Category: Lech Lecha

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Seven Patterns of Marriage in the Bible

Seven patterns of marriage in the Bible. Concubines, wives, handmaids, levirate, etc.

This isn’t a how-to article. I’m not going to tell you how to have a happy or fulfilling marriage. Marriage advice is vital. No matter how smart or “experienced” you think you are, you can’t figure it out all on your own. You need help.

That’s not this. This is more of a “how-did” kind of article. Good, bad, or ugly…this isn’t about managing the dynamics of person-to-person relationships. It’s about categories of marriage that nobody else seems to want to talk about.

That’s understandable. In modern America today, for the most part, a man and a woman date, get engaged, and get married. That’s pretty much how everyone does it. (For the moment, set aside the world’s wickedness and rare outliers like surrogates.)

But I’ve got some foreign and uncomfortable news for you: Modern America is an anomaly. Most people throughout history–most people in the rest of the world right now–don’t do marriage the way we do. That includes the ancient Hebrews who wrote the Bible and for whom it was written.

Marriage Is Central

The concept of marriage is central to God’s portrayal of his relationship with his people. Adam was made in his image, and from Adam, God extracted Eve, making the two together a more complete image of God than either one separately. Over and over, he describes his relationship with his people as a marriage.

The wedding feast…The bride of Christ…Idolatry is the same as adultery.

If God uses marriage as a metaphor of his relationship with us throughout the Bible, it seems to me that it’s important for us to understand how the Bible portrays marriage.

That’s not to say that every marital arrangement in the Bible is a pattern we ought to follow. The Bible doesn’t hide its characters’ bad choices. In fact, it frequently–almost always–highlights them in order to give us examples of what not to do.

But that’s also not to say that every marital arrangement in the Bible that doesn’t conform to our cultural expectations of right and wrong is actually wrong. God doesn’t care about our cultural standards. He communicates with us where we are, but he doesn’t conform his moral standards to ours. If God says something is morally acceptable, then it is. If he says it’s not morally acceptable, then it’s not. Our preferences carry no weight.

God determines right and wrong. We don’t.

It’s tempting to think that God merely “winked” at the sinful nature of foreign things like concubinage and polygamy, which appear on the surface to be unfair to women, because the ancient Hebrews didn’t know any better, but that was never a consideration for any of the laws that he gave. God didn’t hesitate to give a law against making and worshiping statues of him, even though the Hebrews obviously didn’t know that they weren’t supposed to do that. They struggled with idolatry for another thousand years after Sinai, so suggesting God didn’t outright ban any of these marital arrangements only because the Hebrews wouldn’t have understood is absurd.

Slavery…bride price…capital punishment…polygamy…genocide…. Like it or not, these are things that God allows in his Law under some circumstances, and our gut feelings about how right or wrong they are is completely irrelevant to the reality of their rightness or wrongness.

With that understanding, I’d like to describe seven marital arrangements that you will encounter while reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Not because I think we need all of these arrangements now, but because I don’t think you can fully understand the Scriptures without understanding the culture and mindset of the people who wrote them. I am neither promoting nor condemning any of these practices. I’m just telling you how marriage used to work and what God allows in his Law. “Allows” does not equal “desires”. “Allowed” does not mean “ideal”.

  1. Betrothal
  2. Free Marriage
  3. Concubinage
  4. Levirate Marriage
  5. Handmaid Concubinage
  6. Slave Marriage
  7. Captive Concubinage

Betrothal is somewhere between our “engagement” and marriage. Free Marriage is closest to what we call “marriage” today. Levirate Marriage is tied to life in the land of Israel. The other four are all variations of concubinage. I’ll explain what that means later, but it’s important to know that Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have a separate word for any of these, except perhaps for “concubine”, and that word isn’t always applied to concubines. In fact, it doesn’t have specific words for marriage or wife at all.

The Hebrew word for “wife” used in the Bible is ishah (אשּׁה), which really just means “woman”. Except for the Levirate Marriage (yabam / יבם), there is no single word for marriage or marry. For women, the Bible uses phrases like “become a woman” or just “become”. For men, it most often says “master”. For readability, almost all English translations render these terms as some variation of “wife” or “marry”, depending on the context. That’s fine as long as the reader knows this, but if you don’t, I think it can often lose meaning or gain unintended meanings.

The differences between these marital arrangements are fuzzy and often overlap. A captive woman might become a handmaid to a Hebrew wife and then be given to the husband as a surrogate. A concubine might be a man’s only wife and if he dies childless, she might become a levirate wife to his brother. It can be complicated.

The ancient Hebrews probably didn’t categorize their relationships in the way I do below, but I think applying labels and descriptions will help the modern Bible student understand what he’s reading in the Scriptures.

Betrothal

Betrothal is similar to what we think of as engagement, but wasn’t so easily broken. In fact, betrothal was considered tantamount to marriage and could only be broken by a divorce. A woman who was betrothed to one man and had a sexual relationship with another would be guilty of adultery.

A betrothal would begin when a man and woman (and her father) agreed to marriage. Under normal and ideal circumstances, the man would give her and her family a bride price–a substantial gift that would likely be shared between the bride and her father or eldest brother. The woman’s family would reciprocate with a dowry of land, livestock, or some other tangible form of wealth. If her husband ever abandoned or divorced her unjustly, her family would probably try to get her dowry back from him.

Joseph’s betrothal to Mary (Matthew 1:18-19) is an example. The primary laws governing betrothal (apart from to whom you are allowed to marry) are in Exodus 22:16-17, Deuteronomy 20:7, and Deuteronomy 22:23-29.

Free Marriage

A free marriage is one in which a man marries a free (not a slave) woman and receives a dowry as part of the marriage agreement. Although we don’t consciously think of bride prices and dowries, this is what we usually have in mind when we talk about marriage.

If the man paid the woman and her family a bride price and did not receive a dowry in exchange, then she would probably be considered a concubine instead. Recall the story of Jacob’s marriages to Leah and Rachel. He agreed to work seven years for each of them, and if that had been the full transaction, they would have been concubines instead of full wives. When Jacob suggests that it’s time they left his father-in-law, both of the sisters replied by saying “Our father sold us and devoured our money”. They were complaining that Laban had sold them to Jacob for labor and had used up their dowry for himself. Fortunately for them, God intervened and miraculously extracted their dowry from Laban in the form of striped and spotted sheep, ensuring that they were free women. See Genesis 31.

Abraham’s marriage to Sarah, Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah, and David’s marriage to Abigail are all examples of free marriage.

Concubinage

In short, a concubine is a wife who is also a purchased slave, usually belonging to the man to whom she is married. In many ancient cultures, such as the Greek, a slave girl could be used by her master however he saw fit, including for prostitution, but that kind of behavior is forbidden by Torah.

If a man owned a female slave who was married to someone else, usually another slave, and if he had sex with her, then he could be executed as an adulterer. A man could take any of his unmarried, unbetrothed slave girls to be his own concubine, but that would become a permanent relationship. She would be his wife, and he couldn’t then toss her aside or give her to someone else like a party favor.

The primary difference between a concubine and a free wife was her legal/economic status as a slave. She had an added layer of economic obligation to her husband that a free wife did not. This had a huge impact on her social standing and on her options if he were to abandon or divorce her, but–contrary to popular mythology–it did not change the fact that she was his wife. She did not stop being a slave when she became his wife, nor did she stop being his wife just because she was also a slave. God required that he provide for her in the same way that he provided for a free wife. See Exodus 21:10.

The children of a concubine did not inherit her status as a slave if her service was owned by her husband directly, but probably would not be able to inherit as a firstborn unless he had no children by a free wife.

Abraham’s marriage to Keturah (Genesis 25:1; she was not the same as Hagar) and the unnamed Levite’s marriage to the unfaithful woman who was murdered (Judges 19) are examples of concubinage.

Levirate Marriage

The word “levirate” isn’t related to the tribe of Levi. It comes from a Latin word that means “brother-in-law”. In this type of marriage, if a man married a woman and then died without having any children, one of his brothers was to marry his widow and their first-born son would become the legal heir of the deceased. The woman was fully a wife to her new husband, just as she had been to her late husband.

Levirate marriage existed to ensure continuity of inheritance in the land of Israel. In Biblical language, a “name” is more than just a label. A person’s name is their character, reputation, faithfulness, and influence in the community. The story of Zelophehad’s daughters in Numbers 27 and 36 shows that a man’s inheritance in God’s promises is an important part of his name, and the levirate marriage is one way that God ensures his name isn’t lost from Israel.

Exactly how this kind of marriage played out in real life is difficult to discern from historical records, including the Bible, but we can extrapolate a few things from the limited information we have:

  • The deceased’s brother would inherit his land if he died unmarried and without any children, but the brother couldn’t simply take the land if the man had been married and was still childless. In order to take over the land, the brother needed to marry the widow and produce an heir for the deceased. The land would then belong to that heir when he came of age, so the brother would only have control of the land for that period of time. His other children would divide his original inheritance among themselves after his death, while the firstborn of his brother’s wife would be the sole heir of his brother’s estate.
  • There were no exceptions for a man who was already married, so this could result in conflict and complications in his house. A second wife doesn’t just add a second relationship, because she will have to be integrated into the whole family.
  • The widow might also come with obligations to her family, including any stipulations that might have been included in her marriage agreement.
  • The deceased’s brother could refuse to marry the widow but such a refusal would cost him honor and social standing. The levirate obligation would then pass to another brother.
  • If the deceased had no brothers or none of his brothers were willing to marry his widow, it seems from the story of Ruth that more distant male relatives might have the option to marry her and produce an heir for the deceased, although that isn’t explicit in Torah.

Tamar’s marriage to Judah’s three sons (Genesis 38:6-14) and Ruth’s marriage to Boaz (Ruth 3-4) are examples of levirate marriage. See Deuteronomy 25:5-10 for the laws governing levirate marriage.

Handmaid Concubinage

Female slaves weren’t only purchased as concubines. Frequently they were purchased as laborers or as another woman’s personal maidservant, also known as a handmaid. The mistress of such a slave could give her to her husband as an additional wife–usually because she was unable to conceive or bear any children of her own–but this didn’t remove the economic obligation of the slave to her mistress. Hence Abram’s response to Sarai in Genesis 16:6 when she complained about Hagar’s behavior: “Look, your servant is under your authority; do to her as you please.”

A wealthy man’s house could get quite complicated if he had multiple wives, each with their own handmaids. Each wife would constitute a sub-house within the house of the patriarch, and each handmaid and her children would be a sub-house within the house of her mistress. The children of the handmaid were counted as the children of the mistress in some legal sense that’s difficult to make out from scripture, but treated as children of the handmaid in household practice. As with the children of a simple concubine, any sons of the handmaid would likely be passed over as the firstborn in favor of a son born to a free wife, if there was one.

Abram’s marriage to Sarai’s handmaid Hagar (Genesis 16:1-4) and Jacob’s marriages to Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah (Genesis 30:1-5) and Leah’s handmaid Zilpah (Genesis 30:9-10) are examples of handmaid concubinage.

Slave Marriage

In God’s Law, the master-slave relationship takes precedence over the husband-wife relationship. If a man marries his female slave, she becomes his wife, while remaining his slave. If a master gives his female slave to a male slave as his wife, they both remain slaves, and their children will belong to their master.

This is probably one of the most difficult elements of God’s Law for modern Americans to accept, but we don’t get to define right and wrong. That is God’s purview alone.

God requires that Hebrew slaves be set free in their seventh year, but non-Hebrew slaves and their children can remain slaves in perpetuity. If the male slave above is a Hebrew and set free, while the woman is not a Hebrew or has not reached her seventh year, she would not be able to leave with him.

At that point, he can decide between three options:

  1. He can walk away, leaving his wife and children behind.
  2. If his slave-wife is a Hebrew, he can wait for her to reach her seventh year, so that she and her children can join him in freedom.
  3. If she is not a Hebrew or if he doesn’t want to wait for her seventh year, he can choose to remain with his master for life.

I’m not aware of any specific examples of this kind of marriage in the Bible, but it is described in Exodus 21:2-6 and Deuteronomy 15:12-17.

Captive Concubinage

Scripture records numerous instances in which Israel captured the women and children of an enemy people. Although this sounds like a horrible thing, the alternative is that they be abandoned to pagan captors, who did not have God’s instructions on how to treat slaves, or to probable starvation. The most humane thing to do after a war in which all or most of the enemy’s men have been killed, is to take the survivors under your protection, and the only practical way to do that is to put them to work.

Many (most?) of those survivors would become handmaids or field workers, but an Israelite warrior also had the option of marrying a newly widowed or unmarried woman. This would make her a captive concubine. He was not allowed to take her immediately, though. In Deuteronomy 20:13-14 and 21:10-14, God gave instructions intended to add a layer of protection for everyone.

Her new master was required to shave her head, trim her nails, and wait thirty days before he could marry her. This gave her time to mourn her family, time to know if she was pregnant or sick, and time to evaluate her character. If, at the end of that time, the man realizes that he let his passions overrule his good sense, or he changes his mind for some other reason, he is required to set her free. He humiliated her in this process and the recompense is that she had shelter in his house for at least a month and cannot then be made a slave to anyone without her consent. She was free to remain in Israel as a widowed sojourner or make her way to some other land or relatives if she had any.

Although I don’t believe the Bible gives any specific details of these relationships, the sacking of Shechem in Genesis 34:29 and the remnant of Midian in Numbers 31 show two instances when a large number of women were captured in war, some of whom almost certainly became concubines to the victors.

Shadows of the Divine

As I mentioned earlier, throughout the Bible, God uses marriage as a metaphor of his relationship with his people.

Since we are most familiar with the concept of the free marriage, it’s relatively easy for us to understand that metaphor. We are the “bride of Christ”, chosen and betrothed, waiting for the marriage supper of the Lamb. But it’s easy to miss the exchange of gifts: the bride price of the Son’s life and the dowry of gold, frankincense, myrrh, spikenard, and spices. These seem like paltry tokens compared to what we were given, but there is no requirement that the dowry and bride price necessarily have to be of equal value. One could say that we give him our lives in exchange for his, but dedicating our lives to him is the marriage itself, so I don’t think that can be considered a dowry.

When we were transgressors, we were subject to the condemnation of the Law, debtors to the Law under a burden we could never pay. He betrothed us to him while we were still hopelessly in bondage, but then he forgave our debt and redeemed us from bondage so that we could be a free bride.

The freed slave who loves his master and his family and binds himself permanently for their sake of his family. This is connected to the believing spouse in 1 Corinthians 7:14 whose family is sanctified to God because of his faith.

All of the laws governing betrothal, marriage, and servitude in scripture are shadows of greater things designed and implemented in heaven. The shadows are patterns intended for our enlightenment. By studying God’s instructions for marriage–even those marital arrangements that aren’t practiced in our culture–we can learn more about him, ourselves, and our relationship to him.

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Dead Works and Living Faith

Does the Letter to the Hebrews say that the blood of Christ nullifies any need for believers to keep God's Law today? How does the Torah relate to the Christian?

Years ago–sometimes it feels like a previous life–I used to engage any willing theological or political combatant on blogs, forums, and listservs. Not so much anymore. I don’t have the patience for rehashing the same old arguments for the ten thousandth time.

Those years did have a lot of value, though. In defending and supporting my own beliefs, I managed to change my own mind on many topics, I learned an awful lot from digging through the Bible, and I was able to help a very few people with honest questions find some answers. It also produced some great blog fodder. 😉 The post below (in addition to some previous and future posts) came out of one of those discussions…

Dead Works

A commenter using the name “Book of Hebrews” made the following argument against a believer in Yeshua (aka Jesus) keeping Torah today:

Plus there’s that whole crazy thing called…The Book of Hebrews.

“When Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come to pass, through the greater and more perfect tent not made with hands, that is, not of this creation, he entered, no, not with the blood of goats and of young bulls, but with his own blood, once for all time into the holy place and obtained an everlasting deliverance for us. For if the blood of goats and of bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who have been defiled sanctifies to the extent of cleanness of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of the Christ, who through an everlasting spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works that we may render sacred service to the living God?”-Hebrews 9:11-14

“Book of Hebrews” should have paid more attention to the Letter to the Hebrews. Look at verses 13 & 14 in the passage he quoted, as well as this one from the next chapter:

Hebrews 10:4 For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats take away sins.

“Dead works” are those actions that transgress the Law and thus put us under its jurisdiction. The blood of bulls and goats is effective for sanctifying the flesh, but completely ineffective for sanctifying the spirit from those dead works. (Although sin is both physical and spiritual, it should be clear from the context that the author is referring to sin’s taint on the soul in 10:4.) The present tense used by the author is especially important. The blood of bulls and goats is effective for the flesh and is not effective for the spirit. In fact, the temple sacrifices were never effective for sanctifying the spirit.

Living Faith

Consider what this fact means in light of this passage:

[Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph] all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth….Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.
Hebrews 11:13 & 16

These great saints lived and died long before Sinai, yet the blood of Yeshua still washed the stain of sin from their souls by way of their faith in God’s providence. The mechanism of their salvation was (is!) no different than that of the saints who lived after Sinai and before Calvary: Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets. They all lived by faith and are (or will be) raised from the dead because of that faith. They all sacrificed bulls and goats to cleanse their flesh, but they also knew that all of that blood was insufficient to remove all sins from their eternal souls.

This doesn’t mark a change in the Law, merely a continuation. There was always only one way to the Father: faith in his grace to forgive our sins, enabled by the blood of Yeshua. And no amount of faith or grace ever removed the obligation of God’s people to obey his eternal commandments.

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Out of Faith, Obedience

If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination. Proverbs 28:9

I was going through some old correspondence on the issue of Torah-keeping, and would like to share some of the better thoughts. This is somewhat edited from the original emails from sometime between 2000 and 2006…

The theology I remember being taught when growing up in the Assemblies of God now seems to me like a substitute legalism. Dispensationalism of any sort almost inevitably exchanges a Mosaic legalism for a Paulist legalism. The truth is that there is a middle ground that is completely consistent with the entire Bible, without having to relegate certain of God’s instructions to certain dispensations. The Letter to the Hebrews makes it very clear that the method of salvation has not changed from Abraham until now. Salvation was always through faith, and faith always results in obedience quite apart from salvation.

Dispensationalism teaches salvation is through faith in some eras and salvation through obedience in others. In reality there is no conflict between faith and obedience at any time. No one was ever saved by obedience to God’s Law. But if you do not have at least the beginning of obedience, then you cannot have faith, and you are therefore not “saved”. The Spirit will lead you ever towards obedience, but if you deliberately ignore one aspect of what the Spirit has already told you in writing through Moses, how can you expect to ever effectively hear that still, small voice?

Solomon wrote:

Trust in YHWH with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding….Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered.
Proverbs 3:5 & 28:26

Jeremiah wrote:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9

Do you really believe that you are the exception, that your heart isn’t like everyone else’s?

I think you are fortunate that God tries to communicate with you at all when you attempt to dictate through what medium he is allowed to speak. If what you are hearing in secret in your own heart conflicts with what God has revealed openly to the entire world, then there is a very good chance that your heart is deceiving you.

If anyone turns away his ear from hearing the Torah, even his prayer is an abomination.
Proverbs 28:9

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Parsha Lech Lecha – Apostolic Readings, Links, and Videos

New Testament readings and articles for Torah portion Lech Lecha.

Readings

  • Exodus 13:17-15:18
    • Mark 4:35-41
    • Luke 21:25-28
    • Romans 9:15-21
    • Galatians 4:1-9
    • Revelation 4:1-11
    • Revelation 14:14-20
  • Exodus 15:19-16:24
    • Matthew 18:3-6
    • Matthew 28:16-20
    • John 6:16-25
    • James 1:5-8
    • Revelation 2:15-17
  • Exodus 16:25-17:16
    • Matthew 12:1-14
    • Mark 9:2-13
    • John 6:26-71
    • 1 Corinthians 10:1-6
    • 1 John 5:1-5

More Reading on Parsha Lech Lecha

Related Video Teachings

  • Circumcision in Joshua 5 – The children of the Israelites who had left Egypt were not circumcised in the wilderness. God told Joshua to circumcise them after they had begun the conquest of Canaan. This tells us something very important about the controversy in Acts 15.
  • Everyone Serves Multiple Masters – Everyone serves multiple masters all the time, so what did Yeshua mean when he said “No one can serve two masters” in Matthew 6:24? Yeshua frequently used hyperbole in his teachings and this is a good example. He was using an exaggerated statement to teach this principle: When there’s a conflict in the instructions of two masters, what determines who you will obey? Is it money, security, prestige, etc.? Or is it God, the ultimate arbiter of all right and wrong?
  • Do you have any control over your salvation? Romans 3:21-28 – Your eternal fate is solely at God’s discretion. He adopts us as sons or he doesn’t. However, God has told us that he will save or condemn us based on our faith in him and also that we can be disinherited for rejecting him.
  • A Metaphor of Grace in Eliezer, Ishmael, and Isaac – Forgiveness of sins and eternal life are gifts of God, granted by his grace alone. Nobody can buy or work their way into eternal life. Eliezer, Ishmael, and Isaac make a great illustration of God’s plan.
  • Are Law-Keepers Disinherited? Does Romans 4:14 mean that anyone who tries to keep the Law of Moses is automatically disinherited by God? Of course, not! As Paul wrote, “I wouldn’t have known that coveting is wrong if the Law had not said, ‘Do not covet.'” Obedience to God’s commandments, even if they were given through Moses, is a good thing so long as you don’t think that you can earn salvation by them.
  • Does Faith Void God’s Promises to the Jews? Romans 4:16 – The Children of Abraham consist of all those who believe in God’s grace made manifest in Yeshua, whether they were born as Jews, Christians, or pagans. But that doesn’t mean that the natural born children of Israel are no longer counted among Israel. How else could Paul, speaking of unfaithful Jews, say “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.”?
  • Are You under Law or Under Grace? Romans 6:14 – Being “under law” is the same as being under the dominion of sin. If you are an unrepentant sinner, then you are under law. If you have repented of sin and been forgiven, then you are set free from the dominion of sin and are no longer under law. This doesn’t mean that the Law is no longer a guide to righteous behavior as v15 states plainly, but that it no longer has authority to condemn you.
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A Biblical Secret to Building Wealth that Lasts

Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. (Genesis 12:5)

Abram (this was before God renamed him “Abraham”) was a very wealthy man when God first called him to leave his home in Haran. He had a wife, livestock, lots of stuff and even slaves, and as time went on he only got richer.

His herds continued to grow after he left Haran. When he was in Egypt because of the famine in Canaan, Pharaoh gave him many more possessions and slaves, and his herds continued to expand after he returned to Canaan again. Whatever happened, whatever Abram did, he only got richer.

It doesn’t appear that Abram set out to grow his wealth. He was generous with what he had, didn’t demand anything from anybody, and refused to accept gifts from unsavory characters. Yet at the end of his life, he had a large family and immense wealth.

Lot was a wealthy man too. We don’t know that he had anything at all when he left Haran with Abram, but we know that they both had large herds and servants sometime after leaving Egypt. So much so that Abram decided they needed to put some space between their households in order to reduce friction and competition for resources.

After they separated, Lot moved his tents close to the city of Sodom, eventually buying property within the city walls and even becoming a respected city leader. His herds and holdings in the countryside probably continued to grow during that time.

Unfortunately, Lot didn’t end life nearly so well as Abram did. Most of his family had died and what was left was extremely disfuctional. His herds and servants were all dead or scattered. His home and social life were destroyed in Sodom.

These two men came from the same family, had the same traditions, and spent many years traveling, living, and working together. They were both righteous men, so how did they end so differently?

I think there were two major differences between Lot and Abram:

  • Initiative
  • Faith

Initiative

Abram was active, while Lot was passive. An interesting factoid that might be intended to allude to this quality of their respective characters is in the way their children are described. Only male children of Abraham are listed in Scripture, although he almost certainly had daughters as well, while Lot is only said to have daughters.

When their two herds became too great to live comfortably together, Abram saw the problem and offered a solution. He built a godly community from scratch, while Lot joined a community that was already well established. When Abram saw the angelic visitors he ran to meet them, but when Lot saw them, he merely stood to greet them. Finally, when Abram learned of God’s plan to destroy the city, he tried to save the people, but when the men of Sodom surrounded Lot’s house, he only tried to get them to commit a lesser sin.

There were times when Abram allowed himself to be swayed by men (in Egypt and in the matter of Hagar, for example), but usually Abram followed God alone, while Lot usually followed other men. As long as he stayed with Abram, he did well, but his real problems began when the he exchanged Abram’s company for Sodom’s.

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. (Proverbs 13:20)

Faith

Abram didn’t set out to grow his wealth, but it grew regardless because he trusted in God who blessed him for it. On the other hand, despite Lot’s long relationship with Abram, he hadn’t learned that real wealth comes from a relationship with the Creator, not from how much of the creation he could control. By all the wisdom of men, better pastures and better markets ought to equal greater wealth, but there are different kinds of wealth of more or less permanence.

When Abram gave Lot first pick of grazing land, he chose a land rich in the physical but extremely poor in the spiritual. Abram moved his herds to the relatively barren hills, away from the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, but closer to God. He grew steadily in both material and spiritual possessions, content to accept what God would give him in exchange for faithfulness and good stewardship. Abram’s material wealth evaporated upon his physical death, divided among his sons, but his spiritual wealth has continued to grow exponentially over the millennia.

Lot’s wealth, on the other hand, didn’t even last his own lifetime. One morning when he woke up hungover in a cave overlooking a once-lush valley, now smoking and ruined, he surely understood the meaning of Paul’s words to Timothy:

But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. (1 Timothy 6:6-9)

Surround yourself with people of faith and godliness. Their influence will elevate you. However, don’t be content with their mere company. Consciously work to emulate them so that when they are gone, you can stand alone with God and help to elevate someone else.

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. (Proverbs 13:20)

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Faith Is Like a Seed. Make It Grow.

Four essential elements to growing stronger faith in God.

Faith is ubiquitous in Scripture.

  • Faith makes us well. (Matthew 9:22 & 29, Luke 17:19, Acts 3:16, James 5:15, etc.)
  • Faith makes great works possible. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 17:6, Hebrews 11, etc.)
  • Faith inevitably leads to good works. (Acts 20:21, Romans 3:31, Hebrews 11, James 2, etc.)
  • Faith makes our good works effective on the spiritual plane. (Hebrews 11, James 2, etc.)
  • Faith is essential to our eternal salvation. (Romans 3:28, Ephesians 2:8, Hebrews 11, etc.)

Over and over, the scriptures say, “If you had faith, you would be healed.” If you had faith, big things would happen.

Clearly faith is vital. Without faith, we are powerless. Without faith, we are lost.

Yet we all struggle with insufficient faith. We believe, but, for most of us, big things aren’t happening. As the desperate father in Mark 9 said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Is it possible to develop faith, to start with a little and end with a lot? We know that God can simply give us greater faith–he is God, after all–but from long experience we also know that’s not how he usually operates. Yes, our faith can grow over time. Paul told the congregation at Thessalonika that he thanked God for their continually growing faith (2 Thessalonians 1:3), and Yeshua hinted at this fact when he compared faith to a seed. (Matthew 17:20) Seeds aren’t meant to be static. They were designed to sprout and grow into something much larger, which in turn produces many more seeds of its own.

The big question is how. How can we develop our faith from a mere seed to a plant? I know that this is a question that I have struggled with all of my life. Why aren’t people healed when we pray? The answer to that question can be complicated, but Scripture is very clear that, at least in part, people aren’t healed because they or the one praying for their healing have too little faith.

So how can we grow more faith?

Yeshua’s metaphor of the mustard seed implies that faith doesn’t grow only by virtue of its existence. No seed sprouts and grows without fertile soil, water, stress, and light. There are things besides faith itself, which we need to add to our little seed before it will grow to the piont of moving mountains and healing the sick.

Deep, Rich Spiritual Soil

Just as in the parable of the sower and the seed of the Gospel, the seed of faith also needs deep, healthy soil to prosper. It needs to be embedded in an environment which encourages long-term, meaningful maturity. The environment in which our faith sprout–or doesn’t sprout–includes the people, places, things, and habits with which we surround ourselvs.

We have all heard that you become like those with whom you spend the most time, and I believe it’s true.

Pessimists are like the weeds of the parable. Their constant negativity chokes the hope and life out of you until you can’t believe in that anything good could happen for you. They need love as much as anyone–more, evidently–but you can’t keep them as close friends. They will drag you down to keep company with their misery.

The proud and self-sufficient are like the rocks. On the surface, they might be very positive, but their hearts are hard. Why should they trust in God when they believe they already have all that they need. If you spend too much time with them, the seed of faith will have no opportunity to put down roots, and it will whither and die.

Maintaining and building faith requires keeping company with people of faith. Surround yourself with people who trust God. Be active in a community of faith. Be a friend to people who are where you want to be, and be careful not to speak negativity into their lives.

And not only company, but our home, work, and religious environments need to be conducive to developing faith. What kind of art hangs on your walls? What is the usual conversation like in the break room? Do your personal and spiritual habits focus on God’s faithfulness or on God’s wrath?

People like to denegrate religion, but ritual and tradition have always been very powerful instruments for building faith. Liturgy, rituals, annual observances, and the like will never save anyone. If your church teaches that they are necessary for salvation, that will tend to degrade faith. However, if they use these things to emphasize God’s dependability and mercy, they can be wonderful. The forms of traditional religion that unite people and build faith while honoring God’s commands are nearly endless. It’s important that your religion honors God by adhering to his standards, but don’t throw out all religion because some people and organizations have abused it.

If there are elements of your environment that discourage faith, consider how you can replace them with something more positive.

Good Spiritual Nourishment

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10:17)

The Bible is full of God promises and stories of those who trusted him and also those who didn’t trust him. Memorize God’s promises and read those stories often. They are all through the Scriptures, but especially focus on Genesis, the historical books1 the Psalms, and the Gospels2. There are also many stories of faith and miracles outside the Bible. The biographies of missionaries are especially rich nourishment in this respect.

Entertainment and education should also be designed to promote a strong faith and relationship with God. If your favorite author writes disdainfully of the miraculous and if your favorite bands mock the promises of God, how can they do anything but discourage you? It’s counter-productive to read about divine Providence in the morning and listen to someone talk about how it’s all “me, me, me” in the afternoon.

Pay attention to what’s being fed into your life, and try to filter out those inputs that aren’t helpful. Replace them with books, videos, podcasts, conversations, etc., that will encourage you and reinforce your faith.

Spiritual Stress

Yes, stress. Just like children, all plants need some kind of stress to mature and produce good fruit. Some plants need a touch of frost. Some need a hard freeze. Some plants need a strong wind to scatter seeds and some need to be eaten. Almost all plants need pruning in order to reach their greatest heights and productivity.

Your faith will never grow if it is never put to the test. How do you learn to trust someone if you never need to trust them. You start by acting as if you have faith, whether or not you do. You make yourself vulnerable and take a chance.

Take risks. Get banged up a little. If nothing else, you’ll toughen up a bit and gain some life experience.

Shining Spiritual Light

In Yeshua was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:4-5)

Faith isn’t the belief that God exists. Faith is the belief that God is who he says he is, that he keeps his promises, that he loves you and will never abandon you. Faith is another word for trust.

How do you learn to trust a friend, your husband, your wife? Through experience. You trust a good friend because he has been there for you in the past. He stood by your side when everyone else disappeared. If you want to trust God more, then you need to spend more time with him. Set some time aside every day to read your Bible, to pray, and to listen.

Your prayers don’t have to be limited to any particular format. Kneel and pray aloud if that works for you. Or sit in a comfortable chair and sip your morning coffee. Go for a walk. Dance. Whatever language allows you to speak most freely is fine because God speaks that language too.

Corporate worship is also important. Liturgical and informal prayer, singing of hymns, blowing shofars, dancing, waiving banners, pilgrimages… Like intimacy in a marriage and shared experiences with friends, all of these things create mental and spiritual reactions in us that draw us closer to God, that strengthen our emotional ties to the one being worshipped. (And be careful that your worship is directed upward and not to a performer on stage or to an experience.)

Getting to know God isn’t limited to the proverbial prayer closet and time spent focusing vertically. We can also gain a deeper knowledge of God by focusing laterally, toward the people around us.

The King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:40)

Everyone around you–young and old, sick and healthy, good and bad–bears the image of God, and they are all the focus of God’s loving attention. If you want to know God better, go find someone with a need that you can meet and then meet it. Pay attention to the things that God pays attention to. Be kind. Be generous. Love your neighbor, and not just your wealthy and nice smelling neighbors. In showing love to people who desparately need it, you will learn something of God’s heart, of the love and the pain that God feels for each one of us, and God himself will draw nearer to you.

It’s not enough to let God’s love illuminate you, because you weren’t designed just to be a solar collector. You were designed to take the spiritual light of Yeshua and turn it into fruit full of good works meant to feed God’s people. If you want more faith, then you need to be the instrument through which God answers the faith of others.

Faith is a living, growing thing. It requires attention, care, and feeding. It needs a healthy environment in which to take root. It needs a constant stream of reinforcement and encouragement. It needs exercise. Most of all, faith depends on an ever-growing relationship with the King in whom we have faith and with his people for whom we ARE faith.

Gardens don’t spontaneously spring up from the ground. They take planning, deliberate action, and hard work. Even Eden needed a gardener.

When I sit down to write, I usually have an idea of what I intend to communicate, but sometimes God leads me in a direction I wasn’t expecting. This is one of those times, and this is a message I needed to hear. Using this structure of a seed needing good soil, nourishment, stress, and light, I’m going to develop a faith-growing plan for myself and my family.

I encourage you to do the same.

Evaluate your current environment and your life’s inputs and identify those things that would tend to discourage faith. Don’t try to fix everything right away. Remember that God told Israel only to drive the Canaanites out of the land as they were ready to advance and occupy it. Instead, remove a negative influence and replace it with a positive one. Then another. Have a plan with a definite goal in mind, and don’t be afraid to alter the plan as you go and circumstances require. As long as you continue to move forward, your faith will too.

 

1 Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, 1-2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.
2 Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts.

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The One Thing that Really Matters

Circumcision in itself is nothing, just another bit of body modification. It’s irrelevant to your salvation. Neither ritual conversion to Judaism nor ritual rejection of Judaism has any impact whatsoever on who you are in God’s Kingdom. These are merely works, whether good or bad, and, by themselves, works can never save you.

What you do cannot define who you are. Rather what you do is determined by who you are.

This is the true meaning behind Yeshua’s words when he said, “It isn’t what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of him.” (Matthew 15:11) What comes out of a man isn’t limited to words and waste products, but also includes all the things that a man does. So that what a man does is determined by what is in his heart. The evil that is within comes out as deeds. So if a man, whose faith is in God, commits some infraction through ignorance, accident, or momentary weakness, this cannot condemn him.

Likewise, a man, whose faith is in himself, can do every action that the Law requires and still not be saved in the end. He can be circumcised, eat vegan so that he never risks eating anything unclean, give a double tithe, and volunteer every spare minute to the poor, yet still be condemned to eternal destruction because his faith is not in the Creator.

Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but keeping the commandments of God. (1 Corinthians 7:19) And “keeping the commandments” includes the most important commandment of all: You will love Adonai your Elohim with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

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The End of the Wicked

Arise, O LORD! Let not man prevail!

David begins Psalm 9 with an outline:

  • I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart;
  • I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.
  • I will be glad and exult in you;
  • I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.

He proceeds to describe the victories and favoritism God has granted (and will grant) him, then to invite the people of Zion to join him in singing God’s praises, and finally to make several observations about the relationship of God to men that reveals the characters of both.

In the final segment, David focuses on the futile nature of mere men thumbing their noses at an omnipotent Creator.

Psalms 9:15-20 ESV
The nations have sunk in the pit that they made;
     in the net that they hid, their own foot has been caught.
The LORD has made himself known;
     he has executed judgment;
The wicked are snared
     in the work of their own hands.

Meditation. Selah.

The wicked shall return to Sheol, 
     all the nations that forget God.
For the needy shall not always be forgotten,
     and the hope of the poor shall not perish forever.
Arise, O LORD! Let not man prevail; 
     let the nations be judged before you!
Put them in fear, O LORD! 
     Let the nations know that they are but men!

Selah.

Scheming for relative advantage is one of the favorite activities of the wicked, and they are often very good at hiding both their actions and their motives. They set traps for the unsuspecting, hoping to tear people down to make themselves look higher, or to take advantage of someone else’s fall in order to promote their own interests.

If you are ever unsure about the character of someone, watch how he treats people who are less capable or less “sophisticated.” Does he hide the flaws of a product in order to pass the expense of future repairs on to a future owner? Does he make loud promises of gains for everyone, but somehow only ever enriches himself?

No matter what a person says or appears to do, pay attention to the end result of his personal and business dealings. If people who trust him regularly lose, while he keeps going along as if the fault is always someone else’s, watch out. Eventually he’ll fall into a trap of his own making and take with him anyone who is standing too closely. (Remember Korah!)

Death is a great magnet, pulling on men’s souls. Like iron, the evil that infects us and drives us to work toward the destruction of others inevitably pulls us back to its point of origin. David says that the wicked “shall return to Sheol,” and how can they return to something from which they haven’t already come?

Don’t, however, confuse entrapment with giving someone enough rope to hang themselves. It’s one thing to set traps for the unsuspecting. It’s another thing altogether to stand back and let someone destroy themselves by their own blundering or scheming.

The difference between these two competitive strategies draws a clear line between the character of God and the character of mere men. God doesn’t set out to destroy us, but He knows our faults, and has designed the Universe in such a way that those who seek to destroy others will eventually be destroyed by the very weapons they use against others. He knows the End from the Beginning and can never lose a game that He designed for His own purposes.

He will never abandon his faithful who are oppressed by the wicked. He is a God of Life and He will not allow those who put their trust in Him to be swallowed up by Death.

Arise, O LORD! Let not man prevail; let the nations be judged before you! Put them in fear, O LORD! Let the nations know that they are but men!

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The Sword of Salvation

Through Abraham, Salvation is available to the whole world in the person of Yeshua/Jesus.

Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
(Matthew 10:31-39 ESV)

God’s standard of righteousness requires making a distinction between things, separating the clean from the unclean, and much of Creation involved separating one thing from another: light from darkness, water from dry land, woman from man, etc. We should not be surprised that the creation of a new man necessarily involves more separation and loss.

Abraham experienced his share of division resulting from God’s call on his life.

  • He left his childhood home of Ur for Haran.
  • He left his family in Haran for a new, promised land.
  • He left the Promised Land for Egypt.
  • Sarah was taken from him twice.
  • He was separated from his nephew, Lot.
  • He kept apart from the people he lived among.
  • He sent away his second wife, Hagar, and her son, Ishmael.
  • He was resigned to losing his son, Isaac.
  • Sarah died long before he did.

He didn’t seek any of this out. Every loss was born of necessity. He didn’t set out to break up his family or to put walls between himself and the people around him. (Although it was at times a result of his own poor judgment.) Separation, especially from family and community, is difficult and painful, but Abraham’s faith in God and in God’s promises kept him moving in a direction that required division.

God knows what is best for us. He knows what we need and, just as importantly, what we don’t need. If we trust in God, we will obey Him, and this requires a deliberate separation of our old lives from our new. Obedience to God’s commands means that we will look and behave differently from the people around us, and this will, sooner or later, cause us pain. If you are faithful to God, you will experience loss. You won’t have to seek it out–and most of the time you shouldn’t! It will find you all on its own.

Just remember this: despite all of Abraham’s losses, just like Job, in the end he gained much more than he lost. He left Egypt with great wealth. He remarried after Sarah died and had many more children. He didn’t even realize his greatest gains in his lifetime, though he surely knew of them because of his special relationship with God. He became the father of many nations, not just by Isaac, but by Ishmael and all the sons of Keturah. Greatest of all, through Abraham, salvation has been made available to the whole world.

Be faithful. Be obedient. Let God worry about life’s profit and loss.

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God Sees Ishmael

Ishmael & Hagar in the wilderness, kept alive to be a thorn in the side of the whole world.
Ishmael & Hagar in the wilderness, kept alive to be a thorn in the side of the whole world.

Genesis 16:7-15 And the angel of the LORD found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain in the way to Shur. (8) And he said: ‘Hagar, Sarai’s handmaid, whence camest thou? and whither goest thou?’ And she said: ‘I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.’ (9) And the angel of the LORD said unto her: ‘Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.’ (10) And the angel of the LORD said unto her: ‘I will greatly multiply thy seed, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. (11) And the angel of the LORD said unto her: ‘Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son; and thou shalt call his name Ishmael, because the LORD hath heard thy affliction. (12) And he shall be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren.’ (13) And she called the name of the LORD that spoke unto her, Thou art a God of seeing; for she said: ‘Have I even here seen Him that seeth Me?’  (14) Wherefore the well was called ‘Beer-lahai-roi; behold, it is between Kadesh and Bered. (15) And Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael.

God sees you. He knows who you are, who you will be. But he sees much deeper than that. He sees your children and your descendants. He knows who they will be 3500 years later.

God knew from the beginning that Ishmael would be at war throughout his generations, and by including this otherwise private interaction in the Torah, he has given the world fair warning.

There can be no peace with Ishmael.

In the collective sense, Ishmael neither understands nor desires peace. He will not be satisfied with democracy, land, prosperity, or the violent death of every Jew in the world. The sooner we believe what God has plainly told us, the sooner we can forget about ridiculous ideas of nation building and exchanging land for peace and focus on strong borders and containment.

Or missions.

Because the one way that Ishmael might find lasting peace is in truly uniting with Israel through her King and Messiah, Yeshua.

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