By Faith Abraham - 55

Well, as most of you know, we are sojourning in the book of Hebrews and have come of late to chapter 11, which contains the Hall of Faith, a record of many people who honored the Lord with their faith throughout their lifetimes and are set before us as examples. And so chapter 11 is given for the purpose of explaining the nature of biblical faith.

By precept as in verse one and verse six, but primarily by example, by giving us reminders of many from years gone by who believed God and honored him with their faith. We have already examined Abel and Enoch and Noah, and now we're ready today for Abraham. We're going to be looking only at verses eight through 10 because there are a lot more things said about Abraham actually than anyone else in this entire passage. Most of these heroes of faith have only one verse devoted to them, but Abraham has many and Moses also has many. And that's not surprising because Abraham and Moses surely must be considered the two greatest personalities in the history of the nation of Israel. And so in the life of Abraham, we're not going to be able to do what we did with the previous ones, which is not only to examine the text in Hebrews, but also to at least touch on all the other references to them throughout the Bible.

But in the case of Abraham, that would be absolutely impossible. There are too many references in both the Old and the New Testament to Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation. But we are going to consider several key texts before we examine our primary text in Hebrews chapter 11.

And so if you want an outline, it's very simple. Number one, historical background, and you'll know what that is when we get into it. And then number two, textual insights, and that will be our focus upon the text in Hebrews chapter 11. Now I need for you to turn back to the book of Genesis chapter 10 as we begin our historical background.

And I warn you, a lot of what we're going to look at in Genesis 10 and 11 falls into the category of genealogy. And we don't normally consider that to be very inspirational, to be sure. It's certainly instructive if we're willing to take a close look at it, but it's not particularly heartwarming or inspirational. But two things to keep in mind. Number one, because you have been in the habit of skipping lightly over those portions, we're going to look at it more carefully today and make up for all those times that you have skipped over it in your reading.

Fair enough? And number two, it is part of God's eternal word. He put it here for a purpose and he intends for us to look at it. So first of all, I want you to recognize that coming out of chapter nine, which is the last chapter dealing with Noah, Noah began, his record begins back in chapter five and continues in chapter six and seven and eight and nine. And Noah and his three sons and all of their wives, the eight of them, safely made it through the flood and they have come off the ark.

And they are the only people in all the world. And now the world is going to be repopulated by them. And so now, not surprisingly, we have a genealogy of Noah, even as earlier we had looked at the genealogy of Adam to Noah. That involved how many generations?

Anybody remember? Ten generations from Adam to Noah. And now we're going to look at the genealogy from Noah to Abraham. Anyone like to guess how many generations we find there? Ten. Ten once again. So right there we have something that probably you didn't notice when you were reading through the genealogies.

I hadn't noticed that either until this week. And I actually took the time to write down all these names and some information about them. And I numbered them as I did so and I said, well, what do you know?

Another group of ten. And so we have the origin of Abraham. Sometimes our concept of Abraham, or Abram as he's first called before his name is changed, but sometime our concept of him is that he's just some unknown, isolated person out there in the world somewhere.

And God said, eeny, meeny, miny, moe, I think I'll take him and make the nation of Israel out of him. But now we learn that actually he is closely connected to a particular line from Noah through Shem down to Abraham. That's his background. That's his heritage.

And we need to understand that. So notice chapter 10 verse 1. Now this is the genealogy of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And sons were born to them after the flood. And then notice that the genealogy is now going to give us a record of all three of these sons beginning in verse 2 with Japheth. The sons of Japheth were, we'll stop there. Verse 6, the sons of Ham were, and now we've got his descendants, including one of his sons, Canaan. I make special note of that because if you remember the account when Noah got off the ark, there was that sinful episode where Noah got drunk and his three sons were involved in something that's not clearly spelled out in that particular situation. But his son Ham was the one who was the most, who was really the one that's pointed out as the transgressor in all of that.

But God pronounced a curse not upon Ham, the one who did that, but upon one of his sons who was who? Canaan. A curse upon Canaan. But this record tells us who the descendants of Canaan were and I think it's very important that we understand that.

Look at verse 15. Canaan begat Sidon, his firstborn. What do we associate that name Sidon with? Well, with a city in what today is Lebanon, but the cities, the twin cities of Tyre and Sidon on the Mediterranean coast north of Israel. So one of his sons was Sidon who evidently was instrumental in founding that city that became Sidon and so forth. It goes down through here and I won't read all of this, but we'll drop down to verse 19. And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon as you go toward Gerar as far as Gaza.

Well, that's a pretty current name, isn't it? Here we are, how many thousands of years later, still talking about Gaza that's mentioned clear back here right after the flood. But where is Gaza? Well, that's on the Mediterranean coast south of Israel. So where did Canaan and his descendants settle? They settled along the Mediterranean coast from as far north as Sidon and as far south as Gaza. And they are, in short, the Canaanites.

You know who they are, don't you? They inhabited the land of Canaan. Now why do I make a big point of that? Because this, like so many things in the Bible, has been misunderstood and distorted sinfully.

And many of you all know exactly what I'm talking about. But as an excuse to oppress a particular people who are considered to be the descendants of Ham, and they've got the wrong ones entirely, the curse was on Canaan and Canaan is the father of the Canaanites. Enough said, that should dispel some mythology that has been sinfully used to justify the evil practice of slavery in the United States of America. It is entirely wrong. Most everything that is traced back, that people blame the Christian religion for, is not the truth of the Bible, it is a distortion of what the Bible says, almost in every case. I would say in every case, I don't know any exceptions to that. When the Bible is not believed as it is written, and not understood as it is written, and not applied as it is written, it does create all kinds of mischief and sinful things.

Why would you expect otherwise? If you distort the word of God, you get sin. If you believe and obey the word of God, you get righteousness. So the descendants of Noah. We drop down to verse 22. The sons of Shem, now we've gone from Japheth, to Ham, to Shem, the third son, who actually was the first son, but the third one in order here, who was going to be the beginning of the line from which we get Abraham, our hero of the faith for today. The sons of Shem were, and it goes down through all of these, I'm not going to go through that entire genealogy, but it winds up in verse 32. Now these are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their generations, in their nations, and from these, the nations were divided on the earth after the flood.

Okay. Descendants of Noah. And as we move on to chapter 11, the first thing in chapter 11 is a tower of Babel, and the division of the people of the earth by languages. But then it takes up again the genealogy now of Shem in verse 10.

Chapter 11, verse 10. This is the genealogy of Shem. Shem was 100 years old and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood. And he begot, after he begot Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and begot sons and daughters.

Now I'm not going to read through all of this, but I want you to get a sense of how this goes. Very similar to the genealogy we saw earlier from Adam to Noah. It lists the name of the person, the number of years, well, how long he lived before he had his first son, and then how long he lived after his first son, and that he died. And though this doesn't specifically mention and he died, it does give us the same kind of information. And it tells us how long these people lived. And so taking what is actually the oldest son of Noah, Shem, we find that this is the line that produces a line of Abraham. And you'll notice, I will take this much time, I'm not going to read through this account, but let me, I'm going to read down the names, just the 10 names. Shem, Arphaxad, Sheila, Eber, Peleg, Reu, Sarig, Nahor, Terah, and Abraham. Actually, he called Abram until his name was changed.

Terah was the father of Abraham. And now I'm also going to go back to that list and tell you how long each of them lived. Shem, 600 years. Arphaxad, 438 years. Sheila, 433. Eber, 464. Peleg, 239. Reu, 239. Sarig, 230. Nahor, 148.

Terah, 205. And Terah's three sons were Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And we know that Abraham lived 175 years. But please note how quickly the human lifespan decreased after the flood. I've already pointed this out to you before, but when we're looking at the genealogy before the flood, almost every one of those men lived into their 800s or 900 years, Methuselah being the oldest at 965, except one who didn't die, Enoch, who walked with God and was not because God took him, so he only lived on the earth for 300 and some years. But all the rest of them lived 850 to 950 years in that range. Now, Noah and his three sons get off the ark and Shem lives 600 years. His life has been shortened by over 300 years compared to those ancestors before the flood. And it just keeps going down and down until we get to Nahor who only lived 148 years, the shortest life of the ten who are listed here.

And I already offered to you two reasons, I think, the Bible doesn't give these to us, but I think two reasonable explanations for this rapid decline in the length of life. Number one is because of the vapor canopy above the earth that was turned into rain and was responsible in great measure for this incredible flood. That plus the fountains of the deep that were broken up. So there was water in the earth and there was this canopy vapor, the vapor canopy above the earth and it condensed and became water that flooded the earth and the canopy is gone.

And that canopy undoubtedly shielded many of the ultraviolet rays that are harmful to human life and health. Number two, the farther and farther reach away from God's original perfect creation, Adam and Eve. And even when Adam and Eve sinned, they still had almost, well, I would say they still had perfect genes. They had a sinful nature, but they had perfect genes. But now because, because they've been created that way by God. So now, however, because of the curse of sin upon them, their children had some imperfections in their genes, but probably very few.

They're that close to perfection. And then their grandchildren, a few more imperfections and so forth on down the line. And every time you get to another generation, you're getting imperfections multiplied and added to imperfections. So every generation has more genetic imperfections than the generation before it. So you can see why in our day, we are, we are swimming upstream trying to create health and longevity. And we have made some strides in that area by huge, huge, huge efforts of medical science. But we are, we are fighting a losing battle against declining genetic imperfection or declining genetic perfections that become more and more imperfect in every generation.

That's my explanation for these declining years. All right, the descendants of Shem, the Shem, and by the way, Shem is where we get the term what you've heard, all of you heard about anti-Semitism. Shem is where that term Semitism, Semites comes from, Semites or Shemites. And of course anti-Semitism in our day refers particularly to those who are anti-Jewish. But Abraham and the Jewish nation were descendants of Shem.

So anti-Semitism, we could call that anti-Semitism, that's where that comes from. So Adam's oldest son, Shem, produced the line of Abraham with the declining lifespans, but presumably starting out with a good godly heritage. Noah, one of the most godly men who ever lived, was the first in this line following the flood. Shem, the son of Noah, this righteous man, and so forth. But what's different is in the line from Adam to Noah, we find from all evidence we have, each of these men were godly men. Even though the world was declining around them, it seems like faith in God and obedience to Him was preserved all the way down through these ten generations until you get to Noah. But in this line, from Noah to Abraham, we see a descent from godliness into pagan idolatry. The worship of God is not maintained in this line as it was in the previous line. They have a godly heritage, but it is clearly a declining heritage. Now, moving from Shem, we're going to look more closely at the family of Terah in chapter 11, verses 27 and following.

I read that to you earlier. This is the genealogy of Terah. Terah begot three sons, Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And Haran begot Lot.

He gives the ones that are most significant to our understanding of the life of Abraham. And Haran died before his father Terah in his native land in Ur of the Chaldeans. Then Abram and Nahor, Abram's brother, took wives.

The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, later changed to Sarah. And the name of Nahor's wife Milcah, and Milcah was the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah. So Nahor, Abram's brother, married his niece. He married his brother's daughter. You say, well, that doesn't sound very favorable to us because we are accustomed to either forbidding or at least frowning upon marriages in families, particularly between those who are close, but there's no prohibition for this in the Bible, and in the beginning, this was the only way. That old question that's supposed to trip us up about where did Cain get his wife?

It's very simple, though hard for some people to swallow. Cain's wife had to be his sister, or undoubtedly was his sister. You say, oh, no genetic decline, no genetic mutations. This isn't producing more greatly defective people genetically because it's too close to the perfection of creation in the beginning.

It's only later when this accumulation of genetic decline keeps rolling on from generation to generation that the danger starts showing up. And when you marry too close, those defects tend to show up in mental problems and physical defects and so forth. So Nahor, Abram's brother, married his niece, and it doesn't tell us here who Sarah is, but later on we learn she is his half-sister. So he's even marrying someone closer to him genetically than Nahor did, right?

Remember how he used that excuse? Why did you say she is my sister when she was his wife when he went down into Egypt and again later in one of the Canaanite kings? And Abraham says, well, she is my sister.

She's also my wife, but she is my sister. So that's what Abraham did. He married Sarah, his half-sister, apparently had the same father but a different mother.

And Sarah, we read in verse 30, was barren and had no child. And Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot, the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram's wife, and they went out with them from the Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan and they came to Haran. And here we find another example of a town that bears the name of a person. We saw it earlier when I pointed out that Sidon was a son of Canaan but is also a city named Sidon.

And now we have it again. Haran is a brother of Abram, the son of Terah, and also there is a town by that name. And so they came to Haran and dwelt there.

So the days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran. So Terah fathered Abraham, Nahor, and Haran. Haran fathered Lot. Haran died in the Ur, in the city of the Ur of the Chaldeans. Nahor, Abram's brother, married Milcah, the daughter of Haran, his niece. Abraham, or Abram as he's known at this time, married Sarai and they were childless.

And then there was a migration. Terah, Abraham's father, took Abram and Lot and Sarai and left Ur and headed toward Canaan but settled in Haran. And Terah died there at age 205 and it's after that that Abram leaves Haran and travels to Canaan. Now one of the great mysteries still today among Bible scholars and archaeologists is where exactly is Ur of the Chaldeans? And I really thought all my life I knew where it was until I was doing research for this message this week and I said, you know, it could be where most people place it which is most of you are familiar with the fertile crescent that makes a boomerang shaped crescent across the Middle East starting down at the Persian Gulf and making its way up between the two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, all that land and it's fertile, the fertile crescent on up even reaching slightly into the northern regions of Turkey and then back down around towards Syria and Damascus, the fertile crescent.

And for years most people have placed Ur at the bottom point of the fertile crescent almost all the way to the Persian Gulf, just a little bit north of that on the Euphrates river and a lot of excavation has been done there. And that has turned out to be a very advanced city as far as civilization is concerned. They've uncovered and rebuilt many of the homes, the homes that were, they look to us almost like castles.

They're so large and have walls around them and so forth. It was a very prosperous place. They have found artifacts there of fine china and crystal. I mean this is not primitive culture.

This is pretty advanced. If in fact this is where Abram lived in the Ur, this Ur of the Chaldeans, that's in the very southern part of where the Chaldeans were, which we often call Babylonians, then when they made the migration from Ur to Haran, Haran is up in the north of this fertile crescent, that was a journey of several hundred miles. In fact it would have taken them more than halfway to Canaan.

You need to look at a map to figure all this out. But there are some scholars who have found reference to another Ur up there near Haran but they don't know exactly where. It hasn't been precisely located.

Archaeology has not yet brought that to the fore. But many think that the Ur of the Chaldeans that Abram lived in was up there near to the city of Haran. So it wasn't a big move from all the way down in Ur hundreds of miles up to Haran and then stopped there until Nahor died and then several hundred miles more on into the land of Canaan. But rather probably just a relocation of maybe twenty or thirty miles. And there are biblical reasons to prefer that option because it seems very obvious that this area around the city of Haran was the place of the family settlement of Abram and his relatives.

Why do we say that? Number one, because the city was named Haran. Same name as the brother of Abraham. Presumably the city of Haran was founded by Abram's brother Haran.

Number two, when Abraham wanted a bride for Isaac, he said I'm not going to take a bride from any of the Canaanites and he sent his servant back to Haran to get a bride from his own relatives. And later when Jacob was fleeing from Esau because Esau wanted to kill him, where did he go? He went to Haran. And there met more relatives of his.

Laban and so forth were all relatives of his. So it seems likely to me that we're talking about another Ur than the one that has been excavated. Another Ur that hasn't been precisely located but has to be in that same general vicinity. And what it really looks like is that Terah, Abram's father, had for some reason moved fifteen or twenty miles away from where most of his relatives were. But now for some reason he goes back to the town where all of his relatives are and that's where he dies.

And then that is where the call of Abraham takes place and that of course is chapter twelve, verse one. Now the Lord had said to Abram, get out of your country, from your family, from your father's house. See, he's surrounded by family there in Haran. You would think if he had been settled for any length of time, any generations in the southerner of the Chaldees that he'd already left his father and his family and so forth.

But no, he's there among them. And so get out of your country, from your family, from your father's house to the land that I will show you. And so this is the call of Abraham that calls him out of Mesopotamia to where he does not know. Because in the first instance God doesn't say leave your father's house and go to Canaan.

He says leave your father's house and go to a land that I will show you. And Abraham, Abram, went out not knowing where he was going. Furthermore, I think we have to at least mention the fact that it is almost certain that Abram, before God called him, was an idol worshiper. That seems to be what is communicated to us in the book of Joshua chapter 24 verses 1 and 2. Verse 24, Joshua is now getting ready to die and to pass on leadership to someone beyond him. Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and called for the elders of Israel, for their heads, for their judges, for their officers. And they presented themselves before God. Joshua said to all the people, Thus says the Lord God of Israel, Your fathers, including Terah.

Well, there's Abram's father's name again. Your fathers, including Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, dwelt on the other side of the river in old times and this and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from the other side of the river and led him throughout all the land of Canaan. Obviously, Abraham's father was serving pagan gods. And there's nothing in the Bible to indicate that Abraham somehow managed to avoid that. That he somehow had knowledge of the one true God and he held out for godly worship even though his father was an idol worshiper.

By the way, this is interesting. Both in the southern Ur of the Chaldees, and this would tend to go evidence in the opposite direction of what I concluded, but both in the southern Ur of the Chaldees and in Haran, there was the worship of multiple gods, but the primary god in each place was the muden god that went by the name of Sin, S-I-N, both places. They were worshiping idols. Abram, evidently, was worshiping idols.

So what changed that? The call of God. The call of God. The Lord said to Abram, get out of your country, from your family, from your father's house, to a land that I will show you. Now there are a few additional details and I ask you to turn one more, don't bother, I'll just read this to you from Acts chapter 7. Where Stephen, when he's giving his defense against the Sanhedrin, starts recounting some of the history of Israel, and he starts with Abram. Then the high priest said, are these things so? And he said, brethren and fathers, listen. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia before he dwelt in Haran. So now we learned what we suspected but were a little puzzled about, that God actually appeared to Abraham in Ur, whichever Ur it was, I think probably close to Haran, but in Ur and called him there and this migration from Ur to Haran was actually in response to the call of God. Terah was involved in that but they settled in Haran until Terah died and then moved on.

Why? It's impossible to say but I'm assuming that because Terah was getting old and couldn't make the trip. So they said, okay, we'll stay here until you're dead and then we'll move on. So he said to him, get out of your country and from your relatives, his relatives are there, into a land that I will show you. Then he came out of the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran and from there when his father was dead he moved him to this land in which you now dwell and God gave him no inheritance in it, not even enough to set his foot on, but even when Abraham had no child he promised to give it to him for a possession and to his descendants after him. But God spoke in this way that his descendants would dwell in a foreign land and that they would bring them into bondage and oppress them 400 years. I think those additional details in Acts 7 help sort out a few of the puzzling things here. All right, that's the background, historical background. Now we'll take some careful examination of Hebrews chapter 11.

Thank you for your patience. Now Hebrews chapter 11. Here's what we read in verses 8, 9, and 10. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance and he went out not knowing where he was going. By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.

For he waited for the city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God. Now what's the whole purpose of Hebrews chapter 11? It is to exalt faith, both to define it, describe it, and exemplify it. And so this is a recount of Abraham's faith and it was, number one, an obedient faith, verse 8. Number two, a persevering faith, verse 9. And number three, a heavenward faith, verse 10. This is set before us as an example of faith. What was Abraham's faith? First of all, an obedient faith, back to verse 8. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out of the place which he would receive for an inheritance and went out not knowing where he was going. God's called to him and when he was called he said yes. And of course the question is, was God's call a call to salvation or a cause to relocation? And I think the answer is both.

I think that's what we're finding here. God called out to a heathen idolater and made himself, God, Almighty God, known to Abraham. He appeared to Abraham. He spoke to Abraham and Abraham knew instantly that this was God Almighty. His heart was changed. He was convinced, a convinced believer in the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but he's Abraham, this hasn't developed yet.

The God of Enoch, the God of Noah, but the God that he has departed from and his family has departed from, shamefully, to worship idols. But God called him and you say, well, that doesn't seem likely that he could be called to salvation and called to this mission all at one point so quickly. There has to be more time in between.

Well, let me give you another example. You remember a man named Saul of Tarsus who was an inveterate enemy of the Lord Jesus Christ and was on the Damascus road and he received a call from heaven from the Lord of glory, the resurrected Christ, who saved him and called him to be an apostle all in the same moment. His heart was changed. He went from an enemy of Christ to a follower of Christ and he accepted the call to become an apostle of Christ all that quickly. He got a call to salvation and a call to service and he obeyed the call, or we might say he obeyed the calls, both of them. I think the same thing happened to Abraham. God called and Abraham responded immediately.

It is, in the original language, a present participle and it indicates immediate, unquestioned obedience. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called. As soon as he was called, while the words of God were still lingering in his mind, in his ears, maybe God was still speaking and Abraham was, as soon as God stopped speaking, Abraham started packing. And this epistle, of course, is being written to Hebrew Christians who are being inclined to pull back and what the writer of Hebrews is saying is, emulate the faith of your father Abraham, you honor him, do what he did. God said, believe me, and Abraham believed him.

God said, go, and Abraham went. God has revealed his son, the Lord Jesus Christ to you, believe in him. God has told you to become a follower of Jesus Christ, you follow him immediately and unhesitantly. But that's what God calls us to do too, doesn't it? God has spoken to most of you, I take it.

I don't know all of your hearts and all of your conditions before God, but I suspect that God by his Spirit through his word has spoken to the majority of you and revealed his son to you and called you to faith in Jesus Christ and called you to surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ. Abraham surrendered everything. God said, get up and go, leave your home. Some people have estimated that Abraham probably had a 10 or 12 room house with running water and all kinds of wonderful luxuries that were quite amazing in that day and he left all that behind. Abraham had relatives and he left all them behind. He started packing and his relatives came around to ask him what he's doing.

Abraham, what are you doing? Unpacking to leave. Where are you going? I don't know. All I know is God told me to go.

I'm going. Wow. And sometimes God puts that to us in a similar way. I can certainly give you some personal illustrations along that line, but I'm not going to do that today. But God will lay before you a call, a requirement, something that you know, you know, God is calling you to do, but you only have just the slightest outlines.

You really don't know the details. Now, what is our inclination? God, show me the rest and then I'll decide.

No. Believe and obey what you have been given. And then I'll show you the rest in my time along the way. And Abraham took off in the direction that God pointed to him, but he didn't know where he was going.

And he just kept going and going and going and going and going until God said, OK, stop. You're there. Now look around. This is the land that I'm going to give you. You see, God's first promise to Abraham. In Chapter 12. In verse one.

Got to turn my page to get back to it again. No, chapter 11, verse one. No, no, no, I'm in Hebrews.

No wonder I can't find it. God's first here, I'm back to Genesis 12. God's first promise to Abraham. Now, the Lord had said to Abram, get out of your country from your family, from your father's house to a land that I will show you.

He doesn't tell him where it is, but he does make promises to him. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse him who curses you. And you shall all the families of the earth be blessed. God's first promise to Abram was, if you obey me, I will bestow greatness upon you. From you will come a great nation. I will grant you great protection.

I will give you great influence in this world. But I'm not telling you yet where you're going. So he had some wonderful promises, but he didn't know where he was going yet, but he obeyed. And then when he got to Canaan, then God made the promise to give him the land. But even then, it was kind of a deferred promise. Verse 7, Genesis 12, Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, To your descendants I will give this land. And there he built an altar to the Lord who appeared to him.

And that comes up several times. I'm giving this land to you, but not to you personally and individually. I'm giving this land to your descendants.

And what did Abraham do to that? Did he say, Oh, that's not good enough. I want to promise that you'll give the land to me personally.

No, that wasn't his response. Lord, that's wonderful. And I will believe you and I will obey you. And so it was an obedient faith and it was a persevering faith, as we see in verse 9. By faith, he dwelt in the land of promise, as in a foreign country. He was there in the land that God is going to give to his posterity, to that great nation that he's going to make from him. But he never felt at home there.

He was a stranger the whole time he was there. As in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. This persevering faith, he went to the land of promise and he lived as a nomad for the rest of his life in tents.

Back there in Haran, he lived in a mansion with many rooms and courtyards and a stable house. And now he's called upon to live like a nomad, moving from place to place to find grass for his flocks. You say, that's quite a step down. I don't get the impression that Abraham considered it a step down. It seems to me like he is so thrilled to have been met by God, to have God Almighty appear to him, to have God Almighty speak to him, to have God Almighty change his heart, to have God Almighty reveal himself to him, to have God Almighty make promises to him. He is thrilled to death to have been chosen for this. And he worships and serves God obediently with an obedient faith and a persevering faith, which continued on to the next two generations. Not only did Abraham wander as a nomad all of his life, but so did his son Isaac and so did his son Jacob. Now, where is the fulfillment of this promise that you are going to inherit this land and dwell there?

It's coming in about 400 years. Thank you, Lord. I believe you. I obey you.

I continue to believe you. I will persevere in this faith. An obedient faith, a persevering faith, and a heavenward faith. What gave him the impetus to do all this? We're told in verse 10. For he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Abraham realized that the promise of the country, the land of Canaan, now we call it the land of Israel, was a secondary blessing. He realized that the real blessing was a heavenly home, a heavenly inheritance, a heavenly citizenship. He who had been called from pagan idolatry and was on his way to hell, had now been favored by God to be called to faith in God and to salvation and to a city that is not built by human hands, is built by God Almighty himself, an eternal and heavenly city.

Can I wrap this up? This surely is for us a lesson in faith. Abraham was called to believe and so are we. And this is what that kind of faith looks like. We believe in whatever God has revealed.

In our case, here it is, 66 books in the Bible. If you have Bible faith, you believe it. Do you understand every bit of it? No. Do you believe it?

Yes. Yes, you believe it. If you have met the God of heaven and have been granted true faith, we believe in whatever God has revealed. We act in accordance with the divine revelation which we have received. We believe the gospel and we obey gospel claims, faith.

What's the second lesson? Pilgrims. Abraham was called to be a pilgrim all of his life.

So are we. He whose heart is set upon things eternal holds loosely the things of this world. It doesn't mean that we'll necessarily live in poverty, though God calls upon some of his people to do that. It's interesting, Abraham dwelled in tents. He never had a solid home to live in ever since he left Haran, but he had such vast flocks and herds that it was hard for the country where he had them to sustain them.

Lots separated from him because their combined herds were too great to survive. And so in one sense, even in this world, he was wealthy, but in another sense, he wasn't allowed to have a nice, comfortable home with walls and a ceiling, and it's a good example. God does bless us with material things, but don't you ever let those become more important than God himself and his word.

You ought to be, like the apostle Paul, able to be as satisfied with little as with much, to learn in whatever state you are, therewith to be content. That demonstrates biblical faith. God takes something material from you and you go all to pieces.

What does that demonstrate? You have pretty sorry faith. Let's just be honest. Our primary blessing is not material, it's spiritual. Our faith is not primarily upon what God's going to give me now.

It's primarily on what God has prepared for me beyond this world. We're pilgrims. And number three, we learn in this passage the relationship between faith and obedience, and they are inseparable.

It's not the same. Faith is not works and works is not faith. The proper order must be maintained. We exercise faith first, but if it's true faith, obedience always follows.

It always grows out of it. The fruit of true faith is obedience. Biblical obedience points to genuine faith. You can't see the faith, but you can see the obedience that flows out of the faith. Disobedience points to lacking faith. Let's just be honest about it. This is what the Bible teaches.

We want to separate these things. Don't you question my life. I know Jesus. I believe him. Then why are you so disobedient to what he says? Well, that doesn't matter. I'm still going to heaven.

Are you sure? And we're not talking about sinless perfection, but we're talking about a willingness and a desire to be obedient to what our Lord and Master requires of us. And this chapter is illustrating and picturing for us what true biblical faith is. And here's a wonderful example of it in the life of Abraham showing us how obedience flows from genuine faith.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for these portions of your word that are so instructive. Oh, Lord God, help any who are deceived into thinking that they have true saving faith when they do not. Help them to recognize their need so that they can humble themselves before you and seek you for the faith that you must give for them to be true children of yours. And Father, help all of your children who are only at best partly obedient and partly disobedient. And Lord, we know and there there are reasons for that, but oh, Lord, we're not satisfied with that. Help us to continually strive to put down fleshly desires and surrender them all every day, again and again and again to the obedience of our Lord. Namely, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.