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We have now ended our studies of the three creation stories that form the first half of the book of Genesis. We turn tonight to the second half of that book, which begins to trace for us the great royal road of redemption that God built himself down the ages of history, through which and down which he might bring salvation to men, not merely to men as individuals, but eventually to the world as a whole. A road that began with a man called Abraham and proceeded by the formation from Abraham of a nation unique in the earth.
The nation whom we now call Israel, known also as Jews or Hebrews in the ancient times. A nation to whom we owe the Old Testament and the greatest part of the New Testament. The nation to whom supremely above all else we owe Jesus Christ our Lord according to the flesh. A nation, after much wandering, now returned to its own land, unhappily still unreconciled to its Messiah. A nation, as Zechariah promises us in the name of God, that shall yet be a burdensome stone to the nation.
The situation that we see developing, in fact, right now in front of our very eyes. But a nation that shall yet, as Zechariah also prophesies and Saint Paul affirms, a nation that shall yet be re- reconciled to Jesus as her Messiah. And when that happens, there shall begin a period of unprecedented blessing, such as this world has never seen before. We shall, in our studies, be considering how God began that great royal road of redemption in his very earliest days.
We shall trace it. The nation brought into the land, and then for a while, a long while, out of the land, and then back again into the land, even in those ancient times. We shall be considering how that nation rejected its early Messiah, even in those ancient times, and how that Messiah of theirs came to be the savior of the then known world, how his brethren were reconciled to him then, and under their Messiah's good guardianship, Jew and Gentile worked harmoniously together for the good of all.
And we shall be nourishing our faith and hope as we read those ancient histories, for in them we shall see prophecies of things yet to be. Oh, what glorious optimist every believer in Christ has a right to be. For if the Jews' rejection of their Messiah has been indirectly a blessing to the Gentiles, and it has indeed. When the Jewish nation crucified their Messiah and refused him to reign over them, God put them aside and took the gospel as he had planned to the Gentiles, and millions of Gentiles have been saved since then.
But if the casting away of Israel has been the enriching of the Gentiles, what shall their receiving again be? It shall be a veritable life from the dead. There is vast blessing in store yet for this sorry old world. I would like you to catch some of the glory of the optimism and the enthusiasm of faith. This is God's world, and God shall yet run it as it ought to be run, and God shall yet bless men as God has been aching to bless them recently.
Now, tonight we must take the story right back to its original fountain, to a time when there was no Jewish nation, to a time when its forefather Abram was a pagan old idolater, sunk in a mass of pagan idolatry way down in Mesopotamia. To read how God rescued him and made him a pattern for all others who shall follow. How God would rescue us from the burden and slavery and ultimate frustration of idolatry and save us to a living faith in a living God and therefore for a glorious future.
Shall we read from the book of Genesis? The book of Genesis. And first of all, in chapter ten, Verse one: now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Chen, Ham, and Japheth, and unto them were sons born after the flood. The sons of Japheth. Verse two. Verse six. and the sons of Ham. Cush and Mitzrayim and Put and Canan, and the sons of Cush, Sebar and Havilah and Sebtar and Ramah and Sabteca, and the sons of Ramah, Sheber and Dedan, and Cush began Nimrod.
He began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord, wherefore it is said, like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel and Erech and Akkad and Kalne in the land of Shinar. Out of that land he went forth into Assyria and builded Nineveh and Rehe-both-er and Calah and Resen between Nineveh and Calah, the same is the great city. And Mizraim began, begat Ludim and Anamim and Lahabim and Naptohim and Pathrusim and Kasluchim, whence went forth the Philistines, and Katorim.
Chapter eleven, verse one. And the whole earth was of one language and one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, go to, let us make brick and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven. And let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men builded.
The Lord said, Behold, they are of one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do. Go to, let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the o- all the earth, and they left off to build the city. Therefore the name of it was called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth. And from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Chapter twelve and verse one.
Now the Lord said unto Abraham, Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation and will bless thee and make thy name great. Be thou a blessing, and I will bless thee, bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee. And in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed. So Abraham went as the Lord had spoken unto him, and Lot with him. And Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had gotten in Haran, and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan they came.
God speak to us through his holy word. Tonight, God's word would speak to us of a battle. A battle that is waged a thousand times a day wherever there are men's hearts to wage it in. A battle that lies at the very fundamental meaning of human existence.
A battle on whose outcome depends the eternal success and destiny of our soul. It is the battle for the faith of a human heart. And in that contest, the contestants are but two. There is, on the one side, God. And on the other side, the world and all that is in it.
Sometimes it happens that the battle seems to be and is a battle between God on the one hand and vice and sin on the other. But perhaps it is unlikely that it shall be vice of some sort or other that will damn our souls. It is much more likely, my friend, if I may speak frankly, that the thing that would damn your soul and mine will not be some terrible vice, some filthy behavior.
The thing that is more likely to damn our respectable souls is allowing some bit of this beautiful world to claim from us the faith that should be God alone. Our story takes us back way into the dim parts of history, when the world had been cleansed by the flood, and Noah's descendants were busily repopulating it.
And we have read of some of the magnificent cities that those people built in those far off days. You mustn't think of those people as semi-savages running around in their loincloth, though to be sure, with the lapse of the teaching of ancient history in our schools, some of us become very provincial and think history began after the First World War. And imagine that this age is the only one that has ever seen any signs or known any art. The archaeologists with their spades have shown us, as they have turned up the remains of some of these cities, what magnificent civilizations they were.
Their art remains to this very present unsurpassed. Their architecture still one of the marvels of the world. And even more marvelous than our skyscrapers because they lack the technology that we now know. These were the great cities that in the course of later centuries were the first to develop the great arts of astronomy and mathematics. We talk then of a very early civilization represented in those cities whose names we have just read.
The damning thing that must be written over them all is this, that they came to be, every man Jeff of them, idolater. And so was Abram, just as much an idolater as any. As Joshua subsequently reminded his people, your father Abraham once lived the other side of the Euphrates flood, and they served other gods. It was from that idolatry that God had to call Abraham out.
There started the great royal road of redemption for mankind. God broke in one man's life the grip of idolatry and set him free to put his faith where faith would bring him a glorious future. We better pause then and consider to ourselves what idolatry is. And to ask ourselves whether any of us sitting here before God tonight, by any charge, are still idolaters.
For many people, an idolater is a thing or a person that worships funny things like you see in the Ulster Museum, grotesque totem poles, or somebody who tattoos himself and puts big things into the lobes of his ears and engages in nocturnal raids and scouts his enemies and suchlike occupations. Some of them are idolaters too, yes. But every man that has not yet, uh, trusted God personally is an idolater. For an idolater is a someone who puts his faith in something or someone other than God.
I speak, of course, of faith in the absolute sense. It is right that I trust the milkman to bring my milk and the newspaper boy to bring my paper. I am talking of faith in the absolute sense. And I repeat, an idolater is a someone who puts his faith in someone or something other than God. There is a very popular definition of idolatry that says to be an idolater is to love something more than we love God, and that remains true. But I remind you that the heathens who serve their grotesque idols don't love those idols.
But they trust them. And they fear them. And in the last analysis, for the success of their crops and for their family health and for the direction of their lives and for all their future, in the last analysis, their faith is in their idol. And if that be what an idolater is, then we live in a world that is more idolatrous than ever it was. Was this people in the ancient world?
They had a whole world in front of them, and God had held out his promise to them that they were to multiply and fill the earth and develop it in, in fellowship with him. What happened? I cannot tell you how and when the insidious attitude crept into their hearts, but creep in it did. There came a time when they said to themselves, no, this won't do, that we be scattered abroad over the earth. Let's make us a city. Let's make us a town, lest we be scattered. And let us make us a great name by keeping together and trusting one another and piling our inventive skills one on top of the other, and building us a city, and building us a town.
You can say, what was wrong in building a city? Nothing. And what was wrong in building a town? Nothing. Except the motive for doing it. Where was God in it? Where had gone faith in God? And where had gone faith in God's plan for the development of Earth? It's gone, evaporated. It was no longer any reality to it. When men and women get to the position that faith in God is no longer a living reality on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and is a mere singing of hymns, if it's anything at all on Sundays, then nature that abhors a vacuum won't let them go on just believing nothing.
Man will trust something. Tragedy is when he leaves off trusting God, he will trust an idol. There are very few people in this modern world that love test tubes. There's a vast number of them that trust them, and they are their only hope. If you're not to believe that there's a God out there. Their trust for the development of us and for any future that they can scrape together for our planet, their trust is in the laws of science.
Their trust is in technology. Their trust is in practical psychology. Their trust is in anything. Except... in the living God... as a daily... reality. There's nothing wrong in your science, sir. Nothing wrong in your study of psychology. Nothing wrong in prosecuting technology. They are all glorious. But if you come to trust them, rather than trusting the living God, then you have become an idolatry, and stay like that, and it will damn both you and your future.
A few of us are in those walks of life where we have immediate pressing concern to trust, to to decide between trust in God and trust in our own brains, or trust in technology, or what have you. The issue for us comes closer home as we ask ourselves, what is the meaning of life and what is goal and what is future, and where is our trust for the future? For Abraham in those early days, life was simply his goods.
He Had little houses down found in Ur Arab of Calvi. Galilee. They had beautiful ornamentation. Not wretched prefabs. Not utility plates. Gloriously sculptured, beautiful object art. Modern conveniences there by their standards. And a very civilized existence. And that for some years was all the sum total of Abram's life. Faith in the living God as a living reality? No.
You say, what broke it? What broke that old idolatry? Our God, as ever. As ever he does, taking the initiative and sooner or later in life approaching every man and lighting every man that comes into the world, making a man conscious that there is something bigger than food and clothes. That behind his vast world there is a personal God who has given us all things richly to enjoy, but solely in order that they lead us to him and to put our faith in him. A God who breaks his heart.
And the tragedy a million times repeated, that men will take the glorious gifts he gives them. Instead of letting those gifts lead them to God, they let those gifts lead them away from God. It isn't something confined to those far off days. It happens again and again. It happened to the nation of Israel centuries later, and God is to be heard wailing in the prophets of what Israel had done. He brought them out of one of their bondages and put them in the land of Canaan and blessed them with solid houses and beautiful fields and, and abundant crops.
Instead of that leading them to him, it led them away from him. God said, would you know how I feel about you? I feel like a man that fell in love with a girl in the street, poor, disheveled, uneducated, filthy. Says God to Israel, I fell in love with you, and I cleansed you, and I washed you, and I beautified you and adorned you and educated you, and I hung the earrings on your ears and the pearls around your neck.
And I gave you beautiful homes, and I gave you wonderful treasures. Knew not that it was I that gave you your oil and your wine, and you took your gifts, my gifts they were. You went after your lovers. Then there burns at the heart of this universe a passionate but exceedingly grieved heart. Do I talk to someone here tonight and, and your heart doesn't burn with love for God. You say that I got my business, old fellow. I know you've got your business.
You say, but what about the home and... Yes. What about it? Could it be? That business, that lovely home that God has given you, meant to lead you to him, has so swamped you. Now it leaves you with no time for God, nor any faith in him. You're not vicious. You're not wildly immoral. Sheer goods have robbed God of your faith.
And you've made of this passing world an idol. What would you say about the future? I can't always be thinking of God. Oh, poor man. And there is no future without God. If you would have a future, you must learn with Abraham this basic lesson. All they who would have a future must learn to forsake facing idols and put their faith in the living God.
So the God of glory appeared to Abraham. And in that beginnings of the awakening of his heart, Abram discovered that there is something even more surpassingly wonderful than this wonderful world of things. Behind this world, there is a glorious personality, architect of it all, the living God. Oh, what a glorious future began to open up, something big and vast. Not merely a universe of thing.
Behind the thing, a person calling for Abram at the level of personality, calling for his response of faith and calling for his response of love and calling Abraham to a personal relationship with the God of the universe. How big are your horizons? Oh, madam, sir, when the sofa has worn up and the new dining suite is no more, and your children are fed and gone, how big are your horizons?
When the things have slipped through your fingers, are you any future? And then not only did God show Abraham himself, but God drew the veil aside and showed Abram God's program for the world to be. Babylon was glorious, and so was Kalmi and Nineveh and Rehobothir, vast and marvelous cities they were. But God showed Abram what God has planned. Abram saw the city that has the foundations whose builder and maker is God.
And like a child who's been playing with a sixpenny toy and is presented with a motor car that really goes. Abram left those cities and stretched out for the city that has the foundations whose builder and maker is God. And we needn't be high theologians all the time, need we? We could come down to our own humble selves, my dear friend. To any city other than Belfast or Anarlong, any bigger city, when this little life is done.
So the city that has the foundations whose builder and maker is God. And like a child who's been playing with a sixpenny toy and is presented with a motor car that really goes. Abram left those cities and stretched out for the city that has the foundations, whose builder and maker is God. And we needn't be high theologians all the time, need we?
We could come down to our own humble selves, my dear friend. To any city other than Belfast or Anarlong, any bigger city, when this little life is done. I'm not ashamed to stand and confess to you. I believe our Savior's words when he said, in my father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you. I believe those majestic words spoken of all who trust God, that God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.
Walk around its bulwarks, if you can by faith. Count its wonders as God has described them. Ask yourself, how big is your future? Have you found yet your right to enter in at the gate to that great city. Or is your future just bounded by the borough boundary of Belfast and the cemetery at Roselawn? Blessed are they who have washed their robes.
That is in the blood of Christ. For then there is entry at last into that eternal city. But that's the foundation. That is the goal for which the scaffolding of this earth has been erected. It wasn't, however, with Abram, it rarely is with anybody. One constant, undeviating path of faith from the very word, first word go, not indeed. But very often a slow and halting pilgrimage that he made in response to God's self-revelation.
After the initial vision, he came with his father Terah and certain relatives to come out to Canaan, to follow the path of faith and vision with God. And they got up early, and they settled down. And for years they didn't move anything. Wonder what it was that kept them. Don't know, nothing's said. So I suspect it was washing on Mondays, doing the, uh, bedrooms on Tuesdays, and the office work Wednesdays, and and all that kind of thing, that's all. Somehow that vision had got lost.
I wonder has it happened to us? It can happen, can it not? You remember, sir, when you were in your teens? You had some ideas, and you were going to be a believer, but you never quite made it. It didn't come the actual day when personally you trusted Christ and were born again. Tonight sees you in middle age. Now, where are you? Religious, yes? In a religious meeting tonight, yes?
Ah, but sir, have you stopped halfway? Did you really get saved? You've been born again, or did your youthful idealism peter out and run into the sun. God mercifully pursued Abraham, met him again when Father Terah died. Sad it had to be that way. It would have been nicer, wouldn't it, if old Terah had gone on with Abraham, old and young together. Terah telling Abraham as they went, old boy, I've seen the most of life, and what a tremendous comfort it is to me as I grow old, Abram, to know that this life isn't the end of everything, and there is that glorious eternal city ahead.
My boy, make for it. Poor old Terah got halfway and stopped and died there. And he gave Abram a jolt. His father passing on. He asked again, what is life about? At times, says Abraham, I gave more thought to, to what God originally revealed. There is this eternal city. How do I get there? And he started off on his pilgrimage again. And into the land of Canaan he came, and God appeared to him and once more repeated his glorious gospel message.
Abraham, I want to bless you and make you a blessing, and in thee and in thy seed shall all the nations of the world be blessed. Abraham, dear Abraham, I'm not asking you to give up much. I'm asking you to open your hands and take my blessing, a heaven full of it, Abraham, and an earth full as well as your heaven, but it can only be had by those who trust me, Abraham. So Abraham decided to trust God, and he built an altar. But then there came a famine, and Abraham went down into Egypt, so we're told.
And as he got near Egypt, uh, Abraham began to think, now these Egyptians, they were hard fellas, and you know, he'd have to survive in Egypt if he could. So he said to Sarah, his wife, Sarah, my dear, he said, now, I don't know quite how to put this, but, uh, Sarah, you know, you are extraordinarily beautiful, and when the Egyptians see you, um, uh, they they might, uh, kill me to get you. That would never do, would it, Sarah, he says. Moreover, Sarah, he said, I mean, you think, how are we going to live down in Egypt? Do you know we haven't got anything? How are we going to live? You know, he said, I've hit upon an idea, my, my girl.
Sarah, I'll say you're my sister. It won't be all the truth, but it won't be a complete lie. It'll be a kind of a white lie. So you say you're my sister, and they'll say, what a good woman she is. We'd like her, and they'll give me goods for you. So the Egyptians did. They saw Sarah, how beautiful she was, and they took Sarah for Pharaoh's wife, and they gave Abram goods, cattle, oxen, sheep, menservants, maidservants, gold, silver. Of course, he thought he was on a real good thing, and all he'd done for it, well, he he that wasn't a big lie, was it? But all he'd done was to deny his wife.
And for goods. Deny the most sacred of all human relationships. Call what some men will do for money. We needn't stand here tonight to lambaste Abraham. What have I done? What lovely things have I denied, I wonder, in life? To escape a sneer or a jeer, have I denied on times, I confess it to you, by my side, the lovely person of Christ.
I doubt it. Would deny life's most sacred thing or some forebore passing popularity. Sir, there was a time when, as a youth, you would have blushed to tell a lie. When it was a million and a half at stake, when it was to save your face in a business deal, did you too fall and deny the truth for the sake of good.
Or come. We live in a sorry world. How you expect its cities to be beautiful, I don't know. And I'm not thinking now of its streets and its public cleansing department. I'm thinking of cities as communities of people. How think you we can build a community of people if people will put goods before truth? People will put goods before sacred things like loyalty and life. If people will put goods for the world before God and Christ himself.
Needn't wonder that Earth now is full of the most blatant lack of sacredness, when men now don't even regard their bodies as sacred. We live in a society that's lost its basic values and is as vulgar as it possibly can be. Not truth is sacred. Everybody tells lies, and the politicians beyond all, and they'll tell you lies when they know that you know that they know that you know that they are lying. It was thought to be clever. What kind of a city can you build on its foundations? Denying things sacred.
Ah, but let me come to the root of the matter. Said our Lord Jesus Christ, man's life does not consist in the abundance of the goods that he possesses. We told of a farmer whose farm brought forth wonderful, so that he said to himself, soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many.
He thought his future layed goods. What a mistake. Thou fool, said the monster. This night thy life shall be required of me. Can you not see it, said the Savior, that life is more than goods? What shall it profit a man if he gained the whole world? And lose his life. And indeed, lose his very soul. Ever we're to be in that sacred city at last, the New Jerusalem, the great glorious goal to which God is bringing men, we shall have to face this fundamental question of relation to goods and to God.
I say again, it's not that the goods are wrong. God then designs, if you trust his son, eventually to give you a whole universe anyway. God is not asking you to go without goods, but he is pointing out to you that if you let anything take your faith from him, if you put your faith in anything but him, it will damn you. And especially he warns now, what should it profit you? You go on without Christ, without God's salvation, without a personal relation in with him, what should profit you who gain the whole world and lose?
Well, that was all. I must cut the story short and come swiftly to its crisis. Next session, God willing, retrace how Abel came to the crisis. But he did come to a crisis in life, the Bible tells us, when now he was getting elderly. And he had much goods, some of them acquired by very doubtful methods in Egypt, very much goods. But he was learning his lessons. And one day he suddenly woke up to the fact that his hairs were very gray.
He got a bit of rheumatism. He didn't know but what he ought to go and see the doctor. Then the old heartache that had been there all the years began to speak with a voice that wouldn't be repressed. Life was coming to its end, and he had no son. No son. No heir. No future. And he said to himself, what shall I do? I haven't a child, I haven't an heir. The only person I've got is this, this one of my servants here, the chief steward over there.
He's out for he can get anyway. I have no heir, no future. Presently I shall die. Then who shall be saved? Sir, if you can't see it now, it won't take long for you to see it. It only takes about eighty eight years with most people to see that there is no future in goods. As the voice said to the rich farmer, this night your life shall be required of you. Then who shall these things be?
It dawned on Abram that life was the thing, not goods, life. How did you get life? If he couldn't have it for his own body, couldn't he have a son somehow to continue his life, to give him some kind of a future? You've seen it, sir. And what God is trying to say, yes, physical life is more than goods, isn't it? What's the good of earning a million and killing yourself in the process? Way beyond physical life, way beyond physical science, there stands the biggest question of all, eternal life, Future.
Have you any? Abram woke up to it. He cried, with all the cravings of a human heart, cried to God for life, for the future. God responded, for that was where God was wanting to bring the man. God said, Abram, you shall have a son. Abram looked at himself, as good as dead, and he said it was impossible.
And then he thought again. Who was it speaking? If not the living God. Was there hope in him? Was there endless life in him, the very source of life? Was it God indeed that was speaking to his heart and calling for his trust? God willing to give him a son and countless generations of sons way off into the future and within eternal life itself. And Abraham heard the voice of God, and scripture says plainly this, and said, Abraham, but be God.
And it was counter to him. All right. And the big battle had been won. There would come many wars thereafter. The basic issue had been settled. Abraham could leave God. Being just a creature in a world of time and space, Abraham had become a child of God, possessor of eternal life, an inheritor of the very kingdom of... Oh, how wonderful if it happened right now.
Life with its goods has brought us here together tonight. We sit in this rolling place. Oh, sir, what about your future, madam? What about your future? You may have much in life or little, I know not. Oh, could it please God, now and these months. Behind all the sting, behind all the business, you should tonight hear the voice of God in Jesus Christ, his son, offering you eternal life, offering you a personal relation with the personal God that is eternal life begun here on earth, stretching to the infinite, immeasurable future.
The God who, that we might have life, gave his only begotten son the very vitals of the Godhead, wanting to share his own very life with us. But would God you'd rise up and take it? Would God that you would see that all else that you have is but the scaffolding from which God wants us to build part of that great eternal city that should be you saved and redeemed and in fellowship with God. Oh God, grant it may be.
But if you this night, taking your faith from all, deliberately, as best you know how, believe God, then it shall be counted to you for righteousness, for his name's sake. Shall we pray? Oh God, there come moments in life when life's issue becomes sharp and well defined, and all else stands on one side while thou dost stand on the other.
Tonight we have heard thy word and thy ways with one of old, and we apply it to ourselves. Some before thee now may have reached the point when they must make their decision. We pray thou wilt brood over us in these next moments, quieting our hearts, sharpening our thoughts, helping our consciences to work well. Help us to see what the choice is. Help us to hear thy voice. Help us to see that we need to be reconciled to God, to come into living union and fellowship with thee through personal faith.
Grant in these moments, some who have never yet done it before may, as best they know how, rise up and personally respond and come to thee and seek the Lord while thou mayest be found and call upon him, for verily thou art near. Praise thee, that all who thus come, Christ himself has said, him that cometh, I will in no wise cast out. Grant then there might come much joy to thine heart as to ours. Some are brought home, reconciled to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
