HEROES OF THE FAITH – ABRAHAM
DR. JIM DIXON
HEBREWS 11:8-19, GENESIS 22:1-18
OCTOBER 16, 1983
His name was Abraham. He is called the father of the faithful. The Bible tells us that all who believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are children of Abraham by faith. Abraham is recognized as the founder of the Jewish nation. He is the common ancestor of both Jew and Arab. His name means the Father of Nations. From his life, this morning, I have two teachings I feel led to share. The first teaching is this God is sovereign and His sovereignty demands that we entrust to Him our very lives.
Four thousand years ago Kettaloaimer ruled the Elamite Kingdom. He lived in palatial splendor by each of the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers. He ruled the land of Babylon and his power extended even to Southern Palestine but in Southern Palestine five kings rebelled. There was Beara, King of Sodom; Bersha, King of Gomorrah; Sinab, King of Adma; Shamember, King of Zaboyim; and there was the King of Zoare, the name of which is not known even to this day. Five kings in rebellion led by Beare, King of Sodom. So Kettaloaimer came against them. He came to destroy, to stamp out their rebellion. He came to destroy five kings. He came with a greater portion of his armies. He came from the north, and from the east, he came aligned with three other kings. He came with Amraphael, King of Shinar. He came with Arioch, King of Elazar, and he came with Tidal, King of Goam. Four kings against five kings. They battled on the Plain of Sittam, south of Jerusalem, a once fertile plain now covered in part by the Dead Sea. That great battle was won by Kettaloaimer. He defeated those five kings. He stamped out their rebellion. He broke the power of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. And from the city of Sodom, Kattaioaimer took captives men, women and children and he took great plunder, great wealth from that city, and he marched his armies north to begin his journey home. But those were the days of Abraham, and Abraham had a nephew, and his name was Lot, and he was a resident of Sodom, and he was among the captives.
Now Abraham was a great patriarch and he raised up hundreds of men, and by the hand of God, he went after Kettaloaimer. His armies came upon the armies of Kettaloaimer north of the region we now call Damascus, and there by the power of God, Abraham won a great victory. And he rescued the captives, and he took that captured plunder and then Abraham began to take his armies south where he met Beara, the defeated King of Sodom, and Beara praised Abraham and he said, “Abraham, if you would but return to me the captives, if you would but return to me our men, our women and children, you can have the plunder. Keep all of the wealth of Sodom. It is yours.” That would have made Abraham a very, very rich man, but a strange thing happened. A mysterious person the Bible call Melchizedek met Abraham returning from the battle of the kinds. And Melchizedek, whom the Bible call King of Salem, King of Peace, King of Righteousness, of whom the Bible says, “he had neither mother nor father nor genealogy, neither beginning of days nor end of life,” of whom the Bible says, “he continues a priest forever.” This mysterious person called Melchizedek had a message for Abraham.
Many Biblical scholars believe that Melchizedek was a Christophany. That he was actually an Old Testament appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ even before his birth at Bethlehem. In any event, Melchizedek is portrayed as a celestial personage with great power, and he appears to Abraham, and he has one great message for Abraham. He says “Blessed be Abram by the Lord God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth. Blessed be the Lord God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth. Blessed be the Lord God Most High, he had delivered your enemy into your hands.” Abraham understood the meaning of this message. He understood that it meant one thing. The Lord God is sovereign. He possesses the heavens and the earth. He possesses all things. He won that victory. He delivered his enemies into Abraham’s hands. God is sovereign and that meant one thing to Abraham. He would have to relinquish his life and so he did. He entrusted his very life into the hand of God at that moment. He gave 10% of that plunder to Melchizedek as an offering unto the Lord and he gave the rest of it back to Beara, King of Sodom. Abraham kept nothing and then in his nothingness, he offered himself to God and God came to Abraham and He said, “Blessed are you Abraham. I shall indeed be your shield and I will indeed bless you.”
God wants each and every one of us as Christians to come to that point in our life where we recognize his sovereignty fully and we relinquish ourselves totally to Him and we entrust ourselves totally to His sovereignty. When Barb and I were in Jerusalem—you’re going to find this hard to believe but we actually met God face to face. There was a man there, a Jewish man. He’s lived in Jerusalem for 40 years. He was there during the War of ’48, the War of Independence. He was there during the War of ’67. His memory goes back a way. He knows some of the political figures in Israel and he is an interesting man to talk to about the nation of Israel. This Jewish man’s name is literally God. His first name is God. His last name is Alone. His name is God Alone. That’s not blasphemy for the Jew. They think of God as Yahweh, Elohim, El Shadi, Gaborra El. And this Jewish man named God is a friend of Judy Webley who was on our tour. He’s also a friend of Gilman Hill, one of our elders. Judy came up to me one day and said “Jim, how would you like to meet God?” I said, “Sure,” so Judy, Barb and I and Marilyn Woodruff went to God’s house. And Judy knocked on the door and God answered. He’s an older man. I’d say he’s approaching 80. Judy said, “God, how are you? Do you remember me?” and he looked very puzzled, kind of confused on his face, and he said, “No, I don’t remember you, but that’s no problem. I don’t remember very well.” God doesn’t remember. Aren’t you glad that the real God, the true God, Yahweh Elohim, is not like that. He doesn’t grow old. He doesn’t lose his memory. He is sovereign. He is omniscient. He knows everything. He is omnipotent. He has all power in the heaven and on earth. He is omnipresent. He is everywhere active. He is God. And when you entrust your life to him, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, when you entrust your life to Jesus Christ who is Lord of Lord and King of Kings, He can take care of you. Maybe you have times in your life when you think He can’t, and you’ve had a hard day.
Four weeks ago, we had a day like that—Barb and me. Actually, it was a bad day for Barb. She went for a job interview at the new Frontier Horizon Airline. Barb used to be a stewardess for Western Airlines. She used to be a travel representative for American Express and she loves the travel industry, and since our kids are now both in school, she thought maybe she’d take a part-time job with the airline. She’d prayed about this and so she had an interview at 10:00 at Frontier Horizon. She thought she could leave the house at 9:30 and get over there in plenty of time to Stapleton Airport. She left at 9:30 for that important interview—it meant so much to her—and there was an automobile accident on the freeway and the freeway was backed up. It took her an hour to get there. She showed up for that important interview a half hour late, very frustrated. Very frustrated, she drove into the parking lot, ran into a parked car. She got our car hooked to the other car and couldn’t get it free, but she was so frustrated, she had to get into that interview, so she left the car right in the middle of the parking lot. She went into the building. She phoned AAA and she went up for the interview and apologized for being late. After the interview, she came out handled everything with the two cars and AAA and began to drive back home. She was in a hurry because I was taking care of the kids and I had a luncheon appointment with a medical doctor who only had a one-hour lunch break. So, she was hurrying down the freeway, I-25, and she ran out of gas. She left her car there on the freeway. By the time she got home—I didn’t know what she’d gone through—I was mad, and I said a few choice things to her which I’m sure just contributed to part of her day. Sometimes you ask yourself, how can you have a day like that? God is sovereign. You gave your life to Jesus Christ. How can everything go wrong?
Have you ever had days where you just thought everything was going wrong? Maybe weeks. Maybe months. Maybe years like that. It’s amazing as we look back on that day how God did work. Barb was a half hour late for her interview. So was the man who interviewed her, so he apologized for being late. She came out of the interview—the interview, by the way, went very well. When she came out of the interview, she found that AAA had already disconnected the cars and had everything all ready for her. When she ran out of gas on the freeway, she was very much afraid and she began to run down the freeway, but two moms with their children in the back seat stopped and said, “You know, we’ve never picked up anyone in our life, but we feel led to pick you up.” And they took her to a gas station, they got gas for her, brought her back to the place. She got her car running. I was a half hour late for my luncheon with the doctor, but his appointment was cancelled so it was no problem. Sometimes, in the midst of our frustrations—I mean EVERY time in the midst of our frustrations, God is working but we can’t always see it. But you see, at the end of our life we will stand before God, we will stand before our Lord Jesus Christ and He will be vindicated because He is sovereign and He will show us how in every way, He worked. He worked for good in our life, and He wants us to trust that truth.
Paul says, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Those whom He foreknew He also predestined that they might become conformed to the image of His son, that He might be the firstborn of many brethren. Those whom He predestined He also called. Those whom He called, He also justified. Those whom he justified He also glorified. What are we to say to all of this? If God be for us, who can be against us. God did not spare His only Son but gave Him up for us all. Will He not also give us all things with Him. Who can bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Is it Christ Jesus who died for us, who rose, who has gone into heaven and intercedes for us? What can separate us from the love of Christ? Can persecution or tribulation or distress or peril or nakedness or famine or sword? No! In all of these things, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us, for I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor heights nor depths nor anything else in all of God’s creation can separate us from the love of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.” That was the faith of Paul. That was the faith of Abraham, and it should be the faith of all who believe in Jesus Christ and all who accept His sovereignty. Blessed be the Lord God most high.
Now there’s a second message from the life of Abraham and it is this: God is sovereign, and His sovereignty demands that we relinquish, that we entrust, not only our lives but that we entrust our loved ones, that we entrust our children to Him. We see this nowhere more clearly than in the passage of scripture that describes Abraham’s offering up of his only son. God came to Abraham and said, “Abraham, here am I.” God said, “Take your only son Isaac whom you love. Go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” We marvel as we see Abraham rise early in the morning, saddle his donkey, take two of his servants and his son Isaac. We marvel as we see him cut the wood for the burnt offering, as we see him take in his hand the fire and the knife and we marvel as we see him go to a mountain called Moriah and we see the patriarch willing to offer up his only son. But the Angel of the Lord calls to him from heaven and says, “Abraham, Abraham, do not lay your hand upon the lad or do anything to him for now I know that you fear God seeing as you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
You see, God does not want us to withhold anything from him. He doesn’t want us to withhold our lives and He doesn’t want us to withhold our loved ones. He doesn’t want us to withhold our children, but He wants us to entrust our children to Him. As Christians, we recognize that we do not own our children. They belong to God. The Bible says, “All souls are Mine. The soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine.” And we acknowledge this in infant baptism and infant dedication when we bring our children and offer them up. This is what John and Robin and Doug and Stacey did this morning. As Christian parents, they offered their children unto the Lord. They entrusted their children to Him that He might multiply them, that He might bless them.
James and Alice Taylor were missionaries to China. They were the fourth generation of Taylor missionaries in China beginning with the famous missionary Hudson Taylor many decades ago. James and Alice were missionaries deep in the Province of Honan, but their four children went to the Kee Foo School in the Province of Shantung, 1,000 miles away. James and Alice loved their children—they love their children, I should say—and they love them very much. There are four children. There is first Kathy who is 14, Jamie who is 10, Mary who is 9 and John who is 8. They had a terrible thing happen to them in 1939 when World War II broke out. The Japanese invaded China. The Japanese occupied the land, and James and Alice were cut off from their four children. They could no longer visit them, no longer see them, in fact they had to flee the Province of Honan and they moved to the Province of Shinsee. There they dwelt 1500 miles from their children and in the first few days and weeks and months they got letters from their four kids but after that they never heard from them. The months and the years passed. They didn’t know if their children were dead or alive. Alice and James would go to bed at night, and they would cry on their bed. They’d cry out, “Lord Jesus take care of our kids.” Alice would read those old letters until the edges of the papers frayed with wear. They heard the reports that came out of Nanking and how some of the Japanese had poured into villages and raped all of the girls and women of the towns. They heard of the concentration camps, and they knew that children and adults alike were thrown into those concentration camps. They knew of the famines. They knew of the pestilences. They knew of the deaths. They didn’t know if their kids were alive or dead. There were bombs falling on them and they were daily going into air raid shelters. But after two years of silence from their kids, Alice Taylor had a vision wherein God spoke to her and He said to her, “Alice, release your children to me. Entrust your children to me and you serve My Kingdom.”
As a turning point for Alice and James Taylor, they began to seek first the Kingdom of God. They entrusted their children to the Lord and to His love. They founded the Northwest Bible Institute, an institute which has trained hundreds of men and women for the gospel ministry and have led thousands of people to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. They served faithfully. It had been five and one-half years since they had seen or heard from their kids when World War II ended. They were still not allowed to journey into the Shantung Province and search to see if their children were alive. They had to stay where they were for a time. The government insisted on it and so there they were at the Northwest Bible Institute. They were having a faculty meeting. They were sitting in the room and Alice was daydreaming and she was thinking back five and one-half years ago to when she had last seen her four kids. She could remember the clothes they wore. She could hear their voices and suddenly she realized she wasn’t daydreaming, she really could hear their voices, and their voices were getting louder and louder, and the four kids were calling “Mommy ” and “Daddy” and it not possible for me to describe for you that moment when those four children came through the door of the Northwest Bible Institute. They had journeyed 1,500 miles and they had found their parents. God’s hand was upon them, and they were safe. Two of the children were still wearing the same clothes they had had on five and one-half years earlier. They were torn, they were stretched. The kids were healthy. They had been in a concentration camp, but they had never been separated through those five years and God had kept them together, and to this day, He has kept them. Jamie Taylor, today, is a missionary for the Overseas Missionary Fellowship in Singapore. God has raised up all four of those kids and He has blessed their lives and it began with a moment in the middle of war when God spoke to a mom and dad and said, “Entrust your children to Me.”
He says the same thing, you see, to each and every one of us today. He says, “Entrust your children to Me.” Sometimes that’s not easy. It is not easy to be separated from your kids, even two weeks like Barb and I just had in Israel. At the end of those two weeks, we had thought of our kids and prayed from them many times, and at the end of those two weeks we were in Zurich and we got a letter—it was from my mom and dad who were taking care of the kids—and in that letter, Drew and Heather wrote a little note as best they could and they said “Mommy and Daddy we love you.” Barbara cried and we were thinking “Boy, how neat it will be to just be able to net home and hug those little kids.” It’s hard to be separated from your kids physically but it even harder to be separated from your children emotionally and spiritually. If you have children and you see them going down the wrong path and you know they’re not walking where you walk, that’s hard. If you see them going astray—if you see your kids’ taking drugs or living promiscuously—if you see them drop out of school or if you see them as lazy and not willing to pursue a career or take a job, that’s hard for you. It’s hard for us as parents, when we see our kids not responding to the Lord and going their own way and going astray, but you see God says to us, “Entrust your children to me.” He tells us to rear our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, to be faithful parents, but to entrust the result to Him.
You might look back on your parenting and say, “Well, I didn’t do a good job. I didn’t do as best I can, or as best I could,” but you are still called now to entrust your children to Him, to pray for them, to love them, but to entrust them.
I’m sure all of you have heard of a fish called the salmon. Salmon are born in freshwater streams, but in the course of their life, they journey down those freshwater streams, and they spend most of their life in saltwater oceans. Scientists have discovered, in studying the salmon, that those fish after a period of time, perhaps in the middle of their life, but certainly by the end of their life, they begin to come home. They come back. They come from the saltwater oceans, and they return to the place of their birth. They return to the freshwater streams. They have watched those journeys home. Some salmon journey 2,000 miles to reach the place of their birth. Some of them climb waterfalls ten feet high but they come back. Some of them take two to three months to reach the place of their birth and the freshwater stream, but they come back. God wants us to trust that our children will come back when they on astray. He wants us to entrust our children to Him in prayer.
Sometimes children do come back, and we see it as God honors our prayers and our faith and sometimes children come back at the close of their life when their mom and dad have already gone into the presence Of the Lord, but they come back. God wants us to entrust our children to Him. The Bible says “Rear your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. When they are old, they will not depart from it.”
Abraham was a man of faith. He trusted his life to God, that God would protect him and provide for him, and he trusted his children, his offspring to God that God might bless and multiply them. And so, God came to Abraham, and He said, “By myself I have sworn” says the Lord “because you have done this and not withheld your son, your only son from me, I will indeed bless you and I will multiply your descendants, as many as the stars of the heavens and the grains of sand by the seashore. Your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies and by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice.” And the voice of God is this. He calls upon us to trust Him. He is sovereign. Entrust to Him your life and your loved ones. Shall we pray?