A Brief History of Reality, Part Deux (A slightly less brief look at Abraham)

  I can't believe I wrote all those words in the last post, and I wasn't even halfway through Genesis...But this is my continued effort to make chronological sense of the Bible. I have no idea how familiar most of these stories are to the average person, but I'm certain that most people don't have a good sense of how they fit together in the bigger picture of the Bible.

    As I said, God selecting Abram (Abraham) was the first big step toward actively redeeming humanity and it occurred at least 2,000 years after creation. His story takes up the largest portion of Genesis.

    God apparently speaks to Abram directly. How he knew it was God, I can't say for sure, but God communicated with Abram at least a couple different ways. He's described as having visions, the Lord appearing to him, and in one specific incident the LORD appears as a man to Abraham, in the company of what appeared to be two angels (these two angels being the same ones that proceed on to Sodom and Gomorrah and save Abraham's nephew Lot from the coming destruction). 

Note: When reading most modern printings of the Bible, if the word "Lord" is written in all caps (LORD), it is the translator/publisher telling you that the word used was the Tetragrammaton or YHWH, I am that I am, the holy name of God that he gave to Moses at the burning bush. If it is written as "Lord" without it being in all caps, it is probably the word "adonai" (lord or master) which is still a term of respect and may or may not refer to God, but it can also be used as a polite way to show deference to a person.

    God speaks to Abram/Abraham several times and with progressing clarity. He first calls Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans and promises to make him a great nation in a land of promise. Abram is already 75 at this point, but he goes with his wife and his nephew Lot. And when he gets to the land of promise, God shows up again and reiterates that it is to Abram's descendants that He is giving this land. There's a famine. Abram takes his family to Egypt (drama ensues). Abram comes back to the land of promise rich but even older. He and Lot have grown so successful as herdsman that they're running out of space together and agree to separate. The LORD again appears to Abram and promises that everything he sees will belong to his descendants. 

    There's a strange little incident in Genesis 14 where, after rescuing Lot from some pillaging kings, Abram meets a man named Melchizedek. For the brief mention he gets in Genesis, Melchizedek could get his own essay, and gallons of ink have been spilled on him elsewhere. The highlights are this: Melchizedek is described as a king of Salem and a priest of God Most High. His name means "righteous king" and Salem means peace. Abram pays him a tithe. There are two other references to Melchizedek in the Bible (Psalm 110 and in Hebrews). Because of the treatment given to him in Hebrews, it is clear Melchizedek is not a normal dude and an argument could be made he is a pre-incarnation appearance of the Son of God. Even if Melchizedek is not an appearance of God, he is an important figure as a symbol of a priesthood that is (according to Biblical logic) higher than the priesthood that is established under Moses later on (Abraham came before Moses so he's greater than Moses and Abraham pays homage to Melchizedek therefore Melchizedek is a greater than the Israelite priests). 

    Genesis 15 is a crucial chapter. The LORD speaks to Abram again, promising him a great reward. For the first time, Abram seems to have some questions. God has been promising that he'll be a great nation for years now, and while he is rich, he has no one to pass his wealth on to except his servant. God makes his promise explicit. Abram will have a son of his own flesh, with his wife Sarai, and his descendants through this son will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. It will be through this son that all the world will be blessed. And Abram believes God, and we are told in a key line that this faith was "counted to him as righteousness." God then makes the covenant official. He has Abram divide the carcasses of dead animals in half to create a pathway, he makes an explicit promise that Abraham will have a son who becomes a great nation (and even details how that nation will spend 400 years enslaved before returning to the land of promise), and in a vision, God appears to Abram as a burning oven and flaming torch and passes between the divided pieces. 

    The idea of a covenant sealed by walking between the bifurcated bloody corpses of animals is certainly foreign to our Western sensibilities, but the meaning was clear to Abram. God was promising on the highest thing he could promise, himself, that he would fulfill his promise to Abram. If all these things that God has promised do not come to pass then God himself might as well be torn asunder like those animals. It was a bloody image of the severity of the covenant. 

    There's a fascinating line in the covenant that God makes. He says the reason that Abram's descendants will spend 400 years away from the promised land is because the "iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete." The Amorites were the current residents of the land God was promising Abram. So God is telling Abram that his family is going to replace the Amorites but only once the Amorites have spent another 400 years in sinful iniquity. It's important to note here, that God does not cause the Amorites to sin. He doesn't increase their sin. They do this all on their own, and God holds back for a set amount of time before coming in with judgement.

     More years pass. Abram and Sarai don't have a child. Sarai gets impatient and tells Abram to take her handmaid, Hagar, as a concubine to try to get a child via a surrogate (if you think this sounds like "The Handmaid's Tale" Ding Ding Ding. You got it.). But when Hagar gets pregnant, Sarai gets jealous. She treats Hagar so badly that Hagar runs away. God appears to Hagar and makes a promise to her as well. Her son will be the father of his own nation. It's not all good though. Ishmael will be a "wild donkey of a man" who will be against everyone and everyone will be against him. 

    Thirteen years pass. Abram is now 99. God appears to him again and finalizes what we know as the Abrahamic Covenant. He says Abram will have a son through Sarai who will be the son of promise. Abram doesn't like this. He's rather fond of Ishmael after all, but Ishmael is not the son God promised. God says he will still make Ishmael into his own nation just like he promised Hagar, but the covenant promise, the one made to Eve centuries earlier was going to carry on through the son he will have with Sarai. Abram laughs at the idea that at nearly 100 (Sarai is 90) he will have another son. It is here that God renames Abraham and Sarah and institutes the rite of circumcision. Abraham's descendants are to be set apart as different from those peoples around them. Isaac will be the carrier of the covenant promise. 

    Not long after, the LORD appears again to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre. This time he's accompanied by what are apparently two angels, but they are all in the appearance of men. This instance is most commonly interpreted as a Christophany (a pre-incarnation appearance of the second person of the Trinity). The God the Son speaks again to Abraham and reiterates the promise. This time Sarah hears it, and she laughs like her husband. But the promise is sure. God then reveals to Abraham that he's about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for its wickedness. This concerns Abraham greatly because his nephew Lot is there. He seeks assurances that the cities won't be destroyed if even a handful of righteous people are found to be living there. The LORD gives him that assurance. For the sake of just 10 righteous people, the cities would be spared. Considering how famous the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is, it think it's fair to assume most people would recognize that there were not 10 righteous people to be found.

    Finally, when Abraham is 100 and Sarah 90, God miraculously intervenes and Sarah has a son. Isaac. The son of laughter. Now that Sarah has her son, she turns again on Hagar and Ishmael and causes them to be sent away. Hagar wanders in the desert with her teenage son until she gives up hope and waits for them both to die, but God holds true to his promise, opens her eyes and shows her a well. They survive, Ishmael marries, and the Ishmaelites are born.

    Now comes another of the most well known and challenging stories in the Bible. God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to him. If gallons of ink have been spilled over Melchizedek, oceans have been spilled over God demanding Abraham sacrifice Isaac. As Genesis records it, Abraham after receiving God's command, rose early in the morning, took his soon, and trekked to an area called Moriah where God told him to go. He then laid the wood for the burnt offering on Isaac's shoulders and they climbed the mountain. Isaac even asks his father where the lamb will come for them to sacrifice to which Abraham replies, "the Lord will provide." When the altar was built, Abraham bound his son, the son of the promise, the long awaited son that had caused him to push away his other son, and placed him on the altar. He raises his knife, prepared to strike, and the Angel of the LORD called from Heaven,

 "Abraham, Abraham!" 

"Here I am," Abraham replied.

"Do not lay your hand  on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son from me."

The LORD provided a ram caught in a thicket for the sacrifice. And after completing the ritual, Abraham and his son returned to their home. 

    But of course there is so much more going on here than the spare account that Genesis provides. Did Abraham rise early in the morning because he was eager to march off and sacrifice his son? Surely not. He probably didn't sleep a wink. He probably didn't want to try to lie to his wife about where he was going, so he took off before she woke up. I am sure that Abraham doubted, all the way up to the altar until the point when his arm was prepared to strike, whether he had enough faith in God to land the fatal blow. Of course God knew. God didn't need Abraham to prove it for God's sake. There's another image here. A type. The sacrificial lamb. The only son of the promise. Miraculously conceived, and carrying his own means of sacrifice on his back. I hope you know your Bible well enough to see the echoes when Jesus picks up his cross. God held back Abraham's hand, but the Father went through with the sacrifice when the one on the altar was God the Son. 

    This is the thing about the Bible. This is the importance of the Old Testament to New Testament Christians. These parallels aren't accidental. Hebrews 11 fills us on what part of Abraham's reasoning. His faith in God was great enough that he knew that even if he did sacrifice his son, God's promise was so sure that God would surely resurrect Isaac from the dead. But Isaac wasn't the perfect sacrifice. He was the son of the promise to Abraham, and he was a continuation of the seed of the promise to Eve, but he was not the final son. 

       Again, that was more words than I intended to write, but at least, I think we can move on with Isaac next and see where the promise goes from here. 

    

    

A Brief History of Reality

 Note: The following is my attempt to organize Biblical history, mostly for my own edification. If you're reading this, it's important to understand something. I take the Bible to be infallible and inerrant. That does not mean that I am a Biblical literalist in the same way that some people use the Bible to insist the earth sits on literal pillars or that it is flat. I do my best to employ a grammatical-historical hermeneutic. In short, I take the Bible to mean what the writers of the Bible intended for their readers to take it to mean. If it's written as history, then that's how I take it. If it's poetry, then there's going to be metaphor. 

    The thing about most people's knowledge of the Bible is that it comes in the form of disconnected stories or the perception that it's simply a list of rules. There are certainly lists of rules and there are absolutely stories, but it all fits together into one big, all encompassing tale with an overarching plot. Christians tend to call these plot points "Creation, Fall, Redemption" and the Bible concludes by pointing to a future "Restoration (or Consummation)." 

    Within the plot points "Creation, Fall, Redemption," God acts through a series of covenants. These covenants (agreements between God and man) are critical to understanding the Bible and not understanding the covenants is a root cause of all the inane questions Christians get about "why are you against gay marriage but okay with eating bacon wrapped shrimp while wearing polyester blended fabrics?" 

    A critical note about how the Bible is structured: it is NOT (for huge portions of it) put together chronologically. Books are often grouped together more by type of book (e.g. Isaiah and Jeremiah go together because they are prophetic, Esther and Job are next to each other because they are narratives) than they go chronologically (e.g. Esther and Job were probably 1000s of years apart). 

    Most people are familiar with the basic two part subdivisions of the Bible, the Old and New Testament (these are in reference to two major covenants). Some people refer to the OT as the Jewish scriptures or Hebrew Bible which is true to an extent. There have been efforts by some in the Christian tradition who have discounted the need to study the OT. They view it as inferior to the NT and irrelevant to Christians. I'm going to argue that you can't fully understand the significance of Jesus and the NT without the OT. 

    Jews call their scriptures the Tanakh (they also have the Talmud, which is a collection of rabbinical commentary on the Tanakh). They see it as divided into three sections: the Torah (instruction), the Nevi'im (prophets), and the Ketuvim (writings). I think Western people are most familiar with the word Torah. Christians call this the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). It's the first five books of the OT, and it sets the stage for understanding the whole of scripture. 

    We all know how Genesis starts. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth..." Genesis lays out the plot. God created everything (Genesis chapters 1 and 2). And it was good. He put Adam and Eve in a garden and communed with them unobstructed. This is where the first covenant was established: the Adamic Covenant (some people divide this into an Edenic Covenant [prior to the Fall] and the post-Fall Adamic [Covenant]). God created man. He gave them dominion over creation and told them to fill the earth and subdue it. But they could not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

    But once again, we all know what happened. The serpent (understood to be Satan) came along and tempted Eve. He asked the first question in the Bible, "Did God really say?" And Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. We're only into chapter 3 of the first book of the Bible, and we're already to the Fall. This means that the rest of the Bible is going to be about Redemption.

    The first act of redemption is act of mercy on God's part. The curse for eating of the forbidden fruit was supposed to be instant death, but God stayed His hand. But there were still consequences for breaking the initial covenant. Work was cursed. Marriage was cursed. The whole of creation now cursed. Death came into the world. But even in the first death, God used it for good. In the first sacrifice, God took the skins from animals to make clothing to cover Adam and Eve in their shame and nakedness and to protect them as they left the shelter of the Garden. 

    And as Adam and Eve were ushered out of the Garden, another promise was made. God promised in his curse to the serpent that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head, even as the serpent would bruise his heel. This somewhat enigmatic line is the "proto-evangel." The first gospel. As with subsequent prophecies to come, it has a twofold meaning. There's a general truth here. Snakes and people don't usually get along. They bite us, and we crush them. But the deeper promise is that there will be a specific descendant of Eve who will come along and deal the death blow to Satan. 

    What happens at the Fall is critical to understanding the rest of the Bible. Adam acted as a representative for all creation. This is "Federal Headship." This becomes a theme repeated throughout the Bible. As the head goes, so goes the body. As the king goes, so goes the nation. This idea seems foreign to our highly individualistic western cultures, but once you understand it, you see it everywhere in the Bible. 

    After the Fall, Genesis continues with what is now the long slow story of redemption. Eve starts having kids. Cain kills Abel. The population grows. People fall farther away from God. Things get bad. They get bad enough that God intervenes with a hard reset. This is the story of Noah. Obviously this is one of the most well known stories in the Bible. Every Sunday school child has heard it, although I can't imagine most teachers focus on the death and destruction of 99% of all living creatures. If you're calculating time as a hard Biblical literalist, there was close to 2000 years between Adam and Eve and Noah. It may have been longer. But regardless, this is the first big intervention since the Garden, and it results in the Noahic Covenant. 

     The Noahic Covenant echoes the Adamic Covenant. Noah and his sons are told to be fruitful and multiply. God isn't done with humanity. He still has a plan for them and wants them to start afresh. 

    From Noah, we wait another 400 years before Abram (Abraham) comes along. In the meantime, men had gathered and attempted to build a tower to Heaven (the Tower of Babel), and God had confused their languages. This results in the great dispersion of peoples away from what we now call the Middle East. One of the resulting tribes had settled in Ur which was believed to be somewhere in modern day southern Iraq. This is where Abram was when God called him. 

    God's speaking directly to Abram is the first recorded incident of direct communication from God since Noah. There isn't any record of God talking with anyone between Cain and Noah. So for two millennia, God has generally left people alone and observed their wickedness. 

    The calling of Abram can be seen as the first active step God takes toward bringing about the "proto-evangel" he promised to Eve. It is in the Abrahamic Covenant that God makes a promise to a single person to establish him as the father of a specific nation through which blessing will come to the whole world. 

And I've been going on too long, so this will have to resume in Part 2 "The Second Part"