There were just three of us at this morning's meeting, and we had no key to the Meeting House Center, so we had to sit out in the glorious sunshine God blessed us with. We read through Genesis 12 through 16 and had a wonderful discussion. First here is the narrative in brief form:
Gen. 12 - God addresses Abram and tells him to leave Haran, the home of his father’s clan, to go to “a land that I will show you” (12:1). And then come the great promises – God promises to make of him a great nation, and God tells him He will make Abram’s name great and him a blessing to “all the communities of the earth” (12:2-3). Abram is 75 when they leave.
When they get to Shechem, the Lord appears to Abram and tells him that this is the land he is promising him. Abram builds an altar there and invokes the Lord’s name. Then we are told that they go into Egypt to escape famine. Abram worries about Sarai’s beauty being a source of conflict, so they agree to say she is his sister. The Pharaoh indeed does send for her, and we are not told what transpires there, if anything did. But Abram benefits from the Pharaoh’s favoritism; the Lord, however, is very displeased and strikes Egypt with severe plagues. There are a number of “foreshadowing details” here in this story that will be repeated at several points in the later narrative—a move to Egypt forced by famine, a position of honor accorded the wandering man of God from Canaan; God’s infliction of a series of plagues; and sending of God’s favored one away from Pharaoh’s kingdom to bring peace back to the kingdom. Even the wealth Abram obtains there (see 12:16), he gets to take with them. Surely this is a “type” of the later exodus.
Abraham is the first of the three key players in the redemption story—he will be followed by Moses and Jesus—who will in a sense “come up out of Egypt” to begin their ministries. The story of his sojourn in Egypt (one of a triplet of like stories in the Old Testament) establishes his prosperity, even if it comes as a result of deceit, and Sarah’s value and importance. Like his people he comes out of Egypt loaded with goods, so much he must separate from Lot (13:5-11).
Abram is told from the beginning that he is only the first of many, that through him a faithful people will be formed, and that this people will have an impact far beyond the borders of the nation they will form—that blessing will come through him and his seed to all mankind. There will be much hardship along the way—exile, slavery and oppression and who knows what else in the distant, distant, future that will come before “all the nations of the earth” will “bless themselves by his descendants.
The process begins with Abram hearing God’s voice and obeying it.
Gen. 13 - In response to God’s call, Abram goes to the Negeb and on to Bethel, to the place where he builds an altar. Abram and his extended family have so much property that he suggests to his nephew Lot that he go off and find himself a separate place to settle. Lot chooses the Jordan plain. Abram stays in Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the Plain, near Sodom. The first thing we hear about Sodom is that in inhabitants were very wicked (13:13). The chapter ends with the Lord recapitulating the promises he made to Abram: “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that is one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I will give it to you” (13:14-17).
Gen. 14 - There is a war in the region between the two main alliances of kings. When Lot gets taken by the winning alliance, Abram goes and with 318 of his retainers, he recaptures Lot and his possessions and brings them back. When he returns, not only does the king of Sodom greet him, but a King by the name of Melchizedek, King of Salem (Jerusalem), greets him as well. Melchizedek is a priest of “the Most High God,” (our God, the God of Abram) and he gives Abram offerings of bread and wine (14:18-20). In turn Abram givens him a tenth of all he has.
Gen. 15 – God’s word comes to him again and takes him out to see the stars of the sky. And God promises in words similar to those later given to Moses—“I am YHWH who brought you out of [Ur] to give you this land.. .” (15:7) and I will make [your] Abram’s descendants as many as the stars. That Abram has faith (or trusts) in God’s promises is “credited . . .to him as an act of righteousness” (15:6). Then God repeats the covenant, and solemnizes the occasion by having Abram offer a heifer, a she-goat, a ram (all age 3), a turtle dove and a pigeon. Each of the first three is split in two and Abram guards them all day. In the evening, Abraham falls into a trance and “a deep, terrifying darkness envelope[s] him” (15:12). God reveals to Abram that his descendants shall suffer a period of slavery before God delivers them. When it is dark, a “smoking brazier and a flaming torch” pass between the severed pieces of animal and the covenant is concluded with respect to the lands God intends to confer on Abram’s line.
Gen. 16 - Discouraged that NO CHILD has come from all the promises thus far, Sarai, discouraged with her own infertility and not quite as ready as Abram is simply to trust in the word of God they have received becomes impatient and comes up with her own plan to make the promise of God come to pass. She offers Abram her maidservant Hagar with the idea that perhaps any children that result might be considered hers. Hagar is an Egyptian woman. She does become pregnant, but the success of Sarai’s scheme only creates problems. Hagar now thinks she is better than Sarai. Sarai is jealous and blames Abram for her problems. Abram allows Sarai to decide what shall happen with Hagar (16:6) and the child, and Sarai has no pity now. She “abuses” Hagar so much that she finally runs away. The tragedy of human machinations here will require deep and on-going redemptive intervention by God—an intervention that is not yet at an end in our day.
The Lord’s messenger finds Hagar by a spring in the wilderness and asks her where she is going. Then he advises Hagar to return and submit to the mistreatment, and in return she will be given a promise parallel to the one given to Abram. She is the first woman with whom a covenant is contracted with the Lord. Soon after her return, Ishmael is born. Abram is 86.
We found the story is interesting for many reasons. First there is the great patience Abram shows in his faith. He is not young when God makes all these promises to him. And yet he does not complain or ever become impatient with his God. And we talked about the fact that no land in the promised region comes into Abram's hands at all. WE, living in the 21st century can see that the faith he shows in his God will eventually draw the interest of many nations and many people; but the patience and faithfulness of Abram must have had more subtle and interior rewards.
Then there are the interesting consequences of Sarai's IMPATIENCE. She apparently simply cannot believe that God will be able to bring forth an heir for Abram from her aging body. So she must say to herself something like, "How is this promise to be realized?" Certainly God doesn’t expect them just to sit around and wait for a miracle. “God helps those who help themselves—right?” We reason like this all the time. And what we learn from this story is that God, while clearly not behind this “solution,” will eventually accept it and redeem it. There will be many times in this story that a similar thing will happen. God will promise something. We will become impatient or get some inspiration of our own how we can “make” God’s promise happen and we will get it wrong—we will grasp a way he is not behind—and he will make it work in spite of us. It will happen with Ishmael’s birth; it will happen again with the institution of the monarchy in Israel; and perhaps it happens all the time. Perhaps every redemptive “effort” that man has made will ultimately be transformed by God into real redemption by God’s deep and unrelenting love and redemptive work in us, in our lives and in our history.
The appearance of Melchizedek, "Priest of the Most High God" drew interest among us as well. He shows that while God clearly had a process being started with the Hebrew descendants of Abram, He was also part of the worship of other people. The model of Melchizedek will inspire early Jewish converts of Christ, who see that God can act outside the tradition, he can raise up priests who are not of the family of Aaron. Perhaps this gave them the freedom to lay down other aspects of the Mosaic law that were impediments to gentile converts. The balance this Abram story shows between strict terms of faith and what seems a fair amount of latitude God permits us in the exercise of our freedom and our inevitable impatience and imperfection was also something we talked about.
We will begin before Meeting on October 23, or as our forebearers would have said - First Day of 23rd day, Tenth Month, 2011 (10 o'clock). We will start at Genesis 17. If you can read on, great. Or will will read together. Hope you can make it.
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