Word of Salvation – Vol. 43 No. 07 – February 1998

 

Abraham the Traveller

 

Sermon by Rev. J. Rogers on Hebrews 11:9-10

Scripture Readings: Genesis 12:10-13:18; Acts 7:1-8; Hebrews 11:9-10

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I suppose most of us have been on tenting holidays.  You pack up the car and trailer with all the gear, you get to where you want to go and pitch the tent and put up the bunks and get out the sleeping bags.  Maybe you choose a site behind a tree for shelter from the wind – a bit like Abraham did near the oaks of Moreh near Shechem.  And everybody finds little corners to put their personal things, and everybody’s ingenuity works overtime so that, eventually, the toilet bag is hanging up there and the torch is tucked out of the way here and everything looks ship-shape.  In the end, you get to feel quite cosy, especially with the gas-lamp at night.

But for all that, after one or two or maybe, stretching it, three or four weeks, and several books and much sunburn and crotchety little ones and not much better parents at times, you’re glad to pack up and go home again because, however humble, there’s no place like home – where the wind doesn’t blow the gas-burners out when you’ve just used your last match; where you don’t have to try to cope with a four-legged table that seems determined to touch the ground on only three; where little Johnny who seems every bit as active when he’s asleep as when he’s awake can have his own room again, so you won’t find yourself being woken three times a night with a leg flung across your face.

If you’re really roughing it, it’s kind of fun to wash in the river, sit around fires at night, burning marsh-mellows or cramming in together under the tent verandah when it’s raining and you don’t feel like going to bed yet.  We can even handle a long-drop for a while.

Yes, for a while – and that’s just where the picture breaks down.  We can leave our hot, running water and flush toilets and it’s great to get away from it all… for a while.  But for Abraham, the Promised Land – where he had to live like a stranger like that in tents all his life – was home.  What should we think about all this, people of God?

 

Firstly,
            let us see that there is something within us that makes us want to settle down.  Time once was when we felt at home in this world.  There once was a time when man had real peace and contentment in his heart.  We felt at ease, rested; we did not have a sense of longing, for all that we now long for we then had.  We went about our work during the day with pleasure, and at the end of the day our Maker came down and walked and talked with us.  We went over the day’s business together and planned the next.  Yes, there was work to be done, but there was no sense of dissatisfaction or hurry so you could get on with the next job.  There was no such thing as ‘the more you have, the more you want’.

It was, truly, idyllic, even though, as Christians even, we’re tempted to smile at it as a childish dream.  But then came that fateful day when it all turned sour; the day we reached for what wasn’t ours and suddenly we realised that, without trusting obedience, we’re naked – outside our bodies and inside our souls.  There is a great lack, an emptiness, a feeling as if we’re away from home and a longing to go back.  And so that our state matched our heart, we were sent away from home literally – out of the garden – to make us feel that estrangement as deeply as we could.  Well, you never go to the doctor unless you feel sick enough.  And then, as our wickedness grew greater and Cain murdered Abel, God drove the message home further.

So, we meet that strange thing: Cain, the first to build a city, a permanent home.  And his descendants were the first to begin making all those things that make life easier, bronze and iron gadgets; and the things that add grace and beauty to life, music.  Yet, for all that, it was Cain especially who bore that mark that man should be a restless wanderer upon the earth.  Of course, we come from Seth’s line, for Cain’s was drowned in the flood.  But it didn’t take long to show that, by nature, none of us are really all that different.

Deep within us all is a sense of being tired, so, as the song says, “show me the way to go home.”  We all feel the need of a place to settle down.  But also our souls and our spirits need that rest, too.  Didn’t Jesus say, “Come unto me all you that labour and are heavy laden and you shall find rest for your souls”?

Thus, we build our cities so we can feel we’ve arrived at some permanent home, safe from the weather and whatever else this cruel world can throw at us.  Individually, we build our homes like little Israelite cities of refuge with high fences round them and good locks on the doors.  We make our gadgets to make life easier.  We make our music to pour out our souls or, alternatively, to fill our souls with beauty to cover the weariness of our wandering.  Surely it is significant that it was Cain’s line that did that first.

Yes, tenting is fun – for a while.  But perhaps the reason it is only fun for a while is because, after a while, it begins to remind us too much of the real state of our hearts; that things are not settled and happy there.  Yet, not only did God tell Abraham to pack the camel and trailer and go out of Haran.  Abraham had to live like that all his life – in a tent, temporarily.

And it wasn’t as if he could pitch his tent in one nice sheltered spot, either.  Because when he arrived at the first spot in Shechem, he found the place God had told him to come to already occupied by Canaanites.  Have you ever arrived at your favourite spot by the river to find somebody else there?!  The cheek!  Don’t these people know that’s our spot?

Anyway, Abraham had to move on to Bethel and for some reason he moved on further again south, to the Negev.  Then there was a famine in the land, so he actually had to leave the land God promised, and go to Egypt where he got kicked out because he tried to hoodwink Pharaoh that his wife was his sister.

What on earth was God doing?  He was simply driving that message home; that whatever material things might be promised, even though they come from God, they were not the real thing either; neither Canaan itself, nor literal descendants.  And that hankering for home is still there, isn’t it?

But let’s work this out a little further, for it’s not just, wanting to settle down –

Secondly,
            we want to make progress.  It would not be a bad question to ask ourselves: why have we made so little progress as a Church or as a denomination?  Why are we still where we were so many years ago?  Why do I struggle with the same sins as I did ten years ago?  That is another thing about us, isn’t it?  We want to get ahead.  Treading water doesn’t appeal to us a great deal.  It simply uses up energy with nothing to show for it.  We want to get to the shore.

Well, that’s something that’s built into us, too.  Since the Fall, we feel tired and we want to go home because there lingers in us from Creation some sense that there is somewhere where we should feel at home, at rest, at peace, and content.  There is also within us from Creation a lingering desire to be fruitful, productive, to achieve something, to build, to make progress.  Well, we were told to subdue the earth and fill it.

So, Jesus said, “Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations.”  Yet, here we are, just treading water, moving on from one doctrinal argument to another and back to the original again.  The New Age movement is only old-fashioned Gnosticism Redivivus.  Or: from one sin to another and, blow me down, falling back into the one we thought we had passed on from a few years ago.  Like Abraham, from the Negev to Egypt and back to the Negev again?  Or, just as Abraham lied about his wife, so his son, Isaac, did the same!

So, the Church has made great advances in the past, but look at the world today.  Is Christianity making any progress in the world?  Is the kingdom coming as Christians have been praying for, for 2000 years?  What about in here… through the Reformed Church of _____(name)___?

I wonder what Nahor would say to Abraham if he ever decided to take a holiday and go and visit his foolish young brother and see how he was getting on.  “Well, Abraham, it was a lovely, romantic ideal you had, to go out when you reckoned God spoke to you that night about ‘a land I will show you.’  But man alive, you’re twenty years down the track now.  Surely it’s time to take stock.  Does God really lead in such an aimless fashion?  What’s been achieved by all this?  How are you ever going to get this land, Abraham, with all these Canaanites living here?  And as for descendants, you’re ninety-five now.  Isn’t it time you got a bit more realistic and came home?  At least God’s blessed you with plenty of wealth.  You could afford one of the best units at Haran’s new Olive Tree Retirement Village.  C’mon, mate, it’s time to call it a day with all this ‘pie in the sky’ nonsense.”

As far as we know, Nahor didn’t do that.  But even if he had, Abraham would have taken no notice.  And neither must we.  Lot would have.  He did, as a matter of fact.  He saw the Jordan Valley, well watered, “looking like The Garden of the Lord” (13:10).  Yes, Jordan rang bells in Lot’s sub-consciousness.  There he felt he had finally come home – because, of course, The Garden of the Lord is where we all began and what we are all looking for.

So, there he settled down.  Even more, he made progress.  Eventually he bought himself a brick house in the city in The Garden of the Lord; and cities have foundations.  Does that remind you of the book of Revelation?  Where, in the end, all of God’s own will live in a city come down out of heaven from God to a new earth which is all become The Garden of the Lord, with a river flowing through it and trees on either side bearing fruit every month for the healing of the nations?  Here Lot found permanence and safety from marauders and the elements, in company with his fellow men.  Well, for a while, anyway.

And yet, thank God, even though Lot had found the imitation, something in the city that looked like The Garden of the Lord, it didn’t chime with the bell in Lot’s heart.  It was, actually, a lying wonder.  Peter tells us his righteous soul was vexed within him.  He hadn’t found peace at all.  In the end, what did Lot, who looked, far more than Abraham, for progress – what did he achieve?

Well, people of God, if we are not, as a Church or as individual Christians, making progress, very rightly we should ask questions of ourselves.  But then, our idea of progress must not become our god either.  There certainly had better be progress in our experience of, and our relationship with, God.  But the kingdom of God before Christ, and the kingdom and the Church since Christ, have often gone through barren times.  And the barrenness was no sure indicator that God’s people were unfaithful or living out of obedience – even though that is a general rule.  Abraham is, of course, the great example of obedient faith in the whole Bible, but the kingdom of God can hardly be said to have progressed in leaps and bounds under his time.  Can we take our thinking another step?

Thirdly,
            we want to settle down and see progress in our lifetime.  Underneath all these things, God can be doing a work which we cannot see.  Even as he did in Moses in those forty years in the wilderness.  Even as He did in Jesus in the first thirty years of his life.  His whole ministry was over in one tenth of the time of preparation.  We would hope to have the ratio somewhat reversed.

There is the old tension here between resting in God and complacency.  Sometimes, it is so hard to assess life rightly.  Even so, David was faithful in his generation, yet he only made preparations for building the temple – but he was hardly complacent.  Moses ran ahead of God and blew it.  And at the end of his life, even though his faithfulness was second only to Christ’s, he was also denied the crowning achievement.  Neither did he see a lot of progress toward that; his Magnum Opus was to lead a stubborn and disobedient people wandering in the wilderness for forty years!

By faith, Abraham made his home in the Promised Land like a stranger in a foreign country, we are told.  But not only Abraham.  His son and grandson experienced exactly the same.  “…as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise,” our text says.  And the promise was confirmed to them in person.  But they no more saw it fulfilled than did Abraham.  Indeed, Abraham was even told, “Your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and ill-treated for 400 years.”  So, you have three generations.  Indeed, it is only in the third generation that descendants as stars in the night sky looked anything like being in the offing.

What is God doing during these times, congregation?  Is it, like a good wine, that there must be time, and sometimes a long time, for the lees to settle for it to purify and for a generation’s sense of purpose to mature in its own mind?  It is hard to see that the lees ever settled in Jacob’s descendants!  Or to mature in the collective mind of generations?  But then later, when all is ready, God raises up a prophet prepared by all those generations, and he bursts into activity and revival comes and reformation comes.  The kingdom finally is seen to grow, nations are indeed discipled and evil is truly rolled back again.  Just as it took Huss and Wycliffe’s work another 100 years to bring the times to fulfilment (may we say?) and produce a Luther; and another 200 years for the great modern missionary movement.

Well, however, it took some Berger Paints “keeping on keeping on” for Abraham to stick with it.  Let us ask,

Fourthly,
            how did he do that?  God is showing us in this something that is still a part of His ways of working in the world.  When Abraham, Isaac and Jacob lived as they did, they declared to the whole world that the meaning of life was not to be found in this world.  Lot seemed to have found it – but it all went up in smoke.  Abraham seemed not to have found it.  All he had at the end of his life was a burial plot for his wife at, I believe, a pretty high price – and the land was his by God’s promise anyway!  Yet Abraham died at “175 years at a good old age, an old man and full of years and was gathered to his people.”  That is the classic O.T. description of a good death after a fulfilling life.

Abraham looked for a city with foundations.  People of God, a city with foundations, a firm foundation on which to build life and find happiness, is not to be found in this world or in the things of this world.  By his contented living in temporary mode where, at best, you can get things ship-shape and cosy for a few nights, Abraham is saying to the world and to us, “I am quite happy to pass over the illusions of happiness and joy that this world offers; I’ll pass them up because I have my eye on the real thing.”

It is still the same.  Jesus is the ultimate son of Abraham, and he said, “The birds of the air have nests and the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  And He endured that – and much, much more – because of the hope that was before Him.  Paul spoke about some whose minds were on earthly things and the things of time, but he said, “our citizenship is in heaven.”

Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were sure of what they hoped for – so sure, they could live their whole lives as if everything were temporary and up in the air and uncertain, while, in their hearts, they were actually settled down and knew they were making real progress.  So they were quite content to have to wait generations to see their lives come to fruition.  They were absolutely convinced that what God promised in the future was so much more real and solid than anything this world offered.

Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, is the promise good enough for us as good as the reality?  For if it is not, then we are going to fall for substitutes, the devil’s imitations, the things of this world which must, even when they may be good in themselves, only ever be a means to an end for a Christian.  Is that why this world is so important to us?  Because our faith is so weak?  And we are not so sure of the reality of heaven and eternity?

We had better pray, “Lord, I believe, help me in my unbelief.”  Otherwise we are going to feel continually short-changed.  We are going to be continually discontent, continually wanting to go on to better and greater things and achievements.  And ironically, the more of this world’s apparently concrete things we have that would appear to give some substance and foundation to life, we will actually feel more temporary and unsettled than those who have God and little else.

People of God, we need to feed the life of faith.  We need to think more about the things of God and eternity, the people of God and the Church of God.

Listen to Paul: “What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short.  From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them.  For this world in its present form is passing away.” (1Cor.7:29-31).  That is what Abraham did.  What Abraham really looked for in life was to see Jesus’ day.  We must do the same, longing for the coming of Christ – although not morbidly so that we cannot enjoy life while we are here.

All the time, congregation, we need to be feeding the life of our souls.  Then working for the coming of His kingdom will become the driving force in our lives.  Then our lives will be truly founded on a city with foundations.  And so, the happiness we enjoy will be solid, true and a lasting joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.