Shadows to Substance Conference (Day 3 Andrew Rappaport) THE LORD PROVIDES

Abraham’s Mixed Record of Faith and Fear

Well thank you very much for having me. Pastor Jeff, I thank you very much for inviting me. I know you needed a token dispensationalist, so I know my role. But no, I do, for folks at the church here, I'll just say I love your pastor dearly.

I told someone earlier today, I'm trying not to look at him, so don't get emotional, but I really, really appreciate, man, that I can disagree with in such a loving way. I mean, it may sound weird, but I love disagreeing with him because he tells me exactly what he believes.

He doesn't hold back, but then he tells me exactly where he thinks I'm wrong. I love your friendship, brother. Let me start before I get some introductory things. I'll just encourage you to take your song sheet out.

This would be a good thing just to meditate our minds on before I even give some introductory remarks. But the song that we sang the other day, Yet Not I, But Through Christ in Me, I won't sing it. You don't want that.

But I'm just going to read a couple of this where you see C2. I'm just going to read it, a couple parts of that to meditate our minds. To this I hold, my shepherd will defend me. Through the deepest valley, he will lead.

Oh, the night has been won, and I shall overcome. Yet not I, but through Christ in me. No fate I dread, I know I am forgiven. The future, sure, the price has been paid. For Jesus bled and suffered for my pardon, and he was raised to overthrow the grave.

And I hope we can all love this next chorus. To this I hold, my sin has been defeated. Jesus, now and ever is my plea. Oh, the chains are released, I can sing, I am free. Yet not I, but Christ in me. May that be the overwhelming theme, I think, that we've heard throughout this conference.

And I would not be able to sing, so I'll leave that to those who can. You know, I will say, as I start, I was very upset with Michael. He's not here. Someone should just videotape this part. Pastor Jeff, may you video this and send it to him so he knows how upset I am with him.

I was very upset with him. Yeah. Yeah. So I was really upset because if you heard Pastor Michael speak, you know, he spoke about no one looks to Abraham, you know, to Aaron. You know, it's Moses. You know, he's just, he's just Moses's brother.

Yeah, I got a real problem with that. That's my descent. I'm a descendant of Aaron. I'm a Levite. I like Aaron. What is he talking about Moses? Who cares about Moses? Michael's got to get that straight.

But, you know, at a Reform conference, I know there's been some questions here. Many of you have been asking, you know, I don't seem to fit in. People have been wondering, you know, where's my beard? Look, I understand that not everyone can have such a beautifully short beard like I have.

I have one. I just, I don't want you all to be too overwhelmed. So, and so what I want to do is just, I'm going to also ask forgiveness. I won't be as passionate as the men before me. There's some great preaching here, has it not?

Man, I'm sitting there going, I got to follow all these guys. Man. But, you know, in the tradition we've had where we rise for the reading of the Word, I was very tempted to ask us to rise and we'll read through Genesis 12 to 22.

But then we wouldn't have time. I would sit down. So we will be going through Genesis 12 all the way through 22. Yes, I could do it in an hour. I told Brother Greg, I preach through the entire book Leviticus in an hour.

I do it in churches and I tell people they will love it afterwards. They're surprised, but they do. You'll never read Leviticus again the same way. But if you turn to Genesis chapter 12, that'll be where we're going to start.

I'll just say this for my LSB only brothers, I'm sorry, I will be using the English standard version. But I was tempted to use like, you know, the King James. All right, let's start with the word of prayer, shall we?

Heavenly Father, we do, we do love the fact that we can have such sweet fellowship. This week is just a foretaste of what heaven will be like. Oh Lord, I can't wait the day that we can sit and have this sweet fellowship that we've had this week, though without all the theological debate, because you'll correct all of us.

And we won't ever be so happy to be corrected than when you correct us, Lord. But we enjoy the fellowship, we enjoy the humor we can have. As you say, it's good medicine to the bones. I ask, Lord, that you might help that my voice would, as it's raspy, that it would not be a distraction, and that as Pastor Haps had said, Lord, you are the great I am, and I am the great I am not.

We ask that you in the personal Holy Spirit in this hour would take your word and illuminate it to our minds, give us the application thereof, so that we would leave this building knowing you more, loving you more, and living for you more.

Abraham’s Partial Obedience and Fear of Men

We ask this in your name. Amen. My topic is The Lord Provides, Jehovah Jireh, or we say Yahweh Jehovah, Yahweh Jehiva if you have the, you know, LSB. But it is found in Genesis 22, 14. We'll get there in about an hour.

I do believe I have both your session and my session, right, Pastor? Okay, just checking. But as we look at this, this was a name of a place that was given by Abraham when he was offering Isaac as an offering to the Lord, and we're going to look at that passage eventually.

But first I have a question for you, a question for us to think about, a question I'm going to challenge all of us with. You know, being raised in Judaism, Abraham is known as the father of the faith.

And even many Christians will refer to him as the father of faith. So my question is, as we talk about shadows to substance, my first question I want us to think about is, is Abraham even a man of faith?

Let's examine that and see what kind of man of faith Abraham was. Because we don't want to just read scripture and ignore things, we want to engage with it and deal with what it says, and sometimes we have a tendency to just read things.

We don't think about Abraham as a person as much as this kind of shadowy figure of faith that we look to. And so in Judaism you have three great men of faith. Abraham, the father, but two other pillars are Moses and David.

And as we consider Abraham, we would think that this idea of him being this great man of faith, I think it developed over time. Because when we think about it, we'll start in chapter 12 of Genesis, and when we think of Abraham, we think of that command in Genesis 12, one through three, where God ends up commanding Abraham to leave his town Ur and go to Chaldea.

So he gives that command, and many of us think that he just up and obeyed. I'm not going to ask for a raise of hands if you think he just up and obeyed, but he didn't actually up and obey. You see, Abraham did not fully obey God when he was commanded.

In fact, what it says here in Genesis 12, one through three, now the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country and your kindred, your land of your father's house, to the land I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation.

I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be blessed. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.

Now I want you to remember this, because this here, I want you to think about what he was just promised by God. I know there's a lot of people that say they get direct revelation from God, they get phone calls, dreams, and visions, okay?

That's not actually happening. This actually happened. Here you have someone that has a direct revelation from God of what God is going to do in his life, and as we look at the rest of his life, go, what were you thinking?

Well, what he's thinking is he didn't have Genesis 12 written down, okay? It'd be nice to have that, and so we end up seeing, though, is if you go back in Genesis 11 and 31, you end up seeing that Abraham went as far as Huron until his father died.

You're going, well, Andrew, what's the big deal? That's kind of on the way. Actually, it's not kind of on the way, but there's an interesting thing with Huron. Huron has the same gods as the God of his father, same idols.

So why is that important? Well, because in Genesis 11, 31, it says, Tara, his father, Abraham's father, Tara took Abram, his son, and Lot, the son of Huron, his grandson, and Sarai, his daughter-in-law, his son, Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldees to the land of Canaan, but they came to Huron and settled there.

So he didn't go all the way to where he was commanded to go. He kind of went halfway. He kind of was obeying the Lord, but not fully obeying the Lord. He's going so far, but what I believe, this is sanctified imagination, I can't prove it in Scripture, but what I believe happened is that he went, but he wasn't, he wanted to obey God, but he still had some fear of his father.

He still felt he had to go only so far, so he takes, goes with his father and goes to a land where they would have spoken a similar language and have similar gods. And only after his father died do we see that he actually fully obeyed and went to Canaan.

So I think early on, one of the things we end up seeing is Abraham may have had some fear of men. I'm saying may have, but later we'll prove that. So we end up seeing is it could be that he had more of a fear of his earthly father than he did his heavenly father.

It was only when his earthly father was gone that he was willing to fully obey his heavenly father. Now let's not be too hard on Abraham, because many of us have had the same thing. Many of us, even as fathers or grandfathers, still have fathers that we want, that we're looking to honor, and still feel like we have to prove ourselves to them.

I had a friend of mine, he was 52 years old, and I remember we were talking, I actually, what we did was we decided we're going to kind of cross-exchange, and I was, I wrote a letter to his father to share the gospel, and you know, he said, the reason we did, he's 52 years old, and this is what he had said to me, he goes, even though I'm 52 years old, I'm still a child in my father's eyes.

He couldn't share the gospel because his father didn't respect him enough, he still saw him as a child. I think that Abraham may have had that. That was very part of his culture. Not only does Abraham not fully obey the promise, but what we ended up seeing, I believe, he's going to show a fear of men, specifically, in this case, his own father.

But this is going to be a pattern we're going to see, that he fears men. He not only fears men in avoiding, in not fully obeying when it comes to his father, but we also see that he also avoids conflict with his nephew Lot.

When Abraham and his nephew were on their way, they left Egypt, and there became some strife between them. The two of them had some issues because there was this land, and they were trying to have for their flocks.

And so Abraham, being the older member of the family, was the one who should have made the decision on what happens. That is the culture. And yet, what did he do? We see in verses, Genesis 13, 8 to 9, he ends up deferring his right as the the older one to his nephew.

He avoids the conflict. I think he was, he just, I don't want to deal with any, I don't have to deal with issues. Any of us have conflict avoidance issues? Don't raise hands. But Lot was the one who made the decision for both of them, and Abraham submitted to Lot.

Now, we know Lot's decision was basically made out of selfishness. You can see it's Genesis chapter 13, verses 8 to 9. When Abraham said to Lot, let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsmen, for we're kinsmen.

Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right. If you take the right hand, I will go to the left. Now, my thinking when I read this is, if all the land is before you, then why do you need to separate in the first place?

There's lots of land. Right? But, but the strife, he just, let's avoid it. Conflict, he just wanted to avoid the conflict and the strife. Instead of having faith as God promised him. Remember, God promised him he would be a great nation.

Okay, whatever you want, Lot. And then, so we end up seeing that instead of having faith in what God had provided for both of them, he lets Lot make the decision. Now, in our day and age, that may actually seem like a noble thing.

I mean, he's, he humbled himself. He, he sat and allowed someone else to make a decision for him. And that, that seems like something in our culture that would, we'd say, oh, he's preferring preference of others.

Seems good. But that's a dishonor in his culture. To have the, someone who is a descendant, in this case his nephew, giving instructions to the older generation, it would be a dishonor. And so, he was willing to take a dishonor, in this case, to avoid the conflict.

And I mean, after all, you think about all that Abraham ends up doing for Lot, right? He ends up, when Lot gets captured in Genesis 14, he ends up, it's Abraham that comes to rescue him. It could be that the, with the rest of the way we see Abraham, that it is just as easy for us to avoid conflict.

We, we, we, we sometimes will act weak, even when we have God's word to trust upon, to say, you know what, it's just easier to avoid this. I, I counsel dozens, if not hundreds, of pastors over the years in church discipline issues.

I know, I don't know how many men I have to try to strengthen up and say, brother, say what needs to be said, because the word of God says to do it. And men are just like, ah, but you know, just be easy.

And then months or years down the road, they deal with the ramifications of that. Avoiding conflict, when we have God's word, doesn't make it easier. Okay, it, it, as we're going to see with, with Abraham, it only creates more conflict.

So we could look at Abraham and just see him as this, this weak man who has no faith, avoiding conflict, letting others make decisions for himself, dishonoring himself. But one of the things we end up seeing is, he ends up, and this is, kind of becomes a character of his, not does he seem to fear men rather than God, but he seems to be a guy who relies on himself rather than God.

I'm not going to ask any of you how often you go to God in prayer about a situation after everything you could do. I, I know it's just me who does that. You guys are spiritual. I understand that. I don't want to put my sin upon you.

But, but when we look at Abraham, I can identify with him. When God promised that he would have a son of his own body, he doubted the Lord's words. When God told him this, what does he do? He hatches a plan with his, with his wife.

You know what, maybe, maybe we could kind of obey, you know, even though Abraham believed the Lord and accounted to him for righteousness, Abraham didn't fully obey the promise yet again. Why? Because even though he, he wanted some sign from God, he didn't rely upon God.

And he and his wife hatch a plan, Genesis 16. We end up seeing Genesis 16, one through three, this is their plan. Now, now Sarai, and you do realize, I hope, Sarai is Sarah and Abraham, Abram is Abraham, okay, their names got changed.

Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, behold, now the Lord has prevented me from bearing children, go into my servant.

It may be that I shall obtain children through her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after Abraham had lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram as her, her husband, as a wife.

Now I know in our culture we're going, what in the world? This is a culture that has a lot based on the fact of having a next generation. And, and this is surrogacy that would be common. But there's something more here.

Remember the promise that was made, the promise of a child from Abraham's body. Why do I emphasize this? Because, you know, I think Abraham is guilty of things that you and I do often. We kind of obey God.

We make ourselves sound really spiritual, but we know we're not fully obeying God. We go as far as we can without being fully submissive. So it's like, look, Lord, it's from my body. I mean, can you picture Abraham saying that?

Like, I'm listening to my wife. She's got a pretty good plan. It is my child. Yeah, that's the fulfillment of the promise. We're just being impatient, God, because you're taking too long. I mean, we never suffer with that.

Any hunters here? Okay, so hunters, you guys know, we go out real early so the deer, our smell disappears. Okay, this is how pathetic this preacher is. I'm up in a tree. I'm waiting for a deer to come by.

I'm just sitting, I'm just, I'm just thinking about, you know, areas of my life praying to the Lord, thinking about things I need to work on. And unfortunately, this was my prayer. Lord, I really struggle with patience.

Would you be able to help me with this now? Lord, will you forgive me for having impatience with my impatience? Well, I think that's Abraham. He's been waiting years and sees no fulfillment. Could he have been questioning, you know, Lord, I know you made me this promise, but, but, I mean, was it real?

Maybe what you meant was I have a child through Hagar. Maybe that's what it was. And one of the things we're going to see as we go through this, when we try to fulfill God's will with our will, it never ends well.

And so we see here that even though Abraham is trying to have this promised sign of a child, and even though he, so many years of not having a child, he probably justified it in his mind. And ladies and gentlemen, aren't we good at justifying our sin?

We, we can come up with all kinds of amazing ways to disobey the Lord. And that's what Abraham was doing. The Lord wanted him to be patient, to wait upon him, and he was stringing him out. You know, there's, there's three ways God answers prayer.

Yes, no, and we don't want to hear it. Because the last one's wait, and that's the one we hate. Wouldn't it be better to say no, get it over with? What we end up seeing is Abraham listened to the advice of his wife.

I'm not saying that that's a bad thing to do, man, uh, but it does seem to get some people in trouble. But no, the idea that we end up seeing, though, is this, is we see is Abraham listened to his wife over God, and that's the importance.

See, if his wife was saying a godly thing, he should listen to her. But she was coming up with some way of fulfilling God's plan without God. Doing it naturally here, you take Hagar, you take her as a wife and produce a child, which they did.

They did not trust God's plan, but instead developed one of their own. This plan of theirs may have something to do with them justifying themselves. They feel that they could still be fulfilling God's law.

They knew what God's promise was. They were just too impatient to wait upon it. And when we know God's will, but seek to fulfill it only partially, or seek to fulfill it in a way that allows us to do things we know are disobedient, then we are not following God's will.

It displays a lack of faith to attempt to fulfill God's will with man-made plans, even if we can make them seem spiritual. And we do this often, folks. This plan of theirs did not lead to God's pleasure.

Instead, it actually led to conflict within the family. You could see that in Genesis 16. Some of you are afraid I was actually gonna go through every verse of these 10 chapters, 11 chapters. No. But when God came to Abraham and clearly promised him that he would have a son by Sarah, you know what her reaction is in Genesis 17?

She laughed. Instead of trusting in God's ability, the God who created the universe out of nothing, oh, but he can't put a child in my womb. I'm 99 years old, 100 years old. Instead of trusting God's ability, Abraham doubted that a 100-year-old man and woman would be able to bear a child.

When God made Abraham promises, instead of relying on God, he actually begs God to accept Ishmael as the promise. Look, God, here's my man-made plan. Why don't you accept this? I'm too old to have a child with Sarah, but I have Ishmael over here.

Accept him. We sit there and say to God like, okay, I've made a mess of this situation, but can you still work with it? Can you still use what I created, what I did? I used to work in an addiction recovery center.

We had a saying with all the guys that, you know, you'd get into the addiction recovery center because you already made a mess of your life. And then they would sit here as a counselor and they would try to tell us with their plan for how to fix things and how to get things right.

And we had a common saying we'd say, your mess got you in here. You really think you can fix this? You get out of here with Christ. You got in here because of self. Well, that's Abraham here. He got into his mess by self and he's going, but God, I still got my plan.

Just do this. Now, God was being very, very specific with Abraham with his promise. He referred to Isaac as being from Sarah, not Hagar. And Abraham still wants his man-made plan over God's plan. He still thinks, you know, maybe God, you could use my disobedience.

People often disobey the very clear will of God for half measures. And when it produces conflict, instead of repentance, we like Abraham try to negotiate with God for him to accept our situation on our own terms.

We do see some faith with Abraham. There's a bright light here in Genesis 17, 23 to 27. I won't read that, but you end up seeing something because we end up seeing that the faith of this promise after Abraham gets, after he leaves the area, he obeyed God in getting circumcised.

So he did something, right? Maybe that's all it was, right? He got circumcised, so that's why he's a man of faith. Well, we'll see. But I want you to think about the fact of what it must have been like for a 99-year-old man to be circumcised.

We'll get to that. That couldn't have been an easy task. But we see Abraham still being a man who fears men and not God. But there is a worse situation. Abraham prostituted his own wife. Abraham was married to his stepsister.

We know this earlier in Genesis 12, but it says he headed to Egypt and there was a famine. This is what says Genesis 12 talking about the situation. When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarah, his wife, I know that you are a beautiful woman in appearance.

Now stop and think about that. I mean, she's got to be in her 60s, 70s, at least by this time. And he's saying, you know, she's beautiful. How beautiful? Well, here's how beautiful she is. Beautiful in appearance.

And when the Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife. Then they will kill me, but let you live. Say you are my sister. It may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared because of your sake.

So she was so good looking, he assumed that when he enters into Egypt, the men would want to kill him to take his wife. Now she's not a childbearing year, so in that culture that wouldn't have been, you know, that wouldn't be something that would typically happen.

They would want young women. But he's so desperate to save his own life during this famine that he was afraid so much so of the Egyptians that he would let them take his wife as their own. He's still trying to fulfill the promise of God by relying on himself, isn't he?

He has such a great fear of men. And that always leads us into trouble. Many people do this. Let's not be too hard on Abraham. Many of us will justify our sin by deceiving others. And maybe we'll say things that are true, but we're not given the whole truth.

But when you say something that's true for the purpose of deceiving someone and not telling the full truth, that's called a lie. Even if all the little details are true. And that's what Abraham's doing.

Is it true that his, that Sarah is his sister? That's true. Is that the whole truth? No, it is not. It is not the whole truth. And he knows that. But he's so worried about men. What ends up happening as we look at this is he is deceiving others so that he could live.

Did God already promise that he'd be a great nation? Is he trusting in that? No. He's relying on himself. He hatches his own plan again. People do this often, but they feel they're being spiritual. Because I'm telling the truth.

Everything I'm saying is true. I'm just deceiving in the process. However, in Abraham's case, it was even worse. Because Abraham not wanting, not only wanting to deceive the Egyptians, but he expected that someone might take his wife.

And he seems okay with that. Look in Genesis 12, verse 15, it says,. And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken to Pharaoh's house. Abraham, this great man of faith, allowed his wife to be taken into Pharaoh's harem.

What kind of husband allows his wife to be taken to another man to marry? And well, if they're married, I'm assuming consummating it as well. What kind of man does that? Is that the man of great faith that we think?

It says in 12, 16,. And for her sake, he dealt with Abraham and had sheep and oxen, male donkeys and male servants and female servants and camels. So basically, Pharaoh paid Abraham for this wife of his, thinking it's his sister.

Abraham got paid. He got rich off of Pharaoh, because Pharaoh married his sister? No, his wife. However, God protected not only Abraham's life, but also Sarah's. The Lord provided an escape for them. Let's look in chapter 12, verses 17 to 20.

It says,. But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abraham's wife. So Pharaoh called to Abraham and said, What is this you've done to me? Why did you not tell me she is your wife?

Why did you say she is my sister? So I took her for my wife. Now then, here is your wife, take her and go. And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning them and sent them away, sent him away with his wife and all he had.

Pharaoh took Sarah as a wife. And God ended up bringing plagues upon them. And he had to realize, Oh, this is because of Sarah, which probably means it wasn't a short thing. It wasn't overnight. We have to assume that they consummated that relationship and Abraham let that happen.

What was Sarah thinking? You want me to say what? Go into town and you're okay with Pharaoh taking me away? I don't think that she thought of herself, Man, Abraham, you are a great man of faith. I'll go do this.

Genesis 13 .2 states that Abraham was very rich in livestock and silver and gold. Where did he get that from? Well, we saw Pharaoh gave him some of that. We would light, we would like to think that this horrible incident seared in his mind a lesson that he would learn from.

Now, Abraham may not be like you, but he's more like me. One lesson is just not enough. Need multiple lessons. And that's Abraham. I'm glad it's not just me. We end up seeing that through it though, God protects both of them.

And one would think that Abraham would learn from this mistake of the earlier years, this is many years later, that Abraham, who could have trusted God, who could have trusted what was said in Genesis 15 .15, as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace and you shall be buried in a good old age.

It's good to know you're going to die of an old age when you go into yet another town. And in Genesis 20, verses one and two, we read this. From there, Abraham journeyed toward the territory of Nebib and lived between Kadesh and Sir, and he sojourned in Gir.

And Abraham said of Sarah, his wife, she is my sister. And Abimelech, the king of Gir, sent and took her. And we read this and go, what? Do you not remember? Did you not learn the lesson? But this time, he's afraid of men killing him when he has a promise from God that he would live till old age.

Is he trusting God? Is this how we think of faith? But this time, God protected them from before consummation of the relationship. And Abimelech, who actually seems to have more faith than Abraham, when you read the account, because Abraham thinks, he says to Abimelech, oh, I was afraid of you because you're an unbelieving people and you might kill me.

Abimelech is the one that seems to have more faith in this situation. Because Abimelech is the one that says in Genesis 29 and 10, that Abimelech called Abraham and said to him, what have you done to us?

And how have I sinned against you that you have brought on me and my kingdom a great sin? You have done to me things that ought not be done. And Abimelech said to Abraham, what did you see that you did this thing?

Abraham thought that Abimelech had no faith when it seems that he had more. Because though Abraham says that he thought they would just kill him for his wife, Abimelech is the one that realizes that Abraham is a prophet, according to God.

Abraham claims that allowing his wife, though, this is crazy to think about, when he talks to his wife about this plan, he said to Sarah that do me this kindness. This deception that he planned, he convinces his wife that this is a kindness to him.

How did he explain what he was doing at this time with Abimelech? How do you explain that to his teenage son Ishmael? Ishmael is watching this go on. Ishmael is sitting there and knows his mother Hagar is kind of the woman that when Sarah wants to get rid of her, it's gone.

He knows that Sarah is the one that Abraham really, that his father really loves, and yet his father is willing to let his wife go be taken by another man. But here's an interesting thing I was thinking about.

This is how I engage with scripture. Don't ever just read scripture, engage with it. This is not a book just to sit and read because we have our devotional time. This is a book we engage with because I hope you're seeing Abraham.

Yeah, we're a lot like him, aren't we? What in the world was Abraham's escape plan? Your wife is now Pharaoh's wife or Abimelech's wife, but in both cases, a king. How are you getting out of that town?

When the famine's over, do you just go into the Pharaoh and go, hey, she's actually my wife. We're going to get out of here now. If he was so afraid for his life to let someone marry his wife, do you really think he was going to take his wife and leave town?

I mean, is the king going to allow that or just say, well, you know what, now I will kill you because I'm happy with my wife. I cannot figure out what his escape plan is. The only way I can make sense of this is that Abraham didn't quite think ahead.

He was so afraid of men that he just, one step, okay, I don't know what I'm going to do when she's married to the king. I'll figure that out when that time comes. There was no way for him to get out of this except from God.

It's more likely that he just sat there trying to figure out, let me stay in the country until I could figure something out. Abraham behaved much like the nation of Israel, though. He's almost a shadow of the nation.

Because what you end up seeing in the nation of Israel is that they, too, had a promise of God. And they, too, sold themselves as prostitutes to the gods of the other nations. Oh, Lord, give us a king like the other nations, worshipping their idols, taking their own children, and sacrificing them to those idols.

You know, when we were talking about this message, I was talking to Pastor Jeff, and we were discussing some of this and what I might say, and Pastor Jeff had this comment, Abraham would not be the kind of man that we would invite to this conference.

Why do we call him, though, a man of faith? It seems, with everything we've looked at, he doesn't seem like the man we would look at as being a great man of faith, a man we'd want behind a pulpit preaching.

But there seems to be a turning point for him with the birth of Isaac. When the promise that God made was fulfilled and he finally saw that, we start to see a change. We saw a little bit when he was circumcised, some obedience.

But we can rejoice that God was not done with Abraham. As Philippians 1 .6 says, he's not just the author of our faith, but he's the finisher of our faith. I'm glad for that. Because if he was done with Abraham, we'd be in trouble.

Guess what? If he was done with us, we'd be in trouble. But the good thing he's not done with us. As long as there's breath in our lungs and we know Christ, God is still sanctifying us. Oh, we don't like it.

No one likes that fire. But he's still working on us. And many of us are much like Abraham. We too, in our younger years and maybe even our present years, lack much of the faith that we might need to have.

And even though Pastor Jeff did steal a lot of my thunder, it just gives me more time to say other things. Let's talk about circumcision. So anything that I say that he said that seems opposite, you now know what the right one is.

I did say that I enjoy disagreeing with him. He is a man. Sorry, but I'm going to embarrass you. But he's a man that just disagrees with people so graciously, doesn't he? It's like you feel bad disagreeing with him because he's got.