Those who fear the LORD are those who obey Him.  These are His servants--they fear Him and obey Him because He has loved them and they love Him in return.  He makes the work of their hands productive and provides sustenance for them to eat.  He gives them joy and satisfaction in the work that they do and the LORD's blessings will be poured out on them.  Let's note here that this is not the "prosperity gospel."  Jesus promises life is going to be hard for us during this life.  The world will hate us and we will have trouble and tribulation, but the LORD will be with us through it all and He will give us joy in the midst of trials.  He will give us peace in the midst of storms.  He will give us His comfort and blessing in the face of persecution.

The LORD promises that His people will be fruitful when it comes to fertility as well.  Barrenness was a sign for the curse in the Old Testament and large families were seen as a direct representation of how blessed a family was as men and women have little control over whether they get pregnant and if the baby comes to full term and is born healthy and survives.  The LORD controls these things that we have no control over.

The LORD wants to bless the People and the Land, starting with Zion (Jerusalem) and extending outward.  Why starting in Zion?  Because this is where He resides with His people--it is His City.  One day, this will be fully realized when the New Jerusalem comes down and heaven and earth will be one and there will be perfect peace, blessing, and prosperity across all the earth wherever God's people life that will pour out like a river of living water from Zion.

The Psalmist wishes long life on the people of God so that they may see their grandchildren and great-grandchildren if possible (and see them also fear the LORD).  Nothing is a greater blessing to a parent than seeing your children have a right relationship with God and seeing them raise their children to have a right relationship with God, but nothing is harder as a parent than seeing a child who you have raised in the nurture and admonition of the LORD reject everything they have been taught and refuse to raise their children in the truth.

The names of many kings are given here, but the gist of the story is that the king of Shinar (where the Tower of Babel was) is seeking to conquer and dominate the entire world.  He had gathered together with several kings from his region and they are marching west from their homes against the Land of Canaan to go to war with all the Canaanite tribes and kings.  Apparently, war always broke out among the Canaanite kings and someone as soon as the weather improved in the Spring time.  It was part of the changing of the seasons--everything started to become green and kings of the Canaanites went to war.

Normally, Abram wouldn't be bothered by this, but word comes back to him from the battle that his friends are in trouble and that Lot has been taken prisoner and all of Lot's possessions have been taken as spoils of war.  Abram puts together a raiding party (very small in comparison to the size of these armies) of 318 men, pursing the invaders as far as Dan (these are the northern-most reaches of the land of Canaan, though it will not be called Dan until the tribe of Dan moves up there many years later).

Suddenly, a mysterious figure appears in the story.  I wish I could spend much more time writing about Melchizedek today, but I need to focus more on Abram and Lot and how Abram seems to be starting to understand the Abrahamic Covenant a little better.  If you are interested in all the different times that he has been mentioned in my various journal articles though (sometimes explicitly mentioned in the passage and other times he comes up in explaining other passages), you can use this link to query the search feature on the website and find several articles, and I'm sure I will be writing more about him in the future as I get to Psalm 110 and the book of Hebrews.

After Melchizedek shows up, the battle seems to be miraculously won, and Abram pays tribute to Melchizedek, king of Salem, and Melchizedek blesses Abram and God Most High (El Shaddai), the God of Abram and he gives God the glory for delivering the enemies into the hands of Abram (not the other kings, but specifically into the hand of Abram).  This causes the other kings to want to pay tribute to Abram, but he refuses because he says that he will not let these kings take credit for the blessings that are going to come to him from the LORD through the Abrahamic Covenant.  No man is going to say that they made Abram and his family great--only the LORD is going to get glory for that.  Abram makes sure that his men are provided for, that his friends and allies got their portion of the spoils, and that Lot and his possessions are returned safely.  He took nothing else from the wicked Canaanites and made no alliance with them nor did he give them any indication that he would fight for or with them in the future.  It was clear when he left them that their business was concluded.  Abram finally seems to be understanding the covenant he lives under and applying the truth of that covenant to the way that he lives among a people who are not under that covenant.  He is "in the world, but not of the world."  He is relying on God for his provision and protection.  He's not going to live this out perfectly (none of us do), but we see a real change here from the last passage when he turned to Pharaoh and Egypt for protection and relied on his own cunning and lies to get him out of trouble, and ended up in even more trouble.  This time, he did what he knew what was right, even against overwhelming odds, and trusted God to work everything out for Abram's good and God's glory, and He did.  We should have the same kind of faith.

Last time we saw Abram deported from Egypt because he failed to reveal to Pharaoh that Sarai was his wife (not just his half-sister) and allowed Pharaoh to take Sarai as his own wife (though he was never able to consummate the union) and Pharaoh and his household became very ill because of her.  Now, Abram is back in the Promised Land, in the southern wilderness region called The Negev, which is correctly translated as The South here in this version.  When you read this, think of a dry, arid, wilderness area.  Typically the text wants us to consider not just the climate of the Land, but also of the person's heart, as we already discussed how this is probably an accurate representation of Abram's heart--it feels like a dry, arid, desert wilderness devoid of anything he felts close to (expect for his household, and even that is about to fracture and his nephew that was like a son to him is about to be taken away from him).

This is definitely not the best environment for raising lots of livestock.  Food and water would be scarce, but, since you're in the middle of nowhere, at least you wouldn't worry too much about the noise or smell being bothersome to neighbors or your livestock wandering onto your neighbor's property and eating their grain or grass, so, in another sense, this is the perfect place to raise livestock.  You just have to work really hard to keep them watered and fed.  There arises a dispute between Abram's herdsmen and Lot's herdsmen about this very issue and it was no small disagreement.  Things got so heated that Abram decided that they were too wealthy to live together any more--each needed their own parcel of land to tend to and to use for their livestock.  Seeking to avoid conflict, Abram gave Lot the choice of which land he wanted, and Abram would take whatever was leftover.  Lot's choice reveals much about the condition of his own heart as he only saw things in the physical realm--he saw the fertile Jordan River Valley and decided that was where he wanted to raise his flocks and herds.  There was lots of grass and water and plenty of towns for him to do business with.  However, it won't be long before Lot is no longer agrarian in nature and he becomes a city-slicker, pitching his tent towards Sodom and living its shadow, then we find him within its gates doing business and the next time we will see him, he is living within the city with a family--living among an extremely wicked and perverse people.

Abram would mostly live in the area of the Negev, but as we will see, the LORD will come back and remind Abram that despite this contract with Lot, the LORD's contact with Abram superseded it and all of the Promised Land belongs to Abram and his descendants--none of it now or ever in the future will ever belong to Lot and his descendants.  Lot only had eyes for the physical beauty of the river valley and Plain of Jordan, but the LORD protected Abram once again from the spiritual depravity that was there.  The New Testament will tell us that God used Lot as a prophet to the people of this region, but it seems like they did a pretty good job at "evangelism" themselves, especially because Lots daughters married men from the area and they were unwilling to leave when God told Lot is was time for him and his family to get out of town before fire and brimstone rained down on the cities of the Plain to destroy them.  Never again has that region fully returned to the beauty that Lot once saw there as it was compared to the beauty of the Garden of Eden when Lot saw it.

The LORD tells Abram to look around to the north, south, east, and west.  All of the land of the Canaanites would belong to Abram and his family one day.  In fact, there was much more land that the LORD would promise to Abram, but this particular promise of land would be for where the people that we know as ethnic Israel or the Jewish people would be give to live.  It would always be their land forever and ever.  They would be given dominion over much more land, but their allotments would come specifically from the Land of Canaan.  We should keep this in mind when thinking of geopolitics.  No one else has any right to the Promised Land--not even Christians or Muslims who have lived in the area for hundreds or thousands of years.  There is plenty of other land promised to Abraham for them to live in if they want to live within the area of promise and blessing (pretty much everything between the Mediterranean Sea on the west, the Red Sea to the south, and the Euphrates River to the east and north as far north as Damascus).  There is no such thing as "land for peace" negotiations--anyone trying to take Israel's land away from them does not want peace with Israel--they want to make God break His covenant with Israel.  We should be people who love and support that eternal covenant, and we should desire to be a blessing to the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as well as their spiritual descendants (though, again, being a spiritual descendant does not give you a right to what was promised to their physical descendant--we'll get to the conditional part of the promise to them later about blessings and staying in the land and not going into exile or slavery were all dependent on their obedience, but none of that came at this point.  For now, the promise made to Abram and his descendants was unconditional (and I believe still is, just like the promise of our redemption and salvation is unconditional because it is not based on the goodness of the men receive the grace and mercy of God, but on the goodness of the God extending that grace and mercy to those who don't deserve it, never can deserve it, and never will deserve it.)  We need to not treat this covenant with Abram any differently than we would want the LORD to treat His unconditional covenant with us.

The next thing that we see after Abram receiving these great promises about Descendants (and One Descendant in particular), Land, and Blessings is a trial or test to see if Abram will hold fast to those promises and believe in them and the God who made them or if he was going to depend on his own sensibilities and things like the wealth and power of earthly kingdoms.

There was a severe famine in the Land of Canaan so that Abram felt it was necessary to leave and take refuge in Egypt to be under the care and protection of the Pharaoh there.  Nowhere do we see the LORD command Abram to go down to Egypt to take refuge, so I have to assume the conversation didn't happen (we will see another time when the LORD sends His people down to Egypt on purpose to get them away from the Canaanites, and He was willing to allow them to be slaves in Egypt because allowing them to be free among the wicked Canaanites would have been more harmful to them and His gospel plan).

When Pharaoh sees Abrams wife, Pharaoh desires to take her as his own wife, for she was very beautiful, even at an old age, and the LORD gave her supernatural beauty beyond her years and favor in the eyes of Abram and leaders of other nations.  When questioned about his relationship to her, Abram lied saying that she was (only) his sister--she was his half-sister, but he knew the nature of the question and was trying to conceal the fact that he was married to her to save himself.  He'll tell us why he lied later.  This tendency to lie to get oneself out of sticky situations, especially when it comes to being married to a beautiful woman is something that will continue to plague Abram and his family, for we see it repeated in his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob (they probably learned it from Abram and passed it on to future generations who were watching them).

Abram didn't just lie in the moment.  This was premeditated.  He knew this was a real possibility, because he knew the Pharaoh took the best things for himself, including women that he wanted to add to his haram.  So, Abram talked to Sarai ahead of time and told her, "See now, I know that you are a beautiful woman to look at. 12 It will happen that when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ They will kill me, but they will save you alive. 13 Please say that you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake, and that my soul may live because of you.”

Out of fear for his own life, Abram is willing to sacrifice his wife to a pagan king--the very wife that was part of the promise that Abram received.  Now, perhaps he thought in some twisted way this was okay because God would have to save her, but lying is never okay.  We should obey God and trust Him with the consequences.  Abram is in this mess to start with because it seems like he's trying to use his own intellect and reason to figure a way out of something that probably is judgment from the hand of God on the Canaanites.  God certainly had the ability to keep Abram and his family and herds and herdsmen safe in Canaan if that's what he wanted Abram to do, but Abram's children and grandchildren are going to learn from this pattern and run to the Philistines and the Egyptians every time there is a famine, just like Abram did when various famines would arise in the Land.  It will get to the point where the LORD will have to command them to never turn back and go that way to depend on Egypt ever again.  This is still a temptation that the Jewish people face--will they rely on God as their Shield and Defender and their Provider and Portion, or will they look to man to be these things that only God can be for them?

Things happened almost exactly as Abram expected when he arrived at the border of Egypt (which is good reason for him to have never set foot in Egypt).  He and Sarai tell their rehearsed lies, and she is taken to be a part of Pharaoh's haram.  Pharaoh treated Abram well for her sake and gave him all kinds of sheep, cattle, male donkeys, male servants, female servants and camels.  It would seem this is where Abram's great wealth originated from (it was God's plan for the wealth of Egypt to be transferred to His people, but He did that through the story of the Exodus where the Egyptians were ready to empty their national treasuries to get the Israelites to leave).

For the sake of Sarai, Abram, and even the Egyptians the LORD afflicted the men of Pharaoh's household so that none of them could have sexual relations with Sarai and unknowingly commit adultery with her.  The LORD was gracious in doing so because otherwise His wrath would be poured out on a people that were guiltless (though they were not innocent, there is a difference).  The Pharaoh quickly figures out that all this started to him and his household when they brought Sarai into the haram and that she has been nothing but trouble for them.  He makes some inquiries and finds out that Sarai is indeed Abram wife and he confronts Abram about it.  God uses Pharaoh to convict Abram of his sin and Pharaoh casts Abram and Sarai out (along with all the people and animals that he has given to Abram) and tells him to go home (this is the diplomatic way of saying, "I hope to never see you again").  Pharaoh wanted to be so certain that Abram and Sarai left the land of Egypt that he ordered armed men to escort them to the border to handle their deportation (which was a sign of force to communicate "don't come back").  If only Abram had trusted the LORD to take care of him and his wife and his household (as small as they may have been at the time) in the Land where God had promised them as an eternal inheritance.  No famine would should have been able to destroy them or drive them from the Land.  The LORD should have been able to provide for them (or direct them to the place He wanted them to go outside of the Land for safety during the time of judgment like He did with Elijah, giving him a single brook that did not run try and ravens to feed him and then sending him to the widow of Zarephath to give a miraculous sign to these Gentile neighbors of how the LORD would protect His prophets--the same kind of care or greater would have been given to Abram here).  Abram will have to look at all these things that he acquired in Egypt and remember how it was that he arrived and this wealth, and I'm sure he will feel guilt and shame.  God had even better things in store for him if he would have waiting on the LORD's way and the LORD's time.  This is true for so many of us--we hate to wait.  Obey God, lean wholly on His promises, even when they don't make any sense, and trust Him to work everything out for His glory and our good.

The LORD calls Abram to leave his old life behind and to set out for a Land that the LORD would show him (this sounds very similar to God's call to the people of Israel as he's leading them through the wilderness by following the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire, which is what the first recipients of this book were going through at the time that the Spirit revealed this to Moses).  He was not to be like his father that was kept from full obedience by staying where he was comfortable.

Then, in Genesis 12:3, we receive the first glimpse of what will be known as the Abrahamic Covenant (though this man is not yet known to us as Abraham, but simply Abram).  Because of Abram's obedience, all the nations of the world will be blessed through him and God will mete out blessings and curses upon the nations based off of how they treat Abram and his descendants (specifically the covenant people that we know as the nation of Israel, for this promise is repeated to Isaac and Jacob, but none of Abram's other descendants).  God is choosing Abram as the one through whom the Promised One (the Messiah)--the promised "seed" would come.

Abram took his wife Sarai (no issue there) and his nephew Lot (Abram probably considered him like his own son, but the LORD had just told him to leave all of his father's family behind.  This partial obedience is going to lead to many issues down the road as Lot is going to be at the center of many of Abram's problems we are going to read about, and he will be the father of people who will be antagonistic towards God's covenant people--the Ammonites and Moabites).

Abram followed the LORD's leading and arrived at Canaan.  I find it interesting that the LORD said He would show Abram the destination, not just tell him of it.  God did not expect Abram to find his own way given some general guidelines of a particular direction to head in.  The passage seems to indicated that the LORD directed each and every step to get Abram where he was supposed to be exactly when he was supposed to be there.  That's the story of Israel coming out of Egypt, but that is also our story in the Christian life.  We go where God directs us.  We know of our final destination (the place we call "heaven" or "the kingdom of God") and God orders each and every step for us to take along the way).  Abram was promised great things that he would never see fulfilled completely in his lifetime, and he was called to believe those promises by faith.  We are likewise to believe that all of the LORD's promises are "Yes and Amen" to us, even if we can't see how they are going to be fulfilled.  We are to obey and trust the LORD with the details.  There will be a great test of Abram's faith in a few chapters that will show this point more clearly.

Abram passed through all the Land of Canaan once he arrived and then set up camp at Shechem (the Israelites are going to set up camp in the same place when they come into the Land).  His camp was next to the large oak tree at Moreh.  The text makes sure to tell us that Abram looked at the Land that was promised to him and his descendants and it was filled with Canaanites.  We've just finished talking about how evil and wicked these people are, so the whole land was polluted by them and their idolatry and detestable practices.  It is at this moment, at this time, and at this place that the LORD speaks to Abram again and renews His promise that He will give all of the Land to Abram's descendants--Israel is about to conquer Canaan and be the recipients of this promise.  The promises were received by Abram and they were in a way for him, but in another sense they were for his physical and spiritual descendants many, many years in the future.  More on the idea of "spiritual descendants" later when we get into the New Testament which will tell us that all of us who are in Christ are beneficiaries of the Abrahamic Covenant because the promise of "through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed" happened through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.  It was always God's plan to bless all nations through one Promised Seed (the book of Galatians in particular makes this very clear, pointing back to this very passage to note that the use of "offspring" here is singular and not plural, so God is making a promise about a specific descendant which is Christ).  The gospels start with these words in the book of Matthew, "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham."  This is because Jesus is the One we've been following all these genealogies to get to (after His appearing the genealogies stop) and He is the fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant (the King of Kings who will have no successor) and the Abrahamic Covenant (the True Israel who would bring blessing to His people and to all nations that would bless Him, but to those who curse Him, He they will be cursed).

Abram built an earthen altar to the LORD there at Shechem, but he did not stay there.  Instead, he set out for Bethel (though this was not its name yet--the book of Genesis will use lots of foreshadowing by calling places by their covenant names instead of their Canaanite names). We will see this battle over the identity of names of places as the LORD people take control and then the pagan peoples take parts of the Land back and change the names back to worship their old names or to names to worship their pagan gods.  The LORD's people will often build an altar and make sacrifices when they consecrate a place and its name is changed.  Watch for this pattern as we go through the Old Testament.

Abram pitched his tent so that Bethel was to his west and Ai was to his east (if these names look familiar to you, it's because these were some of the first cities that the Israelites conquered in the book of Joshua (chapter 7) and it was at this place that the Lord (a preincarnate appearance of Christ) appeared to Joshua as a mighty warrior, the Commander/Captain of the LORD's Army) and told Joshua, "Be strong and very courageous" and to only be careful to do everything which He had commanded Joshua to do.  The Lord promised He would go before Joshua to ensure victory, but Joshua needed to have the courage to lead the people in obedience, even when it didn't make sense.  Abram continued to wander or sojourn through the whole Land (an indication that he was not going to have any permanent rest there--that was promised to his descendants) as he travelled towards the South.  This word translated South here (that's a good translation of it) speaks of the Negev or Negeb, depending on your translation, which is the southern wilderness that is between Jerusalem and Egypt.  Already in the book of Genesis directions are being given based off of Jerusalem being the point of reference, even though we are thousands of years away from David conquering Jerusalem and taking it away from the Jebusites.  God chose that place in ancient times to be the place that would be called by His Name and where His glory would dwell in and among His people (again, ultimately fulfilled in Christ who was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead there).  That place will be central to the gospel narrative from Genesis to Revelation.

When we go to the South we come across the land of the Philistines.  This was part of the Land that was promised to Abraham but was never fully conquered by his descendants, and it is still giving us issues today (Gaza in particular).  Abram is on his way south to Egypt (outside the Land he was promised) to look for provision from the hand of the Egyptian Pharaoh during a time of famine (this is the same situation that would bring Israel to Egypt in the first place and that got them to be enslaved).  I'm guessing the people reading this are thinking, "Don't do it, don't go down to Egypt--it will only lead to bondage.  Pharaoh can't save you, only the LORD can do that."  We'll read more about Abram in Egypt next time.

While Terah is not a major player in the biblical narrative apart from the fact that he is the father of Abram, it would seem that God called Terah in much the same way that He called Abram, but Terah refused to leave his land and his people and missed out on a great blessing that God had in store for him to be the father of His covenant people.  We see that Abram is not an only child, having Nahor and Haran as siblings, and Haran is mentioned here as being the father of Lot.  Since Abram would have no children of his own for a long time, Lot, Abram's nephew, would be like a son to him.  He would be the only family member that Abram would not leave behind, though this would cause trouble for Abram and his descendants later.

Now we start to hear the names of the wives of these patriarchs.  Up to this point, the wives have largely gone unmentioned, but Sarai (later called Sarah) will have a major part in the story,   We see close family marriages here which were not uncommon at the time.  We'll learn later that Sarai is Abram's half-sister.  We should not judge men and women of this time for close marriages as there was no law forbidding it, and it makes sense given that the world was just divided into peoples who could not understand each other, so it would be very hard to marry someone from outside your clan who spoke a different language.

It seems that Abram's father was the first to receive the call to leave his homeland and go to the land of Canaan, but Terah only made it as far as Haran (probably named after his brother of the same name).  Terah brought Abram and Sarai and Lot with him Haran and he lived there until he died at the age of 205, never seeing the Promised Land that God had called him to.  It would not be until after the death of of Terah that God would call Abram to be faithful where Terah had not been faithful.  Abram would be given a similar (though slightly different) calling in Genesis 12, which we'll look at next time.  He would be called to leave country, relatives, wealth, and everything that attached him to his current land, people, and culture behind and to set out for a land that the LORD would show him.  The LORD told Terah the name of his destination, but the name of the Promised Land was not revealed to Abram immediately.  We could be telling a far different story if Terah had been obedient to the LORD's calling, but, instead it was his son who received the calling and the blessings of obedience.

These are the generations of the Shem (the Semitic peoples).  While there are a few interesting names in the list of peoples that come from Shem, we're really focused in on the specific line that goes from Shem to Abram.  We have a clue that this is the line we are supposed to be concerned with in advancing the story because the ages are given so that we can follow how long we have gone since Adam to Abraham.  You will not see any of these nations rise up against Israel until the last days (I think this is even more evidence that are are in the latter if not the last days as it seems like nearly the whole world has turned against Israel--both the nation and the people).

There is not much that I can say about this passage beyond the fact that is working to preserve a covenant people for Himself.  He is going to choose a seemingly unimportant person from a seemingly unimportant family to accomplish His very important plans.  This is the way that He has been working from the beginning though, so this should not surprise us one bit.  It is the way that He still works today.  He uses the "weak" things of the world to confound the "strong" and the "foolish" things of the world to confound the "wise."  God makes sure He works in such a way that it is clear that He is the one working and He gest all the glory both now and forevermore.