Sunday Night, March 4, 2018 PM

just the basic technology with which the Word of the Lord was written, how it was conveyed down through the ages.

Think about the written Word, how was it conveyed on tablets, on leather, and various forms.

And to spend so much time on this, and the technology, the primary medium was, of course, the scrolls.

That was not cheap to make. The ink was not cheap to make. It was a huge task to preserve and to maintain, and to spend so much time repeating all of that again and again.

The temptation must have been awful, just to say, this happened 12 times, and move on.

I mean, but everything was preserved there. How luxurious. I mean, what?

I mean, that's just kind of extravagant. So why? But again, they were extravagant offerings.

They were extravagant offerings for nomads wandering about in a barren wilderness.

They were extravagant offerings from people that were not very great in name and power and in wealth.

They were extravagant offerings and each one was taken into account in absolute detail by the

Lord. And it wasn't to say what a great people these are, but I think the extravagance of it 12 -fold over was to say, to stress the worthiness of God.

That's all I could come up with. And also think about the scribes and everyone else having to memorize this.

They may be grateful, hey, it's the same thing over and over again, except for these names, but still you have to put it in there.

You have to put it in there. And just all this, you know, so I think that's my best guess.

Sure. Even the venerable

Max MacLean, when he reads the audio version of the ESV, you can tell he's getting weary.

It comes through that British accent. You can kind of tell he's kind of rushing here and there. It challenges us, doesn't it?

I mean, it challenges us to appreciate it. Maybe that's part of the point. Well, he does pretty good.

I'm kind of jealous. No, but isn't that part of it do, you know, and there's something else there too.

Nothing gets old with God. Right? I mean, he's eternal. He does not bear the passage of time.

His characteristics, their edge does not dull.

His way of looking at sacrifice, his way of understanding worship, his appreciation for praise, his offense at sin, all of these things, they dull with us.

Right? They grow dull with us. Not with God. He's not sinful.

He is not under the curse. And each one of these is fully appreciated by God.

Each one of these offerings is fully appreciated in all of its detail by God, every single time as much as the first time.

But we don't get it. We're done by number three, right? Like, oh no,

I've got to do this nine more times. And it shows us that we weary where God maintains absolute appreciation for what's going on here.

And perhaps that's something else that teaches us about who God is. Lori, we're gonna go with Starley's answer.

I think so, too. I mean, to have those names, to have that actual record.

There's also something to be said for it being the same thing every single time. It was not less or more for each of them.

Yeah, I was always asking why growing up. Why? Let's go to Genesis 15.

This is a passage that shows up a lot throughout the

Bible. Sometimes we think about passages that are in the

Old Testament that pop up in the New a lot. Psalm 110, where it has that bit about Melchizedek and the

Lord said to my Lord. Psalm 110 shows up a lot in the New Testament. There are certain passages that show up.

Lots of Isaiah shows up in the New Testament. And you can kind of just hear that as you read through.

But when the Bible quotes itself that way, when the writers are quoting the lawgiver, and when the prophets are quoting the lawgiver and the writers.

I mean, the Old Testament is quoting itself long before you get to the New Testament. So you have a build of not just getting to the

New Testament and saying, oh, here is what the Old Testament means. But even in the

Old Testament, there is progression of God revealing his promises and giving an ever clearer picture of his

Son even before you leave the Old Testament. And that is important to understand when we come to a passage like this in Genesis.

Of course, almost all the passages in Genesis, when we see the portraits of Christ there, we are going to be getting a fuller picture as you move through the rest of the

Old Testament and then into the New. It is if Kimberly was here,

I would feel better because Kimberly Collins could tell me if I was spelling it right. But the word is intertextuality. And so it is the

Bible quoting itself. That is a better way to say it. The Bible quoting itself. The Spirit echoing the truth in greater and more fuller form as you move through the

Bible. Well, this is a passage that gets treated a lot and dealt with a lot. Chapter 15 of Genesis.

After these things, after the war of the kings, after the tithe to Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of God Most High, after Lot and Abram split, after Abram is brought by the hand of God into the land of Canaan.

After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying,

Do not fear, Abram. I am a shield to you. Your reward shall be very great.

Abram said, O Lord God, what will you give me since I am childless and the heir of my house is

Eleazar of Damascus? And Abram said, Since you have given no offspring to me, one born in my house is my heir.

Then behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, This man shall not be your heir, but one will come forth from your own body.

He, he shall be your heir. Then he took him outside and said,

Now look toward the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them. And he said to him,

So shall your descendants be. Then he believed in the

Lord and he reckoned it to him as righteousness and he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the

Chaldeans to give you this land to possess it. So the word of the

Lord came to Abram in many ways, and this one was a vision. We have

Abram, obviously, he's been used of God already. He's seen God do mighty things.

He's already received promises from the Lord, and yet here's a man who is afraid. God comes to him and says,

Do not fear. Why? Because he was afraid. The anxieties and the fears of Abram are revealed here.

He's living in a land that he does not own. He's a nomad. He's wandering around. God has proven himself to him, but still he does not own one square foot of or one square cubit of that land.

He will later on purchase a bit of land from Ephron the

Hittite, but it was a sorrowful purchase for it was a burial plot. For now, he doesn't own anything.

And not only that, his name is Abram, father of a people. That's what it means.

And he has no physical descendant. Eliezer of Damascus is apparently some servant in his household, one who was born in his house, and that's his legal heir.

Obviously, he had drawn up his trust and his power of attorney, and Eliezer was on the documents in their own way.

So he says, What are you going to give me, Lord? Do not fear. You're going to be a shield to me.

You talk over reward, but what's the point? I have no heir. I have no descendant.

In this moment, he must be feeling like Solomon would feel much later on in the book of Ecclesiastes. This feels vanity, vanity.

This is just empty. What does this mean? But God clarifies, reaffirms the promise, and says,

No, Eliezer will not be your heir, one coming from your own body, from your own from your own person.

You will have a son. He will be your heir. So that's a very specific promise, and one that Abraham believed.

Abraham believed that. It was affirmed to him later on, even though he would go through a detour.

But eventually, Isaac would be born, and he would be clarified as this heir, as this seed, literally.

And then the Lord took him outside. And now, okay, get back up.

Verse 1, it says, The word of the Lord came to Abraham. And by the time we get to verse 5, capital

H, He took him outside. The word of the

Lord, He came to Abraham, and He took him outside to look at the stars.

So who is this? This is Christ. Right? This is the second person of the

Godhead coming to reveal God to Abram. No one has seen

God at any time, but the only begotten God in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him, John tells us. So this is

God the Son. He has come as the Word, the eternal Word of God. He has come to speak with Abram, and He leads him outside, and says,

Now look toward the heavens and count the stars. I like this part, if you are able to count them.

I mean, when God tells you to count the stars, you say, Yes, sir, and you get busy.

To clarify, no, Abram, I know you really can't. The point is, you can't count them all, right?

Now look toward the heavens and count the stars, if you're able to count them. And He said to him, So shall your descendants be.

But literally, so shall your seed be. We come back to this key term in Genesis, seed.

Of course, we pick it up, we hear about it in Genesis 1, in simple language of the creation, each plant producing after its own seed, after its own kind.

But then we come to the promise in Genesis 3 .15 of the seed of the woman who will defeat the serpent.

And our attention is then again and again redirected to the seed. Who is the seed?

And sometimes the seed is spoken about in a plural sense, sometimes the seed is spoken about in the singular sense.

But time and again, our attention is on this key term. Now here,

Abram must look at the stars, you can't count them all, but so shall your seed be. Then he believed in the

Lord and he reckoned it to him as righteousness. And that verse particularly pops up three times in Romans 4.

So we'll go there in a moment. And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess it, to inherit it.

So what was accounted to Abraham as righteousness? Faith.

How are we to understand Abram as a righteous man, this man who was a pagan, idol -worshipping, false god -worshipping man from the land of Ur, probably worshiped the moon god, and was taken out of there and brought to land of Canaan.

As soon as God promises it to him, he leaves to go down to Egypt because there was a famine. Lies about his wife and gets into all sorts of trouble down there.

Comes back up out of that land and still just wandering around, has to go rescue his foolish nephew

Lot. And later on, we're going to see him make some serious, serious mistakes that the world still feels today.

But this man, why is he righteous? By faith.

Righteousness is accounted to Abram by faith.

Very good news. We pick up in Romans 4.

So if you go to Romans 4, we'll find that verse, I believe verse 5 was quoted once and verse 6 is quoted three times.

And the whole passage there in Genesis 15 is alluded to again and again in Romans 4.

Paul has just made a very important assertion in Romans 3.

Having dealt with the full weight of the law and the full despair of the human condition in Adam, having said that all the world is guilty before God, the law shuts all of our mouths, we have no excuse.

Everybody is without excuse. Nobody can stand before God and say, yeah, but it's all done.

No excuses left for the human race. Nobody, all guilty. Then he says in verse 21 of Romans 3, but now, but now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been manifested, having been witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith, through faith in Jesus Christ.

Righteousness on the account of faith, on account of obedience to the law or any other kind of measure, it's by faith in Jesus Christ.

Paul goes on to say in Romans 3 that this was to demonstrate the righteousness of God in forgiving and passing over the sins of those who were before Christ and those who are after Christ.

No longer, no matter if someone was looking forward to the cross or looking back at the cross, our sins are forgiven by our faith in Jesus Christ.

And this demonstrates God's goodness and his righteousness. And there's a great question then about, well, what, you know, this doesn't seem fair.

We should be following the law. Well, for the

Jews' sake and for the sake of consistency and harmony throughout the scriptures, Paul then dives into this question in chapter 4.

It says, what then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, according to the flesh has found?

And so he's speaking as a Jew. Dealing with the Jewish objection to what he just wrote in Romans 3 about righteousness coming through faith.

And if you're going to convince a Jew of something, then you go look at Abraham. Now let's go look at how it worked with Abraham since we are his descendants.

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. But what does the scripture say?

Here's the quote from Genesis 15. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Not to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness.

In other words, the one who works and tries to work for the favor of God will get what he deserves and that's the wrath of God.

Paul already made that point in Galatians about the issue of circumcision. Essentially saying in that letter that if you poke a hole in the dam of the law to let the stream of circumcision through into your gospel message, that little hole is going to burst open and the whole law is coming through and you will live and die by how well you perform in the law.

And so you can't let any of that through. It has to be fulfilled in Christ. Here he's saying the one who does not work, but believes in him who believes in God, who does what?

Who justifies the ungodly? Wow. That is an amazing, amazing thought.

God justifies, declares as righteous, accepts to his own self the ungodly.

Those who believe in this God, this God who saves his faith, this person's faith is credited as righteousness.

Meaning righteousness is accounted to him, imputed to him because of faith. Just as David also speaks of the blessing on the man to whom

God credits righteousness apart from works. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds have been forgiven and whose sins have been covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the

Lord will not take into account. So Paul says to the Jewish objector about this apparent disparagement of the law.

No, no, no, no, no, no. He quotes Abraham and he quotes David. So there.

Okay. There should be no more Jewish objection to this. If Abraham and David are saved in this way, why is it a surprise that we're saved in this way as well?

And so in verse nine, is this blessing then on the circumcised or on the uncircumcised also?

When you think of the book of Romans, there are certain ways you may sum up the book of Romans.

Maybe you would say the summary of the Romans is justification by faith alone. It's a good, good way to summarize

Romans. Here's another way to sum up Romans. Missions. Missions.

In the opening first chapter, Paul says, I'm a debtor to all kinds of people everywhere.

I got to preach the gospel to everybody. Boy, I hope I get to come to you too. I want to preach the gospel everywhere because it's the

Jew first and also to the Gentile. And then belabors the point throughout the letter, how it's not just the

Jews that get saved by a Jewish Messiah, but all the Gentiles too. And it was always designed to be that way.

Pointing at Abraham. See, the faith was accounted to Abraham as righteousness, not while he was circumcised, not while he was abiding by this facet of the law, by this facet of a conditional covenant.

But while he was uncircumcised, he received the sign of circumcision in verse 11 as a seal of the righteousness of the faith, which he had while uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all who believe without being circumcised and the father of circumcision to those who are of the same faith as Abraham.

So, okay, he's the father of all who by faith are justified, declared right in the sight of God.

No wonder God said, so shall your descendants be. Look up into the stars, count them if you can.

And he couldn't. There were too many to count. More descendants than he could count. God had already promised him more land than he could ever see.

And he also promises him more descendants than he could ever count. And as far as the descendants go, they're not just Jews and they're not just Gentiles.

They're the Gentiles and the Jews who all turned to God in faith to be saved by Christ.

I was thinking a little bit about this as well. As I go back to chapter three, it says that the righteousness of God that was manifested in verse 22 was through faith in Jesus Christ.

So let's go back to Genesis 15 and let's think about Abraham's faith.

Who did Abraham, or at this point Abram, who did Abram believe in?

In Genesis 15, one through seven. Believed in the

Lord God, right? Yeah. What did he believe?

God gave him a promise and he believed it. What was the promise? He would have an heir.

He would have a seed. Abraham believed this promise about the seed and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.

So who did he believe in? Did he believe in Isaac to be justified? Abram may have lived a long time ago and he may have made some big time mistakes, but I have a sneaking suspicion he was wiser than us all.

If you go to Galatians, we go to Galatians chapter three, and once again,

Genesis 15 -6 is quoted yet again.

Even so, Abraham believed God, Galatians 3 -6, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

Okay, so now get ready for some explanation about what that meant in Genesis 3 -6. Therefore, be sure it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham and descendants of Abraham, right?

The scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles, justify the nations by faith, the scripture preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, all the nations will be blessed in you.

That comes even from chapter 12 when God was first dealing with Abraham. So then it was those who are of faith who are blessed with Abraham, the believer.

You see, the gospel was preached to Abraham. The gospel was given to Abraham in chapter 12 and in chapter 15, we find him believing it and so being justified by faith.

And then you go down just a little bit in verse 16, the promises.

Now, there are a lot of promises given to Abraham, wasn't there? A lot of promises given to Abraham by God. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed.

He does not say into seeds as referring to many, but rather to one and to your seed, that is

Christ. God gives the promise to Abraham in Genesis 15 about the seed who is

Christ. Abraham believes and is justified by faith, saved the same way we are saved by faith in Jesus Christ.

I, we stress that because it does wonders for us to read the scriptures in harmony.

We don't have a, we don't have a bipolar God who did things on way in the Old Testament and then totally switched it up and had a plan

B in the New Testament. The stress in the scriptures is that we have this one

God, this good God, a God of grace and mercy who has put forth his son time and time again to call us to salvation through faith.

So I hope that's helpful. If you want even more clarity that Abraham was looking, he had been promised descendants more than he could count, more land than he could ever see.

But what was he really looking for? Hebrews 11 says he was looking for a city whose architect and builder was

God. Not looking for the tangible temporal right in front of him.

He was, he was looking beyond it. He was a man of faith. And Jesus himself said,

Abraham rejoice to see my day. So I hope that's encouraging to you as you look at the gospel preached to Abraham there in chapter 15.

There's a whole lot more, but hey, we're out of time. So we'll come, we'll come back to this passage because there's even more there that's worth talking about.