"To Abraham and His Seed" 12   This is an edited version of the lecture titled, "To Abraham and His Seed," which was preached on December 29, 2007.   But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; but the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.   John 4:14       How to read the BiblePreviously we have examined the reason why God called out Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans and let him enter the land of Canaan, and how Abraham entered the land of Canaan as per the word of God. God told Abraham that He would make him a great nation (see Genesis 12:2). God also said to him, "And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). We have also studied about "a great nation" and "all the families" that are mentioned in these two verses. The fundamental purpose of God calling out Abraham from Ur of Chaldeans is recorded in the Bible. In accordance with this purpose of God, Abraham entered the land of Canaan, but he was distressed because no children were born to them. Eventually at his wife's request he went in to her maid they brought from Egypt, and got a son, Ishmael. First, let us think about the fundamental purpose of God creating us. In His creation of the world many things had been made. Man, the lord of all creation, whom God made in His image, is introduced in the Bible, but the man disobeyed God's word and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus God predestined a history of a nation, His secondly predestination. This predestination referring to the earth began, that is, the predestination referring to the heavenly kingdom the Jews had been waiting for. Because man ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,  a history of a nation was newly planned. We call this nation "Israel". Among Abraham's family, his son Ishmael foreshadows the history of Israel. We have studied about this before. We are now living in an age when God's promise is actually being fulfilled as it has been done in history,  God promised Abraham that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed, but Isaac, who was to be the ancestor of all families, does not appear until Genesis chapter 20. Rather, Isaac was still only a promise given to Abraham. Here we need to think about the differences between Genesis chapters 20 and 21. While it is important to carefully examine  the contents of Genesis chapter 21, we also need to pay more attention to how the situation changes before and after Genesis chapter 20.  Before we examine this, let us think about Abraham's life that begins to appear from Genesis chapter 12. In Genesis chapter 15 God makes Abraham a promise, in chapter 17 He does this once more, and in between these two chapters Ishmael is born. In addition, some events happen that seem to predict what will happen in the future. In chapters 18 and 19 Lot escapes from Sodom. In my opinion, these events that happen to Abraham are very similar to the sequence of the Old Testament that we are reading now. When I say "the sequence of the Old Testament", you may think of the order of the books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That is not what I mean. Among the words that Jesus said to His disciples is "[all things] which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets" (Luke 24:44). In other words, there are the writings of Moses and then there are the writings of the prophets. The writings of Moses, which are the books of the Bible from Genesis to Deuteronomy, record information regarding the nation of Israel, the norms of the nation, their receiving of the law, which was the basis of the norms of the nation, and the beginning of their founding a nation. Also written here is the prophecy that some day they would come to desire a king. (see Deuteronomy 17:14-20) The books of the Prophets, which come after the books of Moses, record the sufferings of the Israelites  and the blessings they would receive. These stories are written in the Old Testament, and if we read Genesis chapters 12 through 20, it looks like everything that the Israelites would experience is put into a family's history, though the order of the events are not all identical. I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of the Bible. When we go over to Genesis chapter 21 from chapter 20, we meet contents that are closely related with us who live in the Church age. This does not mean that we have nothing to do the contents of the chapters prior to chapter 20, since they are more closely related to the Old Testament. In Genesis chapter 21 Isaac is born, and his birth brings about conflicts between Hagar and Sarah. Sarah tells Abraham in no uncertain terms to drive out the maid (see verse 10). God also tells Abraham that he should listen to her voice (see verse 12). Accordingly Abraham drives out Hagar, and Hagar and Ishmael, who are driven out, take a skin of water, but it is used up. Hagar cries out and tells God that He should not let her see her son die. God tells Hagar that He will make Ishmael a great nation. Then God opens her eyes, and she sees a well of water. She goes to the well, fills the skin with water, and gives Ishmael a drink (see verses 15-19).Then around that time Abraham has a problem of his own concerning water. With the birth of Isaac comes along the problem with water. Isaac is born into this world, Hagar meets God when her skin of water is used up, and Abraham rebukes Abimelech because Abimelech's servants seized the well that Abraham had dug. Why did these events happen? This is very strange. In the Bible we read about an event, and then suddenly a seemingly unrelated event comes up. We understand that Hagar was driven out, because Isaac was born, but then what does this have to do with the well that Abraham had dug?  When we read these events in the Bible, we should not just gloss them over thinking that they do not contain any significant meanings, and that Moses simply dictated God's words. We need to apply our beliefs,  our knowledge on the flow of history  and our perspectives of history to what we read in the Bible to organize and understand what we are reading. We should feel that this is a responsibility we have when reading the Bible.   Ishmael persecutes Isaac. As I said earlier, Isaac does not appear until Genesis chapter 20. He appears in chapter 21. In Galatians chapter 4 it says, "[We], as Isaac was, are children of promise" (verse 28). This verse refers to the Church. The age before the announcement of the Church can be compared to the family of Abraham before the birth of Isaac. If we look at the whole Bible, we can see that Jesus was born, suffered, and died, and on the day of the Pentecost the Holy Spirit came upon the people there from which began the age of the Church. With a similar process, a son named Isaac is born into Abraham's family. Here a problem arises. From Genesis chapter 12 God repeatedly foretells that a son will be born. But when the son was born, it was not like everything was fine. Actually the family was in a big trouble.          When we look at the Bible from a human perspective, we may say, "That's too bad. Such an unfortunate event should not have happened in the family of Abraham, our ancestor of faith." This event that happened in his family foreshadows an event in the future. If we understand this event with human emotions and respect towards Abraham our ancestor of faith, Abraham as well as Hagar and Ishmael look pitiful to us. We should not read the Bible with this frame of mind. We have to read the Bible with the intention of finding out how accurately it was written and how precisely all these events had been planned beforehand. Let us read Genesis chapter 21 from verse 1.     And the LORD visited Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as He had spoken.   In Genesis chapter 18 verse 10, God promises Abraham, "I will certainly return to you according to the time of life, and behold, Sarah your wife shall have a son." And in chapter 21 verse 1 it says, "And the LORD visited Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as He had spoken." Here it says repeatedly, "As He had said," and "as He had spoken." We can see even in these short expressions that the birth of a son to Abraham and Sarah is not much like the birth of a son to us after we get married. The birth of Isaac was promised by God to Abraham's family, and it was fulfilled in accordance with the word of God. The bible says that God spoke to them as He had said, and God did as He had said. The birth of Isaac is the image of the birth of Jesus. As God had said, He spoke to the Israelites, and when He did to them as He had said, Jesus was born through the body of a virgin in Bethlehem in the land of Judah. We believe it as the truth that the history of the whole Bible has been fulfilled as it was written, that is, as God had planned. This is the way God has spoken to us through the history of Israel.       For Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him. And Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him?hom Sarah bore to him?saac. Then Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Now Abraham was one hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. And Sarah said, "God has made me laugh, and all who hear will laugh with me." She also said, "Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? For I have borne him a son in his old age." So the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the same day that Isaac was weaned.  (Genesis 21:2-8)   Everything is fine up to this passage. A problem arises after this. Verse 9.   And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, scoffing.   When there are two brothers in a family, do you think it natural for the older child to be jealous of the younger one, or to scoff at the younger one because he is from a step-mother? Before this happened and Ishmael was born, Sarah asked Abraham to take her maid and let her bear a son through him. In the Bible it says, "And Abram heeded the voice of Sarai" (Genesis 16:2). The son born from a maid scoffed at the son born of the promise.   When we examine this event in the light of the history of the Church, we can find the mystery had been hidden here from ages and from generations. The mystery was the predestination of the one body, the Church that had been hidden in God before the creation of the world. Our ancestor Adam listened to his wife Eve, and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then their eyes were opened and knew they were naked (see Genesis 3:1-7). Because of this accident God predestined a nation in this world, which was different from the Church that God had in His mind in the first place. That nation is Israel (see Genesis 3:15). When the fullness of the time came, a child was born in Israel as it had been said, "For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given" (Isaiah 9:6). Israel hated Him and crucified Him. When the Holy Spirit rested upon those who followed Jesus, the Church was announced and its history began. The Jews persecuted the Church in the early days of the Church. This great history was revealing little by little through the history of Abraham's family. What is it like looking at the Bible as an individual who believes in the Bible? There was a time when we merely knew the name of Jesus Christ, and lived knowing only the name of God but not His true nature while declaring proudly the fact that we have been part of this religion even before we were born. However, just as the birth of Isaac through Sarah is a clear historical fact, so too was the certainty of our belief in the blood of Jesus Christ that He shed on the cross and the change that took place in our hearts. When this change came to us, we were full of joy, loved to read the Bible, and if we did not read the Bible, we felt frustrated. And then we begin to torture ourselves. We find we have great conflicts in our hearts, and even say to ourselves, "I have assurance that I was born again through the word of the Bible, but why do I have these troubles?" What we firmly believed was the fact that God had forgiven our sins when we got saved. That does not mean that we have completely forgotten about all our sins. When we come to believe the fact that God took everything upon Himself through the blood of Jesus, and this has become the answers in our hearts, our conscience becomes as sharp as the blade of a sword towards sin. We have never had this sensitivity before. Have we ever been more sensitive against sin than the time right after we were born again? Since the word of God was planted in my heart, the more I read the Bible, the more clearly I see the status of my mind. This kind of life makes us worried about our daily sinning. We sin because we are still under the control of our fleshly desire. Because of this matter, some people become doubtful about their salvation. So they begin their life of faith with an aim to end this struggle. However, this struggle does not have its ending. It is with us as long as we live in flesh. As the child of the maid scoffed at Isaac, our flesh attacks our conscience. Our conscience which has become sensitive to sins is struggling. As Paul testified, "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:24), so are we to do.        Cast out this bondwoman and her son.Let us read the following passage. This passage gives us the solution.   Therefore she said to Abraham, "Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, namely with Isaac." And the matter was very displeasing in Abraham's sight because of his son. But God said to Abraham, "Do not let it be displeasing in your sight because of the lad or because of your bondwoman. Whatever Sarah has said to you, listen to her voice; for in Isaac your seed shall be called.  (Genesis 21:10-12)   Here is the answer. "Cast out." No mercy is found here. Sarah seems to be a heartless woman. Earlier she had asked Abraham to get a son from her maid because she was not able to bear a son, but now she is asking him to drive out her maid and her son because she bore a son of her own. If this story were to be made a movie, the audience would be on Hagar's side. Out of human compassion people might say, "How could Sarah do this to Hagar?" The Bible, however,  refers to the spirit, which is irrelevant to our fleshly compassion, or fleshly thoughts. Thus if we look at the Bible from a human viewpoint, the Bible seems to often present the harshest of solutions. Let us read Galatians chapter 4 verse 28. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are children of promise. But, as he who was born according to the flesh then persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless what does the Scripture say? "Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for t

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