Abraham: Fact-Checking Your Future - Part A

Abraham, let's call him a prime example of wondering by faith. God told him to leave without any further detailed instructions just to get up and go, and he was willing to go by faith.

Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Pastor Skip is looking at the life of Abraham to show you that salvation has always been obtained by faith alone. But first, here's a resource that'll help you walk the path to true freedom in Jesus. Freedom.

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Now, let's turn to Hebrews 11 and listen to Skip's lesson today. Well, for some people, age is a limitation. And the older a person gets, the more limited they become. And that is why there is something called a retirement age. Sometimes it's mandated. Federal employees, they have certain mandated ages for different jobs.

If you're in federal law enforcement like the FBI, I was astonished when I was an FBI chaplain. And they said that the mandatory retirement age for FBI is 57 years old. And I just thought, boy, a guy gets to his prime where he has learned so much and amassed so much knowledge, working knowledge, and then to be kind of pushed aside and forced into retirement.

But they want them at optimal physical capacity. So there's a 57-year-old mandated retirement for federal law enforcement. Now, for some people, they're just getting started at 57 or 60 or 70 or 80 years of age. Get this, Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel at age 71.

That's when she started her leadership stint. Ronald Reagan retired from his second term in office when he was 77 years old. Benjamin Franklin became a framer of the Constitution of the United States at age 81.

George Bernard Shaw had his first work published when he was 94 years old. Then you think in the Bible, Moses, 80 years old when God called him. Caleb, 85, and he said, give me this mountain. Love that text. It's like, give me a whole new assignment of faith.

I'm ready to face the enemies once again. Well, with that as a background, we come to somebody else in this hall of faith in Hebrews 11. That is a guy by the name of Abraham. Father Abraham had many sons. Do you know that song?

I won't make you sing it. So Father Abraham was 75 years old when God got ahold of him, told him to leave his pagan environment and go to a new land. That's when it all started for him, age 75. But he would be 100 years old when he had his first born child through Sarah, his wife, a son by the name of Isaac. Now let's just have a little quick review of what we have learned so far in Hebrews 11. We've looked at Abel. We've looked at Abraham. We've looked at Enoch.

We've looked at Noah. Abel was an example of worshiping faith. Enoch was an example of walking by faith. Noah was an example of working. Let's call it working out faith, because he did what God told him to do.

He obeyed instructions. Abraham, let's call him a prime example of wandering by faith. God told him to leave without any further detailed instructions just to get up and go, and he was willing to go by faith. So he is next on the radar screen in Hebrews 11. Now I do want to paint a little bit of the background before we jump into these verses, and there are more verses that we're going to cover, so we're going to go swiftly through his verses, which is written about in a lot of places in the scripture, but the writer of Hebrews is trying to make a very important mega point here, and that is he is showing that salvation by faith is always how God has been approached.

It's not like a new approach. It's not like a New Testament only approach. It's not like there were works in the Old Testament. A person was saved by doing ceremonies, and then God changed his mind, and now it's just salvation by faith. The writer of Hebrews is saying God has never changed. It has always been by grace through faith, even in the Old Testament.

And why is he doing that? Because he's trying to show that this New Testament, this new covenant through Christ is not some aberrant antinomian against the law theology. It is the way Abel approached God by faith. It's the way Enoch approached God by faith. It's the way Noah approached God by faith. Remember, he's writing to Hebrews, and the Hebrews that he is writing to, the Jewish audience at that time did not have the pure form of Judaism as God intended it to be. It was by that time, the New Testament, a perverted, legalistic, works-induced form of religion. They believed that by their works or by their circumcision or by their genealogical records, they would be saved.

So the writer of Hebrews is really underscoring this salvation by faith. Now, when we look at the flow of history, we understand that God created Adam and Eve, and they had kids, and you know the story. God made himself available to mankind generally at that time. To the human race, he made himself available. He was available to the world. But by the time of Noah, only eight people believed him enough to get into a box.

Everybody else was destroyed from off the face of the earth. So, though God revealed himself generally in creation, made himself available to all upon the earth, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. He believed God.

He walked by faith, and he and his family were saved. And then the flood came. And then after the flood, God still made himself available to people on the earth, as they repopulated, as they expanded on the earth, as they spread out and multiplied once again.

But something monumental happened to change it all. It was called the Tower of Babel. They once again decided to rebel against God, be free of God's revelation, and make their own way to God, their own religious approach.

So they created a tower, a ziggurat. I'll explain what that is in a minute, because where Abraham lived, the place was full of them. So they tried to approach God that way. God confounded their language. So now people cannot communicate to one another. It's very confusing.

It's very difficult because of the language barrier, cultural barriers also. So the revelation of God became stifled, became slowed at that point after the Tower of Babel. So God begins to isolate a family, a person, gets a hold of a guy by the name of Abraham, who becomes the central figure at that time in redemptive history. Now he's going to follow a genealogy through the scripture, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, 12 tribes, all the way down to the tribe of Judah and Jesus Christ. So Abraham becomes the central figure in redemptive history, and he becomes the father of the Jewish nation. Father Abraham had many sons. Okay, so he becomes the father of the Jewish nation, what Jewish tour guides call grandpa Abraham. That's how they refer to him in Israel.

They talk about grandpa, like we're related all the way back to Abraham. So the Jewish nation then became, for a number of years, the central repository of divine revelation. All that God was doing, he did through the Jewish nation. The Jews became the central Jews, became the evangel. That's what God intended them to be, the evangel, the light, the ones who would open up the darkened eyes of the Gentiles around the world. God said that throughout the Old Testament.

They failed to do it, but that was God's intention. So Paul picks us up in Romans 9. He speaks about the Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, the promises of whom are the fathers, and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is overall the eternally blessed God.

Amen. So to shorten it up, Abraham begins the long lineage and journey to the cross. It begins with Abraham. Fourteen chapters of the book of Genesis are devoted to this one man, Abraham, right in the middle of the book of Genesis. The central swath of Genesis is devoted to Abraham. And great sections of the New Testament are devoted to Abraham. One chapter in the book of Romans is about Abraham. Two chapters in the book of Galatians are about Abraham.

He is called the father of them who believe, so he becomes sort of the progenitor of faithful living. He is called three times in the Bible, the friend of God, very unique title, only given to him, the friend of God. To this day, Arabs will refer to Abraham as Al Khalil. Khalil is Arabic for friend, all is God, so the friend of God. That's how he is affectionately referred to in many Arab places. So what I'm gonna do in the section we're gonna look at, it's an expansive section, it's a little bit longer section, there are 12 verses all together, eight of which specifically deal with Abraham, and then others more generically deal with people of faith.

But what I'm gonna do is quickly, and we're gonna have to kind of move rapidly, and this really deserves weeks, if not months, if you know me. But we're gonna go through it in one fell swoop, so I'm gonna give you five faith facts. Five faith facts about Abraham. Number one, he lived as a pilgrim. He lived as a pilgrim. Hebrews 11, verse 8.

By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place where he would receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was going. That's a pilgrim. That's a wanderer. That's a Bedouin in a modern sense.

If you go to Israel, you've seen the Bedouins, they're just wandering from place to place with their animals so they can have a bit of drink and something to eat. Abraham was, many of you know, from a place called Ur. U-R. That's how you spell his city. Ur. Ur of the Chaldeans.

Ur in Chaldea. Today it would be located in southern Iraq. And the Spade of the Archaeologist has found that Ur was not some little podunk outpost. It was a central vantage point of civilization at the time. It was the capital city of Sumer.

S-U-M-E-R. It had a population of around 300,000 at the time of Abraham. It had an advanced civilization.

Advanced musical instruments were found. They specialized in the study of math and astronomy. They had a university and a large ancient library. But it was pagan. And specifically, it was polytheistic. You know what polytheism is. Many gods. The worship of many gods. But the main god they worshiped, interestingly, the patron god of the city, was the moon god. The moon god. By the name of Sin.

S-I-N. I mean, that's how we would transliterate it into our language. So they worshiped Sin, the moon god. Now what's fascinating, you don't have time to really chase it down, but many scholars believe that the moon god worshiped in Ur of the Chaldeans was where the Arab cultures later on worshiped the moon god called Allah. Before Muhammad came along and said there should be one, not many gods, but one.

But that deserves a study all to its own. Don't have enough time to chase it down. So what I do want to do is give you a few verses out of that large swath that is found in Genesis that deals with Abraham. In chapter 12, I'm going to read just three verses.

It says this. Now the Lord had said to Abram, get out of your country. This is where he begins the pilgrimage.

Get out of your country. From your family and from your father's house to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. I will curse him who curses you. And in you all the family the families of the earth will be blessed. This is God's first words to Abraham. It's not like his introduction isn't like, hi Abram, I'm God. Nice to meet you. His first words to him are get out. Like our tour guide, Steven Israel.

I love you. Now get out. So God says to him, get out. Don't even tell him where to go. We hate the life of faith because it's one step at a time.

Sometimes God just says, get up and go. Well, where? I'm not telling you where. Just go. Now I don't like that. I would much rather God give me two or three or better that just download the entire itinerary of my life because then I don't have to live by faith.

I can live by sight. But God gives him one step. Now God gave to Steven two steps in the New Testament. He said, get up and leave this area of Samaria and go to Gaza, which is the desert. Didn't give him step three, which is you're going to meet an Ethiopian eunuch. He gave him just two steps. Leave here and go there.

But here, Abram didn't even get that. He just get up and go. To the land I will show you. God says, you're to leave your country. You're to leave your family. You are to leave your father's house. Your country, your family, your father's house.

All those things are influences that mold a person's life. Now he didn't know where he was going, as I mentioned. He says, just go to the land. I will show you.

Not I am showing you. I will. Future tense.

I'll give you step two later on after you do step one. So imagine the moving van pulling up in front of Abram's tent and they load up all the belongings. Mrs. Sarah tells Mrs. Abraham. Sarah tells him everything where to go. And then the guy driving the moving truck, I guess pulled by camels, says, where are we going?

Where do we drive? And he goes, I don't know. You don't know. I mean, I'm here moving your stuff and you don't know where to go.

No. Well, how will we know when we get there if you don't know where we're going? And of course, the answer would be, I can't tell you that either, but I believe God will tell me when it's time to stop. That's how he had, he was told to begin his life. Now, God tells us to do the same. God tells every believer to make a clean break from your past, from those things that molded and influenced your life and start over.

Jesus said, if anyone come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. And to the extent that we leave our old life determines how much we enjoy our new life. You enjoy your new life to the extent that you leave your old one. If you don't leave much of your old one, you're not going to really enjoy your new one.

If you really leave the old one, you'll really have more space and time to enjoy the new one. When I came back home from San Jose, California, where I received Christ watching a Billy Graham crusade on television, I went back down to Southern California. I told my mom and dad and brothers that I had come to Christ.

They were not excited. They tried to sort of pull me back into their religious system. All my old friends tried to pull me back into their party scene system. And I had all of those factors in my life, trying to pull me back into their religious system. And I had all of those factors in my life, trying to pull me back. And I remember the battle I was facing.

And it was a summer afternoon, end of July, probably beginning of August. And I was reading this. This was my Bible back then. It's a little New Testament here called The Good News for Modern Man. It really is today's English version of the New Testament. But this was Bible.

And the reason it was is because I could understand it. A regular Bible is just like, I don't know what they're saying. So I'm reading through the first book. I'm reading through the Gospel of Matthew. And in Matthew Chapter 5, what happens in Matthew Chapter 5?

Any pastor or scholar? Sermon on the Mount. Sermon on the Mount happens. So Jesus teaches the crowd on the Sermon on the Mount. And he gives the Beatitudes. Here translated, happy are those who know they're spiritually poor.

The kingdom of heaven belongs to them. So I thought, yeah, okay, good. I get that.

I keep reading. Happy are those who mourn, for God will comfort them. Didn't quite understand what that meant. Happy are the meek. They will receive what God has promised. I think I understood that one.

So I'm going for the ride. Then this verse hit me. Happy are those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires.

God will satisfy them fully. I remember reading this. I put this down, and I thought, okay, I haven't been doing that. But now I am. Now, Lord, I am all in. I'm in it to win it. I'm all yours. I'm going to follow you wherever you lead me.

That for me was my Abraham Pilgrim moment, where I finally let go. And I said, my aim will be to please Him. So fact check. Not knowing where you're going is better than going in the wrong direction. Going where you have no clue where it's going to be is a whole lot better than going in the wrong. So if you're going in this direction, and it's the wrong direction, and you know where it is, and you know where it is, it'd be better to not know where you're going, but go any direction, but the wrong direction.

So not knowing where you're going is better than going in the wrong direction. I did not know where my life would lead me, but I surrendered fully to the Lord's call on my life at that time. And I found out that God knows a whole lot better than I do. So God called Abram to leave, or the Chaldees. He migrated up the Euphrates River to a place called Haran, H-A-R-A-N, before he finally made it into what we call the promised land, the land of Israel. So number one, faith fact number one, he lived as a pilgrim. Faith fact number two, he lived by a promise. Not only did he live as a pilgrim, but the only thing he had to live by was a promise that God revealed to him. Verse nine of Hebrews 11. 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. God made promises to Abraham about his family, about children that he would have, of what God would do with him and through him, about a land that would be his and his descendants forever. Joseph Parker, who was a great preacher, a contemporary of Charles Spurgeon, said, great lives are trained by great promises.

That concludes Skip Heitzig's message from the series Fact Check. Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com. Now we want to share about an exciting opportunity you have to take your knowledge of God's word even deeper. If you're ready to study God's word beyond going to church and personal Bible study, you're ready for Calvary College.

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Thank you. Join us again tomorrow as Skip wraps up his message, Fact Check Your Future, and uncovers what your circumstances do for you. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the cross and cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever changing times.