Have You Only Just Heard of God?

Very powerful message. Thank you very much, Emil, for that. If you want to turn to Job 42, I want to start out today with a message in Job 42, verses 5 and 6, the final chapter of the book of Job. This is a verse that I've contemplated many times.

Perhaps you've looked at it yourself. Now, I've often wondered how a man such as Job would have said such a thing. Job 42, verse 5, he says, I have heard of you by the hearing of my ear. Imagine that for a second. I've heard of you by the hearing of my ear. Now, let's just put that in modern parlance.

Yeah, I heard of you. That's what it says. I've heard of you. It doesn't say, I know you. I have a relationship with you. I'm friends with you. You don't say to your best friend, yeah, I heard of you. You say, oh, have you ever heard of Joe Smith? Yeah, I've heard of Joe Smith. He's the Joe Smith that lives in Antioch. Yeah, yeah, that guy. I've heard of him. That's what Job is saying. I've heard of you with the hearing of my ear, but now my eye sees you. What this means is that he really didn't know who God was until this moment, until 42 chapters into this book. A man who God bragged about to the angelic world. Have you seen my servant Job? He's an amazing man. This is somebody that Job, this is someone that's recorded here, that Job just said, yeah, I heard of God, but now I know him. Now I know who God is. And in fact, Job was so aghast at himself for this incredible oversight that he then says, therefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. This is so grievous that I had not really known who God was until now, that I just abhor myself, that I lived my whole life in this way, thinking that I was doing the right thing when in actual fact I didn't even know who God was. Now if Job were to say something like this, where does that put us? Where does that put us? Does God brag about us? And yet we don't really even know who God is. It should be a question for us as God's people. Look over in Matthew 7, verse 21. Again, perhaps a familiar verse, but one that should make us really consider our ways. Matthew 7, verse 21, says here that, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father. That's what we heard about in the special music. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, cast out demons in your name, and done many wonders in your name? And then I will declare to them, I never knew you. I never knew you. I don't know. Maybe you were doing those things in my name, and in my mercy, I allowed that to continue. If Job had only heard about God, and in the judgment, many people who will have done these amazing things, maybe you've met some of these people. I've met people who just put their lives on the line to put the name of Jesus Christ in front of people who would not otherwise have heard or understood who Jesus Christ was. Whether or not those people are doing it in full knowledge of the truth as we understand the truth of the Scripture doesn't matter. They're sincere. They're putting themselves in harm's way. And what of us? We have services here. We have a webcast.

You know, we'll hand out booklets or magazines. We'll talk about this way of life. Maybe we don't even know who God is, and he doesn't even know who we are. Where do we turn for an example of truly knowing who God is? What steps can we follow to know and to know that we know who God is? Let's turn over to James 2, verse 23. James 2, verse 23. James gives us an example of a man that we can look to. The man Abraham, or Abram. It says in James 2, verse 23, talking about Abram and his life, he says, and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness, and he was called the Friend of God. Okay, now if you're someone's friend, then you have a relationship of some depth that you can say, yeah, I know who Tim Peppworth is. I've been friends with him for twenty years. Yeah, I know who he is. Abraham had that kind of relationship with God. God knew him, and Abraham knew God. And it was developed over years and years. He's called the Father of the Faithful, and he believed God, and his belief was accounted or considered righteousness. And later, through the writings of Isaiah, in Isaiah 41, God reveals that Abraham was God's friend. He's quoting here from Isaiah 41. What was it about Abraham's belief that was so powerful? If Abraham was a friend of God, can we assume that he knew who God was? One of the fundamental doctrines of the Church of God are the promises to Abraham.

A couple weeks ago, Mr. Karamijian went through those promises here in a Bible study. Today, I want to consider some of those promises with an eye towards what we can learn about knowing God, about truly knowing who God is and what God has in mind for us. Because God's relationship with Abraham was one of a deep, personal nature, I think we can safely say that Abraham knew God deeply. It was a relationship that was based upon a give and a take and an understanding. It was a relationship based upon promises and beliefs, communication and interaction, and friendship and love. I think we'll see that Abraham's relationships involved all of these things. The title for my message today is, Have You Only Just Heard of God?

Have you only just heard of God? Let's turn to Genesis 11, verse 27, and let's meet Abraham.

This is where we're first introduced to Abraham. It gives us a little bit of background before we get into the promises made in Genesis 11, verse 27. Let's look and see who this man was, starting here in Genesis 11, verse 27, to understand a little bit more about him. This is the genealogy of Terah. Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran begot Lot. And Haran died before his father, Terah, in his native land in Ur of the Chaldeans. This is essentially ancient Babylon we're talking about a very, very long time ago. And then Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife, Milka, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milka, and the father of Iskah. But Sarai was barren. She had no children. She had no child.

And Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot, the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, and his son Abram's wife, and they went out with them from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan.

And they came to Haran and dwelt there. And so the days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran. So this is a little bit of a background to who Abram was. Very likely the knowledge of the truth of God was passed down from Noah all the way down through Abram. If you look at the genealogies, Noah and Abram had some brief period of overlap. And so there was the knowledge of the truth of God that was passed down. And we see now in Genesis 12 that it says, the Lord had said to Abram, get out of your country and from your kindred and from your father's house to a land that I will show you. And so he's asking Abram to leave everything that Abram has behind. And we're not given much information other than that they traveled from Ur, basically ancient Babylon, to the land of Haran. Now, likely there had been a relationship of some sort that had been built up up to this point. But it was going to be taken to another level because now he says to get out of his country. This would be like, you know, God saying to you, you know, I'd like you to get up and I'd like you to move to Afghanistan, right? It's not like you're going to Las Vegas or you're going down to LA or maybe you're going to Salt Lake City or maybe you're going to New York.

You're going to go someplace completely different that you have no idea who the people are. You don't speak their language, you know, the landscape. Everything is going to be very, very different.

And God is going to say, look, just trust me on this. You don't know where you're going to go, but I'm going to tell you where you're going to go. And so Abraham really begins now this archetype of a pilgrim, which continues to us today, where we are really pilgrims on this earth.

We are not settled in a place. This is not our home. We live here in Northern California. We live in Oakland or we live in San Leandro or we live in Hayward or we live somewhere in the area.

But this is really not where we're from. This is just a place that we're sojourning. And this theme is picked up later in Scripture. If you look over in 1 Peter 2, verse 11, over to 1 Peter 2, Peter picks up on this theme of being sojourners. And so Abraham sets that first example as somebody who's going to leave civilization at the time. And, you know, at the time of Abraham, the earth had, let's say, about 300 million people or so, by some estimation.

And, you know, there just wasn't a lot going on outside of these major civilization centers.

1 Peter 2, verse 11 says, Beloved, I begged you as sojourners and pilgrims.

This is what early Christians were called. This is what we're called. Sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lust which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they observe glorify God in the day of visitation. We're sojourners. Abraham was a sojourner. He left whatever he had, and he trusted in God that God would lead him to a place where God wanted him to be, and that he would be an instrument in God's hand however he needed to be used. So the first lesson we learn here from this example of Abraham, knowing God means having a fresh and current relationship with God. It's just about a relationship. To know God is to have a relationship with God. Let me give you an example. Years ago, I had a conversation with someone who had been in the Church of God for many years. Nobody you would know, not somebody from this area. This person was explaining to me that they did not believe that the Bible was an accurate account of science or history. It was basically just a made-up set of stories, ancient stories, all kind of clues together. He had come to this conclusion because he had looked at the book of Jonah, and he concluded that no man could survive inside a great fish for three days. This was a fable. This was made up. This was a preposterous story. That would be quasi-okay, except that Jesus himself made reference to this fable in his view. Therefore, the very identity and validity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God was now in doubt. In fact, according to him, it truly showed that Jesus himself was just a human being who believed this myth and could not have been God. Therefore, he was going to leave the church. He was going to reject the Bible as the inspired word of God and Jesus Christ as the Son of God. At best, he would be agnostic. I was having this conversation on the phone, and I said, well, there are situations that happen regularly where things that are in the Bible, people will say, well, that never happened. I pointed out the example of Pontius Pilate.

For centuries, people said Pontius Pilate did not exist because there was no record of him. They said, such a man, surely there would be a record of Pontius Pilate. Critics of the Bible said the Bible cannot be true because Pontius Pilate never existed because there is no historical record.

In the early 20th century, guess what? They found a record of Pontius Pilate. In fact, now there are several references to Pontius Pilate. We know that Pontius Pilate was actually an historical figure in that area with the responsibility not unlike what we would see in the Bible.

I was explaining that these things come out in time. We may come to understand that this type of fish may be as extinct today, but again, part of this is that this was a miraculous situation.

Jonah was sustained in the belly of the fish as an archetype of what Jesus Christ would be like, sustained, dead for all practical purposes, and yet then resurrected after three days and three nights. This didn't convince this person at all, as you would imagine. Finally, I said, this has all been very academic up to this point, this conversation.

I said, let me just ask you something. Have you ever had a situation where God intervened in your life, where God intervened directly in your life and changed your life in some way? You were healed, you were protected on the road, you know, there was some situation that was coming down and you knew it was going to be bad, and then you were saved from that situation. God had mercy on you in some way. There was a long pause, and he said, no, I can't say that I've had that happen to me.

And I said, well, you know, what does that say? He says, I don't know.

We just kind of left it there, kind of at that point, and we finished the conversation, I hung up the phone, and I thought to myself, you know, here we are in God's church, and we're all about truth, right? We know the truth of the Sabbath. We know Christmas is some, you know, syncretized pagan thing from the Catholics. We know about the feast that is going to be celebrated in the, you know, world tomorrow because it says it in Zechariah, right? But fundamentally, if we don't have a relationship with God, if we can't point to something where we say, God, thank you for saving my life. Thank you, God, for saving my marriage. Thank you, God, for intervening in my job with my boss. Thank you, God, for allowing me to be here today. Thank you, God, for what you've done for me because I know that you were involved in my life directly, and you changed my life. If we don't have that kind of relationship with God, we don't know who God is. He's just a person who inspired stories, and eventually those stories might just turn into fables if we think about it in those terms, and we just find ourselves right out of God's church. We have to have a relationship with God. And so I ask all of you that, have you had that kind of personal experience with God?

If you have, thank God for it in your prayers tomorrow morning. Thank you, God, that you gave me that opportunity to know you and to know you better. And if you haven't had that experience, I ask that you ask God for that kind of experience because that's what we need to have a relationship with God. Abraham was called the friend of God. Now, I'm not talking about a blind faith here, right? I'm not talking about a blind faith that says, it doesn't matter what goes on. Even Paul says, and we've talked about this before, if they found the body of Jesus Christ, right, if they found the body of Jesus Christ, Paul says, then I'm out of here, right? Because unless Jesus is resurrected, I have no hope. So this is not a blind faith we're talking about.

We still have promises that we stand on on Scripture, but we have nonetheless a relationship with God. Look over at Exodus 33 verse 11. We see another example of a man who had a personal relationship with God, and it was defined in Scripture as a friendship.

Exodus 33 verse 11 talks about Moses. And it says here that the Lord spoke to Moses face-to-face as a man speaks to his friend, and he would return to the camp, but his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, did not depart from the tabernacle. And so what we see here in this example of Exodus 33 verse 11 is that Moses had this relationship. Now we know that you can't see God face-to-face, right? There's another example in Scripture where God says, look, you know, you can see my backside, right? So this is really a way of defining a relationship, which was like a friend speaks face-to-face. Moses did not speak face-to-face in that sense. We understand this is just that sort of discussion of the type of relationship that he had. And so we should all be striving for that kind of relationship to be called a friend of God, that God could be our friend. Proverbs 18 verse 22, look over at Proverbs 18, 24, excuse me, Proverbs 18, 24. Friendship is something that we all should seek to have. God wants a family. He wants more than just friends. We'll get to that a little bit later. But if you look in Proverbs 18, 24, it says, a man who has friends must himself be friendly. There's a little bit of a dispute about what the actual Hebrew here says on this first part. But the second part is not in question.

The second part says, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. God wants a family relationship. He wants us as his sons and daughters, but he wants a close friendship with us. He wants to be very close to us. And you know, a friendship can change over time. We might have had a relationship with God. Maybe there was some moment in our life where we were very, very close. We were going through a trial and you can almost remember every morning when you would get up and you would pray to God and you would ask for his help through that day and through that trial. But then over time, sometimes those feelings change. Maybe there's some chronic health issue that God does not intervene on or there's some family situation that occurred. Perhaps there's a disappointment about our lives turning out the way they did turn out. And so after a certain number of years in the church, there's still a little bit of a hole that we fill with something else. And instead of that hole being filled with God's guidance and direction and him saying, look, I'm here for you, we fill it with something else. We fall and lapse back into something like being addicted to TV or the internet or drinking or whatever it might be. We fill it with something to just sort of fill the time and fill our minds and give ourselves something to look forward to.

If that's happened, I ask you to look at yourself and think about where your relationship is with God. Are you a friend of God? Would God call you his friend? You can't be someone's friend if you never talk to them. You've got to talk to God to be a friend. Think about that. And you've also got to share your heart. Friends don't just talk about facts. Well, you know, God, help me today. I've got a meeting. I'm going to have a difficult meeting with my boss. No, I'm really worried about this meeting. I don't know why I should be worried because you're the sovereign of the universe and you know what's going to go on and you know this meeting is just something that's going to happen and then I'm going to be on to the next thing. God, help me to see things the way you want to see.

You want me to see things. Let's go back to Genesis 12 and continue reading here and going back to Abraham. Abraham had this relationship, as I describe, and God just doesn't say, get out of your country. He then gives him a whole set of promises in Genesis 12, verse 2.

He says, I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing and I will bless those who bless you and I will curse him or curses you and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So there's this incredible list of blessings.

You can imagine, did Abraham, you know, how did Abraham digest this? How did he imagine this?

We aren't told. It just says in verse 4, so Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him and Lot went with him and Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Huron and then Abram took Sarai, his wife and Lot, his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered and the people whom they had acquired in Huron and they departed to go to the land of Canaan and so they came to the land of Canaan.

Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem as far as the Tiborinth Sea of Morah and the Canaanites were then in the land and the Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your descendants I will give this land and there he built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him and he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east and there he built an altar to the Lord and called him the name of the Lord and so Abram journeyed going on still towards the south so he's so journeying in the land he's going about everything that's that God is leading him and he's building altars and he's praising God and he's thanking God for what's going on that's how we understand the beginning of Abraham's life and so I think we're beginning to see that there's a there's a trust that Abraham has of what God is doing in his life and so the second thing that we can say about Abraham is that he kept God's commandments God gave commands and Abraham kept them if you look over in Genesis 26 verse 1 Genesis 26 verses 1 through 5 we see the story here of Abram's son or Abraham's son Isaac and promises that are going to be given to Isaac and God says here in verse 3 he says so journey this land and I will be with you and bless you for to you and your descendants I give all these lands and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father he's going to follow through on what he told Abraham and I will make your descendants multiply as the stars of the heaven and I will give to your descendants all these lands and in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed and why why does he say this because in verse 5 because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge my commandments my statutes and my laws were these the laws that were given on Sinai no this is hundreds of years before were these the laws of clean and unclean meats yeah very likely because no one knew what those laws were were these the laws of tithing well certainly because we see an example of tithing before were these the laws of different sacrifices certainly because Abraham knew how to sacrifice to God so he had commandments and statutes and laws these were things that had been preserved from the beginning and God kept them excuse me Abraham kept them look over in first john 2 verses 3 to 5 first john 2 verses 3 to 5 and we're told something very powerful about what it means to know who God is first john 2 verses 3 to 5 it says here now by this we know that we know him see what we want to do is we want to know that we know God right so now john is going to tell us by this we know that we know him if we keep his commandments if we keep his commandments he who says i know him capital h him that is God Christ and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him so it doesn't matter how charismatic somebody might be you know how how sort of articulate in the scriptures they are you know they can you know the Pharisees got up and preached right and i'm sure there were many very articulate and charismatic Pharisees that got up but if they don't keep the commandments then it doesn't matter the truth is not in them but whoever keeps his word truly the love of God is perfected in him and by this we know that we are in him so if you want to know God you know that is you know you don't want to have heard of him then you need to keep his commands you need to keep his commandments not nine commandments but ten commandments right all of these commandments that are that are in scripture that are given some people say oh yes i i know god i i talk to god all the time i he speaks to me and i had i had a colleague at work that i knew when i traveled to india and he told me one time we were in the guesthouse together and he said yeah the holy spirit spoke to me yesterday and he told me to go to this particular coffee shop he gave me the directions i got into the coffee shop and he told me i would meet a man there who would tell me what i was to do and i went to that coffee shop and sure enough there was a man there and this man was responsible for an orphanage and now i'm involved with this orphanage and the holy spirit led me there well you know i'm not going to judge where god is working and this man is very sincere and he's really worked on a lot of wonderful things for people in india over the years but whatever might happen if i don't keep god commandments if he doesn't keep god's commandments we're liars right we can do great things in god's name but if we don't keep god's commandments then it just doesn't matter we're not going to know who god is so there's a lot of wonderful wonderful people out there but those people need to keep god's commandments if they're going to know who god is and god is going to know who they are that's what the that's what the scripture says it's a very high standard and indeed because it's not just the letter of the law right we went through this you have heard it said you shall not murder right but i say to you whoever you know says you know something angry to his brother is going to be guilty you know of of the same so you know it's the it's the higher standard that jesus is talking about now we can't earn our salvation through law keeping there's nothing that talks about earning salvation here this is about understanding who god is but we have a choice to make every day about how we're going to keep god's laws god says remember the sabbath day to keep it holy right so here we are hopefully we're remembering the sabbath day and we're keeping it holy but you know how we make our choices about how we observe the sabbath or how we keep the feasts says a lot to god about us right how we choose to make our travel plans going back and forth to the feast to make sure we don't end up traveling on a on a sabbath day or cutting the feast short to to visit something or how we approach the sabbath itself you know it used to be we got into a lot of specifics right can i press the button on my dishwasher on the sabbath right i mean we get into that can i go get the mail on the sabbath right well you know all those kinds of details we understand we leave that to us individually to have a relationship with god to know if you're looking forward to getting the mail on the sabbath so you can look through your mail so that something has come and you can get excited about what that's coming you might ask yourself is that what god wants me to do if you want to bring the mail in lest it gets stolen by somebody because maybe there's a check in there or something well that's a different matter right you're just you know you're you're just getting it out of harm's way right if if you have if you're going to spend an hour cleaning up your kitchen after a sabbath brunch then maybe that hour would be better spent studying and you just leave the dishes in the sink right and and go from there if you forgot to press the button on the dishwasher the day before well you can press the button probably that day it's probably not that big of a deal right these are the types of things but it says a lot about how we approach the observance of god's law god says that we should love one another that's another example of of a command as being his disciples and but we see people sometime in god's church speak unkindly to and about other people that's another command right so are we kind in the things we're saying even if people are saying unkind things about us look over in jude 9 look over in jude 9 here's a interesting example somebody says well you know this person was speaking very unkindly to me and i just let him have it you know well we should be open in our communication right we shouldn't be holding back we should be open but look in jude 9 here again we're talking about keeping god's commands jude jude 9 says here yet michael the archangel in contending with the devil when he disputed over the body of moses dared not bring an accusation uh dared not bring against him a reviling accusation but said the lord rebuke you imagine that man this person's evil yeah well this is he's talking to evil himself he's talking to satan himself and he would not even accuse satan that's just the kind of example that was set by this archangel but these speak evil of whatever they do not know verse 10 and whatever they know naturally like brute beasts and these things they corrupt themselves we can't get sucked into that you know we we're probably just drowning in this right we don't even recognize it you turn on the news today and all you're going to get are accusations it's just accusation after it's like it's like that's what people want to well so-and-so did this and so and so did that and you know president so-and-so and you know senator so-and-so and governor so-and-so and this candidate we're just living in a time of nothing but accusations so you know we might that might rub off on us right and the question is do we give people the benefit of the doubt you know i heard that he said this about me and that was just really inappropriate what he said well maybe he didn't say that about you maybe that's the telephone game and that's kind of after three translations that's what you heard so we should not be bringing accusations against our brother we should be loving our brother as jesus commanded is that's a sign of who the true disciples are we should give be giving people the benefit of the doubt that's part of his command here that's part of keeping god's commandments if we know god we will keep his commandments and his commandments will not be grievous to us let's go back to genesis 12 genesis 12 let's keep going through the story there's an interesting bump in the story here genesis 12 verse 10 says there was a famine in the land and a brahm went down to egypt to sojourn there for the famine was severe in the land so this is interesting god said leave your land and go to this other place i'm going to show you and he's wandering around there and he's building altars and now there's a famine so you know a brahm could have easily said well god you said that you would bless me you said i would be a great nation and now i'm in the middle of a famine you know it's not like it's not like you see a famine coming like a dust storm or something oh there's a famine coming i better go no you're you live it right you live it a little like it's getting kind of tough we don't have a lot to eat here uh you know our sheep here you know water and you know it's you're actually living it uh and so somebody could come to a brahm and say well didn't your god say that you know we should leave and we trusted him and now we're in the middle of a famine and now we're going to have to go to another place here in egypt so the third point that i bring out here is to know god is to trust that god will be faithful in his time and his way because this is one of the first things that we see is that there's a famine and in in the land and so they go down to egypt and they sojourn in egypt uh here and there's a lot that we could read about i don't take the time to go through that but after that time in egypt in genesis 13 verse 1 we read that then a brahm went up from egypt after the time he had sojourn there he and his wife and all that he had and and lot with him to the south and it says in verse 2 a brahm was very rich in livestock in silver and in gold so now we're told that a brahm was rich and clearly his time in egypt was was beneficial so he went to egypt as a result of the famine but he came out as a rich man now imagine if you look for a moment at at uh at the promises how many of these promises to abraham were fulfilled in his lifetime go over to genesis 12 verse 2 again just right there it says i will make you a great nation was abram a great nation in his lifetime no i will bless you okay genesis 13 too he was blessed all right there's one check good he was blessed materially anyway i will make your name great no i and you shall be a blessing okay well maybe it's kind of hard to i will bless those who bless you yeah yeah and i will curse him who curses you okay maybe and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed no how many promises during abraham's lifetime i mean there's another one in verse seven the lord appeared him and said to your descendants i will give you this land and he built an altar did he get the land were his descendants as the stars of the of the heavens were his descendants as the sand of the seashore in in actual fact abram did not realize or see but only a fraction of god's promises and yet abram was faithful nonetheless he was faithful in what god told him to do and i i think that takes our relationship with god to another level as well because we may ask god for for things in this life we may feel that god has promised us certain things in this life and yet those promises may not actually be fulfilled in our lifetime but they will be fulfilled in god's time just like these promises were fulfilled in god's in god's time you know um just reading from um bible.org it's an interesting article on the fulfillment of the abrahamic covenant it says here that um abram has been distinguished by higher honors and a more extensive fame than any mere man ever was revered by the jews as the founder of their nation looked up to by christians as the father of the faithful honored by the arabians as their progenitor and whatever of true religion is to be found in islam is traceable to the precepts and example of abraham half of the world's population adheres to a religion which venerates abraham so but in abraham's lifetime he was a rich man that's pretty much all were told in terms of his promises and yet god was faithful to abraham in terms of of his great promises look over in galatians 3 verse 16 we'll see that god was faithful to abraham but not in his lifetime galatians 3 verse 16 says now to abraham and his seed where the promise is made he does not say and to seeds as to many but as of one and to your seed who is christ jesus christ came from abraham and in verse 29 it says and if you are christ then you are abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise this is what's sometimes referred to as grace versus race right it doesn't matter what race we are whether we're you know indian or whether we're african or whether we're european or whether we're australian or you know aboriginal or native american whatever we are of abraham's seed if we are of christ this is a question of grace that has been given to us not of some sort of particular jewish race look over in verse 8 galatians 3 verse 8 and the scripture for seeing that god would justify the nations by faith preach the gospel to abraham beforehand saying in you all the nations shall be blessed so then those who are of faith are blessed with believing abraham we in this room are here because of abraham's faithfulness we have the hope of the future because of abraham's faithfulness it began and it went all the way through jesus christ first coming and as we look forward to his second coming and yet abraham's never saw this at least as far as we know he never saw this look over in genesis 15 let's go back to genesis 15 verse 1 genesis 15 verse 1 this gives us an idea of the kind of relationship that abraham had and again the trust that he had he says in genesis 15 verse 1 after these things the word of the lord came to abraham in a vision saying do not be afraid abraham i am your shield your exceedingly great reward but abraham said lord god eternal what will you give me seeing i go childless and the heir of my house is eliezer of damascus so we can say that to god we can say you know gun you promised that i would be a great nation you promised that in i c all the nations of the earth would be blessed and yet i don't have an heir yet except this man who's born in my household verse 3 then abraham said look you have given me no offspring indeed one born in my house is my heir it's okay to say that god you know i thought you were going to allow this to happen i thought you were going to take care of me i thought you were going to bless me in this way and yet i'm still sitting here without an heir i'm still sitting here with that promise unfulfilled in verse 4 and behold the word of the lord came to him saying this one shall not be your heir but one shall come from your own body shall be your heir god says no no trust me on this one just trust me so as christians as followers of god as people who want to know who god is we have to trust that god in his time will allow these things to happen verse 5 and then he brought me outside and said look now towards heaven and count the stars if you are able to number them and he said to him so shall your descendants be and he believed in the lord and he accounted it to him for righteousness he believed he never saw it abraham never saw his descendants be scattered that way but he believed that god would bring it to pass that's a relationship that's knowing and trusting god and so that's the example that we we see a fourth example that we can gain gain from abraham is we need god's spirit to know who god is we need god's spirit to know who god is look over at first chrythians 2 verse 11 first chrythians 2 we see this principle here that without god's spirit it's impossible to know who god is paul describes us to the chrythians and he says here for what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him even so no one knows the things of god except the spirit of god now we have received not the spirit of the world but the spirit who is from god that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by god did abraham have god's spirit you know there's no specific reference that said abraham had god's spirit but there are a lot of things that surely point to abraham having god's spirit look over in genesis 14 verse 18 in genesis 14 verse 18 this is a very interesting study if you want to have a really cool bible topic discussion did abraham have god's holy spirit right i think we all know the answer is yes but where and how do we see it in scripture genesis 14 verse 18 says here malchizedek king of salem brought out bread and wine interesting bread and wine you ever heard of bread and wine before yeah bread and wine very interesting symbolism goes all the way back to the beginning who was the priest of god most high and he blessed him that is abraham and said blessed be a brahm of god most high possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be god most high who has delivered your enemies into your hand abraham was blessed by malchizedek and they partook of bread and wine together you know there's something here in terms of the god's presence being with abraham clearly there's something that we can see some some some hints some indication look over in uh roman's 4 verse 20 um we'll see a discussion of this as well in roman's 4 verse 20 roman's 4 verse 20 says here speaking of abraham he did not waver at the promises of god through unbelief but was strengthened in faith giving glory to god how are we strengthened in faith how are we strengthened in faith that's that's god's spirit working in us to strengthen us he was strengthened god strengthened him in faith that is god's holy spirit working again these are these are hints that we that we see you know if we aren't baptized if we have not had the laying on of hands to receive god's holy spirit then we can't know who god is that's what first corinthian says we can't know who god is if we're an adult we've grown up in the church or we've recently come into the church and we're waiting for a bolt from the from the sky you know to say you know time to get baptized it's not going to come that way all right it doesn't happen that way what happens is we come to the understanding that we cannot know god unless we have his holy spirit and if we want to know who god is as opposed to just having heard of him that's the only way that we can understand and know who god is to receive his spirit to keep his commandments and to be his friend that's how we're going to know who god is and abraham knew who god was he was blessed by malchizedek he was strengthened in faith he walked with god as a friend of god and i believe that all indications are is that god gave his holy spirit to abraham to those select few as we've talked about our theology when the tree of life was was guarded by an archangel not everyone had access to god's spirit but only a few as we as we know we go through that people like enoch people like noah people like abraham and isaac and jacob and so forth well let's talk about these promises that were fulfilled here let's go to genesis 17 verse one let's go back to genesis and let's look at 17 verse one this is this is an important part of these promises because we've looked at promises in genesis 12 we looked at promises in genesis 13 we'll get promises to isaac but let's look at genesis 17 when abraham was 99 years old genesis 17 verse one the lord appeared to abraham and said to him i am almighty god walk before me and be blameless and i will make my covenant between you and me and will multiply you exceedingly and then abraham fell on his face and god talked with him saying as for me behold my covenant is with you and you shall be a father of many nations in verse four when it says many nations in my margin it says a multitude of nations a multitude of nations this is not two nations this is not three nations this is a multitude this is a lot of nations he's going to be the father of many many nations now the modern day nation of israel claims its heritage back to abraham and indeed the jewish people can trace their heritage back through time they're one of the oldest peoples um that of the ancient peoples even as i've shared before the romans 2000 years ago considered the jews to be ancient people they're definitely an ancient people but does the new jersey sized nation modern nation of israel qualify as a multitude of nations okay i i think not i think not um does ishmael qualifying here well you know ishmael was one of his offspring but i think that the uh the scriptures are very clear that that this this promise here was not going to be fulfilled through something abraham did as part of sleeping with his uh his handmade his wife's handmade here this is going to be through the son of promise and at this point ishmael was 13 years old and i don't think abraham would say oh yeah of course i'm going to be a multitude of great nations because i just had ishmael here and he's going to fulfill your promise no god was very clear ishmael was not going to fulfill the promise of the multitude of of nations um just you'll keep their place there go over to genesis 25 verse uh genesis 25 verse one we'll also see here that abraham after sarah died took another wife named katura and there's a whole set of offspring that are listed here in genesis 25 verse one through six um you know she bore zimrom and joshan and midan and midian and ishbach and and so forth was god referring to these people these people have basically been lost to history we don't have much indication about where these uh these people are we knew that moses when he uh went into the wilderness he ended up staying with um with some of these descendants here but we don't really know much about these people uh some people might say the family of isa'a would be a potential the chiefs of edom um maybe maybe so go back to genesis 17 who are this multitude of nations that that is being referred to here you know ishmael katura this the children of katura the children of isa'a i mean i think all indications are in scripture that this multitude of nations was going to come through the son of promise that had not yet uh arrived and then it says verse five no longer shall your name be called abram but your name shall be called abraham for i have made you a father of many nations he's going to be the father of many nations and i will make you exceedingly fruitful and i will make nations of you and kings shall come from you who are these kings who are these kings you know the you know there are about 12 million jewish people alive today eight million live in the nation of israel modern day nation about another four million people live outside of israel actually the united states being the second largest place many people many jews live in france so 12 million people you know 12 million people is basically a rounding error on the population of china if you look at the population of china it's estimated it's about 1.3 billion people give or take 12 million okay it's a rounding error i don't think this i don't think genesis 17 is a rounding error yeah i'm going to make you a multi-multonous you know this great nation with kings and all sorts of people but it's just going to be a rounding error really compared to other nations no this we have to ask ourselves what is this referring to who is being referred to by all these kings and these multitude of nations and and and what this means modern day nation of israel is ranked 32nd in gross domestic product in the world today behind iran okay you know i just you know i don't think persia was in was in god's mind here right i mean persia has a greater domestic gross domestic product united era emirates has a greater domestic taiwan certainly china these kinds of we have to ask ourselves where were these promises fulfilled and the church of god has the belief and it's not my intention to go through that right now that these were fulfilled through the nations of europe and as europe spread and expanded certain of these nations especially the english-speaking peoples expanded into canada and expanded into australia and expanded into south africa and in all of these nations the the world has been blessed there is something in economics called linkage or decoupling and that is to say that essentially the united states in particular but then many of the european nations basically are the engine of growth in the world and the question is can the world decouple from this engine of growth that the united states is and there was some belief in 2006 2007 that was going to happen and then the economic crisis happened and then basically everybody goes to the dollar i'm going to be traveling to the democratic republic of the congo in a couple weeks as i've shared with you and they use the dollar they have an agreement with the united states treasury and the united states treasury prints dollars specifically for the democratic republic of the congo okay we actually have an agreement where we print dollars for that country and they use our currency we were in ecuador in february and they use the dollar in ecuador that is their currency the u.s dollar you walk down and and you buy things the the united states and many of these english speaking peoples uh the french and many of the french colonies these are nations that the world has been blessed by and we believe that these promises here in genesis 17 are referring to those nations if they're not referring to those nations then they're referring to some obscure peoples of edom they're referring to some obscure peoples of the bettowins they there's some theory that the descendants of couture the bettowins i mean you start getting into some really obscure things and you have to ask yourself is god referring to sort of these obscure peoples around the earth as the multitude of nations and yet in abraham's lifetime you never saw it in conclusion let's turn over to john 15 because i've gone through a number of these promises i've gone through a number of lessons that we can learn from the life of abraham but someone might say well that's the old testament and you know does god really speak to us in that same way and how can i have a relationship like that because you know these this is abraham we're talking about and i'm just me i'm not this great person abraham but look at john 15 verse 12 something that could be very encouraging for us this is my commandment that you love one another as i have loved you greater love has no one than this than to lay down one's life for his friends and you it says here in verse 14 are my friends if you do whatever i command you we are called the friends of jesus christ no longer do i call you servants for a servant does not know what his master is doing but i have called you friends for all things that i have heard from my father i have made known to you you did not choose me but i chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain and whatever you ask the father in my name he may give you these things i command you that you love one another we have an opportunity to have a relationship with god and we've gone through those things right we've gone through we have to have god's holy spirit we have to keep his commands it's reiterated here we have to have a deep level of relationship like a friend that's listed here that's described here i think we have an opportunity like abraham to know who god is the question is are we going to walk through that door or not are we going to let our friendship fall apart are we going to say well i'm not sure i'm ready to be baptized right now are we going to say well god you have not been faithful in in fulfilling your promises to me i can see that i've waited for decades and i have not gotten an answer and so i'm not sure i believe you anymore or are we going to be like abraham and say you know what there were a lot of promises made and maybe in my lifetime i won't see those promises i won't see what those really are but i believe that it's going to come to pass i believe god at his word and he will fulfill his promises in his time the question is for us we won't turn there but hebrews one verse says says that god speaks to us by his word today he speaks to us through his word and if we're on our knees and we're asking for god's direction in our lives he's going to speak to us through his word we are called god's friends and we do have a relationship with him are we going to walk through that door or are we just going to know that we just heard about god which is it