Sermon Tone Analysis

*Intro*

Have you ever watched something on television, whether a ball game, a show or film and right when there is that most important play, or dramatic announcement or revelation, the frame freezes or the DVD’s scratched?

You see it more now because everything is streamed.

It looks like someone pressed the pause button and refuses to press play.

I have no patience with that kind of stuff.

I want to reboot everything immediately or call the cable company.

Sometimes we may even want to throw something at the television.

If it’s a ball game, you feel like everyone else has gone ahead of you and you are the only one in all of the world stuck in this twilight zone of death of not knowing the outcome.

Obviously, this is a “first world” problem, but have you ever felt like your life was stuck on pause?

God has called you to Himself.

You believed in Christ for your salvation and everything was going along nicely and then all of a sudden, boom!

Everything comes to this sudden halt, as if someone pressed the pause button for your life.

Now there you are, biting your nails, getting angry at times, impatient, wanting to throw something at somebody or somewhere and then feeling like everyone else has everything working right on their end and you are the only one stuck on pause.

How do you feel when there is a huge difference between what you felt like God has promised and what you actually see in front of you?

What do you do when the vision you once had of the way your life was supposed to turn out or work out crumbles before you like dust?

For some people, it is a sudden and unexpected unemployment, where prospects of a new job seem unlikely.

Or it might be some news of health problems.

For others, it is waiting to find that spouse or have that child or it might be that you are simply waiting for a particular season of waiting to end.

As a result, we feel “stuck,” and sometimes hopeless, despairing at times, wondering if someone can please press the “play” button again.

Sometimes in this gap, we are tempted to despair and give up.

Other times we are tempted to take shortcuts, taking matters into our own hands.

All of these circumstances often put our hearts into a tailspin as we ponder, what one author calls, how to live in the “reality gap between what God has promised and the circumstances in which you find yourself.”[1]

If that is you today, welcome to the story of Abraham.

Genesis 1-11 was about the history of the world and now we will be in the second half of the book, Genesis 12-50, which will be about the history of Israel, starting with Abraham.

One-fourth of the book of Genesis is devoted to Abraham’s life (Gen 11:27-25:18).

Abraham’s name occurs 234 times in the Old Testament and 74 times in the New Testament.

He is definitely a key figure in the Bible.

Lord willing, we will be studying his life for the next few weeks.

His whole life was about promises and faith, being constantly tested in and often failing in believing God.

He had to learn to live in the gap between God’s promises and the reality of them.

What kept him going?

Remember again that Moses is writing to the children of Israel who are also living in the gap.

God had promised them a land.

Their unbelief got them in trouble so they ended up wandering for 40 years.

As Moses is writing this, the people of Israel are on the Plains of Moab about to enter the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land.

Now what will keep them motivated and not give up?

What is Moses reminding them by sharing this story?

And again, we are not simply learning to be like Abraham, but going with these messages in Genesis, back to the Gospel, the only true power for our lives to change.

We have been looking at how the Gospel of grace invades and intersects every area of our lives and so we will look at the true and better Abraham, Jesus Christ.

Jesus entered our reality gap, into our darkness, having God’s promises with Him, but nevertheless, having to suffer before entering glory.

So we will, with the Lord’s enablement, look through this story, a new beginning, through the lens of the gospel of grace.

So why is Moses writing this?

I believe Moses here is motivating the people of God to see that what will keep them going and thriving in the gap is /obeying and embracing the call of God, which is backed up by the promises of God to bring the kingdom of God on the earth for the glory of God/.

That is a mouthful, but we are going to try to unpack that today and next time.

I want to talk about the call of God.

You are not a Christian until you have embraced His call to Himself.

This was true for them and guess what?

This is true for us as well!

So let’s start with this:

*I.

**God’s call breaks into our hopelessness and impossibilities (Gen.

11:27-30)*

In the beginning God created the earth as His Kingdom where He would be worshipped and served as the Great King.[2] Mankind did not like that.

Making alliance with Satan, who came as a serpent, we chose to rebel against that plan since we wanted to be our own kings.

God promised that there will be an epic battle between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman (Gen.

3:15).

We have seen that time and time again, the seed of the serpent would rise up, but each time, the seed of the woman prevailed.

Cain and Abel die, God raises up Seth (Gen.

4).

God judges the seed of the serpent in the Flood and preserves Noah, the seed of the woman (Gen.

5-9).

Ham’s descendants go the way of the seed of the serpent by building a huge tower to themselves (Gen.

11), and again God judged the seed of the serpent, as we saw last week.

Now what will God do?

It looks like the seed of the woman has died and is gone.

Will God abandon His plan of establish His Kingdom on the earth?

Absolutely not! /No amount of our stupidity and rebellion will thwart the sovereign plans of God/.

The seed of the woman will prevail and we have learned it will come through the line of Shem (Gen.

9:26-27).

So we see that 10 generations from Noah will come someone named Abram.

For all practical purposes, I will call him Abraham from now on.

Abram simply means “exalted father” and God will name him later “Abraham” which means “father of a multitude.”

One means “Daddy,” and the other means “Big Daddy.”

I am also going to call “Sarai” Sarah.

I hope you don’t mind me doing that.

Look over at Gen. 11:10-32.

We learn a few things already.

Notice how much younger people are having children and people’s lifespans are getting shorter.

Abraham’s grandfather, Nahor in Gen. 11:24 at the age of 29 is the youngest to be a parent.

Things are a lot different from how it used to be.

This will be significant because Abraham and Sarah are much older and childless (75 and 65 respectively).

Notice the author making mention of Sarah’s barrenness twice in Gen. 11:30.

No child means that Abraham’s family is going to end right here.

Sarah lived in a society where a woman’s value was measured by her fertility.[3]

Moreover, Sarai’s barrenness would have potentially resulted in a fragile marriage (since failure to deliver children to the family was the most common cause of divorce.)[4]

She must have shed many bitter tears over her infertility.

Commentator Walter Brueggemann adds, “This family…has played out its future and has nowhere else to go.

Barrenness...is an effective metaphor for hopelessness.

There is no foreseeable future.

There is no human power to invent a future.”[5]Paul

says that Abraham looked at his body and thought that it was “good as dead” (Rom.

4:19).

In other words, 2 2=4.

I know dead when I see it.

It’s dead!

Can’t squeeze any more life out of this thing!

Right away, we see irreparable hopelessness.

It is impossible.

This is a dead end.

Look at all the people in the line.

Their ancestors have all had kids at much earlier ages and looks like it’s over for me.

Secondly, notice they are from the Ur of the Chaldeans.

This is an ancient city 125 miles from Babylon, which is present-day Iraq.

Connect the dots.

Babylonia is associated with Babel, where we learned last week about mankind wanting a name for themselves, sticking together in self-preservation and rebelling against God’s mandate to fill the earth (Gen.

1:28; 9:1).

God’s judgment came down in this area.