God's Unwavering Promises: Abram to Abraham

You're listening to the Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk

about the Bible in fun in practical ways. Hey, everybody, welcome to

the Bible Guys. We're back. We are back, better than ever,

baby, better than ever. Okay, see, everything's a movie to me,

right, two guys sitting in a studio. Yeah, I'm back.

Oh geez, you want poorter guys on me? There they're here. Okay,

Hey, we are going to start off with one of my favorite segments.

And this really is just so fun. It is the Dad Joe competition.

I think haven't No, I haven't either. I haven't even read a

single one. But the older I get, the more I think I appreciate

these. Yeah, I think they're funny. Yeah. So, uh you

want me to go? Yes, you go first. We have five each.

Here we go. Here's the first one. What is that word?

Okay, here we go. The word Q is ironic. It's just a

queue with a bunch of silent letters waiting in line. So q U e

U e q q right, Like that's that's how Europe says. British people

say, standing in line. Right, So you queue up or you get

in the queue. Right right now. Yeah, we have ques. Yes,

we were in the queue, but we usually say standing in line,

right in line. But he says, it's just a queue with a bunch

of silent letters waiting in line. So you're clever, you short have to

very clever. It's a reading one's read one. That's one you have to

see. Come on, does a ray? Don't give us a reading one?

That's right. Here we go. A color blind friend of mine insists

that all apples are yellow. I told him that was bananas. Oh jeez,

that was bananas. That's bananas, not apples. That's bananas. Number

two, here we go. What do you call it? Superhero with a

bad sense of direction? I don't know. Wonder woman. It's terrible.

So no, it's so bad. Okay, Oh that's awful. This one's

terrible. This one is. We might get protested on this one. I

recently opened a company selling trampolines disguised as prayer mats. Profits are going through

the roof. Oh wow, wow, wow, that's really good. Okay,

that's really good. All right, How about this one? How can

you tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator? I don't know.

Easy one will see you later, and the other one will see you in

a while, after a while. Yeah, okay, while, yeah this.

My grandson does that all the time, does he. Yeah, But

he doesn't understand the rhyme part of it, so he just makes up new

animals, so you'd be like, see you later, alligator, and then

he'll be like, after a while, elephant. It's so funny. So

he hasn't quite figured out the rhyming part of it yet. We say,

after a while, crocodile, No, no, after a while, Ostrich,

it's funny. Okay, here we go. The person who invented the

ferris wheel never met the person who invented the merry ground. They traveled in

different circles. Oh wow, that's pretty good. That's a clever one like

that. I like that one, all right. How about this one.

When I was a kid, bedtime was nine pm. I couldn't wait to

be grown up so I can go to bed anytime I wanted. Turns out

that's nine pm. That's really fun It's true. It is true. Man,

it's really funny. I fight it, but yeah, okay. NASA.

NASA is launching a satellite to say sorry to the aliens they're calling it

the Apollo g O. That was rough. That was funny, clever,

clever. Why would we want to say we're sorry to the aliens? What

do we do then? All right, this one a dragon would never explode,

but a dino mite. Okay, good one, good one. It's

funny. What's your last one? Uh? Just when you think that food

cannot possibly call you on your phone, Boom onion rings. You know,

the delivery was just as good as the punchline. The way that they wrote

boom is great, and he delivered it perfectly. Boom onion rings. That's

the funniest part of that joke, not even it's not even the cleverness.

It's really funny. Well, was that it? That's a lot of fun

Okay, we are moving on. So if you held on this long,

we're done. It's over. Yes, goodbye, and we'll see you next

time. No, no, no, no, I'm just talking. The

pain is is done. Well, we are now launching into the next after

Genesis seventeen. If you've been following along with us, yes, today we'd

be looking at how Abram is named Abraham, and clearly you can see how

excited Zarba is about it. So yes, I'm so excited Jeff for you

to read. Okay, so Abram, here it goes. I'm so glad

you do the readings. Why is that because last yesterday on the Bible,

guys, you read beer lahai roi, which means well the living one who

sees me? And I thought, and you just you just burned right through

it. I was just making it up and I would never I just don't

want that. Yeah. Yeah, So I just I just allow you to

read, you know, so thank you, like Tony Stark says, I

will allow, I will allow that. Yes, that's me. That's my

favorite line. Yeah. Well it's kind of spelled out that way, right,

But I just am grateful that you're doing the reading of these things.

Well, thank you. Yeah, that's my part, that's the small part.

I get to play, yes, yes, because I mean you get

the sing. Can you get the sing? And you get to laugh,

you get to do all the fun stuff. Yeah, yeah, here you

go, not actual Bible stuff. So Genesis chapter seventeen, verse one,

and it's just simply says this. When Abram was ninety nine years old,

the Lord appeared to him and said, I am el Shadai. I knew

that one, God Almighty, serve me faithfully and live a blameless life.

I will make a covenant with you by which I will guarantee to give you

countless descendants. At this Abram fell face down on the ground, and then

God said to him, this is my covenant with you. I will make

you the father of a multitude of nations. What's more, I'm changing your

name. It will no longer be Abram. Instead you will be called Abraham,

for you will be the father of many nations. I will make you

extremely fruitful. Your descendants will become many nations, and kings will be among

them. I will confirm my covenant with you and your descendants after you,

from generation to generation. And this is the everlasting covenant. I will always

be your god and the god of your descendants after you, and I will

give the entire land of Canaan and where you now live as a foreigner,

to you and your descendants. It'll be their possession forever, and I will

be their God. Wow, there you go. That's great, I think.

I say, there you go almost every time I finished reading. Yeah.

Well, so just in case you're only ever listening and you're not reading

along with us. The Bible doesn't actually say there you go every one of

these at the end of the right, at the end of yeah, there

you go the uh. You know, it's interesting how God had already promised

Abraham to leave his country a long time ago, that's correct, and then

then he was gonna make him a father of nations, right, and he

promised them descendants long ago, which is why Abraham got up and he left,

and he packed everything up and took everything is with him, his wealth,

and he and he traveled all the way through right, even went further

down to Egypt and then came back. But now he is ninety nine years

old, and then the Lord appeared to him. Now what's interesting about this

is is why would God appear and make such a drastic appearance to say the

same thing, only in more detail as he already said. Right, And

you know what I think the answer is. I think the answer is it's

found sort of in between the lines. You know, we just read last

chapter which was yesterday's podcast. The fact that you know, they're praying for,

you know, a child for decades and then they get impatient and then

they you know, act in sin and they do this thing with child out

of wedlock with a servant, and then now he's ninety nine years old,

which means there's another thirteen years that have passed. Yeah, you know what

I believe it is. I believe what God is doing. And again it's

not said, but you can apply it and say, maybe God is showing

up and he is reaffirming or reminding Abraham that he never fails, that he's

going to keep his word. That he is saying, Hey, I've not

forgotten you, and I've not forgotten the promise you know that I've given to

you. I've never stopped watching over you. I've never stopped hearing your prayers.

I've never stopped hearing your cries. And He is showing him up,

maybe showing up in person, maybe to perhaps solidify his faith to you know,

ground him once again and is resolve to serve God. I don't know

what are your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think so very much.

I think that the idea of changing the name. I think that right after

this comes the circumcision Covenant, which we didn't read all of these things,

is God is putting his mark on Abram. God is saying, are you

going to follow me? God? God? Has brought him on his journey,

and there's been kind of an expansion of the promise. This is the

third promise in Abram's life. So the first one Abram is, you know,

probably I don't know what. Does the Bible tell us how old he

was when he left? I don't remember. I can't remember. But here

we are, he's ninety nine. So this has been decades since the first

time God promised. So God promises at the beginning, go to the land

of Canaan, I'm gonna give you that land. And he doesn't say I'm

gonna give you land, go to land of cana I'm gonna make a great

nation of you. That was the promise, right, and you know,

Abram had good times and bad times. He was following God, but he

wasn't a perfect man. Then God promises, Yeah, it says Abram was

seventy five years old when he left Horn. Okay, so seventy five,

So seventy five to ninety nine, so two and a half decades, yeah,

yeah. And then in the middle God promises again. And then this

one here where he finally comes and has this very strong reaffirmation. But at

this time too, he's also promising the whole land of Canaan, It's going

to be yours, right, all of this land is yours, where you

now live as a foreigner to you and your descent city'd be their possession forever.

Canaan is what is modern day Israel and Palestine that area. And God

said, hey, this is going to be your, your people's land forever.

And it is still right. And then God institutes the ceremony of circumcision

as the foundational element, that is physical proof that they were set apart by

God. There's a lot of reasons for that, but God literally put his

mark in the place that is most important to Abram right at that point,

which to me, if you're going to start a religion, that seems like

a really bad recruiting mechanism or recruiting tool, right, But in this situation,

that's what God said. And there's an interesting note in here about this

idea. It says it gave four reasons. One it was a sign of

obedience to God in all manners. And that's that's I think true. Right

from the very basic human behaviors all the way to saying that your heart is

for God. Everything is that way. It is a kind of belonging to

his covenant people. Once circumcised, the man would be identified as one of

God's chosen people, eventually the Jews forever. The third reason is that it

was a symbol of cutting off the old life of sin and purifying one's heart

and dedicating one's self to God. That's where Abram got himself in trouble,

right, So this is where God says, okay, let's cut this off.

And then possibly as a health measure. There's a lot of health issues

that go along with that as well. And so in Abram's day, it

was essential God was saying, I'm going to send the Messiah through your line.

It's essential that God's people stay pure and clean and not defiled and have

their bloodline watered down by the pagans around them, the people worshiping other gods.

And so it was all those things together. And God changes his name

and he goes from Abram means like a celebrated father, right, and Abraham

means father of many. And so even then the difference between hey, you're

going to have a son too, you are going to be the father of

nations, that God elevates the promise. And so I think sometimes people feel

like, oh, I had sin in my past. This is thirteen years

later, right, But you might feel like, you know, a decade

ago you were so in your wild oats and you were messing up your life,

and that there's no hope for you, that God's ever got anything special.

God increased his promise to Abram over those next thirteen years. As Abram

leaned back into his relationship with God, God says, hey, now what

did he say? He didn't tell him. I want you to live pure

right, serve me faithfully and live a blameless life, and I'll make a

covenant with you by which I'll guarantee you countless descendants. So God elevates the

promise, and so you know, if you have something in your past,

God still can use you and still wants to use you in a great way.

Yeah, and I find it very interesting as well. Like, listen

to the wording of what God says. He says, it will no longer

be Abraham. Instead, it'll be called Abraham. You'll be the father many

nations. And then listen to this next sentence. I will make you extremely

fruitful, you ninety nine year old man. Yes, make you extremely fruitful.

It's like, it's like, what, so the idea that, like,

you know, there's still time left. God has not done with you

yet, right, Yeah. How many stories have you ever heard of people

who they're just I mean, I mean simple stories, not even famous.

For instance, I know a guy, a good friend of mine, Tom

Hoague, and his wife since has passed on. But she was a wonderful

nurse and my wife was looking to get into nursing and and she said,

oh, my wife said, I'm so old. I'm in my thirties.

And I think Tom, I think at the time, Tom said, well,

my wife's been a nurse and she went to school to be a nurse,

like when she was in her late forties. And I was like what,

And here she is just, you know, this really well established nurse

and that since then she's passed and and I think Tom maybe in his early

eighties. But anyway, the point is is that, you know, God,

God has great things on the horizons for anybody who maybe thinks, oh

my time has passed, it's too late. Sure wish I would have served

God for decades and now it's too late. It's like no, no,

no, you know, do you ever read Charles Dickens, right, Scrooge

and his late right, you know, in his late ages. It says

the last line of the Charles Dickens novel Course this is you know, fiction,

but it says that he became known Christmas, became attached to his name

more than it was you know, against it or something like that. Right.

So I believe that that's what God can do. God is the god

of second chances. He's the God that wants to use us today, regardless

of how much time we have left. Yeah, my dad became a Christian

when he was forty, So you'd grown up be in a Christian home,

but it was not a Christian And then when he graduated high school, he

he ran from God and he became a Christian when he was forty. I

can remember when he was fifty. I was eighteen, and I can remember

him talking on his fiftieth birthday, Man, serve the Lord. Don't walk

away from the Lord. Serve the Lord. You know, you're at that

age when I just threw it all away, and he said, I feel

like I've wasted so much of my life. And he had a lot of

regret that he wasted a big chunk of his life in being effective and never

really felt like he was going to ever be able to do anything for the

Lord. But now my dad's eighty six, which means he's been a Christian

longer than he wasn't a Christian. Right, that's great. And my dad's

health is failing, and you know, just as you get older, things

are different. And my dad spent a big, big chunk of his Christian

life just really enthusiastic about the idea of sharing his faith. He taught me

how to share the gospel. We would share the Gospel together sometimes with people,

stuff like that. Just recently, I was with my dad and he

was with somebody he cares a lot about, but he wasn't sure that person

was a Christian. And my dad's not always putting together big arguments now or

conversations now, but he leaned in and wanted to make sure that this person

knew Jesus and was on their way to Heaven, right, And I was

just thinking, Hey, that's kind of that. I love that my dad's

been serving Jesus longer than he didn't serve Jesus and he still wants everybody else

to know Jesus right at this point late stage and so for Abram here he

is. He's an old, old, old old man by every standard that

we have in modern times, ninety nine years old. God says, I'm

not done with you. I'm going to change your name. I'm going to

give you new mission. I'm going to expand my promises to you. And

so it's not too late. I guess that's that's what I'm trying to say.

It's not too late. God wants to use you. And maybe right

now, you know, you're feeling you're at home, maybe and you're retired,

you're trying to figure out what you're supposed to do nexty A lot of

times people feel old, they've been told they're old, they have a couple

of health issues. You start to believe it. Whatever you believe about yourself

is usually true in some way, or winds up becoming true in some way.

Right you may get through their self fulfilling prophecies. But if you decide,

hey, guy's not done with me yet. My life has changed,

but now I have to find new strategies. My wife's my mother in law,

she you know, is has some maturity about her. And I think

that's a nice delicate way of saying that man. She jumped in on you

know, we do a lot of the Timothy Initiative training with disciples making disciples

at Heritage, and she jumped in in the very first round of training on

that she has gotten on fire for sharing the gospel making disciples. She started

a Bible study group at the Senior Center. Now she lives in a senior

retirement facility, and she started a group there. And she's just she is

on mission right now, and she has, you know, the time.

She's moving a little slower, but she has the time to do it,

and so she's maximizing her time and man alive. I think that's kind of

what we're seeing here with Abraham now. When when I got out of Bible

College, I went straight to Atlanta, Georgia, and I worked at one

church that was a smaller church. It was like one hundred and eighty people.

I was there for like eight years, and then I left that church.

I should have quite honestly left it long before that. I got in

his timing right, and then I went to a decent sized church. It

was like eighteen hundred people. I was there for about three and a half

years, and then I left there. And I think that both of those

ended poorly. So I liked ministry. I liked, you know, pretty

much like my level down. The problem was I didn't like from my level

up. I didn't like leadership in the church because I had been burned twice

at two different churches. So I decided that I was going to be done

with ministry. And I was really, you know, I mean we're talking

like I'm thirty. I would have been like thirty something years old, thirty

two, And I thought, jeez, I don't know if I have it

in me to go to another church, you know, and move across the

country or do whatever. And eventually I found myself moving to Michigan through an

unbelievable set of circumstances. I don't have time to tell the story, but

it's my it's my angel story, right. But here's my point is that

is that, like I thought to myself, gosh, I've been in ministry

now for you know, for at the time, it would have been but

like a dozen years, and and I'd been a Christian for another five or

six years. I thought, geeze, that's over twenty years of serving the

Lord. I think I think I'm I think I'm done doing this full time.

But the thing that God told me, and there's only a few times

in my entire life where I felt like God spoke it. I don't think

it was audible, but it was just about as close to audible as you

could possibly get. I knew it was from God, and it was it

was just it was just this unbelievable moment. Uh. And it's you know,

it's just a long story, but basically, here's the message. Is

I heard God say with clarity, and I've never doubted it. And the

message was I'm not through with you yet. That was it. And that

was in two thousand and four, and and I just remember thinking, in

fact, it was in It was in August August fifteenth, two thousand and

four. That's where it was. And uh and and I just thought to

myself, geez, like, what a thing to hear from God. And

I knew it was from God. And so if God says, hey,

I'm not I'm not done with you yet, it's that that fueled me for

the next twenty years, from from then until now. Because it's been twenty

years exactly from that date, I can't even imagine how even even how how

much more great it was for God to appear and and to talk to Abraham

face to face. And then the Bible says, if we go on beyond

the circumcision thing, then God also changes Sarah's name to Sarah, right,

both of those names mean princess. But he says, and she's going to

have a son. And Abram is like, he said, oh, bless

her richly, should become the mother of many nations. And this is when

God's solidifying. Hey, you guys, I'm not done with you too yet.

And the Bible says Abraham bowed down to the ground, but he laughed

to himself and disbelieve. And he's like, how in the world, I'm

almost one hundred years old, she's almost ninety years old. How are we

going to have a child. But then he also said, hey, God,

would you bless Ishmael too, And so he didn't forget Ishmael just because

of the promise that God said, Yeah, I'll make a great nation out

of him. And then they went ahead and obeyed God. And I think

that that's the key. The key isn't just the promise. The key is

every promise of God in the Bible. I can't think of a promise apart

from it, every promise of God is if then. So he said,

I want you to live holy right. I want you to be faithful,

be blameless, and I'm gonna bless you then, and i want you to

ope babe me and do this circumcision thing, and I'm going to change your

names. I'm going to change your future. I'm going to reaffirm and expand

the promise. And then the very next thing Abraham did was follow God and

obey God and do exactly what he said to do. So promises of God

are if then promises. It's not just like, oh, I get to

claim the promise, it's mine. No matter what, God always attaches a

thing to it, something to it, And in this situation, it was

be blameless and be faithful. That's great, and they obeyed. Well,

that looks like about our time, so hopefully we will see you tomorrow on

the Bible, guys,