Fresh from a victory over local tribes, and his meeting with this strange figure called Melchizedek, Abram was feeling a bit stressed by life's responsibilities. And he has yet another God encounter... God comes – as he keeps on doing – and makes a promise to Abram. “I am your great reward”.
This is now the fourth time God has spoken his promises to Abram (12. 1-3; 12. 7; 13. 14). Is Abram getting just a wee bit tired of it? In a mixture of faith and exasperation he says “Lord, You keep telling me you're giving me and my descendants the land – but where are my descendants? Right now the nearest thing I have to an heir is my servant Eleazar of Damascus!” (If that's what the Hebrew means: verse 2 is difficult to translate but verse 3 is quite plain!) It's a bit much, Lord; promises, promises. When am I going to see some action? We don't want to hear “I am your great reward!”. We want the descendants! So Abram, reminds God about that bit of the promise as well. And that's OK as a prayer of faith. Jesus told two stories about that sort of prayer. “Once a poor widow kept pestering and badgering the judge, to give her justice. And eventually the judge decided 'If I don't give her her due, one of these days she's going to slap me in the face – so I had better do what she asks.'” (Lk 18. 1-8) And “Once, a man woke his friend up at midnight, looking for food to give to a visitor who had just arrived. Even although it was inconvenient he got out of bed and gave his friend what he asked for – because he was cheeky enough to ask!” (Lk 11. 5-8) Sometimes our prayers are just too polite! And on this Pentecost Sunday, the Holy Spirit is both our rightful inheritance – because Jesus died to make us God's children – and the resource we need to feed a hungry world. So it's right to say to God “Lord, give us your Spirit! You promised!”
Abram believed God – and that was enough. The NIV says “it was credited to him as righteousness”: Tsaddiq – the right, correct, just thing to do. That is a key verse that Paul (Romans 4:3, Galatians 3:6) and James (James 2:23) both quote. . That's what we need to do with the promises God gives us. Believe them. God looks at that, and credits it to our account as “righteousness". It's something we need to take on board. That's basic and fundamental.
Maybe you are at the beginning bit of your journey as a Christian. You are thinking through what it means to walk with God. “What do I need to do?” Be nice to everyone? Work harder? Clean up your life? Take communion regularly? Put money in the offering? Help out with the Foodbank? Give money to famine relief? All of these are good things to do. I'm not saying “Don't do these things!” But God makes is so simple. Believe what he says. He will count that as doing something right. (And in fact, if it's for real, it will begin to change your life: you'll begin to do some of these other things I've been talking about as well!)
To confirm the promise – publicly signing the contract – God has Abram prepare a sacrifice. And as he waits, the darkness comes; he feels “the terror of the Lord.” That's part of how God works. His agreement with Moses, was spoken out of a cloud. Even the New Covenant, the agreement God made thorough Jesus, began in darkness and earthquake (Matthew 27. 45, 51) God is Holy. He is perfect; he is pure, he is clean. He speaks to Abram so intimately; but he is the Holy One.
Now, just an observation here: God's promises are there for the dark as well as the light. He is able to make his promises come true for Abram's nation – even though they will, as a nation, spend 400 years in Egypt, in slavery, to all appearances finished as a clan with any hope of real nationhood. We should not confuse God's promises with our own wishful thinking. We should not extend God's promises outwards to include all we desire. That's a road to heartache and disillusionment.
So then, Abram has a promise. But still no heir. Then someone has a good idea. Sarai suggests that Abram get her servant Hagar pregnant: a king of bronze-age surrogate mother. I don't think my wife would have come up with such an idea – but it was OK in Abram's world. And – whether because Hagar was quite good looking (!) – or more likely because ten years had passed since the first promise and he was desperate to have the promise fulfilled – he accepted. It seemed like God was not answering. It was legal (at that time!) It was a good idea – on the surface at least. But it caused immediate tensions between Hagar, Sarai, and Abram. It brought out the worst in each of them. (Derek Kidner neatly sums it up: “False pride, false blame, false neutrality.”) It resulted in the powerless ones – Hagar and her unborn child – being treated as objects that could be disposed of. And in the end, when God has told Abram that Sarai will have a child, Abram is trying to reason with God just to bless Ishmael instead. “Lord, can't you just use our plan B instead?” (See Gen 17.18)
So what are we NOT to do with a promise? Make it come true ourselves. If you promised your child something – a new toy maybe – you would be angry with them if they got fed up waiting and took the money for it from your purse, and even more annoyed if they simply went and stole it from the local shop. But we do that to God all the time.
In Galatians 4. 22f, Paul says this: “Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise.” Hagar and Ishmael represent the old covenant, the law, the flesh, and slavery. Sarah and Isaac represent the New Covenant, the promise, the Spirit, and freedom. The whole story, and that choice between old and new, law and promise, flesh and spirit, slavery and freedom, applies to the whole of the Christian life, the whole business of journeying with God.
God has made a promise: he who believes on the Son has life. And we have replaced that with good ideas: give to the poor; be a nice person; go to Church; or ignore God and buy the life you want; or contact the supernatural through spiritualism or astrology. We ignore God's voice and listen to other voices instead.
God has made a promise: “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” (Acts 1. 8) And we have replaced that with good ideas: we put on events to attract people; we have websites and public transport advertising campaigns; we pressure people to share their faith. We put our faith in evangelists; in campaigns; in processes like Evangelism Explosion or even Alpha. We run organisations – BB or Urban saints of a Coffee Morning. We try to make our churches look lively by having the most vibrant praise; the greatest kids' work. So we have great schemes and we pressurise people to be part of them. We jump in and do the witness, instead of waiting for the promise, believing that the Spirit will make us witnesses.
The Christian world is littered with the casualties of good ideas. Churches and individual Christians burned out on activism, disillusioned by hype and human attempts to look “successful”, worn out by clever ideas that are greedy for cash and time, pressured to perform to fulfil someone else's vision. You know what really happened to Mary’s little lamb? Mary had a little lamb; it never was a sheep – because it joined a Baptist Church and died of lack of sleep. And in the midst of all that, truth is a casualty; and ordinary little people are casualties.
So, on the Day of Pentecost, I believe God is speaking to us. He is challenging us – to have the courage to wait for the promise of the Father (Acts 1. 4). To stop saying to God “Please may our schemes and ideas live under your blessing.” and instead, to wait upon God to fulfil, in our day, the promise he has made. “We need another Pentecost. Send the Fire today.” And maybe, like Abraham, and like the woman with the judge or the man bashing his friend’s door at midnight, to remind God of his promises and call upon Him to fulfil these promises in our day. “We need another Pentecost. Send the fire today.” Send the Spirit. Lord, you promised; Jesus died to give us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Send the Spirit. Our friends are hungry for the Kingdom and we haven’t anything to set before them. Send your Spirit, Lord. “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk 11. 18)
© Gilmour Lilly May 2015
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