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Fall Asleep to Abraham_s Journey _ The Promise God Made in the Dark · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: To night. You do not have to be further along
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  Speaker 1: than you are. Maybe you are lying here with something unfinished,
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  Speaker 1: sitting at the back of everything. Not a problem exactly,
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  Speaker 1: more like a question that has been following you for
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  Speaker 1: longer than you can remember. Whether the thing you are
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  Speaker 1: hoping for is still coming, whether the direction you have
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  Speaker 1: been moving is the right one, whether it is too
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  Speaker 1: late for the life that, somewhere deep down still feels
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  Speaker 1: like the one you were meant to live. Before we
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  Speaker 1: take another step, there is something worth knowing. The man
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  Speaker 1: this story is about was not chosen because he was ready.
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  Speaker 1: He was not young, he was not looking for a calling.
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  Speaker 1: He was living an ordinary life in a city that
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  Speaker 1: worshiped the moon. And one day a voice spoke that
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  Speaker 1: no one around him could hear. He did not ask
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  Speaker 1: where he was going. He simply went. And what grew
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  Speaker 1: from that one act of trust is still growing in
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  Speaker 1: the world to night. His name was Abraham, and from
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  Speaker 1: the first step he took out of everything familiar to
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  Speaker 1: the last breath he drew in a land he had
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  Speaker 1: walked for a century. His journey has never stopped. Speaking
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  Speaker 1: to night. Every mile of it will keep watch over
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  Speaker 1: your sleep. Chapter one the city of Fire. Close your
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  Speaker 1: eyes and let the world you know fall away, Let
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  Speaker 1: the sounds of to night dissolve, and in their place,
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  Speaker 1: let something older and stranger rise up, something that smells
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  Speaker 1: like river water and lamp oil and the dust of
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  Speaker 1: a city that believed for a very long time that
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  Speaker 1: it had figured out how the world worked. The city
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  Speaker 1: of Or sat on the western bank of the Euphrates River,
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  Speaker 1: in the region we now call southern Iraq in the
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  Speaker 1: time of Abram, which historians play somewhere in the range
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  Speaker 1: of two thousand to eighteen hundred years before the birth
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  Speaker 1: of Christ. Or was not a small settlement at the
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  Speaker 1: edge of the known world. It was one of the
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  Speaker 1: most sophisticated cities on earth. Scholars who have studied its
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  Speaker 1: excavated remains describe a city of somewhere between fifty thousand
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  Speaker 1: and sixty five thousand people, schools and libraries and courts
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  Speaker 1: of law, houses of fired brick with indoor staircases, merchants
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  Speaker 1: keeping careful financial records on clay tablets, craftsmen producing jewelry
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  Speaker 1: from gold and lapis lazuli so precise and beautiful it
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  Speaker 1: still takes the breath away when we see it behind
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  Speaker 1: museum glass to day. This is where Abram was born,
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  Speaker 1: not in a tent, not in a simple pastoral village,
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  Speaker 1: in a city, a wealthy, educated, cosmopolitan city that knew
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  Speaker 1: exactly what it was and was comfortable with the knowledge.
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  Speaker 1: And at the center of that city, rising above every
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  Speaker 1: rooftop like a stepped mountain of perfectly fitted brick, stood
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  Speaker 1: the great ziggurat of or temple, so massive it could
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  Speaker 1: be seen from miles across the flat Mesopotamian plain, and
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  Speaker 1: in the shrine at its summit, accessible only to the
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  Speaker 1: highest priests, lived the god the people of Ur loved most.
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  Speaker 1: His name was Nana, the moon God. Every night the
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  Speaker 1: people of r looked up and saw their God moving,
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  Speaker 1: waxing and waning, growing full and then fading, governing the
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  Speaker 1: darkness with a silver light that made the shadows manageable.
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  Speaker 1: Nana ruled the calender, the tides of the great river,
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  Speaker 1: the rhythms of planting and harvest. In the understanding of
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  Speaker 1: his worshippers, he stood between the city and the chaos
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  Speaker 1: of the unlit dark. To worship Nana was not primitive superstition.
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  Speaker 1: It was the most rational response available to a person
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  Speaker 1: living in Ur. You watched the sky, you observed what
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  Speaker 1: the moon did to the river and the soil. You
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  Speaker 1: built it a house worthy of a god. You made
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  Speaker 1: your offerings, you insured its favor. This was the world
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  Speaker 1: Abram was born into. And here is the detail that
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  Speaker 1: most people pass over when they begin the story of Abraham,
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  Speaker 1: but which changes everything about how the story is heard.
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  Speaker 1: Abram's father was a man named Terra, and according to
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  Speaker 1: the Book of Joshua, Terror served other gods, not the
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  Speaker 1: God who would later speak to Abram, the gods of
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  Speaker 1: the city, the gods passed down through the generations, the
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  Speaker 1: gods that every one around him had always worshiped. Abram
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  Speaker 1: did not grow up in a household of prepared faith.
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  Speaker 1: He grew up in a household pointed toward the zigarat.
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  Speaker 1: This matters because when God eventually speaks to Abram, he
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  Speaker 1: is not speaking to a man who has spent years
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  Speaker 1: positioning himself to receive a calling. He is not speaking
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  Speaker 1: to a spiritual seeker who has exhausted every other option
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  Speaker 1: and is finally ready. He is speaking to a man
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  Speaker 1: from a moon god's city with a moon god family,
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  Speaker 1: who had no particular reason to be listening. For a
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  Speaker 1: different voice Grace in the story of Abraham does not
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  Speaker 1: begin with a prepared heart. It begins in a city
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  Speaker 1: of idols, with an ordinary man, and it works entirely
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  Speaker 1: from the outside inn. Before the voice comes to Abram,
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  Speaker 1: something quieter happens first, something the text records in only
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  Speaker 1: a few verses, but which carries a weight that stays
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  Speaker 1: with you if you sit with it long enough. Terra,
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  Speaker 1: Abram's father, decides to leave Ur. We are not told why.
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  Speaker 1: No reason is given. The text simply says that Terra
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  Speaker 1: took his son Abram, and his grandson Lot and his
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  Speaker 1: daughter in law SARAHI, and they set out together from
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  Speaker 1: Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of
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  Speaker 1: Canaan Kannn, the same destination God would later give to
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  Speaker 1: Abram as a command. Terra aimed at Kannan, and he
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  Speaker 1: never arrived. They came to a city co called Haran,
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  Speaker 1: roughly half way between Uor and Canaan, in the region
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  Speaker 1: we now call southern Turkey, and there they settled. The
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  Speaker 1: text gives no explanation, no moment of decision recorded, just
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  Speaker 1: the fact of stopping and staying. And then, at the
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  Speaker 1: age of two hundred and five years Terra died in Haran.
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  Speaker 1: A man sets out toward a destination and stops half
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  Speaker 1: way there. He builds something comfortable in the place that
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  Speaker 1: was meant to be a waypoint. The destination becomes a memory.
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  Speaker 1: The memory becomes something no one mentions any more. Most
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  Speaker 1: of us have lived in Haran. We have set out
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  Speaker 1: toward something real. We have left something behind to do it.
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  Speaker 1: And then at a point we did not quite decide on,
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  Speaker 1: we stopped. And the years passed, and the thing we
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  Speaker 1: were moving toward became the thing we used to talk about.
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  Speaker 1: Terra's story ends in Haran, but in Haran, in a
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  Speaker 1: house in the aftermath of his father's death, in the
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  Speaker 1: particular silence that settles when one generation ends and the
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  Speaker 1: next has not yet found its direction, something is about
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  Speaker 1: to begin. For Abram. The ziggurat still stands above the
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  Speaker 1: river in Uh. The priests still make the morning clime.
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  Speaker 1: The moon still moves across the sky, beautiful and indifferent,
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  Speaker 1: governing the nights of everyone who has never heard anything different.
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  Speaker 1: But the voice is very close now, and the first
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  Speaker 1: word it will speak is a name. There are certain
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  Speaker 1: names that land differently when the right voice says them.
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  Speaker 1: Abram is about to discover why. Chapter two, The Voice
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  Speaker 1: in the Night. There are moments that divide a life
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  Speaker 1: cleanly into before and after. Not the moments written on
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  Speaker 1: the calendar, not the graduations and the plan transitions. The
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  Speaker 1: other kind, the ones that arrive without announcement in the
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  Speaker 1: middle of an ordinary day, and when they pass, the
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  Speaker 1: person you were before them is simply gone. For Abram,
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  Speaker 1: that moment came in Haran. The text of Genesis, chapter
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  Speaker 1: twelve opens with four words that would set in motion
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  Speaker 1: a chain of events whose reach is still being measured now.
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  Speaker 1: The Lord said, not suggested, not impressed, gradually upon a
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  Speaker 1: prepared mind, said addressed directly and personally and without ambiguity,
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  Speaker 1: to one specific man in one specific city, in the
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  Speaker 1: quiet of a life that had not asked for this.
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  Speaker 1: And what God said was not a theology lecture, or
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  Speaker 1: a doctrinal framework, or a list of conditions to be met.
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  Speaker 1: It was something more personal than any of those things,
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  Speaker 1: and more demanding. A command and then a promise. The
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  Speaker 1: command came first, go from your country and your kindred
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  Speaker 1: and your father's house to the land that I will
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  Speaker 1: show you. Let each phrase arrive on its own your country,
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  Speaker 1: the land that shape the way you see everything, the
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  Speaker 1: roads whose turns you know before you reach them, The
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  Speaker 1: landscape that has been the background of your entire life.
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  Speaker 1: Leave it. Your kindred, your extended family and clan, which
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  Speaker 1: in the ancient world were not merely relationships, but the
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  Speaker 1: structure of survival itself. In a time without institutions or
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  Speaker 1: safety nets. Your kindred were who you called when everything
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  Speaker 1: else collapsed. They were the net work that stood between
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  Speaker 1: you and the uncertainty of the open world. Leave them.
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  Speaker 1: Your father's house, the smallest and most intimate circle, the
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  Speaker 1: people who know your name the way no one else does,
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  Speaker 1: the walls that hold your first memories. Leave it and
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  Speaker 1: go to the land that I will show you, Not
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  Speaker 1: the land I am showing you now, not the land
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  Speaker 1: I will describe so you can make an informed decision.
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  Speaker 1: The land that I will show you future tense, the
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  Speaker 1: address not yet given. We are accustomed to gathering information
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  Speaker 1: before we move. We research and weigh and ask the
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  Speaker 1: reasonable questions. This is not a bad habit, It is
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  Speaker 1: a sensible one. It is what careful people do before
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  Speaker 1: dismantling everything they have built. Abram did not get to
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  Speaker 1: do it, or perhaps more Honestly, Abram chose not to
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  Speaker 1: because the voice was clear enough, and something in him
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  Speaker 1: recognized in the way you sometimes recognize a truth before
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  Speaker 1: you have the language for it, that this was not
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  Speaker 1: a moment for gathering more information. It was a moment
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  Speaker 1: for moving here. I want to give you something. The
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  Speaker 1: English translation does not fully carry in the original Hebrew.
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  Speaker 1: The command God gives Abram is not simply go. The
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew is lech lecha two words. Lech means go, but
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  Speaker 1: lecha is a particle that turns the action back toward
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  Speaker 1: the self. Some in the Rabbinical tradition have understood lech
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  Speaker 1: lecha to carry the sense of go to yourself, suggesting
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  Speaker 1: that the journey outward and the journey inward were, in
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  Speaker 1: Abram's case, the same journey that the man who walked
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  Speaker 1: out of Haran would, in the walking become the man
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  Speaker 1: the promise was spoken to. This reading is not without
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  Speaker 1: debate among scholars, but the story itself seems to confirm it.
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  Speaker 1: The Abram who left Haran and the Abraham who descended
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  Speaker 1: from Mariah were not the same person. The road made him,
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  Speaker 1: and the road began with this command. After the command
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  Speaker 1: came the promise, I will make of you a great nation,
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  Speaker 1: and I will bless you and make your name great,
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  Speaker 1: so that you will be a blessing. I will bless
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  Speaker 1: those who bless you, and him who dishonors you, I
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  Speaker 1: will curse, and in you all the families of the
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  Speaker 1: earth shall be blessedest. These were not modest words. They
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  Speaker 1: made no sense against the backdrop of Abram's actual circumstances.
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  Speaker 1: A man with no children, a wife who could not conceive,
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  Speaker 1: a command to go somewhere unnamed, and through this one
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  Speaker 1: man the blessing would reach every family on earth. The
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  Speaker 1: gap between the promise and the reality was enormous, and
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  Speaker 1: into that gap Abram had to place his trust. The
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  Speaker 1: next verse is one of the most quietly powerful sentences
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  Speaker 1: in all of Scripture. So Abram went three words, no
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  Speaker 1: deliberation recorded, no argument or negotiation. He was seventy five
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  Speaker 1: years old when he departed from Haran. Seventy five, not
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  Speaker 1: a young man with decades ahead and nothing to lose,
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  Speaker 1: A man in the final season of life, by any
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  Speaker 1: ancient reckoning, a man who had every justification to stay,
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  Speaker 1: to let the road ahead belong to some one younger
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  Speaker 1: and less established he was seventy five years old, and
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  Speaker 1: he went. He took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his nephew,
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  Speaker 1: and all the possessions they had gathered, and all the
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  Speaker 1: people who had joined them in Haran, and he set
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  Speaker 1: out for the land of Canaan. No map, no description
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  Speaker 1: of the destination, no guarantee of what would meet him
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  Speaker 1: when he arrived. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews,
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  Speaker 1: looking back across roughly two thousand years, gives the simplest
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  Speaker 1: and most honest account of what Abram did by faith.
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  Speaker 1: Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to
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  Speaker 1: a place that he was to receive as an inheritance,
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  Speaker 1: and he went out not knowing where he was going,
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  Speaker 1: not knowing where he was going. This is presented not
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  Speaker 1: as a failure of information, but as the very definition
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  Speaker 1: of faith. Faith is not the absence of uncertainty. It
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  Speaker 1: is the willingness to move forward in its presence, not
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  Speaker 1: waiting until every question has been answered, taking the first
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  Speaker 1: step while the answers are still on their way, because
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  Speaker 1: the one calling is more trustworthy than your ability to
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  Speaker 1: calculate the outcome. Abram did not have a map. He
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  Speaker 1: had a voice, and he decided the voice was enough.
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  Speaker 1: Let that land quietly for a moment. Is there something
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  Speaker 1: in your life right now that you sense you are
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  Speaker 1: supposed to move toward, but have not yet moved because
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  Speaker 1: the road ahead is not clear enough, a direction you
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  Speaker 1: have felt the pull of, but not followed because the
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  Speaker 1: destination has not been sufficiently described. Abram went at seventy five.
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  Speaker 1: He went without certainty. He went not knowing where he
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  Speaker 1: was going, And the story that began with his going
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  Speaker 1: is still unfolding in the world tonight. So Abram went
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  Speaker 1: three words that changed everything. Chapter three. The Long Road
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  Speaker 1: to Canaan. Six hundred miles is a long way to
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  Speaker 1: walk when you do not know exactly where you are going,
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  Speaker 1: not the abstracted distance of a line on a map,
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  Speaker 1: the actual physical weight of it. The sun rising on
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  Speaker 1: your left as you move south and west, the slow,
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  Speaker 1: patient rhythm of live stock moving at their own pace.
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  Speaker 1: The camps made and broken and made again, week after week,
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  Speaker 1: through changing terrain and uncertain weather. For months. Abram was
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  Speaker 1: seventy five, Sarai was sixty five, and they were walking
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  Speaker 1: six hundred miles toward a place described only as the land.
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  Speaker 1: I will show you there are moments in this story
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  Speaker 1: where we need to stop rushing and simply sit with
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  Speaker 1: the strangeness of what is being described. The real journey
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  Speaker 1: was slow. It was physically hard. The two people at
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  Speaker 1: its center were old, and nobody along the road knew
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  Speaker 1: who they were or what they were carrying. They traveled
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  Speaker 1: from Haran down through the region we now call Syria,
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  Speaker 1: following the ark of the Fertile Crescent, southward and west,
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  Speaker 1: through Damascus, across the Jordan River, and finally into the
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  Speaker 1: land of Canaan. And when they arrived, God appeared to
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  Speaker 1: Abram again. At a place called Shechem, at the oak
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  Speaker 1: of Morey, the Lord appeared and said, simply, to your offspring,
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  Speaker 1: I will give this land seven words. But those seven
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  Speaker 1: words did something essential. They took the promise made in
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  Speaker 1: the open air of Haron and planted it in specific soil.
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  Speaker 1: They gave the future an address, not a general direction.
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  Speaker 1: This land the exact ground you are standing on right now.
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  Speaker 1: And Abram built an altar there. Then he moved on
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  Speaker 1: to the hill country east of Bethel and built another
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  Speaker 1: altar and called on the name of the Lord. Notice
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  Speaker 1: the pattern. Everywhere Abram stops in this land, he does
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  Speaker 1: not yet own, among people who do not know him,
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  Speaker 1: he builds something that makes a quiet declaration, I was here.
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  Speaker 1: The God who called me is real, and I am
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  Speaker 1: intrusting the rest to him. The altars are not monuments
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  Speaker 1: to his faith. They are more honest than that. They
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  Speaker 1: are the repeated acts of a man choosing, at each
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  Speaker 1: stopping place to anchor himself to something he cannot yet
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  Speaker 1: see fulfilled. Not once, not at the beginning, and then
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  Speaker 1: never again. Every time he stops, every time, and then
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  Speaker 1: the land fails him. A famine came to Canaan. The
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  Speaker 1: promised land could not feed him. The Bible does not
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  Speaker 1: explain this. It does not tell us what Abram was
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  Speaker 1: supposed to learn from it, or why God allowed it,
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  Speaker 1: or how long Abram prayed before deciding to move. It
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  Speaker 1: simply records the fact there was a famine in the land,
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  Speaker 1: and Abram went down to Egypt. He left the Promised
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  Speaker 1: Land before he had fully arrived in it, and in
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  Speaker 1: Egypt some thing happens that the story does not soften
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  Speaker 1: or explain away. As they approached Egypt, Abram turned to
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  Speaker 1: SARAHI and said, I know that you are a woman
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  Speaker 1: beautiful in appearance and when the Egyptians see you, they
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  Speaker 1: will kill me and let you live. So tell them
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  Speaker 1: you are my sister, that it may go well with
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  Speaker 1: me because of you. He asked her to lie to
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  Speaker 1: protect him. When the Egyptian officials saw Sarah, they brought
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  Speaker 1: her to Pharaoh's household, and Abram received sheep and oxen
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  Speaker 1: and servants and camels on her account. The man who
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  Speaker 1: walked out of Harun in obedience to a voice was
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  Speaker 1: now profiting from his wife's captivity. The Bible does not
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  Speaker 1: give him a speech of explanation. It does not render
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  Speaker 1: his internal struggle in sympathetic prose. It records what happened
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  Speaker 1: with the same plainness it records everything else. This is
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  Speaker 1: one of the things I trust most about the way
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  Speaker 1: Scripture tells its stories. It does not protect its people
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  Speaker 1: from their own failures. It shows them as they actually were,
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  Speaker 1: which means that when it shows them at their best,
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  Speaker 1: we can believe that too. But God did not leave
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  Speaker 1: Sarai in Pharaoh's house. The Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his
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  Speaker 1: household with great plagues because of Sarah. Fhaeaoh called Abram
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  Speaker 1: in and said, what is this you have done to me?
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  Speaker 1: Why did you not tell me she was your wife,
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  Speaker 1: Take her and go. And so Abram left Egypt with
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  Speaker 1: SARAHI and with everything he had received. He went back
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  Speaker 1: to Canaan, back to the hill country between Bethel and Aye,
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  Speaker 1: back to the place of the altar, and he called
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  Speaker 1: on the name of the Lord. He came back to
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  Speaker 1: the altar, not to a new altar in a new
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  Speaker 1: location where the old failure was not known, to the
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  Speaker 1: same one, the altar already standing in the place of
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  Speaker 1: the original promise, as if to say, I know what
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  Speaker 1: happened in Egypt, I know what I did, and I
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  Speaker 1: I know where I need to come back to. The
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  Speaker 1: altar does not move when we do. That is the
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  Speaker 1: quiet truth at the center of this chapter. Grace does
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  Speaker 1: not relocate itself to a more convenient position while we
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  Speaker 1: are wandering. It stays at the place of the promise.
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  Speaker 1: It waits at the altar we left, And when we
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  Speaker 1: find our way back, however long it took, and whatever
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  Speaker 1: road we took to get there, the altar is in
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  Speaker 1: the same place we left it. Abram came back to
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the altar. He stood again on the hill between Bethel
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: and Aye, older, now more honest, perhaps about the specific
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: geography of his own weakness. The man who had left
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: harm so cleanly had now seen what fear looked like
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: when it lived inside him. He came back anyway and
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: called on the name of the Lord. Let that be
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: the last thing that settles in you before we move on.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: You know what it is to set out towards something
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: and lose your footing. You know what it is to
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: look back at a choice you are not proud of
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: and wonder whether the grace available to you is large
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: enough to hold what you have done. The altar is
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: still there, It has not moved. Chapter four, Lot and
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: the Parting of Ways. There is a moment in every
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: significant relationship when the road quietly forks, it rarely announces itself.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: It comes the way a river divides around an island,
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: each current beginning its own direction, so gradually that from
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: a distance you cannot see exactly where the separation started.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: You only notice it clearly when you look ahead and
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: realize the two streams are no longer moving toward the
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: same place. For Abram and his nephew Lot, that moment
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: came on a hillside in Canaan. Lot had walked every
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: step of this road beside Abram from Ur to Haran,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: from Haran all the way down through Canaan and into
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: Egypt and back again. He had been there for the
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: famine and the failure and the return. He had watched
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: the altars go up at every stopping place, and heard
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: the name of the lord called on in the hill
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: country between Bethel and Aye. In many ways, he was
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: the closest thing to a son that Abram had given
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: that Abram had no sons of his own. But now
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: both of them were prosperous. Abram had flocks and herds
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: and silver and gold. Lot had accumulated wealth of his own.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: The land around them could not support both households moving
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: in the same direction. The herdsmen of Abram and the
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: herdsman of Lot began to quarrel, and Abram did something
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: that reveals the person he is becoming. He went to Lot.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: He initiated the conversation, and what he said was not
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: what the customs of the ancient world would have required
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: or even permitted. Let there be no strife between you
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsman, for
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand,
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: then I will go to the right, or if you
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: take the right hand, then I will go to the left.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: The elder had the right of first choice. This was
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: not a cultural nicety. It was the binding structure that
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: ordered ancient relationships and resources. Abram had age and authority
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: and every tradition standing behind him. He could have looked
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: out across the land and claimed the best portion without
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: apology or explanation. Instead, he said, you choose first. This
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: is a man who has begun to understand where his
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: security actually comes from, not from the quality of the
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: land he selects, not from the shrewdness of his negotiations.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: His future rests on a promise, and the promise did
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: not say anything about which valley he needed to claim.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: Lot lifted up his eyes and looked, and he saw
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: the Jordan Valley stretching out to the east, well watered everywhere,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: lush and green and abundantly productive, the best land visible
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: from where they were standing. Lot chose it, and he
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: moved his tents toward Sodom. The text adds a single line, quietly,
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: almost in passing, The men of Sodom were wicked, great
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: sinners against the lord. Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: He did not move inside the city immediately, he settled
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: in the direction of it. But direction is not a
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: neutral thing. The way you orient yourself when you put
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: down your stakes tells you something true about where you
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: intend to go. After Lot departed, God spoke to Abram again.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: Lift up your eyes and look from the place where
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: you are northward and southward, and eastward and westward. For
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: all the land that you see, I will give to
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: you and to your offspring. Forever. Lot had lifted his
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: eyes and chosen by what he could see. Now God
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: told Abram to lift it eyes and look at the
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: promise the same gesture, a completely different orientation. Time passed,
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: and then war came to the valley. A coalition of
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: four kings swept through the region and defeated the five
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: kings of the cities of the plain. They took the
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: possessions of Sodom and Gomorrah and departed, And among the
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: captives they took was Lot, who was living inside Sodom,
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: now no longer near by inside. The distance between the
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: direction we face and the place we eventually inhabit is
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: shorter than we usually see in the moment of choosing.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: When Abram heard that Lot had been taken, he armed
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: three hundred and eighteen trained men from his own household
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: and went after him. A night raid divided forces, the
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: enemy driven north, everything recovered, and Lot brought home. Then
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: on the road back, two very different men came out
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: to meet him. The first was Melchissen. The text introduces
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: him with a brevity that seems almost deliberate, as if
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: giving him too much description would miss the point of
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: him entirely. Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: He was Priest of God Most High, King of Salem,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: Priest of God most High. No genealogy, given, no explanation
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: of where he came from or how long he had
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: been there. He simply appears at the exact moment of
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: Abram's return from battle, with bread and wine and a blessing.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: He stood in the road with bread and wine in
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: his hands, and he blessed Abram, and Abram gave him
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: a tenth of everything without being asked, not a tenth
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: of some things. Everything Abram recognized in this man something
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: that required no explanation, something that the long road from
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: Er had perhaps been preparing him to recognize a holiness
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: that preceded the covenant, a priesthood that answered to a
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: name higher than any city. King David would write about
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: him centuries later, describing a coming king who would be
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: a priest forever after his order. The writer of Hebrews
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: would spend chapters trying to describe what his appearance meant,
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: ultimately concluding that some things in scripture are best understood
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: not by explaining them fully, but by following where they
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: point on this road, on this evening, Abram simply received
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: the blessing and gave the tenth. And then the king
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: of Sodom stepped forward with his own offer. Give me
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: the persons, He said, keep the goods for yourself. And
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: Abram said, no, I have lifted my hand to the
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: Lord God, most High, possessor of heaven and earth, that
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: I would not take a thread or a sandal strap,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: or anything that is yours, lest you should say I
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: have made Abram rich. He would not let the King
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: of Sodom write the story of his prosperity. The blessing
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: had come from somewhere else, and that somewhere else was
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: the only sort he was willing to name. Lot had
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: lifted his eyes and seen the best land. Abram had
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: looked at the best offer and seen through it. The
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: parting of ways between them was never really about pasture land.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: It was about what each man was looking at when
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: he made his choices. One man was learning slowly and imperfectly,
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: and with many detours to see with different eyes. The
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: other had oriented himself toward a city, and was moving
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: deeper into that orientation with every passing season. Be still
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: here for a moment, two men at a fork in
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: the road, one moving toward the brightest lights, one turning
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: away from the offer and walking back into the land
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: of a promise. He cannot yet hold. The direction we
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: face when we put down our stakes matters more than
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: we usually know. In the moment of facing it, Lot
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: pitched his tent toward Sodom. Abram built another altar, and
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: the voice was not finished. Chapter five, The Covenant in
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: the Dark. After these things, the word of the Lord
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: came to Abram in a vision. After these things, after
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Haran and the six hundred miles, and the altars on
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: the hillsides, after Egypt and the failure and the return,
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: after the parting from Lot and the battle of the Kings,
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: and the bread and wine of Melchizedek. In the quiet
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: that follows the end of a hard season, the word
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: of the Lord came, fear not, Abram, I am your shield.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Your reward shall be very great. And Abram answered not
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: with gratitude, not with a hymn, more a carefully managed
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: theological response, with something more honest than any of those things. O,
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: Lord God, what will you give me? For I continue childless,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: What will you give me? He is placing the gap
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: directly between himself and God. You said, great Nation, you said, offspring,
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: like the dust of the earth. I have been walking
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: this road for years. I have built the altars, I
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: have believed what you said. And I am still here,
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: still old, still without a child. What will you give me?
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: Hear the courage in those words. Most of us manage
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: what we bring to prayer. We offer the composed version
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: of our interior life, the one where we have already
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: resolved the tension and arrived at the right conclusion, the
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: one that sounds like faith, even when what is actually
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: present is something raw and less settled. Abram brought God
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: the unresolved version. He named the gap out loud. He
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: refused to pretend the distance between the promise and the
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: reality was not there, And he placed that unresolved gap
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: directly in front of the one who had made the
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: promise and waited. God did not rebuke him. God took
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: him outside. Look toward heaven, and number the stars. If
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: you are able to number them, so shall your offspring be.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Not a correction, not a reminder to be more patient
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: or more trusting. Just this. Come outside, look up, Try
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: to count them. The stars too many to hold in
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: the eye, the ones stretching past the edge of what
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: is visible, the ones burning before Abram was born, and
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: burning still long after every city he knew had returned
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: to dust. That many from this old man standing in
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: the dark with no children, asking hard questions in the dark.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: And Abram believed the Lord, and he counted it to
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: him as righteousness, not earned, counted credited to his account,
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: not because of ritual performance or moral achievement, or the
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: sustained consistency of his obedience, because he believed the Apostle Paul,
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: writing to the church in Rome roughly two thousand years
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: after this night would build the foundation of his entire
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: argument about faith. On this single verse. He would point
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: out that Abraham was counted righteous before circumcision existed, before
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: the Law of Moses existed, before any formal religious structure
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: had been established around the promise. The righteousness that mattered
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: was the one received by faith alone. It was always
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: from the very beginning about trust. But Abram was not finished.
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: O Lord God, how am I to know that I
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: shall possess it? He has just watched the full sky
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: be placed before him as a personal promise, and he
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: is asking for something more, not because he disbelieves, because
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: the human heart needs something to hold in its hands,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: not just in its mind. Because faith is not the
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: elimination of the need for assurance. It is what we
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: do with that need when it is present. And God
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: did something Abram could not have anticipated. God told him
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: to bring animals a heifer three years old, a female
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle, dove,
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: a young pigeon. Abram brought them. He cut the larger
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: animals in half and laid each half over against the other.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: The birds he did not cut, and he waited beside
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: what he had prepared. Birds of prey came down on
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: the carcasses. Abram drove them away. The afternoon heat settled
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: around him. He kept watch over the pieces as the
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: sun moved across the sky and began to descend. And
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: on Abram, and a great and dreadful darkness came over him.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: In that darkness, God gave him a vision of the future.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: The years his descendants would spend as slaves in a
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: foreign land, the judge coming on the nation that enslaved them,
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: their return to this land in the fourth generation. The
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: promise would not be quick or comfortable. Its ark would
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: extend far beyond the reach of any single life. Abram
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: would not live to see most of what was being
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: shown to him. He was being asked to trust a
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: story that would outlast him. Then the sun went down completely,
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: and it was dark. And behold a smoking firepot and
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: a flaming torch passed between the pieces. Stay here for
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: a moment, do not move past this image. In the
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: ancient Near East, the covenant ritual Abram had been preparing
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: was a recognized and binding form of agreement when two
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: parties entered into a solemn covenant. Both of them walked
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: together between the divided animals. The meaning was understood by
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: every one present. It was a way of saying, may
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: what has happened to these animals happen to me if
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: I break what I have sworn Here both parties walked through.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: The obligation was mutual. The risk was shared equally between them.
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: On this night, only one party moved through. The pieces
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, images that
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: appear throughout the Hebrew scriptures as signs of the presence
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: of God, the same fire that would lead Israel through
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: the wilderness, the same presence that would descend on the tabernacle,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: the same God. God walked through. Abram did not. Abram
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: was asleep. He was not a participant in the ceremony.
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: He was a witness to it. And what this means
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: is almost too large to hold in a single thought.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: In a covenant where both parties walk through, if either
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: one breaks the agreement, the consequences fall on the one
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: who broke it. When God walked through alone, he was
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: declaring in the most binding legal language the ancient world
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: possessed that this promise does not depend on Abram's faithfulness.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: It does not rest on Abram's consistency or obedience or
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: sustained moral achievement. If this covenant fails, the failure falls
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: on God alone. The promises held entirely by the one
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: who made it. This is not a footnote. This is
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: the heartbeat of the entire story. Not because Abram was
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: special enough to deserve a one sided promise, because God
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: is faithful enough to make one. Because the God who
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: spoke in Haran knew exactly how unreliable the human beings
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: receiving the promise would turn out to be, and staked
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: his own name on keeping it anyway. The fire walked
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: through the pieces in the dark, and Abram slept. He
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: received it in the deepest sleep of his life. He
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: did not earn it, or perform it, or hold himself
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: together long enough to deserve it. He asked hard questions
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: and watched the stars, and fell into a great darkness,
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: and received in that darkness the most unconditional promise ever
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: spoken over a human life. Bring the weight you are
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: carrying into this image. Now. The ways you have not
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: been the person the promise in you seem to point
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: toward the altars revisited and abandoned. The Egypt moments, the
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: long stretches of road where the voice seemed distant, and
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: you kept moving anyway, or stopped moving and are not
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: sure how to begin again. None of it changes what
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: was sealed in the dark that night. The promise does
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: not rest on your faithfulness. It rests on the one
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: who walked through the pieces alone. The fire has not
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: gone out. The covenant made in the dark is still standing.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: Sleep now, let the smoking firepot moving between the pieces
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: in the darkness be the last image before rest comes.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: The stars outside are still too many to count, and
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: every one of them is still burning. Chapter six, Hagar
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: and the godd who Sees. Ten years is a long
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: time to wait for a promise, not as a number
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: on a page, as a lived experience. Ten years of
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: waking up every morning in the same body, carrying the
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: same absence, holding the same hope that has not yet
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: become anything visible or touchable or real. Ten years of
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: watching the seasons turn and the faces around you age,
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: while the one thing you were promised remains exactly as
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: distant as the day the words were first spoken. SARAHI
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: had been waiting for ten years since Abram brought her
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: to Canaan, and she had not conceived. I want to
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: be careful here because the text is careful here. The
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: Bible does not present Sarah as a woman without faith.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: It does not position her as a cautionary tale or
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: assign her a villain's role in someone else's story. It
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: presents her as a woman in an impossible situation, looking
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: at the tools available to her and trying to find
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: a way through the tool available was a woman named Hagar.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: Hagar was Egyptian. She was Sarai's servant, most likely acquired
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: during the time in Egypt, which means she had already
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: been uprooted once before. This story finds her taken from
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: her home country and placed in service in a foreign household.
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: She had not chosen this. She had not arrived at
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: this life by any road she had selected. The structures
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: of the ancient world had placed her here, and she
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: had no recourse against them. Sarai came to Abram with
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: a proposal. Behold, now the Lord has prevented me from
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: bearing children. Go in to my servant. It may be
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: that I shall obtain children by her. This arrangement was
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: not unusual in the ancient Near East legal documents from
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: roughly the same era describe exactly this practice. A wife
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: who could not bear children could offer her servant as
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: a surrogate, and the child born would be legally recognized
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: as the wife's own. It was a known solution to
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: a known problem. But solutions that use people as instruments,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: even legal ones, even ones made in desperation, tend to
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: produce damage that the original plan did not account for.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: Abram agreed. He went in to Hagar, and Hagar conceived,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: And when Hagar saw that she had conceived, she looked
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: on her mistress with contempt. This is a deeply human moment.
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: Hagar had been given no voice in this arrangement. She
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: had been transferred from one person to another as a
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: means to an end. She was a woman with no
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: standing and no power, and no ability to refuse. And
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: then suddenly she had something Sirai did not have. She
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: was carrying a child, and something in her some entirely
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: understandable response to finally possessing something of her own in
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: a life that had given her almost nothing, shifted the
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: way she looked at the woman who owned her. She
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: should not have done it. It caused real harm. But
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: I do not read this with condemnation. I read it
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: as the response of a person who had been invisible
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: for a very long time and did not know what
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: to do with the moment. She was not Sarah dealt
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: harshly with her in return, and Hagar fled into the
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: wilderness alone, pregnant, with nothing but the road in front
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: of her and everything she was escaping behind her. She
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: was on the road back to Egypt, the road that
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: led toward the only place she had ever called home,
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: the only direction that made any sense to a woman
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: who had run out of options. And here is the
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: moment that still takes my breath away when I read
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: it slowly. The Angel of the Lord found her. Not Abram,
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: to whom God had been speaking throughout this whole journey,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: not Sarai, the matriarch of the Chosen household. The Angel
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: of the Lord went looking for Hagar, the Egyptian servant,
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: the woman with no covenant and no recorded promise, and
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: no claim on the attention of any one with any
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: power in her world, found her by a spring of
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: water in the wilderness, on the road to shore, the
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: road home. She was done, and the Angel asked her
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: two questions, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from?
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: And where are you going? Two questions past and future,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: both brought into focus at the exact moment when Hagar
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: had almost certainly stopped thinking about either one and was
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: simply moving, running, following the road away from the place
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: that had hurt her, toward the place that felt, in
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: memory at least like something safer. She answered the first question,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: I am fleeing from my mistress SARAHI. She did not
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: answer the second because she did not know. The angel
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: told her to go back, and then before she could
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: respond to that instruction, came something she could not have
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: been expecting. I will surely multiply your offspring so that
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: they cannot be numbered for multitude. The same language used
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: for Abram off spring beyond counting spoken over a pregnant
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: servant woman alone in a desert on the road away
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: from the only household that had a place for her,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: and the angel told her the name of the child
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: she was carrying. You shall call his name Ishmael. Because
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: the Lord has listened to your affliction. Ishmael. The name
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: means God hears, not God noted your situation for review.
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: Not God is aware of your general circumstances. God heard,
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: active present personal, your specific affliction in this specific desert,
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: at this specific moment, on this specific road. And then
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Hagard did something that no one else in this story
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: has done yet. She gave God a name. You are
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: a god of seeing, she said, And she called him
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: el Roy, the God who sees, She said. Truly, here
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: I have seen him who looks after me. Think carefully
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: about who is saying this. Not a patriarch, not a
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: priest trained in any formal tradition, not some one positioned
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: by birth or calling to receive a theological revelation. A
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: foreign servant woman, alone in a desert, pregnant, and without
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: a single structure of power standing in her favor. She
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: is the first person in this entire narrative to name
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: this particular truth about God, that he sees, that he
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: looks after, that he is present in the wilderness places
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: where no human eye would think to go searching. El
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: Roy the God who sees. The well where the angel
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: found her was named beer lahai Roi, the well of
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: the Living One who sees me, a name that outlasted
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: every empire that existed when Hagar first spoke it, a
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: name that has carried people through wilderness places across thousands
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: of years of human history, and it was first spoken
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: by a woman the world of her time would have
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: counted as invisible. Hagar went back. She returned to the
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: household that had hurt her, at the direction of a
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: God she had not grown up knowing, carrying a son
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: whose name meant that God had heard. Abram was eighty
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: six years old when Ishmael was born. Thirteen years would
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: pass before the story moved forward again in any significant way,
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: thirteen years during which Abram presumably understood Ishmael to be
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: the fulfillment of what had been promised, Thirteen years of
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: ordinary life stretching out beneath an extraordinary promise, the way
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: most of our lives actually look from the inside. God
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: was not done. He is never quite done when we
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: have settled into our own solution and decided that this
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: must be what the promise meant. But before we move on,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: stay here a moment longer with Hagar, with the spring
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: in the desert, with the two questions that found her
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: when she did not know she could be found. Where
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: have you come from? Where are you going? There? Is
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: some one listening to this tonight who is on the
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: road to somewhere that feels like a way, not running
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: towards something, running from something moving mostly on momentum, and
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: the animal instinct to put distance between yourself and the
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: place that hurt you. The Angel did not wait for
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: Hagar to find her way back to a better position
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: before he appeared. He did not require her to turn
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: around first, to demonstrate some minimum level of spiritual readiness
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: to prove she was worth the effort of finding. He
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: found her on the road, out in the middle of
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: the running, at the spring she had stopped at, by
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: chance or by exhaustion, Elroy, he has already found you rest.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: In that chapter seven, The Fire that Fell on Sodom,
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: there are conversations that change the shape of everything that
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: comes after them. Not arguments, not the ordinary back and
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: forth of people negotiating from competing interests. Something rarer and
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: stranger than either of those things. A conversation in which
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: one party is infinite and the other is not, and
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: the infinite one chooses to sit down in the dust
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: of a hot afternoon and speak as though there is
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: nowhere else to be and nothing more pressing than this Abraham,
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: as he is now named, was sitting at the entrance
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: of his tent in the heat of the day. When
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: he lifted up his eyes and saw three men standing
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: in front of him. He ran from the tent door
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: to meet them. He bowed himself to the earth. He
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: called for water and rest. He told Sarah to prepare bread.
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: He ran to the herd to select a car laugh,
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: and gave it to a servant to prepare quickly. He
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: brought curds and milk, and set the meal before them,
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: and stood near by while they ate. He did not
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: yet know who they were. As they ate, they asked him,
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: where is Sarah, your wife? She is in the tent,
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: he said, And the Lord said, I will surely return
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: to you about this time next year, and Sarah, your wife,
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: shall have a son. Sarah was listening at the tent
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: door behind him, and she laughed to herself, not out loud,
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: inside the private, involuntary laugh of a person who has
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: been waiting for something so long that the announcement of
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: it has traveled past hope and arrived at something closer
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: to absurdity. She thought, after I am worn out and
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: my lord is old, shall I have pleasure. She was
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: eighty nine years old, And the Lord said to Abraham,
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: why did Sarah laugh? He knew she was behind the
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: tent wall. He had not seen her face, but he
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: knew what was in the room. Is anything too hard
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: for the Lord? That question has been hovering over this
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: entire story since the voice first spoke in Haran, unasked,
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: but always present, Is anything too hard? A childless man
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: at seventy five, a famine in the Promised Land Egypt,
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: thirteen years of Ishmael as the assumed answer, And now
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: a laughing old woman standing behind a tent wall, thinking
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: she was alone with her doubt. Is anything too hard
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: for the Lord? Sarah said, I did not laugh. She
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: was frightened. But he said, no, you did laugh. And somehow,
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: in that correction there is more warmth than judgment, more
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: understanding than rebuke, as if the one holding the universe
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: in place has room in his attention for the private
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: laughter of one woman in one tent and considers it
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: worth addressing, not with punishment, but with something closer to this.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: I know what you did, I know why, and I
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: am telling you that the thing that made you laugh
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: is exactly what I am about to do. The men
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: rose and looked toward Sodom. Abraham walked with them a
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: portion of the road, and the Lord said, shall I
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: hide from Abraham what I am about to do? This
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: is remarkable. The God who is about to execute judgment
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: on an entire city pauses to consider whether to tell
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: Abraham first, And the reason given is the relationship itself.
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: I have chosen him. He is my friend. The same
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: God who walked alone through the Covenant pieces in the dark,
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: the same God who sent an angel to find a
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: servant woman at a desert spring, now stopping on a
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: road to share his plans with a friend before carrying
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: them out. The two other men walked on toward Sodom.
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: Abraham remained standing before the Lord, and Abraham drew near
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: and said, will you indeed sweep away the righteous with
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: the wicked? What follows is one of the most intimate
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: exchanges in all of Scripture. Abraham is not being clever,
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: He is not negotiating from self interest. He is standing
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: before God with genuine concern for people who are not him,
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: making an argument rooted in God's own character. Suppose there
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: are fifty righteous within the city, will you sweep away
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: the place for lack of fifty righteous. Far be it
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: from you to do such a thing. Shall not the
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: judge of all the earth do what is just? Not?
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: Asking for mercy is a favor, appealing to integrity, asking
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: God to be consistent with who God is. And God
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: received the argument, if I find fifty righteous in Sodom,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: I will spare the whole place for their sake. And
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: Abraham kept going. Suppose five of the fifty ath lacking,
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: then forty five, then forty, thirty, twenty, Then, oh, let
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: But this once, suppose ten are found there, for the
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: sake of ten, I will not destroy it. And the
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: Lord went his way, and Abraham returned to his place.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: Ten the city would stand for ten, There were not ten.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: The two angels arrived in Sodom at evening. Lot was
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: sitting at the city gate, and he saw them and
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: brought them urgently to his house, prepared a meal, urged
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: them strongly to stay inside, but before the night was over,
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: the men of the city surrounded the house. Their behavior
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: that night removed any ambiguity about the nature of the place.
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: Sodom was a city where the vulnerable, had no protection,
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: and human dignity carried no weight, and the most basic
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: obligations toward other people had been entirely abandoned. The angels
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: pulled Lot inside and struck the men at the door
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: with blindness. Then they spoke plainly, do you have any
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: one else here? Sons in law, sons daughters, get them out.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: We are about to destroy this place. Lot went to
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: his sons in law and said, up, get out of
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: this place. The lord is about to destroy the city.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: And they thought he was joking. They had built their
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: lives in Sodom, made their investments and their plans and
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: their futures dependent on a city they had decided was permanent.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: The idea that it could simply end, that the ground
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: under everything they had built could be gone by morning
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: was beyond what they could take. Seriously, they did not
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: leave at dawn. The angels urged Lot to hurry, take
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: your wife and your two daughters, or you will be
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: swept away. And the text says something that deserves to
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: be read Slowly. Lot hesitated after everything he had heard
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: and seen that night, after the angels had come to
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: his house and struck his neighbors blind and told him
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: in plain words, what was coming. He hesitated because leaving
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: the city you have made your home, even a city
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: you know is wrong, is harder in the actual moment
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: than it ever sounds in the abstract, because the familiar
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: is powerful even when it is harmful, Because the life
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: behind you is always more certain than the life you
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: are walking toward. The angel seized his hand and the
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: hand of his wife and his two daughters. The text says,
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: because the compassion of the Lord was upon him, they
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: brought him out and set him outside the city. Escape
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: for your life. Do not look back, do not stop
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: anywhere in the valley. And the Lord reigned on Sodom
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: and Gomorrah, sulfur and fire. He overthrew those cities and
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: all the valley, and all the inhabitants and everything that
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: grew on the ground. But Lot's wife looked back, and
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: she became a pillar of salt. I have thought about
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: this moment many times. The warning was precise and clear,
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: and the reason for it was real. And she looked
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: back anyway not, I think because she was wicked, Because
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: looking back at the life you are leaving is one
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: of the most human responses there is, Because what is
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: behind you is always more familiar than what is a head,
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: because it is very difficult to move fully away from
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: the world you built without one final look at what
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: it cost to leave. She looked back, and early in
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: the morning Abraham went to the place where he had
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: stood before the Lord. He looked out towards Sodom and Gomorrah,
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: and toward all the land of the valley, and he
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: saw the smoke rising from the land, like the smoke
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: of a furnace. He had argued down to ten, there
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: had not been ten. And now he stood in the
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: morning light and watched the smoke, and carried the particular
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: weight that belongs to people who have prayed with everything
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: they had, and watched the outcome arrive anyway, who pushed
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: as far as prayer could be pushed, who stood on
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: the hillside after and held what was left. He watched
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: the smoke. And then the text says one quiet thing.
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: When God destroyed the cities of the valley, God remembered
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: God remembered Abraham, not because the prayer had succeeded by
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: any external measure, not because the city was spared because
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: the friendship was real, and in the ruin of what
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: could not be saved, the person connected to the friend
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: of God was brought out by angels who took him
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: by the hand when his feet would not move. Sometimes
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: grace does not arrive as the answer we prayed for.
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it arrives as hands around your wrists when you
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: have run out of the ability to move yourself. Rest
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: here for a moment. If you have ever pushed your
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: prayer down to ten and stood in the morning with
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: the smak of what could not be saved rising on
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: the horizon, if you have done everything available to you
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: and the outcome came anyway, you are standing on the
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: same hillside. And the God who remembered Abraham in the
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: midst of the overthrow is the same God present in
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: the room where you are lying down to night. He
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: has not forgotten where you are. He never does. Chapter eight,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: The Sun of Laughter. There is a kind of joy
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: that arrives so late and so unexpectedly that it does
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: not feel like joy at first. It feels like vertigo,
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: like the disorientation of a person who has been carrying
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: something heavy for so long that when the weight finally lifts,
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: the body does not know how to stand without it.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: It feels like laughing when you meant to cry, or
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: crying when you meant to laugh, because the emotion that
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: arrives is too large and too sudden for any single expression,
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: and the heart genuinely does not know what to do
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: with it. This is the joy that came to Abraham
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: and Sarah. But before the laughter arrived, there was a
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: name change. And the name change matters more than it
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: might first appear. Abram had been Abram for ninety nine years.
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: The name was given in a city that worshiped the moon,
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: before any voice had spoken, before any altar had been
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: built in the soil of the promised land. Abram meant
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: exalted Father, a fener name, a family name. The kinder
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: household gives a son they are proud of. God came
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: to him when he was ninety nine years old and said,
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless.
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: And then he changed the name. No longer shall your
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham,
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: for I have made you the father of a multitude
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: of nations. Abraham, a name whose sound carries abundance inside it,
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: Father of many, not one nation, a multitude nassijuons plural
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: kingdoms from you. And then God changed Sarah's name. As
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: for Sarah, your wife, you shall not call her Sarah,
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: and give you a son. By her. She shall become nations.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: Kings of peoples shall come from her. Sarah. The name
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: means princess, not simply a woman in a tent at
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: the edge of a land. She had been promised for
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: a quarter century. A princess, the mother of nations, kings
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: from her body. In the ancient world, the changing of
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: a name was not a casual act. A name was
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: not merely a label. It carried identity at its deepest level,
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: described what a thing truly was beneath the surface of
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: its present circumstances. To change a name was to declare
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: a new reality, to speak into existence something not yet visible.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: God was naming Abraham, the father of nations, while Abraham
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: was ninety nine years old, with one son by a
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: servant woman and a wife who was eighty nine. He
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: was calling things that were not as though they were.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: And Abraham fell on his face and laughed, Not Sarah, Abraham.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: He fell in the posture of worship, and he laughed.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: The text shows us what was in his mind. Shall
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: a child be born to a man who is a
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: hundred years old, Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old,
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: bear a child? He was laughing at the arithmetic, at
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: the biology, at the straightforward physical impossibility of what was
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: being announced. And then he said something that shows us
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: exactly where the weight of all this was landing. Oh
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: that Ishmael might live before you. Eight words carrying thirteen
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: years inside them, thirteen years of watching a boy grow
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: from infant to young man, thirteen years of loving a
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: son he had not originally planned for, born of human
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: calculation rather than divine promise. Thirteen years of believing in
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: all probability that this was how the promise had been fulfilled.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: That Ishmael was the nation, that the future ran through him.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: Oh that Ishmael might live before you. He was not
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: dismissing Ishmael. He was advocating for him with the full
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: weight of a father's love. He did not want the
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: new announcement to come at the cost of the Sun
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: already present and known and loved. And God heard him. No, Sarah,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: As for Ishmael, I have heard you. Behold, I have
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: into a great nation. But I will establish my covenant
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: time next year. I have heard you the same words
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: at the center of Ishmael's name, God hears he was
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: honoring a father's love for his firstborn son. Ishmael would
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: be blessed twelve princes from him a great nation. The
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: God who found Hagar at the desert spring had not
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: forgotten the boy she carried back with her. But the
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: covenant would run through Isaac. And Isaac's name had already
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: been chosen, chosen by God himself before the child existed,
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: and the name meant laughter. God was naming the child
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: after the response of his parents when they first heard
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: the promise. Abraham on his face in worship, laughing, Sarah
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: behind the tent wall, laughing to herself. Both of them
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: confronted with something so far past the edge of biological
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: possibility that their bodies responded before their theology could catch up. God.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: God named the child after the laughter. He could have
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: chosen a name that meant faithfulfilled, or covenant kept or
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: promise completed. He named him laughter, as if to say,
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: I was there when you laughed. I heard it from
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: both sides of the tent wall, and I am putting
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: it in the name of the child you are going
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: to hold in your arms. This is not a small thing.
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: God does not require that our first response to an
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: impossible promise be composed and theologically correct. He does not
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: demand that we never waive or laugh from the wrong
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: side of belief. He receives the laughter, He receives Abraham
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: falling on his face in worship while simultaneously laughing at
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: the mathematics. He receives Sarah behind the tent wall, thinking
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: she was alone with her doubt, and he puts it
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: in the child's name, not as a failure to be
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: erased from the record, as a detail to be remembered.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: The year turned and Sarah conceived, and she bore Abraham,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: a son in his old age, at the time of
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: which God had spoken to him, and Abraham called the
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: name of his son, Isaac, and Sarah spoke in her
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: own voice. God has made laughter for me. Every one
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: who hears will laugh over me. Who would have said
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children, yet I have
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: borne him a son in his old age. Who would
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: have said it. Not the astronomers in Uh watching the
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: moon track its predictable path across the sky. Not the
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: merchants with their clay tablet calculations, Not the herdsman who
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: had watched these two old people walking the roads of
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: Canaan for twenty five years. Not Abraham and Sarah themselves,
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: who had each laughed from their separate positions on either
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: side of a tent wall. Nobody would have said it.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: God said it, and then he did it. Sarah held
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: the son of laughter in her arms at ninety years old,
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: and she laughed. And this time the laughter was not
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: the involuntary sound of disbelief. It was the sound of
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: a woman holding the impossible and finding it warm and real,
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: and breathing against her chest. But joy in this story,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: as in most honest stories, arrives with complication attached. Ishmael
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: was about sixteen years old, and at the feast Abraham
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: made when Isaac was weaned, something passed between the two
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: boys that caused Sarah to come to Abraham with a
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: demand cast out this slave woman with her son, for
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: the son of this slave woman shall not be heir
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: with my son Isaac. And the thing was very displeasing
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: to Abraham on account of his son. Of course, it
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: was this was his boy sixteen years of mornings, and
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: the particular knowledge of father develops of a child grown
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: up under his own tent. He had pleaded with God
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: for Ishmael by name, and now he was being asked
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: to send him away. But God spoke to Abraham in
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: the night. Be not displeased because of the boy. Whatever
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, For
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: through Isaac shall your offspring be named. And I will
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: make a nation of the son of the slave woman,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: also because he is your offspring. Because he is your offspring,
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: God was asking Abraham to trust him with the son.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: He was releasing the same trust asked of him in
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: every previous chapter of this story. The same hand extended
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: over the same gap between what is visible and what
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: has been promised. So Abraham rose early in the morning.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: He took bread and a skin of water and gave
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder along with
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: the child, and sent her away. Rose early before the
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: day was fully present, before the faces of the camp
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: were visible, and the ordinary human reasons to reconsider had
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: gathered their full strength. And Hagar wandered in the wilderness
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: of Beersheba. When the water was gone, she put the
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: child under one of the bushes, and she sat down
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: opposite him, about the distance of a bow shot away,
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: and said, let me not look on the death of
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: the child. And she sat and she wept. She walked
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: far enough away that she would not have to watch
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: him die. And God heard the voice of the boy.
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: The Angel of God called to Hagar from heaven. Fear not,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: for God has heard the voice of the boy where
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: he is up. Lift up the boy and hold him
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: fast with your hand, for I will make him into
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: a great nation. Then God opened her eyes and she
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: saw a well of water. The well was there, It
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: had been there all along. She could not see it
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: until God opened her eyes. She went and filled the
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: skin with water and gave the boy a drink. And
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: God was with the boy and he grew up. He
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: He grew up a full life, a real life, watched
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: over by the God who had heard his voice in
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: the desert, and the God who had first appeared to
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: his mother at a spring on the road to Egypt,
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: when she was running and did not know where she
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: was going. And when Abraham died, both sons came to
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: bury him. Isaac and Ishmael together the two streams that
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: had diverged, stood side by side at their father's grave.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: We will come back to that moment, but first the
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: story has one more mountain to climb. Chapter nine, Mariah,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: be still now. What comes next requires more quiet than
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: anything else we have walked through together to night. Not
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: because it is the most dramatic moment in the story,
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: though it contains the most dramatic moment in the story,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: because it is the deepest. Because the ground we are
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: about to walk on is the kind that presses on
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: something most of us carry quietly and do not offer name.
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: The rabbis called this event the akada, from the Hebrew
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: word for binding, the binding of Isaac. The text begins
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: with a sentence that is both very simple and very large.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: After these things, God tested Abraham. After these things. The
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: phrase holds the entire weight of everything that came before it,
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: After r and the Voice in Haran, and the long
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: Road and the Altars, after Egypt, and the failure and
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: the return, after the covenant in the dark and the fire,
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: walking through the pieces alone, after Hagar at the desert spring,
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: and Ishmael growing up under the open sky, after Sarah
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: laughing behind the tent wall, and holding the impossible child.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: After all of it, a test came. The Hebrew word
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: is nissa. It carries the sense of proving or refining,
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: the way a craftsman examines finished work under good light
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: to see whether it is sound. It does not carry
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: the sense of tempting someone toward failure. It means examining
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: what is actually there. God was not trying to undo Abraham.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: He was about to reveal to Abraham himself and to
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: every generation that would read this afterward, what had been
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: built over a lifetime of following. But Abraham did not
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: know that yet. What Abraham heard was this, take your son,
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: the land of Mariah and offer him there as a
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: shall tell you. Let each phrase arrive separately, and settle
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: fully before the next one comes. Your son, your only son,
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: whom you love. God named the love specifically, He looked
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: into the interior of Abraham's life and identified what was
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: most precious in it, and named it out loud, not
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: a possession, not a resource, the person Abraham loved most
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: in the world. And then the instruction offer him there
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: as a burnt offering. The God who had spent twenty
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: five years building this family, who had given Abraham a
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: son when every biological door was closed, who had named
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: the child after the laughter of his aging parents, who
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: had said clearly and repeatedly that it was through Isaac
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: that the promise would continue, was asking for a child back.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: I will not try to make this easier than it is.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: The text does not do that. It lets the full
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: weight of what is being asked land without softening it.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: And anything less than honesty about the difficulty of this
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: moment would be a kind of disrespect to everyone who
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: has ever read it and felt the difficulty themselves. What
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: we can do is look carefully at what Abraham did next.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: So Abraham rose early in the morning, the same phrase
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: used when he sent Hagar and Ishmael away early before
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: the day was fully awake, before the weight of what
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: had been asked could gather all its arguments and present
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: them fully in the light of a normal morning. He
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: saddled his donkey. He took two young men with him,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: and his son Isaac. He cut the wood for the burnt,
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: offering himself with his own hands. He arose and went
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: to the place of which God had told him. On
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: the place from afar. Three days of walking, three days
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: with Isaac beside him, with the wood on the donkey
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: and the fire and the knife in hand, and no lamb.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: Three days of knowing what waited at the end of
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: the road and walking toward it. Anyway, I have thought
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: about those three days more times than I can count.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: Whether they talked as they walked, or whether silence settled
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: between them, whether Isaac asked questions about where they were
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: going and what they would find there. Whether Abraham slept
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: at the night camps or lay on his back listening
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: to his son and breathe in the dark beside him
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: and tried to hold what he was carrying without letting
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: it show. Three days then Abraham said to the young men,
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: stay here with the donkey. I and the boy will
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: go over there and worship and come back to you.
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: We will come back to you, both of us. The
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, looking back across
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: roughly two thousand years, says that Abraham reasoned that God
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: was able even to raise the dead. He could not
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: see the path by which both of them would descend
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: from the mountain. He trusted the one who had made
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: the promise over his ability to calculate how the promise
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: could survive what was coming. He was not certain of
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: the outcome, he was certain of the one holding it.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: And they went together, both of them, and Isaac said
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: to his father, my father, And Abraham said, here I am,
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: my son, he neni, the Hebrew word for a presence
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: that is fully attentive. I am here. I am not
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: somewhere else in my mind, even though what is in
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: my mind right now is more than I know how
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: to hold. Here I am. And Isaac said, behold the
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: fire and the wood, But where is the lamb? For
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: a burnt offering. Where is the lamb? That question has
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: been echoing through everything written after this moment. Where is
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: the offering that will actually be sufficient? Where is the
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: lamb that will accomplish what all the ritual is pointing toward?
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: The whole sacrificial system of Israel would ask a version
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: of this question for the next fifteen centuries. Abraham said,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering,
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: my son, God will provide yahweh yire in the Hebrew.
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: Not I have arranged it. Not there is a solution
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: near by. Not everything will be fine. Simply this God
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: will provide. And they went together. When they came to
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: the place Abraham built the altar, he laid the wood
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: in order. He bound Isaac, his son, and he laid
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: him on the altar on top of the wood. Isaac
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: was not a small child at this point. Most scholars
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: who have examined this passage estimate he was a young man,
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: certainly old enough and strong enough to have resisted an
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: elderly father if he had chosen to. He did not resist.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: He was bound and laid on the wood, and in
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: his not resisting, those who followed the thread the New
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: Testament writers followed would later see something pointing beyond itself.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: A son carrying wood up a hill on his own shoulders,
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: a son who did not resist, A son bound by
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: his father's hand and laid on the altar. The writer
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: of John, and the writer of Hebrews and Paul in
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: his letter to the Romans would all hear the echo
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: of this moment in a later story on a later hill,
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: and under stand it differently than it could be understood
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: before that later story happened. But we are not there yet.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife. The
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: hand was raised, the sun was bound from every visible angle.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: Everything the promise depended on was about to end on
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: this mountain. And the Angel of the Lord called to
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: him from heaven. Abraham Abraham, and he said, here I
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: am he NENI still present, still attending even now, especially now,
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: do not lay your hand on the boy or do
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: anything to him. For now I know that you fear God,
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: from me. Now I know the faith made visible by
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: the act, the trust confirmed not only by the inner
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: conviction carried over twenty five years of following, but by
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: this by the hand raised by the moment when everything
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: the promise depended on was placed on the altar and
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: held there. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked,
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: and behold behind him was a ram caught in a
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: thicket by his horns. The ram was there, not there before,
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: not provided in advance as a comfort to make the
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: walk up the hill more bearable, present at the precise
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: moment of the precise need, caught in a thicket, waiting
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: to be seen at the exact instant when it was needed,
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: and not one moment earlier. Abraham went and took the
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: of his son, instead of his son, and Abraham called
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: the name of that place, the Lord will provide, as
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: it is said to this day, on the mount of
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: the Lord, it shall be provided Yahweh Yaireh, the name
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: given to the place where the sun did not die,
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: became a saying that outlasted the moment that produced it.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: On the mount of the Lord, it shall be provided
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: not on the easy roads, not in the comfortable vs. Vs.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: Where the way forward is clear and the outcome is predictable,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: on the mount in the hardest place, in the place
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: where everything has been given up and the hand is raised,
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: and there is nothing left to offer but the thing
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: you love most. That is where provision appears. The land
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: of Moriah, where God told Abraham to go, is identified
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: in the Second Book of Chronicles as the mountain on
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: which Solomon would later build the Temple. The same ground
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: where the ram was caught in the thicket became the
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: ground where the smoke of the daily sacrifices rose for centuries,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: where generation after generation of people brought their offerings and
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: asked year after year whether the offering was enough. And
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: for those who follow the thread, the New Testament writers
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: followed who read in Abraham's journey up the mountain an
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: image of something still to come. The Ram in the
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: thicket was a promise written in that moment about a
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: provision not yet made, an answer to Isaac's question that
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: the Angel on Mariah was pointing toward not completing on
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: the mount of the Lord, it shall be provided. The
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: Angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: from heaven. By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: Because you have done this and have not withheld your son,
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: your only son, I will surely bless you, and I
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven,
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: and as the sand that is on the sea shore.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: And in your offspring shall all the nations of the
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: earth be blessed. Because you have obeyed my voice. Stars
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: of heaven, sand on the sea shore. Both the promise
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: first spoken when Abram stood outside in the dark, counting
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: what could not be counted, had now been sworn with
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: an oath, sworn by God in his own name, because
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: there was no higher name by which to swear it
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: confirmed not by a ceremony this time, but by a
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: father's obedience on a mountain, and an angel's voice and
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: a amb breathing in a thicket. And they went together.
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: The phrase appears one final time on the way down,
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: not only on the ascent, where it carried everything that
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: was coming on the descent as well. Together father and son,
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: both of them alive, walking down from the summit into
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: the rest of their lives, with the weight and the
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: wonder of what had happened at the top between them
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: and the whole road still ahead, they went together. Let
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: that be the image you carry into sleep, Not the knife,
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: not the altar, the descent, two people walking down from
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: the hardest place together, the sun alive, the father changed,
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: the promise confirmed, the Ram still breathing. In the memory
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: of the thicket, they went together. Chapter ten, The stars
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: still shine. There is a beauty that belongs only to
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: the far end of a long job ernie. Not the
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: beauty of arrival exactly, though arrival is real. Something quieter
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: than that, the beauty that comes when you turn and
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: look back across the full distance of what has been walked,
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: and see, perhaps for the first time with any clarity,
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: that none of it was wasted. Not the detours, not
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: the failures, not the long stretches of road between the
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: moments when the voice was clear, not even the egypt mornings,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: or the years in Haran, or the laughter from the
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: wrong side of belief. None of it wasted. This is
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: where we find Abraham. Now. Moriah is behind him, The
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: Ram is in the thicket of memory. Isaac is alive
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: and growing, a young man whose very existence is the
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: proof of every impossible promise his parents had laughed at
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: and waited for and almost let go of. The Covenant
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: is intact. The stars Abraham was asked to counter still burning,
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: but error is dying. She was one hundred and twenty
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: seven years old. The text records this with an unusual specificity,
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: as if to say that her years deserved to be
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: measured carefully, that a life like hers should not simply
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: dissolve into the background of someone else's story without its
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: length being noted. She is the only woman in scripture
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: whose age at death is recorded. And she died in Hebron,
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: in the land of Canaan, not in Or, where the
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: journey began, not in Haran, where the first journey ran
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: out of momentum and stopped in Kanaan, in the land
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: God had shown Abraham when he first lifted his eyes
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: and looked in every direction. She made it, and Abraham
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: He wept for her, the woman who had walked every
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: step of this road beside him, who had left Ur
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: and crossed the desert and survived Egypt, who had waited
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: ten years in silence, and then thirteen more years, watching
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: a different sun grow up in her tent, who had
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: laughed behind a tent wall at an impossible promise, and
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: then held the impossible promise in her arms, and laughed,
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: a completely different laugh who had been there before the
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: voice spoke when he was simply Abram, an ordinary old
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: man in a moon God's city with no particular claim
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: on the future. He wept for her, and then he rose.
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: He rose from before his dead and spoke to the
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: people of the land. I am a sojourner and foreigner
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: among you. Give me property for a burying place that
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: I may bury my dead, a sojourner and a foreigner.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: After a hundred years in the Promised Land, after the
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: covenants and the promises, and the stars counted in the
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: dark and the fire walking through the pieces, he still
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: owned none of it. He was still technically a guest
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: in the land God had been promising him since he
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: was seventy five years old. And the first piece of
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: Canaan that Abraham would ever legally own was a burial cave.
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: He bought it from a man named Ephron the Hittite,
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: the cave of Machpela near Mamre, with the field surrounding
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: it and all the trees in the field, four hundred
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: shekels of silver, the full price, in front of witnesses
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: as a proper transaction, with nothing left to dispute or contest,
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: and he buried Sarah there. The first permanent mark Abraham
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: made on the land of Promise was not a palace
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: or a monument or a city bearing his name. It
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: was a place to lay down his dead, a purchased
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: piece of ground that said, simply and finally, we belong here.
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: Whatever is still unfinished, whatever promises are still waiting on
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: their fulfillment, this much is settled. We are in this soil.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: He laid Sarah in the cave of Machpela, and then,
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: because life moves forward even through the loss of the
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: people who shaped it, Hoost, Abraham turned his attention toward
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: the future. Isaac had not married. He was somewhere around
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: forty years old. Abraham well passed a hundred, and acutely
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: aware now of what the end of a life looks like,
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: felt the urgency of the next generation with the particular
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: sharpness of a man who knows the time remaining to
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: him is shorter than the time already spent. He called
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: his most trusted servant and gave him a charge, do
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: not take a wife for my son from the daughters
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: of the Canaanites. Go to my country and to my Kindred,
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: and take a wife for my son Isaac. Go back
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: to Haran, to the family left behind when the journey
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: began sixty years ago, find among them a wife for
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: the child of the promise. The servant asked the practical question,
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: what if the woman will not come back with me,
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: shall I take your son back to the land you
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: came from. And Abraham said something that reveals how completely
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: the promise had become the very ground he stood on
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: by no means. The Lord, the God of Heaven, who
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: took me from my father's house and from the land
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: of my kindred, and who spoke to me and swore
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: to me, saying to your offspring, I will give this land.
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: He will send his angel before you. He will send
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: his angel before you. The man who had walked out
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: of Haran without a map was now despatching a servant
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: on a long journey, with the calm certainty of some
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: one who has learned over a lifetime of following a
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: voice through uncertain roads that the road ahead is never
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: as unattended as it appears. The servant went to Haran.
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: He arrived at a well in the evening at the
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: time when the women came out to draw water, and
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: he prayed specifically, honestly, naming what he needed and asking
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: for a clear sign. Before he finished speaking, Rebecca came.
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: She was the granddaughter of Abraham's brother than Nahor. She
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: drew water for the servant without being asked. She offered
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: to draw water for all his camels. She was the
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: answer to the prayer. Arriving while the prayer was still
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: being formed, Rebecca agreed to go. Her family blessed her.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: She traveled the long road back to Canaan with a
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: servant she had met that afternoon and a story about
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: a god she was only beginning to understand. And Isaac
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: was walking in the field toward evening. He lifted up
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: his eyes and saw the camels coming. Rebeccah lifted up
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: her eyes and saw Isaac, and she asked the servant,
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: who is that man walking in the field to meet us?
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: It is my master, the servant said, And the servant
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: told Isaac everything. And Isaac brought Rebeccah into his mother's tent,
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: and she became his wife, and he loved her, and
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. He loved her
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: and he was comforted. I want to stay here a moment,
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: because the simplicity of those words carries something that could
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: be missed. Not a transaction completed efficiently between families, not
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: a diplomatic arrangement, a man walking in a field at evening,
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: lifting his eyes, and something beginning the tent of Sarah
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: receiving someone new into it, grief and love arriving in
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: the same season as they do. He loved her, and
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: Abraham took another wife, whose name was Kitturah, and she
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: bore him sons. The man who had been told at
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: seventy five that his offspring would be like the stars
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: was still adding to that number decades later. Life in
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: Abraham's case kept expanding in ways that defied every reasonable calculation.
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: But everything he had he gave to Isaac. The inheritance
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: was clear, The covenant line ran through the son of Laughter,
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: the blessing was specific, the promise particular. And Abraham breathed
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: his last and died in a good old age, an
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: old man and full of years, and was gathered to
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: his people a hundred and seventy five years old, full
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: of years, not simply old, full, the way a thing
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: is full when it has received everything it was made
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: to hold. A life that began in a city of
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: idols and ended in the land of Promise, a life
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: that had known Egypt and altars and stars too many
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: to count, and a fire walking through the dark, and
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: a mountain where a knife was raised, and a father
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: and son walked back down together full of years. And
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: Isaac and Ishmael, his sons, buried him, both of them together.
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: The two sons who had been separated in childhood, sent
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: in different directions by the complicated and very human circumstances
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: that gather around even the most sacred stories, stood side
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: by side at their father's grave. The son of the
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: Covenant and the son of the desert well, the child
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: of the Promise and the child of the human plan
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: that preceded it, the one whose name meant laughter and
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: the one whose name meant God hears. Together they buried
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: him in the cave of Machpela, in the field Abraham
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: had purchased from Ephron the Hittite, in the only ground
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: he had ever legally owned, in the land he had
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: walked for a hundred years. He was a sojourner and
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: a foreigner until the end. He had never lived in
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: a house in Canaan He had never governed a city,
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: or commanded an army, or built a monument that would
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: bear his name to future generations. He had walked through
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: the land with his tent and his flocks and his altars,
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: calling on the name of the Lord at every stopping place,
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: trusting a voice that the world around him could not hear,
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: and from him the blessing is still moving. The cave
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: of Makpala still stands in Hebron. People come from every
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: direction to stand near the place where the Father of
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: faith was buried by his two sons. The oaks of
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: Mumri have long since fallen. The altars Abraham built on
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: the hillsides have been swallowed by centuries of soil. The
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: tent where Sarah laughed is dust. But the word that
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: was spoken in Haran has not returned empty. The promise
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: made to one man in one city on one ordinary
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: night is still traveling through the world in ways that
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: reach far past what any single account of it can hold.
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: In your offspring, all the families of the earth shall
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: be blessed. The families of the earth are still receiving it.
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: You are part of the world that Abraham was told about.
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: When God pointed him at the stars, not because of
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: anything you have done, because of a promise made in
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: the dark to one sleeping man beside divided animals, while
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: a fire walked through, and God staked his own name
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: on the keeping of his word. The stars, Abraham counted,
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: are still burning. Every one of them rest here in
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: the fullness of what has been walked to night in
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: the God who called a man out of a moon
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: god city and made of him a blessing that is
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: still moving. In the promise that has outlasted every empire
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: that existed when it was first spoken. The stars are
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: still shining, and not one of them has gone out.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: We have walked the whole length of it tonight, from
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: Or to Moriah, from the first word spoken in the
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: dark to the last breath drawn in fullness from a
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: man who simply went to two sons standing together at
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: a grave that is enough to carry into sleep. Let
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: us pray, Father, we come to you quietly tonight, Thank
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: you for Abraham, the real one, the man who went
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: without a map and came back to the altar after Egypt,
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: and laughed at the impossible, and walked up a mountain
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: with a knife and walked back down with his son.
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: Thank you that the failures are in the story, that
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: Grace was waiting at the altar every time he returned
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: to it, that the covenant made in the dark did
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: not depend on him keeping it. We bring you the
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: places in our own lives where we are still walking
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: the promises. We are still holding the altars. We have
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: not yet found our way back to meet us there.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: And tonight, as we lie down, we ask for one
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: thing only. Let the fire that walked through the pieces
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: in the dark be the last image before sleep comes.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: Not the knife, not the altar, the fire moving quietly
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: through the darkness, keeping a promise in God's own name,
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: holding everything that needs to be held. We do not
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: have to figure anything out tonight. The covenant is keeping
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: watch guard our sleep. Father. Let the word that has
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: outlasted every empire reach the deep places in us tonight,
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: and when morning comes, let us wake still held to
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: the God who walks through the dark and keeps his word,
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: be glorified. Amen, good night beloved. The fire is still burning.
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: Sleep now,