The Patriarchs - Absolutely Sovereign

This is the eighth post in a series that I am doing based on the lives of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), the accounts of which are found in the book of Genesis.  In spite of the title of this series, the record of the experiences of the men listed above are only incidental to me.  What I find far more interesting, relevant, and important is the revelation of the character and nature of God that we can see by observing these men's lives.  Each post will coincide with a lesson being taught in a classroom.  As such, they will not be in a traditional essay format.  Rather, it will be a slightly expanded version of the notes that I hand out in class. 

The Genesis Account

Gen. 15:9-21 – Within this passage is a curious little phrase.  Starting in verse 13 The Lord prophesies the future of Israel.  And in verse 16 He says “Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.”

Gen. 16:11-12 – God commands Hagar to name her son Ishmael.  This is interesting because the word means “God hears”.  Such a name, clearly given at God’s direction, gives strong implication as to the ordination of this man’s life according to the will of God.  Then it is revealed that Ishmael would be in opposition to everyone.  This further clinches the idea that Ishmael’s confrontations were planned by God.

Gen. 32:24-32 – The name Israel means “he who strives with God” or “God strives”.  With this as the name chosen by God for the nation He was going to form, is it any surprise they turned out to be obstinate?  Furthermore, God obviously intended for things to work out the way they did for Israel, including their eventual rebellion.

Supporting Scriptures

Exo. 34:1, 4-9 – In God’s interaction with Moses He reveals an interesting facet of His character.  There is a duality seen between loving-kindness and forgiveness contrasted with anger, an encompassing patience mixed with an implacable finality of justice.  The end result is that the guilty will be punished and wrongs will be set right.  In God’s economy of righteousness the prosecution of justice will sometimes result in the crimes of the fathers being visited on the heads of the children.  Our selfish human nature tends to bristle at Biblical concepts such as this one.  We put our backs up and wail about the unfairness of God.  We seek to cast blame elsewhere.  And this penchant for shifting attention from ourselves ultimately lands squarely in the court of punishment for sin.  We cry foul over God’s condemnation of the entire human race for what we see as Adam’s wrong-doing while conveniently ignoring the fact that not a day has gone by in which a single one of us has not crawled into bed with sin.  Going back to the account in Exodus, two points rise to the surface.  One, as already mentioned, although a father may be guilty of a specific crime for which God demands restitution, it is undeniably accurate to state that any and all of his offspring are equally guilty, perhaps not of the same exact sin, but a litany of sins at least equal in scope to that of their father.  Two, the reality is that many times children repeat the mistakes of their parents.  Whether the issue is narcotic addiction, physical abuse, uncontrolled rage, or anything else, the pattern of human behavior is that if the issue was seen in the parents it will probably also be seen in the children.

Amos 4 – Piggybacking on the already revealed truth from Exodus is this sobering passage of condemnation uttered against the northern kingdom of Israel.  The Lord painstakingly details not one, not two, but five specific warnings given to the Jews in the form of material discomforts.  Yet they spurned their God consistently every single time. 

Hab. 2:3 – God assures Habakkuk that the prophetic depictions of future events about to be delivered are marked for a specific time.  God’s response to unrighteousness is not haphazard.  It is precisely proportioned, carefully considered, and perfectly applied in the exact time and manner that is best.

Questions For Meditation

What did God mean when He said “the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete”?

A pattern of divine response to evil is established in the pages of Scripture.  It is perhaps best and most expansively demonstrated through God’s dealings with the nation of Israel.  There are three significant components we can see.

First is that God is very patient.  In the Exodus passage listed above He is quite clear about His intention to show loving-kindness, compassion, grace, and truth to multitudes of people.  Likewise when we turn our attention to Amos chapter 4 we see a record laid out before us of God in His vast patience giving Israel opportunity after opportunity to repent.  Who of us, as human parents, would ask our children to obey five or more times in a row, without an authoritarian response to their wrongdoing?  It is true that God was punishing Israel via material discomfort while He “waited” for the ultimate turning from their sin that would never come.  But it is equally true that those temporary passing acts of discipline were not commensurate to the weight of their idolatry.  In other words, these temporary punishments did not fit the crime.  It would be like one of us, with a child guilty of murder, refraining from calling the police and in lieu of that simply taking away their phone privileges or video game time.  Then finally, after 4 more murders and 4 more small time punishments with no repentance, we finally turn our wayward child over to the authorities.  I do not mean to suggest that a parent who takes this course of action is sanctioned in it because they have a pattern in Scripture of God behaving the same way.  We are not God and His ways are not our ways nor are our minds anywhere close to His mind.  Thus our distorted application of righteousness cannot measure up to His perfect rendition of it.  The point rather is that we should be in awe of just how patient and longsuffering God truly is.

The second point of this divine pattern of response is a guarantee that there will come a day of reckoning when accounts will be settled and wrongs will be made right.  In both the Exodus and the Amos passages this element can be seen, in that at the end of the day God visited wrath and consequences upon the heads of the sinners involved that absolutely did fit the crimes they were guilty of.  God’s response to evil may seem, to us, to be slow in coming, but when it does come oh boy does it ever come with a vengeance.  There is no escaping the great and terrible day of the Lord when His flaming anger consumes sin just as a super-heated furnace vaporizes living tissue and inanimate minerals alike.

Thirdly and finally, the deliverance of this divine verdict is perfect in its timing because God is perfect in His planning.  There is no possible way we can ever hope to comprehend why or how the timetable of a penalty is selected by The Lord.  But we can be assured that when it does fall the hand of judgment is optimized flawlessly by One who sees the past, present, and future all at once.

With these points in mind we can turn back to the original question: what did God mean when He told Abraham that “in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.”?  The evidence from Scripture strongly suggests that God was not ready yet for the Hebrews to come in and subjugate Palestine.  First of all, they were not numerous enough yet.  While it’s true that God could have supernaturally given Canaan to His people on the spot, it’s also true that His preference for action is to work through human surrogates via a process and over a period of time.  We considered elements of that truth in the very first essay of this series when we looked at the concept of the Mediatorial Kingdom.  Also, we know from the book of Joshua that His instructions to the people were to take possession of the land by annihilating the people groups living there.  But apparently, the evil the Amorites were guilty of had not yet reached its full measure of debauchery in which God finally says “enough!” as He did hundreds of years later with Israel.  And so the decree was given that these pagan peoples would be allowed to continue for a season in their unrighteousness while God grew the seed of Abraham into a mighty people as numerous as the sands on the shore or the stars in the heavens.

What does this imply about the relationship between the evil present in the world and God’s sovereignty?

The inescapable conclusion here is that God permits evil to exist and persist for a season.  In fact, I’ll go even further and say that He ordains it.  To ordain means to “order or decree something officially”.  Only someone in authority has the right and privilege to do this.  The definition of a ruler is “a person exercising government or dominion”.  If that doesn’t describe the Lord God then I don’t know what does.  The logical conclusion then is that God, as the ruler of all creation, orders and decrees all that transpires within His realm.  If we say that He does not then we ascribe the power of cause to an agent other than God.  In other words, we elevate the creature over the creator.  This is a heinous contradiction of the sovereignty of God.  We are stripping God of at least a portion of His authority.  And to do that in any way, shape, or form is a horrible offense worthy of death.  This is the point of Romans chapter one.

In contrast to this picture of stolen authority we have passages such as Isaiah 46:9-11 or Deuteronomy 32:39 which clearly paint an unblinking picture of a God who is completely in control without any question or serious contenders for His throne.

And lest you balk at this idea of God ordaining evil I would encourage you to turn to the first chapters of the book of Job.  In these pages we are given a front row seat into the inner workings of the heavenly realm.  We see Satan come before The Lord and challenge the notion that the creation will sing of His glory.  God deliberately gives the enemy of righteousness and truth a license to visit unspeakable evil and horror upon Job.  And although Job is never told why this was done, we as the reader have a bit more information to base a conclusion on.  The fact of the matter is that, like it or not, God did this to Job, through Satan, for no other reason than the advancement of His own glory.  We may in our self-centeredness not care for this.  But that doesn’t make it any less true.

How does this truth impact your life on a deeply personal level?

Put simply, realize and understand, bad stuff that happens to you was ordained by God.  Don’t make the mistake of robbing God of His prerogative by laying the over-arching responsibility for the orchestration of the events in your life to any other agent than God.  I’m not talking about personal responsibility here.  It’s certainly true that if someone steals from you they are culpable for the crime.  But it’s equally true that they only did it because God allowed them to, just as He allowed Satan to do what he did with Job.  I think far too often we tend to marginalize and ignore this second component of a perceived bad circumstance and in so doing we shift the focus away from God, even temporarily.  This is something we must not do!