He is Risen Matthew 28:1-20

God Stands With His People Through the Ups and Downs

One area we can draw encouragement from in the narrative of Scripture is that God stands with his people through the ups and downs. As we read the Bible, sometimes we are left scratching our head at the behavior of the Lord's followers.

We can relate because we too do foolish actions on our journey through the life of faith. Whether it be the people of Scripture or our own journey, the Lord stands with us through obedience and through disobedience.

My old pastor said to me one time that we don't want our life to be like the Rocky Mountains, like these big ups and these big downs, but rather like a Kansas wheat field. The ups and downs are not too pronounced because of their consistency.

Your journey will become closer to a Kansas wheat field as you experience spiritual growth, as you have that steadiness in the faith. What we are going to see today in our sermon is a low for Abram. We've seen some highs for him and we've seen some lows.

We're going to see a low today. The story of the Bible is not a story of great men and women. It's a story of a great God and how He interacts with these people. Today we're continuing our sermon series through Genesis.

We started our sermon series in September. We're now in April and we're just making our way through. We're in Genesis chapter 16. I encourage you to follow along with me in a Bible. The Bible that's used in the Red Bible in the pews is on page 13.

This sermon is titled, The Foolishness of Man and the Greatness of God. The Foolishness of Man and the Greatness of God. Our big idea, our proposition is the Lord's holy character is shown masterfully in this bizarre narrative.

You'll see what I'm talking about here in a little bit. The Lord's holy character is shown masterfully in this bizarre narrative. We're going to see three holy characteristics displayed by God. The first is He patiently endures the impatience of His people.

He patiently endures the impatience of His people. Two weeks ago, we finished up the covenant the Lord made with Abram known as the Abrahamic covenant. In that covenant, we saw the Lord promise Abram that he would have offspring that would become a great nation.

This nation, which would later be known as Israel, would inherit the land of Canaan. Those who bless him will be blessed and those who dishonor him will be cursed. Chapter 15 was a highlight for Abram because it was in this chapter when it said, Abram believed in the Lord and it was counted to him as righteousness.

Abram's journey of faith has truly been a rollercoaster. We have seen this over the last few months. Remember the wild thing at Valleyfair? You think you're going to go up forever and you go up and up and up and up.

Then all of a sudden, a huge drop. Today, it's like that huge drop for Abram. You're going to be left scratching your head. At times, we are confused as to why he does the foolish things he does. The Lord makes these incredible promises to Abram in Genesis 15 and Abram shows faith.

Abram believes in God. We think, okay, we're going to see him walk with the Lord where he doesn't have these ups and downs. He's going to have this steady faith going forward. Then chapter 16 happens.

Abram and Sarai’s Impatient Plan

We'll see this beginning in verse 1. Now, Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. The author, Moses, wants us to see right from the get-go that Abram and Sarai had yet to have any children.

Remember, an Abrahamic covenant, this promise the Lord makes to Abram, is that he's going to have a child. From this child are going to be so many children that you won't even be able to number them because there's going to be so many in the heavens.

But the Lord makes them wait, as he so often does for us, too. During the waiting, Sarai begins to doubt whether the Lord is going to deliver. During the period of doubt, Sarai comes up with this plan that involves a female Egyptian servant named Hagar who lives in their house.

We see Sarai's plan in verse 2. Sarai said to Abram, Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant. It may be that I shall obtain children by her. The plan that Sarai comes up with is to give Abram the servant woman, Hagar, to him in order to bear children.

She is thinking, since so much time has passed and God has still not enabled me to conceive, we must come up with our own plan. And this practice of giving a servant in the house to the male of the household in order to bear children was a common practice in the ancient Near East, in these ancient times.

So Sarai is thinking, lots of other people are doing this and it's worked for them, so why not us? Maybe we'll try this, too. What do you think Abram's response is going to be here? It's not going to be a good one.

Is he going to say, Sarai, the Lord promised us that our heir would be our very own son? As the Lord told Abram in Genesis 15 -4? Sadly, this is not the response that Abram gets. Rather, this is his response.

I'm going to read the rest of verse 2 through verse 4 here. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife.

And he went into Hagar, and she conceived. Does this sound familiar? In Genesis 3, Adam listened to the voice of his wife, and he ate from the tree that the Lord told him not to eat from. In that situation, Adam should have told the youth, no, we should not listen to the serpent.

The Lord told us that we could eat from any tree in the garden, but this one tree, the tree of the knowledge and good of evil, we cannot eat from. But that's not how Adam responded. They ate from the fruit and sinned, and the results were just disastrous for them and for the human race, as the human race plunged into sin as a result of their sin.

That's what we call original sin. Now let me stress here, men do well to listen to their wives. In marriage, God's design is that the husband and wife would work together and listen to one another. So this isn't saying, okay, men, don't listen to your wife.

That's not what we're getting at here. But if your spouse, whether husband or wife, leads you to sin, you should not go down that path with them. That's crystal clear here. And not just your spouse, but you should not let anyone lead you into sin.

I remember when I was a senior in high school, we had closed lunch, which means you couldn't go off campus for lunch. I'm not sure if St. Croix has that or not, but we had that at Mound. And one of my friends told me, Seth, let's go to Subway.

Subway was about a couple miles down the road for lunch. And so what I should have told him is, no, that's against the rules. But guess what? I didn't do that. I said, okay, let's go. And so we snuck out of school during the lunch hour.

We drove to Subway. And we actually did this a few times. It wasn't just once. And we got to the point where we knew they were getting on to us. And so we decided, okay, we're not going to do this anymore.

And if they would have caught us red-handed, we would have been in big trouble. But the point is, I let my friend lead me into sin by breaking the rules that the school had set up. We should not give in to pressure to spit to sin when a spouse, family member, or a friend leads us down that path.

Abram makes the sad mistake, and we so often have made the same mistake in our own lives. He listened to Sarai when he should not have, and he took his servant, Hagar, as his wife, and she conceived. And Abram had not been able to have children with Sarai, but now he has a child with his servant, Hagar, after taking her as his wife.

And this raises a question here. You're thinking, okay, Abram's already married to Sarai, and now he takes Hagar as his wife. What do we call this? We call this polygamy, when you have more than one wife.

And you might think, okay, when I read the Bible, I see that so many people in the Old Testament have multiple wives. And so I figure I'm going to take a minute here to explain polygamy in the Bible. Right from the get-go, in the beginning of creation, in Genesis 2 .24, it says, A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So we see right from the get-go that the Bible supports monogamous marriage. But then we see in the Old Testament, of course, some of these men, we see David, for example, Solomon. We see Abram here, they have multiple wives.

So the question is, is this sin? Well, in the Old Testament time, during this culture, there was more women than men, because a lot of the men would go off to war, some of them would die. And women lived longer than men anyway, as we see that today.

And so there would be a lot more women than there were men. And at this time in history, women could not care for themselves like they could today. They weren't as independent with work, and so they needed someone to take care of them.

And so what happened is, for a temporary period in the Old Testament, the Lord enabled these men to take multiple wives for the purpose of protecting them. Because, obviously, having a woman in this time all alone, without having any provision where she could take care of herself, that would be the worst thing that could happen than polygamy.

Polygamy was actually better in this situation. Now, fast forward to the New Testament. Jesus was asked about marriage by the Pharisees. And Jesus said to them, Since the beginning, Genesis 2 -34, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So when Jesus is asked about marriage, he goes back to the original creation design, which is that marriage should be between one man and one woman. It was that way in the New Testament. It was that way from the beginning.

And it's that way today. So that's why monogamous marriage is the way that marriage should be. And polygamy should be something that should be avoided at all costs. I hope that made sense. That was kind of a little quick summary.

If you want me to explain it again or even more in detail, I could do that at a later time. But we've got to get back to our sermon here. Now, sadly, the reasons I just listed for provision, which is the only good reason to have multiple wives in the Old Testament, is not what Abram does here by taking Hagar as his wife.

They're doing this by their own plan in order to bear a child. Now, in the ancient Near East, when this practice of providing a servant woman for the sake of bearing a child took place, the original wife was not displaced.

Her place in the household as the primary wife still stood. But judging by Hagar's response to conceiving Abram's child in verse 4, she may think she has replaced Sarai as Abram's primary wife. And we're going to see this here at the end of verse 4.

And when she saw that she had conceived, when Hagar saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. So, Hagar looks at Sarai with contempt. And as you might imagine, Sarai is not going to be all too happy about this.

And this is her response in verse 5. And Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong done to me be on you. I gave my servant to your embrace. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt.

May the Lord judge between you and me. Now, you would expect Sarai to respond with anger toward Hagar, the one who looked at her with contempt. But she does not do that. Rather, she shows her anger toward Abram.

Remember, she's pointing the finger here at Abram, not directly at Hagar. And what we see here is that Sarai blamed Abram, but at the end of verse 5, she acknowledges that she bears some of the blame here, too.

By that statement, may the Lord judge between me and you. By this statement, she is admitting that she may deserve some of the blame. And, of course, we would say, well, of course you do. This was your plan in the first place.

And so she acknowledges we're both to blame here. But she's pointing the finger at Abram, which, by the way, we do often, right? When the problem is a twist, we tend to think that other people's sins are greater than ours.

And that's what Sarai thinks here, too. Now, Sarai may have been at peace with this plan, but Hagar, looking on her with contempt, sets Sarai off. And she's thinking, I've made a horrible mistake. Now she thinks that she is going to take my place as a primary wife in this household, and I'm going to lose the position that I once had.

And, of course, the truth is both of them are to blame. Sin blinds us, by the way, to see when we are at fault, because we do this, too. And what we need to do is, when we realize that sin blinds us, we need to ask the question to the Lord, what it is that you want me to see here?

In Psalm 1912, the psalmist said, declare me from innocent faults. Okay, so we need to do that, too. Because if you're blind, you're going to say it's really an ugly thing. Because other people can see it sometimes, but you can't see it.

So we need to seek the Lord out when that comes. And Abram's response here is a poor one. As I said, this chapter is not one of Abram's brightest moments. Abram should have responded by calling for peace and reconciliation between Sarai and Hagar.

Sadly, this is not how he responds. This is what he says at the beginning of verse 6. But Abram said to Sarai, behold, your servant Hagar is in your power. Do to her as you please. All right, that's not a good response.

Abram gives her the authority to treat Hagar poorly. Abram knew that Sarai saw Hagar as a threat to her place in the house. So Abram appeases Sarai by not putting Sarai under Hagar, or even at an equal level, but putting her in a position over Hagar, saying you still have authority over her.

And what Abram should have done is kept Sarai in the authority position, but helped reconcile Sarai and Hagar. And that does not happen. And Sarai, in order to preserve her position as Abram's primary wife, treats her poorly.

The end of verse 6 says, Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her. So we see immaturity on the part of Sarai. This is not the way a godly person should treat someone else. And at this point, we do not know where Sarai's faith is in the Lord.

We know that Abram is the true follower of Christ. Or not Christ, but at this time in history, but true follower of the Lord. And later on in Hebrews 11, Sarai's faith is mentioned. So we do know that at a later point, she does have faith in the Lord.

But this time, we see a lot of immaturity here. And we wonder, again, we're left scratching our head. Why are they doing what they're doing? This treatment from Hagar is so bad that she gets to the point where she can no longer tolerate it.

So what does she do? She flees. She wants out. We can all think of a time in our own life when we're in a situation where it's miserable. And we want out. I remember I had a job one time when I was working security in seminary.

Pretty much all the accounts I worked at, I enjoyed. There was one account where I could not stand it because the boss there, the manager, treated everyone so poorly. And so I just wanted to say, okay, Lord, I'm done.

I'm leaving. I can't deal with this. It was only one day a week, so I could tolerate it. But the Lord said, no, you're going to stay there. And so I stayed there. And I saw His good purpose in it because good things came from it.

I was able to have all these conversations with people about the Lord who worked there and visitors. But sometimes when the Lord thinks it best that we stay, we need to realize it's for our good. He has a purpose for it.

And we'll see that in the next place. And what is striking is that the Lord does not scrap His plan with Abram and Samuel. The Lord just made all these wonderful promises in Genesis 15 to Abram saying, I'm going to give you this offspring.

I'm going to give you land. I'm going to give you all these things. But the Lord does not scrap His plan. He keeps His plan. And we're going to see that more next week. And the Lord is patient with those who are impatient.

Because what is the problem here between Sarai and Hagar? They're impatient. But the Lord stays with them. So this is the first holy characteristic displayed by the Lord. He patiently endures the impatience of His people.

He's still going to bless them. The second holy characteristic displayed by the Lord is He demonstrates mercy to those we least expect. He demonstrates mercy to those we least expect. Now as I just mentioned, the best solution is not to immediately run from a difficult situation, but to stay there until we know the Lord is guiding us somewhere else.

But Hagar does run away amidst the tremendous pressure. Hagar is an Egyptian. So she heads south toward Egypt from the land of Canaan. And the Lord, in an effort to keep Hagar in Abram's house, pursues her.

And what the Lord does here is an act of mercy toward Hagar. And I'll touch on that more in a bit. But let's see the Lord's pursuit in verse 7. It says, Now this part says that the angel of the Lord pursued her as far as the way to Shur.

Shur was located in northwest Sinai, which would be between Israel, southwest Israel, and northeast Egypt. You can picture that if you have that mental map in your head. And what we need to do here is we need to figure out the identity of this messenger that pursues Hagar.

It says, What you'll notice is that in Scripture, sometimes you see the title, the angel of the Lord, show up. And other times you see an angel of the Lord. When you see the angel of the Lord show up, this is what we call a theophany.

That's a big, fancy word. What it means is that God appears to these people in either human form or as an angel. And so even though the angel of the Lord doesn't have a body, but when he appears to these people, he talks to them.

And so it's God actually speaking to them. So that's what we have here. An angel actually pursues Hagar. And God asks her a question in verse 8. This is what he says. He says, Of course, God knows exactly what is happening here.

He knows everything. But he asks this question to bring out a response from Hagar. And Hagar tells him at the end of verse 8 why she has fled. She says,. Now the Lord does not tell Hagar to take the easy way out and to continue her path toward Egypt.

Rather, the Lord tells her to take the hard path in verse 9. The angel of the Lord said to her,. The Lord tells her to go back to the difficult situation where she was treated poorly. The Lord is not sending her back to a situation where she is going to be miserable and only bad will happen to her.

God, by sending her back to Abram's household, as she's trying to escape here, is actually doing her good. He's sending her back for her benefit. The Lord does the same for us in a similar way for our benefit.

He sends us into difficult situations not to leave us high and dry, but rather to go through it with us for our benefit. And the way that he benefits us is by producing godliness in us. Sometimes he sends us into a really difficult situation.

And the purpose is he cares who he is making you into being. He wants to produce godliness in you through that difficult situation. John 15 says that he proves us that we would bear more fruit. In this account, the Lord is sending Hagar back to benefit her in an earthly sense.

Verse 10 tells us what benefit she will get if she goes back to the household of Abram. The angel of the Lord said to her, so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. Not too long ago, the Lord promised offspring to Abram, that he would have so many that he wouldn't even be able to count them.

And we see that here, too. The Lord is not only going to bless the chosen line, which is Abram's line, but he's also going to bless Hagar's line, which is the non-elect line, with many, many offspring.

And why is it that God is going to bless this servant, Hagar? The answer is the promise the Lord made to Abram in Genesis 12, 3. Remember that promise? Those who honor Abram will be honored. Those who dishonor Abram will be cursed.

So by returning to Abram and submitting to Sarai, she will experience physical blessing because she will actually be honoring Abram. And so, by the Lord sending her there, he is actually able to bless her.

What we need to do here is highlight the mercy that the Lord has shown Hagar. He does not need to do this. God did not like this plan that Sarai devised that Abram went along with. You might think the Lord is not only angry at Abram and Sarai, but also Hagar, the one who was pregnant with the child.

And one who is unmerciful would send her away to rid the problem and say, okay, let's just send her away. Let's just forget this ever happened. But God does the opposite. As she runs away, he pursues her.

The Lord does good to her. I promised her a future by leading her back to Abram's house so that he can bless her. And the Lord wants to bless her. And so he's saying, I'm going to make a way so that I can bless you.

You're going to come back from the household. And so I'm able to keep my promise to Abram that those who honor you will be honored. And I'm able to bless you as well. You see the wisdom of the Lord here?

This is incredible when we think about this. And we should do the same to people in our own lives. People do things that anger you. And we do things that anger others. And what are the solutions? Should we rid them from our lives?

Or should we show them grace and mercy by pursuing them as the Lord pursued Hagar? Everything we do in our lives, we want to reflect the Lord. And by pursuing people who make us angry, we are showing that we want the best for them, even when it is inconvenient for us.

And by doing this, you are following the Lord's way, not the world's. And when you think about this, this is the Lord's consistent character. He shows us mercy by sending Jesus to die for His enemies.

We are born in this world as enemies of God. And the Lord shows us mercy by sending His Son to die for those who do not deserve it. We are people who we should least expect to receive mercy, His enemies, the Lord's enemies.

And yet, He shows it to us. This is the second holy characteristic displayed. He demonstrates mercy to those we least expect. And the third and final holy characteristic displayed in Genesis 16 is He delivers consequences to His people for their sins.

Consequences for Sin and the Future of Ishmael

And in this last point, this is going to be really fascinating if you like watching current events, because we are going to see how this chapter has effects still to the present day. It is pretty incredible.

Now in verse 11, the Lord tells Hagar details about this son that she is going to give birth to. And each of these details are not good for Abram, Sarai, and their future offspring. Let's first look at verse 11 concerning the details of this child.

And then we'll look at verse 12 to see the negative characteristics. So verse 11 here first. And the angel of the Lord said to her, to Hagar, Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son. You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction.

So Hagar knows that this child she is going to have is going to be a male. And it says she's going to bear a son. And then the Lord tells her what she is to name this son. The name is Ishmael. And this name means God hears.

And he has named this because God heard her affliction and pursued her. So every time Hagar would think of this name, she would remember. God heard me when I was afflicted. And that's what's so fascinating about names.

We name our children after someone we admire. Someone from our life or someone from history, someone from the Bible we admire. Or we name them with some meaning or significance to the name. Rhiannon and I actually named our daughter Alacia because it means truth in Greek.

When Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the way, the Alacia, and the life. We want her to know that. Someday when she gets older, this is why you were named this. In a day and age where truth is kind of pushed aside.

But truth is so, so important. It's timeless and it's forever. We want her to know the importance of the name truth. And so names have importance. And so Ishmael is named God hears. So that she would know God heard her in her affliction.

And what we have just seen is that Hagar will be blessed if she returns to Abram. And the way that she will be blessed is by having a multitude of people who come from her lying. The Lord could have just said Ishmael be born and that was it.

But no, lots and lots of people are going to be born from this lying. And Genesis 17 20 says that a nation will come from her. And this nation will be trouble for Abram's future offspring. This future nation is pictured in the description of Ishmael in verse 12.

And verse 12 here, what I'm about to read is a prophecy of Ishmael and his descendants. It says he shall be a wild donkey of a man. His hand against everyone and everyone's hand against him. And he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.

So Abram and Sarai face trouble because of this offspring that is born from Hagar. And Abram and Sarai's sin here comes back to bite them in a couple of ways. First, Sarai has this ongoing conflict with Hagar.

And in Genesis 21, Ishmael mocks Isaac, Isaac who is the promised child, when he is born. And this led to Hagar and Ishmael being cast out of Abram's household. Now Abram and Sarai would not have had this constant scorn if they would have trusted the Lord in the first place and waited for their own child Isaac to be born.

And if you think about this, if you think about the sins in our own life or the sins we see others commit, the sins in our world, there's continuing consequences for sin. I know that Mark worked in a prison system.

We joke that he was on the right side, he wasn't on the other side. And what Mark can tell you is there's consequences for your actions, right? These people commit crimes and they're serving the time.

And you know what? We might not be in jail, but when we sin too, there's earthly consequences that we face for our sins. Thankfully, we don't face eternal consequences, right? Our sins have been paid for, we don't go to hell, we go to heaven, but there are earthly consequences for our sins.

Now the descendants of Abram and Sarai experience consequences of the foolish plan also. So not only Abram and Sarai themselves, but their offspring. And the nation that came from Ishmael were known as the Ishmaelites.

These would be what we call today Arab peoples. Not all the Arab peoples, but some of the Arab peoples. And this prophecy in verse 12 says that Ishmael would be an independent man, which means he's a wild donkey.

A wild donkey of a man. His hand would be against everyone and everyone would be against him. And lastly it says he would have trouble with his kinsmen. Which means that there's going to be this conflict between Ishmael and his descendants and Abram and his descendants.

There's going to be this constant war that's going on. This prophecy here describes not only Ishmael's characteristics that are going to describe him, but it describes his offspring as well. This conflict that they're going to have, the kind of people that they're going to be.

And this is how it would play out in history. As I mentioned Ishmael's death in Genesis 25 -18, it says that his offspring settled against their kinsmen. Their kinsmen being the offspring of Abram. And during King David's reign, the Ishmaelites joined with other nations with the goal of destroying Israel so that they would be remembered no more.

That comes from Psalm 83, 4 -6. And do you think this conflict is happening today? Yes it is. Turn on the news. It's right there. I mentioned earlier that Arabs are descendants of Ishmael. Many Arabs are descendants of Ishmael.

The religion of Islam, they say that Ishmael is the promised child and not Isaac. So you see they're doing some revisionist history there. They're changing what actually happened to fit their own theology.

And the animosity between Islam and Abram's physical offspring, the Jews, is still enormous to this day. Nations dominated by Islam that surround Israel have radicals who want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

That's an actual quote that's been said. We want to wipe them off the face of the earth. In ancient times that was said and it's said today. And as Christians we can understand the hostility between Islam and Christianity.

Remember we're Abram's offspring too. It's probably not as big as Islam and Judaism but it is still big. Radical Muslims have great animosity toward Christians. And Jesus, you know what, he calls us to love these people.

If they show animosity toward us we should show animosity back. We should love them back. We're supposed to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We should pray for them that they would know Christ.

That they would repent as we have repented of our sins. And it's incredible how accurate the Bible is. It tells things from long ago. And we see it play out in history. And we see it happen in our own day.

And people are like, why does this keep happening? Why does this keep happening? We can say the Bible said it was going to happen. Genesis 16, the Ishmaelites. This constant friction throughout history between these two offsprings.

As we wrap up this chapter, Hagar listens to the Lord. And as she listens to the Lord, she highlights another attribute of God in verse 13. She says, She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a God of seeing.

For she said, Truly, here I have seen him who looks after me. So by saying to the Lord that God is seeing, she is saying that he looks after her. And he is going to look after her as she goes back to the typical situation with Sarai.

The harshness that she's dealt with her. And verse 14 highlights that the well here, where the Lord has a conversation with Hagar, was named after the event. It was called, Which means the living one who sees me.

And then finally, in verses 16 and 16, the birth is highlighted. It says, Hagar bore Abram a son. And Abram called the name of the son whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram.

Alright, so the key emphasis we saw in this third point is that there are consequences for sin. Abram, Sarai, and their descendants experienced this. And so do we when we do foolish actions. We experience these continual consequences for our sin.

Like I said, thankfully we don't have to pay for them, right? Christ paid it all at the cross. But the consequences are real. And the Lord uses all of them for our good. All the trouble that Abram and Sarai faced, he used it for their good.

All the trouble that Abram's offspring have faced, he uses it for their good. And he uses our difficult circumstances that we face from our sins for our good as well. So this is the third holy characteristic displayed by the Lord.

He delivers consequences to his people for their sins. So you might read this account and you wonder, How is the Lord going to handle this? And so not only did we see these three actions that I highlighted today, but we saw the Lord's wisdom come out in this sermon as well.

So to summarize here, the Lord's holy character is shown masterfully in this bizarre narrative. And we've seen three holy characteristics displayed. He patiently endures the impatience of his people. He demonstrates mercy to those we least expect.

And he delivers consequences to his people for their sins. And as I mentioned in the intro, the Bible is not primarily a story of seeing good people and following their examples. Rather, the focus is on how the Lord shows his holy character as he deals with sinful people.

The Bible is about God and how he works with the people of God. And we can see by how he works with them how he works with us. That's how we need to read the Bible. Next week, what we're going to see is the Abrahamic covenant come into focus again.

And what the Lord is going to do is he's going to renew this covenant with Abram. And then we're going to see what Abram's offspring is required to do to participate in this covenant that the Lord makes with him.

Let's close in prayer. Father in heaven, thank you for your word. Lord, this passage was difficult to preach. It's odd. And sometimes I think it'd be so much easier just to go preach somewhere else. But Lord, the entire Bible, all 66 books of the Bible are meant to be proclaimed.

They're meant to be preached. There's something that you want us to see in every part of the Bible, including this bizarre narrative today. And so, Lord, help us to see here what it is you want us to see.