Between Promise and Fulfillment - Genesis 12:1-9

well if you do have a Bible with you this morning in book form or app form I want to invite you to open it to Genesis chapter 12 as we've been saying the last couple of weeks we are beginning a brand new series today the series is called between promise and fulfillment and we're going to be exploring that theme as we make our way through Genesis chapters twelve to twenty five now Genesis 12 to 25 really contains the story of the life of Abraham and we're gonna explore that theme throughout his life at least it tells us one season of Abraham's life when we meet him in chapter 12 he's actually already 75 years old so there's a lot that we don't know about him the skeleton of the story and many of you may know the story the skeleton of the story is that God appears to him he tells him to leave his homeland and his family and go to an unknown place that God will and that God will make him into a great nation it's a great promise or a great series of promises or set of promises as we will see but the fulfillment of that promise and those promises takes a long time there is in fact a 25 year gap between God's initial promise that Abraham will be made into a great nation and the birth of his son Isaac and most of what we have in Genesis 12 to 25 is the story of Abraham living in the gap between promise and fulfillment now I said there's a 25 year gap between promise and fulfillment and Abraham's life but that's not even quite accurate because the birth of Isaac that was long waited for was only a partial fulfillment of what God had promised him I mean one son didn't suddenly make him into a great nation and we see this with other aspects of God's promises to him as well when his wife Sarah dies Abraham purchases a small burial plot in the land of Canaan and it's a very small thing but it's just really the begin of the fulfillment of God's promise to give him and this nation land as a matter of fact as we read through the life of Abraham we will discover that Abraham actually didn't get to see any of the promises of God's fulfilled in their entirety in his lifetime and I think many of us can relate to what we find in these chapters because we all live in that territory between promise and fulfillment I mean we know that there will come a day we've been promised that there will come a day when God will restore all things and make all things right in the world but in the meantime we live with a tension because the world is not as it should be and when we look around the world we see wars and poverty and famine and natural disasters we see planes that are shot down and fires burning out of control we see injustice and sickness and death and when we look at our own lives we see barrenness and brokenness and pain and we are left to wonder if the things that have been promised will ever come to pass we live between promise and fulfillment and the story of Abraham helps us to understand how we're supposed to live in that gap so we're gonna begin this morning by reading Genesis 12 verses 1 to 9 and I want to invite you to stand as I read God's Word in your hearing and this is what it says 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 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 I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonours you I will curse and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed so Abram went as the Lord had told him and lot went with him Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran and Abram took Sarai his wife and lot his brother's son and all their possessions that they had gathered and the people they had acquired in Haran and they set out to go to the land of Canaan when they came to the land of Canaan Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem to the foot to the oak of Moray at that time the Canaanites were in the land 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 from there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and aí on the east and there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord and Abram journeyed on still going toward the Negev you can grab a seat as you look at the passage the passage actually breaks neatly into two sections there is the call of gods in verses 1 to 3 and then there is the response of Abraham in verses 4 to 9 now I've actually structured my message or under three headings or under three things that we discover here and I would say that the first thing we learn about is the strange Providence of God's call so listen again to verse 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 now if that verse seems kind of abrupt to you it's because it is it might actually feel that way because it's been some time it's been three and a half years since we left off our series in Genesis 11 and it might be helpful to sort of go back and and get some background from the last few verses of Genesis chapter 11 i'll read verses 27 to 32 of that chapter for you it says now these are the generations of Tara Tara fathered Abram Nahor and Haran and her an fathered lot Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred in ear of the Chaldeans and Abram and Nahor took wives the name of Abraham's wife was Sara the name of Nahor's wife Milka the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and iske now Sarai was barren she had no choice Terah took Abram his son and lot the son of her and his grandson and Sara his daughter-in-law his son Abraham's wife and they went forth together from ur of the chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan but when they came to her ran they settled their days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran so those verses introduced us to Abraham or to Abram as he was called at this point in his life but they don't actually really tell us anything about him they don't tell us any reason why God might possibly have chosen him and chosen to bless him in this way and so as we think about why God chose to break in here and suddenly make this call and sort of have a brand new beginning you might wonder well why did he do it like this and I think there are two things to reflect on about the way God often does things and the first one is to remember that he delights in choosing unlikely candidates see I think most of us have kind of a romanticized version or picture of Abraham in our minds we think of him as maybe like a gentle grandfather type I mean he is father Abraham after all but that's not actually the Bible's presentation of him least not at this point in his life Abraham is not presented as a super Saint there's no indication that he was more righteous than other people in his generation in fact what we do know is that Abraham was a pagan up until this moment of his life he did not know the Lord here's how the book of Joshua describes him later says then Joshua said to all the people that says the Lord the God of Israel long ago your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates Tara the father of Abraham and of Nahor and they served other gods the day of that verse they served other gods would have included Abraham at the time of his calling so he's an unlikely candidate for God to suddenly come and say this is what I want you to do and this is what I'm going to do for you but as you read through the Bible you you find that it's not just Abraham where God reveals a penchant for choosing unlikely candidates the Bible reads like a who's who of unlikely candidates it's filled with stories of shepherds and stutterers and fig farmers and barren women and fishermen and tax collectors and prostitutes and a host of other unlikely candidates who become the heroes of biblical narratives and we should see this as good news because the message of the gospel is not that God is looking for the best and the brightest to join his team but that God often chooses unlikely candidates Jesus came to save lost sinners like you and me now we've spent a good deal of time in first corinthians over the last 18 months and i think we would all do well to remember these words from chapter 1 of that book where paul says four consider your calling brothers not many of you were wise according to worldly standards not many of you were powerful not many of you were of noble birth but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong God chose what is low and despised in the world even things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God and because of him you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God righteousness and sanctification and redemption so that as it is written let the one who boasts boast in the Lord he got delights in choosing unlikely candidates Abraham could not stand before God and say well of course you chose me I mean I'm such a great guy in fact God chose him for reasons unknown to us in a similar way this passage reminds us that God revels in starting with nothing the Bible begins that way in the creation account first two verses the Bible read like this in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters now we refer to that as creation ex nihilo which means creation out of nothing this is what God does and this is what he delights in doing he delights in making something out of nothing and we see that at the very beginning of Abraham's story God promises to make him into a great nation but remember the reality of Abraham's situation at the time if we back up to verse 30 of chapter 11 it says this about his wife now Sarai was barren and then just in case we missed it she had no child so I only went to public school but that to me seems like a strange way to start a nation I mean if there were a book about how to start a great nation I'm pretty sure it wouldn't begin with take a 75 year old man and his barren wife that's a great way to start but this is what God does he loves beginning with nothing and the story of Abraham is set in deliberate contrast with another story from Genesis chapter 11 it's the story of the Tower of Babel if you look back at verse 4 of chapter 11 it says this tells us what was in the builders minds as they set out to build this great tower then they said come let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth so what they want to do is they want to build themselves a city they want to make a name for themselves and become famous they want to stay right where they are and if you know the story you know that God comes along brings their tower and their city down to a pile of rubble and then he comes along to Abram and he says I want you to leave your comfort and security where you're settled I'm gonna make you into a great nation I'm gonna make your name great see God begin like God loves to begin with nothing even later in Chapter 11 we we can see that this wasn't the first move towards the land of Canaan that that Abraham's family made if you listen again to the way chapter 11 ends in verses 31 to 32 it says Terah took Abram his son and lot the son of Haran his grandson and Sarai his daughter-in-law his son Abraham's wife and they went forth together from ur of the chaldeans to go into the land of canaan but when they came to her and they settled there the days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran see her Anne was as far as human initiative could carry them and see the story of the Bible is not the story of God meeting us halfway to fulfill our dreams the story of the Bible is God taking the initiative to do for us what we could never do for ourselves that's the grand story now many of us have a hard time with that I mean we have a hard time with believing and understanding that we actually didn't do anything to merit this gift it's pure grace on God's part we have a hard time with the idea that we contribute nothing to our salvation I think I've told this to you before but it's interesting to me that when instant cake mixes first appeared on store shelves in the 1950s they had a difficult time selling them now we're used to instant everything today but it wasn't always that way or that wasn't always the case and the first cake mix packages put warnings on the box not to add milk but just to add tap water some housewives however could not help themselves and they would add milk anyway as sort of their special touch and then be disappointed because the cake would flop many of these mixes also prohibited adding eggs because they had already been added in dry form by the manufacturer and women who were interviewed in focus groups about why these cake mixes were not selling they were disturb they said well what sort of cake is it if all you do is add water so the marketing had to be changed and the mixes needed to tell the how the homemaker that she and the mix could make the cake together so the box is now proclaimed in bold lettering you add fresh eggs the message was look you do have something to contribute here you do play a role in this and many of us are like those homemakers when it comes to salvation we like to think that we've got something to contribute right I've got these gifts or these skills or this character trait God must want that on his team but to really understand grace we need to know that salvation is God's work from beginning to end he's the one who initiates the only thing we contribute is our sin God revels he delights in beginning with nothing I love the words to the old hymn that says nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross or to the I cross I cling so we learned something about the strange Providence of God's call second thing we learn about is the astounding grace of God's call and this is what we see in verse 2 listen to these promises that God makes to Abram he says and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonours you I will curse and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed these promises are filled with grace the word blessing appears five times in these two verses for reasons unknown God has set his affections on Abram and he desires to bless him and then to bless the rest of the world through him if you want to enumerate the promises you can count them as anywhere from four to seven distinct promises that God makes to him here now I think we can group the promises under six headings and they all conveniently start with P how about that so there is firstly a promise or the promise of place God says go to the land I will show you and then later in the chapter he will say to you and your offspring I will give this land now that word land is going to prove to be one of the dominant themes in the rest of the Old Testament so much of Israel's history is taken up with whether or not they will occupy this land and you will know that even today this is still an ongoing conflict for Israel there secondly the promise of people God says I will make you a great nation you can't have a nation let alone a great nation without people and this is the tension that runs all through the life of Abraham will he have a son or won't II will that promise be fulfilled it's also here promise of prosperity God says I will bless you now the reason God wants to bless Abraham is not just for his own benefit but as the verse goes on to say so that you will be a blessing this is why God blesses us and then fourthly there's a promise of posterity God says I will make your name great the fact that we are spending the next few months studying the life of Abraham is an indication or is evidence that that promise is continues to be fulfilled God also makes a promise of protection he says I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you and then lastly there's a promise of a program God says in all the families of the earth shall be blessed so God has a purpose in blessing Abraham that will extend far beyond Abraham it's a staggering collection of promises that God gives to him but we might hear all those promises and think well look look that all sounds nice but they're a bit you know airy-fairy they might sound too good to be true and it's probably good to remember that they must have sounded too good to be true to Abraham as well God's promise wasn't that everything was going to go smoothly however in fact as we think about each of the promises that God made here all six of them as I'm sure Abraham did our minds might immediately go to the obvious obstacles to seeing those promises fulfilled I mean God says he's going to make him into a great nation but as we've already seen Abraham is 75 his wife is barren the prospects don't look good God says he's going to give him this land but the end of verse 6 gives us this ominous reminder that at that time the Canaanites were in the land so how are you gonna get the land when it's already occupied and at the very least this should remind us that God's promises don't necessarily go in a straight line there's often a delay between promise and fulfillment there are often obstacles that seem to stand in the way of God's promises ever being fulfilled see I think sometimes we look at the promises of God and we think well look I don't know how that could ever be fulfilled I mean how would it even be possible for God to do that and the story of Abraham reminds us that nothing is too difficult for God if he can take this 75 year old man and his barren wife and build a great nation through them there's nothing too hard for the Lord and when we talk about the astounding grace of God's caller the astounding grace of his promises to Abraham we might still be tempted to think well well good for Abraham I mean I'm glad God blessed him in that way but what does this have to do with me well these promises to Abraham like all the promises of God are ultimately fulfilled in Jesus the way that all the families of the earth or all the nations of the earth are blessed through Abraham is that Jesus is one of Abraham's descendants and his salvation his blessings come to all nations all families here's how the New Testament speaks about this specific promise to Abraham says know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham and the scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying in you all the nations be blessed so then those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham the man of faith so listen those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham the way you and I get in on this promise is that we place our faith in Jesus so these words aren't just for him they're for us as well as I was thinking about the blessings that are ours in Jesus I couldn't help but think of another passage from the New Testament ephesians chapter 1 is a passage i think we ought to meditate on a regular basis anytime we need to be reminded of the blessings that we've been given in jesus i want you to listen to these words listen to the blessings that are ours there paul says blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him in love he predestined us for adoption we're his children to himself as sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of his will to the praise of his glorious grace grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved in him we have redemption through his blood the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of His grace which he lavished upon in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will according to the to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him things in heaven and things on earth we've been blessed with every spiritual blessing we've been adopted as his children we have redemption we have the forgiveness of our trespasses God's will has been made known to us in Christ can you see the staggering blessings that God has given us so we see something about God's call and something about God's promises or blessings third thing we learn about in this passage is the proper response to God's call and we read about Abraham's response in verses 4 to 9 and there are two main things that stand out about the way Abram responded to things that I think ought to characterize every one of our lives the first one is obedience listen again to how verse 4 begins so God calls him he makes these promises and then verse 4 says this so Abram went as the Lord had told him I mean I I love the simplicity of that God says Abram this is what I want you to do I want you to leave your security behind I want you to leave your homeland your family I want you to go to the place I'm not even gonna tell you where it is I want you to go so Abram went and I think we need more of that in our day we need more obedience to the simple commands of God that when God says it we do it now the blessings that were promised to Abram were conditional on his obedience he would not have experienced those blessings had he not obeyed we can't forget about how difficult this call must have been and he was told to leave his country his family all that was familiar to him none of that could have been easy it's not easy to leave places that are familiar to us or precious to us it's not easy to leave people that we love and have relationships with now God doesn't call all of us to leave our homeland or our family but he does call all of us to lay down the things we find security in and follow him you might remember the way Jesus called his first followers here's how Matthew records it while walking by the Sea of Galilee he saw two brothers Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen and he said to them follow me and I will make you fishers of men immediately they left their nets and followed him and going on from there he saw two other brothers James the son of Zebedee and John his brother in the boat with Zebedee their father mending their nets and he called them immediately they left their boats and their father and followed him I mean it's a simple picture of obedience Jesus calls and they follow immediately they put down what they're doing and they say this is far more important to me now there are a number of call narratives in the Bible stories of individuals receiving a call to step out and follow God's leading and most of those stories involve leaving some other type of security say I'm gonna lay that aside and trust in God now I didn't experience this on the level of Abraham but I did experience something of this firsthand with the call to plant this church now when I look back at my calling to plant this church I feel somewhat like bilbo baggins in case you don't know bilbo baggins as the lead character and Tolkien's book The Hobbit you may have read the book or seen the movie and I identify with Bilbo not just because he was short but because he was a hobbit and hobbits loved living lives that were characterized by comfortable predictability that's how he wanted to live they wanted to live in in the safety of the Shire and the problems for Bilbo started when Gandalf the wizard shows up invites him to leave his life of comfortable predictability to leave the comfort of the Shire he was accustomed to and to set out on an adventure now I'm not going to summarize the entire plot but he accepts the invitation embarks on the adventure of a lifetime and at the end of the story after all of his adventures are finished he returns to the Shire but he returns a very different Hobbit now I would describe my own journey towards church-planting along those same lines so if you don't know my story some of you came with us but I spent 13 years in ministry at Willington church in in Burnaby was a very secure place it was my home church Ilona and I both came to faith there I had a pretty good setup had a great job in position and I would describe the last few years of my ministry there as being very fruitful but also being characterized by comfortable predictability and I first began to sense a call to plant a church in Surrey when I first began to sense that I initially wanted no part of it I mean I wanted my security and I found my own way to avoid God's call met with a few of the elders I told them you know this is what I'm sensing they basically said luckily that's great but we'd like you to stay we'll give you more responsibility we'll pay you more well that I was sure was the voice of the Lord right we're gonna pay you more of course that must be God's will that's his call so I stayed on took on more responsibilities scheduled myself to begin doctoral studies but God was relentless and in His grace God relentlessly called me out of the shire and into an adventure and I will just tell you there are blessings I would have never received if I had not been obedient or responded to that call now your experience with God's call might be different than that circumstances might be different the situation's might be different but I'll say this that if your experience with God's call has been to just sort of add Jesus to an already full life you have to wonder if you've really responded to God's call at all I mean it's doubt full to me that your agenda for your life and God's agenda for your life have been the same from the beginning many of those things you may have wanted to accomplish that's not actually what God wants to do in you Graham scraggy was a longtime pastor in England in the in the first half of the 1900s he preached a message in Edinburgh where he said this the callings of God never leave a man where they find him for to stay where he is after God has bidden him to move on is itself a backward movement though he take no actual step that's a really profound statement what he's saying is look if God calls and you just stay exactly where you are you're actually moving backwards you will not experience the blessings of God if you do not step out in faith and the call of Jesus is compelling I mean it's the kind of thing that causes us or should cause us to immediately lay down our nets and follow him he calls we obey in uncertainty at times I mean listen to the way Abraham's calling is later described by the writer of Hebrews he says by faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance and he went out not knowing where he was going by faith he went to live in the land of promise as in a foreign land living in tents with Isaac and Jacob heirs with him of the same promise for he was looking forward to the city that has foundations whose designer and builder is God's by faith Sara herself received power to conceive even when she was past the age since she considered him faithful who had promised and then I love this line therefore from one man and him as good as dead were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore see that decision to step out and to respond to God's call in faith resulted in all of this so we had to respond to God's call with obedience second thing we see in the response of Abraham is worship look now at verses 6 & 7 says Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem to the oak of Moray at that time the Canaanites were in the land then the Lord appeared to Abram and said to your offspring I will give this land so he built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him it's a significant thing that the very first thing Abram builds when he comes into Canaan is not a tower or a city but an altar his priority is worship now there's a couple of geographical mentions here that we shouldn't just pass over even though we'd be tempted to do so the first one is Shechem Shechem was the leading city in Canaan it eventually became the first capital of Israel this is where Abram sort of planted a flag and for Abraham to build an altar there was a bold thing to do he didn't seem to have the mindset of most churches who want to flee further and further into the suburbs he said no he here's where I'm gonna build my altar to the Lord it also says that he built the altar at the oak of Moray now that little notation about the tree that was there is doing more than just serving as a geographical marker more a means teacher or Oracle giver and the Canaanites and other pagan groups often gathered at the base of these large trees because they thought well these trees extend way up into the heavens this is the place to worship gods so the Great Tree of Moria was the place where the Canaanites would have assembled to hear the Oracle's of their soothsayers and their prophets and it is at that very place at the central city in Canaanite culture that Abraham builds this altar to the Lord and declares for me in my house we will serve the and I point this out as a reminder that the life of faith is actually always lived out in the midst of competing ideologies I mean we sometimes look around and we kind of lament the way things are in society we see all the the troubles or we lament the fact that we live in an increasingly post-christian society it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that there are many aspects of culture that are hostile to the Christian faith so how are we supposed to live in the midst of that well Abraham is a good example listen now to verse 8 from there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and a eye on the east and there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord so I just want to draw your attention to the two pieces of architecture that are mentioned in that verse tents and altars and I think they are significant and they are the ones that ought to be reflected in our lives see we are worshipers and we are pilgrims we are in the words of one writer resident aliens this world is not our home the New Testament tells us our citizenship is in heaven when Peter writes to the group that he writes to to those who've been scattered listen to the way he speaks to them he says to those see here's who his letters addressed to to those who are elect exiled of the dispersion in Pontus Galatia Cappadocia Asia and Bithynia those are elect exiled right they're not in their homeland and then later in the letter he says beloved I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh flesh which wage war against your soul keep your conduct among the Gentiles so honorable so that when they speak against you as evildoers they may see your good deeds and glorify God in the day of visitation see the two things Peter is instructing his hearers or his readers to do is just plant their flag as a worshipper of God but also to understand that their sojourners they're passing through their exile this is not their homeland this is not their ultimate home and that's the same calling that God gives to every one of us we've build an altar we declare ourselves to be a worshipper of the Lord and we know that we live in tents temporary dwellings we don't make this our end goal so the way to live faithfully in that gap between promise and fulfillment the gap that we all live in is to view our lives through those lenses of tent and altar and altar because the worship of God is our first priority in a tent because we know this world is not our ultimate home so my prayer for us today my prayer really for this series is that we get a better sense of what it looks like to live out our faith in the midst of a culture that does not understand it which is exactly what Abraham experienced so let's pray together Heavenly Father we do want to thank you again for your word we thank you for its directness we thank you for your grace that calls us when we're not worthy to be called blesses us in ways that we do not deserve but also demands of us obedience and we pray that as we hear your call we would be obedient to it whatever that might be so lord I pray that as we spend this time today reflecting later going through this week that we're mindful of those truths that we are your people and that our home is with you we pray in Jesus name Amen you

Channel: Crossridge

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Keywords: crossridge, church, surrey, bc, canada, sermon, bible, god, jesus, spirit, christ, christian, christianity, holy, message, lee, francois, andy, frew

Id: E9aAzuPU4sI

Length: 39min 49sec (2389 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020