WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Tonight we begin a new series that I'm very excited about. 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:09.000 It'll be about seven weeks on the life of Abraham. 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:17.000 Now I know we read from Genesis 3, but this is the setting that sets the stage for Abraham's story. 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000 So Abraham walks on and through the pages of Scripture like a giant. 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:27.000 He is one of the most important figures of the Christian faith. 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:32.000 The Bible talks about Abraham, it feels like on every page. 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:37.000 The New Testament is concerned especially with who are Abraham's descendants. 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:42.000 Now of course many in Jesus' day are talking about who is physically descended from Abraham, 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:49.000 but Jesus and his apostles are concerned with who is spiritually descended from Abraham. 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:54.000 Christians are at least spiritually the ones who are the true descendants of Abraham. 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:01.000 It's those who have faith, because of course Abraham was the man of faith. 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:07.000 He's a brilliant example of what it means to live by faith, but he's more than just an example. 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:11.000 It's not just a good example. 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:16.000 Abraham's story is actually our origin story. 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:21.000 In fact, it's the sort of origin story that if you don't get your mind around it, 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:28.000 you'll miss so much of the richness of your own story and of the Gospel itself. 00:01:28.000 --> 00:01:33.000 So the story of Abraham bursts out of Genesis chapter 12. 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:37.000 It's absolutely a blaze with hope. It's a marvelous story. 00:01:37.000 --> 00:01:41.000 But before we can understand the beauty of this new hope, 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:47.000 we have to understand the darkness of the despair that precedes it. 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:53.000 So we're going to read Genesis chapter 11 verses 27 to 32, 00:01:53.000 --> 00:02:01.000 and this will be the text that our sermon today is anchored out of. 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.000 Starting in verse 27. 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:08.000 Now these are the generations of Tara. 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:15.000 Tara fathered Abram, Nahor, and Huron, and Huron fathered Lot. 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:21.000 Huron died in the presence of his father Tara in the land of his kindred in Ur of the Chaldeans. 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:24.000 And Abram and Nahor took wives. 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:29.000 The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife Milka, 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:32.000 the daughter of Huron, the father of Milka, and Iska. 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:37.000 Now Sarai was barren. She had no child. 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:42.000 Tara took Abram his son and Lot the son of Huron, his grandson, 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:46.000 and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:51.000 and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan. 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:55.000 But when they came to Heron, they settled there. 00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:03.000 The days of Tara were 205 years, and Tara died in Heron. 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:06.000 Ten times in the book of Genesis we find the phrase, 00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:10.000 now these are the generations of so and so. 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:14.000 This is not like a family tree from Ancestry.com. 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:18.000 It's something like it, but it's much more than that. 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:26.000 When it talks about the generations in the book of Genesis that marks important divisions in the story, 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:31.000 these generations direct our attention to what we need to focus on. 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:36.000 What we need to focus on next, it's like the changing of a scene in a movie, 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:43.000 with a scene shifts to an entirely new location, and you get a new setting and you get new characters. 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:49.000 Now in this particular chunk of the story, this generation section is quite short, 00:03:49.000 --> 00:03:55.000 and it just goes from Tara to his death, mapping out his children and grandchildren. 00:03:55.000 --> 00:04:00.000 But the very center of this narrative is the thing that everything is pointing to, 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:05.000 and it's the fact that Sarai is barren. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:07.000 Barrenness is the backdrop. 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:13.000 Barrenness is the setting to this whole story, to the whole story of Abraham. 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:15.000 We need to understand that. 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:20.000 But this story and the emphasis on Sarai's barrenness doesn't come in a vacuum. 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:26.000 It flows out of and develops from everything that came before it. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:30.000 So we're going to reflect back on what Thomas read for us from Genesis 3 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:36.000 and kind of think through Genesis 3 and 4 and down the line up to Genesis 11 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:40.000 and kind of a fly by, if you will. 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:45.000 So in Genesis 3, of course, God has put Adam and Eve in a garden, 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:48.000 and he's given them access to the tree of life for eternal life, 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:52.000 and he's also placed there the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 00:04:52.000 --> 00:04:56.000 and he's commanded them to not eat from that one tree. 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:02.000 Of course, they do eat from it, and they're tempted to this sin by the serpent. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:10.000 Now when God comes and discovers this, in verse 14, you can look at it if you have your Bible, 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:15.000 after sinning, God doesn't begin by addressing Adam and Eve. 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:18.000 He addresses the serpent. 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:23.000 He says, serpent, because you have done this, 00:05:23.000 --> 00:05:26.000 and he doesn't curse Adam and Eve. 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:30.000 He does tell them eventually what the consequences of their actions will be, 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:34.000 but he curses the serpent. 00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:39.000 Now we need to notice something before we talk about the next verse in 15, 00:05:39.000 --> 00:05:42.000 that in many of our translations it's going to say offspring, 00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:45.000 and of course it is talking about the offspring. 00:05:45.000 --> 00:05:50.000 Now the literal word behind that is most directly just seed. 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:54.000 I'll probably say that a lot, it's hard to get my mind out of thinking of it as seed, 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:58.000 because I've read it that way for so long, but it's a very valuable thing to understand. 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:05.000 Now just like the English word seed, the Hebrew word for seed has three different kind of meanings. 00:06:05.000 --> 00:06:10.000 It can mean one literal seed that you would plant an apple seed and get an apple tree. 00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:15.000 Seed can also mean plural seeds at the same time, like I was sowing seed, 00:06:15.000 --> 00:06:18.000 but seed can also mean offspring. 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:22.000 Now of course the author uses all three of those meanings, 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:28.000 and he plays with them and weaves together some incredible kind of narrative intricacies 00:06:28.000 --> 00:06:33.000 that are exciting but also meaningful. 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:38.000 So in verse 15 he says there's going to be enmity between the offspring 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:43.000 or the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:50.000 What this is pointing to is that all humanity ultimately is going to fit into categories. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:54.000 Category one is the offspring of the serpent. 00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:59.000 It's those who submit their lives and their purposes to the evil one. 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:05.000 Category two are the ones who submit their lives and purpose to God. 00:07:05.000 --> 00:07:10.000 There is no morally neutral gray middle zone. 00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:12.000 We are not our own masters. 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:17.000 Jesus actually makes this point in the Gospel according to John chapter 8 verse 44. 00:07:17.000 --> 00:07:19.000 I'll read it for you. 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:23.000 He says you are, and he's talking to the Pharisees, 00:07:23.000 --> 00:07:28.000 who are proud of their ancestry pointing back to Abraham. 00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:32.000 Jesus says you are of your father, the devil, 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.000 and your will is to do your father's desires. 00:07:35.000 --> 00:07:41.000 He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. 00:07:41.000 --> 00:07:47.000 When he lies, he speaks out of his own character for he is a liar and the father of lies. 00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:50.000 But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:52.000 Which one of you can fix me of sin? 00:07:52.000 --> 00:07:55.000 If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? 00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:59.000 Whoever is of God hears the words of God. 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:05.000 The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God. 00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:09.000 So we find that here in Genesis 3, 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:13.000 we are setting the stage for us for understanding the rest of the Bible 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:18.000 and frankly the rest of history in these categories of two seeds, 00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:23.000 two spiritual ancestries, so to speak. 00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:27.000 But of course after this grave error in Genesis 3, 00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:32.000 Adam and Eve throw away God's reign and rule and choose their own path, 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:34.000 ultimately the path of the serpent, 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:37.000 God doesn't just throw up his hands in exasperation. 00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:38.000 He doesn't give up. 00:08:38.000 --> 00:08:41.000 This book is always a book of hope. 00:08:41.000 --> 00:08:44.000 And the rest of the Bible, this whole story, 00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:49.000 it flows out of this moment, out of this promise that a seed will come, 00:08:49.000 --> 00:08:52.000 a seed of the woman, an offspring. 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:54.000 And he'll save us. 00:08:54.000 --> 00:09:01.000 He will come and he will destroy the very thing that has driven us away from God. 00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:06.000 It sets up longing for a savior. 00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:13.000 So of course when we read the story like a story 00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:16.000 and we kind of move on to the next portion of the story, 00:09:16.000 --> 00:09:21.000 we're naturally set up then to start looking for this offspring. 00:09:21.000 --> 00:09:23.000 We're looking for the seed of the woman. 00:09:23.000 --> 00:09:27.000 We know, okay, God said there's going to be a seed born, 00:09:27.000 --> 00:09:30.000 an offspring who's going to crush the serpent. 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:34.000 That's what we want because the serpent's what caused all this problem in the first place. 00:09:34.000 --> 00:09:36.000 The serpent introduced the evil to us. 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:40.000 So if we can get rid of the serpent, that's what we need. 00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:43.000 So as we move through the story of Genesis, 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:50.000 it's from this place of longing, a place of expectation, looking for the savior. 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:53.000 But of course in the very next story in Genesis chapter 4, 00:09:53.000 --> 00:10:02.000 Adam and Eve, they have two children, two offspring, two seed, Cain and Abel. 00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:07.000 And Abel has favor with God and Cain does not. 00:10:07.000 --> 00:10:13.000 So we have a righteous one and what Cain does is he gets jealous and kills Abel. 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:21.000 And we find in the end of the chapter that Adam and Eve had likely set their hope on Abel as the righteous seed. 00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:25.000 They were thinking, here's two children, one of these surely will be the savior. 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:26.000 God promised. 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:29.000 He promised an offspring to save us. 00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:36.000 But he was crushed, Abel was crushed and didn't crush the serpent. 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:42.000 Now in chapter 4 of Genesis verse 25, Adam and Eve have a third son and they name him Seth. 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:44.000 Even the name basically just remains replacement. 00:10:44.000 --> 00:10:56.000 And it says quite specifically that God has appointed another seed in place of Abel who was crushed. 00:10:56.000 --> 00:11:00.000 But Seth isn't the one either. 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:03.000 And Seth fathers children and he dies. 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:05.000 And Seth's children, father children and they die. 00:11:05.000 --> 00:11:11.000 And the story goes on and on and on for hundreds and hundreds of years. 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:16.000 Generation after generation, we're looking for the seed who will save us. 00:11:16.000 --> 00:11:24.000 And finally we come to Noah and we think, oh, here's a righteous one amidst a world that's absolutely just terrible and wicked and horrible. 00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:26.000 There's one bright spot in it. 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:28.000 Surely Noah is the seed. 00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:36.000 And of course God judges the world with the flood and he wipes away all the filth and he preserves Noah and his family. 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:46.000 But when we come out the other side, we find that Noah has the same infection that Adam and Eve had and that Cain had. 00:11:46.000 --> 00:11:55.000 And he sins and he falls and he fails to be the seed who will crush the serpent. 00:11:55.000 --> 00:11:58.000 Another failure. 00:11:58.000 --> 00:12:06.000 Noah has three sons and one of those sons, Shem, is pointed to and we know that again by the genealogy. 00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:08.000 So now these are the generations. 00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:12.000 Earlier we find a section of these are the generations of Shem, Noah's son. 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:22.000 And it goes down the line and Shem's great, great, great, great, great, maybe great grandson is Tara, the father of Abram. 00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:24.000 Sidebar. 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:28.000 Abram later, his name will be changed to Abraham. 00:12:28.000 --> 00:12:31.000 It just means basically father and father of many respectively. 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:35.000 So don't get confused if we call him Abram from this text. 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:37.000 Later he will become Abraham. 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:48.000 But for generations and generations and generations from Adam to Tara, to Adam and Seth and Noah and Shem and Tara and all the dozens of people in between, 00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:52.000 we've been waiting for the seed to save us. 00:12:52.000 --> 00:12:56.000 And he hasn't come. 00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:58.000 So much longing. 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:03.000 But the story leaves us wanting and waiting. 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:14.000 I can't help but feeling that early readers maybe after every generational failure would have felt a lot like Jesus' disciples after the crucifixion. 00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:17.000 Well, we really thought he was the one. 00:13:17.000 --> 00:13:19.000 What now? 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:23.000 Is there any hope? 00:13:23.000 --> 00:13:32.000 At this point, it's interesting, if you check out the life spans in Genesis from Noah's great, Noah's grandfather I think is Methuselah. 00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:36.000 They lived over 900 years old, nearly a thousand years old. 00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:42.000 And from that point, if you were to chart out their life spans, they just plummet. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:48.000 They lived for 900 years and 800 and 600 and 500 and 400 all the way down. 00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:53.000 Humanity is careening toward extinction. 00:13:53.000 --> 00:14:02.000 And I have to wonder, if God hadn't stepped in in Genesis 12 with the story of Abraham, if God hadn't interceded in human history, 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:06.000 I wonder if we would have snuffed ourselves out. 00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:11.000 Wouldn't that be just like us? 00:14:11.000 --> 00:14:17.000 So we find that not only is there generation after generation of kind of disappointed hope, 00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:24.000 but it's actually been funneling down, it's been narrowing down where we should be looking for this seed to come from. 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:29.000 Because of course, by the time of Tara, there's many, many, many people on the earth. 00:14:29.000 --> 00:14:36.000 If we drew out Adam's family tree, it would look like the root system of a forest when we're all done, right? 00:14:36.000 --> 00:14:41.000 But we know that Eve's line, Adam and Eve kind of came down to Seth's line. 00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:46.000 And Seth had a bunch of sons, but out of Seth's descendants, it narrowed down to Noah's line. 00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:48.000 And from Noah's line down to Shem's line. 00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:52.000 And now, in Genesis 11, we find that it's in Tara's line. 00:14:52.000 --> 00:14:55.000 But what happens in Genesis 11? 00:14:55.000 --> 00:14:59.000 Tara's line hits a dead end. 00:14:59.000 --> 00:15:02.000 Sarah is barren. 00:15:02.000 --> 00:15:07.000 And the line stops here. 00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:10.000 Where is the hope for the seed now? 00:15:10.000 --> 00:15:15.000 Who will save humanity? 00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:17.000 Now we're going to go zoom back in. 00:15:17.000 --> 00:15:20.000 We've zoomed out and looked at Genesis 3 to 11. 00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:24.000 And now we're going to zoom back in to Genesis 11, 27 to 32. 00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:29.000 And we're going to look at two characters who've been introduced to us in this story. 00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:31.000 We'll get to Abram next week. 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:35.000 Today, we're going to look at Tara first. 00:15:35.000 --> 00:15:38.000 Tara, the pagan. 00:15:38.000 --> 00:15:41.000 Now this is the godly line of Seth. 00:15:41.000 --> 00:15:44.000 This is the godly line of Noah and Shem. 00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:47.000 But Tara, by the time we get down to him, 00:15:47.000 --> 00:15:51.000 he's steeped in paganism and idolatry. 00:15:51.000 --> 00:15:55.000 So Abram is born to Tara in Ur of the Chaldeans. 00:15:55.000 --> 00:15:59.000 And this is kind of just a hub, a center of pagan worship. 00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:01.000 It's basically Babylon. 00:16:01.000 --> 00:16:04.000 And later in this very passage, 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:08.000 Tara moves his family from Ur of the Chaldeans to Huron. 00:16:08.000 --> 00:16:14.000 And Huron is like the mecca for moon worship, 00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:17.000 for worshiping this moon god. 00:16:17.000 --> 00:16:22.000 And ancient readers would have picked up on it more quickly than we do. 00:16:22.000 --> 00:16:25.000 We need help getting there because it's not obvious to us. 00:16:25.000 --> 00:16:29.000 But even the names of Tara's children and all the female names, 00:16:29.000 --> 00:16:31.000 Sarai, Milka, Iska, 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:36.000 they're all named after kind of the mythological royal family of this moon god. 00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:43.000 God will call a worshiper for himself out of this family. 00:16:43.000 --> 00:16:48.000 But the family themselves are as far from God as you can get. 00:16:48.000 --> 00:16:51.000 Very pagan. 00:16:51.000 --> 00:16:54.000 Seth and Tara form these two dramatic bookends. 00:16:54.000 --> 00:16:57.000 Remember, Seth is the son, the third son of Adam. 00:16:57.000 --> 00:17:01.000 And Tara now is this kind of final descendant before Abraham. 00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:05.000 And in Seth's time, it says in the end of Genesis 4, 00:17:05.000 --> 00:17:09.000 in his days when they first began to call upon the name of the Lord, 00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:13.000 worship of God started then in earnest, 00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:16.000 in kind of a, with a fullness. 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:20.000 But by Tara's time, it was gone. 00:17:20.000 --> 00:17:25.000 And they're worshiping the moon. 00:17:25.000 --> 00:17:29.000 The light has gone out. 00:17:29.000 --> 00:17:30.000 What hope is there? 00:17:30.000 --> 00:17:34.000 It's dwindled to nothing. 00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:36.000 From Genesis 3 up until now, 00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:41.000 it's very important for us to see that when left to ourselves, 00:17:41.000 --> 00:17:44.000 we would never choose God. 00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:45.000 What hope is there for us? 00:17:45.000 --> 00:17:47.000 When left to ourselves, we never choose God. 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:51.000 That's why Jesus says in John 15, 16, 00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:56.000 you didn't choose me, I chose you. 00:17:56.000 --> 00:17:57.000 We didn't love God first. 00:17:57.000 --> 00:17:59.000 God loved us first. 00:17:59.000 --> 00:18:04.000 God had to come and seek us out because we weren't seeking Him at all. 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:08.000 We would never choose God if left to ourselves. 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:11.000 We're just like Tara's line and like Tara himself. 00:18:11.000 --> 00:18:15.000 You might say, isn't that just kind of depressing and guilt inducing? 00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:18.000 No, here's why this is so important. 00:18:18.000 --> 00:18:22.000 It's easy to love the lovable. 00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:28.000 But who could love the unlovable? 00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:34.000 Read Romans 5, 6 through 8. 00:18:34.000 --> 00:18:38.000 For while we were still weak at the right time, 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:41.000 Christ died for the ungodly. 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:43.000 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, 00:18:43.000 --> 00:18:46.000 though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. 00:18:46.000 --> 00:18:51.000 But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, 00:18:51.000 --> 00:18:55.000 Christ died for us. 00:18:55.000 --> 00:19:00.000 While we were still sinners, 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:03.000 He came and died for us. 00:19:03.000 --> 00:19:04.000 He pursued us. 00:19:04.000 --> 00:19:07.000 The love of God becomes more beautiful to us 00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:11.000 when we see that He desired us, when we were undesirable. 00:19:11.000 --> 00:19:14.000 He loved us when we were unlovable. 00:19:14.000 --> 00:19:20.000 He died for us when we were dead spiritually. 00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:25.000 The setting and backdrop to Abraham's story, 00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:28.000 this is the backdrop to our story, 00:19:28.000 --> 00:19:34.000 because we were far from God and had nothing to offer Him. 00:19:34.000 --> 00:19:37.000 And that's when He came and saved us. 00:19:37.000 --> 00:19:41.000 So that's Tara, the pagan, character number one. 00:19:41.000 --> 00:19:47.000 Character number two is Sarai, the baron wife. 00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:52.000 Now the Bible doesn't take baronness and miscarriage flippantly. 00:19:52.000 --> 00:19:55.000 Baronness is awful. 00:19:55.000 --> 00:19:59.000 It's horrid because it's a kind of a deadness 00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:05.000 in the very womb and cradle of life. 00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:10.000 In the biblical story, God uses baronness many times 00:20:10.000 --> 00:20:13.000 with many of the matriarchs of our faith in the Old Testament, 00:20:13.000 --> 00:20:15.000 and in the New. 00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:19.000 And He uses baronness not to cultivate a longing for a son, 00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:23.000 but He uses baronness to cultivate a longing for the son. 00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:30.000 In other words, Sarai wasn't baron to create a longing for Isaac. 00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:36.000 Sarai was baron to create a longing for God. 00:20:36.000 --> 00:20:41.000 Sarai, the baron wife, and Tara, the pagan father, 00:20:41.000 --> 00:20:48.000 this brokenness, sadness, despair, this rebellion, the sin, 00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:55.000 this is the backdrop for the explosive story of what God is about to do. 00:20:55.000 --> 00:20:59.000 Now, we're not going to really cover chapter 12 this week, 00:20:59.000 --> 00:21:02.000 but the first verse of chapter 12 starts with, 00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:08.000 Now the Lord said to Abram, God speaks. 00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:13.000 The beginning of chapter 11, humans are speaking a common language. 00:21:13.000 --> 00:21:18.000 They're using their language to unite themselves against God. 00:21:18.000 --> 00:21:21.000 That's building the tower of Babel. 00:21:21.000 --> 00:21:25.000 But the beginning of the next chapter, God speaks and uses language 00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:35.000 to unite humanity back to Himself through one family and one seed. 00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:38.000 Scholar Dane Ortland said, 00:21:38.000 --> 00:21:44.000 If the actions of Jesus are reflective of who He most deeply is, and they are, 00:21:44.000 --> 00:21:50.000 then we cannot avoid the conclusion that it is the very fallenness which He came to undo 00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:56.000 that is most irresistibly attractive to Him. 00:21:56.000 --> 00:22:01.000 That has always been true about God. 00:22:01.000 --> 00:22:08.000 So if the first eleven chapters of the Bible teach us anything about God, 00:22:08.000 --> 00:22:15.000 it's that God has moved to create life where there is nothing but deadness. 00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:22.000 God moves toward us in the very spot of our failure and our weakness. 00:22:22.000 --> 00:22:26.000 God loves His enemies even when they hate Him, 00:22:26.000 --> 00:22:33.000 and God pursues most vigorously those who are farthest from Him. 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:40.000 And it's when things are at their bleakest that God's power and love are most beautiful. 00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:49.000 It's like a star whose beauty is best seen against the backdrop of the darkest night sky. 00:22:49.000 --> 00:22:55.000 So from the setting of Abraham's story, we find that one note resounds like a clear bell, 00:22:55.000 --> 00:23:13.000 and it's that goodness and getting your life together are not prerequisites for God coming to you with His love, just the opposite. 00:23:13.000 --> 00:23:18.000 Jesus came not for the healthy, but for the sick. 00:23:18.000 --> 00:23:20.000 That's who He is. 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:26.000 We have to be open to saying, I didn't get this right, Lord, that I need a Savior. 00:23:26.000 --> 00:23:33.000 If we don't think we need a Savior, He can't save us. 00:23:33.000 --> 00:23:36.000 We have to let Him in. 00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:46.000 Praise God that He changes hearts and draws people to Himself even when they're farthest off. 00:23:46.000 --> 00:23:53.000 Jesus will not be the sort of sugar sprinkled on top of your life. 00:23:53.000 --> 00:23:57.000 Jesus will not be your sidekick. 00:23:57.000 --> 00:24:03.000 Jesus will not be your guru dispensing kind of bite-sized bits of wisdom. 00:24:03.000 --> 00:24:09.000 Jesus must be your Lord, and if you let Him, He'll save you. 00:24:09.000 --> 00:24:11.000 He'll draw near to you. 00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:30.000 And if death itself could not keep Jesus in the ground, then no spiritual deadness, no brokenness in or around you, can keep Him from drawing close to you right now. 00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:33.000 Let's pray. 00:24:33.000 --> 00:24:45.000 Our gracious God and Father, we thank you for moving toward us in the midst of our sin, in the midst of our darkness, in the midst of our pain. 00:24:45.000 --> 00:25:00.000 We thank you that even now, as we call on your name for salvation and we consider ourselves in Christ, we know our future is bright, but we look around at these dark circumstances, and we're tempted to despair. 00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:11.000 Father, we take hope, we take courage, we put steel in our spines from the truth that you've given us in your word. 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:31.000 We praise you, and we just collapse onto you and trust you in the name of Christ. Amen.