So, in our message this morning, we're doing a series while while Pastor Russ is on about it.
We're doing a series on Christ in the Old Testament, how we see Jesus in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew part of the Bible.
And so this week we're going to be looking at Abraham.
So you've got this really good life in a famous old city.
Your dad is rich and powerful, and your hometown is known for its religious devotion, moon worship in this case.
And then one day a crazy thing happens.
You hear God, and he's saying to leave all that behind and go to a new land, and that your descendants are going to bless the whole world.
And then something crazier happens.
You believe him, and off you go.
We're continuing this week in a series of messages and how we see Christ in the Old Testament, and we're going to look into the life of one of the giants of the faith, Abraham, known affectionately as Father Abraham.
Abraham was the father not only of Judaism, but of all who have faith in Christ.
So we owe a lot to him, and his life has a lot of lessons for us today.
The level set, let's briefly recap a story.
Abraham, who lived in Palestine, started out as Abram, who lived in Ur, which is modern-day Iraq.
And when he was already in old age, he heard God's call to go to this new land, the promised to him, his descendants, and the promise that his descendants would bless the whole world.
He had this incredible walk with God.
God made and kept all kinds of promises, including that he'd have a son in his old age.
And along the way, Abraham made some pretty boneheaded mistakes.
But ultimately, God's promise of a son came true.
And Abraham became this role model of trusting faith and obedience to the point of obeying God even when God asked him to sacrifice his son.
So let's be clear: all these great accomplishments did not earn Abraham right standing with God.
Here's our first point.
Abraham was declared right with God on the basis of his faith, not his accomplishments.
And so are we.
Out of all the great promises God made, there's a point early in Abraham's story in Genesis 15, where God promises that Abraham will have an heir and descendants more numerous than the stars in heaven.
The result, the Bible says, is that Abraham believed in the Lord, and God accounted it to Abraham as righteousness.
This is actually a really big milestone in the story.
In the New Testament, Paul uses this event as an example of what it is to be made right with God.
In Romans 4, he points to that Abraham didn't act righteously so as to achieve righteousness, but instead that God imputed righteousness, that is, declared Abraham as righteous, just on the basis of believing faith.
At this moment, Abraham was justified or declared right with God, declared permanently right with God.
We have that same permanent right standing with God when we trust in Jesus as our Savior.
When we trust in Jesus as our Savior, all of our sins are put on Jesus, and Jesus' perfect righteousness is put on us.
And we are once and for all saved.
And Abraham experienced this same blessing, even though Jesus' death on the cross was in the future.
That's the point Paul is making in Romans.
And we need to let that sink in.
We are just as loved by God, just as right with God, considered just as righteous as a giant of the faith like Abraham from the moment we place our trusting faith in Jesus.
If you don't remember anything else from today's message, remember that.
You were just as loved by God as Abraham.
Now Abraham's story doesn't stop there, and neither does ours.
After being declared righteous, Abraham took God at his word.
As he stepped out in trust and faith, praying and interacting with God, his walk with God grew stronger, and his trust grew deeper and deeper until he could do what God asked without hesitation.
Growing promises and growing trust by faith in those promises changed Abraham's behavior.
And this leads to our second point.
Abraham grew in obedience by growing in trust and faith, and that's how we grow too.
At the culmination of his journey, there's this crazy scene when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac.
How did he get to the point in his life where he could do this?
As we've mentioned, Abraham had this really great walk with God.
He called on God wherever he went.
He built altars, he had this dialogue with God.
At different points in his life, he's laughing in disbelief at a promise God made, or he's haggling with God, or he's having lunch with God.
He has this very close walk with God.
And while all this is happening, God made a growing stream of promises to Abraham.
That he'll make a great nation from Abraham, peopled by his descendants, and that everyone on earth will be blessed by his descendants.
And specifically, that this will happen specifically via Isaac, the son of his wife Sarah.
And you really need to see this for the scene to make sense.
Isaac had to survive for this incredible stream of promises to come true.
The blessing that will extend to all nations via Isaac and no one else, and thus Isaac has to survive to raise a family in order for God's promises to come true.
Therefore, when God in Genesis 22 tells Abraham to go and sacrifice his son, Abraham believed full well that no matter what happened on top of the mountain, he'd be coming home with his son.
The author of Hebrews tells us that Abraham expected God to bring Isaac back from the dead, and instead, just as Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, God provided a substitute.
There was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns, and that was a substitute instead of Isaac.
But here's the key point.
As Abraham believed God's promises, his trust in the promises and in God grew and grew to the point where he could have full confidence in what God was asking.
His belief grew into trust and then into changed behavior.
You can label that as obedience, or you can label that as life-altering trust within a covenant of promises.
The point is that Abraham's obedience flowed from the promises that God made and kept, and more importantly, it flowed from the fact that Abraham knew God as opposed to knowing about God.
This is what gospel obedience looks like for Abraham and for us.
Now, what does it look like when we trust God and do something that seems crazy?
I have a cheesy example in my life.
I wasn't asked to sacrifice one of my daughters, and thank goodness.
But uh the story goes like this.
My family and I had this really great vacation, and uh on the return, the return flight was on Air France, and we got to the airport and we got bumped to another flight.
We had to take this much longer series of flights, and and of course we get back to Atlanta Airport at one in the morning to find our batteries dead in the minivan and all that.
It was just a miserable day of travel.
But the only good news for us was that Air France had promised us this rather large sum of money for in exchange for being bumped on the flight.
Okay.
So this is Air France, right?
So time goes by, there's no money.
You know, we call, nothing happens.
At one point, we even go down to the airport, we talk to this very nice person behind the counter who's completely helpless, and you know, nothing, nothing gets resolved.
So finally we bring in the big guns.
The Department of Transportation has this email, this email address whenever lines are treating you bad things.
So we did that, and sure enough, we call in the big guns, Department of Transportation, and it works.
This this money, big bunch of money, shows up on our credit card, and everybody's happy.
Okay.
To bribe our kids, we agreed to split it with them.
So every uh we're all happy at this point.
Now, now here's where the story really gets fun, okay?
Like a couple weeks after that, we get a nice big fat check in the mail from Air France.
Okay?
Now, legally and ethically, it's not our money.
They've already paid us what we said.
So I announced we need to void the check.
No, that's not what happened at all.
My wife Ruth announced we need to void the check.
And we all grudgingly agreed with her.
We all felt it was the right thing to do, even if it did feel weird, even if it did feel weird voiding a big check.
At that point, it was a little test.
Then it came to be a big test.
A few weeks later, we got another check in the mail, okay?
This was our Isaac moment.
And I'm proud to say my wife, Ruth, passed the test.
Okay, we avoided that one too.
I'm not completely ashamed to admit the rest of us were really sitting on the fence about that second check, okay?
But my wife's trust in God outweighed her trust in a check from Air France.
For her, honestly, it was a no-brainer.
And thus it was the same way for Abraham.
It was a no-brainer for Abraham as well.
And when you see Abraham's obedience as flowing directly out of trust in God's promises, you realize that credit for Abraham's obedience belongs more to the God of covenant promises than it does to Abraham.
Obedience glorifies God only when it flows from our trusting faith in a loving Father.
Now, as we mentioned, Paul says Abraham was justified when he had believing faith.
But a different New Testament writer, James, says that Abraham was justified when he offered his son Isaac.
And what's the difference?
People like to point to that as a contradiction in the Bible.
When James says justified, he's using the word to mean demonstrating the truth of a prior claim.
Okay?
So Abraham was declared right with God once and for all in Genesis 15 when he had believing faith.
And he demonstrated that right standing with God in Genesis 22 when he did what God said.
Now, as I mentioned before, Abraham was the father of a nation and the spiritual forefather of all who trust in Christ.
So his life was about way more than just personal piety.
And that gets me to my third point.
God's promises comprised a covenant program of raising up a group of people who would do the things that God does, and we are part of that same program, okay?
In the middle of the story of Abraham, there's a scene where Abraham's having lunch with God, okay?
And in the scene where Abraham's having lunch with God, God says this, and this is the scripture reading for today, shall I hide from Abraham what I'm about to do?
in verse 19.
For I have chosen him that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.
God's program is right there in verse 19, and it's still going on today.
Let's unpack it.
The program starts with God's choice.
Okay?
The Hebrew says that God chose Abraham in love.
Abram, who was likely a moon worshiper, didn't choose God.
God chose him.
And God comes to us long before we come to him.
But the choice is not in a vacuum.
God did it for a reason.
For Abraham to command his children and his household.
God started by promising Abraham a nation, but he amplified it by promising Abraham descendants.
Okay, you rule a nation, but you raise a family.
God wanted Abraham to be an influence over his spiritual descendants, both those related to him, his children, and those not related to him, his household, and build a nation from the ground up by his influence.
The command is to keep the way of the Lord.
The Hebrew word translated way means a path worn by constant walking.
A path worn by constant walking.
We keep the way of the Lord when we walk consistently in his well-worn path.
This Old Testament concept of walking in the Lord's way is very much related to the New Testament concept of abiding in Christ.
And what's the result of walking in this way?
Doing righteousness and justice.
These are huge, heavily loaded Hebrew words.
When you're an amateur like me, you get the Hebrew lexicon out, you know, and you look up the words, and most of the time, you know, the words mean pretty much what they mean.
But this one, justice, is really cool.
Okay, there's two different Hebrew words for justice.
This word for justice, Mishpat, means divinely ordained actions that promote the well-being and equality of all humanity.
Okay?
When proud oppressors are humbled and brought low, and when poor, uh, the oppressed are vindicated and restored, justice is done.
And humanity is moved towards this new equilibrium or shalom, okay, uh, where an equilibrium where rights are uh wrongs are righted and the impoverished prosper.
That's the concept of Mishpat.
This idea of putting down the proud and lifting up the humble and promoting shalom is all over the Old Testament.
Okay, it's a common theme of the prophets.
Uh Hannah in 1 Samuel in her song says, the bows of the mighty men are broken, the Lord makes poor and he makes rich.
He brings low and lifts up, he raises the poor from the dust.
That's Mishpat in action.
Now, God calls Abraham and his descendants to do justice and righteousness.
Yet in many other places, God says that he does justice and righteousness.
What do we make of this?
Well, simply that God's primary intended way, although not his only way, of doing justice and righteousness is through his people.
It's through us.
When you ask God to right wrongs in your life, to make the world a happier and more harmonious place, the answer to that prayer, as incredible as it sounds, could be you, could be me.
You, I, and Christ's church should be seeking to do justice and righteousness no less than Abraham and his descendants.
Now, how does this map into the New Testament church?
The Hebrew concept of Mishpat or equalization by reversal comes right over into the New Testament.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, has this song in Luke chapter 2 that's sometimes called the magnificat, and in that she says, God has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly.
When Jesus strongly confronts those in power and graciously comforts the downtrodden, he's exercising Mishpat.
If anything, the gospel takes it even further.
This idea of reversal.
To lose one's life is to find it.
The way of life is to die.
The gospel makes us all equal.
It humbles all of us by announcing that we're dead spiritually.
And it raises us all up by resurrecting us spiritually and declaring us right in God's sight, so that we have shalom or peace.
When we experience and when we share the gospel, we're carrying out that Hebrew idea of Mishpat.
And this whole program that was announced to Abraham, God choosing someone, that someone influencing others, so that those others walk in God's ways and trust and obey him.
Does that sound familiar?
If you've been around church any length of time, you've probably heard of the Great Commission.
When he was leaving earth in Matthew 28, Jesus says, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you.
Jesus' Great Commission is an amplification of, and yet fully consistent with, God's program, God's charter that he gave to Abraham.
If anything, Jesus takes it further.
Abraham was called to raise a nation.
Jesus has commanded us to take the gospel to all nations.
To the extent that we're carrying out the Great Commission, we're also carrying out God's charter to Abraham.
As we raise families and nurture disciples, we're growing God's kingdom and we're changing the world in the process, happening just as God promised Abraham.
Abraham's journey was marked by huge promises made and fulfilled.
And this resulted in increasing trust in God and his promises.
All the while, God was setting in motion a kingdom program of raising up a nation of people who will do the things that God does.
Out of Abraham and his grandson Israel came the nation of Israel.
And from that nation came the Savior of the world.
Jesus said in John 8.56 that Abraham rejoiced that he would see his day and that he did rejoice.
Isaac was saved by a ram in a thicket.
Jesus is our ram.
When Abraham was counted as righteous for believing, Jesus is our righteousness.
And when we raise families and when we make disciples and live out the gospel in the wider world, we're carrying out the call from Jesus and the same call given to Abraham, Father Abraham.
Let's pray.
We thank you, Lord, that you called Abram out of Ur.
We thank you that you told him that you were one God and that you taught him so that he taught his descendants and they have passed down the scriptures to us.
We pray that we would be making disciples and raising families and building up God's kingdom, that we would be teaching them to do righteousness and justice, to walk in the way of the Lord, to abide in Christ.
And we pray that as we do that, we would see the world changed, that we would see Mishbah, that we would see peace and shalom restored as we labor for your kingdom.
In your son Jesus' name, we pray.
Amen.