Parasha Lech Lecha 5782

Me

To mimic an ideal stand-up comedian’s joke setup: Diets… Am I right…?

Most of you have probably notice I have unfortunately put on quite a bit of weight in the past year or so… Mostly since my initial surgery in February and my primarily sedentary lifestyle since...

What’s funny is I have started and failed eating better, dieting, whatever you want to call it over and over since probably May of this year. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know how to lose weight and get in shape, I’ve done it before. About four or five years ago I shaved off almost 100 lbs, started working out like a dog, and kept the weight off up until this year. So, losing weight isn’t an issue, keeping weight off isn’t an issue… Nah, getting started is the issue.

I started changing my eating habits a few weeks ago, I was doing really well too. It was great, I started seeing weight shave off little by little. I mean, I’m not saying I had substantial losses or anything, but I started and saw some progress.

But, a few days later I tripped and a pizza fell into my face… Then the next day I slipped oagain and Chick-fil-a somehow landed in my stomach… But it’s not just eating fast food or whatever either… NO, God forbid I find a bag of Wavy Lays potato chips in my pantry. Or a tub of ice cream. Or pretty much anything for dinner that has enough left over for seconds...

I am prewired to be a chunky kid… No doubt about it. This means losing weight and getting in shape is an extremely difficult job to get rolling. Once it starts it is always worth it, once the goal weight is hit it feels great.

Yet, getting started, this is the complicated part. I get hyped up for a good diet launch, when the day to kick off rolls around I’m all about it… But, two, three days later, that’s the hard part. It’s always easy to get up and rolling when things are easy, but when the going get tough it becomes a whole different problem. When you know you should be eating broiled salmon and broccoli but there’s a ridiculously good looking cheese burger on the menu, or a Ruben, or a milkshake, or a Philly cheese steak with fries, or whatever other carnival grade food one can think of is within reach, it is so easy to second guess things and fall into old habits.

When you really don’t know what is waiting around the corner it is pretty easy to fall into the temptation and inevitable regret. But for whatever reason, hindsight is always 20/20… But you rarely really see the full weight of decisions in the moment...

We

In one way or another, we all know exactly what I’m talking about… This premise of knowing the path we’re suppose to be walking on, happily and willingly walking on said path without a care in the world… Then one day, all of a sudden, we look around us and have know idea how we got here...

Maybe this is something we experienced in school. We start a new semester off with the decision that this semester, this year is going to be better, to be stronger. We’re going to stay on top of things, we’re going to meet all deadlines and plan ahead. But then somehow, for whatever reason, we find ourselves toward the end of the semester having procrastinated on everything and now super-stressed trying to get it all done in a rush.

Maybe we’ve gone into work with every intention of having a great day and doing our part to make everyone else around us experience a good day too. But then we run in to problem after problem, or maybe just one problem—that one guy who drives us up the wall—then the next thing we know, our entire day is a wreck and we just can’t wait to get home, crawl into a corner in the fetal position, and cry...

Maybe it’s a family gathering and we know our family has its quirks, and there’s always that one person who says all the wrong things at all the wrong times to all the wrong people… We walk into the event knowing they’re going to be there, but we’ve made the decision we’re not going to let it get under our nerves, we’re not going to hurt feelings, blow up, say something we’ll regret, or even let them bother us at all. Then all of a sudden, we lost focus and let it all go wrong… And we spend the rest of the evening ticked off and trying not to throw verbal hand grenades all over the place.

Maybe it’s in our discipleship… We have made the decision we’re going to be more intentional in our spiritual habits, we’re going to wake up early and spend time in communion with the Lord reading the Word, praying, journaling, quieting listening for His Baht Kol. Sunday all goes according to plan, Monday in the books, Tuesday a success and we’re feeling good… Wednesday we hit snooze a few times too many and run out of time. Thursday we had completely forgotten to set the alarm. And before we know it, we’ve completely gone off the rails.

Or maybe it’s one of a thousand other possible scenarios in this crazy ride we call life. We’ve all experienced it though, chances are we’ve experienced it this week. We know where we’re suppose to be going, we want to be on the journey, we want to do everything right, we want to give it our all… But, somehow we still allow ourselves to veer off track from time to time.

God

This week we read Parasha Lech-Lecha, Genesis 12:1-17:27, which lays the ground work, the foundation of the building of what would become B’nei Yisrael. First we see a guy named Avram called out of by Adonai to leave his family, to leave everything and everyone he’s ever known and to start traveling to a destination he doesn’t even know yet, but God will tell him when he’s arrived. (For the record, I trust my GPS apps a lot, but I generally like to put a destination in for them to map out before I leave… but, maybe that’s just me…) He gets to Canaan and spends some time wondering the land and getting to know it.

Then famine hits and he and his wife pack up and run to Egypt to try to survive, and there’s this whole debacle there and ultimately he is run out. Then in chapter 13 Lot’s people (Lot is Abraham’s nephew) and Avram’s people have some words over the grazing of their flocks, so Avram and Lot separate and go their own ways. In Chapter 14 Lot and his family get kidnapped by some marauding kings and their armies, and Avram goes and saves him and brings him home. We also see, in chapter 14, the narrative of Malchi-Tzedek the king of Salem and Avram’s interaction with him, which is hyper-prophetic.

In Chapter 15 we see the covenant cut between Adonai and Avram and the fiery torch passing between the halves of the sacrifices.

Chapter 16 we see Avram and Sarai make more stupid choices with longterm ramifications. They have no kids yet, they don’t trust they ever will, so Sarai convinces Avram to take her servant Hagar as a wife and have a kid with her. Anyone that’s married or ever been in a romantic relationship of any flavor can imagine quickly how all of this can go horribly wrong.

Then in Chapter 17 we see the Covenant of Circumcision and Avram’s named changed from Avram (exalted father) to Avraham (father of multitudes) and Sarai’s (princess) name changed to Sarah (noblewoman). And ultimate sign of this covenant, aside from the physical sign of the circumcision, is the promise of a son through Sarah. In the covenant made earlier in Lech Lecha, Avram is passive (fire miraculously passing through the halves), whereas in this covenant he is active (physical circumcision).

Now, that we’ve covered a basic synopsis of the Parasha let’s dive into it, shall we. One of my favorite things about the Bible, and we talked about this some at Torah on Tap this past week, is that we have these huge heroes of faith found throughout… But, even though they are these tremendous heroes of faith the Bible doesn’t hide from us that they are human and humans are stupid and so this means these heroes have the same propensity for the same kinds of stupid that we do, sometimes worse. God doesn’t sugar coat these heroes of faith, no matter what we may have learned in Sunday school, the Bible doesn’t paint this narratives as all rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns with ice cream sundaes topped with sprinkles… No, the Bible lays it all on the line for us, it puts all their business right out in the open, it shows us the humanity of our heroes and the power of redemption in their lives.

Lech Lecha and the story of Abraham is no different. And through his humanity we see a dynamic principle of Torah that we should take to heart in our walks today.

No matter how great the journey starts, if we aren’t careful it’s really easy to allow our humanity to take us off track from God’s calling.

(Repeat)

Let’s get into it...

Genesis 12:1–3 TLV

Then Adonai said to Abram, “Get going out from your land, and from your relatives, and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. My heart’s desire is to make you into a great nation, to bless you, to make your name great so that you may be a blessing. My desire is to bless those who bless you, but whoever curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.

This is such an awesome reality to read year after year. I have always found so much encouragement in following the call of God through Abraham’s life.

Adonai, presumably a God his family really didn’t know—or at least not well, calls out to Avram and tells him to pack up all his belongings, get his wife, and leave his entire family and all he’s ever known behind and begin a journey to a land he doesn’t know. He’s to simply start moving and trust God to direct him and to tell him when he’s arrived at this allusive destination. So, as all great heroes of faith should do, Avram listens and moves quickly to answer the call. Unlike Moses, or Gideon, or Jeremiah, Abraham doesn’t argue, he doesn’t try to pester God for more details, he doesn’t try to negotiate… He just packs up and rolls out with excitement and anticipation.

And this is where this narrative should stop… God said go, he went, the end… But no, unfortunately, we don’t get very far in before Abraham, our great hero of faith, has a very human moment that will ultimately blow up in his face…

Genesis 12:5 TLV

Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his nephew, and all their possessions that they had acquired, and the people that they acquired in Haran, and they left to go to the land of Canaan, and they entered the land of Canaan.

We learn in verse 4 that Avram was 75 years old at this point. He recognizes, even in consideration of how old people tended to live back then, that 75 years old means he’s no spring chicken anymore… Sarai at this point is 65… They haven’t had any children yet, so if God follows through on all His promises to Abraham who the heck is he going to hand things off to when he dies? He doesn’t have any kids of his own to inherit anything… So, what’s the point?

And, as is often the case in our own lives, a major weakness or doubt that we may have will rear its ugly head numerous times in our walk with the Lord, right? Abraham, this great hero of faith is no different. And the issue of his fear of having no son to inherit all God is doing for him will plague him for another 25 years and ultimateley creates a generational curse that will wreak havoc on B’nei Yisrael even today...

So, God tells Abraham to pack up and roll out and leave his family behind, leaving with only his wife and possessions and the next morning that’s exactly what he does. Well, almost… In a moment of weakness due to his doubts of having progeny to inherit his promises, he takes his nephew Lot with him as well, kind of a backup plan in case nothing else develops in the offspring department.

And we’re not long into the story of Abraham’s life in the Promised Land before this decision begins to bite him in the rump… Lot and Abraham’s shepherds begin to come to blows over grazing their flocks because they were right on top of each other. So, Abraham and Lot end up going their own ways. But, then Lot gets kidnapped and Abraham’s old hide has to come in and save the day. So, it’s pretty quick we start to see the immediate ramifications of Abraham’s decision to slightly veer from the plan…

But the longterm ramifications will be problems that Abraham’s future descendants, B’nei Yisrael, would wrestle with for generations. Not to go into all the details, but after Sodom, lot’s daughters think all of humanity is lost (why not, it’s happened once before and they’ve likely heard the stories). So they get their pops fershnickered and follow through on a terrible idea (read the story, you’ll catch on). This terrible idea (which would have never been had Abraham left Lot back in Haran) ends up producing offspring who ultimately become the Moabites and Ammonites, two peoples who proved themselves to be a constant thorn in B’nei Yisrael’s side for a very, very long time. Yet, oddly, in a story of redemption, we get Yeshua through all this craziness because Ruth (a Moabite) marries Boaz (an Israelite of the tribe of Judah) and they become the great-grandparents of Melech David.

No matter how great the journey starts, if we aren’t careful it’s really easy to allow our humanity to take us off track from God’s calling.

But, that’s not all folks… The story goes on and immediately after we read of Avram and Sarai leaving Haran and coming to Canan, we read of a famine hitting the Land and things get rough. Now, we don’t know exactly how much time has elapsed between arrive in Canaan and them fleeing to Egypt, but what we do know is that we see Avram, our great hero of faith, make two of these poor decision we’re speaking of all in one...

Genesis 12:10–13 TLV

Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to live as an outsider there, because the famine was severe in the land. Just as he was about to enter Egypt he said to Sarai his wife, “Look, please, I know that you are an attractive woman. So when the Egyptians see you they’ll say, ‘This is his wife.’ And they’ll kill me; but you, they’ll let live. Please say that you are my sister, so that I’ll be treated well for your sake, and my life will be spared because of you.”

The first failure we see is Abraham doesn’t appear to turn to God in the midst of the famine and ask what he should do (and we see Joshua, another great hero of faith, make the same failure in Joshua 9 with the treaty made with the Gibeonites). Think about it, God told Abraham to pack up a and leave his family behind to come to a Land he’s never known and there God will prosper him and make him into a great people. Does it seem like God would have let Abraham die off shortly after coming to the Land? Does it seem as though God would have wanted Abraham to run to Egypt for protection and provision rather than turning to Adonai?

The second failure is that Abraham, this great hero of faith, who is now running to Egypt for salvation rather than turning God, who doesn’t have enough faith in the trial to trust that God will protect them in the famine also doesn’t trust God can protect them in Egypt. He apparently is well aware that he married up, married way outside his league… Apparently Sarai was smoking hot, she was a real head turner… And Avram was well aware of this (probably one of the reasons he married her). He was afraid the Egyptians would kill him to take her from him because of how hot she was, so he convinced her to lie if anyone asks and to just say they’re siblings. He even has the chutzpah to look her in the eyes and say,

Genesis 12:13 TLV

Please say that you are my sister, so that I’ll be treated well for your sake, and my life will be spared because of you.”

I don’t know about how you’re reading this, but it doesn’t seem as though this great hero of faith is too concerned with how his wife is treated, so long as he survives…

And, sure enough, just as he feared, an Egyptians becomes interested in her… But not just any Egyptian… Pharaoh, the kind of Egypt. So, Pharaoh took Sarai, who he was under the impression was just Avram’s sister, and brought her into his house to marry her. No worries though guys, it’s all ok because:

Genesis 12:16 TLV

But Abram was treated well for her sake, and he got sheep, cattle, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys and camels.

For real though, how messed up is this so far…?

But, God is still faithful and protects them, especially Sarai. Pharaoh and his household get hit with a plague (foreshadowing much?) and he realizes what’s going on and returns Sarah to Abraham and kicks their butts to the curb to fend for themselves. And I’d love to say that Abraham learned a very valuable lesson here… But, he doesn’t, and worse still he makes the same mistake all over again in Genesis 20 with Avimelech. And worse still, it becomes a generational issue as we see Isaac later on does the exact same thing with Rebekkah.

What’s really interesting about Abraham, who truly is a great hero of faith, is that we can actually relate to him. I mean, we may not have made the exact same mistakes (I mean, I know I’ve never tried to pass Danielle off as my sister to save my own hide), but we’ve all made mistakes along the way in our journey that have blown up in our faces and we had to rely on HaShem to restore us from. Imagine though, just for a crazy moment, if we relied on Him fully to begin with, how much easier would our lives be without the failures?

No matter how great the journey starts, if we aren’t careful it’s really easy to allow our humanity to take us off track from God’s calling.

We can look through the Bible and see our great heroes of faith falter and make all sorts of mistakes along their journeys. And, truthfully, we’re barely scratching the surface with Abraham, we haven’t even touched on Hagar and Ishmael and the havoc that is still wreaking on Israel and the Body of Messiah today… But, that’s another day’s discussion.

One of my favorite examples of this very reality of the humanity of our great heroes of faith, aside from Abraham and Melech David, is Peter. And there are several moments we could look at, like him slicing homie’s ear off when they came to arrest Yeshua, but in particular I want to draw your attention to his thrice denial of Yeshua, and my favorite account of it is from Luke 22.

Luke 22:55–62 TLV

Now they had lit a fire in the center of the courtyard and sat down together, and Peter was sitting among them. Then a servant girl saw him sitting at the fire. She looked straight at him and said, “This one was with Him too!” But he denied it, saying, “Woman, I don’t know Him!” A little later, another saw him and said, “You too are one of them.” But Peter said, “Man, I am not!” And about an hour later, another began to insist, saying, “Certainly this fellow was with Him, for he too is a Galilean!” But Peter said, “Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!” And immediately, while he was still speaking, a rooster crowed. And the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had told him, ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will deny Me three times.’ And Peter went out and wept bitterly.

Now Yeshua had already forewarned Peter he would deny Yeshua, Peter argued about it though. Then it happens… And Peter didn’t even realize it was happening till it was way to late to turn the ship around, he had already passed the point of no return. Three separate times he denies knowing Yeshua and then immediately the rooster crows and the part that gets me every time is this...

Luke 22:61–62 TLV

And the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had told him, ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will deny Me three times.’ And Peter went out and wept bitterly.

Oooph… Could you imagine…? We’ve all had those awkward moments where we accidentally lock eyes with someone we don’t know and didn’t mean to and then feel super-uncomfortable… I can’t even imagine how it would have felt when Peter heard the rooster crow, then all of a sudden Yeshua—who’s dealing with His own stuff at the moment—snaps his gaze over at Peter and they have what I imagine was the most awkward moment of eye locking…

But, at the end of the Gospel of John we see this powerful narrative of restoration for this great hero of faith when Yeshua thrice asks Peter if he loves Him and they share this moment of renewal and restoration.

No matter how great the journey starts, if we aren’t careful it’s really easy to allow our humanity to take us off track from God’s calling.

And, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve probably all had these moments in our lives, maybe even this past week, where we knew exactly who we’re suppose to be, exactly where we’re suppose to be, and exactly what we’re suppose to do… We knew without a shadow of a doubt who we are in God, but yet for a fleeting moment lost all sight of that and made our own moment of failure from poor decisions and a momentarily lack of faith in God’s plan and Truth. We’ve all had our own Abraham-esque moments of epic failure from time to time over the course of our walks with the Lord. But, what is so amazing is not the how or why, but it’s the restoration… It’s the forgiveness… It’s the reality of the depth of Adonai’s compassion and love for us despite our moments of weakness…

That’s the most important part of these moments of humanity and failure in the lives of our great heroes of faith throughout the Bible, there is always the opportunity for restoration. And despite our momentarily lacks of faithfulness to HaShem, as we see with His saving Sarai and Lot, He is always faithful to restore when if we are faithful to return.

You

So what are you finding yourself failing at in your walk with the Lord today? This week? This year?

Are you wanting to prioritize your own discipleship but continually finding the yourself climbing in bed at night asking how the time got away from you and telling yourself you’ll do better tomorrow?

Are you finding yourself struggling with wandering eye syndrome? You know you shouldn’t be lusting after the men or women you see around you, but you keep having moments of weakness in this area?

Are you finding yourself loosing your temper with your family and allowing your own verbal, emotional and mental hand grenades to blow up all over your household?

Are you finding yourself struggling to trust God in your finances and making poor choices because of it?

You are not along in your moments of weakness in your walk.

We

If our worship team will make their way back up to the stage. (Unmute the worship team)

We get to dig further into the life of Abraham and the development of B’nei Yisrael moving forward in our Torah Cycle over the coming weeks. And as we do we will continue to see more of our great heroes of faith faltering in their walk in one decision or another. And, I don’t now about you, but I find great encouragement in this reality. Not because I look at it as an excuse to cover my own failures, “If Abraham can get away with it why can’t I?”

No, I find it encouraging because after all of their mistakes, after all their failures, after all of their major issues, here we are some 2000-4000 years later looking at them and considering them great heroes of faith anyways. Not because of anything they did on their own, but because of what God was able to do through their T’shuvah and restoration.

I find great encouragement and hope in that because this means that no matter how much we’ve messed up in the past, no matter how much we may still mess up moving forward (and we will), as long as we are faithful in T’shuvah He is faithful in restoration and He will be faithful in fulfilling His calling and promises in our lives.

So, as we spend some time in worship over the next few moments I want to invite you to take the next step and surrender fully to the Lord. Repent now of the many failures we are fully aware of, and ask Him to draw to our hearts and minds the ones we may have forgotten and still need to repent of. Let us turn to Him in full T’shuvah and experience the fullness of His restoration, and may those who look back at our lives years down the road look at us as great heroes of faith to them, may they see that even though we’ve made some mistakes along this bumpy road we always sought restoration, just as we do looking back at our heroes found throughout the Bible.

(Prayer)