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Hi everybody. Glad you joined me again today. Keep up the good reading work.

Today we’re looking at an interesting string of chapters that include Lot splitting from Abram, Abram’s defeat of the kings of the east, and God covenant assurance with Abram. As usual we don’t have time to look at every detail of these fascinating passages, so will instead focus on just a few (3) items that I hope will be useful for us all to ponder.

Lot’s poor choice and the foundations of that choice — After Abram (and Lot) left Egypt they returned to Canaan. Abram and Lot were quite prosperous; God was blessing them greatly. Not only did he have gold, silver, and such; but they also had a lot of livestock and a lot of herdsmen. They had so much, in fact, that their herdsmen were starting to argue with one another about grazing grounds and water. Not wanting the arguments between herdsmen to break out into family division, Abram suggests that they give each other more room by taking their families and possession in different directions. Abram said, “Is not the whole land before you? Please separate from me; if to the left, then I will go to the right; or if to the right, then I will go to the left.”” Genesis 13:9, NAS95.

And given the choice, Lot chose the direction that looked the very best for a herdsman — the lush Jordan Valley. The Jordan Valley is described as as green and well watered as the Nile Delta — of course, it’s not this way so much today, but we’ll discuss that in a later chapter. Specifically, Lot chose the southern Jordan Valley, where Sodom, Gomorrah, Zoar, and Admah were located — a region that appears to have been widely known for its wickedness (Gen. 13:13). Lot chose prosperity, even though there were clearly serious moral risks involved. And that choice cost him dearly. In time, this choice let to Lot and his family being captured in war (although they were recovered), almost being killed in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, losing his wife, and becoming a victim of a seriously perverse plot by his own two daughters. On what bases do we make our own choices? What risks are we willing to run in order to get the other thing we want?

Desire for prosperity has lured many a Christian from Sunday assembly with spiritually tragic effects. Sexual desire has been the basis of many a troubled marriage. The desire for the approval of others has enticed many a teen into doing things that has led down a terrible road of pregnancy, addiction, jail, moral compromise, and worse. Satan is a master at holding out the bait attractively to pull us right in to trouble. What are the bases of your choices?

The mysterious Melchezedek — After the war of the kings, which Abram wins with a ridiculously small army against 4 eastern kings, Abram returns to Canaan and gets a greeting from a certain Melchezedek (his name means “king of righteousness”). He is a king about whom no genealogy is listed, he called the king of Salem (later called Jerusalem), and he is also a priest of “God Most High”. There’s a couple of observations that can be made here.

First, Abram wasn’t the only one who knew about and worshiped God. Melchezedek did. Job and his friends did. And Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, did. Now, how strong they were in their monotheism is not absolutely clear, but there must have been something especially unique about Abram for God to have chosen him, a worshiper of other deities by all biblical accounts. Was it his childlessness? Something God saw in his faith? What does God see in you? What potential, if we’d only obey?

A second thought about Melchezedek is that he becomes a “type” of Christ. Without ancestry, a king, a priest, and a priest that even a Levite would have to respect, since Levi (still in his father’s loins) payed Melchezedek a tithe (see Heb. 7).

How do we know? How do we have assurance? — In Gen. 15 we find Abram in a quandary. God has promised a nation, but so far Abram has no children and the motherhood clock has stopped ticking for Sarai. Abram’s attempt to “help God out” is to propose that his chief steward become his heir (usually through adoption). But God promises Abram that his heir would be from Abram’s own body, his own son. This is really good news to Abram, and the Scripture says that he believed God (as improbable as this promise might have seemed to any other rational mind) and it was counted to Abram as righteousness. This passage, by the way, is quoted a few times in the New Testament and used as a logical argument against salvation by works of the Mosaic Law (circumcision in particular) and in favor of salvation by faith. But God, as He expands on this promise of a large family, leaves Abram to wonder how he can know for sure that this promise will come to pass.

God answers with a covenant. Covenant was about making family and it solemnizes a contract or agreement in a special way, because you don’t back out of your promises and obligations to family. How would Abram know that God would keep His promise? God adopted him into His family.

How do we know that all our obedience will be rewarded as promised? We too have been adopted; we are part of the new covenant made with God by Christ on the cross. Rest assured, God will keep His promise to His children.

See you tomorrow, Lord willing.

Today’s reading is Genesis 10-12: the genealogy of the nations, the tower of Babel, and the beginning of the story of Abram (Abraham).

Most of us consider the genealogy passages usually worthy of merely passing over to get to the storyline parts of the Bible. And chapter 10 is one of those chapters, but don’t let its content lull you to sleep; there really are a few interesting things here.

Moses, through God’s inspiration, follows dispersion and (contemporary to Moses) settlements of the sons of Noah. Japheth’s descendants largely settled the Mediterranean basin and north of the Fertile Crescent. The nations that sprang from Ham and his son Canaan are listed next. They include the peoples that settled in Palestine (including Sodom and Gomorrah) and Africa, a few that settled in southern Mesopotamia (Babel), and a few more who became the Philistines (who seem to be related to the ancient Minoan civilization and perhaps even the Greeks). This genealogy and the curse put upon Ham and Canaan by Noah in the last chapter, help us and the Israelites to understand the perverse course the Canaanites were taking and why it was perfectly just of God to allow them to be destroyed later. Lastly, in this genealogy there are listed the descendants of Shem, the Semites. Notice that so many of those in the middle east are, in fact, Semitic: Elam (Persians), Asshur (the Assyrians), Arpachshad (the Jews are his descendants), Aram (the Arameans / Syrians), and others that probably included Arabs. Their languages mostly belong to a family of languages known as Semitic tongues.

And by the way, just in case you have heard this somewhere and were wondering about the truth of it: No, neither Ham nor Canaan were given black skin to mark them. It wasn’t given to Cain, either, whose descendants clearly perished in the flood. Darker skin is a common feature of most peoples living closer to the equator and is a protectant from too much sun. Lighter skinned is indigenous to peoples living farther from the equator, and who probably need more sun and the vitamin D it gives us keep a healthy immune system to survive. It has been micro evolution at work — not macro evolution, the changing of species — micro evolution, the adaptation of species over a number of generations to environmental conditions. Don’t get fooled by people who are looking for a religious reason for their personal bigotry.

Chapter 11 tells us the story of how Noah’s family got scattered across the face of the globe — pride, rebellion, and language. It is, by the way, a flashback we’re seeing here; Gen. 10:25 notes that the world (its people) was divided in the days of Peleg (his name means “division”). Noah’s family moved from Ararat east and south, down the Euphrates. They, of course, all spoke the same language and understood themselves to be one people, one family. But sin, never very far away, tempted mankind, only about 5 generations from the flood, to build something great, as a matter of pride, to reach to the heavens in order to “make a name for ourselves” and unify them. What really interests me here is God’s remark:

“The LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.” Genesis 11:6, NAS95.

Here’s an amazing, inspired observation about unity: nothing would be impossible for them. Now, there might be some hyperbole here, but consider the power of real unity. We live in such an independence oriented society, one that wants to embrace diversity in whatever extreme it comes, one that exalts the man or woman who marches to that different drummer, that we may never really understand the revolutionary power of unity — but it’s there. History has many examples for us to consider. But what I really wanted to point out here for us to think about is the power to turn the world upside down that believers in Jesus waste with denominationalism! The power wasted in the Lord’s church over squabbles over taste, opinion, pride, politics, and other nonsense, while the unsaved world looks on in deceived contempt or desperate confusion. Two passages to consider:

“A new commandment I [Jesus] give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”” John 13:34, 35, NAS95.

“Now I [the apostle Paul] exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment. For I have been informed concerning you, my brethren, by Chloe’s people, that there are quarrels among you. Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, ‘I am of Paul,’ and ‘I of Apollos,’ and ‘I of Cephas,’ and ‘I of Christ.’ Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” 1 Corinthians 1:10-13, NAS95.

The way to weaken them, divide them — by languages.

Do we have to be in absolute lock-step about everything? No, 1 Corinthians makes it clear that different skill, talents, and members are important, and even different scruples or opinions are allowable; but we do need to be on the exact same page in biblical teachings, in God’s purpose, and in leadership.

Lastly, we find the story of Abram in the latter part of Genesis 11 and all of chapter 12 — “Go west, old man, go west”. Abram and his family — only about 10 generations from Noah’s flood; maybe about 400 years had passed, if all the generations from Shem to Abram have been listed in Scripture — were pagans, worshiping other gods (it doesn’t appear to take long for people to wander off the path). But God seems to have seen something special in Abram, and so He calls him with a very strange calling: leave your home and follow Me to an undisclosed place and I will bless you with a great name, and a great nation.

“Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.'” Genesis 12:1-3, NAS95.

There’s just one problem, Abram and his wife Sarai are old — Sarai especially is too old to bear children. Nevertheless, Abram believes, and his faith becomes the touchstone of teaching to all men about what God values the most through the Old and New Testaments.

Moreover, this becomes the second Messianic prophecy, “And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” Through Abram’s family the Messiah of all the world would come, and every family could be blessed.

After Abram arrives in Canaan, a local famine drives Abram to Egypt. Here Abram’s faith in God is tested — and it fails. Because Abram feared that Pharaoh would kill him to take his beautiful wife (Sarai was apparently quite attractive at 65), he commands Sarai to lie that she is only his sister and not his wife. In the end, God rescues Abram and Sarai and their marriage remains unviolated, by plaguing Pharaoh and communicating to him that Abram was favored by God and that Sarai was Abram’s wife. Pharaoh stops his advances toward Sarai and sends them both away.

Although Abram’s folly seems rather extreme to us, it doesn’t seem to have been so unusual for that period of history in that region of the world (e.g., Gen. 19:8 / Judges 19:24). But extreme or not, truth be known, avoiding trouble by doing sinful or worldly things still remains a common temptation: going along to get along at work or in business deals, telling “white lies” to avoid trouble, cheating on taxes, etc. Where’s all this faith that we say we have?

Hope you’re keeping up with your reading. See you tomorrow, Lord willing.

Yesterday we took a look at the quick nose dive of humanity in the pre-flood age. People lived a long time and even (did you notice this?) developed some fairly sophisticated technology (see Genesis 4:22 — bronze and iron implements). But people also became so evil that God was grieved and in His wisdom decided it was time to almost complete “erase the chalkboard” in Genesis 6. But Noah, the Scripture says, found favor in the eyes of the Lord.

This favor was expressed in what had to have been a pretty strange-sounding command, build an ark. Although Bill Cosby certainly took a few liberties with the biblical story, if you’ve ever heard his comedy routine on Noah, you’ll know that he probably captured the incredulity of poor Noah as God gave His life-saving command. No one in his generation would have understood what he was doing. Certainly, as a “preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5) — possibly for as long as 120 years — Noah would have been jeered and mocked (remember the age he was living in). No doubt about it, Noah had a pretty tough row to hoe.

Sometimes God gives difficult commands. And it’s not so much that they are necessarily so hard to follow, as much as they are hard to follow when everyone else, when our emotions, when our desires, and perhaps when even human reasoning itself is telling us something completely different. But following God’s will was Noah’s salvation and it will be ours, too.

“For it is written, “I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE, AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom;…but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.…But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption,” 1 Corinthians 1:19-22, 24, 30, NAS95.

So Noah built the ark, he preached righteousness, and he filled the ark with the animals God brought to Him (two of each kind, except 7 of each clean animal).  And God started erasing the chalkboard — He flooded the earth. Notice it was a three way flooding cataclysm (Gen. 7:11,12): the fountains of the great deep burst open, the floodgates of the sky were opened, and, for the first time anywhere, it rained. We’re familiar, of course, with rain; we can imagine what the fountains of the deep would entail; but it’s the floodgates of the sky that we might wonder about. Some have theorized that the earth may have been enveloped in a vapor cloud in the earliest years of its existence, and that a collapse of that vapor canopy might be what the “floodgates of the sky” might be. It has been further theorized that the collapse of that vapor canopy around the earth may have something to do with the sudden shortening of life-spans of man (and presumably of other animal life, too) — that the vapor canopy might have blocked some variety of radiation for pre-flood life, giving them a longer life-span, but which has since shorten ours. There are, of course, other possibilities for this fascinating turn of events — this just happens to be one that I favor.

This flood, by the way, wasn’t a widespread but only regional flood as some minimalist interpreters have insisted. When the mountains are themselves are underwater — as both Scripture and the scientific discovery of marine fossils at the tops of mountains indicate — we can be sure that the flood was really worldwide. Now, no one knows how high the mountains might have been at the time. There are some creationist scientists who have proposed that the flood also may have precipitated some enormous tectonic activity (rapid subduction) — perhaps  causing the Indian subcontinent slamming into Asia to create the Himalayas, Italy slamming into Europe to create the Alps, and the Americas splitting away from Europe and Africa. But the point is that even the highest elevations of the earth at the time were under 22 feet (15 cubits, Gen. 7:20) of water without receding for about 5 months! When it did begin to recede (probably due to the tectonic activity I mentioned above, creating new, deeper ocean basins), it was still over seven months until the ark could come to rest on a high mountain (or mountain chain — Ararat is both a mountain and a chain of mountains). And it was another several months (they were in the ark a year and 10 days in total) before Noah considered it safe to come out of the ark with the animals. That’s not a local flood. The God of the universe is really quite capable of doing the unimaginable, things on a scale so big that it boggles the human mind. And we wonder about whether God can answer our prayers? Oh WE of little faith!

And by the way, in an earlier posting I mentioned that the earth’s layers and fossils have caused some to conclude that the earth is billions of years old — hey, you’d look a little older, too, if you’d been through the “Noah’s flood” wringer. Layers are typical of even local floods. Canyons can be very quickly created by even local catastrophes (e.g., Mt. St. Helen’s eruption). And interestingly enough, geological catastrophism is in the scientific ascendency (gaining much greater scientific credibility) over geologic uniformitarianism (layers of the earth build up at a steady, predictable rate).

After coming out Noah offered sacrifices to God from among the clean animals he brought on the ark. And in response the Lord made a covenant with mankind never to destroy the earth by flood again — giving us the rainbow in the sky as a perpetual reminder of His promise (Gen. 9:11-14). Rainbows are more than just pretty, more than just an interesting fracturing of  light through the prism of water droplets, it is a God-promise you can see.

The Lord also, by the way, gave mankind meat to eat as a menu option at this time. If you’re vegetarian, that’s fine and dandy; but just so you know, it’s not a religious or spiritual matter. God gave His seal of approval to hamburgers and chili, when Noah and the animals came out of the ark.

Lastly for today, we can take notice of the story of Noah’s drunkenness. It may not register at first why God would include this story in the Scriptures, but I think I can hazard a couple of guesses. First, even righteous Noah could fall. In Steve Farrar’s book Finishing Strong his very excellent point is that as great as starting well might be in life, finishing strong is even greater. There’s something about the end of life that tempts even great men to fall — call it mid-life crises, call it battle weariness, call it what you will — it must be guarded against in every life, no matter how strong you think yourself to be, no matter how much good you might have accomplished for the Lord. Noah’s story is one among many cautionary tales about remaining spiritually alert to the end. But second, this story is also a means of explaining the corruption of the Canaanites. Later, Israel would be given the land of the descendants of Canaan, whose land was being taken away from them, because of their moral corruption. But the moral corruption didn’t just start a few years before Israel’s entry; it started back as far as Noah. It’s one of the generational sin warnings again — what may start as a small trickle of sin will ultimately blossom into a raging flood of corruption over time. As parents we must take our responsibility seriously, not just romantically — and as children, we must take warning and follow the Lord, even when parental examples might lead another way.

Have a great day — by following the Lord. See you tomorrow, Lord willing.

Well, you’re back again! Great!

Yesterday we looked at the creation and at mankind’s first sin, the sin that threw everything “out of kilter” (Romans 8:19-23). And it all goes downhill from there.

After the fall, Adam and Eve have sons, Cain and Abel. Cain becomes a farmer and Abel a shepherd. In time the young men need to both make a offering to the Lord, and both make an offering of the work of their hands. Cain makes an offering of what he had grown in the field, and Abel offered a firstling of his flock. And the Lord had liked Abel’s sacrifice — a blood offering; Cain’s vegetable offering, not so much. Cain became angry!

The text tells us that God, like a good parent, had a good, practical conversation with Cain about it. If I may be allowed a little paraphrasing: “Why are you angry, Cain? If you do it right, won’t you feel better? But if you continue down this path, watch out! This emotion leads to worse things!”

But Cain didn’t listen to God’s counsel and ultimately murdered his brother — over religion (…becoming the world’s first jihadist? But let’s not get distracted from the main point here). Cain got his nose out of joint for the same reason that many still do — they want God to approve of what they do (in worship, lifestyle, marriage, ethics, etc.) regardless of whether it matches God’s commands or not. The lesson here is that God isn’t going to compromise and make an exception for you or me or anyone; He simply calls us back — like He called Cain back — to do what is right, and says, “You’ll feel better, when you do it My way.”

Many like Cain, don’t listen, and they remain angry — usually at God but sometimes at the other Abel’s in the world, who are doing it right — and sometimes it spills over into violence, sometimes into atheism, and sometimes into long-term psycho-therapy (so they can be told over and over that they’re really OK).

In any case, God calls Cain to account for it and as punishment makes him a wanderer. An interesting detail in the text here is that Cain doesn’t seem to repent. He whines about his punishment being too great for him to bear, and he seeks protection from God, but there doesn’t seem to be any repentance. The long range effect of this is that Cain’s descendants learn his violent behavior, and we see the first examples of generational sin coming to its apex with a violent, proud, and unrepentant man named Lamech (Gen. 4:18-24). It really should give us all pause for thought about the areas of our lives that we refuse to repent from, because it is learned by our children and even influences others around us. We fool ourselves by thinking our little sins too small to be too harmful; what we don’t realize is that such sins (as in Cain’s case) grow deeper and darker and more harmful in subsequent generations — giving new impetus to God’s advice, “If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up?” (4:7).

Chapter 5 is a genealogical list with ages — really amazingly old ages. The sort of ages that have called into question the historicity of the Bible — usually by folks who don’t want to believe. Interestingly enough, however, geneticists have recently suggested that if certain genes were turned off, we might all live considerably longer than we presently do. So — maybe the Bible is more historical than we thought? (Insert ironic smile here.)

And by the way, if you do the math, you find out that Methuselah died in the same year of Noah’s flood. Sort of makes you wonder, was it old age or drowning?

Lastly for today, the beginning of Noah’s story is found in Genesis 6. I’ll talk more about Noah tomorrow, Lord willing, but it is sad and instructive in the extreme to read (6:6) that God’s great heart was grieved to the core by how low and how quickly mankind had sunk in their sinfulness. Sometimes we, like children toward their parents, never consider the wounds we inflict on God through sin.

As children we are egocentrically aware of only our own feelings and sensitivities and consider parents as immeasurably strong and immune from words, slights, blows, and insults — then we grow up and learn differently. Likewise, as humans we are often egocentrically aware only of our own feelings, considering God to be more of an impersonal, infinite force and less of a personal being — hopefully we grow up spiritually to understand that sin insults, wounds, offends, and effects God emotionally. This is not to say that God is “needy” or codependent or curls up in the fetal position in depression, when we sin — there are more responses to grief than tears and depression (say — shock-and-awe wrath); but it is to say that if we do love God as we claim, let us make every effort to honor rather than offend, obey rather than grieve, our Almighty God.

The beginning of the Bible, the book of Genesis, “sets the table” for so much of the rest of the Bible: God’s creative act is how we exist; God is good and has our best interests at heart; sin is profoundly destructive; Satan lies; men still continue to believe the same old lies; God began His work of redemption for fallen mankind right at the first; the hardness of life is basically the result of our own sin and rebellion. There’s so much here upon which I could comment, that a book could be written — but I’ll limit myself to just a few observations.

The world was created in 6 days. One attempted compromise between evolution and creationism is known as “Theistic Evolution”, and it generally proposes a “day equals a thousand years” resolution between evolution and creationism. I used to subscribe to this point of view myself as a college aged man, looking for a way to blend the two otherwise opposing ideas. But a read through Genesis 1 one day, made me rethink this position. It was the reiteration at the end of each day’s description of creation, “and there was evening and there was morning, one day”. What caught my attention was the realization that Moses (the writer of the book) never had a watch or a clock or a unit of time like an hour. For ancient men, the usual means of describing what we would call a “24 hour day” was “there was morning and there was evening”. If the Lord really were trying to convey more of an eon long period of time for our solar system to have evolved, then bring forth life, and ultimately evolve humans, it seems reasonable to thing that he would have simply told us that there was simply “one day”. But the specificity of “there was evening and there was morning” points to something else, to 24 hours.

And why wouldn’t God be able to create the world in 6 24 hour segments? If such a thing seems to incredible to you, it just might be that as J.B. Philips put it “your God is too small.”

So, why does it look so old with all the layers and fossils etc.? Maybe a world-wide flood? We’ll touch more on that in a later post.

Genesis 2 is a second telling of the creation story, putting the magnifying glass, as it were, on the story of man’s creation, situation (Eden), and receiving of a mate. It’s the receiving of the woman that catches my attention to talk about for a moment. As Adam receives Eve, he is famously known to have said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” It is little known or little talked about, but here are the first wedding vows, the first marriage covenant being confirmed. The phrase of “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” is typical covenant language of the ancient world, since a covenant was really the confirmation of an agreement by artificially making family. The American Indian referred to becoming a “blood brother” with someone not closely genetically linked to them by mingling their blood together. It was their form of covenant. And this is what marriage (described as a covenant in Malachi 2:14) is, a covenant. When we marry, starting from Adam to the present day, we include someone in our family, who is not blood-related to us, as if they were blood related.

Marriage should be seen as covenant, as making family. Too often it is seen as nothing more than a contract, which can be made or broken easily by either unhappy partner. But that’s not what you do with family. You stick with them, you work things out, they’ll always been your mother, father, brother, or sister, even if they make you crazy! So also with marriage, God says.

In Genesis 3 we can see the original sin — which, by the way, is not a sexual encounter between Adam and Eve (having sex was God command for husband and wife, Gen. 1:28 and 1 Cor. 7:1-6) — and then God’s judgment on mankind, because of their sin. What I’d like to draw attention to is the first Messianic promise of 3:15 — part of the condemnation of the “serpent”. The promise is that there would be enmity (hatred) between the serpent’s seed (Satan and his minions) and the woman’s “seed”. I put this in quotes because this is a very unusual expression. In the ancient world sexual reproduction was often pictured in a farming metaphor with a field and a seed. The woman’s contribution to reproduction was always conceived (no pun intended) as the field, while the man’s contribution was always the seed. So, to see the Scripture refer to the “woman’s seed” is really strange — strange unless you know that the Messiah came through a virgin birth. The enmity would result, this prophecy says, in a head injury to the serpent (fatal) and a heel injury to the seed of woman (the Messiah) painful, but not fatal. The cross is where it happened: Jesus died on the cross and rose again, and by doing so, dealt a fatal blow to Satan.

What a mighty and loving and good God we serve!