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Shabbat shalom! Today’s parasha is Lech L’cha, translated “Go forth,” and covers Genesis chapters 12-17.
I would like to preface our parasha with a word of caution. At any given time, God is doing one of three things in your life: offering to use you, preparing you for His use, or using you. These Spirit-driven changes are the building blocks of your story and, ultimately, the story of God redeeming the world. The question is: are you attempting to resist, rearrange, or reschedule them.
Abram beautifully illustrates this point. At age 75, Abram was not too old to learn and grow in wisdom and obedience. After God summoned him to leave behind all that was comfortable and familiar (and after pronouncing a seven-fold blessing over him), Abram didn’t hesitate to become God’s nomad, bringing with him his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot. Leaving his father’s basement was step one: responding when God offered to use him.
He sojourned a long way before encountering step two: a series of trials designed to prepare him to be used. The first was a famine which sent him seeking refuge in Egypt. Only, he had lost sight of the prize for which God had called him. Afraid that the Egyptians would kill him for his beautiful wife, he forced Sarai to play the role of sister. Presented with an opportunity to display sacrificial love, honesty, and faith, he acted in fear and chose deception.
As is usually the case, his sin succeeded only for a season. Pharaoh took Sarai as his wife, but God sent plagues on his household, and when it was all settled, Abram and company were banished from Egypt.
Humbled, he retraced his steps to Bethel. It was actually wise for him to return to the land where he constructed his second altar. Once the place of an encounter with Adonai, it now served as a place of rededication after his spiritual crisis. In a fallen world, the progress of an otherwise righteous man occurs in a “two steps forward, one step backward” manner.
Had Abram given up and returned to Haran, he would have given the devil more than his due, a heinous sin. But he didn’t; he remained in Bethel; long enough, in fact, for his capital to outgrow the land. As their flocks grew, quarrels broke out between Lot and Abram’s men. Consequently, Abram generously offered Lot first choice, to settle whichever land he desired. Lot chose the more superficially prosperous (albeit deeply immoral) of the two, the region of Sodom. Predictably, from expediency grew misfortune. A war broke out that ultimately engulfed all of Sodom, and Lot and his family were captured by an allied army of four kings.
Upon receiving word of this, his second trial, Abram displayed sacrificial love and faith foreshadowing that of Messiah: he left the ninety-nine, as it were, for the one. Abram rounded his army of 318 men, led them to victory, and rescued his nephew.
Afterward, two kings turned up at his doorstep. The first, the king of Sodom, a luciferian figure, offered earthly spoils. The other, Melchizedek, the king of Salem, whom some believe to have been the preincarnate Messiah himself, offered bread, wine, and a blessing. Abram elected to receive the blessing, tithed to that enigmatic priest-king, and pressed onward.
Abram’s courage and faith were rewarded. At Abram’s request, Adonai consented to make a formal covenant with him. Abram sacrificed animals, lined them in two rows, fell asleep, and heard from God that his offspring would be enslaved for 400 years before receiving their promised land and prosperity.
To consummate this covenant rite, it was customary for both parties to walk through the animal halves. When Abram awoke, he saw a smoking firepot with a blazing torch passing by. The Lord ratified this covenant unilaterally!
Next, Abram faces his third trial, this time with Sarai’s influence. Sarai was a faithful wife who yearned for God’s will, her promised boy. Yet, her faith falters here, and she presses Abram to circumvent God’s plan by instead producing a son through her servant, Hagar. Just as with Pharaoh, the human plan almost worked. Hagar birthed Ishmael, a donkey of a man, who received the blessing of prosperity, but the curse of lifelong contention and strife.
Like Sarai, our desire for good turns wicked for want of patience and humility, ultimately ending in a perversion of the original Good. Between Sarah snickering “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?” one can almost hear Pilate asking sarcastically, “Are you King of the Jews?” Cynically, we suppose that what God has promised is too good to be true. Boy, are we wrong!
At the end of our story, Abram and Sarai realized just how wrong. After 25 years, they received the greatest, unlikeliest, and earliest gender reveal in history with God’s pronouncement of Isaac, the prophesied son. In one year’s time, he would enter the world, sparking a family line which eventually gave us both the Messiah and the righteous community of God’s children scattered, today, between all corners of the earth—what St. Augustine called the City of God.
By gradually submitting to God’s intended character-building, Abram and Sarai graduated from the offer to be used by God, to being prepared to be used by God, to finally step three: being used by God for this, their destiny. Accordingly, God changed their names to Abraham and Sarah. And, to show that they had some skin in the game, Abraham was circumcised with every male in his household, present and future.
Foreshadowing Messiah, this humble, faithful man was destined for greatness, simply because he could say, “Not my will, but yours be done.” When God used trials to prepare him, Abraham obeyed; and when he failed, he quickly returned to God in repentance. Today, we celebrate him as the father of the faith because of that simple obedience.
I urge you, brothers and sisters, wherever you are along the path, obey the Lord. He is either offering to use you, preparing you to be used, or using you. Press on in that endeavor. And when you fail, make a strategic retreat back to that place of nearness to Him.