Second Sunday in Lent
Genesis 12
Pastor Mike Stanczak (guest preacher)
Genesis 12
Pastor Mike Stanczak (guest preacher)
Good morning. Would you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
My name is Mike. I pastor a little church in Libertyville called Trinity Community Church. I'm here with my wife and five of our six kids this morning. And Grace is a church that's very dear to us. And so this is a really special opportunity to be able to see these spaces that I recognize and share the word of our Lord together.
As you know, today is the second Sunday in Lent. And as the church would have it each year on the second Sunday of Lent, we are guided to consider an episode in the life of Abraham. And today, that episode from the life of Abraham is the call of Abraham that takes place in Genesis 12.
So what we're seeing in Genesis 12 is God not just calling Abraham or Abram, as he was called at that time in his life. He's not just calling Abram. But from the perspective of the biblical authors, someone sort of contains within themselves, the potential for all the people that are going to come from them.
And so when God is calling Abram, he's not just calling Abram. He's calling the nation that's going to issue from Abram. And so this morning, what we're going to see in the passage is that God calls a blessed nation that is gathered by faith and will journey by faith.
And I'm going to use that as kind of my structure for the sermon. So I'll break down that sentence and that will be my answer.
But I'm going to use that as my outline this morning. So God first, he calls a blessed nation. Today's psalm read that “blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” When you're reading just straight through Genesis and you arrive at Genesis 12, what you realize is that nationhood is very much on the mind of the Lord as he gives us the book of Genesis.
So if you consider the previous two chapters in the book of Genesis, leading up to chapter 12, so chapters 10 and 11, what you first get in chapter 10 is something that biblical scholars call the table of nations. And what it is, is a genealogy from Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
So from these sons issue this genealogy. But the significance of the table of nations is not just that Shem, Ham, and Japheth happened to have sons. The significance of it is that they issued forth peoples.
So you can kind of imagine it like this: so if one man had two kids, and then let's say those two kids had two kids, and those two kids had two kids, and you just keep drawing that tree outward. If you were to extrapolate that for 500 years, at the end of the 500 years, that man has produced likely over a million people, and potentially the number is much, much higher, depending on how quickly the kids get busy in the meantime.
You know, generation to generation.
So you have well over a million people issuing from this one man. At that point, he's gone from just being dad to being the patriarch of peoples, right? And so that's what you're seeing in chapter 10 of Genesis. Nationhood is on the mind of the author of Genesis as he gives us chapter 10, this table of nations.
Now in chapter 11, what we find is that these peoples who have issued forth from the sons of Noah, they haven't gone and filled the earth. They haven't gone and become many peoples. They've remained one people and remained in one place. And staying all together, they form into this kind of empire.
The empire takes a form of a great tower that they intend to build up to heaven. And we know that empire is what we're looking at because the tower's name is Babel, which in the Hebrew is just Babylon. So we're seeing this tower of Babylon, tower of Babel, this tower of empire.
And the Lord looks down from heaven and he sees that if these people are not made to disperse, there will be nothing that can stop this empire from doing whatever it sets out to do. A few of those things being obey the Lord, right? And so what does the Lord do? You guys know the story.
He confuses the languages. He confuses the languages of the people. And those who have the common language, they disperse this way. And then other folks who have a common language, they disperse this way. And so the Lord disperses this empire out into many nations. So you have two chapters that have nationhood in mind.
And then finally, we get the call of Abram. And it takes this form. Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I live in. I will show you and I will make of you a great nation. Once again, this idea of a nation being formed is at the center of this movement in Genesis.
Of all the nations that disperse from Babel, there's only one that the Lord chooses. This is the nation that the psalm calls blessed. And what is that nation? What we realize is that that nation is the church. That the nation that's actually, in mind in the psalm, the nation that the Lord is actually speaking to Abram about is us.
It's the blessed nation of the church that the Lord is gathering. A people, but it's a people of peoples, gathered in Christ who is the one lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness so that all who look on him in faith will be saved. That is the blessed nation. It's the church.
Other nations might have military might. Other nations might have cultural influence. Other nations might have staggering wealth. Other nations might have immense territories. There's a handful that have all four of those things. But we should not mistake any of those things as the blessing that the psalm from this morning has in mind. The blessing is Christ himself.
The blessed nation, the nation of the church is blessed because we, even if we have none of those other things, we have God himself.
And so we are blessed. Now, how does this people, this blessed nation, come together? And that's where I want to dig into Abram's faith. We are a blessed nation gathered by faith. Now, when you look at the story of Abram, his story is actually a very sad one. So Abram is aging, and his wife is aging too.
And when she was young, she was infertile.
And he has no children of his own. His brother is dead prematurely. We're told in the previous chapter that his brother Haran dies in the presence of Abram's father, Terah. And so Abram, like a good brother, he takes responsibility for his nephew Lot. Abram has no lineage to look forward to.
And what lineage he does have is really one that he's perpetuating for his brother's sake. And we look at the story of Abram. We look at Abram's father. And Abram's father's story is one of grief. As I just said, his son Haran dies prematurely. And so Terah, he gets up his family, he gathers everybody, including Abram and Sarai and Lot.
Everybody's going to go with him because this is what you did back then. And it's Terah's intention that they will go to the land of Canaan. But instead, what ends up happening is Abram's father takes a 400-mile detour north and lands in a... a city that shares the name of his dead son, Haran.
And so you have this image of a man who, in the end, sets off for one place, but his grief comes to define him. His grief comes to be the thing that settles him in the end. Abram's story and Terah's story are stories of futility and frustration and crushed hopes, specifically around children.
And it's in this context that the Lord tells Abram, I'm going to make of you a great nation. Now, we would perfectly understand if at this point Abram had a couple questions because in general, if a great nation is going to issue forth from you, that normally doesn't happen, all things being equal, without children.
So at this point, we would understand if Abram was going to say, you know, hold up, I need some explanation. But that's actually not what we get. He's given us a chance to say, he's given this promise that not only will he become a great nation, but that somehow, in him, all the nations of the earth have a stake.
He will become a great nation, and through that nation, all the families of the earth will be blessed. And amazingly, we get no questions from Abram. We're given this simple line, so Abram went just as the Lord had said. In other words, Abram had faith in God.
Abram chose to believe God over against his powers of observation. So if Abram had only his powers of observation to go on, that's all he's going to trust, he would quickly realize that, you know, well, I can't possibly trust this God because I'm looking around and I don't have any children. How's this going to happen?
How's that going to happen? In the end, though, he takes the word of God to be more reliable than his powers of observation. And the same must go for us.
God made to Abram an impossible promise, a promise that seems impossible given his powers of observation. God has made an impossible promise to us in Christ, multiple of them. And if we have only our powers of observation to go on, well, then we should just trust the empiricism, right? Trust our reason.
But instead, no, we know that God can be trusted. God will come through on his promise, because he's the one who made them, and he can be trusted. We have promises that history is not truly chaos. That as you're scrolling through your newsfeed or whatever it is, and you're seeing all these different news stories, and it just looks like the fog of war, I can't even tell what's going on, this must all be chaos.
No. What's actually happening is that history itself is being guided by the ascended Lord. He is superintending every detail, and he will drive it to the right conclusion. We, by our powers of observation, might say, I'm alone. I've been forgotten. No one's watching out for me. No. You have the spirit of Christ with you.
You are never alone. And you can trust that that is so because Jesus said that he would be with you to the end of the age. We look back on mistakes we've made in the past, or even in the past, the habitual sins that we're wrestling with right now, and we say, you know, these are going to be the things that define me, aren't they?
I'm going to be defined by this. This is going to be the final word on me. No. The thing that will define you in the end is not your sin, but the righteousness of Christ credited to you by faith. That is so. If there's anything that our powers of observation would tell us, we can pretty much hang our hat on.
It's the reality of death. There's nothing more permanent than the reality of death. And so we look around and we say, well, there's nothing that overcomes death. No. Christ has overcome death. Christ is risen. And all who have died with him will be raised with him. We have been made impossible promises by God.
And he came through on his promises to Abram, and so he will come through on every one of his promises to us.
Now, God's promise to Abram was that a people would come from Abram. And that people, us, the church, we are defined by the faith that defined Abram. If we had only Genesis to go off of, we might think that the nation God had in mind at the call of Abram was ethnic Israel, a nation set apart by circumcision.
But today's epistle makes clear that, no, the nation that God had in mind is a nation of both the circumcised and the uncircumcised. In other words, it's a nation of nations. It's a people of people of peoples. And what brings us together is that we share the faith of Abram. We have placed our faith in Christ.
And so we are a people gathered by faith, but we're also a people journeying by faith. Which brings me to the final brief thing I want to add is that we are a blessed nation gathered by faith and journeying by faith. As you look at Abram's story, what you find is that he's told he needs to go to the land that God is calling him to.
He picks up everything and he goes. He doesn't even know where he's going. God just says, go to the land I will show you. So he goes and finds himself 400 miles south of Haran in the very land his own father was trying to make it to at the beginning. He's there in Shechem within Canaan.
And yet we expect, okay, here's the moment where Abram's faith is all going to be sight here on out. No more need for faith. That's exactly not what happens. Yes, the blessed child comes, Isaac, but Abram quickly has to move from Shechem. A famine moves him down into Egypt. In the end, the promised child will come, but Abram will die owning nothing, nothing in Canaan except a grave site.
Which means that the fullness of all God's promises to Abram are unfulfilled at Abram's death. He doesn't see in his own biological life all the fullness of what God promised to him. Which means that there is no point in his journey where it stopped being about faith. Someone once said that the way in is the way on.
The way into the Christian faith is by faith. The way on. And the Christian life is by faith. The way in is the way on. We will always be living this thing by faith. That is how it is done. We will always be living this thing, banking everything on the promises of our Lord.
Now, just a brief thing for us to consider as I finish on this. You know, I think that sometimes we can just fully intellectualize what faith in Jesus really means. We can kind of do this thing. We can kind of do this thing where it's like, well, I have faith because I agree to the doctrines of the Christian faith.
But of course, that's a very different thing than actually, you know, putting the chips down, banking everything on Jesus as a day-to-day way of living. And so if that's you this morning, I expect it's all of us to some degree. You know, something that I'd encourage you to think about in the silence after the sermon.
I think that faith is kind of like a muscle that can be worked out. And so, something you could do to just instill a deeper reliance on the Lord is identify something that you could do that would make zero sense if the promises of God were not true. Right?
So now that might be something as simple as like, hey, we're really, our margins are really tight this month. What if we chose this month to host a couple families at our house and, you know, throw a party or something like that? It could be something very simple like that. But it's something that where you're purposefully putting yourself in a little bit of a position where you have to rely on God for something because it works out the muscle of faith.
And I'm just convinced that God honors that and God responds to that. And he will honor your effort to live more by faith. And so, you know, you might, in the silence after the sermon, you might consider that. And also think through, you know, maybe you're already in a position where things are really intense for you.
You're facing things that you fear. What do you need to believe God about? Which of his promises do you need to rely on this morning? So I hope that you'll consider that as we finish. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you.
My name is Mike. I pastor a little church in Libertyville called Trinity Community Church. I'm here with my wife and five of our six kids this morning. And Grace is a church that's very dear to us. And so this is a really special opportunity to be able to see these spaces that I recognize and share the word of our Lord together.
As you know, today is the second Sunday in Lent. And as the church would have it each year on the second Sunday of Lent, we are guided to consider an episode in the life of Abraham. And today, that episode from the life of Abraham is the call of Abraham that takes place in Genesis 12.
So what we're seeing in Genesis 12 is God not just calling Abraham or Abram, as he was called at that time in his life. He's not just calling Abram. But from the perspective of the biblical authors, someone sort of contains within themselves, the potential for all the people that are going to come from them.
And so when God is calling Abram, he's not just calling Abram. He's calling the nation that's going to issue from Abram. And so this morning, what we're going to see in the passage is that God calls a blessed nation that is gathered by faith and will journey by faith.
And I'm going to use that as kind of my structure for the sermon. So I'll break down that sentence and that will be my answer.
But I'm going to use that as my outline this morning. So God first, he calls a blessed nation. Today's psalm read that “blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” When you're reading just straight through Genesis and you arrive at Genesis 12, what you realize is that nationhood is very much on the mind of the Lord as he gives us the book of Genesis.
So if you consider the previous two chapters in the book of Genesis, leading up to chapter 12, so chapters 10 and 11, what you first get in chapter 10 is something that biblical scholars call the table of nations. And what it is, is a genealogy from Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
So from these sons issue this genealogy. But the significance of the table of nations is not just that Shem, Ham, and Japheth happened to have sons. The significance of it is that they issued forth peoples.
So you can kind of imagine it like this: so if one man had two kids, and then let's say those two kids had two kids, and those two kids had two kids, and you just keep drawing that tree outward. If you were to extrapolate that for 500 years, at the end of the 500 years, that man has produced likely over a million people, and potentially the number is much, much higher, depending on how quickly the kids get busy in the meantime.
You know, generation to generation.
So you have well over a million people issuing from this one man. At that point, he's gone from just being dad to being the patriarch of peoples, right? And so that's what you're seeing in chapter 10 of Genesis. Nationhood is on the mind of the author of Genesis as he gives us chapter 10, this table of nations.
Now in chapter 11, what we find is that these peoples who have issued forth from the sons of Noah, they haven't gone and filled the earth. They haven't gone and become many peoples. They've remained one people and remained in one place. And staying all together, they form into this kind of empire.
The empire takes a form of a great tower that they intend to build up to heaven. And we know that empire is what we're looking at because the tower's name is Babel, which in the Hebrew is just Babylon. So we're seeing this tower of Babylon, tower of Babel, this tower of empire.
And the Lord looks down from heaven and he sees that if these people are not made to disperse, there will be nothing that can stop this empire from doing whatever it sets out to do. A few of those things being obey the Lord, right? And so what does the Lord do? You guys know the story.
He confuses the languages. He confuses the languages of the people. And those who have the common language, they disperse this way. And then other folks who have a common language, they disperse this way. And so the Lord disperses this empire out into many nations. So you have two chapters that have nationhood in mind.
And then finally, we get the call of Abram. And it takes this form. Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I live in. I will show you and I will make of you a great nation. Once again, this idea of a nation being formed is at the center of this movement in Genesis.
Of all the nations that disperse from Babel, there's only one that the Lord chooses. This is the nation that the psalm calls blessed. And what is that nation? What we realize is that that nation is the church. That the nation that's actually, in mind in the psalm, the nation that the Lord is actually speaking to Abram about is us.
It's the blessed nation of the church that the Lord is gathering. A people, but it's a people of peoples, gathered in Christ who is the one lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness so that all who look on him in faith will be saved. That is the blessed nation. It's the church.
Other nations might have military might. Other nations might have cultural influence. Other nations might have staggering wealth. Other nations might have immense territories. There's a handful that have all four of those things. But we should not mistake any of those things as the blessing that the psalm from this morning has in mind. The blessing is Christ himself.
The blessed nation, the nation of the church is blessed because we, even if we have none of those other things, we have God himself.
And so we are blessed. Now, how does this people, this blessed nation, come together? And that's where I want to dig into Abram's faith. We are a blessed nation gathered by faith. Now, when you look at the story of Abram, his story is actually a very sad one. So Abram is aging, and his wife is aging too.
And when she was young, she was infertile.
And he has no children of his own. His brother is dead prematurely. We're told in the previous chapter that his brother Haran dies in the presence of Abram's father, Terah. And so Abram, like a good brother, he takes responsibility for his nephew Lot. Abram has no lineage to look forward to.
And what lineage he does have is really one that he's perpetuating for his brother's sake. And we look at the story of Abram. We look at Abram's father. And Abram's father's story is one of grief. As I just said, his son Haran dies prematurely. And so Terah, he gets up his family, he gathers everybody, including Abram and Sarai and Lot.
Everybody's going to go with him because this is what you did back then. And it's Terah's intention that they will go to the land of Canaan. But instead, what ends up happening is Abram's father takes a 400-mile detour north and lands in a... a city that shares the name of his dead son, Haran.
And so you have this image of a man who, in the end, sets off for one place, but his grief comes to define him. His grief comes to be the thing that settles him in the end. Abram's story and Terah's story are stories of futility and frustration and crushed hopes, specifically around children.
And it's in this context that the Lord tells Abram, I'm going to make of you a great nation. Now, we would perfectly understand if at this point Abram had a couple questions because in general, if a great nation is going to issue forth from you, that normally doesn't happen, all things being equal, without children.
So at this point, we would understand if Abram was going to say, you know, hold up, I need some explanation. But that's actually not what we get. He's given us a chance to say, he's given this promise that not only will he become a great nation, but that somehow, in him, all the nations of the earth have a stake.
He will become a great nation, and through that nation, all the families of the earth will be blessed. And amazingly, we get no questions from Abram. We're given this simple line, so Abram went just as the Lord had said. In other words, Abram had faith in God.
Abram chose to believe God over against his powers of observation. So if Abram had only his powers of observation to go on, that's all he's going to trust, he would quickly realize that, you know, well, I can't possibly trust this God because I'm looking around and I don't have any children. How's this going to happen?
How's that going to happen? In the end, though, he takes the word of God to be more reliable than his powers of observation. And the same must go for us.
God made to Abram an impossible promise, a promise that seems impossible given his powers of observation. God has made an impossible promise to us in Christ, multiple of them. And if we have only our powers of observation to go on, well, then we should just trust the empiricism, right? Trust our reason.
But instead, no, we know that God can be trusted. God will come through on his promise, because he's the one who made them, and he can be trusted. We have promises that history is not truly chaos. That as you're scrolling through your newsfeed or whatever it is, and you're seeing all these different news stories, and it just looks like the fog of war, I can't even tell what's going on, this must all be chaos.
No. What's actually happening is that history itself is being guided by the ascended Lord. He is superintending every detail, and he will drive it to the right conclusion. We, by our powers of observation, might say, I'm alone. I've been forgotten. No one's watching out for me. No. You have the spirit of Christ with you.
You are never alone. And you can trust that that is so because Jesus said that he would be with you to the end of the age. We look back on mistakes we've made in the past, or even in the past, the habitual sins that we're wrestling with right now, and we say, you know, these are going to be the things that define me, aren't they?
I'm going to be defined by this. This is going to be the final word on me. No. The thing that will define you in the end is not your sin, but the righteousness of Christ credited to you by faith. That is so. If there's anything that our powers of observation would tell us, we can pretty much hang our hat on.
It's the reality of death. There's nothing more permanent than the reality of death. And so we look around and we say, well, there's nothing that overcomes death. No. Christ has overcome death. Christ is risen. And all who have died with him will be raised with him. We have been made impossible promises by God.
And he came through on his promises to Abram, and so he will come through on every one of his promises to us.
Now, God's promise to Abram was that a people would come from Abram. And that people, us, the church, we are defined by the faith that defined Abram. If we had only Genesis to go off of, we might think that the nation God had in mind at the call of Abram was ethnic Israel, a nation set apart by circumcision.
But today's epistle makes clear that, no, the nation that God had in mind is a nation of both the circumcised and the uncircumcised. In other words, it's a nation of nations. It's a people of people of peoples. And what brings us together is that we share the faith of Abram. We have placed our faith in Christ.
And so we are a people gathered by faith, but we're also a people journeying by faith. Which brings me to the final brief thing I want to add is that we are a blessed nation gathered by faith and journeying by faith. As you look at Abram's story, what you find is that he's told he needs to go to the land that God is calling him to.
He picks up everything and he goes. He doesn't even know where he's going. God just says, go to the land I will show you. So he goes and finds himself 400 miles south of Haran in the very land his own father was trying to make it to at the beginning. He's there in Shechem within Canaan.
And yet we expect, okay, here's the moment where Abram's faith is all going to be sight here on out. No more need for faith. That's exactly not what happens. Yes, the blessed child comes, Isaac, but Abram quickly has to move from Shechem. A famine moves him down into Egypt. In the end, the promised child will come, but Abram will die owning nothing, nothing in Canaan except a grave site.
Which means that the fullness of all God's promises to Abram are unfulfilled at Abram's death. He doesn't see in his own biological life all the fullness of what God promised to him. Which means that there is no point in his journey where it stopped being about faith. Someone once said that the way in is the way on.
The way into the Christian faith is by faith. The way on. And the Christian life is by faith. The way in is the way on. We will always be living this thing by faith. That is how it is done. We will always be living this thing, banking everything on the promises of our Lord.
Now, just a brief thing for us to consider as I finish on this. You know, I think that sometimes we can just fully intellectualize what faith in Jesus really means. We can kind of do this thing. We can kind of do this thing where it's like, well, I have faith because I agree to the doctrines of the Christian faith.
But of course, that's a very different thing than actually, you know, putting the chips down, banking everything on Jesus as a day-to-day way of living. And so if that's you this morning, I expect it's all of us to some degree. You know, something that I'd encourage you to think about in the silence after the sermon.
I think that faith is kind of like a muscle that can be worked out. And so, something you could do to just instill a deeper reliance on the Lord is identify something that you could do that would make zero sense if the promises of God were not true. Right?
So now that might be something as simple as like, hey, we're really, our margins are really tight this month. What if we chose this month to host a couple families at our house and, you know, throw a party or something like that? It could be something very simple like that. But it's something that where you're purposefully putting yourself in a little bit of a position where you have to rely on God for something because it works out the muscle of faith.
And I'm just convinced that God honors that and God responds to that. And he will honor your effort to live more by faith. And so, you know, you might, in the silence after the sermon, you might consider that. And also think through, you know, maybe you're already in a position where things are really intense for you.
You're facing things that you fear. What do you need to believe God about? Which of his promises do you need to rely on this morning? So I hope that you'll consider that as we finish. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you.
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