Mid-Advent 1
Gen
12:1-8
12/2/20
Matthew
begins his Gospel by writing, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus
Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” He then proceeds to lay out the genealogy of
Jesus which ends with the words, “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was
born, who is called Christ.”
Matthew
gives us the family line that led to Jesus – and wow, it is impressive! I mean, we are talking biblical blue bloods
here. You have Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
You have Judah, and the kings David, Hezekiah, and Josiah. There are the
patriarchs of the nation of Israel. There are the kings of Israel beginning
with David.
But what Scripture
tells us about some of these individuals reads more like an insider “tell all”
book written about some European royal family.
Actually, it’s worse than any book like that could be. In fact as we dig a little into Jesus’
heritage we find ourselves asking: “A Savior came from this family?!?
Tonight we look at the patriarch –
Abraham. Things begin very well with
Abraham. Abraham’s father had been taking the family from Ur in what is today
Iraq in order to go to the land of Canaan – what we now know as Israel. But for
some reason they didn’t complete the trip.
Instead, they stopped in Haran, what is now Turkey just north of Syria,
and settled there.
But God had plans for Abraham, and
so in our text we hear: “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 dishonors you I will curse, and in
you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”
God told Abraham to leave
everything – to leave his home and extended family, and to go to a new land
that he would show him. But God also made incredible promises to Abraham. He promised to make Abraham into a great
nation. He promised to bless Abraham and
make his name great. And he promised that in Abraham all families of the
earth would be blessed. He promised that the Savior – the seed of the woman
who would defeat the devil – would come forth from his family line.
Abraham believed God. He believed
his promises and he headed south into Canaan.
While there the Lord appeared to Abraham and said “To your offspring I
will give this land.” God promised to
make Abraham into a great nation, and he promised to give Canaan as the land in
which they would live.
God had identified Abraham as the
unique individual through whom he would work to create a nation and bless all
people. He had said, “I will bless those
who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse.” Yet immediately after this we learn that a
famine in the land of Canaan prompted Abraham to travel to Egypt. When he
arrived there Abraham feared that the Egyptians would find Sarah beautiful and
kill him in order to have her. Abraham
convinced Sarah to claim that she was his sister. Pharaoh, the leader of Egypt took an interest
in Sarah. He paid a dowry to Abraham and
took Sarah as his own.
Only after God afflicted Pharaoh
with great plagues did he become aware that something was very wrong.
Eventually he learned who Sarah really was.
He summoned Abraham and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did
you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister’
so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her, and go.”
You can’t get much worse than
this! Not only had Abraham failed to
trust God’s promise, but in order to save himself he had done something
absolutely appalling to Sarah. Right out of the gate, after God calls Abraham, this
is very next thing we learn about him. Frankly, it is shocking. This guy
is going to be the source from whom the Savior of the world will descend?
God had promised to make Abraham into
great nation, but Sarah had not given birth to child. Later, the word of the LORD came to Abram in
a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be
very great.” Abraham protested that he was in fact childless and said, "Behold,
you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my
heir.”
But God replied, “This man shall not
be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” God brought Abraham
outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are
able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” We
are told that Abraham “believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as
righteousness.” He believed God’s promise, and because of this faith God
considered Abraham to be righteous in his sight.
Abraham was a sinner, just like you
are. There have been times in your life
when you have have failed to trust God. There have been times when you have
used and taken advantage of other people.
But the apostle Paul tells us that in his faith Abraham is a model of
how God deals with us. He told the
Romans “But the words ‘it was counted to him’ were not written for his
sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe
in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord,
who
was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”
Abraham had displayed great faith in
God’s promise to give him descendants. But then in the very next chapter we
learn that Sarah continued to be barren.
So she told Abraham to take her servant Hagar, and to have a child with
her. Sarah ignored God’s promise, and Abraham
went right along with it as he ignored the promise too. Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, and as always
happens when you ignore God’s word, there were great hardships for
everyone. If you think back at your
life, you will find the same thing is true for you.
Finally, when Sarah had entered into
menopause and was no longer capable of having children God came to Abraham and
said, “I will surely return to you about this
time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” Sarah was listening
from behind the tent and laughed at the idea that she would have a child. Yahweh said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh and say,
‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too
hard for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, about
this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.”
As we learn about Abraham’s life, we
see failure to trust God and shocking sin. We are in the season of Advent
preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus the Christ – the Savior. The truth is that we see in Abraham, the very
same thing we see in ourselves – we see the reason that the Son of God had to
enter into our world as the Savior. We see sin.
We see that God worked through
sinners as he began to fulfill his promise to bring forth the Savior in whom
all nations – all sinners would be blessed.
We also see that God always remained in control, because nothing is
impossible for God. He worked a miracle
– he used the barren and dead womb of the elderly Sarah in order to give
Abraham a descendent; to give him Isaac.
And in this action we are reminded
that while God worked through the line of Abraham – through a bunch of sinners
- to bring forth the Savior, he gave us a sinless Savior. He did so by another miracle as he used the
womb of a young woman, Mary who was a virgin.
When Mary asked how she as a virgin was going to have a child, the angel
Gabriel answered, “The Holy Spirit
will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;
therefore the child to be born will be called holy--the Son of God.”
Conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary,
Jesus Chris was the sinless Son of God.
True God and true man, he came to be the Savior of sinners by dying for
us. And this returns us to Abraham one
last time. Yes, Abraham was a sinner. But Abraham was also a man of faith. In Genesis chapter twenty two Yahweh said to
Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the
land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains
of which I shall tell you.”
Abraham was faithful.
He was ready to obey God and sacrifice his only beloved son, when the
angel of God stopped him, and in his place a ram was provided as a sacrifice. Yet this event in the Old Testament points
forward to what God has done for us.
Born in Bethlehem, Jesus Christ grew up to be the sinless sacrifice for
us. God the Father offered his beloved only begotten Son in our place. He the sinless Son bore our sins – be became
sin for us – in order to win us forgiveness.
But as Yahweh told Abraham, “Is anything too
hard for the LORD?” And so on the third day God raised Jesus from the dead
as he defeated death. This is what God had done through the line of
Abraham. As the apostle Paul told
the Romans, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord
and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will
be saved.
For
with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses
and is saved.” This is how God has fulfilled his promise to Abraham: “and in
you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
No comments:
Post a Comment