Word of Salvation – Vol. 13 No.39 – October 1967

 

God With Us… We With God?

 

Sermon by Rev. A. I. De Graaf on Genesis 12:4-20

Scripture reading: James 1:2-18

Psalter Hymnal: 328; 298; 127:1,2,3,4; 381; 137; 387

 

Brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ,

The Bible is full of stories about people who said, “God is dead”.  Or who at least THOUGHT that way, ACTED that way.  Abraham is one of them, as we shall presently see.  There’s nothing new under the sun!  The fool, who says in his heart “There is no God,” is a brother of mine and of yours.  And sometimes you’d think he is a twin brother: you can’t tell the difference any more.  One of the greatest wonders of all the marvels of the Gospel is that the Lord God hasn’t got sick and tired of His church, His own people.  But that He surprises His weak and miserable children, with their weak and miserable life and their weak and miserable faith, with His mercy, even though that mercy sometimes means a well-deserved boxing of their ears.

The most beautiful verse in our text of today – no doubt – is verse 7, the first part: “THEN THE LORD APPEARED TO ABRAM”.  You know, that had not happened in the world since the days of Noah!  Hundreds of years before Abram lived!  Abram had heard God’s Voice or felt His prompting: “Get out of your land… your father’s house”.  But this is different: THE LORD APPEARED!  The Lord came and visited this planet, this silent planet, and on it this weak man, this one small heap of dust, and it is as if we hear from afar already the music of Revelation 22: “The tent of God is with people and He shall dwell with them!”  But we shall also see that to hear that music once does not mean that the Lord can let go of you one moment!  This is not the story of great, big Abraham doing fine, but the story of God’s mercies which have no end.  And how else can it be?  Him to preach is my business!

We shall LOOK at Abraham.  But we SEE the Lord at work.  For we see, then, that Abraham is…
(1)  TESTED,
(2)  SURPRISED,
(3)  GRATEFUL,
(4)  DOUBTFUL,
(5)  PUNISHED and
(6)  KEPT.

ABRAHAM TESTED.

Terah now lies buried in Haran.  And Abram again has marching orders.  And he goes [ – as we saw last time].  Leaving brother Nahor behind, and his family.  Taking Sarai, his wife with him, and Lot, the son of his deceased brother Haran.  Now Abram is on his own.  No one to ask for guidance, he is now the head of the procession.  And on it goes; on and on into the South-West.  Until at last he can go no further: he has arrived in the last country before hitting the sea, further south there is the desert, and then… Egypt.  And this last country is not empty.  It does not wait for Abraham like America waited for the Pilgrim Fathers: open and wide and inviting the struggle of man against nature.  It is full of highly developed tribes who had built cities and fortresses, who traded the seas and imported strange cultured treasures, who served gods made with hands – in by far the most cases.  That there was one among them, one King, who still was priest of Abraham’s God, Abram did not know.

And he had to march on… and on…!  And what do you think?  Must he not have thought at times, “Where is my land now?  Where is God’s choice for me… where is GOD… isn’t it all an illusion?  Haven’t I made a tragic mistake?  Must not Satan have whispered to him: “Man, you’re crazy!  There you are: at the dead end!  And all you see is trees and wild animals and heathen cities and where is your God now?”  Had Abram left the one heathen civilization, just to land into another?  From the frying pan into the fire?

And still…. no word from the Lord.  Abram had first travelled from Ur to Haran almost 1000 miles!  Now he had travelled from Haran…. 750 miles!  And he had reached Shechem and camped under the oak of Moreh, nearby…!  What a test this must have been!  Blessed are they that have NOT seen… yet believed!

It was the same way then as it is now.  God TESTS His children…  or – as the Bible says – that’s the way faith will get strong!  Abram had no more feelings to go by.  They must have withered away in all that time; he had travelled maybe for years now!  The only thing he could go by was the Word of God spoken to him long ago.  Just like God’s children today often have their baptism to go by, and that was long ago, too.  And the Bible.  But that book is under constant attack by the Devil, who tries to prove that it isn’t true.  In the testing of our faith there is still the voice of God: Small one, do you believe Me?  Do you trust Me… even though all the odds seem against me?  It seems that God is dead… do you still HOLD ON to My assurance given you THAT I AM ALIVE FOR EVERMORE?  Then the day shall come that you know again: For God doesn’t only test.

HE ALSO SURPRISES.

Then, as Abram has struck camp near the big oak tree of Moreh, it happens: The Lord appeared to Abram… and said: To your descendants I will give THIS land!  This very place!  This is IT…!

This is the first time the Bible tells us of an appearance of the Lord in Palestine, and as a matter of fact, the first time GOD APPEARS to a human being on earth since Adam and Eve.  God often had SPOKEN to others before, but this is new, whatever form it must have taken: a dream, a vision (like Isaiah and Ezekiel were to have and Jacob long before them) or an appearance in human form as was to happen later to Abraham again.  But we, who often can feel so forsaken and alone, who wonder if this earth does not just belong to Nature, hatred, violence and death, we must wonder here at what GOD does!

He APPEARS to a man… makes Himself VISIBLE on earth.  Oh sure, not in all His glory – for who can see the Lord in all His glory and live? – but He is going to show people again what it is like to have THE LORD LIVING RIGHT AMONG YOU, and Abraham is given a glimpse here of what was to happen in that same country, long, long after, when THE WORD would become flesh and DWELL AMONG US!  And One would appear to sinful men and women who would say, “Who has seen Me…  has seen the Father”.  Mind you, I want you to notice that our text says: He APPEARED to Abraham.  That means: He made Himself VISIBLE.  He was there before, you know.  He saw Abraham plodding along, and was right with him…. all the time.  As the Lord Jesus is, who said, “I am with you ALL the days even to the end of the world.”  But of the SURPRISE when the Lord suddenly makes that VISIBLE, makes it so obvious as with Jacob who saw the Lord in that dream and he’d thought he was so forsaken and alone on his flight away from home…and he says it in wonder on the next day: “My, the Lord was here, the Lord… HERE… all the time!  And I did not even realize it!”

Yes, there in that country the Lord appeared to Abraham; He who later again would appear in that country as the Son of Man and the Son of God, Who came so near that we could touch Him… eat with Him… hear His voice… crucify Him…!  That country in which Abraham was a stranger now would be the only country in all the world where Jesus would go around in the flesh, except for a short while in Egypt.  And Abram was allowed a preview of this.  A preview of this glory and wonder that GOD IS WITH US, right here – now and to the last day!

No wonder he is…

GRATEFUL.

And he replies in the only way possible for him: He offers to the Lord a sacrifice.  As a matter of fact, he did that time and again.  Like a trail laid by a scout through hostile bush, there is that row of altars, showing from place to place where Abram went.  “What shall I render unto Thee, O Lord, for all the benefits Thou gavest me?”

Abraham did not cheat the Lord God like some church people do.  He did not say, Let others pay their tithes, my two bob on the plate will do fine.  He did not say, I have to buy that TV-set first, the Lord comes later in my last will.  He built an altar because he wanted TO SHOW the Lord that he loved Him.

I doubt whether he knew already that God would forgive because of the shed blood of the animal pointing to the shed blood of Jesus.  Much, much later the Lord would teach Israel that and even not all they would understand.

This sacrifice was just to show love and gratitude to God.  Abraham’s animals were his livelihood.  The very thing he and his wife and servants had to live from.  THIS he wanted to give to God: for he knew again: GOD HIMSELF is my life-giver; He is not dead, He lives, and to Him I owe my heart, my very best.  Abraham knew then, as we might as well know now, that to do any less than “MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST” (to-use–Chalmers’ term) is in reality to say, God is dead!  He who cheats the LIVING GOD out of the sacrifices we owe Him, and thinks he can get by that way, is not taking the Holy Lord seriously.  Neither is he taking seriously that God’s Son came to save him, a sinner.  There must be those moments in my life that I know this again, and then the heart MUST speak.

Which does not mean that on this earthly pilgrimage then nothing can go wrong any more.  We have seen Abram surprised and thankful before the Lord.  But shortly after that we see him…

DOUBTFUL.

Abraham is the father of all believers, you know.  The father of the people of Israel who would HEAR and SEE God’s majesty on Mt. Sinai and who 40 days after offered to a golden calf… as if really nothing had happened…!  The father of Elijah who stood on Mt. Carmel challenging the prophets of Baal and praying fire and rain down from heaven in joyful faith, who only one day later, after only one letter from a silly queen, laid down under that bush, saying: Lord I give up… it’s no use… you’d better let me die.

Abraham was surprised by God, and had offered to God… was so close to the Lord…. and yet he said it, shortly after: GOD IS DEAD.  For you can say that by your actions.  You can say that in the form of a lie, or, like here, in the form of a half-truth.

Abram and his family had to get to some place where there was food, for there was drought and hunger in Canaan.  And so Abram went to Egypt, which then was at the height of its beautiful culture: Egypt, where the yearly flooding of the Nile gave fertility, and food a-plenty…!  And in those days when man was stronger than now, for not so many centuries upon centuries of sin had weakened the offspring of Adam yet, man died hard and stayed young long – Sarai was still a beautiful woman, though she never had the artificial means women now need to keep looking good.

And Abram got worried: the Pharaoh then ruling in Egypt might just have her snatched for his harem, as was done quite often in those days by rulers to nice foreign women just visiting the land.  Quite often in our world a stranger is fair game…!

Yet Abram and Sarai had a promise from God: HE was going to make a great nation out of this still childless marriage.  HE had just shown Abram that Abram could trust Him…!  Yet here is Abraham just doing as if there’s NO God and he has to fix it all up by his own poor little self.  “God is dead” – yes, here Abram is preaching it by his actions, like you and I can do when we lie awake about making ends meet… as if God had been looking after the sparrows and the hairs on your head, but had forgotten all about you… or died since.  Like you and I can do when we work… work… and plan, and turn ourselves in knots about our problems – say for instance at work, or how to make our marriage tick, or how to bring up the children…!  But never talk it over with the Lord…!

If Abram is a father of all believers, then there is ONE thing in which many of his children look like Dad, and one of them is in this pulpit right now…!  Oh, must not our Father in heaven at times sigh, “Shall they NEVER learn?”

Mind you, Abram’s lie that Sarai was his sister was a HALF LIE.  For indeed, Gen.  20:12 tells us that Abram and Sarai had the same father but not the same mother.  Such marriages were not forbidden in that time in which as I said before – sin had not weakened the human race as it has done now.  Not then was there the chance we have now of getting deformed or retarded children from such a marriage.  It also shows that these two people – grown up as children together – must have loved and known each other very much indeed.  Yet our story shows that Abram might well have been somewhat careless about Sarai as well.  Not only did he withhold the FULL truth, but he also hoped to gain by it.  If then Sarai is taken by the Egyptian king, he will be nice to me, he reckons, and will give me many riches as a compensation.  And indeed that’s how it worked out.  Abram’s half-lie got him into trouble, just like our half-lies do.  When we say the small truth, but forget about the bigger truth we do the same.  A half-truth is a lie and doubt is such a lie because it really acts as if God is dead.  And so here: Abram’s marriage goes on the rocks.  BUT FOR GOD.  For even though we SAY and ACT as if He were dead… He isn’t.  And His mercy is greater than my doubt.

God not only…
PUNISHED
Abram by letting him all but lose his wife, God also
PROTECTED
his marriage, from which one day Jesus had to be born as the Holy Offspring in whom all families of the earth are to be blessed.

But Abram had to stand dumb and shamefaced when the KING OF EGYPT reprimanded him!  Oh, that is the bitterness of our unbelief, that OTHERS SEE IT, and wonder: These Christians are phoney…. must not their God be phoney, too?  When people see your church in debt because you do not fulfil your obligations, they won’t just say, “These people are dishonest,” but they will say: “As I thought: this religion business is just a big sham…!  Just watch what happens when they really got to sacrifice, then they love their TV or their car more than their God…!”  Yes, that’s what happens.  Pharaoh must have had a very, very dim view of Abram’s religion!  But NOT of Abram’s God, for, you see, God HIMSELF showed Pharaoh that he’d better keep hands off Sarai, for she was His child and someone else’s wife.

If it depended on my religion, then no one could come to Jesus… but – alleluia – it depends on the Lord my God.  However, the blush of shame was there on Abram’s face, when PHARAOH had to tell him of the care and keeping of his God – instead of how it should have been… the other way round.

And so, brothers and sisters, as we have seen these things happen before us, as the Lord prepared the coming of His Son Jesus that He could redeem you from sin and hell, from death and destruction, we are again humbled by seeing HOW IT ALL WAS GOD’S WORK.  HE appeared to Abram… HE kept Abram’s marriage safe in his holy hands… HE prepared the path for Him who ALONE would do what no one could help Him with: bear the sins of many and open the road to the Father.

And now that you and I have seen it again, we can again go TWO ways about it.  We can say, “God is dead”.  Either by our words – as the fools of Psalm 14 and of 1967 – or by our actions of unbelief and disobedience and doubt.

O pray that God will forgive you for these actions, for His mercy is great.  Pray before it is too late and you will discover that He is the Living God indeed…!  We can also believe in Him and go to Him and prayerfully again begin to TRUST Him…

Trust and obey…
for there’s no other way,
to be happy in Jesus,
but to trust and obey…!

Then the Lord will make it – again and again – PLAIN to you that He is alive.  For He still has His ways of appearing to people, of DWELLING with people, dwelling IN them, as His Spirit testifies with your spirit… that – yet – YOU TOO – are a child of God.

Amen.