Unexpected visitation
This week's return to Bible greatness is from Genesis 18:1-10:
These are some of my favorite verses. They give some good insight into the character of God and how he interacts with us, and they address hopelessness and the sort of bondage to scientific logic I think our culture suffers from.
To get the full effect of the verses, picture yourself in Abraham's place. You've given up on a promise God has made to you. You lack the resources, you're too old, science has deemed you incurable, and you're just tired and skeptical. It's a scorching summer day, and it's too hot to do anything. You're sitting in the shade as best you can, while the heat coming off the ground makes everything wavy. Everything has that hot dirt and sand smell that summer can bring sometimes. You're weak, and probably dehydrated. You blink and suddenly you realize there's three men with you, out in the middle of nowhere. Are they there to rob you? Is there something supernatural about them? Should you be polite and invite them to share your food and drink? You reach out to them, and come to find out that all three of them are God simultaneously, and they restate the promise that you keep ignoring. How is that even possible? And what a day for that to happen!
There is so much in this story that's unexpected and wonderful. How is God simultaneously three individual people? It's like the holy trinity. I don't know if I'm even capable of understanding that. But this isn't Bible-school-theoretical. This was three actual men standing, in flesh and blood, before Abraham. Did they look alike? Did they take turns finishing each other's sentences? I don't know how that could work out not to be amazing, just by itself.
Along with that is the fact that God came to Abraham's tent on a pretty much useless day, and paid him a personal visit. To my knowledge, God has never paid me a personal, in the flesh, visit to my house or campsite. Something like that is wonderful, almost beyond my imagining, and this is something God did for someone who pretty much told him he was full of crap, and who he knew would still doubt him after the encounter. That rates right up there with angelic encounters for things I'd like to experience before I die.
Even more amazing is that God sort of made Abraham seek him out in order to be reminded of the promise. God didn't invite himself in. It's not like God's GPS was off and he couldn't just materialize his three man self inside Abraham's tent. He wanted to be invited in. That's such a powerful statement on God's respect for our sovereignty as individuals. He wants us to have the luxury of choosing him. Freedom is the ability to say yes or no to something without your choice being overridden by someone else. That's a huge risky gift for God to give to his limited-smarts creation. It also reminds us that just because God is present doesn't mean he's in relationship with you. You still have to engage him.
That brings me to a heavy theological question that people probably debated for centuries in the Middle Ages: Did God's three-part self really need the swanky feast put out by Abraham? Was God hungry? Or was it just a case of Abraham trying to relate to human-looking God in human terms? Was it a symbol of the temple sacrifice? Or was it the establishment of a covenant, kind of the 'business lunch' people would use to seal deals, sort of God's way of saying "No, Abraham, I really mean it. I really do want to do the impossible for you. You have my word on it." Or maybe it was some combination of those things? Either way, it's fascinating that they ate together.
And that brings me back to the child-promise I've taught on a bunch of times before, because it enthralls me. It's such a good illustration of the impossible dream. In Abraham's day, so much rode on whether or not you had a son to carry on the legacy and care for you when you got old. To not have a son was an illustration of your lack of value as a man or a woman. Ancient cultures like these had all sorts of folk remedies for infertility, and someone of Abraham's advanced age would probably have tried all of them countless times. On top of all of that, they were too old to have kids. The clock had run out. You might as well be raising someone from the dead. It wasn't irrational for Abraham to mistrust that this would happen. Who can intuitively grasp that God is so great? And that was before science and the scorn we're raised to have for ungrounded hope and blind faith.
These verses tell us that God can do anything. The basic scientific foundations of how the universe works do not apply when God has made a promise. He exists outside of those constraints. There is no place for hopelessness when God is engaged. And we must engage him, because he wants to be pursued. We must actively seek him when he's around, even if we're too ignorant at first to believe everything he says.
And he likes us enough to seek us out too. He loves us enough to respect our choice to not speak to him, but still wants to be seen. He wants us to be mature creations who choose him because he's great, not because something bad will happen to us if we don't. The same goes for our belief. He doesn't require that we believe on the first try in order to be blessed. If that was true, Abraham and Sarah would have died childless and miserable. God is patient and will coax us into a greater understanding of him and his universe, if we let him. These verses show that his methods of doing so can be very creative and memorable.
The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.He said, “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.”
“Very well,” they answered, “do as you say.”
So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.”
Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree.
“Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked him.
“There, in the tent,” he said.
Then one of them said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”
(Full disclosure: I chopped the second half of verse ten off, because it sort of starts another paragraph, and I wanted the excerpt to encapsulate the story I'm teaching on. I am not a heretic using some freaky incomplete version of the Bible.)
These are some of my favorite verses. They give some good insight into the character of God and how he interacts with us, and they address hopelessness and the sort of bondage to scientific logic I think our culture suffers from.
To get the full effect of the verses, picture yourself in Abraham's place. You've given up on a promise God has made to you. You lack the resources, you're too old, science has deemed you incurable, and you're just tired and skeptical. It's a scorching summer day, and it's too hot to do anything. You're sitting in the shade as best you can, while the heat coming off the ground makes everything wavy. Everything has that hot dirt and sand smell that summer can bring sometimes. You're weak, and probably dehydrated. You blink and suddenly you realize there's three men with you, out in the middle of nowhere. Are they there to rob you? Is there something supernatural about them? Should you be polite and invite them to share your food and drink? You reach out to them, and come to find out that all three of them are God simultaneously, and they restate the promise that you keep ignoring. How is that even possible? And what a day for that to happen!
There is so much in this story that's unexpected and wonderful. How is God simultaneously three individual people? It's like the holy trinity. I don't know if I'm even capable of understanding that. But this isn't Bible-school-theoretical. This was three actual men standing, in flesh and blood, before Abraham. Did they look alike? Did they take turns finishing each other's sentences? I don't know how that could work out not to be amazing, just by itself.
Along with that is the fact that God came to Abraham's tent on a pretty much useless day, and paid him a personal visit. To my knowledge, God has never paid me a personal, in the flesh, visit to my house or campsite. Something like that is wonderful, almost beyond my imagining, and this is something God did for someone who pretty much told him he was full of crap, and who he knew would still doubt him after the encounter. That rates right up there with angelic encounters for things I'd like to experience before I die.
Even more amazing is that God sort of made Abraham seek him out in order to be reminded of the promise. God didn't invite himself in. It's not like God's GPS was off and he couldn't just materialize his three man self inside Abraham's tent. He wanted to be invited in. That's such a powerful statement on God's respect for our sovereignty as individuals. He wants us to have the luxury of choosing him. Freedom is the ability to say yes or no to something without your choice being overridden by someone else. That's a huge risky gift for God to give to his limited-smarts creation. It also reminds us that just because God is present doesn't mean he's in relationship with you. You still have to engage him.
That brings me to a heavy theological question that people probably debated for centuries in the Middle Ages: Did God's three-part self really need the swanky feast put out by Abraham? Was God hungry? Or was it just a case of Abraham trying to relate to human-looking God in human terms? Was it a symbol of the temple sacrifice? Or was it the establishment of a covenant, kind of the 'business lunch' people would use to seal deals, sort of God's way of saying "No, Abraham, I really mean it. I really do want to do the impossible for you. You have my word on it." Or maybe it was some combination of those things? Either way, it's fascinating that they ate together.
And that brings me back to the child-promise I've taught on a bunch of times before, because it enthralls me. It's such a good illustration of the impossible dream. In Abraham's day, so much rode on whether or not you had a son to carry on the legacy and care for you when you got old. To not have a son was an illustration of your lack of value as a man or a woman. Ancient cultures like these had all sorts of folk remedies for infertility, and someone of Abraham's advanced age would probably have tried all of them countless times. On top of all of that, they were too old to have kids. The clock had run out. You might as well be raising someone from the dead. It wasn't irrational for Abraham to mistrust that this would happen. Who can intuitively grasp that God is so great? And that was before science and the scorn we're raised to have for ungrounded hope and blind faith.
These verses tell us that God can do anything. The basic scientific foundations of how the universe works do not apply when God has made a promise. He exists outside of those constraints. There is no place for hopelessness when God is engaged. And we must engage him, because he wants to be pursued. We must actively seek him when he's around, even if we're too ignorant at first to believe everything he says.
And he likes us enough to seek us out too. He loves us enough to respect our choice to not speak to him, but still wants to be seen. He wants us to be mature creations who choose him because he's great, not because something bad will happen to us if we don't. The same goes for our belief. He doesn't require that we believe on the first try in order to be blessed. If that was true, Abraham and Sarah would have died childless and miserable. God is patient and will coax us into a greater understanding of him and his universe, if we let him. These verses show that his methods of doing so can be very creative and memorable.
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