Written, produced and directed by God

Abe’s a man of faith, the man of faith.

These past few weeks as we’ve looked at his life, we’ve seen so many examples of him just hearing God ask him to do something, and he goes and does it. He’s not perfect, sometimes he goes out on his own, sometimes he lies because he doesn’t think God will look after him. But when it comes down to it, when God says trust me with the most precious thing in your life, the thing you love more than anything, he says, ok.

And the NT says that’s what makes Abe the example of faith par excellence. ‘Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’ says Paul in Romans.

Now, from all this we could get the impression that faith is waiting for God to give us a word and then acting on it. When Abraham waits for God to direct him, then obeys, God is pleased with him and it goes well. When Abraham just goes out on his own, God corrects him.

So, faith means following God’s plan, and the opposite of faith is showing initiative?

If that’s true, what is his plan? Like for me specifically. What is his plan for my life? If faith is waiting for God to tell me what to do and then doing it, I don’t want to be presumptive. Who does he want me to marry? Where does he want me to work? Which suburb does he want me to live in? Which school should I send my kids to? Which investments should I make?

If we think about faith this way, then we’re not just asking, is there a wise, ethical choice - like, Jesus probably wouldn’t invest in big tobacco - which company is God telling me to invest in? I need to know which particular house, on which particular street, in which particular suburb Jesus would have me live in.

If Abraham is blessed because he follows God’s voice, then I need to figure out how to hear God.

I don’t want to miss out on his best. I need a sign. A voice. A signal, one way or the other.

That’s a possible ‘lesson’ from Abraham’s life., that might be the lesson about faith that we are supposed to take..If we left out Genesis 24.

As we heard the chapter read out, you may have been wondering, how is some ancient near eastern episode of the bachelor relevant to me at all. Is this just the bible’s way of tying up some loose ends - we need to know how Isaac met Rebekah just so the story can move on to Abraham’s other descendants and more dramatic events? Sure, but did we really need to hear it twice? Why is it so long?

As foreign as Genesis 24 is to our western culture, it has something increadibly important to say to us about faith, how God works, and what it means to be a faithful person.

Pray

Main point: God’s word is enough

Even when it’s been around a long time

State

Show

Gen 24:1-9 [Abe’s charge to his servant, assertion of faith]

A lot of time has passed since we encountered Abe on Mount Moriah last week. He’s now a very old man, Isaac has grown up, God had blessed him in all things. There’s just one problem - Isaac can’t get a date. Maybe his tinder profile wasn’t very sharp, maybe he didn’t have the right cologne.

Abraham knows there’s not much time left, he’s going to die soon so he calls his most trusted servant to him and tells hiim, I’ve got a job for you. I need you to find my boy a wife but there’s one rule: you can’t get one from around here - no marrying into a family that will claim the land that God has promised me.

Genesis 24:4 NRSV

but will go to my country and to my kindred and get a wife for my son Isaac.”

This is a huge undertaking. He’s asking the servant to travel almost 1000km back to Ur where Abe was born. The guy is supposed to travel for a month, rock up to Abe’s hometown and say, any of you ladies fancy marrying a bloke you’ve never met?

You can see why he’s worried about being trapped by this oath.

He says in verse 5, what if she won’t come back with me? Fair question right? What am I supposed to do, try and take her by force? Trick her into it? Bribe her Dad?

This is no joke right? Abe has been unscrupulous in the past, this is his oldest servant - he’s seen how Abe operates. He would’ve known about Hagar and Ishmael.

Abe, are you asking me to make her an offer she can’t refuse? Can I bring Isaac, maybe if she can see the guy, it might be a little easier?

Abe says no, Isaac’s gotta stay here (if he went back, chances are he’d just settle down with his wife and extended family).

Don’t worry about it, God will see to it (hear the echo of last week?). He’ll sort it out, in fact, he’ll send his angel before you (v7) but if the woman won’t come with you, you don’t need to stress, I’ll know that you did all you could (8).

And the servant says, ok, and they do the weird thigh ritual - ancient equivalent of a pinky promise. And off he goes.

Explain

Notice God didn’t tell Abe to do this. He didn’t get a sign. There was no angel saying ‘mate, you need some grandkids’. He didn’t hear a ‘still small voice’, there weren’t any dreams. All he had was the word God had spoken to him half a lifetime ago, in another place, in another world. In verse 7 he says to the servant, God took me from my Father’s house and where I was born and told me, your offspring will have this land.

It’d been so long since God made this promise. But Abraham had learned that it is no dead word.

This is why the Bible’s age makes no difference to how relevant or powerful it is. Doesn’t matter that these words were spoken thousands of years ago. The God who spoke them and caused them to be written down is alive. And so are his words.

But not everyone in this episode is that confident. The servant seems to think that God has to give him some new, obvious sign, or he’s not involved.

Even when we can’t see him at work right now

Show

Gen 24:10-27 [servant’s encounter with Rebekah]

The servant sets off and takes this huge entererage with him. 10 camels loaded high with Abraham’s best stuff. He’s betting that, if the woman can’t see Isaac, at least she’ll see he’s loaded.

He makes the journey, arrives in Nahor near where Abraham is from. And the camels are thirsty, they’re at the well in the evening - the time when women go out to draw water.

I wonder what’s going to happen.

If one were to hypothetically watch the bachelorette - hypothetically - one might notice that when some contestants are interacting with the batchy they play clown music, just to really subtly hint that this contestant might be here for comedic value, but then for another contestant it’s all Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet violins - again to very subtly tell us, romance.

This scene, at the well is about the most stock standard scene in all ancient literature. Whenever you have a man meet a woman at the well outside town, you know marriage is around the corner.

The servant gets to the well, and he prays.

Genesis 24:12 NRSV

And he said, “O Lord, God of my master Abraham, please grant me success today and show steadfast love to my master Abraham.

Good way to start. Great prayer.

But then, he says let the girl who comes out and says, I’ll water your camels too, let that be the one. Then I’ll know that you’ve shown steadfast love to my master.

Teaching point

Really important thing to say right here: just because someone in the bible does something, doesn’t mean we ought to immitate it. Even if on the surface it seems to work out. That doesn’t mean it’s endorsed. We’ll come back to this.

But before the man had finished speaking, there’s Rebekah - who just so happens to be Abe’s relative. And verse 16 she just so happens to be good looking, and a virgin - how would he know? And they happen to have this discussion, the servant says ‘please let me have a sip’, and she says those magic words: ‘drink, and I’ll water your camels too.’

And she proceeds to draw water for 10 thirsty camels. Which is a ridiculous. A thirsty camel can drink 95 litres of water which means she would’ve drawn about 960 litres of water by hand.

By the way, the servant is standing there just watching - not helping.

This is bordering on superhuman! Of course, it’s just a coincidence.

But the servant thinks, ok I’d better give her some incentive to listen to me, and gives her this fancy gold jewellry. And they get talking and they realise they have a mutual friend - you know so and so, fancy coming all this way and the first person I meet is one of Abraham’s family members?

What a coincidence! How “lucky!”

Explain

It’s easy for us to think that the world is like a machine that works by itself. Like a clock that God made, wound up, and left going. We may be open to God occasionally ‘interveneing’ to do ‘miracles’ sometimes, adjusting it, but normally, ordinarily, the world just spins by itself.

But what this whole chapter shows us is that the world is not like that at all. God doesn’t have to say anything, or "intervene” to be at work. Because the whole of history is written, produced and directed by him.

Did you notice, the narrator never attributes anything to God in this whole story. Sure, the characters pray and acknowledge his actions, but the narrator never says ‘God did this, God did that.’

The servant thought he needed to force God to intervene. He gives God this binary option, let the girl who says, ‘I’ll water the camels’ be the one. If she doesn’t say that, she’s not the one. See, he’s trying to force God’s hand here.

He’s not like Abraham, open to God keeping his covenant promises however he sees fit. The servant thinks he needs to get God to adjust the watch, to fiddle with the machine.

But God humourosly shows that he was across the whole thing way before the servant even left Canaan. Why else are there so many coincidences? Why else is the whole story repeated to Laban over dinner in verses 34-50?

God is showing us, his word is enough. It’s powerful even when we don’t realise it. He is leading everyone whether they know it at the time or not.

This is the beauty of Abraham’s mature, grown up faith. It is so confident that God will keep his promises, but so relaxed and open about how he will keep them. This is the faith of a man who can look back on his life and see the way God has kept his promises in ways that Abraham couldn’t possibly have imagined. And with that perspective, he is able to be the kind of partner God had always intended human beings to be.

Illustrate

My friend Fiona was not usually in the habit of asking God for signs. She didn’t think that’s how God usually guides people. She’s very matter of fact and usually I’d hear her say ‘why are you tieing yourself in knots trying to figure out God’s will, we’ve got the bible’. But when she and her husband Dave were thinking about moving to Palmerston to plant a church she told me that she had been ‘putting out fleeces’. Setting up these little tests for God. They’d heard there was a need. There weren’t many faithful churches in Palmerston at the time. Here was a needy, gospel-poor area and it seemed like God was telling them, uproot and head north.

As it happened, God did uproot their lives, but not in the way they expected. They weren’t going to the Northern Territory, Dave was going to the cancer ward. They were going to finish ministry with Crossroads church, but their new ministry would not be leading a church in Palmerston, it would be writing and speaking about how Jesus offers us a better hope than just being cured of sickness.

Fiona’s faith was not shipwrecked. She didn’t conclude that God isn’t there or has no interest in her. She didn’t conclude that they made the wrong choice and were now ‘out of God’s favour’ or ‘missing his best’. She didn’t anxiously go back over her life looking for that still small voice where God spoke to her and told her, don’t sell the house, don’t plan to move.

She and Dave have since looked back and seen how God has been faithful and kind to them in the 12 years since. Not just in giving Dave more than a decade of life post diagnosis. Not just in giving them a ministry to people with cancer. God has even answered their prayers for the territory. They didn’t go, but we did right before I went to Moore College. And I spent my four years there speaking up for the territory to the people in my year. God led 7 people from my year to go to the NT. He also led one of the lecturers to become the bishop. God is doing amazing things there.

Apply

Often, it’s only as we look back that we can see God at work. Often it’s only as we look back that we can see how God is keeping his promises. It’s only with hindsight that we can see how God led us.

And so if we can’t ‘hear’ God right now, if he hasn’t given us some obvious sign, or even if he has, we don’t need to worry. We don’t need to panic that we might be missing out on his best. Mature grow-up faith like Abraham, faith that doesn’t need to lock God down, faith that doesn’t insist that God do something ‘miraculous’, faith that doesn’t tell God how to be God, that’s the kind of faith that God want’s to produce in us.

As we saw last week, the test, the call to sacrifice Isaac has refined Abraham.

He knows that God will lead his people. His word is at work, even if we can’t see it at the time.

Restate

God’s word is enough to lead us, even if we can only see how he led us with hindsight.

Transition

All of this is showing us what mature faith is really all about: loyalty + creativity.

Even when he hasn’t given us a rule for this case

Imagine someone discovered an unfinished play by Shakespeare. Acts I-IV there, most of the story is written, and the notes for the ending of Act V are there, but the details of Act V were never finished.

Imagine you were trying to put on that play today? What would you do? Surely you’d study Shakespeare. You’d read all his other plays. Then you’d study the first 4 acts of this unfinished play, you’d look at how it ends. And you’d get a sense of what would make sense, how the characters have grown, how the narrative has moved through twists and turns and how it resolves. And you’d get the actors together and say, this is where I think it would go, this would fit with what this character has said and done before, this would fit with what Shakespeare would do.

In the last few verses of Genesis 24, Rebekah agrees to marry Isaac, and she returns with the servant. And really, this is the end of the story for Abraham. God has been faithful to every single promise he made to Abraham. And Abraham has become God’s his partner, something Genesis 1 said we were created to be (see Genesis 1). Abraham has completed his apprenticeship.

Did you see that in verses 7 and 8? He says to the servant, God will send his angel ahead of you - he’ll sort it out. But then in verse 8, if she won’t go with you, you’re free from the oath. God will keep his promise, but if this is not how he’s going to do it, don’t stress!

A partner doesn’t need a specific rule for every situation, because he know, the one I work with is like this, they care about this, they’ve told me their goal is this, their values are these. So, I can go ahead and act, even though he hasn’t told me every single line.

God’s word is enough.

And as You and I look back at the first 4 acts of God’s great drama of redemption - creation, fall, Israel and Jesus - we can see the story moving forward, we can see how God acts, we can see the kind of things he does, and we can see how the story ends - with people from every nation being blessed through Abraham’s descendant - Jesus, and finding a place in his family.

But here’s the thing. The drama isn’t finished yet. You and I are called to partner with God in finishing it. He hasn’t given us every line. Instead he calls us to act with loyalty and creativity. We look back on what’s happend, we know where the story is going, and we confidently carry the story forward.

Conclusion

Sometimes we tie ourselves in knots wondering, what does God want me to do? Where is the specific rule for investing in the ASX? Or buying real estate in Belconnen? Or primary schooling in the ACT?

But rather than worrying about where to live, God wants us to serve him we he has placed us. Rather than worrying about who to marry, God calls us to focus on being the kind of person who would be a great spouse - whether we’re married or not. Rather than worrying about what stock to invest in, God calls us to focus on using the wealth he’s given us to further his mission. As we are faithful to him, we have so much room for creativity.