051: Dev Ramcharan - I Have Made You A Father Of A Multitude Of Nations

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   welcome to the good christian talks podcast i’m levi and i’m chris thank you so much for joining us this week on this podcast we select one talk a week to help each one of us get the bible in our daily news feed we post at the start of each week for you to listen with a short intro beforehand to kind of set the stage for the talk here about to here and now let’s hear more about this week stock talk this week we’re listening to a class that was given by brother devram tran if the toronto western pleasure this past june twenty nineteen at the rocky mountain bible school his overall series topic is abraham believed god uh this particular class is class three which is i will make you a father of a multitude of nations first of all brother death is just a really fun speaker to listen to he has a very engaging style that even comes through over just audio but if you’ve ever been to a series that he’s taught in person he has a very personal style that he has if you talk with him individually all the way to if you’re sitting in the audience as he has he teaches his class so he’s a really fun to listen to his a couple fun little tangents in this class that are enjoyable to listen to what really jumped out at me about this class in particular was that he’s looking at the promises to abraham and in this particular one he’s looking at the covenant when god first makes the promise to abraham and promises the seed that would come through sarah

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   ann that topic is something is is central to our beliefs and is one of those things that has been spoken about a lot but at the same point as you’re looking at it it’s one of those things where because it’s such a central piece i feel sometimes everyone just assumes that we know what that story is and what brother dave is doing in this class in particular is looking at all the little details that goes into that covenant that god made and the vision that he showed to abraham when he made that those promises to him and i personally found a lot of really neat little parallels and and lessons that brother dad pulls out and we used together really well that was a really exciting to listen to so really excited to uh to share this one the entire series is really really good so will be making sure to get that up on the extended talks podcast thank you for everyone for your patience as we’ve gotten more and more of those published and gone live i know a lot of people who really enjoy being able to listen to an entire series in a really easy way so we’re going to try to make the effort to get more of those out on a more timely fashion were actually coming up believe it or not on a year of doing the podcast uh the next episode we publish will be fifty two which will be fifty two weeks of doing it so uh leave on i have a have a special little one that we’re going to do other kind of commemorate that so so

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   look for that coming out pretty soon is always thank you so much to everybody who sends in suggestions for the even just the comments of support and encouragement for how much you appreciate it uh it means a lot to us to know that people are out there enjoying it and is is helping them and something they find beneficial to other walk just to get a little bit more bible study in their in their daily lives if you have anymore suggestions feel free to send him in if you know anyone who would think might enjoy listening to the podcasts you know please share it with them whether it’s through social media sending text anything like that to to help people find it it’s growing faster and faster which is amazing to see and we’ll talk more about that in the in this little special episode we got coming up so with that will turn it over to our brother devram stand for his third class from abraham believed god titled i have made you a father of a multitude of nations well good morning brothers and sisters major decision this morning i’m going to put my watch in front of maine which is almost indecipherable that way um and that i would be able to keep time and arrived in the room five minutes late things have not gone well a little bit of additional information that was supplied justin in discussion yesterday great points by people but one that stuck out that i want to share with you is this lot makes this progression from pitching his tent toward sodom to dwelling in sodom and

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   eventually lot is a city councilor in sodom sitting in the gate of the city so what you have is a traveling sojourning pilgrim who becomes a landed immigrant or what you call a resident alien a resident alien and then he becomes a city councilor and one of the reasons that was suggested was perhaps the same kind of brokered arrangement that occured between abraham abraham at the time and those people around him from the amala kites who became his well his allies in the war that occured they had a mutual self defense a treaty or arrangement with each other occured likewise in lots case lot must have had quite a retinue of people remember from the group of people that abraham had three hundred and eighteen were chosen born in his house as servants with enough time to grow up to full adult adulthood to become fighting men trained fighting men and there were so many of them in both families and the extended retinues that the land could not support them so it could have been a sizable group of people that lot had with him lot his immediate family and then and extended group of servants which if we said conservatively was three or four hundred people only three survived attic lisha only three only abraham was thinking as he negotiated with the angel that represented yahweh will look let’s go with a ridiculous number if there’s ten if there’s ten we will you spread the city and in all of his compassionate empathy the angel says yes if there are ten knowing full well there aren’t even that many there aren’t even that many right and so that descent into

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   sodom led to the loss of a generation i want to tell you a little bit about my generation just briefly i am the end of the baby boom generation a generation that experienced decade by decade exponential increases in prosperity as their parents and grandparents after the second world war rebuilt and saw flourishing economies around the west we were a generation that was used to getting new things all the time there was so many kids born in that generation they couldn’t build the schools fast enough you may recall that those of you of that generation you’d be bust all over the place because the schools were full up and people moved out and out built the suburbs built their homes with the picket fences and the prosperity increased and increased and increased to the point that the generation that was raised in that millions of prosperity became used to it being the norm they should always have what they want they should always be able to get in a choir whatever they desire credit became so cheap but something our grandparents could never ever have imagined became reality for us you didn’t have to have money to get things you just needed a credit card or you needed whatever kind of account you needed to have so that out of it with no money you could purchase things there by putting the entire western world economy based on that system no longer built on gold bullion sitting in a room in a vault somewhere but just based on printing more money printing more money rebuild a pack of cards of an economy and our lives likewise for us is baby boom kids growing

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   up we without ever wanting to without realizing what we were doing had the life of lot most of us now many didn’t and many of those are here and many of those have their children in the truth but for the rest of us me included we had one foot planted in the equation the other foot planted in the world and it’s entertainment luxury ‘s and its travel in all the accoutrements come with the prosperous life of that generation in this world many of us have been leveraged with debt up above our eyeballs we can barely breathe but you would never know it looking at us parents know you don’t that’s our generation what did our kids see what did the children see they saw mommies and daddies with one foot planted in sodom one foot planted in the equation

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   what do you reckon we were going to choose eventually what was going to be the easier choice for them and for most of us we’ve experienced children who walked away from the truth into the world many of them irretrievable so that when we go to our children and say god is going to destroy this city they look at us as if we’re making a joke we are like lots those of us that are like what i just described so these are not stories about people walking around in robes speaking the poetry of the kings english in the period of shakespeare and company these are real life people making decisions that it looks like they were common sense decisions at a moment in time but we’re entirely and completely spiritually the wrong things to do and their children paid the price so lockmix dot progression is really a kind of a regression isn’t it a retrogression he goes deeper deeper down now something that i i can say with honesty is the generation after us has it right in many many ways saving raising their children much closer to their kids much more absolutely involved in keeping them engaged with brothers and sisters with their children with activities around the closure as much as possible first for us there was that thing we thought was a kind of balance between the fund of this world in life of this world thinking we could survive it unscathed and the life of the equation never fully addressing the disconnects and inconsistencies of that half worldly half ecclesia spiritual life the struggles that we many of us is boomers will take to the day that we die or the days

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   of the kingdom comes but it is our struggle and we have to keep on struggling just keep in the truth no matter how small the remnants are vestiges of what is left of our families after all the mistakes that we’ve made and so chapter fifteen begins or chapter fourteen goes into that part of the narrative the talks about the end of the battle everything being brought by abraham that was taken away from sodom and it says verse eighteen melchizedek king of salem brought forth bread and wine and he was the priest of the most high god wow man whose name means king of righteousness who cities davis piece so he’s the king of righteousness and the king of peace as a consequence so so what do we have altogether we have the king we have righteousness we’d have to piece we have a priest we have LL young the most high god the title seems to imply that god is a being amongst around whom are other high beings but he is the most tired that goes god is with the angels now is with the angels and the lord jesus christ like keith is the most high god in the story we have bread we have wine we have a blessing we have deliverance from enemies so many echoes the reminders of the lord jesus christ the atonement that was achieved by his father and by him safe in the middle of all of those elements of the gospel of how god has engineered and worked out salvation that he might save those of mankind willing to respond brings forth bread and wine and so the commentaries say outside well

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   it’s it’s just a regular meal there’s nothing that associates this with uh with with the bread and wine of christ of course that’s that’s stupid exposition isn’t it this is it is a pre echo it points forward paul writing the hebrews talks about the fact that melchizedek was made like unto christ notes it doesn’t say christ was made like unto him it says he was made like unto christ in his priesthood his priesthood so so this man without father without mother etc in other words god is the parents of the lord jesus christ ultimately this individual comes and he blesses him hey greater bless is salesa no abraham had just beaten a bunch of incredibly powerful kings like gideon he had come rolling by night time with his two little teams and conquered undelivered his brother and all of the people that were with him resubmits and humbles himself before melchizedek and the point that the writer in the hebrews make says melchizedek priest was superior and prior to the levitical priesthood he was outside of the law and above the law the levites were in the loins of abraham generations yet to come and they with abraham bowed down to an humble themselves before melchizedek king of righteousness king of peace who is analogous to christ outside of the law and superior to the levitical priesthood and all of the rituals and all the details that are associated with their work he is above all of that as was melchizedek and abraham your forefather acknowledged that when he submitted to be blessed by the one greater than him milk is a deck so it goes on and it says

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    he blessed him and he says blessed be abram of the most high god and i love really is by by the most high god possessor of having a nurse and blessed be the most high god which has delivered zain enemies into thy hand and so melchizedek articulates the right balance no it’s not that you were a superior general who are able as a guerilla warrior to outfox superior forces using your mind god delivered you god delivered jam into your hands god made you victorious it was god who had the victory and it says he gave him a tenth of all times of all no brother john carter and his commentary on hebrews writes the following words abrams oath this is the author is about to make in the presence of melchizedek this is what it’s about it is clear from abraham ‘s words that in the worship of god in company with melchizedek abraham had made a solemn dedication of service to god some intimate words had passed between priests and worshippers and some great resolve registered the meeting had set abrahams course and giving him the moral earnestness to follow it through it meant refusing the overtures of the king of sodom and offering of repulse to him that could make him an embittered enemy when abraham rejects sodom ‘s offer of goods effectively he’s put himself in this world in an absolutely tenuous position but he did it he nailed his spiritual colors to the mass and so it says the king of sodom said unto abraham give me the people and take the goods to yourself because that’s what the custom was that is what was done

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    add think of what that meant all the money all the gold all the silver all the jewelry associated with the people that had come back whatever they had taken in the way of flocks herds

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    all of that which which was fast wells would have been abrahams think of the material security in this world does that would have given him in the world what would what would you have done with that decision abraham makes a different decision this is what april says high and lifted up my hand unto yahweh L alien

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    possessor of heaven and earth so he makes this decision to the wicked adam he makes this decision all about his god by doing that he’s not just insulting the king by saying no to his offer of money he saying to the king your gods are nothing i have made a vow to the one existing god who is the possessor of everything so now now what he has done is an egregious insult pagan king telling him your religion is all rubbish everything you believe is nothing my god is everything and i have promised him i will not take a thing from you not one thing it goes on and he says but i will not take from us thread even a shoe latchet that i will not take anything that is yours remember you are the proud horrendous king of sodom i just foreigner looks at you and says i want nothing of you at all not even a piece of string i want nothing to do with you what would you think how safe would abby mann dot net and after you were over the shock because nobody had ever talk to you like that in your life not once not even once what would you be thinking to do to that man after abraham says what he says abraham then it says lest val should say i have made abraham rich because uh salt i made him rich we made him rich save only that which the young man have eaten the portion of the men which went with me other who’s made name means boy esco your river levee esco whose name means cluster and memory whose

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    name means strikes then there’s a quiet did abraham has some separation between the event and where he is at the beginning of genesis fifteen enough time for him to become anxious enough time for him to realize the potential implications of what he said to the king of sodom the level of safety and security that he has enough time to reflect on if i had only taken that money think of what i could do with it god says division

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    don’t be afraid abraham i of your shield can we get away the sentiment about melchizedek had said when he said to him less would be god who has given you the victory who put your enemies in your power who delivered them into your hands i am your shield don’t be afraid why would he say don’t because he was afraid men and women of faith have times when they are afraid it doesn’t mean you’re not a believer or or brother or sister in christ of substance it just means you’re human and he was afraid zygarde

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    i am your shield then he goes on and he says and you know all that money you walked away from i am your exceeding great reward

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    and what does that would reward mean would reward means payment of contract it convened salary compensation benefits higher reward the word is used in different places in chapter thirty one verse eighteen jacobs told the ring street shelby zai higher and the word higher is reward numbers eighteen verse thirty one and you shall eat it every place in every place ye and your households for it is your reward for your service in the tabernacle of the congregation so the reward the eating of the sacrificial offerings well that was the reward of the men who had that benefit same word and the word is also used in zachariah that terrible passage where it says so they weighed for my price with price thirty pieces silver

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    and some one twenty seven verse three talks about the fruit of the womb is his reward is everything you lost everything you walked away from in this world so that you could be faithful to me i will compensate you for abraham said abraham said behold to me you’ve given no seed and somebody born in my house is my air behold the word of yahweh came under him saying this man shall not be your air did he that you’ll come forth out of line own bowels she’ll be design it’s night time tell the stars that doesn’t mean speak to them bank teller tell the stars

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    and of course it’s it’s not possible to do that scientists today with the biggest telescopes can only mathematically infer how many stars there might be out there and they still don’t know you can’t count social your CD no this is the measure of a man this is a measure of us as believers tell us remember lot through the veil that obscured his vision lot meeting veil saw the land and it looked lovely to his naked human eyes but with the eyes of faith abraham here’s what he just said he doesn’t laughed cynically he believed in the lord and he counted it to him for righteousness now it wasn’t it wasn’t some kind of a quid pro quo you believe in me and then i’ll give you X amount of righteousness brother jim has been at pains to show us that there isn’t that kind of accounting that god is doing is if there’s a balance sheet that he works with like that it’s about face abraham believed him

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    dog gluten and made the choice to see him as righteous you counted that to him as righteousness the hebrew word has a means to think to regard to compute the greek equivalent is legit semi and it means to reckoned account to computer calculate she has all of those words sound like accounting but ultimately what happens is this god sees U his child trusting and believing in him no matter how desperate no matter how tenuous your circumstances maybe he loves you for it and he sees you as righteous for your face and for the sake of his son to whom you have connected yourself through baptism into his act of faith his crucifixion is death then through the process of obtaining the hope of the resurrection which was the result of the consequences of his perfect obedience in faith abraham believed god now this is the man of tremendous faith showing his face but still having a margin of needing to be shown and encouraged to believe with something more and so he says lord god i know that i shall inherit it just said he believed him but it’s just like gideon with this lease just just just give me something to hold onto i just thought does not say to him listen i just told you didn’t i help you in that battle that just occured he doesn’t do any of that god ‘s not like us it doesn’t rail witold angels do not real steady beat some where he is they put things in terms of what people did then now when people were going to have a very serious binding agreement whether we’re willing to stake their lives on the agreement

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    sacrificed animals they would take animals they would divide them down the middle now you might take a call for instance and you would literally split that animal from the nose all the way down to the tail area for a precise division into two pieces meeting both sides have an equal stake in this promise

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    then the halves of the animals would be organized on both sides the animals would be fires would be lit the people the men would come from either side of the dividing open area between the animals that have been split and would meet in the middle they would then after they had made the promise there covenant eats of the offerings together that was serious business very serious actively is if i break this agreement and you could just with the ellipsis dot dot dot workout the consequence so what does god do knowing that’s what happens culturally knowing that is what happens in this society in which they live and knowing also the pre echo to the lord jesus christ what he would do his accomplishment and what that would entail it says take me a hassle three years old the cheat codes three years old totaled over the young pigeon he took out jim aldisa divided them in the midst and they each piece one against the other but the birds divided he not there were too small and when falls and sorry falls came down upon the caucuses abraham drove them away and when the sun was going down a deep sleep phillip on abraham hello and horror great darkness fell apart do you set on the apron over shorty dice each will be a stranger in orlando and she’ll serve them four hundred years but also that nation whom they shall serve will i judge afterwards so they come out with great substance dow jones go to my father ‘s and peace thou shalt be buried in a good old age but in the fourth generation

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    they shall come hit her again for the iniquity of the armor rights is not yet full when the sun went down and it was dark behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces so imagine the one man coming from the one end of those arranged sacrifices so that he could make his commitment to that promise that covenant who’s the one man the same thing that they saw in the wilderness the pillar of fire the pillar of cloud fiery thing i know that incredible glow and fire associated with god harry is jewel manifested in this this this this coming through demonstrating gods commitment to the covenant abraham doesn’t get to do that yet he does that effectively symbolically and chapter seventeen when god will say to him as for your part this is what you will do about effectively is is is abraham walking from his side through the sacrificial offerings agreeing with yahweh so that they both are together and disagreement no it says period of time abraham drove away the birds you remember that wonderful session we had last night or the eagles you will not soon forget that will you and that image of the end that dramatic image of the double headed eagle not easily forgotten eagles but the caucuses there will the eagles be gathered matthew would write god through matthew the exposure of the caucuses attracted the attention of hungry birds of prey but abraham kept watch and repeatedly drove them off suggestion has been made here was symbolized the frequent ignorant attempts that have been made over the centuries by gentile nations to thwart gods purpose with israel during the

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    long period that that nation has been like a slaughtered carcass in a figure abraham has continued to keep watch over his own israel continues to be a nation beloved for the father ‘s sake the symbolism the symbolism of daniel four verse twelve where again the birds of heaven symbolize the polyglot that’s multilingual multilanguage nations of the world appears to support this interpretation and then he he points uh to some other cross references we can look at and of course is matthew twenty four it was twenty eight uh there’s also habakkuk one versus sixty eight which brother roger showed us last night and also deuteronomy chapter twenty eight verse forty nine so abraham driving away the birds is like the effect of the promises as a protective canopy to some degree through the ages over the jewish people horror of great darkness if you if you are a jew today you might look at that and see something which interpretatively reminds you of the holocaust which was a horror of great doctors and then the torch the furnace would have different echoes for you but for us as bible students christadelphians in a room together horror of great darkness well it could be typical of the darkness which which which isn’t descended over the land on the day of the crucifixion as christ was dying on the cross david uses the same word translated horror in some fifty five verse four where he says the terrors of death of falling on me horror great darkness it could also refer to the fact that the falling asleep the darkness is going to entail death resurrection to life for

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    abraham and all those you see how god it is loving kindness and compassion beach abraham mary is his ideas and concepts that you can understand as a man leaving in his world at a particular point in time god doesn’t believe me because i said so he could have said that to be absolutely appropriate in jewish history but in this instance the gentleness be compassion the embassy he demonstrates to the to the one who is his friend who who is all of us all of us because it wasn’t just a levi ‘s over here in his loins we were in his spiritual noise as it were all the seed the adopted see the grafted in branch god has that same loving care for us where we are P well remove on then it says this eighteen same day the lord made a covenant with abraham saying device seed will i give this land from the river of egypt all the way to the river euphrates not lots of piece of land i’m going to give it to you and to your seed so there’s there’s there’s a sense of the scale of what is being given by god abraham now we’re going to skip chapter sixteen ’cause will look at that when we get back together tomorrow deal with the situation of abimelech but just a very very very quick and cursory glance at genesis seventeen going to five minutes worth of that when abraham was nineteen years old and nine yahweh appeared to abraham and sent it to him i am L shadai elsadig strikes yes mighty ones L O R I T one arrow strikes shadai the word should i is

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    founded on words breast shut i means breasts wondered means power bites request both of them are appropriate for your way both and both are engaged in the loving protection of abraham and his seed the nurturing loving mother leanness of god well where does the motherly instinct of women come from from gods from god does god created both male and female all the attributes that we have anything that is worthwhile in US comes from him so we shouldn’t be a total trouble to hear god referring to himself with a title that is talking about what we would associate with our mom ‘s and us as babies I M L shadai pizza he says to him walk before maine and bees out perfect jim kelly suggested walk before me could be translated literally walk as though you are in my presence zoe noah walked with god walk with me beetle perfect right and because we know what we are made of and we already think well that’s it stories over for me but but with perfect does not mean sit in las that that’s not what he’s talking about there’s not talking about sinlessness means that would be perfect has to do with blamelessness don’t be an individual who lives in the world like a sodomite like somebody who is from gomorrah

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    live in the world like someone who has faith ND you know you go to bible schools and they have a multitude of rules and regulations this one wisely makes it harder like law and grace lawyers richard richard richard right because then you know exactly what you have to do and how to get around the rules the more you have the better you get it by passing them but when the rules are do what you ought to do you are in vice because now you know well i have to act like a grown up right i have to behave in a in an orderly and responsible fashion that’s what this is like walk before me and being accountable responsible mature chase believer so he says i will make a covenant with you well didn’t he just make a covenant well what do you mean i will make a covenant with you is if one is already not made it must mean i will now implement the covenant taking it to that stage right now it’s it’s moving forward no it has been thirteen years since god last spoke to him or at least thirteen years since dish meals been around it’s a very long time isn’t it thirteen years now for you to be a matter of face continuing without that connection of the voice of god for thirteen years is is a measure of the face abraham he talks about multiplying his seat exceedingly as for maine these are the things that he’s going to be doing i’m going to make you a multitudinous seed you were going to be a father of not just

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    one nation that is multitudinous in itself but a multitude of nations so you’re going to be a father of gentiles no just your own descendants everybody is going to be your children who are tide to your seat i will stop there pick it up briefly tomorrow and continue forward thank you for listening to the good christadelphian talks podcast please subscribe for new episodes and leave a review and apple podcasts or whichever service you are listening from to help people find the show when they search for it if you enjoyed this talk share it on social media so other people can find it too for show notes and links to the talk that you just listen to visit our show page at anchor dot FM slash G C T we want to encourage everyone to share their thoughts from the talk this week on facebook or instagram where we’re at good christadelphian talks or on twitter where we’re at BCT underscore podcast if you know of a great talk we want to know about it to send a suggestion to good christadelphian talks at gmail dot com or messages on any of our social media platforms thank you for listening god bless and talk to you next week