Abraham

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Psalm 105:1-3 (Opening) 1 Oh give thanks to the Lord; call upon his name; make known his deeds among the peoples! 2  Sing to him, sing praises to him; tell of all his wondrous works! 3  Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice! Introduction Not everyone lives in a city or a town, or even in a house. There are a large number of people in this world who don’t have a fixed address; they move from place to place for different reasons. They’re called nomads. People are nomadic for different reasons. Sometimes it’s the only way they can make money to survive; traveling from job to job, doing what they know how to do, or whatever work they can get, like migrant farm workers. Some, it’s their cultural lifestyle, like the Romani or Gypsies. Some, like the Bedouin of the middle east, are called nomadic pastoralists. They travel from place to place with their herds or flocks, looking for land to graze their animals. Anthropologists believe pastoral nomadism started in the fertile crescent, the area of the Middle East from the Nile river, east and north along the coast of the Mediterranean, and east to the Tigris river, down to the Persian Gulf. The area where most of what we read in the Bible happens. They believe that around 6500 BC, herders began moving from place to place in the Middle East, moving their flocks and herds to wherever the good pasture lands were, surviving off the local plants and whatever their flocks and herds produced; meat and milk for food, and fibers and leather for clothing. Twenty years ago, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, estimated there were between 30 and 40 million nomads in the world. I don’t know if that number has increased or decreased over the past 20 years, but I imagine coming up with that estimate was like counting chickens. Without a fixed address, it’s hard to come up with a good count of how many nomadic people are driving herds around in different places around the world. If that number is still accurate, that’s around one half of one percent of the worlds population, so one out of every two hundred people is a pastoral nomad. Honestly, that number is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. Starting Out The history of pastoral nomads is important to us, because the important people of the Bible, the Jews, started out as pastoral nomads. Abraham, or Abram when he started out, lived in a city. Abram lived in Ur with his father Terah and his brothers Nahor and Haran. When Haran died in Ur, Abram took responsibility for Lot, Haran’s son, Abram’s nephew. Terah decided to move to Canaan, and his son Abram and grandson Lot went with him, along with Abram’s wife Sarai. They didn’t make it to Canaan, though, and settled down in Haran. Haran was another city. Archeologists believe Haran was located near the current border between southern Turkey and Syria. It would have been the easiest travel route from Ur to Canaan, following the Euphrates river toward the mountains of Turkey, and then turning south toward Canaan. Abram’s father Terah died there in Haran when he was 205 years old. He never made it to Canaan. Not long after that, Abram’s lifestyle changed. He was about to go from being a city person to being a pastoral nomad. Genesis 12:1-2 1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. Abram was 75 years old when God sent him away from Haran toward Canaan. We don’t know how long he lived in Haran, and how long he lived in Ur before that. All we know is that when he was 75, God made him a nomad with all his flocks and herds and sent him toward Canaan. Once he arrived in Canaan, Abram continued south to Shechem, which is about 25 miles or so north of Jerusalem. Abram and Lot both had flocks and herds, and also they had people who helped them tend their animals. There was a large group of them traveling south through Canaan and stopping at Shechem. They probably stopped here because there was good pasture land nearby. Genesis 12:7-9 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved to the hill country 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. 9 And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb. Bethel and Ai were about half way between Shechem and Jerusalem. Again, there was probably good pasture here. We don’t know how long they stayed in the area around Bethel. They stayed there for a while because Abram built an altar there. Bethel is an important place in the Bible. The name means house of El, or house of God. El was the name of the head god of the Canaanite gods, but is also a name used for Yahweh. Bethel is where Jacob saw the stairway to heaven with the angels going up and down on it. Once the Israelites came to take their inheritance in the land of Canaan, the tabernacle was permanently located at Bethel until the Ark was captured by the Philistines. Like I said, there’s a lot of history around this one place. But Abram didn’t stay there. He continued south. The Negeb is the area between Jerusalem and Egypt, west of the Dead Sea. It is flat, and is a desert, now, but it may have been lush grasslands four thousand years ago when Abram went there. Into Egypt But he didn’t stay there long. We don’t know how long he stayed there in the Negeb, but because of weather difficulties, he was forced to continue south. Genesis 12:10 10 Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. Maybe all the famines we read about in Genesis caused the Negeb to become the desert it is now. Maybe it took more than that. But because of the famine, probably caused by a drought, Abram took his family further south toward Egypt. Archeologists have discovered several forts or outposts on the northern boarders of Egypt. These outposts were located along the roads traveled by the trading caravans in and out of Egypt. They were manned by small groups from the Egyptian army and acted like our boarder crossings with Canada and Mexico. Anyone traveling toward Egypt on those roads were stopped and questioned, and the commander of the outpost would determine if they would be allowed to enter Egypt or would be turned away. Of course, just like the lock on the door to your house, this would only keep the honest people out of Egypt, but we’re still doing it today. The boarder outpost commander must have thought Abram had something that would be beneficial for Egypt, so they let him and everyone with him into Egypt. It’s possible the beneficial aspect of Abram coming into Egypt was his wife Sarai, who he had told to tell everyone she was his sister. Genesis 12:15-16 15 And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. 16 And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels. Maybe the princes of Pharaoh were commanders at the boarder outposts. Maybe the commanders sent someone to escort Abram and his “sister” to the princes of Pharaoh. However it happened, Pharaoh was nice to Abram in exchange for taking Sarai into Pharaoh’s household as one of his wives. Probably not the best way to gain entry into a country, and this won’t be the only time Abram does this. He does it again to get in good with the king of Gerar, a city in the Negeb. Abram’s son Isaac does the exact same thing later on with the king of the Philistines. We don’t know how long Abram lived in Egypt, or how long it took for Pharaoh to learn the true relationship between Abram and Sarai. Genesis 12:17-20 17 But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. 18 So Pharaoh called Abram and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? 19 Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her, and go.” 20 And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had. Oops. I guess that’s one way to get deported. Hopefully for Abram’s sake, the famine was over and there was suitable pasture land for their flocks back in Canaan. Settled So far, Abram and his group have probably traveled around a thousand miles, looking for good seasonal pasture land and avoiding famine-ravaged areas. We don’t know how many years it was from when Abram left Haran to when he came back to Bethel and Ai, but during that time, the flocks of both Abram and Lot grew to the point that they couldn’t live near each other for fear of overgrazing the area, so they decided to split up. Genesis 13:12 12 Abram settled in the land of Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the valley and moved his tent as far as Sodom. Bethel and Ai were about even with the north end of the Dead Sea. Many archeologists and scholars believe that Sodom was at the south end of the Dead Sea, about 70 miles away. Definitely enough room for the flocks to not interfere with each other. Maybe Lot was missing the city life they left behind in Haran all those years ago. It says that Abram settled. The Hebrew word here doesn’t imply owning the land he settled on, just that this was where he stayed for a while. Abram spent a lot of time near Bethel, and God spoke to him often while he was there. Genesis 13:14-18 14 The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, 15 for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. 16 I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. 17 Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.” 18 So Abram moved his tent and came and settled by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron, and there he built an altar to the Lord. Bethel is about in the middle of the area of land God promised to give to Abram as an inheritance. He probably couldn’t see the entire area from there at Bethel, but he could get a good feel for what God was going to give him and his children. He had walked a good portion of the land already, grazing his flocks as he went. God explained that He would eventually give Abram and his descendants all the land he could see from Bethel as a permanent inheritance. It would always be theirs. But God pointed out that it was in the future, not at the time He was speaking to Abram. When God told him to walk the length of the land, Abram headed south, but didn’t go far. He went about 40 miles or so south toward the Negeb and stopped at what is now Hebron. The Canaanites had a different name for it. They called it Kiriath-arba. Abram built another altar in Hebron. When he builds an altar, he seems to stay there for a while. While Abram was staying at Hebron, Sarai decided to take God’s promise of giving them a son into her own hands, and gave Abram her servant Hagar, and she gave Abram a son that he named Ishmael. Ishmael was born when Abram was 86, or eleven years after they had left Haran. Then the story jumps thirteen years. Abram is still in Hebron, or still using it as a home base for moving his flocks around in the Negeb. God speaks to Abram and renames him Abraham. Then God reiterates His promise about the inheritance. Genesis 17:8 8 And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.” After this promise, God tells Abraham his end of the covenant: all males eight days old and older must be circumcised. And God also tells Abraham that his wife, Sarai, has a new name, Sarah, and at the age of 99 will have a child, appropriately named “She Laughs” or Isaac. There are a lot more adventures that Abraham goes through during his time in Hebron. He defends the possibility that righteous people may live in Sodom, and that God should spare the city if there were even just five righteous people living there. Unfortunately for the city, the only people we know were living there who may by some stretch of the imagination have been considered righteous, were Lot, his wife and two daughters, but all of them had major problems. Abraham fights in a war to rescue Lot and his daughters from captivity. He travels into the Negeb further and calls Sarah his sister again, causing more problems with another king. Sarah has a son, Isaac. God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and provides a ram as a substitute for Isaac just in time. At the beginning of chapter 23, Abraham, his family and flocks had been in Canaan for over 50 years. They had spent the majority of their time using Hebron as their home base, the place they would come back to when they returned from grazing their flocks. Genesis 23:1-4 1 Sarah lived 127 years; these were the years of the life of Sarah.2 And Sarah died at Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. 3 And Abraham rose up from before his dead and said to the Hittites, 4 “I am a sojourner and foreigner among you; give me property among you for a burying place, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.” Abraham makes a deal with the local clans for a plot of land in a field that included a cave. That cave was where he would bury Sarah. Almost 50 years later, Isaac and Ishmael would bury Abraham there. Isaac, Rebecca, and Jacob would also be buried in the same cave. This plot of land became the initial part of the land in Canaan that was owned by Abraham and his descendants. When he was making the deal with the Hittites, Abraham called himself a “sojourner and foreigner” among them. He had lived in Canaan for 50 years, but he was not a Canaanite. He would always be from Haran. Abraham sent his chief servant back to Haran to find a wife for Isaac rather than have him marry a Canaanite woman. Isaac did the same thing with Jacob, sending him to the area around Haran to his brother-in-law’s house to get a wife. They didn’t assimilate into the Canaanite culture; they were always different. They worshiped one God, and not the many Canaanite gods. We should be like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this way. We live in the world, but we shouldn’t assimilate into the culture that is around us; we should be influencing the culture around us to be more like Jesus. Peter used the same Greek phrase that is used in the Septuagint or Greek translation of the Old Testament here in Genesis 23 when he encouraged Christians in his first letter. 1 Peter 2:11 11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Don’t go native. Don’t become like the people around you. Remember how a Christian is supposed to live and live that way, not the way the people around you who aren’t Christians live. Remember your homeland. Peter says we are a holy nation, God’s people. If we are God’s people, than we belong to Him, and we belong with Him, where He is; in heaven. Conclusion We sing hymns with words like “This world is not my home, I’m just a’passin’ through”, and “Here we are but straying pilgrims”. Do you really believe what you’re saying? Are you a citizen of heaven, or do you just hope to have a visa for there? Where do your loyalties lie? Abraham, even though he lived for almost 100 years in Canaan, was not a Canaanite. He didn’t assimilate into the culture around him. He was from Haran, and his son and grandson went back to Haran to get their wives so as not to have any local influences on their lives that could pull them away from God and pull them into the local culture of sin. During our journey here on earth, we start out as citizens of the earth, but have the opportunity to change our loyalties, renounce our earthly citizenship and become true citizens of heaven, even though we don’t have the opportunity to chose when we move there. Satan runs things here; he’s not God, but he thinks he is. He thinks he should control everything. But because Jesus sacrificed Himself for our sins, we have an escape from Satan’s control. We can renounce our earthly citizenship and become citizens of heaven. Honestly, that’s when the real battle begins; when we change sides. As long as Satan thinks he has us, he’s going to leave us alone. He’s content to leave us however we are, doing well, or not. But as soon as you are immersed into Christ, suddenly you’ve changed sides. You make yourself an enemy of the state, if you will. Satan knows you’ve switched sides, and he’s going to do everything in his power to get you back to his side. He can make life a living hell for you. But it’s worth it, because if we persevere, we will go home to our new homeland, heaven, and spend eternity with God and Christ. I think that would be better than any alternative. Philippians 3:20-21 (Closing) 20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
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