Passing on the Promise
Notes
Transcript
Open your Bibles to Genesis 24.
I told you last week that we were working a little backwards in the way I was handling the text because we skipped over this chapter and looked at the end of Abraham’s life last week.
Our time through Genesis has centered around how God was showing his faithfulness to the promises he made to Abraham over the years.
We saw how God has promised to make him the father of many nations and bless the whole world through his offspring.
As we saw last week, these promises are going to take more than Abraham and Sarah’s lifetimes to fulfill.
That’s what this chapter is telling us—How was God passing the promise on to the next generation?
We know who the next patriarch will be because God has already said it multiple times. Isaac is going to be the one whose family will carry promise God made to Abraham.
What we haven’t found out yet is who is the woman that God is going to use to fill Sarah’s shoes in this next generation? Who is the woman that will be Isaac’s wife and bear the children who will carry the promise on?
This chapter, which is the longest chapter in Genesis, is going to answer that question.
The events take place in multiple places with multiple people, but the emphasis through the entire passage is that God is working to pass the promise on to the next generation.
As we focus on the actions of three main characters in this story, we are going to see what some see as a tension but I am trying to see more and more is a beautiful reality.
Each character in this account takes active steps of obedience. At the same time, it is crystal clear that the primary mover in this story is God as he is working through their obedience to pass on his promise.
As we think about our lives in light of what God does here, we will see that God works out his plan through our obedience.
Let’s see what some of our responsibilities are as we follow what God is doing.
Starting with Abraham, we see that we are responsible to...
1) Pass on what God has done.
1) Pass on what God has done.
Let’s look at verses 1-9 together.
We are going to focus on Abraham here because we will talk more about the servant in a minute.
Abraham instructs the servant to go back to his family and find a wife for his son Isaac.
Remember, God had not yet prohibited marrying a close relative at this point—that comes later when God gives the law through Moses.
The servant asks a few clarifying questions, and Abraham’s answers make one thing crystal clear: God is going to work, and you cannot let Isaac leave to go back there. He also cannot marry one of the Canaanite women.
Why? The text doesn’t tell us, but we can make an educated guess.
The person you marry is one of the single most important decisions you will make in life.
That person will either support you growing closer to God or they will pull you away.
Abraham knew God had called them to this land and to follow him and him alone. He was ensuring that Isaac would not be tempted to leave the land and, more importantly, the God they served.
We know God blessed Abraham materially, but he spared no expense in making sure his son had a wife that wouldn’t draw him away.
He risked his chief servant by sending him on a journey that would take him hundreds of miles away.
We will see in a minute that the servant loaded up ten camels and an unknown number of goods and gifts to give the woman who would become Isaac’s bride.
By investing in finding Isaac a wife, Abraham is modeling for us a very crucial pattern: He went to great lengths to pass his faith on to his son.
While we don’t necessarily arrange marriages any more, we have a responsibility with our children and grandchildren to make sure they see and know what God has done in us and how he can work in and through them.
God would command the Israelites to do this later:
These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart.
Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.
As parents and grandparents, we acknowledge our limitations. We cannot force our children to follow Jesus; only God can save them.
However, we can create an environment that makes it easy for them to believe.
We can teach them, we can model for them, and we can include them in what God is doing.
While our children and student ministries are doing what they can to help reinforce what you are doing at home, you and I are the ones primarily responsible for teaching our kids.
Even for those who are not parents, we still have a responsibility to pass on what God has done to those who are coming behind us:
The Lord is great and is highly praised; his greatness is unsearchable.
One generation will declare your works to the next and will proclaim your mighty acts.
Can I make a challenge to our older adults today?
You have lived through a lot of life already and have a tremendous amount you can pass on to those who are coming behind you.
I could keep you for hours telling you story after story of what God has taught me through older adults I have known through the years.
The news is telling you all kinds of things about “kids these days,” and I have heard several people express despair about Gen Z and the direction they are headed.
Instead of wringing your hands and telling them to get off your lawn, why not invest in the lives of those younger than you?
Not everyone is interested, but look around the room to the people you think are younger than thirty, and see if you can take some of them to lunch.
Find the young couple living near you and take them something homemade or invite them over for dinner. They may say no, and they may think your weird, or they may welcome the opportunity!
Find out what life is actually like for them as individuals, and see how God would allow you to pass on what he has done in your life to them. You might be surprised.
Abraham went to great lengths to pass on what God had done and make it as easy as possible for Isaac to follow the God who had made such great promises.
We must do the same.
In addition, like the Abraham’s servant, we have a calling to...
2) Live out what God is doing.
2) Live out what God is doing.
While we fulfill all three of these roles at different times, this one is honestly where we find ourselves most often as we follow Jesus.
We have seen plenty of flaws in Abraham, but c’mon—he is still Abraham. He is a really important guy and God worked through him in some incredibly big ways.
What about this guy?
Read how he is described in verse 2—he is the chief servant who is in charge of everything Abraham owns.
Going off what we read back in 15:2, many commentators think this is Eliezer of Damascus, and it very well may be.
However, the Bible doesn’t tell us that directly here, so we don’t know if Eliezer is even still alive at this point! Anything could have happened.
When God led Moses to write this passage, he chose not to give us his name.
All we know is the servant’s position in Abraham’s household.
By not identifying him, God keeps the focus on Abraham and on God himself.
As the servant is obedient to do what God called him to do through Abraham’s instruction, we see that God’s activity is more important than our identity.
In our sermon planning time this week, some of the other pastors used the phrase, “faithful and forgotten.”
When we think of the heroes of the faith, we think of the big names, and certainly they are great.
However, what we don’t think about is the millions of other believers whose names have been forgotten to history.
People who, like this servant, simply went about life doing what God told them to do.
They were obedient, and God knows and sees and rewards our obedience, but the rest of the world may completely forget them.
We may not know this servant’s name, but what we do remember is his obedience.
Let’s look at some selected verses to catch what is going on.
Pick up in verses 10-14...
God is going to answer the servant’s prayer, but let’s pause for just a second and let me give you a helpful distinction.
Some passages in the Bible a prescriptive. In other words, they are God telling us what to do—prescribing something. The passage we looked at a minute ago in Deuteronomy 6 is that kind of passage.
However, other passages in the Bible are descriptive. They aren’t commanding us to do the same thing a person did; they are simply describing what they did.
I want to caution you that in many ways, this passage is descriptive. We are learning from it and drawing truth from it, but he isn’t setting a hard-and-fast model for us.
In other words, mom and dad, don’t load up the camels and drive to the duck pond at Tech to wait for a young woman to come water the camels and marry your son. Do you see what I am saying?
This is an extraordinary time where God is working in an extraordinary way, and he doesn’t promise that he will always speak through our circumstances like he does here.
We get into trouble when we start saying things like, “Well, I knew God told me to divorce my wife because he wants me to be happy.” While I believe God allows for divorce under specific circumstances, your unhappiness is not one of them, so based off what God has revealed in his word, he didn’t tell you that.
God will never lead you to do something that contradicts what he has said in the Bible.
With that said, however, let me muddy the waters even more!
The reality is that God is sovereign over our circumstances and does respond to prayer and lead us by his Holy Spirit in ways that are hard to explain.
There may be times where God works in extraordinary ways to do extraordinary things in and through and around you.
Unfortunately, I can’t always give you a hard-and-fast answer about when God may or may not be guiding you in a direction.
I will say this, though: Look at the way the servant prays again.
There is one thing that stands out: His focus over and over again is not on himself.
As we are seeking God’s face, if our primary motives are selfish, we may very well misread what God is indicating.
That’s where it is essential for us to spend time in God’s Word, spend time in prayer, and seek out godly counsel from friends we know love Jesus and love us enough to tell us the truth.
The servant, however, is certain he is seeking out God’s will on behalf of the good of his master, and God comes through.
Pick back up in verse 15...
The servant approached her and asked for a drink of water from her jar, and Rebekah gave him the water he asked for and voluntarily watered the camels as well.
I love the not in verse 21… He watched her to see if God had given him success.
God truly had—she did exactly what the servant had prayed for.
The servant gives her a gift and then finds out what we already knew: she is from the same family as Abraham.
Again, look at the servant’s response in verse 26-27 — He recognized God’s goodness to Abraham and God’s guidance for himself.
Let’s summarize what happens next:
Rebekah runs back to her house and tells them what happened.
Her brother Laban, who we’ll talk about more in a few weeks, comes back to get Abraham’s servant.
The servant recounts all why he was there and all God had done to that point.
Pick up in verse 49-51...
The servant asks if the family is willing to let her go, and her brother, Laban, and father, Bethuel, recognize God’s hand in it all and give permission for Rebekah to marry Isaac.
The servant’s mission is almost complete, so let’s pause and reflect for a bit.
In many ways, we are like this servant.
Most of us are not physical descendants of Abraham, so in a sense, this promise isn’t directly for us.
However, like that servant, we have the privilege of sharing in the blessings of the promise God made to Abraham.
As we have said throughout the series, these promises find their greatest fulfillment in Abraham’s greatest descendant.
He isn’t just going to rule over a piece of land; he is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords who rules over all heaven and earth.
His is the kingdom and the power and the glory; we are simply his servants whose names history may never remember.
We are stewards of the promise that God would bless the world through Abraham’s offspring.
Like this servant, our master is not physically present, so we are his ambassadors:
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.”
He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
The servant came to Rebekah and offered her a part in what God was doing in Abraham’s line if she would follow him; we come to those around us as representatives of Christ pleading on his behalf for people to be reconciled to God.
Generations after Rebekah and Isaac had their sons, Jesus would be born to this family line.
While all of us have tried to live life on our terms and do things our way, we have pushed God away and are spiritually dead!
Jesus came to take our sin--all the wrong we have thought and done—he took that upon himself and paid the price so we could be reconciled to God.
Our job is not to make a name for ourselves but rather to trust the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and point people to the him so they can receive his forgiveness and be reconciled to God.
Our role is to allow him to guide our lives and put us in places where he has to come through if we will succeed, not for us but for his glory.
Are you willing to be that kind of servant?
If we are going to follow God as he works around us, we also must...
3) Surrender to what God will do.
3) Surrender to what God will do.
We could draw this point from the example of any of the people in this account, but I want to turn our attention to see Rebekah’s reaction here.
Pick up in verse 52-56...
The servant is eager to complete his mission, so he is ready to get back.
His family was not eager to see her leave. From what we know of Laban, maybe he was hoping for more presents if the servant stayed. Hopefully, though, it was that they didn’t want to rush their last few days with her.
Pick up in verse 57-61.
Understanding that their culture was dramatically different than ours, Rebekah’s reaction is still powerful. She met this man a day ago, and now she is leaving behind everything she has known except for a few servants going with them.
In the day that passed, she heard stories about God and saw his goodness through the gifts the servant brought. She heard about Isaac, and believing God was in it, she surrendered to go.
Commenting on this passage, Warren Wiersbe wrote,
“She heard the word about Isaac and believed it. She saw the proof of his greatness, generosity, and wealth and wanted to belong to him for the rest of her life. She had never seen Isaac…, but what she had heard about him convinced her to go to Canaan with the servant.”
[1]
She may not have had much say in the engagement itself, but in this moment, she demonstrated her faith in Isaac, the servant, and God himself.
She got up and went.
When she did, she began in earnest a journey that would put, as Warren Wiersbe puts it, “under the special providential care of God and was now a part of a thrilling plan that would bring salvation to the world.” [2]
Rebekah was going to be the woman who would carry on the line of descendants that would one day lead to Jesus.
She followed, and in verse 67, we see that she became Isaac’s bride.
Are we willing to be like Rebekah?
The question is first for those of us who don’t know Jesus.
You heard us say that we are spiritually dead and need God to save us.
You heard us talk about the fact that Jesus came to become sin for us so we could be reconciled to God.
Like Rebekah, you may not know much more than that.
However, are you willing to surrender to follow Jesus today?
He saves us by his grace, but the call to follow him means we have to leave behind our old way of living like Rebekah did hers.
It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.
If you are saved today, is there something you have sensed God is calling you to do?
If so, what are you waiting for? You may not have all the details, but if God is inviting you to follow him in a new opportunity, to leave behind some kind of sin or step out in faith or whatever, why not surrender this morning?
Endnote:
[1] Wiersbe, Warren W. Be Obedient. “Be” Commentary Series. Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1991.
[2] Ibid.