How do you feel about free offers? Do you snap them up or think they must be too good to be true?
Who likes to negotiate and barter?
What’s happening with Abram?
Abram has been promised by God that he will be blessed and that through him God’s promised blessing (Jesus) will come to all nations. For Abram, the immediate blessing means
- Place in God’s presence: God gives him a land to live in
- People: God promises many descendants
- Provision and protection. God will bless Abraham and curse his enemies.
How is Abram going to respond? Well, as we saw last week, Abram’s response is described as “faith.” Trusting God. But it doesn’t always work like that. As Sometimes Abram attempts to negotiate with God, in order to sort out the plan for himself. To make the promises happen.
An unfortunate detour to Egypt (Genesis 12:10-20)
Abram had no sooner arrived in the land when danger hit. There was a severe famine. Understandably perhaps Abram goes to find food. He heads down to Egypt. I say “understandably” because we can empathise but in fact it leads to trouble, Abram seems to have forgotten that God had promised, place/presence, people, provision and protection. So, instead of staying put where God had sent him to, he heads off on his own terms. Then he gets frightened. He worries that hat the Egyptians will take a shine to his wife, Sarai and so he comes up with a ruse. He gets her to pretend she is just his sister. It’s only a little lie, a half truth because they technically are related. However, the result is that when Pharoah falls for Sarai, Abraham is unable to protect her and she’s taken to the king’s harem. God intervenes with judgements and plagues. Abram has to own up.
Despite his failure, God still blesses Abram. We see something of grace here.
Splitting up (Genesis 13)
Now, when Abram returns to the land, he continues to do well and God blesses him with riches and herds. However, there now seems to be a space problem and so Abram suggests that his nephew Lot should go his own way to find his own pasture land. Lot sees the fertile plains around Sodom and Gomorrah and chooses them. This will lead to trouble for him. Abram goes the other way which means heading to more challenging, hilly terrain.
Abram is now trusting God and God repeats his promises to him again.
Notice that Abram is being challenged along all three lines.
- Will there be enough land. Will the place be enough for him?
- Will God provide the promised descendants? A people? This is the beginning of a narrowing down of the options. Sarai is barren but God makes it clear that the promise won’t be through relatives like Lot nor servants like Abram’s chief steward or Sarai’s slave girl Hagar
- Will God be able to provide in a land that looks challenging and difficult? Will God protect Abram? Will he even protect his family when they head off to dangerous places?
But notice that Abram calls on the name of the Lord. He expresses trust in the one who has made the promises (13:4). “LORD” is a reference to Yahweh, the God who is eternal, who makes promises (covenants”, who keeps them and who steps in tor rescue his people when in danger.
Here’s the question for us? Are we able to trust God in these things. Where do we struggle?
People
Can we trust God to bring people in to hear and respond to the good news? I know there have been challenging times for us as a church when we worried about if there would be enough of us here to keep going but God has answered prayers. However, we are desperately wanting to see people coming from outside of church backgrounds and put their trust in him.
Trusting God means praying and asking God to send people but it also means acting and sharing the good news with friends and family.
Provision and protection
Can we trust God to provide for and look after us and our families? This means having a healrthy attitude to work and to rest. It means being willing to work hard but also not allowing work to take over our lives.
Can we trust God with our families. This may be hard if they are heading off to school, work, away to University.
Place
How do we know if we are in the right place? How do we learn to be settled and content? This can apply to work, housing, church.
It’s helpful to remember that those three promises of Place/presence, People and Provision/Protection are actually fulfilled in Jesus. The promised blessing was actually the Gospel, the promised descendant was specifically Jesus and so place/presence actually means that we find our life, our everything in him and that he through the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in us.
The safest place to be is to stick close to Jesus, to be at the centre of his will. This means that our first priority is to be right with God, to have come to Jesus for forgiveness and it means a life where we seek to listen to the voice of Jesus -and obey it – all the time.
Conclusion
Take a moment to reflect and pray by yourself.
- What do you need to trust God for? What have you been negotiating on
- What does it mean to stick close to Jesus?
Faithroots 