Good morning.
Isn't this a lovely, damp, dark, dismal, grisly,
foggy morning?
Now, you want to know why I said
lovely, didn't you?
Well, I'll tell you why I said lovely,
because after saying it's dark, damp, grisly, and
dismal, somebody's going to come up to me
with an angelic smile.
It'll have to be a sister.
Men don't have angelic smiles.
And she'll say to me, Now, Brother Dave,
don't you forget this is the day which
the Lord has made.
We'll be glad and rejoice in it.
They do this to me all the time.
And I have a little difficulty with that,
I don't mind telling you, because most of
the people who quote me that verse and
sing the chorus, you know, this is the
day, this is the day, don't know where
the verse is.
They know it's a verse in the Bible,
and they know it sounds good, and somebody
complains about the weather.
So, when they come to me with that
lovely smile and say, Now, don't forget, Brother,
this is the day which the Lord has
made, I say, By the way, do you
know what that verse is?
What's in the Bible?
Do you know where what's in the Bible
it is?
Well, no, but I know it's in the
Bible somewhere.
Do you know what it has to do
with?
Well, no, but it sounds nice.
Well, let me say this to you.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the
weather.
How do you know this is the day
which the Lord has made?
I expect when Job woke up in the
morning and discovered that the Chaldeans had carried
off the camels, and the Savians had carried
off the oxen, and the fire from God
came out of heaven and destroyed all the
sheep, I suppose there was somebody there to
save him.
Now, Job, remember, this is the day which
the Lord has made.
It has nothing to do with the weather,
absolutely nothing to do with the weather.
Well, where is it?
Well, it's in the Psalms.
What Psalm is it?
It's the 118th Psalm.
What's it all about?
Well, if you read from verse 22 on,
you discover that the passage says, the stone
which the builders rejected has become the head
of the corner.
This is the Lord's doing, and it's marvelous
in our eyes.
This is the day which the Lord has
made.
We'll be glad and rejoice in it.
It concerns our Lord's return to Israel and
the vindication of God when his son was
rejected by the leaders of Israel as he
set himself in Matthew 22, and the stone
was rejected and set aside.
The stone is going to be taken and
made the head of the corner.
Then they will say, this is the day
which the Lord has made.
Please, it has nothing to do with the
weather.
I want you to turn with me, if
you will, to the book of Genesis this
morning, seeing that there's another class at 1030
in town.
I shan't keep you late.
I want you to do a little leafing
with me this morning.
Go over to Genesis chapter 15, if you
will.
I want to travel rather hurriedly.
You're not going to like it, I know,
but the hurrieder I get, the behinder I
get.
I want to do a little of that
this morning, starting with chapter 15.
Chapter 15 starts off, the word of the
Lord came on favor in a vision.
Now, we're not going to look into the
details here, but God is promising him that
his seed, his descendants, his posterity will inherit
the land.
He complains, or rather he protests to the
Lord, because this Eliezer of Damascus in verse
2 is his steward and he is his
heir.
God says, no, thine own son will be
thine heir.
That's the promise he makes to him.
Then you remember the covenant on the basis
of the sacrifice and the horror of great
darkness that happens at the close of chapter
15.
Now, God has promised Abram, he's not Abraham
yet, he's promised Abram a son.
Now, the word Abram means great or exalted
father.
He's not a father.
God has promised him to have a seed.
Now, Sarai, for she's not Sarah yet, Sarai
being a true wife, companion, and partner, has
concern for her husband, and because he has
no heir, and he's 85 years old, and
he has no heir, she decides, determines, and
decides how she can fulfill the ambition of
her husband.
I want to look at this from the
woman's viewpoint, and that is, for I have
no son who will do anything to please
her husband, and that which comes first in
his mind comes first in her mind.
So, because she knows Abram longs for a
son, and he has no son, with a
little bit of feminine strategy, a little bit
later on, a little few grains of feminine
psychology, she decides that she's going to please,
she's going to do something very special for
her husband, because, you see, she is Sarai,
and Sarai is not Sarah, as we'll see
in a minute.
So, she decides that she's going to use
this strategy, and that she wants to find
a son, an heir for her husband.
Whatever pleases him is going to please her,
whatever he wants, that's what she wants, and
so she resorts to this strategy, as we
have in chapter 16 now, of giving Hagar
to her husband as his wife, and consequent
upon this, as you know, Hagar conceives, and
she's going to bear a son, and Abraham
is going to have an heir.
Now, I certainly believe myself that Sarah, or
Sarai rather, Sarai did this out of the
very best of intentions, and with a true
womanly heart, but it backfires.
It wasn't the fulfillment of Genesis 15 as
God had designed it.
She was going to fulfill the promise, and
I doubt not that Abraham had confided in
her about the promise which God had made
to him of an heir, and she has
done this for his good, for his pleasure,
and then you know what happens when Hagar
perceives that she's conceived by Abraham, then she
despises Sarai, and as a result, Sarai protests
now, with a little twist of feminine psyche,
she protests to Abraham, and says, my fault
be on you.
Now, that's one of those undiscoverable, undefined, and
baffling enigma of feminine psychology.
It was her plan, she did it out
of the best of intentions, she did it
for his pleasure, she did it for his
sake, she did it to fulfill the promise,
and it's backfired on her, so she throws
it back on him, and he says, Sarai?
Now, Sarai means my princess.
That e on the end makes it possessive,
you see that letter e.
So, he says, Sarai, my princess, she's in
your hands.
What the result now, there's a dramatic twist
to Sarai's attitude towards Hagar, and she turns
on her with a venomous bitterness.
The woman that's used is abused, and to
such an extent that she flees home, goes
out into the wilderness, a wanderer.
Her honey is turned to gall, her pleasure
is turned to bitterness, the reversal of her
plans is a shocking discovery to her, and
she goes out into the wilderness.
Four times in chapter 16, which we have
turned to now from chapter 15, four times
in chapter 16, we read the angel of
the Lord in relation to Hagar.
Now, we're coming to visions and revelations of
God, and we're coming to consider the kind
of persons to whom God is pleased, and
was pleased to reveal himself.
The angel of the Lord, it says, found
her.
Verse 7 of chapter 16, the angel of
the Lord found her.
Isn't that a lovely touch?
Now, I don't know that we may always
be absolutely sure who this person called the
angel of the Lord is.
There are times when, unquestionably, it is one
of the theophanies, and whether it is or
whether it isn't in this occasion, I don't
know, but the expression is significant at any
rate, but the angel of the Lord found
her.
God, is he the God of the Jews
only?
Is he not the God of the Gentiles
also?
Is he the God of the favored only?
Is he not the God of the rejected
as well?
So, the angel of the Lord found her,
and he did, and found her in the
wilderness, and then three times after that, the
expression is used, the angel of the Lord
spoke to Hagar.
What a marvelous thing it must have been.
I do envy the people of the book
of Genesis considerably for the intimacy, the nearness,
the familiarity with which they had touch with
God, and God has a very close contact
with them personally, physically, and at times visibly.
There is a warmth about this revelation of
God in the book of Genesis that you
don't find but infrequently elsewhere, until he who
is God himself came to walk and to
wander amongst the sons of men.
So, the angel of the Lord speaks to
Hagar and asks her what's her problem.
Why is she here so dejected, so despondent,
so sad?
And she tells him what has happened, and
he says to her, go back and return,
and put yourself under the hand of your
mistress, and she does this in obedience to
the voice of the angel of the Lord.
She doesn't know what she's going to do
at any rate.
How often do we find ourselves in a
dilemma similar to this?
We've come to the end of the road,
we've come into great perplexity, things have not
gone well with us, we had planned something,
the strategy backfired, it didn't work out, and
we wonder where we are and why we
are where we are, and we try to
flee from the circumstances, and yet it may
be right in the circumstances that the Lord
is pleased to meet us.
How marvelous these revelations of God are to
our hearts in times like this one.
So, he gives her a command, and obedient
to the command, she goes back, and she
subjects herself for some considerable time to the
hold and the hand of Sarai.
Then, from that point, we move on into
chapter 17.
Before we do that, let me notice just
exactly what she said.
If you remember, the angel of the Lord
told in verse 11 how she would call
her son when he was born, Ishmael, that
is, God was here.
When you get that suffix El again on
a word, you know that it has to
do with God, and is one of the
grand titles of God, his majesty, his glory,
his uniqueness, his singularity.
So, it's Ishmael, as it is Gabriel, and
Michael, and so on, and these suffixes El
always relate the individual to God.
So, she is going to call her son
Ishmael, or Ishmael, God was here.
He is marked from this moment on that
the angel of the Lord found the mother
-to-be.
The son is marked as the object of
God's interest and care, and of his provision,
as we know later on.
So, she names the Lord that called unto
her in verse 13, and she calls him,
Thou God's seest me, and the well which
he found was called Bir Lahairoi, or the
well of him that lives and sees me.
Now, that's Hagar, the Egyptian slave's experience with
the god of Abram.
It's marvelous that right from the beginning, even
in chapter 12, as related by Stephen in
Acts chapter 7, right from the beginning, God
promised to bless anyone who is associated with
his elect.
That brings us to 1 Corinthians chapter 7,
doesn't it?
The saved wife and the unsaved husband, or
the saved husband and the unsaved wife, and
consequently God's special interest in the children.
And that leads to the very common question
I'm not going to go into this morning
about those who'll be included in the rapture,
and so on, you know, of parents of
that kind.
But God looks with interest, as he says.
They are not common, to use his words,
the children of one saved parent or of
both saved parents.
God has a special interest in them, and
that's why he has a very special interest
in Hagar, because she is associated with the
one whom he has chosen and called to
be his special friend.
Now, moving out of chapter 16 into chapter
17, we have another appearance of God in
the first verse, when Abram was 90 years
old and nine.
Now, that's after Ishmael was born, because he
was 86 years old when Ishmael was born.
When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord
appeared to Abram, and he said unto him,
I am the Almighty God.
Walk before me and be thou perfect, and
I will make my covenant between me and
thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.
And then that's when Abram asks that God
would consider Ishmael as his heir, and that's
verse 18.
But before I come to that, just look
at some of the opening verses in verse
5, for example, neither shall thy name any
more be called Abram, but thy name shall
be called Abraham.
Now, he is not to be the exalted
father uniquely, he is to be the father
of a multitude.
Abraham is the father of a great multitude,
and this is in connection with the of
course.
And then when you come down further to
verse 15, Sarai, God said unto Abraham, now
he is Abraham, never more to be called
Abram, but Abraham the father of a multitude.
As for Sarai, thy wife, thou shalt not
call her name Sarai, my princess.
He drops the I at the end, a
possessive letter, and he says her name shall
be called Sarah.
And when he drops that possessive letter I,
he takes the exclusive nature of Sarah being
a princess to Abraham, and he makes her
a princess to the multitude.
He enlarges her scope, enlarges her field, he
enlarges her influence.
Now, she is not going to be Abraham's
princess, Sarai, my princess, she is going to
be a princess to the great multitude as
her husband now is Abraham, and not Abram.
And that's the interesting part in particular, I
think, of the early part of chapter 17.
Later on, then God promises to Abraham in
verse 18 and 19 that Sarah would have
a son.
Now let's go over to chapter 18, but
I want to hurry through up to chapter
22 if I may this morning, briefly.
I'm just snatching excerpts, as you can see,
from some of these chapters.
Chapter 18 and verse 1, the Lord appeared
unto him again, another appearance, another vision, another
revelation of God to Abraham, and it was
in the plains of Mamre, and you remember
this word Mamre means from the vision, and
he sat in the tent door in the
heat of the day.
Don't you like that?
Isn't that a lovely little touch?
And those of you who have lived in
tropical countries, and I know some of you
have, and don't necessarily have any connection with
North Florida in February, who know what the
heat of the day really is like, will
know exactly why Abraham was sitting in his
tent door in the heat of the day.
This is siesta time, of course, but there's
something very significant, I think, in this.
When he looks up, he sees three men
walking towards him.
What's he doing?
He is resting in the heat of the
day.
Well, what has that got to do with
the revelation of God, with a vision of
the Lord which Abraham was to see?
Well, in the heat of the day, nature
is quiescent.
There's no activity.
There's no expressed energy.
He's sitting quietly in the heat of the
day, and when nature is quiet, God reveals
himself to us.
Now, I know we're not all born with
the same temperament.
Some of us were born high-strung, and
some of us were born low-strung.
Some of us were born very active, and
some of us were born very passive, and
as I said to you the other day,
we can't help the way we're born, but
we have to struggle with it, nevertheless.
But, we are born, all of us, with
an impatient, lawless nature, and it's difficult for
us to do what Abraham is doing on
this occasion, just to sit quietly at rest
when nature subsides, and in the heat of
the day, when Abraham is quietly at peace,
the Lord appears to him.
I think that's instructive, don't you?
Then he looks up, and he sees these
three men this is the plural of the
word ish, I think it is.
He sees three men, and they were standing
by him, and when he saw them, he
ran to meet them from the tent door,
and bowed himself toward the ground, and said,
My Lord, and this is the divine title
of the sovereignty and the greatness of God.
Abraham knew who they were.
He has had sufficient contact with God up
until this point, that when he sees the
Lord approaching him with the two angels that
are mentioned later on, he knows who he
is.
He recognizes him.
Now, some of us entertain angels unawares, don't
we, and don't know who they are, and
some of us have had experiences when we
thought afterwards it was an angel of the
Lord, and Abraham sees these three men coming
towards him, for they are actually called distinctly
men.
He sees them coming towards him.
By the way, perhaps some of you ladies
could explain to me just why it is
when angels appear in the scriptures visibly, with
a palpable body, I'm not going to ask
you about the body part, that's another subject,
the angelic bodies, but will you tell me
why it is that angels, when they appear
like that visibly and tangible, why it is
that they appear as men?
I thought all the angels would have been
feminine, wouldn't you?
That's how I saw them when I went
to Sunday school, in the drawings, but anyway,
I mustn't labour here, I might get into
difficulties.
At any rate, they approach him, and they
are three men.
He runs to meet them.
He bows himself to the ground.
Remember how old he is now, he's 99
years old.
He bows himself to the ground, and he
invites them in the true oriental courtesy to
come into his tent and to rest a
while in the heat of the day, and
he will prepare not only lodging for them,
but he will make physical provision for them
as well.
So, they acquiesce to his invitation, and they
come, and they sleep themselves there, and Abraham
runs off into the herd, try it the
next time you're 99, and catch a calf,
and he delivers the calf to a young
man, and he tells him, now you dress
and prepare, and he goes to Sarah, and
he tells her what to do, and he
gives her instructions about what she is to
bake, or what she is to prepare, and
he himself waits until the meal is ready,
and then he acts as the host, and
he acts as the servant, and he brings
the meal, and he sets it before them,
and then the interesting expression is when we
find this here, verse 8, he took butter
and milk, and the calf which he had
dressed, and he set it before them, and
he stood by them under the tree, and
they did eat.
How much closer can God come to us
than this?
For this is Jehovah, this is the Lord
himself, they did eat.
The three partook of the food that Abraham
had prepared for them.
It reminds me of the verse in Romans
chapter 8, what the law could not do,
and that it was weak through the flesh,
God sending his own son in the likeness
of sinful flesh, in the likeness of sinful
flesh.
The word became flesh, but not only did
he become flesh, he came in the likeness
of sinful flesh.
Now, of course, we know it was not
sinful, we know he did no sin, he
knew no sin, in him was no sin,
but he came in the likeness of sinful
flesh, and he partook of our nature, for
that's what he got from Mary, by the
way, was his inhuman nature.
I know there are mysteries here, and I'm
not going to go too far into it
with you, but I strenuously refute the position
that has been taken by some that Mary
was a surrogate mother, that Mary contributed nothing
to her son.
He was her son, he is called her
son, he brought forth her firstborn son.
Therefore, that thing which shall be born of
the holy, Gabriel said, shall be called the
son of God.
He was her son, and he came in
the likeness of sinful flesh, and there he
lived with them, and he toiled with them,
and he slept, and he worked, and he
ate with them, and he experienced all the
vicissitudes and difficulties of life with them.
Here, in this book, Jehovah comes to Abraham's
tent with two angels, and he sits down
and partakes of Abraham's food.
What a marvelous thing it is!
Sometimes our concept of God is very abstract,
and it's very remote, and we have relegated
to him a distance which the scriptures deny,
and we have felt that not only is
heaven far away, but God is far away.
He could come no closer, could he, than
he has on an occasion like this.
Remember the Lord says in resurrection, if you
hear anything to eat, and they said, they
gave him a piece of broiled fish and
a honeycomb, and he took it and did
eat before them.
Marvelous, this body of glory, isn't it?
What we're going to be like.
Somebody asked me just the other day, the
other day, were we going to be eating
in the glory?
I said, of course we are.
No, I didn't say it would be great,
you understand.
That's one of the things we had to
learn when we came to the south of
North Carolina a few years back.
My wife just thinks they're marvelous.
Grits in the pulled beans, cooked with bits
of fat back in it.
Each to his own.
El gusto de consumidor, we say in Spanish.
You have your own taste, you're welcome to
some.
Well, at any rate, of course we're going
to eat, and why are we going to
eat?
Because there is no living creature that is
self-sufficient or self-sustaining.
Nothing, and no one.
Everything that God and every person and every
individual and every intelligence that God has created
must be sustained outside of itself.
So, of course, we're going to need food.
Sit down and eat bread.
My table, he said, and my king, didn't
he?
All right, now don't ask me what they
mean, but that's something else.
So, he comes very close to Abraham.
Now, there are two main subjects on his
heart, on his mind, as the Lord sits
there, and after the meal is through, then
they rise up to go on their way,
and they're walking away from the tent, but
before they do so, God brings up the
first of the two subjects on his mind.
The first subject is the son, and he
speaks to Abraham about him having a son,
and he's going to have it at a
set time, he said, according to the time
of life.
So, this is not a miraculous birth in
the sense that we sometimes think of a
miraculous birth.
This is a birth from a miraculous rejuvenation
of two dead bodies, but God said twice
over, according to the time, at this time
of the year.
So, it's a nine-month gestation period, as
you and I know today, and he's not
going to move outside that framework.
He's going to give Abraham and Sarah a
son, but he's going to give them a
son in accordance with the laws of procreation
that he himself has established.
I think that's very important, and the reason
why I suggest to you that's important, although
I'm not going to interest a lot of
you here today, I have often had the
question thrown at me.
In fact, I visited a little lady recently,
she has four children, and she was feeling
very badly as a thin little woman, very
energetic, very energetic rather, very artistic, hard worker,
tireless worker, but she didn't want to have
any more children, and she said, well, my
husband says that God is the creator of
all life, and financially we can't afford another
child, and he wants to have another child,
and I don't think we should, and he
says, well, he believes that God is the
creator of all lives.
Reminds me of a little lady, a Spanish
lady, I was having some meetings in Miami
and Spanish one night, and this little lady
came to me after, and she said to
me, Andavid, I want to ask you a
question.
I said, what's the question?
She said, will you explain to me that
verse that says the meek shall inherit the
earth?
And I said, um, why were you thinking
about that verse?
She said, I'm 37 years old, I've had
17 children, and my husband is leaving me,
and how am I going to raise them?
And I think the poor soul was wondering.
She was a meek kind of individual, and
she was a poor kind of individual too,
and how she ever was going to inherit
the earth, the way things were going with
her, I think was a big problem in
her mind.
But at any rate, this little lady said
to me, um, what can you tell me
about this problem, this situation?
I said, tell your husband that God doesn't
contravene or interfere in the establishment of his
own laws, unless it pleases him for a
very specific purpose to do it.
He established the laws of procreation.
He made you too the creators of this
new life, and you must accept the responsibility
for it.
So we had a long little chat about
that, and when I was all finished, she
said to me, Would you please come back
and talk to Mark?
Because I can't get that through his head.
Well, some husbands' heads, you know what they're
made of, don't you?
So God is telling Abraham that he's going
to have a son.
Sarah's going to have a son at the
set time of the year.
And Sarah laughs, you remember.
She's eavesdropping.
She's listening, as your margin will tell you,
she's listening at the tent door.
She's hearing him listen.
She laughs, and of course the Lord heard
the laugh, and he said, Why did Sarah
laugh?
And Sarah comes out and says, I didn't
laugh.
I didn't laugh.
No, no, I had nothing to do with
Sager, you know.
I mean, it was your fault, Abraham.
And I didn't laugh, she says.
And the Lord says, But you did laugh.
Well, and later on, you remember, when God
comes to Abraham again and talks to him
about his son, Abraham falls on his face,
and he laughed, but he laughed in an
altogether different way.
It's not that you laugh, it's how you
laugh, isn't it?
Sarah's laugh was very cynical, and Abraham's laugh
was a laugh of joy, of gladness.
It was a laugh of exuberance.
He was exultant when he laughed.
It all depends on how you do a
thing, doesn't it?
How you say something, because sometimes you will
say something, and somebody will repeat the same
thing you said to somebody else, but they
repeat it with a different inflection, a different
intonation, and the third party takes it up
altogether differently than the way you said it
in the first place.
Have you ever wondered how the Lord said
in John chapter 20, Mary?
How do you say that?
Mary.
I don't know how he says it, but
it all depends on how you say things,
not necessarily what you say.
So, Sarah laughs, and God says, Why did
Sarah laugh?
And then, finally, he rises up, and they
go on their way, and it says, As
they went on their way, now, I don't
know whether this is a soliloquy, or I
don't know whether the Lord is talking to
the angels.
I don't know, but the Lord says, it
might have been a soliloquy, I don't know,
he says, Shall I hide from Abraham the
thing which I'm going to do?
I really can't keep it from Abraham.
I must tell him.
Isn't that marvelous?
Why should the Lord of all creation, why
should the ruler of the ends of the
earth, why should the omnipotent, omniscient God confide
in a man regarding the secrets of his
works?
Here's a man that was so near to
him, and so dear to him, that he
said, I must tell him what I'm going
to do.
So, he tells Abraham about Sodom, and he
adds a very human touch to it, doesn't
he?
When he says, I've come down to see
if the cry that I've heard up there,
and down here, is really what I have
been hearing.
Strange, the language that God uses at times,
isn't it?
How he accommodates himself to us in our
frailty.
It amazes me, and it humbles me to
think that God would do this.
So, he says, I've come down to see
about Sodom, Abraham.
The city is wicked before the Lord, and
I've come down to see if it is
as I have heard it to be, and
if so, I will destroy it.
And then you begin that marvelous work of
intercession.
Abraham draws near to the Lord.
He draws near to the Lord, understanding the
two of them together, because the angels have
gone on towards Sodom, and Abraham's left before
Jehovah, and he begins to speak to the
Lord.
You know how he starts at 50 and
moves down by 10, and he moves down
until he comes down to 10, and he's
interceding for Sodom, and each time the Lord
responds to him, I'll not spare the city,
I won't spare the city.
Am I muttering, by the way?
I dropped my voice, pardon me.
And he says, if there's 50, and if
there's 40, and if there's 30, and if
there's 20, and if there are 10 in
the city, I will not destroy it.
And Abraham says, I have no more to
say.
He has reached that fascinating number 10.
You'll find it right from the earliest chapters
of Genesis, right through to the closing chapters
of the Revelation.
It comes up a multiple of times, this
number 10, this metric system that you good
folks here don't have to fight about as
we do in Canada.
You know, minus two degrees, and plus three
degrees, and so forth, and then there's so
many kilometers from here to there, and you
multiply it by six and add two in
order to get into miles.
You don't have to worry about that down
here, do you?
Well, we folks, some of us, younger, older
ones at any rate, don't like this metric
system too well.
So, he's coming down and he gets to
that last number, the number of a complete
measure always in the metric system, number 10,
and he stops there, and if you stop
and figure it out, if Lot had been
the man he ought to have been, and
if his wife had been the woman she
ought to have been, there would have been
10 in the family of Lot, as I
see it.
So, Abraham stops there, well, I can't go
any farther, there must be 10, and God
says, if there's 10 in the city, I
won't destroy it, and Abraham withdraws, and it
says, the Lord went on his way.
There's a little touch in chapter 17, I
never noticed with you, but after God is
speaking to Abraham, and he's changed his name
in chapter 17, then it says, the Lord
went up from being with Abraham.
He's come down, and now he's going up,
and in this case, the Lord Jehovah goes
on his way, and Abraham returns to his
tent.
Quite marvelous revelations these are of God.
Now, chapter 19, we'll pass right over that.
Come to chapter 20, and I want to
notice this briefly, I was going to stop
right on the quarter hour, I have a
good brother back there at the door and
says, you are supposed to take 40 minutes,
regardless of when that is.
So, I can't obey everybody at once, but
I shall try.
When we come to chapter 20, we have
a Philistine king, Abimelech, and here is a
man who falls into a trap regarding a
woman, and Abraham and Sarah and all his
retinue, they move into the land of the
Philistines, and Abimelech, the king of Gerar, the
king of the Philistines, he sees, well, they
report to him that Abraham's wife, Sarah, is
a beautiful woman.
Didn't even know about oil of old age,
and even at this advanced age in life,
she's still a beautiful woman, and Abraham says,
now, we'll keep by the bargain when we
left the Chaldees, we left the Chaldees with
this bargain that you would always say you're
my sister, and I will always say I'm
your brother, because if not, they're going to
take you for your beauty, and they'll slay
me.
So, it goes on again, even at this
stage, after chapters 15, 17, and 18, Abraham
and Sarah are still working under this subterfuge,
under this deceit.
Well, don't be too hard on them.
How long have we known the Lord?
How many years are behind us now?
And aren't it time to resort to that
which is questionable as Christians, and here they
are, and they go into the land of
the Philistines, and they say, no, he's my
brother, and Abraham says, she's my sister, so
they take Sarah into the harem of the
king of the Philistines, and God appears to
Abimelech the king in the night, a vision
of God to a Philistine king.
Is he the God of the Jews only?
No, he's not.
Is he not the God of the Gentiles?
Yes, but what for?
God appears to him in a dream.
Watch the people to whom the Lord appears
in a dream, and watch the people to
whom an angel comes in person, and look
at the circumstances.
We had Hagar, and Hagar comes up again
in the next chapter, 21, but at any
rate, the Lord appears to Abimelech, and he
says, you're a dead man.
You took another man's wife, and Abimelech uses
a title of divine sovereignty, and he says,
Lord, I don't, he said, I did it
in innocence, and I haven't touched the woman.
He said, she's my sister.
She said, he's my brother.
God said, I know.
God is talking to a Philistine king.
We can't limit him, can we?
We can't circumscribe or hedge in the grace
of God, the magnificence of the grace of
God that reaches out to anywhere, but what
purpose?
And I must, I must, I must stop.
God says, return to the man his wife.
If not, you're a dead man.
So Abimelech goes up in the morning, told
all his men what had happened, the dream
he'd had, the Lord had spoken to him,
and what had happened, and he called Abraham,
and he said, why did you do this?
You put me into jeopardy of my life
by saying that she was your sister.
What a tragedy, isn't it?
And a man of this character, of this
position, a man who's just walked with Jehovah,
a man who's just been talking and pleading
and interceding with God about others, that he
should fall into this thing again.
And yet, the angel of the Lord was
pleased to intervene for this purpose, because of
the sanctity of the marriage of his elect.
That's the whole reason for it.
Do you know the days that we're living
in, when the sanctity of marriage, not only
in the world, but now, unfortunately, amongst God's
people, is being cast aside?
God intervenes in this miraculous way, in this
angelic way, by a dream to this king,
because he will have preserved the sanctity of
the marriage of his own.
God is interested in these affairs of marriage
life.
So there, we must leave it.
Let us pray.
Our Father, we commend us to thee this
morning.
We thank thee for thy word.
We thank thee for thine inimitable grace.
O Lord, how marvelous it is to us
that thou shouldst accommodate thyself to us in
our low status and stature.
But we are here before thee this morning,
and our hearts are cheered by the fact
that we have read of thy ways of
old, and we know that thou art the
same yesterday, today, and forever.
May thy grace attend our activities this day,
and the blessings of thy Spirit be upon
thy people, as we commend this to thee,
through the Lord Jesus.
Amen.