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Now here's today's message from Pastor Skip Heitzig. Because of the way Psalms and Hebrews treat Melchizedek, some have speculated, "Oh, he's much more." If he has no father or mother, no genealogy, if he has neither beginning of days nor end of days, this must be third explanation: a theophany, theophany, an appearance of Christ in the Old Testament, a pre-incarnate representation of Christ, a theophany, or, or more directly, a Christophany. An appearance of Jesus in the Old Testament, our great High Priest and King of Kings. When we get to chapter 15, we have the elaboration of an unconditional covenant.
Now, you're going to hear us talk about covenants as we go through the Bible. They're big in the Bible. You need to know what they are. Basically, there were two kinds. I say basically.
I don't want to get into too much detail. There were unconditional covenants and conditional covenants. An unconditional covenant, let's call it a unilateral covenant, that is one party makes a promise and will fulfill it. A bilateral covenant, that is a conditional covenant. There's conditions on both sides.
Both parties have to do things for that covenant to stay intact. This is an unconditional covenant that we're reading about here.
Now, in chapter 15, Abraham is about 90 years old when God makes his covenant with him. Basically, he makes a promise to Abram that he's going to have what he always wanted and more. He's going to have a son. That's what he wanted. Oh, but he's going to have much more.
He's going to have a heritage of offspring. A nation will come out of him. Nations will come out of him, and with that will come many hardships. To this family of Abraham, I know you've heard the saying: "Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it." Or, "Be careful what you wish for; you might get more than you bargained for." I heard about a couple; they had been married sixty. They were in their sixties.
They had been married for forty years. They were having their anniversary party, and people were there. And while they were celebrating, the good fairy appeared to this. Couple, and the good fairy said, "You have been such a loving and wonderful couple all these years. I'm going to grant you each one wish." And so the wife thought about it.
She goes, "Well, I've always wanted to see the world. I'd like to travel the world." So the good fairy waved her little wand, and poof, tickets appeared and ready cash for world travel. And then the good fairy said to the man, the husband, "Time for your wish." Well, he paused a while and he thought about it. He said, "I think I'd like a wife, thirty years younger." So the good fairy said, "You sure?" Said, "Yes, that's what I want." So, waved the wand. Poof!
Instantly, he was ninety years old. Be careful what you wish for. Abraham will get what he wished for, but much more than that. Chapter fifteen, verse one. After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, "Do not be afraid, Abram.
I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward." But Abram said, "Lord God, what will you give me, seeing that I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eleazar of Damascus?" And Abram said, "Look, you have given me no offspring. Indeed, one born in my house is my heir." Speaking of that eldest servant. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, "This one shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir." Now he's how old at this point? He's ninety. That's the promise.
Then he brought him outside. Verse five. I love this. And he said, "Look toward heaven, and count the stars, if you are able to number them." And he said to him, "So shall your descendants be." Verse six. And he believed in the Lord, and he accounted it to him for righteousness.
See that little word, believed. You know what it is in the Hebrew. Amen. That's the Hebrew word for believe. Amen.
So God gave him a promise, and he said, "Amen." He believed it. That's where we get the idea of "Amen." It's so be it. I believe it. He believed in the Lord. He counted it to him for righteousness.
So, on some clear, dry Middle Eastern night, God took Abram outside and said, "Look up. That's what I can do." And if I can do that, I just want you to count the stars. See how many you can count, because I'm going to make you have not just one son, but a whole host of progeny that will become a nation. And let me just encourage you: when you feel down, when you feel despairing, when life seems overwhelming, go outside at night and look up. And just realize, my dad did that.
He just spoke that into existence, and he holds all of that at play so simply, so effortlessly. Isaiah put it this way: Isaiah forty. Who else has held the oceans in his hand, and who has measured off the heavens with his fingers? I often like to think of this, especially when I'm out camping and I look up at those stars, and I realize I'm looking at a portion of the Milky Way galaxy, just a portion of it. But that that galaxy, our home, the Milky Way, is 10,000 light years wide by 100,000 light years long.
A light year is the Time or the distance it takes light to travel in a year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
So get this: if you could go that fast, 186,000 miles per second, you could circle your Earth, this Earth, which has the circumference of what, 25,000 or 24,900 some miles in circumference. You could circle the Earth seven and a half times in a second. That's the speed of light. Seven and a half times in a second. If you went out to the moon.
Which is a quarter of a million miles away. You would get to the moon in one and a half seconds. Keep going. You're going to get to Venus in two minutes, eighteen seconds. You're going to sail past Mercury in four and a half minutes.
You're going to get to the Sun in seven and a half minutes. But for you to go from one end of your galaxy to the other is going to take you a hundred thousand years. Traveling at 186,000 miles per second, you know what God does with that? He just says, "Yeah, it's only about that big. Small stuff, easy for me." So here is God saying, "Abram, look at that.
So shall your offspring be. This is the God you serve. This is what I can do. I can handle it." Well, in this chapter is a weird set of instructions. I'm just going to cut to the chase.
It's a ritual that makes no sense to us in modern society, but in ancient times it was known as cutting a covenant. There are two words in Hebrew at play in this chapter, berit and karat, which means covenant and cut. It means to cut a covenant. And in those days, when you would make a deal with somebody, you would often cut an animal. Lay the pieces on either side and walk between them.
You go. That is so gross. What's the purpose of that? The idea is that's what's going to happen to you if you break this covenant. That was the idea in ancient times.
So the cutting of the covenant is highlighted here. God is basically saying, "This is how much emphasis I place on my promise. When I make a promise, I'm serious about it." So a covenant is cut, verse twelve, chapter fifteen. When the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram. Behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him, and he, the Lord said to Abram, "Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them and afflict them four hundred years." Also, verse fourteen: the nation whom they serve, that is Egypt, I will judge, and afterward they will come up or come out with great possessions.
Now, as for you, you will go to your fathers in peace. You will be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. And it came to pass when the sun was going down and it was dark that behold there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces. Those are the pieces of the animal.
So Abraham is like sleeping, opens his eyes, sees this kind of torch going through these pieces of cut up animals, and a dread comes upon him. After he sees that God tells him the borders of the land that He promises for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob to inherit.
Now God is making a covenant by Himself. Typically, both parties or whoever is involved in making and keeping the covenant would walk between these pieces of animal, but Abraham. Looks up and sees this torch. This is the Lord represented that is moving through these pieces. Abram didn't walk through those pieces.
He's he's out. He's sleeping. This is a unilateral covenant, a one-sided covenant, an unconditional covenant. God is making a promise, and he's saying, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to fulfill what I said." If you fail to understand the nature of this covenant, this unilateral covenant that God makes with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for that land, you will fail to understand the place of Israel in God's plan.
It won't make sense to you. God is saying, "I'm going to give you not based upon how good you are, but based upon my nature, forever this land for you." And your progeny to inherit. This is Connect with Skip Heitzig. Want to understand your Bible better without getting lost in all the details? Pastor Skip Heitzig's new devotional, Soaring Above It All, takes you through the entire Bible in one year, giving you the big picture perspective you need to see how God's story fits together.
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Now let's return to today's teaching.
Well, it's such a wonderful promise that in the next chapter, chapter sixteen, Sarah called Sarai. At this point, it's such a wonderful promise that Sarai wants to help God fulfill His promise. It's almost as if, well, you know, it's such a wonderful promise. God can't really do this on his own. He needs me to get involved, me to help him out.
So her plan is: look, I can't get pregnant. I'm infertile, right? But I have a handmaiden named Hagar, an Egyptian handmaid. Abram, sleep with her, and she will conceive. and And that child that is born, that we'll call that God's fulfillment.
I remember when I was a boy. My dad would always say, "God helps those who help themselves," and and I remember because he would always say, "You know, the Bible says that God helps those who help themselves." So I grew up thinking that's what the Bible says. Then I got saved and I started reading the Bible, and I said, "Dad, I can't find it." Goes, it's in there somewhere. And then I remember the day when I found out it was it was not in the Bible. It was Benjamin Franklin that said that.
I said, you know, I know Benjamin's in the Bible, but but that one isn't, and that's not in the Bible. And I discovered that God helps the helpless, not those who help themselves. God helps those who can't help themselves, and so. This man is growing older and older and older, and by chapter 17, he is 99 years old. He cannot help himself, nor can Sarah.
What's funny about chapter 17 is, in this hopeless condition, his name is what? By this time, it's not Abraham yet. It's what? Abram, which means what? Exalted Father.
Exalted Father, Chapter Seventeen. God gives him a new name, Abraham, which means father of a whole bunch of people, father of a multitude. Can I just say how embarrassing for Abraham? Look, I can't have a kid. I don't have a kid.
You said I'm going to have a nation. My name is Exalted Father. That's bad enough. But now you're calling me father of a whole bunch. I got to tell people, hey, I changed my name to Father of a Multitude.
It's not going to go over well. Also, God changes Sarai's name to Sarah. Sarai means she strives. Sarah means princess. And it's just a small voice inflection to change it, right, from Sarai to Sarah.
But that's how effortless it is for the Holy Spirit of God to change a life. Just a single breath, the Holy Spirit means the Holy Breath or the Holy Wind. It's just God goes, a life change happens, from Sarai to Sarah.
Now in chapter seventeen, verse nine, God said to Abraham, "As for you, you shall keep my covenant." You and your descendants after you, throughout their generations, it's going to happen. I'm doing it, but it's extended now to them. This is my covenant, which you shall keep between me and you and your descendants after you. Every male child among you shall be circumcised.
So this is the covenant I'm going to do to signify that you're a part of it, that you believe in it, because you're really not going to do it. It's unilateral. You just have to indicate that you agree with it by just having those babies of yours, those male children, circumcised. And when verse twelve, he that is eight days old. Because of this, every Jewish boy who has ever been born in Judaism to keep the Jewish covenant is circumcised on the eighth day.
Why the eighth day?
Well, I'm glad you asked. The blood clotting in the human body does not reach optimal levels until the eighth day. Vitamin K in the human body kicks in between day five and day seven, and another element called prothrombin is below normal levels, but it peaks at a hundred and ten percent on guess which day, the eighth day.
Now. Abraham didn't know that, but God did.
So God initiates this on the eighth day, and so He did it. It was an act of faith. Can I just say something? That when God gives you an order, or a promise, or He tells you to do something, I mean, because Abraham said, "I don't eighth day. Why?
Why the eighth day?
I'm going to write that into the pastor next week. Why the eighth day?
When God gives you a command. You need to create a file in your heart, and you label it "waiting for further instructions," or "waiting for further information," and you just file that. You don't know the answer now, but later on, as we develop science, we can look back and go, "Oh, that's why the eighth day was so important." But at this point, it was an act of faith.
Well, in chapter eighteen and nineteen, three visitors come to. Abraham and Sarah in their tent in the heat of the day. These three visitors look like normal people, but it turns out one of them is the Lord and two of them are angels. Which to me is just a wonderful thought. God comes to your house.
Angels come to your house. What do you serve them for dinner? You can just heat up any old thing. You're gonna make them a feast. Angel hair pasta, maybe.
What would you give them for dessert? You said it, angel food cake, or or or devil's food cake, just to have a little fun with it, maybe. I I don't know.
Well, in in this chapter, chapter eighteen, God promises Sarah that she will have a son, birthed from her womb. That it won't be Abraham and Hagar. It won't be a surrogate. That she herself, this old woman, is going to birth the son.
Now she is on the other side of the tent flap, and she hears this, and she snickers a little bit. She laughs. And so the Lord, the visitor who is the Lord, said, "Why did Sarah laugh?" And she said, "I didn't laugh." And God said, "Yeah, you did. I heard it." She's ninety years old at the time. She gets this promise.
The visitors get up and they go toward the Dead Sea, to that region where they can overlook the area, and they overlook the area of Sodom.
Now Abraham is concerned because they announced that judgment is coming to these cities of the plain. Abraham is concerned because somebody he knows lives there by the name of. Lot, so Abraham sort of enters into Middle Eastern negotiations. Hey God, if you found fifty people who are righteous in the city, would you spare them? God said, I'll spare them if you can find me fifty people, I'll spare the city.
Abraham thinks about that because not Sodom. You won't find fifty righteous people there. Would you do it for forty? Sure, you find forty people, I'll spare the city. He thinks about that.
He goes, Hey, thirty. Would you do it for thirty? Works the Lord all the way down to ten people. Tell you what, God, if I can find ten people, would you spare the city for ten? God says yes.
Guess what God did to that city? He destroyed it because ten righteous were not found. Only Lot was found, and he was only relatively righteous.
So God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah. And why does He destroy them? For what sin? For what sins? You see, I ask that question because we typically glibly answer that by saying it was homosexuality, it was sexual immorality.
All of that is true, but you would be short-sighted if that's all you said. God judged them for. In Ezekiel sixteen, he said that he would judge them for pride, laziness, gluttony, and because they mistreated the poor and the needy. Along with sexual perversion was pride, laziness, gluttony, and indifference.
Well, the next few chapters are grim. Chapter eighteen, Sodom's doom is pronounced. Chapter nineteen, there is a destruction that goes on. After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which, by the way, as far as I know, the the world's best living expert. On the times of Abraham and Lot, and the cities of the plain, goes to this church, and his name is Dr.
Steve Collins. Steve might even be here tonight. Yeah, he's right back here.
So, any questions about Sodom and Gomorrah? Ask him. He's been digging it for 15 years. We get to chapter 20, and old Abe has a relapse of unbelief. Yeah, he was the guy who went down to Egypt and said Sarah is my sister, not my wife.
Now he does it again. He goes into old style behavior, and so the chapter is filled with lies and deception.
So by this time, if you are reading through the Book of Genesis, by this time you're ready for a break. You need a little laughter. And that's good because chapter twenty one kicks in, and the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as He had spoken. You're going to have a baby, Sarah. I'm ninety.
I'm going to laugh about that. That is so funny. What a good joke. No, it's not. It's really going to happen.
I didn't laugh. Yeah, you did.
So time elapses, and it happens. She ends up pregnant. She has a child. You know, God is never late. God is always exactly on time.
He's always punctual. You say punctual. Why did God then make this couple wait twenty-five years from making the promise to fulfilling the promise? Why did they have to wait so long?
Well, wouldn't you agree that would make the fulfillment all that much more dramatic? Because as the years go by, God is stacking the odds against Himself that that could ever happen. You say, "Well, you know, a ninety-year-old man can have a child." Well, what about a hundred-year-old man?
Well, you know, a seventy-year-old woman can have a baby.
Well, what about a ninety-year-old woman? See, God just makes it harder and harder so that when it happens, you go, "Whoa." I guess God can do anything. It makes the fulfillment more dramatic.
So, verse two of chapter twenty-one: For Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him. Verse five: Now Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him, and Sarah said, "God has made me laugh." And all who hear will laugh with me. She also said, "Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? For I have born him a son in his old age." God basically turned a retirement home into a maternity home. And made this couple so happy.
They're laughing, but they're not laughing. A laughter of unbelief. This is a laughter of sheer joy that God pulled it off. They're rejoicing. We're so glad you joined us today on Connect with Skip Heitzig.
Before you go, don't forget about Pastor Skip's brand new devotional, Soaring Above It All. This one-year devotional gives you a panoramic view of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, helping you better understand God's Word and stay engaged with it every day. Request your copy as our thanks when you give fifty dollars or more to help bring clear Bible teaching to people around the world. Give today at connectwithSkip dot com slash offer, or call eight hundred nine two two eighteen eighty eight. See you next time.
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