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Sunday Night, January 7, 2018 PM Michael Dirrim Pastor
But that Genesis 1 through 11 covers a great deal of time. Genesis 1 through 11 covers about 2000 years and the next 10 chapters cover 25 years. What might that suggest? Aren't they? And of course the first 2000 years are important.
They are.
But as you can tell, when things slow down and focus in, there's something very, very important that we need to know and you can think about it from the perspective of those who first heard the book of Genesis read to them, the people of Israel, the tribes of Israel, in their preparation before entering into the land of Canaan before crossing the Jordan River.
What kind of important things are they hearing from Moses as he reads and as the Levites read the scriptures to them? What are they hearing? What kind of impact does it make on the way that they're thinking and getting ready to cross over into the promised land?
And this is true that when it slows down, you can sense the importance of it. We'll see this even when we come to the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac. The story is clipping along and when it comes to the moment that Abraham is to slay Isaac on the altar, everything slows down and every single physical action that Abraham takes is deliberately written out so that the whole action slows down to the very moment before God stays his hand.
And it's a very similar thing that was happening in the book of Genesis. Of course, everything that we've been looking at in Genesis is very much put into the context of the creation story, that God made all these things for his own glory, that when he was done creating the entire world in six days, he steps back and says, it is very good.
It is very good. So God evaluates his own creation and he is well-pleased in how things have come together. It's good, it is good, it is good, it is very good, very good when those he created in his image, his special creation is placed as the last piece of the puzzle and everything is arranged around humanity living in such a way that they live in the image of God, that they love God supremely, love each other rightly and they steward the creation responsibly.
Now, of course, we read about the fall, read about the rupture that occurred in Genesis three because of sin and the promise in Genesis 3 .15 that God placing enmity between the woman and the serpent, between her seed and his seed, that God promised victory through the seed of the woman.
And the trajectory moving on past that point is an attention to who is this seed and when will he be born and how will all this transpire? And we've been keeping our attention there as we've moved through.
As something to pay attention to in Genesis 11 that I don't believe we got to, would someone care to read verse four of Genesis 11? Make for ourselves a name, Shem.
Shem.
Make for ourselves a name, Shem. Does Shem sound familiar? Who's Shem? Wasn't he one of the sons of Noah? Well, at the beginning of Genesis 11, you hear about those gathered together by Nimrod in the plains of Shinar, they're going to make for themselves a name.
They're on a quest to make for themselves a shame, a name to glorify themselves. This does not work out in rebellion to God and he scatters them by confusing their languages. And as soon as the failure of Babel occurs, we begin to read about a genealogy, don't we?
In verse 10, verses one through nine, the failure of making for themselves a name, a Shem. And then verse 10, these are the records of the generations of Shem. The one who's named the name. And so we're supposed to follow his genealogy now.
And it's a very similar situation as we have in Genesis five, where the 10th from Adam is one called Noah. And Noah is a critical person in the line of redemptive history. And God uses him to save a remnant of humanity and a remnant of the creatures.
And with Noah, 10th from Adam, God makes a covenant that ensures the preservation of the earth from another worldwide flood. Well, now 10th from Noah. We could begin with Shem and we start going through the list and we come to one whose name is Abram.
And so we should be anticipating something significant. Here's another 10th. Here is Abram. Now he doesn't look like much. He's not much. He's not someone who has a kingdom. He doesn't even have any land.
He's not much in the way of having a great name. His father dies. His brother dies. They are a bit of a shattered family and they're wandering. They left the land of Ur, the Chaldeans, the general area from where Babel was constructed and where it fell apart.
And here they are traveling to Haran, traveling along generally the arc of the Euphrates River, getting ready to then drop back down into the Fertile Crescent, into the Levant, where apparently God had ordered Haran to start out from and start out towards.
And again, came to Abram and told him to go specifically. But Abram does not look very much. Abram, his name means father of a people. And what's the problem with that? He has no people. One of his brothers stays back in Ur.
So he's traveling along with his nephew, Lot, who has taken over his little area of the family after his father died. Haran is dead. And so, I mean, what is Abram? He's got a shattered family. He's a nomad.
He's wandering about. He has no claim to any land. His name doesn't mean very much because he's supposed to be father of a people, but he doesn't have any children. And so who is this guy? He's not very much at all.
He's not very much at all. So things are set up just right because throughout the scriptures, we see that God delights in doing the impossible through the unlikely. And Abram is one of those unlikely people.
And so we come to chapter 12 and verse one. Now, the Lord said to Abram, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land, which I will show you. And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great.
And so you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him and Lot went with him.
Now, Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his nephew, and all their possessions, which they had accumulated and the persons which they had acquired in Haran.
And they set out for the land of Canaan. Thus they came to the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land as far as the side of Shechem to the Oak of Moreh. Now, the Canaanite was then in the land.
The Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your descendants, I will give this land, literally, to your seed, I will give this land. And so the name, the critical word of seed has popped up here again. And God says to Abram, to your seed, I will give this land.
And so he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him. Then he proceeded from there to the mountain on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.
Abram journeyed on, continuing toward the Negev, which I failed to mention this morning about the Negev that was mentioned in Jeremiah, about the cities being locked up. But those cities in the south were in a poor, more kind of a desert wilderness area in the southern area of Judah.
And they were in many ways, a place of last resort. And this is not a prosperous area. Why would Abram be journeying that direction? We see in the next passage, there was a famine in the land and he was journeying on, trying to find some better place to be.
But for now, think about the tribes of Israel hearing about the fact that their forefather, Abram, who came from the line of Shem, that he came from the line of Eber, thus they're the Hebrews, and he had already come to the land, the one true God, the God who had just defeated all of the so-called gods of Egypt.
This same God had come to Abram, their forefather, and told him that I am giving this land to you and your descendants. How does that resonate with the Israelite tribes? Because they've been ordered, you're going to cross the Jordan and you're gonna go into this land and you're gonna fight the Canaanites and you're gonna drive all the idolatrous peoples out of the land.
And well, God had given it to them. This was part of his plan. And Abram, some 600 years earlier, by the time the Israelites are hearing this, 600 years before they're hearing this, they discover that Abraham was already there and he'd already worshiped the Lord on that land.
He'd already built altars to the Lord on that land. And he had traveled the length and the breadth of it. And this was a promise from God. So I think it has an invigorating effect on the tribes of Israel to know this.
Let's pay attention to verses one through three. When the Lord says to Abram, go forth from your country, which is the land of Ur, from your relatives, from your father's house, everyone that Haran had left behind, everyone who would know Abram and vouch for him and give him a place in the society, every bit of privilege that Abram would have being with his family in their homeland, leave it all.
And he says, so go forth from, from, from, but go to the land, which I will show you. And here are the promises. I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great. And so you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. Well, God promises to make him a great nation, promises to bless him and to make his name great.
Now, the very beginning of chapter 11, we hear about those gathered in the plains of Shinar to make for themselves a name. We're going to make our name great. And boy, Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord, what a great name he has.
And he's going to make a name, they're going to make a name for themselves by building a great city, but it failed. So how does one's name, how is one's name made great? By the, by the grace of God, by God intervening into the life of this nomad from a shattered family.
This 75 year old man who supposed to be a father of a people who has no heir. God says, I will make your name great. And he's going to, he's going to showcase Abram and his descendants for a particular purpose.
So I'm going to bless you. I am going, I am going to invest, God is investing his blessings with Abram. And he has a purpose in this so that in Abram, all the families of the earth will be blessed. And there are a whole lot of families of the earth as chapter 10 has just said.
The 70 different names, or the, in other words, the idea of a 70 different nations in chapter 10, how did they get scattered? The beginning of chapter 11 tells us because of Babel. Well, in Abram, all the families of the earth will be blessed, God says.
So what do we think about these promises from God to Abram? So God didn't make him into a great nation.
Didn't he?
Gave him, gave him a son and a grandson and many great grandsons. And by the time they went down to Egypt in the days of Joseph, there were 70 persons in all. And when they left, they were in the millions.
When they went wandering through the wilderness and when they descended upon Canaan, the promises of God, Joshua said, were fulfilled in that day at the end of Joshua, that God had kept his promises and he made them a numerous people, as numerous as the stars in the heavens and God had given them their land.
And, but so if you start reading here in Genesis 12, by the time you get to the end of Joshua, Joshua is saying, God has kept his promises, you know? And yet in some way, there was more to come. There was more to come.
And how do we know that? Well, what do we think about this passage right here in verse three? I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
Let's just take the, and I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse. Now, how do we normally interpret that today? God says to Abraham, I guess it says to Abram, I'm gonna make you a great nation.
You're gonna have many descendants, okay? I'm gonna keep my promises to you. I'm gonna bless you. Those who bless you will be blessed. Those who curse you will be cursed. What do we do with that verse most of the time?
Right, so we write, right? And then the contradiction, right? So those who curse you will be cursed too. So this has guided our foreign policy for quite some time, hasn't it? Now, I would say that having an ally in the Middle East is good politics, but I think it's bad theology.
And here's why. Before we even get out of the book of Numbers, God is saying to Israel, before they even get into the promised land, the attention of this statement right here, I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse.
Before they even get into the land, before we get out of the book of Numbers, God is telling them, this is ultimately not fulfilled in you all as a group, but in one who will come from you, okay? All right, we don't have to wait to the New Testament to find out that the seed of Abram and that the significance of Abram is found and bound up in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
We don't even have to wait to the New Testament, we see it in Numbers. Let's go to Numbers chapter 23 and 24. We have the odd character of Balaam, who was a prophet for hire, and Balak, king of Aram, hired him to come and curse Israel.
That doesn't work very well. Balaam is fine with making some money, but the angel of the Lord stops him on the way and reiterates what God had already said, don't you dare say a word that I don't say.
You cannot say something contrary to what I have said or what I want you to say, and under threat of death, okay? So Balaam begins to give his, he's supposed to offer curses against Israel, this does not work.
Verse eight of chapter 23, Balaam says, how shall I curse whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce whom the Lord has not denounced? He says it's of Israel, correct? He's looking at Israel. Now, Balak is one of the first post-moderns, perhaps not the first, I think Satan was the first post-modern, I'm not sure, but Balak says, oh, okay, well, let's try something else.
Maybe if you come over here to this other mountain top over here and see them from a different perspective, then you can curse them. Doesn't work, again. And he says, how can I curse those whom God has not cursed?
And we come to chapter 24, and again and again, Balak moves him around, but it doesn't work. Now look at verse eight. Numbers 24 and verse eight. God brings him out of Egypt. Now, what does the scripture do with that?
Out of Egypt I have called my son, Exodus and Hosea, and Matthew, out of Egypt I have called my son. God brings him up out of Egypt, he is for him like the horns of the wild ox. He will devour the nations who are his adversaries and will crush their bones in pieces, read Psalm two in the anointed one who has absolute rule over the nations, and will shatter them with his arrows.
Ah, and here we have Balaam quoting Jacob. Balaam quotes Jacob from the end of Genesis. Genesis 49, he couches, he lies down as a lion, and as a lion, who dares rouse him?
Who is that?
The lion of Judah. This is where we get the expression lion of Judah from Genesis 49 and nine. The lion of Judah, that we know who that is, and that is Jesus Christ. Shiloh, the one to whom it all belongs,.
Genesis 49. And here, Balaam is saying, he couches, he lies down as a lion, as a lion, who dares, he says, the lion of Judah, he brings to remembrance, the lion of Judah, notice, blessed is everyone who blesses you and curses everyone who curses you.
What does Balaam say in agreement with God? That the attention, the ultimate attention of this statement, everyone who blesses, you will be blessed, all those who curse you will be cursed, that the ultimate intention of that statement is not political ethnic Israel,.
It is Jesus Christ.
Which Paul says in Galatians, that the promises were to the seed, meaning Christ. Now, I am all for supporting Israel, I think it's a good idea. I think it's an excellent idea. I don't have anything against the Jews.
And from salvation, from the Jews came salvation, and that we have a very Jewish Messiah. In any sense, we should love Jews because our Savior is a Jew, okay? He's a Hebrew, he is a Jew because he's from the line of Judah, and he is our Messiah, and much of what we believe is just drenched in Jewish thought.
And those are all good things. It's the way God planned it and arranged it for our good and for his glory. But, I think it's bad theology to say, God will bless our nation if we keep our embassy in Jerusalem along with Guatemala and the few people who do so.
God will bless us if we arm Israel and send funds their way. God will bless us if we take their side over against the Palestinians, and that that's how God will bless us. I think it's really bad theology.
I think that good theology says that we put our attention upon Jesus Christ. We don't read the Bible to find out how special Israel is. That's what the Pharisees did, that's what the Sadducees did. They read the Old Testament scriptures to find out how special they were.
And when Jesus came, he said, look, you're the vineyard workers who aren't giving the fruit to the owner of the vineyard. And you're not giving the due glory to God. They're like Saul who can't abide the fact that David is the anointed one.
And they rage against the one for whom they existed. They were supposed to point the way and light the way and show the way to Christ. So I don't think we should get too distracted away from the main focus of the scriptures.
So that's, now, this becomes, verse three, I think verse three becomes something far more important than a political position. I think verse three is one of the most underrated evangelistic scriptures that we have in the Bible.
What do you think of Jesus Christ? Right, what do you think of Jesus Christ? Do you bless him? Or do you curse him? Do you delight in him? Do you rejoice in him? Do you praise him? Or do you find him not so very important at all?
Somewhat out of date, old fashioned, meaningless, so on and so forth. This is about what you do ultimately with Christ. For in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed. And we find the Lion of Judah in Revelation five as the one that with his blood he purchased, he purchased men, women, and children from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.
And him, all the families of the earth are blessed. I've left you two minutes to ask me questions about all that, so yeah, that's not very fair. Any questions or thoughts about what we've seen so far?
Yes, Miss Jill. Yes, so Jill makes a good point about why did the Jews in Jesus' day not have this focus on the families of all the earth? Why were they just focused upon themselves? Why is that so? Well, I think part of it had to do with their being oppressed by the nations.
Now, a lot of that was their own doing for they sinned against God and they wouldn't worship him supremely. And many judgments came upon them because of that. They were also in an era where they were about, they were around a little less than 100 years from a time and place where they were self-ruling under the Maccabeans.
They had won an insurgency against the Greeks and had won for them 100 years of self-rule which ended when the Romans came. And the Romans were basically occupying their territory. There were many zealots still trying to run an insurgency, a half-hearted one, because of the totalitarian tactics of the Romans.
And they're very upset with the foreigners occupying their land. As part of their cultural sense, they also were not ready to give up what they perceived to be their particular right to kill every Gentile and get them out of their land.
When in fact, the judgment that God prescribed for them to accomplish, they did in a great deal accomplish. They didn't have a thorough accomplishment. In Judges, we read that they didn't thoroughly do what God called them to do against the Canaanites whom God left for 400 years with a warning from Abram, but they never repented.
And they were to come into the land of Canaan and execute the judgment of God and they did not do so in full, which was their downfall, as they intermarried with the Canaanite tribes who were still there and became idolatrists and so on and so forth.
Now, when you get to the time of Jesus, Jesus himself confronts them about the temple and talks to them about, the temple is supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations, is what he says. And of course, they didn't allow that.
There's a very conspicuous bit of archeology, a bit of an arch that was preserved and we have found today from the temple that wasn't fully destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. And it basically says that if you're a Gentile, if you pass through this gate, death is the penalty.
And that seems pretty foreign to us, doesn't it? And what should have been in the scriptures, a pointer to the exclusivity of Jesus Christ, the Jews made about exclusivity of Israel. And in Christ, he's the only savior for the world, but in him, all the nations are blessed and there's no other savior.
So he's exclusive, but look at the wideness of God's mercy and people from all over the place can come to Christ and be saved. And so some of those things, I think, got a little twisted and misapplied.
I think that's just part of our sin nature, right? If we get prideful and complacent. And so this is a good passage to remind us that God, by giving this passage to the Israelites, the original audience, stirring up their zeal to go do his work, to bring about the kingdom through which all the families of the earth will be blessed.
And we are encouraged much the same way. To be zealous with what God has entrusted to us in Christ so that all the families of the earth will be blessed in Christ.
Absolutely.
You see, the thing with the Old Testament is you're gonna be walking through different phases of God dealing with his servants. And you have a God dealing with Adam and then dealing with Noah and dealing with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and then Israel as a whole.
And every time you find God dealing with his servants, God's kingdom agenda is to comprehensively manifest his glory through his chosen servant. Well, who's his chosen servant? Well, in this stage of history, he's dealing with, in Isaiah, he's dealing with Israel as a whole, calling them to live in the image of God as he's designed them to live.
And he is dealing with Israel with shape and shadow that is soon to be fulfilled and filled out in the substance of Christ. So in the trajectory of redemptive history, it matters a great deal how people were dealing with Israel and it matters a great deal how Israel was dealing with God.
For what a poor picture of the servant did they give? One who was not faithful. One who was, you know, think about Jesus Christ saying, everything the father says to me, I say, and what he tells me to do, I do.
That's what the servant's supposed to be. And that's what Israel was called to do. And they were to model that and show that and show the shadow and the shape of the Savior to come to stir up the faith of the people around them in the Savior that God had promised from Genesis 3 .15 to all humanity.
And so it mattered a great deal how people dealt with Israel and it mattered a great deal how Israel dealt with the nations and dealt with God because gospel expression was at stake. So it mattered a great deal.
One of the interesting things that we'll close on is that you have to trace how in the New Testament does Jesus Christ and his apostles take up the Old Testament and apply it. How do they deal with it?
On things as simple as the Psalms saying, the meek shall inherit the land and Jesus taking up that very same passage in Matthew 5 it says the meek shall inherit the earth, the whole earth. Not the sliver of land in the Levant we call Palestine today or Canaan back then.
He says they're gonna inherit the whole earth.
Why does Jesus do that?
Why does he move from a sliver of land to the whole earth? In Romans 4, Paul says the promise to Abraham and to his seed that he would inherit the world was not by works but by faith. Well, the promise to Abraham and his descendants was about a land, the land of Canaan.
By the time we get to Romans 4, Paul says it was about a promise that he would inherit the whole world. What's happening to the promises? The promises are fulfilled in Christ. Second Corinthians chapter one verse 20 says, as many as are the promises of God in Christ, they are yes.
So when they are fulfilled in Christ, all of a sudden they go global. And there's gonna be land, folks. And in the new creation, we're gonna have dirt under our fingernails. There's gonna be land. And it's all Christ's.
Who receives the land? Who inherits the land?
Christ does. He's the heir.
We are co-heirs with Christ. Anything we need in terms of fulfillment, it's in Christ. I don't make a particular leap from the church equals Israel. I think Christ is the focus. Okay, Christ is the focus.
Everything that the Bible, everything God promised to Israel, Christ fulfills.
Everything.
I can't find any other way around it. And that's why Christ is the savior of Israel and the savior of the Gentiles. And everybody in Israel who's supposed to be saved are gonna be saved in Christ. Everybody who's supposed to be saved in the Gentiles will be saved in Christ.
And that's the whole point of the wild olive and the native olive being grafted together into one big tree in Romans 11. Because he's the holy root. I think very much what Jesus did while he in his ministry in God with us and us with God and the healing and the deliverance from every spiritual darkness and deliverance from all of the sickness and disease, his resurrection, which brought many other saints out of the grave when he rose from the dead, Matthew tells us.
All of that was showing us that our, that the new creation hope is in Christ.
Okay, well, let's go ahead and close by singing the doxology together.