19th October 2025 - Martin Mowat

Abraham, friend of God, father of faith 4 – 19/10/25 – Martin Mowat

Readings Genesis 13:1-9 & Genesis 14:17-24.

If you were here last week you’ll have heard about Abraham’s big blunder, and how he was expelled from Egypt with his tail between his legs.

But God hadn’t finished with him.  Far from it. He had a plan and a purpose, and it would take more than a human error of judgement to knock it off track.  

What was this big plan of God’s? It was to birth, through Abraham and his baren wife Sarah, a people through whom he could introduce himself, in human form, to bring hope, meaning, and purpose to a lost world, a world that he had created perfect, but which had rejected him right from the outset. 

So our study of Abraham is important.  It’s not just reminding us of the stories we heard in Sunday School, it’s helping us understand who we are, and what our role is, here in Mirepoix in the 2020s.

Abraham now “went from place to place” which sounds fairly aimless, but it’s what shepherds did, to find sufficient grazing for their flocks. He did that “until he came to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier and where he had once built an altar”.  He had gone full circle.  Bethel mans ‘a place of blessing’. Ai means ‘a heap of ruins’. He was literally between a rock, a good one in this case, and a hard place ;-)   How very pertinent!  

How long had it been since he was last there?  We don’t know. The Bible doesn’t tell us. A year or two perhaps. 

But life can be like that. We go off track, pursuing our own agendas, and God brings us right back to where we started. 

Notice too that when Abraham got back there, and got back to the alter he had built, once again he “called on the name of the Lord.”  What did he say, I wonder?  “I’m so sorry”?? “Please don’t withdraw your promises”?? “I promise I won’t do it again” (although he did)?? 

Anyway, he’s back where he started and he’s safe. The country would have been recovering from its famine but the land couldn’t support both Abraham and Lot, so as we heard, they split up, Lot choosing the fertile Jordan valley to the south-east.

It’s interesting that Abraham gave Lot the choice.  It’s also interesting that his choice included the wicked towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. Had he heard about their reputation, I wonder? Did he, perhaps fancy visiting the nightclubs occasionally? We have simply no idea.

When Lot had left Abraham, God did an amazing thing. Putting both his promises together for the first time, and at the same time making them even bigger, he said to Abraham “Look around from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west.  All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever.  I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.  Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.”

When we first got the keys to our house in Plaigne, that we had bought almost blind at a bailiff’s auction, the first thing we wanted to do was to check it out, walk around it, start to feel that it was really ours.   That’s what God was telling Abraham to do. “Go and check it out – see with your own eyes how good it is.”

When he’d done that, he chose Hebron as his base.  Hebron crops up again and again in the Bible. It’s where Abraham’s tomb is and it’s where David was crowned, to name but two.

When he got to Hebron, Abraham did two things, the first, you won’t be surprised to hear, was to build an alter.  The second was to make allies of the local tribal leader, Mamre, and his two brothers Aner and Eschol.

So it would be nice to think that he was able to settle down, enjoy his new environment, and finally start that family God had been promising him. But no, sadly not. Not yet anyway, because he got a message to say that Lot was in big trouble and needed help. 

It’s all in chapter 14, which is complicated reading, and full of unpronouncable names. Simply put, a group of four Mesopotamian neighbouring kings had conquered a number of city-states in Palestine. Five of these city-states, at the south end of the Dead Sea had been tribute-paying vassals for twelve years. 

But in year 13 they rebelled and stopped paying, with the result that the four Mesopotamian kings brought their armies to punish them, looted and sacked the cities and took many of their inhabitants captive, before heading back to where they came from.

Poor Lot, Abraham's nephew, is one of those taken captive; but he was in luck, because, as chapter 14 tells us “When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan.  During the night Abram divided his men to attack them and he routed them, pursuing them as far as Hobah, north of Damascus.  He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative Lot and his possessions, together with the women and the other people.

That was an act of amazing bravery and military skill for a small group of nomadic shepherds.  The ONLY way that I can begin to explain it was that it was an act of pure faith. 

God may well have talked him through it beforehand, and Abraham may have felt the presence of God go with him. The 318 men were probably trained, armed retainers whose job it would have been to defend Abraham’s tribe, but even so, as an ex-soldier myself, I find it simply staggering. 

So let’s move on to our second reading, which is what happens next, and it’s quite fascinating. 

Abraham was on his way home and he got to a place called Salem, probably Jerusalem today, Jeru-Salem. There, as Philip just read to us, he met two kings. One was Bera, king of Sodom where Lot had been living, a city renowned for its idolatry, and it’s evil and licentious lifestyle, and who had come to negotiate for his subjects' release. 

The other was the king of Salem, a man called Melchizedek, and I think we should take a moment or two to discover who he was, because not only was he the King of Salem, but he’s also described in Genesis as being the “Priest of the Most High God”.  Indeed, his very name meant "king of righteousness".

Who was this guy?  And imagine Abraham’s excitement when he met another leader who was also monotheistic, believing in the very same God.

There are a couple of places later in the Bible that help us better understand who he was. 

The first is in Psalm 100, where David says “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.”

The second is in Hebrews 5, 6 & 7, where the author explains what David meant, that Jesus had been a priest, not of the Levitical order, but in the order of Melchizedek.

We might go into more detail next week because we’re running out of time here now.

Let’s just note that these two kings were clear opposites. They both wanted to give something to Abraham, but significantly Abraham accepted Melchizedek's gift of food and his blessing, but he firmly rejected Bera’s offer of Sodom's captured property.

But that wasn’t all that happened.  Verse 20 tells us that after Melchizedek had blessed him, “… Abram gave him a tenth of everything”.  And that, if you think about it, was quite something.