Abram & Sarai in Egypt

Today's reading is from Genesis 12, verses 10 through 20.

Genesis 12:10–20

It says, Now there was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.

When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, This is his wife.

Do you guys hear that?

Is that my pulse?

We all know I'm alive now, that's good enough.

And when the Alright, everybody focus on the word.

And when the Egyptians see you, they will say, This is his wife.

Then they will kill me, but they will let you live.

Say, You are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.

When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful.

And when the princess princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house, and for her sake he dealt well with Abram.

He had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels.

But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife.

So Pharaoh called Abram and said, What is this you have done to me?

Why did you not tell me that she was your wife?

Why did you say, She is my sister, so that I took her for my wife?

Now then, here is your wife, take her and go.

And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Alan, any recommendations?

I think it's not easy to make all reason.

Okay.

I'm gonna switch sides.

Nobody watched my hands, it's making it difficult.

Okay.

Can you hear me now?

Look at that.

And no no more heartbeat.

Good.

My heart's not racing.

Your heart's racing.

Welcome to Church This Morning.

My name is James Rathman.

Thank you for joining us.

Uh this is our second uh stop in our series through Genesis this year.

We're not hearing it, right?

Okay, so it is just in my head.

A little bit?

You're good.

It's quite my head, but it's still there.

Okay.

All right, now it's just become a hearing test.

Okay.

So welcome to uh yeah, welcome to church this morning.

A couple of announcements before we get into our text for today.

First of all, membership is coming up, so you can join us for uh as a member, and that is um you can sign up at info at redemptiondenver.com.

And this is just a great way to begin the process of membership.

So if you'd like to be involved with that, or I think we got it.

Cool.

If we'd like to, if you'd uh like to join us as a member, uh in that way I'm so distracted now, um uh please reach out.

We'd love to get that conversation started.

Also, starting on Wednesday, we're doing a study through Bonhoeffer's Life Together.

So believe it or not, one of the best gifts that God gives us is each other.

But just like all of his gifts, he has to teach us how to receive it.

And that's something that we need to learn and needs to be done in our spirit, is how we receive this gift of one another in God.

Uh so that's what this book study is going to be all about.

We're going to be going through life together, and we're going to be uh yeah, just learning this uh capacity to live and uh share our time with one another.

I'm still hearing it.

Is there, could I like hold a mic?

It's so distracting.

Okay.

This one.

We'll just mute my uh okay.

Hello?

Hello?

Wow, look at that.

All right, now I'm gonna preach.

Now I'm holding a mic.

I'm like a mega church pastor now.

Leave it on.

Okay.

We did sound check.

We did a really good job sound checking, actually.

Okay.

So uh that's the Life Together study.

It starts this Wednesday.

Uh, I really recommend signing up, and I think it's going to be a really joyful experience.

Those studies have been really great so far.

Raise your hand if you've done one of them.

Pretty good, right?

The whole right side of the room has where are we, left side of the room?

Nice.

One in the back.

That's right, working slides.

Uh yeah, pretty good.

So I recommend signing up for that.

Okay, let's pray, and we'll get into the text for today.

Father, we just praise you for uh your work in drawing us together.

Lord, I pray that uh your word would shine through into our hearts today, that you would give us a capacity to understand you more completely as you show yourself to us in your relationship with Abram.

Lord, help our hearts to grasp the reality of the covenant that you have extended to us, and I pray that we would learn better to trust in your character and your promises.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Okay.

Last week, John kicked us off in this next phase of our Genesis series, and it was uh oh, he did an excellent job.

Great job, John.

Nice.

Oh, yeah, good.

Um uh and he introduced to us the covenant.

Now, the covenant becomes the shape of the narrative throughout scripture.

It's where we see the drama of our redemption unfold.

And God, in this covenant, he's not just revealing to us some particular promises.

In the covenant, God is revealing to us his very heart so that when we see the promises of God, we're seeing an expression of his character and his love towards us.

Now, what we saw in the first 11 chapters of Genesis is that sin moves into and infects the whole world through our first parents, Adam and Eve.

And sin continues down the lineage of humanity all the way through into us, so that we all are corrupted by sin.

All of us have a broken relationship in that most important relationship in our lives, which is our relationship to God.

And that infects all of our decision making, all of our other relationships, all of the things that we put most importance on are all infected by this deep spread of sin in our hearts.

Now, as we saw the universal implications of sin, one of the fascinating things to see is that God's response to sin in redemptive history isn't universal.

It's not this broad stroke.

Instead, it's very particular.

He zooms in on one person, one man, Abram, and he makes a promise, establishes a covenant with Abram, as John explained last week.

And it's that promise which kicks off redemptive history, and we are drawn into that very same rhythm of those promises through Christ.

Now, today we're going to begin moving through the stories of Abram and his experience with the covenant of God.

What does it mean to be a person who is in covenant with the Lord?

And this is best explained through narrative.

The Bible is mostly narrative, if you were to add it all up.

And we might wonder why it is mostly narrative and not uh just explanation or uh, you know, lists of rules or list of how-tos for how we should live.

And Timothy Ward, uh, who is a great Christian linguist, uh, don't ask me to name another great Christian linguist.

Maybe he's medium, but he's the only one I know.

Uh he says this.

He says, narrative is the form of writing best suited to answering with clarity and conviction the key questions which offer, uh which the offer of a promise always raises.

These are the key questions.

Can I trust the person making this promise?

What happens when it seems as if he is failing to keep his promise?

What will be the consequences if I trust him or if I don't?

So when God makes a covenant with humanity, he is also pushing us into these deeply human questions.

Can I trust him?

What do I do when it seems like God isn't living up to his promises?

Can I trust him then?

How are we to understand our relationship within the promises of God?

Now many of us fall into a mechanical type of thinking when we consider the promises of God.

And we think of them more like a relationship of something like karma, where you simply get into it what you put out of it.

It's just the other side of an equal sign.

But the way that the relationship, the way that God's covenant is described to us in scripture is not mechanically or not karmically.

There's there's no, it's not a formula that you can simply understand and then learn how to manipulate the promises of God to your ends.

Instead, it's relational.

And that's why it's described to us in narrative, so that we can see that the promises of God are revealing the heart of God.

And it is ultimately God's own heart that we are learning to trust in, not some formula that we're learning to use for our own ends.

And that means the stories that we see get messy and complicated.

And a lot of the ways that the covenant plays into our lives is not as intuitive as we think it would be.

So today we're going to see one of those messy stories where Abram is in the land that was promised to him in God's covenant with him, and he experiences a famine.

And in the famine, he's forced to flee to Egypt.

And when he goes into Egypt, he decides to lie to the Pharaoh about his wife Sarai for his own self-protection.

And in that, he gains a great reward from the Pharaoh, but God sends a plague, and then he's sent out, but still receives that great reward.

So, what's the moral of today's story?

Run from God, lie about your wife, and get a bunch of cool stuff.

It's a weird story.

So we're gonna press into this, to all this complexity.

We're going to see where the promises of God put pressure on our faith, and we're going to see that even when we cave under that pressure, God remains faithful.

That's what we see in the story of Abram this morning.

Let's look at verse 10, Genesis 12, 10.

Now there was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.

So Abram is given the promise of the land of Canaan, and he's living there after setting out from his uh father's house with Sarai.

And while they're in the land of Canaan, there's a severe famine.

The text reiterates it twice.

And so, because of that, they go down to the Nile River Delta, where there's just fertile land.

You know, Egypt remains such a superpower throughout this time, mostly because of that reason, because the Nile floods periodically and it makes this land incredibly fertile, uh, despite what's happening elsewhere in the climate.

And so Abram commits himself: this land that I've been promised, there's a famine, so we're gonna leave and we're gonna go down to Egypt.

Now, do you see how already there is pressure being put on the very promise that God has extended to Abram?

Here I am, God has promised me this land, he's promised me that he'll bless me.

I stepped out in faith, I went to the land, here I am, where's the blessing?

Instead of a blessing, he receives a famine.

How many of you have ever prayed for a job and got it and then wished you didn't?

This is that same type of experience.

He sets out and it's like, look, everything seemed to be lining up just right.

I was following precisely in the plan of God, and yet I arrive and stay in the promised land, and there's a famine.

I can't even survive in God's promises.

He's being pushed into those very questions that Timothy Ward describes.

Can I trust the person making the promise?

What happens when it seems as if he is failing to keep his promises?

Well, Abram, in this deep sense of vulnerability, says, I'm going to take matters into my own hands.

I'm going to go down to Egypt to make sure I get my own food.

And in doing so, he even decides to take truth itself into his own hands as he uh develops this plan to lie to Pharaoh.

This is what happens in Genesis 12, 11 to 12.

When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai, his wife, they're just outside of customs, I know that you are a woman, beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, This is his wife.

Then they will kill me, but they will let you live.

Say, You are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.

So they're about to enter Egypt, and he says, Look, Sarai, you're beautiful.

And that's not good news for me, your husband.

Because when we enter, the Pharaoh and the Egyptians are going to see you, and they're going to want to take you for themselves, and then they're going to kill me because I'm your husband.

So I've got a plan.

You're going to tell them instead that you are my sister.

And this isn't entirely a lie.

They were uh half siblings.

They had a different mother but the same father.

Uh we don't need to get into that.

It's a sermon for another day.

But at this time in redemptive history, that was a thing that happened.

And uh uh so it was just a half truth, but it was a whole lie because he was leaving out the most important aspect of their relationship, especially for Pharaoh, which is that they were married.

And so they hatched this plan.

So look, we can see this type of transition in uh uh what takes place between Abram and Sarai.

There's this uh uh there's this risk that Abram is forced into by his hunger.

And he meets this risk with a deep fear, and he says, the way to mitigate this risk is to hide myself in a lie.

And so he crafts this lie for the sake of his own benefit, and the pressure point of the lie is right at the very place that God had promised his faithfulness.

God promised him land and offspring.

He left the land, and now he's putting his marriage at stake for his own safety.

So he continues on, and we can see that there's this pattern to Abram's drift.

And it's a pattern that I think many of us will find familiar.

There's a promise of God, and that gives us a sort of expectation.

You know, I think, especially when we're new or young Christians, and we say, you know what, I'm gonna get my life together, I'm gonna come back to church, and I'm gonna commit myself to Christ, then all of a sudden, all of these difficulties in our life start to prop up, be it a job loss or marriage pain or whatever those things may be, however, whatever shape they take in your life.

And we say, Look, God, I had this expectation of you for what your promises meant.

And when you're not meeting those, then what I'm learning is the author of reality isn't trustworthy.

And if the author of reality isn't trustworthy, then my only hope is to craft a lie.

It's to craft a reality just from what I can see, and then based on that reality, try and uh gather my own safety, try and be in control of my own safety.

And Abram goes through just exactly this drift.

Lord, I'm in the promised land, but you aren't showing your faithfulness to me here.

And that means you must not be trustworthy.

So I'm going to lie, and I'm going to hide out within my own lie.

And you know, I think Abram thought he was right for a while.

He thought he made the correct move.

Genesis 12, 14 to 16, this is what happens.

When Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful, and when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house.

Abram likely thought, see, I was right.

I assessed the situation exactly.

And for her sake, he dealt well with Abram.

And he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels.

So Abram's plan works.

He hides within his own lie, and for a while, it really works.

Just exactly as he said.

Look, Pharaoh was going to take you.

And because of this lie, he took you, but he didn't kill me.

And in fact, he dealt well with me because I'm your brother, just as I said he would.

And how long was Abram willing to live in this lie?

Well, look, I I I don't manage logistics at all, in fact, right, Krista?

Oh, but he gets sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels.

Like I don't think those were all delivered on one day.

So he's here, let's say, at least a week.

He's living in this lie for a long time.

Now, what does this show us about the way Abram understood the covenant so far?

It shows us that he starts off with this initial act of faith, but then it's a conditional act of faith.

Because when pressure is put on it and he experiences the hunger, his hunger drives him into fear, and his fear drives him into lying, and he's willing to remain in the lie so long as he's blessed by it with wealth.

Do you see this pattern taking place here?

He conjures his own blessing, based not on the promises of God, but based on his own lie.

So, in order to go into Egypt, and in order to be blessed by Egypt, Abram needed to tell a lie to Egypt.

So here's a question.

What lies do we need to tell our culture in order to be blessed by it?

What lies do you need to tell the culture that we're a part of in order to be blessed by our culture?

Can you think of any?

Let's go through two.

I think there's two categories that we can think of this.

One is generosity, and the other is our sexual ethic.

Both of which I think often our culture requires you to lie in order to give your blessing.

One of which our culture tells us to be very tight with, and the other of which our culture tells us to be very loose with.

So Christianity tells us that we should live lives of generosity, that we should hold on to our things very loosely because it's better to give than to receive, that there's a happiness in the act of giving, that collecting and gathering things for ourselves is not where safety ultimately lies.

And yet the normal pattern of our culture demonstrates that we really think that safety lies in our gathering of possessions, our building up our own kingdoms, our gathering of wealth.

And we reinforce that lie in our patterns and in our practices.

And so this tells us that we actually don't trust what God says about generosity.

We actually trust what the world says about safety and protection and our wealth.

Also, our sex ethic.

So the Bible.

The Bible calls us to a heterosexual, monogamous uh relationship, that that is what marriage is definitionally, as it's created in the garden.

And it calls us to a strictness and even a tightness with that type of sexual ethic.

But our culture calls us to a looseness with it.

Where, as the Bible says, your sex life can't be divided from the rest of your life.

But you are a whole person wherever you go.

And when you commit yourself physically to someone, you are also committing yourself emotionally to them.

Therefore, do this wisely in this created context.

But our culture would say, no, you actually are a divided person to where your sex life and the rest of your life can simply be separated from one another.

I was watching a show, it was actually a pretty funny show, on uh uh Apple TV Plus, and one of the two shows on Apple TV Plus.

And uh this uh the one of the main characters has a one-night stand, and then he feels shameful about it the next day.

And the episode taught us as the viewer a lesson of how silly it was that he felt ashamed.

And the questions that they asked were uh, do you feel happy?

Were you happy?

Was it fun?

And he says, Yeah, yeah, it was fun.

I I was happy.

And then they say, Well, was she happy and was it fun?

And he says, Yes, I she was happy, it was fun.

And then they say, See, well, what's the problem?

Why are you beating yourself up for this?

And he's and then his great revelation is, you're right.

Why am I beating myself up for this?

This is so silly and backwards.

And so our culture says, you'll be blessed when you gather for yourself possessions, and it says you'll be blessed when you stop holding so tightly to your own sexuality.

If you're tight here and you're loose there, then you'll be blessed with true happiness and joy and fulfillment.

See, our culture, just like Egypt, asks you to tell a lie before it blesses you.

Does that make sense?

That pattern?

So I want you to consider, those are just two examples, but they're meant to just prime your thoughts.

In what way is our culture asking you to tell a lie before it blesses you?

And when, like Abraham, do you find you're satisfied enough by what you receive, by the wealth that the culture gives you?

When are you satisfied enough by those things to remain in the lie?

That's a big question.

Because Abram sat there for a while.

So God, of course, doesn't let him sit there forever, outside of the promised land, separated from his wife.

Instead, God remains faithful when Abram didn't.

This is what happens next in Genesis 12, verse 17.

Genesis 12:17

It says, But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife.

So remember, so look what happens.

The Lord looks at Pharaoh and he says, Plagues, which is a thing we'll learn God's kind of into with Egyptians.

And there's a uh he sends these plagues upon Pharaoh's house because he sees what's happening with Sarai, uh, who's been taken in by Pharaoh.

Now, remember, part of the covenant promised to Abram.

God committed himself to Abram, and he says, Him who dishonors you, I will curse.

Part of God committing himself to Abram was God saying, Him who blesses you, I will bless, and him who dishonors you, I will curse.

Now look at the faithfulness of God.

This is not intuitive.

God is not a man like us.

When he promises, it's not with the built-in conditions that we all have built into our promises.

God says, He who blesses you, I will bless, he who curses you, I will curse.

What we add is, sure, God, unless I bring that curse upon myself.

If I bring that curse upon myself, then you will no longer be on my side, but you will be on whoever else's side.

But that's not the promise.

The promise of God to Abram was, He who blesses you, I will bless, and he who curses you, I will curse.

And he sees that Pharaoh is cursing Abram.

He took his very wife from him and is treating him as his own wife.

This is a curse, whether Abram is in on it or not.

And so God is saying, I will remain faithful even when you have brought this faithlessness upon yourself.

Do you see that?

He's not like us.

He doesn't have the built-in conditions on his promises that we all have built in.

His faithfulness is uh otherworldly.

It's it has to be shown to us in stories like this that shock us.

Otherwise, we won't be able to see it.

We won't, you wouldn't believe it if I told you.

Well, hopefully you will, because I'm trying right now.

See, him who dishonors you, I will curse.

And so God does exactly what he said he would do.

He said, Abram, I have committed to you.

You are in a situation where you are being cursed, even though you've brought it upon yourself.

I will now bring plagues upon the one who is cursing you.

And so plagues come down on Pharaoh and his household.

Now, we aren't given how exactly Pharaoh pieces this together.

But Pharaoh does.

He's either told by God as uh another king later who this same sort of thing happens to, named Abimelech.

Abimelech is told in a dream.

We aren't told if Pharaoh is told in a dream, but he pieces together, at least through the plagues, and he's saying, you know what?

I think this has to do with Sarai, and I think that there's something shady about Sarai and Abram's relationship.

It's not very sisterly.

And so this is Pharaoh's response to Abram.

Genesis 12, verse 18 through 19.

Genesis 12:18–19

So Pharaoh called Abram and said, What is this you have done to me?

Why did you not tell me that she was your wife?

Why did you say she is my sister, so that I took her for my wife?

Now then, here is your wife, take her and go.

All of Abram's lies are laid bare in front of him.

By who?

By Pharaoh.

Who could be more outside of who we would expect truth to come from?

And yet God uses him as this mouthpiece of truth to the person who he has entered a covenant relationship with to lay completely bare the lies of Abram in front of him.

And what does Abram respond with?

Nothing.

He is silent before him.

Abram's been caught.

He's been exposed.

Now, what of these questions that Pharaoh asks?

What is this you've done to me?

Why did you not tell me that she was your wife?

Why did you say she is my sister so that I took her for my wife?

Abram easily could have said, Look, if you knew that she was my husband, you would have killed me.

And Abram, we shouldn't treat him as an unreasonable person.

He probably had that fear because he'd seen those things take place before.

So it's easy for us to think, like, look, we should just run what's the counterfactual here?

What would have happened if Abram just stayed in Canaan?

You know, maybe God would have had manna rain down from heaven so that he would have eaten.

We don't know.

We can't run the counterfactual.

What if he had gone to Egypt but not lied about Sarai?

How would God have worked out his salvation?

We don't know.

We see God work out salvation in even more dire circumstances than that.

Later on, Abram's own offspring will have their back pressed up against the wall of an ocean and be chased down, hunted to be killed by the entire army of Egypt, and God will free them from that situation.

So we don't know what God's faithfulness would have looked like.

But what we see here is that God was faithful to Abram even amidst Abram's faithlessness.

The covenant that God made still stood, even when Abram didn't.

In Genesis 12, 20, it says, And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.

Pharaoh likely gives orders to protect Abram on the way out, so that he's able to leave and actually plunder Egypt when he's leaving.

He leaves with more than he went in with.

Now, what do we do with the ambiguity of this story?

Because that's it, that's the end.

Abram goes, he leaves the promised land out of hunger, he goes into Egypt in fear and lies.

He remains there with his confidence being placed just in his wealth.

But then when he's rebuked, he doesn't respond.

And God offers no follow-up commentary on this passage that Moses, when he's writing this, doesn't write in, and that was a bad thing for Abram to do.

Now, here's the next part of the story.

No, we don't we don't see that type of commentary in this.

It's very strange.

In fact, it's it's left to us to see how this develops to be able to piece through what is taking place in Abram's life and in Abram's heart.

We've got a couple of signs.

Some commentators are split on this.

Not some of them, many are split on this.

Some say that we shouldn't interpret what Abram did as wrong at all.

I think that's not true.

I think we should interpret what Abram did as wrong.

And part of the reason for this is I think we see Abram's heart here is really distorted.

Abram, this father of our faith, has a heart like ours.

Later on, he will be confronted by another king, the king of Sodom, who offers to bless him by giving him things.

And Abram says, I will not take anything from your hand, lest you say that you have made me wealthy and not the Lord.

Now, where would Abram learn a lesson like that?

I think it's right here.

I think through this process, Abram leaves with this with all of this wealth, and he reflects back and he says, I acted faithlessly, but what did I learn?

God was still faithful to me.

Maybe I need to shift the way I understand the relationship of our covenant.

Maybe when I look out and I move forward into the world and I say, look, I've got to abandon what God has called me to here, because the only safety that will really deliver are the lies that I can come up with.

Well, what if Abram learned in an experience like this, even when it doesn't make sense what God is calling me to, God is still faithful to me.

We see Abram act like that later.

Abram will have far more pressure placed upon his faith in the promises of God than he has here in the beginning.

He'll be asked to kill his own son, the very object of the promise of God.

And Abram will move in faith.

But how did he learn a faith like that?

It was through the ambiguity of his own heart and in the midst of that, seeing God was faithful.

What's the shift that's taking place in Abraham?

He's no longer assessing his circumstances to determine the faithfulness of God.

Instead, he's trusting in God's promise.

He's trusting in God's character.

Did you hear that?

When he considers God's faithfulness to him, the main factor is God's character.

That's what makes his faith strong, because he knows the one in whom he is trusting.

He's not trusting in his own stalwartness or the strength of his own character.

He has learned it isn't very strong, but there is one who is.

And his faith then becomes in God himself.

This is what we see in these stories.

If we are to assess this story and we look and we try and discover how should we act based on this hero of our faith, then we're missing what's being truly revealed in the pattern of these stories.

What's being revealed here isn't the faithfulness of a hero of our faith.

What's being revealed here is the faithfulness of God in his promises.

God could no more change his covenant promises towards us than he could change his very own character, because these promises are revelations of who he is, and God is unchanging.

So I want to ask you, what is your faith in?

Is it in the circumstances?

If it is, then you will soon be crafting a lie to elicit some blessing for yourself.

But if it is in the promise of God, you will find that no matter how weak you are, there is a strength that you've been given.

Because you aren't looking into yourself.

You're looking into the faithful one.

How much more can we know this than Abraham knew it?

Abram, excuse me.

I'll switch when he switches.

How much more can we know this than Abram knew it?

How much more have we seen the faithfulness of God demonstrated to us?

Abram lies about his wife and in circumstances that we can probably even justify, right?

It's like, well, look, he was gonna starve and then he was gonna be killed, and so he needs to protect himself.

Like you get it.

We can reason ourselves through this real character defect that we see in him.

And yet God remains faithful through it.

How much more do we know of God's faithfulness in Christ?

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

That instead of punishment, we might receive blessing from the Lord, that through the judgment that comes down on Jesus, just like the judgment that came down on Egypt, we are able to pass through with blessing.

When Abram walked out and he looked back at the camels and the servants that he left with, uh all he could think was, I did nothing to deserve this.

In fact, I did more than nothing to deserve this.

I I this should be taken from me.

I've been bad and wicked.

That is how we stand before the blessing of God.

Do you see the goodness of our Lord?

Do you see that even in our wickedness he extends blessing to us?

Do you see how he's not like us, how his heart is just different than ours?

That it extends a real grace, a real grace to you.

In Christ, it is extended to you.

This very promise.

I commend you, take it.

Place your faith in it.

Place your faith in the promise of Christ.

Let it stretch beyond the sin that entangles you.

Let it stretch beyond the lies that you have committed in order to gain a blessing from our culture.

Come into the truth of Christ.

Because you can see his heart is kind towards you.

In his promises, we see his heart revealed.

Okay.

Let's see if there are any questions.

No questions?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um there are parts of Genesis that aren't in chronological order.

Yeah.

So the question was, is Genesis always in chronological order?

Uh no, it's not necessarily in chronological order.

And we'll see, especially later on, when there'll be these kind of strange jumps.

Oh, like we'll jump into the story of uh of Judah, kind of right in the midst of this story of Joseph.

And it's like, this doesn't seem to make much sense, but Moses just wants us to see the parallels in these characters' lives.

So with a book like Genesis, we need to have on both a historical narrative lens and we need to have on a literary lens to understand the shape of the book as a whole.

Does that make sense?

Cool.

Any other questions?

No further questions.

Let's pray.

Father, I pray that your faithfulness would just be written in skywriting, uh, Lord, that we would see it and that uh we would see it even in these strange stories in Scripture.

Lord, uh an ambiguity that I hope uh for for anyone who pays attention to their life, I hope it strikes them as realism uh because our lives so often feel like that.

Lord, let us trust in your faithfulness even in the midst of that strange ambiguity that we live in.

Lord, let us trust that the work that you do in Abraham and that we get to see as his faith starts off in this weak way and then develops into this beauty as he sees your faithfulness to him over and over again.

Lord, remind us in our hearts of your own faithfulness to us in our lives.

That way we might trust in you.

God, I pray that we would repent of the lies that we have told to elicit blessing.

And God, I pray that you would set us free from those so that we might live in the truth of your faithfulness to us.

Lord, we pray that you would be glorified and uh that our our worship would be pleasing to you as we take communion together.

Lift this up in Jesus' name, amen.