Join Nicole McBurney and Pastor Bob Enyart as they delve deep into the biblical narrative of Abraham and Lot, exploring the intriguing practices of casting lots and its implications in making wise choices. This episode unpacks the historical and spiritual contexts surrounding Abraham’s journey and God’s promises. As they discuss the choice of land, the episode paints a vivid picture of the allure and pitfalls of Lot’s decisions near Sodom and Gomorrah.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
So casting lots. Now you wouldn’t cast lots to determine which of two men will drive the ambulance and which will perform the open heart surgery. You wouldn’t cast lots for that. Wisdom goes to the wise. God gives wisdom to the wise. And are there times in our lives today where we can cast lots? I think so. But if I ever do it, it’s not because I’m asking God to supernaturally intervene and answer the question. I would never do that in my life, expecting that he’s going to do that. But I would say, Lord, I cannot make this decision and I humbly submit my situation to you and we’re casting these lots and see what happens and then take that and run with it. And if I was able to, if by some fluke all the other people interested in governing were transported out of here and went to Russia or something, and there was nobody left to run a government, they said, Bob, you do it. I’d say, okay, let’s cast lots and find the leader. That’s the way I would do it. I’d love to be able to put in the Constitution. Okay, here’s a new Constitution, and now we cast lots to see who the leader of the country would be. And that’s actually, with our shadowgov.com and our first five days novel, on a Christian government that takes over the country. That’s the principle used for how you end up with your leader, with the leader of the government. All right. It seems that God protected Abram through Lot’s choice and not by God making Lot choose foolishly because we’ll see that his choice of the land towards Sodom and Gomorrah really got him in serious trouble. difficulty, but by giving Abram the wisdom to trust God rather than exert his own influence. In certain situations, God would have us exert our own influence and do everything humanly possible to achieve a goal or to further some effort. But in other circumstances, we can take a more passive approach and it requires wisdom to know when, which strategy is And which techniques do we use to implement different strategies in life? There’s not just one way to behave. And once you learn that one way, then you’re set for life. It doesn’t work that way. Life circumstances are varied and we have to learn different techniques to survive and thrive as Christians. Okay. If, you know, Abram could have looked at the land And he could have chosen the land towards Sodom and Gomorrah. And that would have been a bad choice, apparently, as history went on to show us when Lot chose it. But what if Abram would have said, you know what? I’m going to take this land over here and I’m going to give you the land towards Sodom and Gomorrah. What might Lot have responded? He might have been upset. He might have thought, hey, what does Uncle Abe know that I don’t know? What’s going on here? And he might have argued and they might have had more tension. So it was real wise to let him decide. Chapter 13 of Genesis, verse 12, Abram dwelt in the land of Canaan and Lot dwelt in the cities of the plain and pitched his tent even as far as Sodom. But the men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked and sinful against the Lord. So Lot chose the land that was really near the wickedness. When I was growing up, I remember in high school and even in college, I became a Christian as a freshman in high school. But I remember saying for years and years that I’d like to live for one year in New York City, just one year. Because we grew up right outside of New York City, maybe half hour from Times Square. And we used to go see Broadway plays there and go to… Rockefeller Center with the Christmas tree and go to Radio City Music Hall. And I used to say, I’d like to live in New York City for one year because everybody would say, oh, I hate New York City, too much traffic. And I always would say that. And I thought it was just me showing how cultured I was. But no, it wasn’t. It was the allure of the wickedness and of the sin of the city and of the anonymity. Nobody knows anyone There’s too many people in a big city. And you could get away with things that you can’t get away with in a small town. And so with Lot choosing, wow, here are these thriving cities. There’s all kinds of excitement down there. It could be very appealing. The men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked and sinful against the Lord. We’ve noticed in our Genesis, the fall study, when Adam and Eve sinned and when Lucifer sinned, we talked about the number 13 and how in the Bible that number represents wickedness. And we’ll see that number come up perhaps later in this study or the next study. But here is the first verse in the Bible where the word wicked appears and the word sinful appears. And just coincidentally, it’s chapter 13, verse 13. But that’s just coincidental. But the word for wicked, the Hebrew word is raim from ra, which means to break in pieces, to destroy. And the word sinful is chadam. And I don’t know Hebrew. I can’t read Hebrew, but you can look words up in reference books. And chadam comes from chada, to miss the mark, to step wrong, to miscarry. And I know a bit more Greek, studied Greek on and off for some years. And when the Hebrew word chada means to miss the mark, that’s just like the Greek word amartia, which means to miss the mark. Adam Clark, who lived some time ago, wrote interesting commentaries. And his definition of these sinners here in Sodom, the definition of a sinner or a wicked sinner, he said, a sinner is always aims at happiness and constantly misses his mark. He’s radically evil within. He seeks for happiness where it can never be found. And that reminded me, reading that, of the Declaration of Independence, written largely by Thomas Jefferson, whom we know, even as Christian conservatives, we know he was not a Christian. In fact, he has We have his Jefferson Bible where he went out and cut out most of the Bible and left the parts he thought were worthwhile. And in the Declaration, he wrote that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just a cliched phrase. We have the right to pursue happiness. And you know, Clark was right. When you pursue happiness, you can’t ever find it. When you pursue happiness, when that’s your goal, I want to be happy. You don’t ever end up happy. When you pursue God, when you pursue righteousness and justice, then you can find happiness. But when you pursue happiness, you can’t find it, which is so fascinating. In our country, if you look back, on the last couple hundred years of American history, we sure look like a country that’s pursued happiness. We are full-time in the pursuit of happiness. And we’re about as far as being a happy place. I mean, we’re a very gay country right now. But we certainly are not happy. The gay 90s are back. Verse 14, And the Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, Lift your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward, southward, eastward, and westward. When God is speaking to Abram again, in the story, he hadn’t talked to him for a little while, and this is now when Abram left Egypt, and when Lot separated from him, and now God is speaking to Abram. what God had said to him to start with. Leave your family, separate yourself from your family, and come to this land of Canaan. So he had brought his family with him everywhere he went, and then he went to Egypt, and so now he’s again alone without his family members in the land where God wanted him to be, and the Lord spoke to him and said, look at this place, north, south, east, and west. God loved Abraham, and he wanted to remind Abraham him of his promise. And this was, for Abram, undoubtedly a mountaintop experience. Because whenever, in most places, if you look in four directions, you can’t really see very far in four directions, most places. You have to be on top of a high hill or on a mountain. And we talk about a mountaintop experience. Here, Abram might have been, he may have been standing on the Mount of Olives. That’s where he may have been Just about, we’ve been there. There’s a tremendous view from the Mount of Olives. Only about five miles or so south of his altar, south of where he first established his tent and his dwelling place. And from the Mount of Olives, he could have looked north toward Bethel and Ai and beyond that to Shechem and even beyond that, not that he could see, but up that way is the Sea of Galilee. And he could have looked south toward Bethlehem and beyond that, the Negev and all the way down to the Nile River. And he could have looked east toward, from Jerusalem, east is Jericho. And beyond Jericho, eventually the Euphrates River and west past Jerusalem, over Mount Moriah, over the city of Jerusalem, which then would have been a few tents. right to the Mediterranean Sea. Not that you could see to the sea, but that’s the land that God was saying he wanted to give to Abram and his descendants. So he had a mountaintop experience. You know, we take an annual hike once a year. We go bobbin it live, Rocky Mountain climb. We take 15 guys and we climb a 14,000 footer in the Colorado Rockies. And every year there’s a couple guys here that have gone Every year, it is the most awesome experience. Three guys in the room, right, that have gone? Yeah. Yeah, Jim, Aaron, and Dave. And it’s hard to describe the fellowship and the worship of the Lord and just getting out there and being able to look that, you know, we worship God in churches that we’ve made, but this is the sanctuary that God has made. Not only the earth… as his footstool, but then the heavens as the ceiling above us. And it’s just so exciting to worship God out in his creation. Verse 15, For all the land which you see, I give to you and your descendants forever. And I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth, so that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then your descendants also could be numbered. Now here, God is obviously envisioning The passage of a lot of time. Much time. To God, 1,000 years is as a day when it is passed. God is very patient. And so, Abram, I’m going to multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, he will say eventually. Verse 17. Arise, walk in the land through its length and its width, for I give it to you. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s there’s supposedly a first-person account of Abram walking through the land and describing it. And in that account, it’s incredibly lush. It’s not the barren, hostile desert that much of the land is today. Verse 18, Then Abram moved his tent and went and dwelt by the terebinth trees of Mamre, which are in Hebron, and he built an altar there to the Lord. He built an altar there to the Lord. And J. Vernon McGee, who I hope to quote a little later in the study if I get to it, he points out here on this verse, he says, Abram leaves an altar behind after he visits a place, but we, a modern man in America, we go to the moon, we leave footprints, we leave a flag and a motto, and it says that we’ve come in peace. We’ve come in peace. They said, why didn’t they leave the word of God and to show the difference between modern leaders and Abram? And in this country, could you imagine if someone said, why don’t we leave a Bible up there? Could have been a civil war over that. Chapter 14, verse 1. And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar. Now, We’re going to see the names of nine kings here in the first two verses, and then another king a few verses later. And people, Christians, have tried to identify these kings. It’s very difficult. There may be a couple that we’ve identified. Some decades ago, they thought Amraphel was perhaps Hammurabi, King Hammurabi of Babylon. But he’s not. He… Hammurabi lived about 100. This is 120 years too early before King Hammurabi and Hammurabi’s code. So this Amraphel king of Shinar, Shinar’s Babylon. So it came to pass in the days. So this is about how long before Christ? This is somewhere between 1920 years and 1910 years before Christ. So almost 2000 years. In the days of this king of Shinar, Ariok, king of Elessar, Chedorlamor, king of Elam, entitled king of nations. And this king of nations, that’s Goyim in Hebrew. And that’s their typical word for Gentiles. So the king of the Goyim. And I wonder whether or not that land is where Israel eventually got their word for the nations, for the Gentiles. And back then, that might have been the name of a region, Goyim, and eventually that word came to mean the nations or the Gentiles. So perhaps it should say king of Goyim instead of king of the nations. Verse 2, that they made war. These first four kings, and just for example, this Ariok king of Elessar, He might be a king named Ariuk that we know from the 18th century before Christ, these Mari tablets where we have King Ariuk, A-R-R-I-Y-U-K. So we might be able to identify some of these, but it’s unclear. Anyway, these first four kings made war with Bera, king of Sodom, Bersha, king of Gomorrah, Shinab, king of Adma, Shemabar, king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela, and that is Zohar. Now, Chedorlamor had subjugated these five kings, Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighbors. He had subjugated them, levied a tribute against them. They had to pay him every year. They had to answer to him. They These five kings, Sodom and Gomorrah and crowd, they got angry, probably somewhat like our Boston Tea Party. And they said, hey, we’re not going to pay taxes to you guys anymore. And they rebelled against Chedolamor. And so Chedolamor got his allies, four kings from the east, and they said, oh, yeah, well, watch this. And they came down and they were going to show who was in charge. Verse three, all these joined together in the valley of Siddam, that is the salt sea. So in the centuries after the flood, when the waters were subsiding, a very low area, which we call today the Dead Sea, and there was no outlet for the Dead Sea. And as water would flow into it, it would evaporate, but all the minerals would stay and become more and more dense and Similar to our Salt Lake in Utah. And you go there and you float on top of the water. And women take the mud and put it on their face and all. It’s a little strange. But back then they called it the Salt Sea. Even then. And so these all joined together in the valley. So you have nine kings. Now they’re called kings. But we shouldn’t think of them as kings of like France or Germany. Because those areas are too large with too vast populations. It’s like the king of Sodom and the king of Gomorrah. It’d be a city-state, only a small city-state. The population of the earth was still just getting started. And so there were significant numbers, but they weren’t tens of thousands of people in their cities or hundreds of thousands or armies of millions. We can’t think like that. These are villages that we call, maybe today, maybe Boulder would be the biggest of these five kings of Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, anyway, probably not nearly the size of Boulder. When did this happen? You know, we can call this really the first real world war, right? Nine kings at war. The first real world war won Right here, as far as the historical records indicate. And so when did our modern World War I, what year did it start? 1914, right? So what year is this back then? Well, it’s somewhere between 1910 and 1920 B.C. So we can just, just for a rough estimate and make it easy to remember, we can say this was 1914 B.C. and the modern World War I was 1914 A.D. Okay, now verse 4. Twelve years they served Chedolamor, and in the thirteenth year they rebelled. We’ve talked about the first appearance of different words in the Bible. And sometimes the first appearance of a word seems to indicate its significance or its symbolism. And here’s the first appearance of the number, the word thirteenth. Thirteenth as in ordinal. And then we also have the first occurrence of 13 without the TH. That comes later in Genesis. So this first occurrence of 13th is associated with rebellion. In the 13th year, they rebelled. And in the Bible, sure enough, 13 seems to be a symbol for rebellion. And in our Genesis, the fall study, which we have available in albums, we covered that. Why? Why would Friday the 13th be considered an unlucky day. Why is the 13th? Why do we have skyscrapers without 13th floors? It’s just uncanny. And around the world, why is this fear of the number 13 in existence? And the Bible does seem to put a stress on 13 and rebellion. And that’s sort of a fun topic. Anyway, the number 13, its first occurrence is when Ishmael was 13 years old when he was circumcised. And Ishmael was Abram’s son after the flesh. So that also has a negative connotation. It’s interesting that the word 13 appears in the Bible 13 times in 13 verses. At least that’s in my New King James. Check that. Chapter 5, verse 5. In the 14th year, Chedorlamer and the kings that were with him came and attacked. The Repham in Ashtaroth, Carname. The Zuzum in Ham. The Emum in Shavav, Kiriatham. Now these Emum guys, they were called giants. The Anakim by Moses and the Moabites in Deuteronomy chapter 2. They were called giants. And we talked about the giants, the Nephilim that lived before the flood. And when Moses wrote Genesis 6… He said there were giants in the land in those days and afterward, before the flood and after. And sure enough, in the history of the Old Testament, we know that there were giants in the land of Canaan, which is interesting, but we’ve talked about the implications of that. Okay, verse 6. And the Horites in the mountain of Seir, as far as El-Paran, which is by the wilderness. These Horites, a tribe of, were eventually kicked out of Seir by the descendants of Esau. Then they turned back and came… Now this is… Let’s see. This is… They’ve got a battle going. And… Excuse me. I’m going to switch the texts I’m using here. Okay. Verse 7. Then they turned back and came to En Mishvat, that is Kadesh, 4 Kings against 5. Now the valley of Siddam was full of asphalt pits, and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled. Some fell there, and the remainder fled to the mountains. Then they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their provisions and went their way. They also took Lot, Abram’s brother’s son, who dwelt in Sodom, and his goods and departed. Then one guy escaped… And he told Abram, the Hebrew, for he dwelt by the terebinth trees of Mamre, the Amorite, brother of Eshcol and brother of Aner. And they were allies with Abram. So Abram had some allies among the Canaanites and he found out that his nephew had been kidnapped. And should he seek help from these Canaanites who were not believers? Sure, if unbelievers want to help me in various endeavors, I’m often thrilled to receive their help. What’s that book, The Art of War by Zeng Tzu from centuries before Christ? And he writes in there that if you can use your enemy’s resources, like if you can get wheat from your enemy to feed your army, if you get a thousand bushels of wheat, that’s the equivalent of 6,000 bushels of wheat, of your own wheat, because it’s your enemy’s wheat. And if you could use your enemy’s resources, we’ve had the ACLU defend pro-lifers who’ve been charged with disturbing the peace or whatever. And normally they win the case. So we despise their wickedness, but use their resources toward our own ends. Well, So he had some allies. And, you know, it’s sort of like in the Old West. Either you hang together or you hang separately. So they said, let’s work together here, guys. We have a problem. Verse 14. Now, when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his 318 trained servants. You see that number? How awesome it is. Imagine what a successful businessman Abram must have been to have 318 trained servants who were born in his own house. And he went in pursuit as far as Dan. So he went out after these guys and they were armed. Abram was not a pacifist. David was not a pacifist. They believed in self-defense and in arming yourself. If they lived today, they’d be members of the NRA. Only they’d say the NRA is a little too squishy for them. He had 318 that he could arm. How many in his whole household? You know, he wouldn’t arm the women or the children or the elderly. And these were 318 trained servants, implying he might have had others that never quite got trained. And they were ones who were born in his own house, not ones he had purchased. Wow. He could easily have had over a thousand people that he was responsible for in his household, in his extended household. So when we see him and Lot were having difficulties, it’s not like, you know, he had his six people in his family and Lot had three and they were… It was two… It was two villages… that had been trying to coexist. So verse 15, Abram divided his forces against them by night. He and his servants attacked them and pursued them as far as Haba.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hey, this is Nicole McBurney jumping into the broadcast. We are out of time for today, so be sure to come back next Thursday to hear the rest of this study. To find other resources and Bible studies, be sure to go to kgov.com. That’s kgov.com.
