The Jewish Final Solution to the World's Problem - The Call of Abraham

[0:00] Genesis chapter 12, and there we'll be reading verses 1 through 9.

[0:13] Now the Lord said to Abram, Go forth from your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's house, to the land which I will show you.

[0:30] And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, and so you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse.

[0:49] And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him.

[1:04] Now Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took Sarah his wife, and Lot his nephew, and all their possessions which they had accumulated, and the persons which they had acquired in Haran.

[1:26] And they set out for the land of Canaan. Thus they came to the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land as far as the site of Shechem, to the oak of Morah.

[1:44] Now the Canaanite was then in the land. The Lord appeared to Abram and said, To your descendants I will give this land.

[1:57] So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him. Then he proceeded from there to the mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west, and I on the east.

[2:18] And there he built an altar to the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord. Abram journeyed on, continuing toward the Negev.

[2:37] I have to remind myself that in conjunction with the passage just read that identifies Abraham as being seventy-five years old, we generally think that that's pretty near the twilight time of one's life, and it's a rather unusual time for someone to be receiving a new kind of commission.

[3:00] At the age of seventy-five, we tend to think about downsizing and packing it in, not getting ready to take on any new challenge. But you've got to remember that Abraham has yet a hundred years of rather dynamic living ahead of him.

[3:16] He will not die until he reaches the ripe old age of one hundred seventy-five. His son, Isaac, is even going to outlive that.

[3:28] He will live to be a hundred eighty years old. Now, of course, we moderns today look upon those numbers with some suspicion and say, well, there must be some mistake, because nobody today lives that long.

[3:42] I mean, occasionally we have somebody make it to a hundred and fifteen, and they usually survive on yogurt and live in Tibet or something like that. But that's not the way it is today.

[3:54] Well, you've got to understand that this was in the Earth's infancy, and the environment was different and food was different and the air was different and everything was different.

[4:08] Plus, the gene pool had not been contaminated and reduced to what it is today. So, these are numbers to be taken at face value, and I am confident that eventually we will find out that, yes, they really were.

[4:25] A hundred and seventy-five years old, and yes, they were 365-day years, just like we have today. So, in this passage of Scripture, we have some items surfacing that are going to be so encompassing and so strategic to the entire human race that it is, as I said, absolutely impossible to over-exaggerate or over-emphasize the importance of this.

[4:56] This twelfth chapter of the book of Genesis is so jam-packed with what will turn out to be ongoing consequences that I almost despair undertaking it because of its fullness and because of its richness and my inability to do it the justice that it deserves.

[5:19] If anybody is interested in a more detailed explanation of this passage than what we will be giving in this series, I would suggest that you request copies of recorded material that we brought from the book of Genesis several years ago.

[5:36] Those who have been with us for some length of time will recall that we spent five years of Sunday mornings going through the book of Genesis verse by verse, and I am here to tell you that we missed a lot more than we got.

[5:53] That's just the nature of the book. So this twelfth chapter has to be understood as very key and very pivotal for all of humanity, not just for the Jew.

[6:06] This passage really relates to you because you and I are involved in the fallout of what is coming from this. You see, the only possible way of understanding the present is to know something about the history because history is the record of how we got to where we are.

[6:27] And for those who say they are just really bored with history, it's just a bunch of old stuff, dates and people whose names you can't pronounce and it goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. Who cares about that stuff anyway?

[6:39] That's not important. Oh, yes, it is. It is very important because you are the product of that history. So the only way to understand the present is to understand history.

[6:53] You cannot know where you are and what this is about unless you know where you've come from. And the only way to understand the future is to have a grasp of the present because the future is where we're going.

[7:05] So we've got past, present and future. And all of these are absolutely very, very vital because as we've said many times, history is not at all cyclical. It is linear. There was a starting point and there will be an ending point.

[7:19] Humanity is going somewhere and it isn't going in circles. While it is true that just about every generation that comes on the scene has certain similarities to the generation that preceded it and we become more modern and more technological, etc., yet humanity has not changed one bit.

[7:36] And we see this as you move into prophetic portions of Scripture and as we engage the books of Daniel in some of those portions and their prophetic elements, as well as particularly the tribulation period that will surface in the Olivet Discourse and in the book of the Revelation, we will see precisely what God has in store for this planet and why.

[8:01] Because the why of the future is because of what has happened in the past and in the present. So before we look at this in Genesis chapter 11, I just want to make a couple of connections. Back up a page, Genesis 12.

[8:14] Back up to Genesis chapter 11. And let me just recount a couple of things. It is in chapter 6 of Genesis. We'll not go back there. But it is in chapter 6 of Genesis that God becomes very perturbed with creation as it existed at that time.

[8:33] And he called a certain man by the name of Noah and he told him that he is planning to destroy the entirety of humanity and he's going to start all over again with a new beginning.

[8:47] This man, Noah, had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And you and I are all descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Probably all of us here are likely descendants of Japheth.

[9:01] And we'll not go into those differences, but some of you may recall that. And as a result of the violence that was upon the earth, which thing, by the way, God obviously really hates, because violence comes from men doing terrible things to their fellow men.

[9:25] Maria and I noticed just last night, this was, well, they even warned us before the actual pictures came on. They warned us that the content of the upcoming pictures may be very upsetting to some people, so be warned.

[9:46] And what it had to do with was the demise of Nazi Germany and the death camps. And it showed scenes of American GIs going in to Dachau and liberating that place.

[10:07] There were piles of skeleton-like corpses. I don't mean skeletons. They still had flesh on them. But they were like skeletons.

[10:21] And that they had been so starved and so emaciated. And they were just piles of these people, just stacked up on top of one another, all naked, that the Nazis had not yet succeeded in exposing or dispensing with in their crematoriums.

[10:42] They had not got to them yet when they were overrun by the American troops. And the military in command went into the nearby town there in Germany and forced the leadership of that town, leading citizens of that town, to come into that area and witness those bodies and bury them.

[11:09] And this was actual footage. It wasn't a reenactment. And some of the most gruesome stuff you've ever seen.

[11:22] You can only sit there and shake your head in amazement. How could civilized human beings do that to other human beings?

[11:39] It just completely escapes us. And do you remember one of the points that we made in a message past about man reasoning with a skewed intellect, with a warped mind?

[11:56] Fallen man is able and is limited to thinking in a certain way that will allow him to justify doing utterly inhumane and cruel things like that to other people.

[12:17] And the reason these things were done to these people was not because they had done anything. Not because of any crime they had committed.

[12:30] But it was just because they were Jews. They had already been defined as less than human.

[12:41] Not entitled to rights and privileges of real human beings. And you know, the very same kind of philosophy prevailed in this country in the 1800s.

[12:53] And we fought a civil war involving it. When our illustrious Supreme Court came down with their decision in the Dred Scott decision in the 1860s, that a Negro slave or a black man or woman was not to be accorded the privileges and benefits of real full-fledged human beings because they were less than human.

[13:23] They didn't actually qualify as humans. So they could easily be bought and sold and owned and beaten or whatever. How could people think that way?

[13:37] This was the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States of America? Are you kidding me?

[13:50] How could they possibly hand down a verdict like these? The answer is because they think with a warped intellect.

[14:01] Man's reasoning powers are affected and infected by the fall. It enables him to reach bizarre conclusions like that.

[14:13] That completely escape us. Now, fast forward to 1973.

[14:26] It was called Roe versus Wade. And the Supreme Court, whom we thought could probably never outdo that notion, nefarious decision involving Dred Scott and the black race.

[14:43] They topped themselves. They went even beyond that and ruled that an unborn is not really a full-fledged human being and therefore is not entitled to constitutional rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

[15:06] So it is therefore permissible and legal for a mother to terminate the pregnancy of her unborn child at any time she wants.

[15:18] It's called abortion on demand. And if we look at that and say, what? Kill an innocent baby trying to survive in the womb of its mother and it's all right to take that life?

[15:37] Where do you get off with that kind of thinking? How can you possibly justify that? These are supposedly the legal elite of the nation. I mean, they are the Supreme Court as far as we are concerned as a nation.

[15:51] They are the court of last resort. Their word is final. You cannot appeal to a higher court, at least among humans. How could they reach a decision like that?

[16:03] And the answer is, they think with a warped intellect. It can allow you to justify and excuse all kinds of really crazy stuff if it's something you really want to do.

[16:16] Or if there is a certain number of people putting pressure on you to do it, you can cave in. And the only thing that can correct that kind of thinking, the only thing that can correct it and cause us to understand that a human being is made in the likeness and image of God and that life is precious and that everyone who has life is entitled to sustain it.

[16:42] And no one has the prerogative of taking it unless it is the state under the due process of law because the individual has taken other human lives.

[16:54] The Bible offers the only corrective to human skewed thinking. And we're going to be hearing more about this as time goes on. So, here in Genesis chapter 11, where much of this is going to start being played out, I'm just going to pick and choose a few verses here.

[17:12] We're in Genesis 11. And what I really want you to notice is that verse 10 says, These are the records of the generations of Shem.

[17:25] Shem is the word from which we get the word Semitic. S-E-M-I-T-I-C. We just dropped the H. It's just a different spelling.

[17:35] It could also be Shemitic. And you've heard of people being referred to as anti-Semitic. And now that's not really an accurate term because most of the people who are referred to as anti-Semitic are not really anti-Semitic.

[17:55] They are anti-Jewish. And the big difference lies here. The Arabs are Semites also. Yet, the vast majority of the people who are anti-Jewish are not anti-Arab.

[18:12] Many are pro-Arab. So, the truth be told, for today, they are referred to as anti-Jewish. Although, when you say anti-Semitic, most people understand that to mean they are against the Jewish people.

[18:27] And reasons for that are going to surface as we move along in this series. But probably right up front, and to get you thinking along this vein, most of the opposition that has been leveled against the Jewish people, which started back in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and we'll see that historically, was in connection with their national rejection of Jesus as their Messiah.

[18:58] And as more and more Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, came on board and became Christians, embracing the person and work of Christ, they began holding the Jews who did not receive Christ with more and more contempt and disdain.

[19:15] And eventually, persecution is going to begin against them. But the one thing that is almost always overlooked, that is a very, very key factor in this, is satanic and demonic involvement.

[19:32] I don't think you will read anything in the newspapers or any of the news reports about satanic activity in connection with anti-Semitism. But it is rife.

[19:43] And we will be able to show you, we will trace this through the Old Testament and into the New, where none other than Satan himself is a chief instigator behind much of the persecution and vilification that has gone on regarding the Jewish people.

[20:03] And they still live under a cloud today in a great many nations. I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but new pockets of anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish, if you will, has arisen in the Southland here in the United States.

[20:18] And much of it is being fostered by the same people who were anti-black. And it is very consistent for them to be also anti-Jewish.

[20:32] And we will show you the connections between that and how that is a very logical way for them to think. Although, again, it is a skewed and false thinking. And we will be able to see satanic involvement and how he has instigated a great deal of the persecution against the Jews so that they have been an ostracized, marginalized people wherever they've gone in the world.

[20:57] And yet, the promises that God is going to give to Abraham seem to militate against that. And we will address that as well. So, I just want to point out to you that we are talking about the line of Shem.

[21:10] So, God is starting all over again. Everyone on planet Earth has been destroyed. Everyone except for eight people.

[21:23] Noah, his wife, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives. And God is starting all over with these eight people. He still has a promise in the hopper that he has to make good on that was ushered into the scene back in Genesis 3.

[21:43] And we found that as soon as the fall had taken place, Adam and Eve's rebellion and rejection of God's authority, as soon as that had been realized, God promised a Redeemer.

[21:57] And that's Genesis 3.15. Some have said that's the first expression of the gospel in the Bible. And I agree. It is the seed of the woman that means a descendant of the woman.

[22:10] A descendant of Eve is going to be struck or smitten on his heel, which poses a temporary kind of wound.

[22:20] That will be Christ. But that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. And that speaks of finality, not just wounding.

[22:32] And we believe that that is speaking of none other than the person of Jesus Christ being smitten by Satan unto death in the crucifixion, but it was not permanent in that the third day he came back from the dead, and he has been sent by God to destroy the works of the devil.

[22:49] And that is underfoot right now. So Satan is very much active and alive in this world now, along with his minions. The problem is, we don't see him.

[23:02] He's invisible. Demons are invisible. Now, make no mistake. We see what they are able to accomplish by way of their influence. And I do not know.

[23:14] I do not know to what extent Satan is involved in the decisions of men to do things like the Holocaust and things like that.

[23:26] We are not given specific examples of satanic involvement. But let me just put it to you this way. He has not died. He has not retired.

[23:39] He has not gotten old and decrepit so that he can't do anything. He's not a human being. He is a spiritual being. And he has great powers of influence.

[23:52] We just don't know exactly how he exercises them. We don't know how he is able to influence people's thinking. We don't know how or if he is able to commandeer someone's mind and volition and use them.

[24:08] Although we know that there are instances of that in the Gospels where Christ casts demons out of individuals. So there is so much that is unknown about satanic involvement. And since no one has ever seen the devil in action, it seems perfectly logical to just ignore him and dismiss him as mythological.

[24:32] Just like a fairy tale that is believed by people but has no substance in reality. And that's probably where most people are. They just dismiss him as not being an actual person.

[24:45] But he is. And I can assure you that when Jesus was talking to the devil, he wasn't hallucinating. He was talking to an actual person.

[24:56] And he did battle with him. So here in Genesis 11, we have the surfacing of Shem along with Ham and Japheth. But it is the line of Shem that is this strategic line.

[25:09] And as you read the generations over, as you go down the verses, what this is is simply a genealogical table. And you can follow it right down until you get down to verse 26.

[25:21] And we read, Terah lived 70 years and became the father of Abram. Don't be confused by the spelling. God is going to change his name later.

[25:34] Abram means father of a multitude. And yet, ironically, embarrassingly, he doesn't have any children.

[25:45] Can you see Abraham going into a public square someplace back in those ancient days and someone saying, Hey, my name is so-and-so. Who are you? My name is Abram. Oh, Abram. How many children do you have?

[25:56] Well, actually, I don't have any. You don't have any and your name is Abram? How embarrassing must that have been? And that isn't the worst of it.

[26:08] God is going to change Abram's name a little later to Abraham. And that means father of nations. Here, God is calling him a father of nations and he doesn't even have one child.

[26:22] So, that will surface later. Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And, verse 29 says, Abram and Nahor took wives for themselves.

[26:33] The name of Abram's wife was Sarai. And God is going to change her name later also to Sarah.

[26:44] So, Abram will become Abraham and Sarai will become Sarah. And, we read in verse 30 that Sarai was barren.

[26:54] She had no child. And Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, the son of Abram's wife. And they went out together from Ur of the Chaldees in order to enter the land of Canaan.

[27:10] And they went as far as Haran and settled there. And the days of Terah were 205 years. And Terah died in Haran.

[27:22] Now, here is where the plot really thickens. And the Lord said to Abram, Question.

[27:35] Why Abram? Answer. Why not Abram? As simple as it sounds, if God is going to use anybody, he has to choose somebody.

[27:52] We don't know what criteria God used to settle on Abram. As best as we can determine, he was, along with those of his family, an idolater, moon worshippers.

[28:05] And Joshua refers to that in chapter 24 when he looks back historically and talks about the gods, plural, that your fathers, which would have been Abraham, served on the other side of the river.

[28:19] That was before Abram crossed over. And when God called Abram, we don't know the circumstances that existed. We're just told that God called Abram. We may well wonder, how did he call him?

[28:35] Well, we know he didn't text him. That we know. We just don't know how God communicated that to Abram. Sometimes the scriptures refer to God appearing to someone in a dream or in a vision.

[28:52] But here, it just says, the Lord said to Abram. Could this possibly have been some kind of a God-slash-human confrontation where God was talking to Abram eyeball to eyeball?

[29:16] But that doesn't sound right. That doesn't sound like God, who his spirit, could reduce himself or would reduce himself to a human body in order to communicate with another human.

[29:27] But I do think that is precisely what happened. May I go so far as to say, I think what we have here is what we call a Christophany.

[29:39] That means an appearance of Christ. But we know Christ is not going to be born here in Genesis 12. Christ is not going to be born of the Virgin Mary for another 4,000 years.

[29:56] But we also know that Jesus Christ has always existed as a member of the triune God. He didn't begin in Bethlehem. That was merely the beginning of his humanity.

[30:09] That was the beginning of his fleshiness. He took upon him a human flesh and became as one of us. But prior to that time, I am positing the idea that God actually assumed in the person of Christ a physical body and he confronted individuals in the same way that he confronted Adam and Eve.

[30:36] If God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, doesn't that imply he had legs and feet? You see, we aren't told that.

[30:49] We tend to think that it's somehow as the movie presents it, it's this nebulous voice from heaven or something that talks to someone. But as we shall see here, I think there is every reason to believe that this is a face-to-face confrontation.

[31:03] This is a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ. And sometimes he is referred to as the angel of Jehovah. We'll see that also.

[31:14] The Lord said to Abram, Go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house. Why? Why? What's this going forth got to do anything with?

[31:27] Why can't he just stay put where he is and do what God wants him to do right there? Why does he have to? May I suggest that God is seeking to isolate Abraham.

[31:40] He wants him out and away from that which has been influencing him. In other words, let me put it this way. God is making provision for Abraham to get him to himself.

[31:55] God is going to be interacting with Abraham in a very, very unusual way. And this Abrahamic covenant, which, by the way, is referred to in this article in Israel, My Glory, is the root of every blessing.

[32:12] The Abrahamic covenant. And indeed it is. And he is going to use this covenant, this promise, this contract. It's an agreement between God and man as to what God is going to do, how he is going to affect it, and what the end result is going to be.

[32:30] And this thing is being played out as we speak. Let us read. Go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land which I will show you.

[32:44] And I will make you a great nation. That's a promise. And I will bless you. That's a promise.

[32:56] And make your name great. That's a promise. And so you shall be a blessing. And I will bless those who bless you. And the one who curses you, I will curse.

[33:10] What happened to Pharaoh and the Egyptians? God cursed them. Why did he curse them? Because they had cursed Israel.

[33:23] What happened to Haman in the book of Esther when he constructed this gallows on which he was to hang Mordecai?

[33:34] What happened? They were cursed. God cursed them because they cursed Israel. What happened to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany?

[33:46] Do you realize the Third Reich was supposed to last for a thousand years? The government, the Third Reich, the Nazis that Hitler originated was to last a thousand years?

[34:00] It scarcely made it past the first decade. What happened to them? They cursed Israel. And if you happen to see on the History Channel the program to which I was referring earlier, you would see much of Germany and those beautiful old cities, hundreds and hundreds of years old, reduced to nothing but rubble everywhere you looked.

[34:29] and the German people were going to go without sufficient food and water and clothing for a full three years after they surrendered.

[34:43] That was a curse on that nation. One of the reasons I am persuaded personally that the United States of America has enjoyed the benefits and blessings that we have in our last 175 plus years, 200 years, is because we have had a policy of accommodation to the Jewish people.

[35:10] We have included them very much in the American context of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, constitutional rights and privileges and so on.

[35:22] and we have been blessed because of it. It isn't all Yankee ingenuity that has gotten us where we are. It has been at least in part a result of how we have treated and accommodated the Jew.

[35:38] So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him and Lot went with him. Now Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran.

[35:48] In regard to the manner in which God spoke to him, I want you to get that fixed in mind and I think that it's very valid so if you will look at a couple of other passages while we're in the neighborhood, let's look at chapter 13 and verse 14.

[36:13] And the Lord said to Abram after Lot had separated from him, Now lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward, southward, eastward, and westward.

[36:30] For all the land which you see, I will give it to you and to your descendants forever. And by the way, let me just inject here to show you how germane this is.

[36:44] This land spoken of here in Genesis 13, this is the very same piece of real estate today that the Palestinians and the Jews are contending for.

[37:01] That's what all this hubbub is about in the Mideast right now. This is why the rockets have been firing from Gaza over into Israel and this is why Israel has invaded Gaza in an effort to stamp out those who are sending the rockets over.

[37:21] Is this relevant or what? I mean, this is today. But this is so old. This is thousands of years old. But it's all strategically connected.

[37:34] It's all tied together with what we are seeing today. I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth so that if anyone can number the dust of the earth, then your descendants can also be numbered.

[37:47] Arise, walk about the land through its length and breadth, for I will give it to you. Then Abram moved his tent and came and dwelt by the oaks of Mamre, which are in Hebron, and there he built an altar to the Lord.

[38:02] Now, come over, if you will, another chapter to chapter 15 and verse 1. After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision.

[38:16] Well, now, that, frankly, is a lot easier to grasp because God could just provide this vision to Abram and talk to him in the vision and, frankly, that's a little easier for me to accommodate than the face-to-face meeting.

[38:33] And he said to Abram, Do not fear, Abram. I am a shield to you, that is your protection. Your reward shall be very great. And Abram said, O Lord God, what wilt thou give me?

[38:45] In other words, what can you give me that I don't already have? We're already told that he had a great amount of cattle, he had a lot of silver, and he had a lot of gold.

[38:57] Abraham had everything, had everything he wanted. But one thing, didn't have a child. That's what he really wanted.

[39:09] He wanted a child. I'm childless. The heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus. And Abram said, Since thou hast given no offspring to me, one born in my house is my heir.

[39:23] And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, This man will not be your heir, but one who shall come forth from your own body.

[39:34] He shall be your heir. Now, I want you to look at verse 5. He, God, took him, Abraham, outside.

[39:46] How did he do that? It didn't say that he told Abram to go outside. It says he took him outside. I think Abram was in his tent.

[40:00] And this tent was a large tent. Large tent. Made of animal skins. And the pre-incarnate Christ was in the tent with Abraham, telling him this.

[40:16] And in the midst of the conversation, this God incarnate in human flesh to communicate with Abraham, I think takes him by the arm and says, come on outside, Abraham.

[40:33] I want to show you something. You can't see the stars from inside the tent. And he takes Abram outside and he says, now look toward the heavens.

[40:45] Count the stars if you were able to count them. He said to him, so shall your descendants be. In this monumental verse, Abraham believed God, and God counted his belief for him as righteousness, which he didn't have.

[41:06] This is justification by faith way back in the Old Testament. And he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess it.

[41:21] And he said, O Lord God, how may I know that I shall possess it. Now, I'm not going to go into this ritual and the covenant and the way they ratified the covenant because it is covered in considerable detail with the references in this article that I want you to read today.

[41:41] The root of every blessing, the Abrahamic covenant. You will see that there. But if you'll come to chapter 16, we'll just mosey along here. Chapter 16 and verse here we have the angel of the Lord and I am suggesting in verse 7 and again in verse 9 and 10 and 11 that the angel of the Lord is none other than this Christophany, this angelic being and he is the pre-incarnate Christ.

[42:28] And if you will look at, well, in verse 9, this has to do with Hagar. Now, the reason Hagar is so important, and we just read over these things and it just doesn't register, but Hagar is terribly important because Hagar is going to be the mother of the Arab world in the same way that Sarah is going to be the mother of the Jewish world.

[43:01] Hagar will be the mother of all of Arabs. this will not extend to Egypt, but it will include just about everyone else in the Arabian Peninsula and all the people in Iraq and Iran and Saudi Arabia.

[43:22] These are all Arabs and they are all descendants of this woman Hagar. And Hagar is going to produce children that will result in 12 tribes just like 12 tribes of Jacob.

[43:38] There will be the 12 tribes of Israel. There will also be the 12 tribes of the Arab world. And in verse 9, the angel of the Lord said to her, said to Hagar, return to your mistress, this was when she had been driven out because of the animosity between Isaac and Ishmael, and submit yourself to her authority.

[44:04] And I want you to look at verse 10 now very carefully. Moreover, the angel of the Lord said to her, I, I will greatly multiply your descendants.

[44:15] What? That's not part of the job description of angels. Angels don't multiply people's descendants. They may deliver a message that they are going to have descendants, but they do not provide the power or wherewithal.

[44:31] But who does? It is in this case the angel of the Lord who is none other than the person of Christ incarnate. I will greatly multiply your descendants so that they shall be too many to count.

[44:44] The angel of the Lord said to her, Behold, you are with child, you shall bear a son, you shall call his name Ishmael. and Ishmael and Isaac are half brothers.

[44:58] They've got the same father, two different mothers. They were at war back here. They are at war today. The animosity and the hatred that exists between these two people is often the subject of the six o'clock evening news.

[45:16] Just about every day is what's going on there. This goes all the way back to these roots. In chapter 17 and verse 1, when Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abram.

[45:32] How did he do that? I think physically, eyeball to eyeball. I am God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and I will multiply you exceedingly.

[45:47] And Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him, saying, As for me, behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.

[46:01] No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be called Abraham, for I will make you the father of a multitude of nations.

[46:12] In other words, a person's name in the Bible is often given to them in conjunction with what they are going to accomplish, what they are going to do. And that's the basis for the name of Abraham here.

[46:24] And I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations, plural, of you, and kings shall come forth from you, and I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your descendants after you.

[46:52] And then he institutes the rite of circumcision. I want you to note this because this is very, very important to the Jewish people and it is critical to being a Jew.

[47:03] Verse 11 says, and you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin. The word circumcised simply means to cut around. It's the word from which we get the word circumference, the distance around, and the circumcision is the word from which we get the word incision or to cut, and it literally means to cut around.

[47:24] And this is what's going to happen to a little Jewish baby when he is eight days old, he's going to have his sex organ cut around. He is going to be circumcised.

[47:35] What's the point of that? Well, in the first place, there is a practical reason for it, which we'll not go into, a hygienic reason that prevents the women they marry from contracting cervical cancer.

[47:47] That has been established medically. But besides that, it was an in the body stamp or reminder of the one who was circumcised belonging to Jehovah and a child of the covenant.

[48:05] It was a reminder, a perpetual reminder. And if you were a Jew, you wouldn't even consider not having your male child circumcised on the eighth day.

[48:18] It was very critical. Because if he wasn't, he was not admitted into the covenant of Israel. So, all of these things come into play. And I want you to notice in chapter 18, the Lord appeared to him again by the oaks of Mamre while he was sitting at the tent door in the heat of the day.

[48:38] And he is conversing. And these three individuals come and they don't know who they are. They think they're just strangers. And the time comes when God reveals himself to Abraham later on in this 18th chapter.

[48:54] And it is in connection with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And the thing that I want you to note in closing is that Abraham engages in a bargaining session over the destruction of Sodom.

[49:06] And he says you're going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. And the Lord says yes the cities are given over to extreme wickedness. I'm going to wipe them with the unrighteous.

[49:23] At least you need to do is to and the Lord says well there aren't any righteous there. And Abraham says oh surely surely surely there are 50 50 there who are righteous.

[49:33] You're not going to kill them along with everybody else. And the Lord says no there aren't 50 there. And they bargain down to get down to five.

[49:46] And the Lord says if there are as many as five righteous there I'll spare the city. And of course there were not and as a result the city was destroyed. But what I want you to notice is in verse 32 well I stand corrected it gets down to 10.

[50:10] And he said I will not destroy it on account of 10. And verse 33 says and as soon as he had finished speaking to Abraham the Lord departed and returned to his place.

[50:27] Departed from where? Departed from standing before Abraham and talking with him just like I am talking with you. Now we cannot conceive of that and we somehow think that that's something that God would not do but I am convinced that he did it with Adam and Eve he's going to do it with Joshua later on he does it here with Abraham and he's certainly going to do it with Moses a number of times when he communicates to him the law that Moses is to deliver to the children of Israel so all of these things are bits and pieces that I trust in your mind will be coming together more and more and you'll be connecting more and more dots and I think you're going to see more and more light bulbs in the mind go on you'll make more and more connections as we move along let's conclude by just reminding you that there is a cosmic conflict that is taking place even as we speak but it is so foreign to our thinking simply because we can't see it yet there is an unseen world of satanic and demonic spirits

[51:40] I do not know how they influence the minds of men but it is apparent that they do and this is going to play out all through human history during the time of tribulation which is the prophetic portion of scripture this is going to intensify because Satan is going to pull out all the stops and this world is going to be one hell of a place that will be the tribulation and it will come to full fruition and interestingly enough guess who is going to bear the brunt of the damage and the persecution during the tribulation period the Jew the people of Israel oh and one other thing needs to be added to it I don't know if you've been reading the papers or watching

[52:42] TV of late but have you not noticed how that Christians in general and in some places in particular are coming under more and more criticism and rejection and ostracism with the secular rising of our society take God out of this take God out of that you can't do this you can't mention that you well things are warming up and we are heading toward a precipice we really are and I think the scriptures will support that in every way and we'll see that as it develops don't forget don't forget you get them would you close with me in a word of prayer father we recognize that so much of this is so far removed from us because it's so long ago and in a far away place and the tendency is to just look upon these things as interesting tidbits of history and really not even attempt to make any connections or see the relevance of it at all so many just dismiss it as boring history without realizing that it is really vitally connected to where we are today and where we're going we look to you for the ability to make these connections so that they will not be matters of conjecture or hypothesis or suggestions but that they will be rooted in the reality and the revelation of scripture itself we know that you can do that and we know that it is your heart to do that and we want to be on the receiving end of it to this end we commit the furtherance of this study in

[54:32] Christ's name Amen