Now, because we do not truly believe in our hearts that the day of adversity is as much from God’s hand as the day of prosperity, we believe that there has to be some way to game the system, and if we somehow play the game of life in just the right way, God will reward us with prosperity and long life. Or we bargain with God - God save me and I’ll be a good person. Or we berate God - God, I’ve been a good person, why are you doing this to me? Spirituality becomes a transaction. If I pray right and live right and present myself in the correct way, God will honour that and bless me with life and success.
Some people wish the world were simple. That we could easily divide the world up into good people and bad people, and maybe it would be nice if people of our faith were always good, and people outside the faith were always bad. That would be simple wouldn’t it? And wouldn’t it be great is once a person came to faith, they continually walked forward into greater measures of obedience and maturity and never took a step back or failed or let others down, or struggled. That would be a simple world.
But that’s not the world the Bible describes. That is not the world we live in. We live in a world of moral complexity, a world in which good people do bad things, and bad people surprise us, a world in which people of faith are also people of deep failing, and a world in which our progress toward maturity often takes great detours. this reality underscores the fact that in the Bible, no one is truly good, but God alone. He is the only hero, the only one who does not fail. Our pride does not like to hear that reminder, but the reality is that sin has affected and infect every part of our being, every aspect of our human experience, and therefore the simple work of right and wrong, good and evil, faith and failing becomes infinitely more complex.
Genesis 20 is one of these reminders. Nearly everything in this chapter challenges our desire to keep morally and humanity in simple little boxes.
We don’t know why Abraham leaves Mamre to end up in Gerar. Some think he left out of grief over Lot, whom he assumed was swept away in Sodom. Some think that the destruction of the cities in the valley would have caused environmental damage to the air or soil quality in the region, and so he had to leave for some time for the sake of his herds. Whatever the reason of his departure, we have already observed a pattern in the life of Abraham that is true here as well, Abraham’s proximity to Canaan seems to be tied to Abraham’s spiritual vitality. And we’ll see in this chapter that Abraham is at one of his lowest points spiritually.
Over the last couple months we’ve been going through the classic passage on prayer from Matthew 6, the Lord’s prayer, looking at the larger meaning and concepts behind each segment. We’ve looked at everything from praying together with and for others, to our position as children of God through the cross, to God’s greatness and His Kingdom to be established, to our daily need for provision and forgiveness that flows out to others. Today we will be tackling the last major chunk in the prayer: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. What is this temptation? What does it mean to not be lead into it? What does it mean to be delivered from evil? And what was our example in Jesus
We continued our "Being Human" series by opening up the issue of free will and moral responsibility. The opening text was Genesis 2:15-17 in which God sets a moral choice in front of humankind. We learned that any "freedom" human beings have is a gift of our Sovereign Creator and that God holds us morally responsible for the choices we make. Because of our sin nature desiring things contrary to God, we need Jesus to save us and bring us back to spiritual life so that we can choose the good by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The puzzle of humanity has a moral dimension. We are capable of acts of great compassion and even heroic virtue. Some even sacrifice their lives to rescue others in peril. Yet some deep stain of corruption still plagues human life. The evidences of the darkness of the human heart are pervasive in human history, yet such darkness still surprises us. Something seems to have gone dreadfully wrong.
Where can we go for help as we wrestle with this riddle? We must go to God if we are to find the answer to this most baffling riddle. For God our creator has spoken to us through his Word and has revealed his answer to the human dilemma. He spoke both of our dignity and our depravity. And, as importantly, he also revealed the one way that human depravity can be destroyed and human dignity established through divine redemption.
