Genesis 11:26

After Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran.

We read where Terah is the father of Abram. I said last week that Chapter 12 is one of the most important chapters in the Bible, if not the most important. It tells you some promises that God is making that are carried out through the rest of the Bible. That's what I want for you to see this morning.

Genesis 12:1

The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you."

What did God tell him to do? Leave what?

Leave:

• Family
• Country
• People

Genesis 12:2-3

"I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."

God told Abraham to leave all of this and what does He promise?

Promises:

• Great Nation
• Great Name
• Bless You
• Bless those who bless you
• Curse those who curse you
• Bless all peoples on earth
• Land (listed later)

These are all of the promises that God made to Abraham (or "Abram" now).

How many Jews are in the world right now? Zero. How many Israelites are in the world right now? Zero. Is Abraham a Jew? No. Can you picture this now? We think of the Old Testament as the religious book of the Jews, but we haven't gotten to a Jew or Israelite yet. We don't have anyone in Israel right now. Abraham is the father of the Jews and Israel. He is also the father of Islam and the descendants of Arab nations. As a matter of fact, Abraham is the father of three major religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Abraham is a very well known person. All of these religions go back to him as the father.

I want for you to see that the promise "bless all peoples on earth" has Christ in it. I want everyone to see that. It says, "through you, I will bless all nations/peoples on the earth." Does it say, "I will bless all of the Jews on the earth?" No. All the Hebrews or all the Muslims? No. Do you see what it says here? Is anyone excluded from that? No one. God's promise says, "Through you, Abraham, I am going to bless all of the people on the earth." I told you that we're going to see Christ in the Old Testament. To me, this is saying that God knows, right now, the story of the plan of salvation. That story and plan is that He will send His Son to die for mankind (for our sins) and we all might be blessed. Sometimes we just concentrate on the Jews, but it's not just for Jews. It is for all the people and all the nations on the earth. That's a promise that we will want to track and see throughout the Old Testament (as well as all the others).

Genesis 12:4-5

So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.

Before I go much further, I want for you to look at Joshua 24. This tells us about the home life of Abraham. I'm trying to give you some background on Abraham so that you can see how he came to the point where he believed God.

Joshua 24:2

Joshua said to all the people, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: `Long ago your forefathers, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the River and worshiped other gods.

So what does the Bible tell you about Abraham and his upbringing? He came from a paganistic family. Did Abraham worship other gods? Yes, originally he did. I want you to picture this. I want you to see that. Abraham had to find God or God was finding Abraham. Abraham came from a paganistic family and worshipped other gods. That's Abraham's background. I want for you to think about that. It wasn't like Abraham was born and said, "Oh yeah, I'm going to believe in God for the rest of my life." As a child, he did not say, "There is God and only God and I'm going to worship Him." He did not pick up his Sunday School quarterly or his Bible and start reading about God. What did he have? What did Abraham have to discover God?

Let's talk about these other gods for just a minute. What other gods were there? What were some of the most important (to a pagan) gods? Sun god, Moon god, Agriculture god, Fertility god, Baal, etc. They had all of these gods for every aspect of their lives. They asked, "What's the most important thing to me?" "Well, it's for my crops to produce because that's my livelihood." So they created a god for the crops. Then they have a rain god. "I've got to have children." So they have a god for fertility. They create these gods and start making idols that they worship. Then they create religions for these idols. They are not thinking of God, Creator. Abraham grew up with all of these different gods. If you grow up in this kind of society, how do you discover God? God spoke to him. How else could Abraham have found God before He spoke to him? He may have heard of this God, who is the God of everything, among all of these other gods, but he didn't know Him very well.

This is what we do in our lives. In our lives, how do we discover who God really is? Do we take everything that's important in our lives and make them gods among God, Himself? This is what Abraham was doing. What separated Abraham from the others was his relationship to God, Creator. I know that we're going to see that God spoke to him, but even before that, how did Abraham know that God was there? Could it have been that Abraham looked at these gods and said, "They're empty. They're meaningless. They don't provide anything. They're just idols sitting on a shelf." In other words, he started questioning his concept of God-what a god is and who God is. When he did that, God intervened and said, "Here, look at the thunderstorms and lightning. Look at how I take care of things and create things." Abraham started thinking, "Maybe there is just this one God, the Creator, that I heard about from Noah." When that happened, God spoke to Abraham. But even after God spoke to Abraham, does Abraham say, "That's it! I've found God. I can get rid of all of these other gods. I have just this one God and I'm going to obey Him. I know who He is and I know exactly what to do the rest of my life?" No. We're going to see him disobey God even with what we've just read.

Did Abraham obey God when God told him to leave and go? No. He took his nephew. What had God told him to do? Leave your family. "Leave everything and I'm going to take care of you." But, no, for some reason, he took his nephew, Lot. Later on, we're going to find out that that caused a problem. That's disobedience. You may say, "Well, that's not too bad." But it comes down to God showing who He is and saying, "There's a way of living that is based totally on faith and obedience in Me. You can't have faith and obedience in Me and do what you want to do also." It doesn't work that way.

Abraham's life is like yours today. We don't have a Sun god. We've grown up and become more intelligent. We know what the Sun is. But, we might list our job or our 401k. You could put children as a god. Some mothers have their children as gods to them. Woe if anything happens to the children. You can think of your own "most important thing" and ask, "Have I made that a god?" Sports? Money? Anything. Do you see how we could do that just like Abraham? We all can say, "We know that God exists. How can we find out about Him?" That's what we'll read about who Abraham is and what he did.

Question: It looks like Abram didn't leave Ur-he left Haran.

It says in all of the other places in the Bible that Abram left Ur. That seems like a contradiction. I want to show you a book. If any of you ever have doubts or want to address contradictions in the Bible, this is an excellent book-When Critics Ask (by Norman Giesler and Thomas Howe). This question is in here. The book addresses hundreds of questions critics have asked. You can read it and say, "I agree" or "I disagree." But it does handle a lot of difficult topics in the Bible. In Old Testament times, the father really was the patriarch, the leader. So if the family's going to move, it was always put in the father's name-even if it was the son who said, "I'm moving." So, in this case, God told Abram to leave.

His father and family moved with Abram up to Haran. We know that Terah died there and Abram took Lot with him. He's still disobedient. God called Abram out of Ur and they moved up to Haran. In fact, the name "Haran" means, "delay." Abraham stopped there for some reason and spent too much time there. God wanted for him to leave Ur with nothing and go to Canaan.

Here's another thing. I don't know whether you all want to think about this or not. God has His plan for salvation and He wants Christ to be born in Canaan so that all nations will be blessed through Abraham. If Abraham had left everything and gone to Canaan with nothing, I believe that the Bible would have been a lot shorter because God's plan would have been carried out quicker. Because Abraham disobeyed and brought Lot with him, there were struggles in Abraham and Lot's lives. This delayed God's plan. God's plan is perfect, so He says, "I can work with that. I will not take the will away from anyone. If Abraham decides to do that, I will work with it." And He makes His plan so. Because of the disobedience, I don't think it happened as fast as God said it could've happened. But God says, "I can work with it."

Question: Why did God pick Abraham?

Capacity for faith. That's why God picked Abraham. Abraham was someone searching. He wasn't the closed-minded, also-ran, "I'll just do my job every day" man. I think Abram had an inquisitive mind. I think he went outside of what normal people think-considering all possibilities. That introduces faith. That goes for all of us when we accept Christ. We step out and say, "I have a capacity for faith. I don't have to see it to believe it. I can believe it without seeing it." That's the way I see it. Abraham turned out to be a great man, just like God promised. But he was picked because of his capacity for faith-that we all have that God gives us. We choose whether or not to use it.

Genesis 12:6-7

Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.

Here's where the Land comes in. I want for you to see that God's promises are absolutely, positively above and beyond just Jews and Israelites. He says it's for his offspring (Jews and Israelites). Does anybody know why they're called Jews? They settled in Judah and "Jews" was short for "Judah." God promises the Land. I want you to note what land He's going to give them. What we're going to see is that all of these promises have been delivered except for this one: the Land. What is going on over in the Mideast right now? What are they fighting over? Land. This will knock your socks off. Genesis talks about Abraham and the Land and today, they're over there fighting over the Land. It hasn't been delivered yet. We're going to see that throughout the Old Testament. God says, "Go in and take this Land." But they haven't taken it yet.

Question: Why didn't the author write more about the physical appearance of the Lord?

God wants Abraham to give it all up and live by faith in Him. That's what God told him. By faith, move. Get up and leave. The Lord doesn't have to appear to you in a physical form. We're going to talk about that. The Lord appears several times in the Old Testament, and I believe that He is the pre-incarnate Christ. We'll talk about that in just a moment.

If God told you to move, what would it take for you to move? What kinds of questions would come into your mind? You believe in God and there's a voice (it doesn't have to be an appearance) saying, "You need to move. I want for you to go somewhere else." What kinds of questions would come into your mind? What's inside of you? To Abraham, some god was asking him to do this. What would it take? Forsaking all and following. Short of saying that the Lord appears to us, we are given so many miracles and results of the Lord's work. Why doesn't it change us? What would it take today for you to sit down and write a book about the Bible? Even though the Lord physically appeared, the people doubted. What does it take for us today to expound on His presence in our lives? If the Lord appeared to you this afternoon, would you be a changed person? We're human. What would we do if the Lord appeared to us? We would doubt. Abraham acted on faith.

The Holy Spirit inspired what needed to be written. Nothing more and nothing less. There are a lot of things that I wish God had said. There is going to come a time where the author is going to describe the Lord appearing to him. If man had been the ultimate author, he might have embellished the "appearance of the Lord."

Genesis 12:8-10

From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev. Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe.

"Pitched his tent," means that he made a home.

Is this trip to Egypt disobedience? Where did God tell him to go? Canaan. Where did he end up? Egypt. He didn't trust God through the famine. I want you to see that the relationship is there, but certain crises in his life cause him to lose faith and desire to take care of himself. He said, "Here's a crisis-a famine. I've got to take care of my family and go down to Egypt." He did not trust God. We'll see the same thing when God tells him that he's going to have a son. Through his offspring all will be blessed. He doesn't have any children, just Sarai. Abraham and Sarai are going to get together and attempt to deliver on God's promise in their own way, not in God's way.

The relationship is there, but it still has cracks in it. Abraham is still saying, "Well, during a crisis, I've got to take over. I can't trust God for it yet." Does everyone see that? That's what Abraham does-just like we do. I want you to see that Abraham is just flesh and bones. He is learning about and growing with God-just like you. What does it take to get there?

Genesis 12:11-13

As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, "I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, `This is his wife.' Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you."

Does it sound like God is in this? It doesn't. What is it? It's man, again, plotting and manipulating and scheming.

Genesis 12:14-20

When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that she was a very beautiful woman. And when Pharaoh's officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels. But the LORD inflicted serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram's wife Sarai. So Pharaoh summoned Abram. "What have you done to me?" he said. "Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Why did you say, `She is my sister,' so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!" Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had.

The Egyptians took care of Abram because Sarai was his sister, not his wife. This is not God's plan, so He intervened.

How did Abram get back to Canaan? What was the motivation? Pharaoh kicked him out. Why? God intervened with the diseases and said, "Get rid of this man."

Question: Why is Abraham being rewarded for deception and disobedience?

<It's in When Critics Ask.> It looks like he's getting all of this stuff and being rewarded. But what kind of wealth is this? Worldly wealth. If that's what you're after, then you can look at this and say, "Wow. Abraham was rewarded." How about spiritually? Where is Abraham spiritually? Pretty low. He's got to renew his relationship with God. He is finding out what God is about. Abraham is learning. There is going to come a time when they are going to offer him all kinds of material possessions and do you know what he's going to say? He's going to say, "Unless God gives it to me, I don't want it." A man who's given all of these things is going to turn around and refuse it because he's learned. It's coming.

That's the relationship that we have to build with God-day by day by day. We want to go one way and God wants for us to go another way. We've got to come to an agreement with God on that.

Genesis 13:1-4

So Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev, with his wife and everything he had, and Lot went with him. Abram had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold. From the Negev he went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had first built an altar. There Abram called on the name of the LORD.

What is Abraham doing? Repenting. He's saying, "Hey God, where are you? Let's talk." Is that not what we do?

Genesis 13:5-9

Now Lot, who was moving about with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents. But the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together. And quarreling arose between Abram's herdsmen and the herdsmen of Lot. The Canaanites and Perizzites were also living in the land at that time. So Abram said to Lot, "Let's not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers. Is not the whole land before you? Let's part company. If you go to the left, I'll go to the right; if you go to the right, I'll go to the left."

Abraham's being pretty nice, isn't he? He says, "Lot, you choose, and I'll take whatever's left."

Genesis 13:10-14a

Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered, like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, toward Zoar. (This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east. The two men parted company: Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom. Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the LORD. The LORD said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, "Lift up your eyes.

Notice that Lot looked up. I can't help but notice this-it looks like Abraham was looking down. Lot looked up and Abraham looked down. God told Abraham to lift up his eyes. Abraham's countenance was downcast and he said, "OK, Lot, you choose whatever you want." Lot chose. God says, "Abraham, look up." So he looks up.

Genesis 13:14b-17

"Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted. Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you."

This may sound like a strange habit. We moved a lot while the kids were growing up. After I learned this, wherever we bought a piece of land, I would walk it and pray over it. I seriously believe that God honored me walking over it such that nothing evil would come on that property or that land. I would have to say that our house, our home, and our land were set aside in honoring God the whole time. People would come into our home and say, "Something's different here." It's not because of us-they would just see that something was different. So, you men, take the spiritual leadership, if you haven't walked your property (I know this sounds strange), walk around your property, praying the whole way that God will protect your property, your house, your home, your children, your wife, and ask God to be there. I believe He'll deliver.

Genesis 13:18

So Abram moved his tents and went to live near the great trees of Mamre at Hebron, where he built an altar to the LORD.

There is the altar again: a testimony that God was with him.

Genesis 14:11-12

The four kings seized all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their food; then they went away. They also carried off Abram's nephew Lot and his possessions, since he was living in Sodom.

There is a history of kings early in Chapter 14. While God is working with Abraham, there are a lot of other things going on.

Here's one of those "bumps." Abram brought Lot over and he wasn't supposed to, so here's the "bump." Lot's been taken into captivity.

Genesis 14:13

One who had escaped came and reported this to Abram the Hebrew. Now Abram was living near the great trees of Mamre the Amorite, a brother of Eshcol and Aner, all of whom were allied with Abram. When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan.

Notice Abraham's being referred to as a "Hebrew" now.

Dan was a long way from Hebron. Abraham had to do some travelling. It wasn't just the next town or city.

Genesis 14:15-17

During the night Abram divided his men to attack them and he routed them, pursuing them as far as Hobah, north of Damascus. He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative Lot and his possessions, together with the women and the other people. After Abram returned from defeating Kedorlaomer and the kings allied with him, the king of Sodom came out to meet him in the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King's Valley).

I'm going to pick up with Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18) next week, but jump over to verse 21.

Genesis 14:21-24

The king of Sodom said to Abram, "Give me the people and keep the goods for yourself." But Abram said to the king of Sodom, "I have raised my hand to the LORD, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and have taken an oath that I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the thong of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, `I made Abram rich.' I will accept nothing but what my men have eaten and the share that belongs to the men who went with me--to Aner, Eshcol and Mamre. Let them have their share."

The king wants the people. Sodom and Gomorrah were known for homosexuality, lesbianism, and wickedness. They wanted the people and told Abram to keep the goods.

"I've raised my hands to the Lord, God, Creator of earth." Do you hear those words? It's different from all of the other gods.

How did Abram change between Egypt and this incident? No worldly possessions; let God make me rich. Do you see that in there? There are all kinds of things that you can put out of here to observe a spiritual change in Abraham's heart between Egypt and now. He earned this, but in Egypt, what was happening? They just gave it to him. Here, he went off to war and earned everything. He could've said, "Well, I've earned it."