Living in the Gap Between Promise and Reality

The Gospel According to Abraham

Iain M. Duguid

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629951720
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

What do we do when God's promises seem to fall short of reality? Abraham's story points weary believers to the gospel, providing an example and profound encouragement for us today.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PREPARATION OF A SAINT (GENESIS 11:27–32)

The making of a tennis player does not begin the first time he or she steps onto Centre Court at Wimbledon; nor does the making of a concert violinist begin on stage at Carnegie Hall. Such careers begin much earlier than that, often in childhood. Making it to the top demands sacrificing much that others take for granted; while others play, they must work—on lobs and smashes, serves and backhands, scales and arpeggios, bowing and fingering. Without those years of preparation, they would never be ready for their big moment in the public eye, the goal to which their whole life has been heading. Indeed, it would be unfair to expect a top performance at the highest level from a beginner. Only those who have matured through long and sometimes tedious years of preparation are equipped to undertake such a searching test.

The same principle holds true in God’s service. Like an astute coach or a gifted teacher, God prepares his saints for the tasks to which he has appointed them before he uses them. Moses, for example, spent forty years in the desert, herding sheep, before God called him to lead his people out of Egypt. What better preparation in patience could there have been for his assignment of leading an equally stubborn flock of people through the wilderness for forty years? Similarly, David learned courage from his own experience as a shepherd. Later, the one who had learned how to take on wild animals in the defense of his flock would be called upon to take on the biggest wild animal of all, mighty Goliath, in the defense of God’s flock. God knows how to prepare his people for the tasks to which they are assigned.

THE PREPARATION OF ABRAHAM AND SARAH

The principle of preparation for service is also evident in the life of Abraham. We often miss this aspect of Abraham’s story because we usually commence our reading of it at the beginning of Genesis 12, in which God speaks to Abraham for the first time. But that’s not actually where his story begins. In the book of Genesis, the beginning of a major new section is frequently marked by the formula “These are the generations of . . .” So, for example, we find “These are the generations of Noah” (Gen. 6:9), “These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son” (25:19), and “These are the generations of Jacob” (37:2). Abraham’s story is introduced by the same marker at Genesis 11:27: “These are the generations of Terah.” We tend to skip over the verses that follow this announcement in order to get into the exciting material of Genesis 12. After all, aren’t the intervening verses only about obscure genealogies and incidental details, which may be of interest to Old Testament experts but have nothing to say to ordinary people? By no means! In fact, quite the reverse is true. Genesis 11:27–32 gives us vital information about the background to the calling and subsequent career of Abraham.

You see, God’s dealings with Abraham didn’t start with him as a seventy-five-year-old about to set out on a journey to Canaan. God didn’t just slip down to Haran, looking for a suitable retiree to act as the father of his people. No, he had been preparing Abraham for a while—even though he (or Abram, as he was then known) was quite unaware of that fact. The circumstances are recorded for us in Genesis 11:31–32.

Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.

We find out here that it was actually Abram’s father, Terah, who first set out for Canaan, taking Abram with him. The Scriptures don’t tell us why he wanted to make the move. This was a period of history in which there were great movements of population around the Middle East. Terah, Abram, and Lot would by no means have been alone in pulling up stakes and setting off in search of greener pastures. But they never made it to Canaan. For some reason—again, we’re not told why—they stopped at Haran and settled there. Yet the idea of going to Canaan had been planted in Abram’s mind. Through this experience of moving once from home and family in Ur, he was being prepared by God, so that when the call came to get up and move on to Canaan, he was ready. God had fitted him to hear his call and answer it.

Of course, Terah himself was not picked at random, either. The genealogy of Genesis 11:10–26 shows us that he came from the line of Shem, the son of Noah. He was a descendant of the very line in which God had been working for many generations. What is more, in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11:10–26, it is the tenth name that is the one of key significance. Noah, the one in whom the line of Adam was preserved through the flood, was the tenth patriarch in the line from Adam. Abram was the tenth patriarch in the line of Shem, suggesting that through Abram a new deliverance would be set in motion.

God’s plan from the beginning was to preserve for himself a godly line, through whom the promise of a redemptive offspring of Eve would ultimately be granted (Gen. 3:15). God planned that this “seed” of the woman would ultimately triumph over Satan and his cohorts. This godly line was soon endangered from without and within. Angered by the acceptance of his brother’s offering, Cain killed his brother, Abel (Gen. 4:8). But God responded by giving Eve another child, or, more literally, “another seed” (4:25). When humanity became utterly corrupt within a few generations, God kept Noah safe through the flood, so that the line of promise could continue (Gen. 6–9). Yet even the judgment of the flood had no power to change humanity. Almost the first thing Noah did when he emerged from the ark was to get drunk, and the pattern of ongoing sin climaxed in the tower that mankind built in Babylon as an expression of their united pride and arrogance—the so-called Tower of Babel.

Abram was born and grew up in that hotbed of idolatry, in Ur, and the Bible tells us that his family was not immune from its temptations. In Joshua 24:2, we read, “Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods.” But God would not give up on rebellious humanity. With Abram, the time came for the next phase in the history of redemption. Although Abram may have been unaware of the ways in which God had prepared him for his task, everything was ready.

Sarah (or Sarai, as her parents had named her) was being prepared as well, in the school of hard knocks for women. Genesis 11:30 tells us, “Now Sarai was barren.” And then the writer repeats himself (just in case you missed it the first time around): “She had no child.” Not to be able to have children in a society where a woman’s value was measured by her fertility was a bitter blow indeed. Sarai must have shed many bitter tears over her inability to bear children. But, paradoxically, her inability in this area was a crucial part of God’s preparation of her for her role in his plan. In order for her to be the mother of the child of promise, it was necessary for her to be unable to bear children without the direct intervention of God.

OUR PREPARATION

In Ephesians 2:10, Paul describes us as God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” That raises the question, “For what good works is God preparing you?” Your answer right now may well be, “I haven’t a clue.” God’s purposes are certainly not always transparent at the time. Moses probably had no idea why he was stuck in the desert with the sheep. He must have felt permanently sidelined. Likewise, David had little idea of the future greatness for which he was being fitted. Abram could scarcely have discerned the higher hand bringing him from Ur to Haran, and Sarai’s tears were not answered with an explanation of the need for her present pain. Only later, with the benefit of hindsight, would they be able to look back and discern how God had indeed done all things well in their lives. In the meantime, they simply had to cling to God, believing, though not understanding.

An awareness of the way in which God frequently works may similarly provide a vital perspective on our own experience. The situation in which we find ourselves may well be a key part of God’s preparation of us for the task to which he will call us at some point in the future. But it may be only as we look back that we will come to understand how it all works into God’s plan for our lives. In the meantime, we may simply have to cling to God, believing, though not understanding.

AN EXAMPLE

Let me give a small example from my own experience. When I felt God calling me to the ministry at the age of seventeen, a vital part of that call was Romans 15:20, where Paul proclaims, “I make it my ambition to preach the gospel.” As a teenager, God impressed that verse upon my heart as a call to me personally to share Paul’s ambition. Over the years, however, I came to recognize that I had latched on to only half of what Paul is really saying. His full statement is, “Thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation.”

In other words, what Paul is actually proclaiming is not so much his commitment to preaching the gospel as his commitment to church planting. This fact came home to me only as I sat in front of a congregation of people, about to tell them that the Lord was apparently opening the doors for us to go to Oxford, England, to plant a church there. I almost fell off my chair when I made the connection! What we had considered to be the outcome of a series of strange twists and turns in our lives, when we had frequently been unsure of what the long-term future held, now seemed to have been in the Lord’s mind all along, even though we had had no idea of it! What a comfort it was then, and throughout our time in Oxford, to be assured that God had brought us there for his purposes.

It may be the same for you, too. The experiences in which you find yourself now may very well turn out to be God’s preparing of you for the good works he has planned for you to do later. That’s a great encouragement, isn’t it? Of course, a caution is necessary at this point: we must not elevate our reading of God’s working through circumstances into authoritative guidance; we can easily be wrong! We must not forget that the Bible is the only infallible rule in our lives. No matter how clear the Lord’s leading may seem to us, we are still called upon to subject our understanding of it to the Scriptures and also to the wisdom and discernment of the wider body of Christ. But when circumstances do work together to point us in a particular direction, or to show us how God has indeed worked things together for our good, we should take encouragement from them and thank the Lord for them.

Praise God that he prepares his people through many different circumstances before he calls them to any task! By the way, that’s not just a lesson for young people to learn. Moses and Abram were still in their preparation stage long after most people have retired!

PREPARATION DOES NOT GUARANTEE “SUCCESS”

But even lengthy preparation does not guarantee immediate success. Although God prepared Abram and Sarai to hear his call, and then called them to become a great nation through which blessing would come to all nations, for a long time all that distinguished them from their neighbors was the promise of God. There was no halo of glory surrounding their camels as they traveled from Haran to Canaan; nor was there a pillar of cloud and fire to lead them, as Israel had coming out of Egypt. At a time when many other people were traversing the Near East, they appeared to be just another group of travelers. Only the promise of God marked them out as different.

It’s the same way today, isn’t it? What marks you out from your non-Christian neighbors? You’re not smarter than they are; you’re not richer; you’re not better looking or healthier. You experience many of the same kinds of problems and crises that they do. So what marks you out as different? Only the promises of God do. If you’re a Christian, you know that God is working in you and through you to achieve his purposes in the world. If you’re a Christian, you know that “for those who love God all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28).

It is precisely the existence of such promises that makes the experience of the reality gap so intense. For the non-Christian, there is logically no reality gap. His or her life may be going well or it may not, but either way it has no meaning. If one is simply a chance collocation of atoms, there is no reason why one’s life should go well or why one’s sufferings should have any significance. There is no promise that the non-Christian can claim. He or she is left simply hoping against hope that everything will turn out all right in the end, whatever “right” is. The Christian, however, is different. He or she knows that God is in control of all things and that, even if all appearances are to the contrary, God has a plan in which all things in heaven and under heaven will work out for his glory and our good. It is precisely our faith that creates the reality gap when we don’t understand how particular trials or circumstances will work out.

STAYING STRONG IN THE REALITY GAP

So how do you stay strong in the midst of the reality gap, when you find yourself drowning in painful feelings, dire circumstances, or broken relationships? That was our situation when the little church plant in Oxford that God had so clearly called us to plant closed down after only three years. How could God call us to do something and then let it “fail”? Shouldn’t God bless us when we step out in faith to pursue his will? It’s a question to which I still come back repeatedly as I struggle with failures in my own life—patterns of sin and self-centeredness that continue to hurt my marriage or my children, or damage the church and seem to threaten it in one way or another. God’s plan is wonderful, but I am not; my circumstances often seem to conspire against me; people are often recalcitrant and difficult. How can I really believe that God is going to work all this mess for good?

How do you stay strong in the reality gap? The answer is simple—at least in theory. You cling to the promises of God and the God of the promises. You don’t have to understand what God is up to; you just have to cling. That is the lesson that Abraham had to learn. Like so many of us, he had to learn the lesson not once, not twice, but repeatedly. It took him a while to catch on. But we have an advantage over Abraham. We have the whole history of God’s faithful dealings with his people, recorded in the Scriptures for our instruction. What is more, God’s promises to us have been signed and sealed in the broken body and shed blood of Christ. Abraham had to leave his home and his family on the strength of the bare word of God’s call. We have this further assurance: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32).

The good news for weak people like us is that even clinging to the promises is not ultimately left up to us. God is not holding his breath, waiting to see whether our strength will be sufficient to hold on to him in the midst of life’s storms. He holds us firmly in the grip of his grace, and he will not let us go. Though we may indeed be “tempted, tried and sometimes failing,”¹ as the hymn writer put it, he is the one whose strength wins the victory. So it is that we see Jesus not only showing us how to have faith in the reality gap, but also exercising that faith for us in our place. Jesus left the glories of heaven and came to earth, where he learned humility through obedient suffering. The incarnation began a thirty-year-long preparation period for Jesus, an apprenticeship in suffering and humility. The all-perfect God had never suffered before. Yet as a child, he stubbed his toe and stepped on sharp rocks. He experienced cruelty and rejection. He was misunderstood and misrepresented. All these very human and very painful experiences were necessary as a preparation for his great work of becoming our heavenly High Priest, representing us before the Father.

Jesus stayed strong in the face of abandonment and betrayal. Even as his closest disciples left hi...