea of Jew from.

The Israelites, or the children of Israel, were the twelve tribes or the twelve sons of Jacob. They're called the children of Israel because God changed Jacob's name to Israel, and they were his sons.

But a generation before that was Isaac, and a generation before that is Abraham. Abraham is an idolater from Ur of the Chaldees, and God has drawn him now to begin this wonderful process. Now the Lord had said, chapter 12, unto Abraham, get thee out of thy country from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee.

Now, you know, again, whatever we might say about Abram, I mean, it is amazing that he leaves everything. He leaves an environment where civilization is to go through the desert, and no doubt in my mind that terror went in him.

He was concerned. Here's Abram, his son, saying the true and living God appeared to me. He's called me. He told me to leave this country and to leave my family, and he's going to show me where I'm going.

He doesn't have a lot of information. I'm heading out. I'm not sure where yet, and again, but that will tend to keep you in touch with God. So Abram now, it says to us, was told by God, had said, and it Hebrew gives us the sense of had said and was continuing to say.

It isn't a present perfect tense like we have in Greek, but the sense of the word is that God had said to Abram and was saying to Abraham, get out of your country away from your kindred to this place, that this was still on his heart.

Now I appreciate that, because I know, you know, oftentimes people will ask, how do I know if God's speaking to me? How do I know if it's the enemy, or how do I know if it's my flesh, or how do I know if it's the Spirit?

And I hear them asking that question, I'm thinking, I have no idea. I don't know why you're asking me. Because when I go through that struggle, I'm saying to myself, now is this the enemy, or is this my flesh, or is this the Spirit?

Now, there's no doubt about it if it's written in black and white. If we have it in God's Word, we know for sure. Then there's no argument. You know, people say sometimes in counseling, well, you're judging me.

I say, no, the Word's judging you. I'm just fruit inspector. You know, the Bible's what is judging you, not me. But there are other times when God is leading us as an individual in a personal and particular way that, you know, when we were looking for a building we couldn't find in the Bible.

Go on down to Philmont Avenue, make a right, you'll see an old meter factory. That wasn't written in here anywhere. So you go through that process of praying, and, Lord, are you speaking to me? And it's wonderful for me to observe some of that in the Scripture, because it seemed that God said to Abraham, and five years later he's still saying to me, now, I think I'm thick.

Usually God's got to talk to me for about a month, you know, before I'm done saying, is this you, is this you, is this you? Do the same thing. Don't look at me like you don't know what I'm talking about.

You know, Lord, I'm busted. I need a hundred and twenty-two dollars and twenty-two cents. Lord, I need a hundred twenty-two dollars and twenty-two cents. An envelope falls in your mailbox, you open it up, it's a hundred twenty dollars and twenty-two cents, and you say, Lord, is this from you?

You know, you're just like I am. You know, it's wonderful in Jeremiah when he said, God said to him, your cousin, Hananiel, is going to come to you, he's going to buy a parcel of ground from you, and I want you to buy, I want you to buy the ground from him, and it was trusting God that God would restore them to the land again.

So Jeremiah says, then my cousin, Hananiel, came to me and asked me if I want to buy the ground, and Jeremiah says, then I knew that the Lord had spoken to me. See, because I think Jeremiah knows all the time.

He's a prophet. Well, he's just like us. He needed to be confirmed in his heart. As I look at the book of Acts, and I see the early church with James and the Apostles in Acts chapter 15, and they're making a decision about what would be required of the new Gentile believers, and then when James writes the letter, he says, it seemed good to us and to the Holy Ghost.

Now, I like that, because I can do that with my staff. Well, it seemed good to us. I mean, we, you know, we prayed about it, and it seemed good to us, and it seemed peaceable. And I like the fact that as I observe Abraham, now it is God that's faithful.

If he had been perfect, it would be very discouraging to look at his life to learn lessons. But he was so human. And yet, as we read about his life in Hebrews chapter 11, because there it's under the blood, you know, there it is through the filter of God's faithful in the New Testament, we don't read about his flaws.

We read about the observations of God, of Abraham's faith, and how he loved him, and how he was the friend of God. But here, God is honest enough always, as he displays a human life in front of us, to not hide the flaws of those even that he loves.

And Abraham now has taken a five-year delay. Five years! You know, and he's already 70 years old. You would think he's not going to delay five years. Of course, maybe when you're 70, you're thinking, what's five more?

I don't know. I'll tell you when I get there. Now, again, this voice is speaking to him. Get thee out of thy country from thy kindred, come into the land, that I will show thee. I will make of thee a great nation.

Now, you have to understand, Abraham's hearing this, he's childless, he's 75 years old. I will bless thee and make thy name great. Again, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, the majority of the world finds this man's name great.

Thou shalt be a blessing, which is imperative. That part is almost a command. You are going to be a blessing. It's like God's going to pull this off, whether you like it or not. I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

Now, by the way, I don't get any sense that that's been removed. It's very interesting to study the nation of Israel and her history, because through her history, those who have cursed them have been cursed, those who have blessed them have been blessed.

God has not revoked that. Look at what happened to Egypt. Look what happened to Assyria. Look what happened to Babylon. Look what happened to Rome. Look what happened to Adolf Hitler. Look what happened to every nation that pulled back from Israel and tried to double-cross them or curse them.

There they are today, existing in the land, remarkably, and all of those nations. When was the last time you spent an afternoon with a Babylonian? So I don't see that that's been revoked at all. It is still a promise that stands, and I then, as a believer, and I think you should do, I think we should all pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

We should pray for that nation. You know, we're told in Romans chapter 11 that we've been grafted in, that they, the Jews, Israel, have been temporarily blinded, that the Gentiles might be grafted in.

And if we are a wild branch and they're the natural branch, we shouldn't be haughty. We should realize that God has used this people and this nation, and they've been persecuted through the ages, to bring the Messiah according to the flesh and bring salvation to the world.

So I don't see where that's been revoked at all. Now, the amazing thing is, here's Abraham. Abraham's an idolater, or the Chaldees, Joshua 24 -2, and his whole family, Terah, by rabbinic tradition, an idol maker.

And God, boom, appears in his bedroom, or wherever, just appears to him one day. Says, get out of your country. That's a strange thing to hear from God, the first thing if he appears to you. You know, get out of your country, get away from your family, go to a place I'm going to show you.

And then this God says, I'm going to make you into a great nation. I'm going to bless you. I'm going to make you a blessing to others. I will bless them that bless you. I will curse them that curse you.

And through you, all the families of the earth are going to be blessed. I'm going to bless your socks off. I'm going to blow your mind. I'm going to bless you and then bless your blessings. You know, I mean, this is pure grace.

This is election. This comes from nowhere. It comes out of heaven. It comes out of the blue, and boom, onto Abraham, by God's divine choice, by his election. And I think it's wonderful, by the way, as we look at that.

God calling him now, out of Ur of the Chaldees. All of grace. So Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken unto him. That probably should say over and over and over and over. And Lot went with him, and Abram was 75 years old when he finally left Haran.

Now, by the way, that means you're not beyond God's call. Don't think I'm 70, it's too late to accomplish anything for God. I don't want to hear about it. Abraham's 75 years old when he answers the call and comes into the land.

And how over the years we've heard wonderful stories of people up in age that have yielded to the Spirit and changed people and tribes and nations, as a matter of fact. So Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken to him.

Lot went with him. Abraham was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai, her name will be changed to Sarah, his wife, and Lot, his brother's son, his nephew, and all their subsidence that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran.

Now, 1414 tells us Abraham had over 320 armed servants with him. And the idea is that they were, they had a sense of, they were keen in battle. It wasn't just slaves. He had 300, over 320 armed servants with him.

Now you figure, those servants plus slaves, plus wives and children, Abraham comes into the land, no doubt with at least a thousand people as he comes into Canaan. Took Sarai, his wife, Lot, his brother's son, all their subsidence they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran.

And they went forth to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan they came, 600 miles from Haran. Now they've gone all tall, over 1400 miles on foot. That's quite a walk. And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Shechem, unto the plain of Moreh, and the Canaanite was in the land.

That will be an important verse. The Canaanite was in the land. Interesting. He comes into the plain of Moreh. Moreh was evidently, the Terebinth was named after a famous teacher. There's an oak of Moreh.

The plain of Moreh meant instruction. It became synonymous with the idea of instruction. Abraham comes into the land, and he's come there now to the plain, to the place of instruction. He doesn't realize that because he's going to learn his first lesson very shortly.

But he's coming into the land now. Interesting. Shechem means shoulder. The idea, and it's wonderful, a place to lean. And Moreh means instruction. And the Lord appeared unto Abram and said, this is the first time we have the word appeared in the Bible, related to God.

Now Acts tells us that he did appear, but that's the New Testament, inner of the Chaldeans, the first time we read in the Old Testament that God appeared. He appeared unto Abram, now this is in the plains of Moreh, and said, unto thy seed will I give this land.

And again, Abram's childless. And there builded he an altar unto the Lord who appeared unto him. No evidence that he appeared in Haran. You know, he had appeared in the inner of the Chaldeans. Years had gone by until Abraham brings his life to where God asked him to be.

During that time he was still Abraham's God. And you have to understand that too. God saves us. He becomes our Father. If you go away from his path, if you take a detour, if you go AWOL, if you backslide, the fellowship you have with him will break down.

The relationship remains. When I moved to the West Coast, my father was still my father. The fellowship wasn't there because we didn't sit in a living room and talk anymore. But the relationship remained.

And it's very interesting to see Abraham going out of God's will. God said to go to Canaan. He goes to Haran. He's there for years. Evidently God is prodding his heart. And though the prodding is there, he doesn't have this, what he had in Ur.

It's when he gets into Canaan there and then God appears to him again in the plains of Moreh and says to him that his seed shall inherit the land. And Abraham does what all of us would probably do. He builds an altar.

Now, no doubt God has taught him. Under the Lord who appeared to him. Abram, right away he sheds blood. Very important when God's appearing to you. And he removed from there unto a mountain on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west and Ai on the east.

And there he built an altar unto the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. Now again, as we go through, we just constantly find these meanings to names. There's nothing by chance here. Abram now comes and he camps between Bethel and Ai.

Bethel means house of God. No doubt in Abram's day it was named something different. Moses, as he writes, says he was camped with Bethel on the west and Ai, which means heap of ruin, on the west. And there he is camped between the house of God and heap of ruin.

And there he puts his tent and he builds his altar again. Now this morning we mentioned, look, the tent and the altar will be the things that identify the life of Abraham. As we get to the next chapter, we'll see he is extremely wealthy by the time he comes back from Egypt.

He could have built a house that looked like the Beverly Hillbillies house. He could have built a mansion. He could have done whatever he wanted. And yet Abraham stays in a tent and he journeys his entire life.

He never gives up his pilgrim nature. He's looking for a city as builder and maker as God. He's not looking to settle down. There was something that God had put in his heart that was greater than the real estate itself.

There was a promise attached to it that was more important to him than the dirt that he walked on. And the tent and the altar become the two things that define the life of Abraham. Now the tent defines his relationship with this world and the altar defines his relationship with the next world.

You know, it is the tent that defines Abraham's relationship. He is holding on loosely. He is learning to let go. He only owns, by the time Sarah dies, one piece of real estate in the land in Mephila and that's a place to bury her.

He drug this poor girl from her, the Chaldees. God appeared to me. God spoke to me. Sometimes it's hard to get your wife to follow you. When you say, God appeared to me, God spoke to me, and your wife is saying, are you sure God spoke to you?

You know, we're walking 800 miles through the desert. Are you sure God spoke to you? And then they come into the land and it's going to say, as soon as they get there, there's a famine. And Sarah may have been saying, are you sure this is the place God told you to come to?

In fact, when we get to chapter 18, the Lord comes to Abram there in Mamre with angels, several angels, and sits and talks with him. Says, Abram, this time next year, your wife will bear a son. And Sarah still does not have hold at that time of this whole promise thing, and she starts laughing.

She's in another part of the tent. It wasn't proper for the women to come out and socialize with the guys while they talked about important things. Different culture. And God says, what's your wife laughing about?

Abram must yell back, what are you laughing about? She says, I'm not laughing. Now God's sitting out front, you know. She still doesn't have hold of the program. And God says, really? Well, why don't we name the child Laughter, Itzhak, to remind you for the rest of your life that you weren't laughing.

He's in the land. He's now between Ai and Bethel. The tent defined his relationship of his earthly pilgrimage, his journey. The altar defined his relationship with heaven. This is a man who constantly cut the throat of a lamb, took a lamb from the flock, and watched the blood flow down upon the stones.

And somewhere deep in his heart, as Jesus said, Abraham longed to see my day, and he saw it. And he would get deeper revelation as he went on. This man understood somehow there was an innocent substitute to come.

And substitutionary atonement was God's way to heaven. And there would be a price that would be paid. So he always travels, the tent and the altar, followed the man everywhere. Camped between Ai and Bethel.

Now, we find ourselves camped there a lot, between the house of God and a heap of ruin. Abraham journeyed going on toward the south. And he ends up to be a man that lives in the area of Hebron and Mamre.

He loves the desert. God gave him the whole land. He seems to be a man who loves the desert. And certainly it has its own beauty. And there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt. Now, that's an awful lot confined in a few words.

Abraham’s Famine, Egypt, and God’s Provision

Here's Abram in the promised land. He's building an altar. God has appeared to him there. We don't know if any of his servants or his wife has seen God appear. Was it Abraham alone with God? Now he's journeying.

He is making his tent. He is building his altars. And now all of a sudden there's a famine in the land. And with a famine in the land, by the way, it was common in that culture for those ancient civilizations, during a drought, and no doubt that's the reason there was a famine, for them to go down to Egypt.

Many cultures did that. Again, on Sunday morning, I shared not too long ago, they excavated a Yemenite tomb in Yemen of a Yemenite princess, and they found the inscription in her tomb that during seven years of drought, she had sent her servants to Joseph in Egypt, and sent money to buy grain, and Joseph had refused.

She sent back her camels loaded with pure gold. Joseph had refused. She sent back her camels loaded with jewels, rubies and jewels, and Joseph had refused. And the inscription in her tomb, she pronounces a curse on anybody who trusts in earthly riches, because in the bottom line, they meant nothing.

Beautiful thing for us, bearing out the realization and the reality of Joseph. And it was common for these cultures to go to Egypt, because Egypt was flooded in the Nile Delta. They built their canals and their irrigation.

During the season when the river ran low, they had pedals. They would sit and pedal with their feet and would draw these cups up and dump the water into the canals. And Egypt was fertile year round, and had growing season year round.

So when there was drought in other countries, it was common to head that way. Abram now heads to Egypt. Now he's wrong. God told him to go to Canaan. And I think it's difficult for us to understand sometimes.

God loves us. God reveals himself to us. He tells us to come into the promised land. We get there. He appears to us. We build an altar. We have fellowship. And all of a sudden, everything dries up. And we think, Lord, yoo-hoo.

And then we start racking our brain. Okay, I know he doesn't forget, so he couldn't have forgotten me. He's getting me. I was mean to my Aunt Sarah when I was five years old. Now how do I think about it?

And we start racking our mind. Did I do this? Did I do that? Is he getting me because of this? Did he pull back his presence before this, for this reason? Is he getting me for this reason? And you know, the amazing thing is, as you study the Scripture, there are deserts that are prescribed by God.

There are famines. There are droughts. The places where God takes us, you see, because Sarah's womb was a drought, it was a famine. And the nation of Israel would walk through a desert and be fed by manna from heaven.

It would fall from the sky. And the very great part of what God would become to his people was only discovered in those circumstances. Paul would say in the New Testament, I rather glory in my infirmities now because I've discovered that in my weakness God's strength is made perfect.

So he said, when those difficult times come, I'm not there yet. I'm telling you what Paul said. He said, I just rejoice. When everything runs out, all my natural resources run out, and I end up in a pickle, and there's nothing I can do to squirm my way out of this, because that's the first thing I do.

When I get in a difficult time, I try to worm my way out of the situation. When I can't worm my way out, then I'll try to scream my way out. It doesn't work. When all else fails, you pray. But Paul said, I've learned.

When everything dries up, it's time to learn something new about God that I've never discovered if I'd been left to my own resources. There's some facet of his being and of his love and of his provision that now I'm going to experience that I've never known if it had been left to me, because I'd have been happy just feeding myself on worldly sustenance.

And God will say in Deuteronomy 8 that he led their forefathers in the wilderness to teach them that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And that he disciplined them, he chastised them, but it's the Hebrew word for that which is considered necessary instruction from a parent to a child.

It was necessary for them to learn those things. And it says in all those years they didn't starve. And it says in all those years their clothes didn't wear out and their shoes didn't wear out. Imagine having a pair of sneakers that last for 38 years.

Their shoes didn't wear out. You know, when I read that, I think, you know, if you were a little baby when you started on a journey, did you have those great big white baby shoes by the time you were done?

Of course, I'm just joking. But the idea is there is a continued revelation of who God is and a big part of that is in his provision. A big part of that is in his compound names, in regards to him being their banner, in regards to him being their healer, in regards to who he will be in regards to them.

And this is a famine, a drought, that is prescribed by God. Now, just as Hagar will learn, he is able to bring forth a spring in the desert. And I want to say to you, if you're going through an experience in your life right now where you're dry, now, no doubt, if you're in sin, if you're in fornication, if you're in a rebellion against God, he reserves the right at that time to chasten you, and if you're a child of God, you will be chastened.

And it's unpleasant, but it yields a peaceful fruit of righteousness. And if you are living in compromise right now in sin against God, we're living in the last days. Jesus could come at any day, and because he loves you, he will not give you rest.

He'll give you ulcers before he gives you rest, and that will be better for you in the long run. But there are times in all of our lives when our heart is towards God, and still we encounter those desert experiences, those dry times where we haven't sensed his presence, and we haven't heard his voice.

Very necessary, part of our instruction. And I think early on as a new Christian, I was very dependent on goosebumps or, you know, sensing his presence or the experiential side, and I think now after years, I'm convinced that whether I sense his presence or not, he never leaves me or forsakes me.

When I sense his presence, it's wonderful. When I don't sense his presence, he's right next to me, not wanting me to sense his presence. That's where he's at. The problem's with me, not with him. He's still there.

And he takes Abraham into the land, he appears to Abraham, everything seems wonderful, and all of a sudden, where's that abundant life, Lord, that you promised, you know? We even have the little bread basket on our morning table with all those little promises you pull out and read every morning.

But none of them say, you know, the world hated me, it's going to hate you. Blessed are those who persecute it for righteousness sake. Those promises are not in there. All of a sudden, there's a famine in the land, Abraham goes to Egypt.

This is the first mention of Egypt in the scripture. Now he's moving out of God's blessing, the place where God will bless him. It was grievous in the land. I'm not saying I would do any better. Imagine having the responsibility for a thousand lives.