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"The Lord is Near" Last time, two Lord's Day mornings ago, we took vv. 10-27 which tell of the encounter between Abraham's servant and Rebecca at the well of Nahor. These next verses take the story forward and then recapitulate and conclude the entire story. v.30 We will learn subsequently that Laban was a man to notice first the expensive jewelry! v.57 This may have been in many respects an "arranged" marriage, but the consent of the bride was still required -- as it was in ANE marriage customs generally. v.59 We learn in 35:8 that this nurse's name was Deborah. She was to prove a faithful servant to the next two generations of the family, dying finally in Jacob's household. v.60 For Rebekah's family, this was a conventional blessing. For the reader of Genesis, the words are much more powerful, echoing as they do God's promise to Abraham (cf. 22:17). v.63 "To meditate" -- The verb is found only here and so the translation is not certain. But the early versions (the LXX esp.) took the verb this way and a similar form can mean that and no one has a better idea. v.65 The veil was a badge of betrothal and marriage -- the bride was presented to the groom veiled. But it was used much more freely and much less often than, for example, in modern Islam. v.67 "Into Sarah's tent" -- It would have been improper for her to have been brought to Isaac's tent before the wedding, but bringing her into Sarah's demonstrated to everyone the place she would have in the family. The most important love, the strongest and the best love, is the love that follows marriage, which [love] Hollywood will never understand. Last time we treated the account of the servant meeting Rebecca at the well as a study in the providence of God, his sovereign rule and direction of all things, even the smallest things, so as to bring his holy purposes to pass in the world and in the life of all men. And that history is certainly a beautiful demonstration of that! But the entire history of this faithful and devout servant's seeking and finding a wife for Isaac is also and just as much the demonstration of the nearness of the Lord to his people and of their sense of and reliance upon that nearness. If the doctrine of divine providence, the sovereign rule and control of all things by Almighty God, produces in us such a sense of the majesty and transcendence of God and so the distance of God from us, his being high above us and occupied with the affairs of the entire universe at once, we are given this counterpoise. If God's absolute rule over all things might lead us to believe that it is futile to appeal to him for help and comfort because all is eternally fixed in the divine mind and nothing can occur but what he has determined to bring to pass according to the purpose of his will, we have this other emphasis on the active presence of God with his people as a corrective. The vastness, the immensity of his rule does not make the living God a god who, as Carlyle put it, "sits on the hills, since the first sabbath, careless of mankind." He is so great, so far beyond our power to comprehend, that this God, our God, the living God, is not only in direct control of absolutely everything that happens at every moment, everywhere in the furthest reaches of this cosmos, but he is also one who watches over Israel, and walks with his people, with the tenderest affection and interest. This point is beautifully portrayed in the three prayers of this servant that mark the turning points in the story. All of them are what the old writers used to call "arrow prayers." These are not the prayers that Daniel prayed, three times a day facing toward Jerusalem. These are not the prayers our Saviour prayed, early in the morning and late at night. These are not the prayers that a believer prays, morning and evening, when he offers to God the worship of his heart and asks those blessings of him that any faithful Christian seeks day after day. These are the prayers of the moment, the prayers called forth suddenly by something that happens or words that are spoken or an opportunity that develops. This is the prayer that Nehemiah prayed in the moment or two between the time the King asked him what he wanted and his reply. We have three such prayers of this good man in this narrative. The prayer he prayed at the well in v. 12 which he mentions again in v. 42 -- he had arrived at the well and was committing the opportunity to God. The prayer of thanksgiving and worship after Rebecca behaved as she did at the well, mentioned in v. 26 and again in v. 48. And, finally, the prayer of v. 52, the thanksgiving he gave to God in the presence of Rebecca's family, between their granting approval to the marriage and his bringing out the gifts to seal the agreement. God was so much a Presence to this good man, God's nearness so real and so constantly a matter of his thought and reflection, that it was the most natural thing for him to turn his concerns and needs, even those of the moment, over to the Almighty, and to honor his God for every happy development even in front of others. The living God was too near to him for him to imagine that God was not always and in everything the one with whom he had to do and the knowledge of God's nearness was such a pleasure to Abraham's servant that it was natural for him to see his life in terms of this being with God, walking with God, and his communion and conversation with a present and interested heavenly Father. It is essential that we hold both of these stupendous convictions together -- that God is Ruler of all things and that he does what pleases him in heaven and on earth on the one hand and, on the other, that he is near to his people to care for them, to hear their prayers, to act on their behalf, and to receive their love and thanks in return. It is entirely characteristic of the Bible that we should have these two thoughts side by side and no thought whatsoever given to reconciling or harmonizing them. Both are true. And both must be known, both truths loved and kept in the front of a believer's mind. Last Lord's Day I was preaching for a PCA congregation in Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville, as you may know, is a town of rocket scientists. One of the men in the church told me that he often says to people, "and, yes, I am a rocket scientist!" The Redstone Arsenal is there, where Werner Von Braun came with his scientists to begin the American space program after the Second World War and, for years, NASA has been there, the rockets that have taken the manned missions into space, all having been developed in Huntsville. There is a space museum there that I was taken to last Monday. Fascinating -- actual capsules from the Mercury and Gemini programs, enormous rockets standing upright or lying on their sides, pictures and memorabilia from various stages of space flight, moon rocks, and so on. But the piece de resistance of the museum is an IMAX film on the universe -- from the infinitesimally small vastnesses of the interior of the atom to the overwhelming distances of outer space. It is a gorgeous film and, for a Christian, I found it marvelously doxological -- a demonstration of the glory of God however little that may have been the intention of the filmmakers. At one point, the camera ascended from the square of St. Mark's cathedral in Venice until the entire city could be seen and then all of Italy and then all of Europe and then the entire world and so, it seemed, the camera continued to move upwards until the moon came into view with the world far beyond it, and then the planets and the solar system, and the Milky Way galaxy in which, -- you can say this but no one, no one can grasp this, in which there are 100,000,000 other suns like ours, the nearest of those other stars in our galaxy so far away that it would take 100,000 years at the speed of today's spacecraft to reach the nearest one -- and then the untold millions upon millions of other galaxies, many so vastly larger than our own as to beggar the imagination, until finally we had reached the outer limit of the universe as, so it is thought, today it can be measured. No wonder Calvin wished that all Christians might be astronomers. For if the power and wisdom of God are revealed in the cosmos he has made, how great, how great beyond the power of the human mind to conceive, must His power and wisdom be? And it is just as amazing, the facts just as overwhelming to the imagination, when the camera took us down into a drop of water and into a single cell in that drop of water and into its nucleus and down, down, down into that astonishing, breathtaking universe within the atom. Now, Calvin would say he wished all Christians could be astronomers and atomic physicists! God made all of this; he called these vastnesses into being by the mere utterance of his mouth. He spoke and it was so! He rules it all. And we, his highest creatures, are able to figure out the numbers by which to measure how great this cosmos is, but our minds are too small to comprehend them. If we think at all, we put our hands over our mouths so that we will not speak of things we do not understand, things too wonderful for us. [I say as an aside, that, while evolution was assumed in the film, perhaps the most revealing remark in the narration was at the point of the development of life from non-life when the narrator said simply that "somehow" it happened. Is it now becoming easier for the scientific community to except that they have been completely unable to suggest a plausible mechanism for biochemical evolution? We may pray and hope so!] And so, if we have our wits about us, and take note of what nature proclaims and Holy Scripture confirms, we stand in stupefied wonder, awestruck before the glory and majesty of God. Truly he is a God who inhabits eternity, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, who makes his angels winds and whose ministers are flames of fire. No one can shorten his hand or say to him, what have you done! Of this God who set the heavens in their places, "surely," as Isaiah says, "the nations are like a drop in the bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales...they are regarded by him as nothing...as worthless and less than nothing" (40:13-17) But only the Christian thinks that way. Only the Christian can think that way, for he knows, she knows, that the vastness of the universe does not leave man alone, small, nothing of consequence. For God is great enough to hold this immeasurably large, this infinitely complex universe in his hand and still care for each and every one of his children. Carl Sagan came to exactly the opposite conclusion. He would tell us how many billions and billions of stars there were and how many millions of light years they were separated from us. But for him that vast universe was empty of meaning because it was empty of God. The universe is all there is. That is what made the seeking of extra-terrestrial life such a moral, shall we say, religious crusade for Sagan. This is the theme, you are aware, of the new movie, "Contact," which is based on Sagan's novel. But, at the end of that novel, when contact is finally achieved with the aliens, when the heroine asks the alien to tell her the secret of life, "why are we here," the alien can only answer that he does not know either. And then he, or it, says to Jodie Foster, "We have found that this is the only thing that helps us to ease our sense of the aloneness in the universe, -- to reach out and connect with other intelligent life in the universe." In other words, without God, without a Creator, without a mind to give meaning to this immense existence, a Creator to make it in fact a creation, a ruler to give its history a purpose, we must now find some other meaning for ourselves. And, apparently, locating some others who are as befuddled as we are is the best we can do. Others share our predicament. As one reviewer put it, "a starving man will put anything in his mouth, even sawdust." But, not so Abraham's far wiser servant. He did not doubt that God made the universe and, had he known its vastness, he still would not have doubted it. Such is the glory of God, the maker of heaven and earth. But, he also knew that a God that great, that powerful, and that wise, was perfectly capable of ruling all that he had made and still leave time and energy left for each of those whom he made in his own image for fellowship with himself. Is the universe, as one review of "Contact" put it "an endless emptiness whose inhabitants search for companionship like children lost in some foreboding forest late at night"? Or, is it a home, where a wise and tenderhearted heavenly father watches carefully over his children and keeps them always close to himself? [Geocentrism? Astronomically? But theologically, of course! This is where God concentrates his attention, as the Incarnation of God the Son proves.] It is, the Bible says, a home -- an all the more impressive confession because, of course, the Bible does not mince its words in proclaiming as well the infinite transcendence of the holy God. It is a home, says the Lord Jesus Christ, who came into the world as a man to demonstrate that God cares for his children, loves them utterly, and could not possibly be more involved in their lives or more caring of their welfare than he is. It is a home, says the Holy Spirit, for God's children are never a hair's breadth removed from the God who promises to be with them wherever they go and promises to ensure that neither life nor death can separate them from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus their Lord. Is this not what our Savior said? When he left us and returned to heaven, did he not say, "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Christ, the God-Man would be wonderful beyond all words were He only present with us from time to time, say at the most critical junctures of our lives. It would be wonderful beyond all words, if you stop and ponder this, if Christ were present with only some of us and proved himself to us all by being with some. But He is present with all of us and all of the time. He is the personal spiritual friend, confidant, helper, guide, protector, and Savior of untold multitudes of souls. This is even more amazing than the vastness of the cosmos or the infinite complexity of the sub-atomic world that remains always and everywhere entirely under his control. How naturally Eliezer turns to him? How naturally he lays the issue of that day, of that moment in the Almighty's hands? How naturally he turns to the same God to offer his thanks and praise for help so readily given when sought? But what makes all of this so surpassingly wonderful is that the one who is so near, so close to this good man, always so available to him, is the One to whom, at that same moment, the entire universe and all of its parts and motions is present to view; is the One who is powerful enough to control every movement of every particle in every atom as well as the orbits of the planets and the spiraling of the galaxies. That God meets the old man at the well, hearing his prayer, helps him with his problem. That God pauses to receive the servant's thanks. And that God sees him safely home to Abraham his master. Lay the emphasis on both words in the sentence, pour into each word its entire universe of meaning: God is with us; and God is with us! This is the heart of our faith as Christians. No wonder our Savior should be called, Emmanuel. He came to show us that and how God is with us! Pascal said, "From his deepest foundations upward, man is born to think. His whole manhood, his whole duty to God and to man is simply to think about God and about man and about himself as he ought to think. That is the whole obligation, and merit, and dignity of man." [in Whyte, Thomas Shepard, p. 164] And here is where that thinking, that life-transforming thinking, is to begin. That God, the Maker of heaven and earth, is with us, is near us, to hear and to help us when we call upon him and walk with him. And, like this faithful and devout servant, if we will only think this all through and over again, and then live as we think, we shall be Christians in life, as he was, and shall know that happy nearness of the living God as he did. A few of you know the Dunstans, John and Rosemary. John is an elder in our Faith Presbyterian Church in Vancouver, BC They are English people who immigrated to Canada. I have always liked them very much, for their old-style piety; cheerful, devout, lovers of our Reformed faith as the truest human expression of God's glory, and raising their children to love and serve the God of their parents. Rosemary had cancer nine years ago, but was treated and enjoyed good health until the beginning of this last summer. One day in May, she became ill quite suddenly. They found brain tumors everywhere. On that first day, John began reading the psalms to his wife. One psalm for each day to mark the passage of her remaining days. They got to Psalm 62 and she died. Do you remember Psalm 62. It begins with a refrain that is repeated also later in the psalm.
And, then, this, at the end of that wonderful Psalm:
Everywhere man is lost for having forgotten that. He may glimpse now and again the greatness of God through what God has made [though he was but a vague impression of that majesty], but he does not understand that he may know that God, great as he is, and be loved by Him each day. Buddhism denies the infinite personal God; Islam denies that a man or woman may walk with Him in nearness and holy love. Secularism knows God not at all, either in his glory or his love. It can only say, that "somehow" life occurred in this world of infinite astonishment and wonder, and hope that someday we may find some others as bewildered as we are. But this universe is a creation and its chief purpose is that its Creator may be known by men. But among us, brothers and sisters, too many of us, too much of the time, know too little of his majesty or his nearness or both. That is what Abraham's servant knew and counting on that knowledge he lived his life bathed in the nearness of the living God to his own soul. And the record of that man's walk with God is a commandment and an invitation to us to do the same. Brothers and sisters, every day we do not, every day we do not live as this wise and good servant, we squander our greatest privilege as human beings, fail to live a truly authentic life, and miss that thing greater than the vastness of the cosmos or the infinite complexity of the atom -- the nearness of the living God to a sinful soul he loves! |
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