Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: If you have your Bibles, if you'll take those now and turn, if you will, to the book of Genesis.
The book of Genesis, chapter 11. I want to read one verse there and then we'll turn to chapter 12 and read a number of verses.
Genesis 11 and 24.
First of all, Genesis 11, verse 10.
These are the generations of Shem.
Shem was an hundred years old and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood.
Shem.
Now how many have ever heard the word anti Semitic?
Will you raise your hand? Anti Semitic as hating Jews.
So the Semitic people are Jews and Arabs and that comes from Shem.
So they are Semitic. So we say Semitic. Now to verse 24. And Nahor lived nine and 20 years and beget terah, chapter 12 and verse five. And Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, his brother's son. And all their substance that they had gathered and the souls that they had gotten in Haran, and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan, or we say Canaan, into the land of Canaan. And into the land of Canaan they came. And Abram passed through the land of the place.
Passed through the land unto the place of Sichem, unto the plain of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land. And the Lord appeared unto Abram and said, unto thy seed will I give this land. And there builded an altar unto the Lord who appeared unto him. Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, in the next few moments, I pray that your spirit will witness with ours. Teach us. O Lord, we long to hear from you in the wonderful name Jesus, the strong son of God.
Amen.
I'm titling this whole spring semester, all the Wednesday nights of these 10 also featured in the cast.
Now that's a theatrical or cinematic term. It means that there will be, you know, the big stars that are in the play or the movie. And then there'll be all the minor players.
And a lot of times we don't even know who those minor players are, even though their faces may be familiar to us.
So I'm going to be dealing with minor players in the stories of big Bible stars.
So for tonight, tonight, for example, we'll be talking about, yes, the journey of Abram into the land of Canaan and into becoming Abraham. But there are people that also appear in the cast each Wednesday night. I'm also going to give you somebody from current life.
So here is one.
Here is a man who appeared, has appeared in 200 films, multiple television shows. He's won an Academy Award.
He won an award with the British Film Actors Award.
He won the Golden Globe Screen Actors Guild. He appeared in Spider man, starring Toby, Tobey Maguire. He appeared in the Accountant with Ben Affleck. And he was just also mentioned in the cast.
His name is J.K. simmons. You may not even recognize the name, but here's his picture.
And you know him as the farmer's insurance guy.
Thank you.
Around Abram, there are these Nehor, Terah, Lot, Laban and Sarai.
They're not the star. Abram is the star. I suppose you could say Sarai is the co star, but Abram is the star.
But what I want to deal with are these secondary figures.
So I prepared this for you.
If you did not get one of these, would you please raise your hand and an usher will get them to you right straight away. All the folks right across the back there and one right over here, they're coming fast to have it. Now, we're going to also put it on the screen, but it's going to be quite small. But you'll be able to have it right in your own hot little hand.
Now, I want. I've prepared this. Just keep your hand up so the ushers can see where you are.
Now I want you to see the family tree, if you will, and how complicated and intermarried it is.
So if you will, look, we read in Genesis, from the tribe of Shem, there comes this man named Terah.
He. He is important. His father is Nehor the First. We know virtually nothing about Nehor the First, but that's the father. And then comes Terah.
Now, look, if you will.
Terah has four children that I want to mention. Nehor ii. He's named for his grandfather, Abram, who later marries Sarai, Haran.
And then their half sister, Sarai, who marries her half brother, Abram. So you see, that's the same one. You see, her name is under Abram. Parenthetically, they were half brother and sister.
Now let's go over to the side with Nehor II and look at how the family unfolds.
He has a son named Bethuel.
He has two children, Laban and Rebekah.
Laban has two daughters, Rachel and Leah.
So look at Laban's sister Rebecca.
Rebekah marries her cousin Isaac.
A generation later, Leah and Rachel both marry their cousin Jacob.
Now you'll see come down to the family line of Abram. Abram marries Sarai.
They have Isaac, or in Hebrew, Itzhak. Itzhak marries his cousin Rebekah. So you have half brother and sister married, Their child marries their cousin. Their grandchild marries both his cousins.
And then you have the other son, Jacob. And Esau. And Esau.
From Esau comes the tribe of, of the Edomites.
Now go to Haran over one more.
Haran has a boy named Lot.
When Abram travels, we're going to come to this. When Abram travels to Canaan, he takes with him his nephew, his brother. Haran's son. Lot travels with him to Canaan and Lot later. And we're going to talk about how this happens. From Lot come two of the desperate enemies of the Jewish people. The Moabites and the Ammonites come from Lot in a tragic way.
So if you've never had a clear view of the early family of Abram, I wanted to write it out for you in a way that you could see it and see how they, how they all connect, the intermarried nature of it, the way that they marry cousins and half siblings. And it's shocking to us.
We just, we flinch.
But you have to understand, first of all, the tribal gatherings were quite small.
They were. This is not. We're not talking about New York City.
We're talking about some people who live in tents on the edge of the wilderness. Nomadic people.
And as they move among other people, the other people may not want them to intermarry with them.
Second of all, God is preparing a unique reality, something that has not existed on the earth before.
He is leading the way toward the creation of a new people. The Hebrews, or as they came to be called, the Jews. The word Jew comes from the tribe Judah, but the original name for the Jewish people is Hebrews.
Now, the first Hebrew is Abram, who became Abraham.
But look at his forebearers, Nehor Terah, his brothers, Nehor Ii, Haran.
Who were these people?
They were from the modern country of Iraq, Ur of the Chaldees.
Don't have any mistake in your mind.
They are not Jewish people who worship the God Jehovah.
They are Gentiles of the tribe of Shem, who are later on in the book of Joshua. It tells us that Abram's family were idol worshipers.
So they are idol worshiping Gentiles God is going to begin covenantally the. The Hebrew people with Abram.
It is not until Egypt that they are created as a nation.
They're actually created as a nation in slavery in Egypt.
But they are a single family traced through one man who, entering into covenant with God, is transformed from an idolatrous Gentile into the patriarch, patriarchal founder of the Hebrew people.
He's the star of the story.
But let's look at some of these other people and see what we can learn about people that traveled with the star of the story.
The first thing, let's look at Terah and his son, Nahor ii.
There. There may be people. Let's suppose that you are the star of your own story.
What can you learn from these people?
There may be people that are around you.
I'm not talking about idol worshipers and evil people. I'm talking about people that do not share your fundamental values, that are not really where you need to be, who you need to be with.
Please don't misunderstand.
I'm not trying to convince anyone to abandon their family.
What I'm talking about is understanding that people around you do not have the right to own your principles and values.
Abram stood apart from everyone that was near him. Ultimately, God called him to leave.
Ultimately, God says to him, I want you to leave your land. I want you to leave your family. I want you to leave everybody. I have a special purpose for you. Now, whether or not we're talking about physically leaving or not, I do want to say that there may be people around you that think they have a claim on your life who are actually the accident of genetics.
And you should. You should never compromise your relationship with what you believe to be true about God and your relationship with God based on other people's sense of their claim on your life.
I'll give you an example.
I was a youth pastor in Atlanta right at the end of the Civil War.
And it is rude to laugh at me.
I was youth pastor at a large Methodist church in Atlanta, Georgia. There was a boy in my.
Just out of my youth group. He was in his early twenties, who.
One night he and another boy stole a boat, a motorboat out on Lake Lanier.
And racing out across Lake Lanier with their lights off to get away from anybody catching them. There was a fisherman who was sitting in the middle of the lake and they ran over him and killed him.
This boy's father was the president of a huge Atlanta company. If I named it, you would. Everyone in the room would know it and he was a chief executive officer, I should say, of this huge company.
And his father's influence and power and money got him off.
He killed a man, left a widow and three children, and his father got him off completely.
And it satisfied the father. It did not satisfy the boy.
He was riddled with guilt, filled with condemnation.
And he came to me and we prayed, and he received Jesus Christ as his savior.
And he said, I'm going to spend the rest of my life making up for this. I said, you'll never make up for it, but you can spend the rest of your life lining yourself up with what God has for your life so that as you have been destructive, you can now be creative and important and significant.
That exciting. It's wonderful. Then, three or four months later, his dad came in my office and he leaned over on my desk and pointed his finger in my face. And he said, I am a powerful man in this city, and if you ever speak to my son ever again, he said, I will destroy your life.
I can destroy your ministry.
I can destroy you. I can bring you down, son, if you ever attempt to speak to my son again.
I said, now, sir, your threat means nothing to me, but I will not try to contact your son because he's your son.
But if he contacts me, I'm not going to hang up on him. He said, he'll never contact you. You'll never hear from him ever again. I promise you.
And I said, what you've done is done. It's your son. But I said, do you mind if I ask you why? And he said, no, I don't mind telling you. He said, until my son started coming to this youth group, we used to sit together and watch a ball game and have a couple of beers. He used to come home with me after work and we'd have some cocktails. He said, my son will no longer drink a cocktail with me. And he said, you have ruined my family.
I said, let me make one thing perfectly clear to you. I have not ruined your family.
Jesus has ruined your family.
If by ruin your family you mean taking a destructive boy who killed a man on a dark lake and left a widow, if that means ruining your family, then I give Jesus glory for ruining your family.
He pointed his finger in my face and he said, have it any way you want it, but never speak to my son again. I never heard from that boy ever again. I have no idea whatever happened to him. But I thought to myself, there are people around us who want us to be like them.
And at some point or Another God says, I have the claim on your life.
I have the claim on your life.
I don't want anybody to misunderstand. I'm not talking about deserting anybody or walking out on your family. I'm talking about understanding that God says, you, you're not like them.
You belong to me.
So there are people like Nehor and Terah.
Then there are people like Haran.
And Haran began the journey.
He left Ur, the Chaldees, Iraq, and he went only as far as Turkey.
There is a town in Turkey named Haran.
And apparently it was either he was named for the town or the town was named for him. But that's probably as far as they went. In Hebrew, the word Haran can mean a mountain.
It can also mean somebody that climbs a mountain. Like a mountaineer, you might say so I don't know why the name is that. But Haran is that Tira and Nehor are people that have to be left behind emotionally, spiritually. You have to move on with God.
Then there are people like Haran.
They carve themselves off.
They may start the journey with you, but they fall by the wayside.
Now listen to what I'm going to tell you. This is not a fun thing. I'm not trying to add to anybody's misery index. But there are people in whom the work of Christ doesn't take hold all the way.
It's one of the discouraging realities.
Out of five who get saved at youth camp, two make it.
One moves on all the way. If you allow yourself to be discouraged or to fall by the wayside with them, if you stop where they stop, you can't go on and make the journey God's called you to make.
There are just going to be people in this life that just don't. They're not going to make it all the way to Canaan. They're not going to make the journey.
Jesus talked about it. He said some of the seed falls in stony places. It won't take root.
The rains come, it washes the little plants away. Sometimes it falls among thorns. The cares of this life, riches chokes them out. There's more seed that doesn't make it than does.
And we have to know that there are just going to be those people who begin with us. It's one of the hard things in the ministry is that there are people who help you plant a church, stay with you, do things, and they just can't make the journey.
And sometimes you have to just let him go.
Now I want you to move further Down.
I want you to look at.
Go to the side of Haran and look at Lot.
He does go with Abram.
Lot goes with his uncle. I want to go with you.
I see what you're like.
I see your leadership. I see your vision. God has spoken to you. I want to go with you. And so Lot goes with his uncle Abram.
He also leaves his family. He also leaves his father. They all leave Ur. The Chaldees, they leave Haran. They move on to Canaan. To Canaan. And he's with him. And God begins to prosper him and bless him. Abram's flocks are blessed and prospered. Lots are blessed and prospered. They're just becoming great agricultural barons almost.
And then the herdsmen of Lot and the herdsmen of Abram begin to fight with each other. They come to a water hole. They can't get their sheep in. They can't get their cattle in. Back and forth. And so finally, Abram says to his nephew, look, we're just too much for the land.
We're just too much.
Let me let you decide which way you want to go.
He says, look at all of this beautiful land of Canaan. Look at everything, all this pasture.
You just take your flocks. We're not going to be enemies.
We're just going to separate.
You take your flocks. If you go east, we'll go west. If you go north, we'll go south. You choose any way you want. It's all yours. And you choose.
And Lot.
Lot chooses to move down into the south, into the Araba, which is a plain. He moves down there. And the next verse is stunning.
It says, and he pitched his tent toward Sodom.
Lot made his life in Sodom.
I want to go through Lot's life with you a little bit because it's absolutely horrifying.
You know it, much of it.
Lot became a big shot in Sodom. It does not tell us that he took part in the sins of Sodom. We don't know that. We just know that he was well thought of. He was respected. He said he sat in the gate of leadership. He became like a judge in Sodom.
Maybe the fact that he didn't take part in all their wickedness made him important, made him significant.
But he was in it.
We don't know. We didn't know at the beginning how compromised he was. But we begin to sense it finally. You remember, the Lord appears to Abram and says, I'm going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
And Abram negotiates with God.
He enters into this intercessory bargain.
You wouldn't destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there were 50 righteous people. God said no. Okay, for 50, I'll spare. What about for 20? What about for 10 if I can find 10 righteous people?
There aren't 10.
And God goes down with his angel to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
But he's going to lead Lot and his family out.
He appear. He. The two angels come to Lot's house and come in.
And there must have been some way in which they were physically attractive.
Maybe their angelic countenance, their skin glowed or they were radiant, or they had, you know, some way they looked not as much like angels as just like really attractive men.
And the men of Sodom surround Lot's house and demand that he bring those two angels out for them to rape them, from which we get the word sodomy and demand to commit homosexual rape on these angels.
Now look what Lot says.
This is crazy.
Listen to what he says.
Don't do this.
These men are under my roof.
He says, instead, I have two daughters.
I'll bring them out and do anything you want to to them.
Does he think he's doing? You see how your judgment one, not your judgment one's judgment can get twisted.
You live around the twisted long enough, you begin to think twisted.
Does he think that is a righteous thing? That he's. It's okay for him to save these two men by turning his daughters over to be abused?
It's craziness.
And then the angels step out and take care of the issue by striking everybody blind.
That solves the issue temporarily.
And then the angels tell Lot and his family, go, we're going to destroy this city.
Come with us. And you have to leave immediately.
Lot goes to his son in laws and he says, we gotta go. God's going to destroy this. And they laugh at him.
It says it sounded to them like he was making a joke.
It sounds ridiculous to them.
Listen, I feel like part of this message is adding to the misery index. What you said, it was prophetic. Maybe, Pastor, but listen to me.
The more a society sinks into depravity and wickedness, righteousness sounds comical.
It sounds crazy.
The prophetic reality that God's going to destroy those cities and that Lot knows it by the voice of angels. Present tense, visible angels and his son in law's laugh.
So Lot takes his wife and his daughters by hand and they start out of the city.
And the angel says, go into the mountains and don't look back.
Now, we all know the story, and Lot's wife looked back over his shoulder and turned to a pillar of salt.
And it's made jokes of and everything else, but it's a very sobering story.
What does it mean? Was it a capricious and sort of.
Sort of whimsical command? Don't look back.
Keep your eyes straight ahead. No, don't you see what God is saying? There's nothing back there for you if you long for what you've left behind. Jesus put it another way. Any man who puts his hand to the plow and looks over his shoulder is not fit for the kingdom of God.
So the angel says to Lot and his family, don't look back.
I wonder what was in the mind of Lot's wife.
What was she thinking about? Was she thinking about her house?
Oh, I love that house. It's the best house we ever lived in. We were living in tents.
I just want to see my house one more time. Was she thinking about her bridge club?
Was she thinking about her friends? Was she thinking about the money she had in the bank? Oh, she said, we left so fast, I didn't get a chance to get the money out of the bank.
We wonder what was in her mind.
But instead of keeping her eyes on the call, she turns and looks behind her and her life is ruined.
She's destroyed.
Now, you see that Lot's inclination towards Sodom is gradually destroying his life.
Now, Lot tries to do a bargain with the.
With the angels.
The angels say, go into the mountains. He says, oh, I'm afraid of the mountains. He says, let me go to Zoar.
It's a little city.
Even still, he says, I don't want the big sins. I don't want Sodom and Gomorrah. I'm not looking for Las Vegas. I'm not looking for all that. Let me just have a little sin.
Let me go to Zoar, just a little town.
And so Lot and his two daughters move into a cave north of Zoar.
And his daughters say to themselves, we'll never get married, and we're never going to have children, so we're going to have to use our Father.
And so they get him drunk, and he sleeps with one of them and impregnates her.
The next night, they get him drunk again. He sleeps with the other one and impregnates her. And from those two incestuous nights come the Moabites and the Ammonites.
Look, this is a sobering story. Look, I'm Going with Abram.
I'm leaving my family. I'm leaving the past. Abram's had a word from God. We're going to Canaan. I'm traveling with him.
Finally separation.
Finally the inclination toward. Toward Sodom and Gomorrah. Finally compromise. Finally destruction. Finally the destruction of his family. And finally drunken incest.
When he left Ur of the Chaldees with his uncle. Drunken incest that would produce two tribes that would haunt the Hebrew people for hundreds of years. That never occurred to him.
So there are people like Terah and Nehor that we have to kind of carve off from our lives.
There are other people that make the journey with us and stop somewhere.
There are other people that make the journey with us. And just when it looks like we're in Canaan, they fail because they start to compromise.
The story of Lot is one of the most horrible, horrifying and tragic stories in the whole Bible.
There's one other person in the play also mentioned in the cast.
Sarai.
Sarai is not perfect. Abram is not perfect. By the way, this is not a story about perfection.
This is a story about keeping your eye on the call of God.
Even when he fails, even when he falls, even when he does something stupid. Abram never lets go of who God is. Never forgets the covenant, never forgets his destiny.
And his wife, his half sister, Sarai.
There are mistakes along the way.
She was a beautiful woman, evidently.
And Abram convinces her not once, but twice to tell people that she is his sister.
Which in a sense, she is. She is his half sister so that they won't kill him in order to get her.
That's a very weak thing.
But both times nothing happens. She never sleeps with those two men. She comes back to him. They move on. She's with him.
There is the failure. With Ishmael, it is a failure.
God gives them the promise that from them will come this great tribe, the Hebrew people, the Jewish people are going to come from them. But they're old, they're quite elderly, and they're childless.
So Sariah is just going to take care of it for God.
So she gives her handmaid to Abram and says, make her pregnant and I'll take that baby. And that'll be how God will work it. There's sometimes we're just going to fix it for God.
We just, you know, we trust God. Yes, we trust you, God, but let me just take care of this.
And that woman gives birth to Abram's child, Ishmael, who also became the head of many, many nations.
And through him comes Muhammad.
The Islamic religion, demonic religion comes from that side.
When you rush and get ahead of God and try to make something happen in order to fulfill the promise of God, you may give birth to an ishmael that you'll regret the rest of your life.
So there are mistakes made.
There are mistakes made.
But finally, God gives Sarai in her old age. And in Abram's old age, God gives her this miraculous baby.
Now, let me tell you something really good about Sarai. I told all this. These are complicated people. They're real people.
Does anybody here know anybody that looked like they were going to be great for the whole journey and they fell by the wayside?
I'm asking you, do you know anybody that got saved? They looked like they were going to make it, and they just didn't make it. Will you raise your hand? Look. Look at all the hands. Look. This is real.
Does anybody know anybody that had talent and ability and prosperity? And they just kept compromising and compromising until they fell into the sin. I'm not talking about maybe Sodom and Gomorra, but sin and destroyed their family and lost everything. Anybody know anybody like that? Sure.
Sure, we do. These are real people. These are real stories.
Sarai and Abram, they're not perfect. They're not. They don't glow in the dark.
But let me tell you one thing about Sarai.
Through thick and thin, up and down, Sarai stayed with her husband.
A journey by camels, living in tents from Ur of the Chaldees through Turkey into Canaan. Wandering, living in tents, that is not the dream of a woman's life.
But she believed the call of God on her husband and she stayed with him.
Yes, the story is about Abram.
Yes, he's the star of the movie.
But without Sarai, also mentioned in the cast, the story doesn't end like it's supposed to.
Look, living with a preacher on his best day is not the best thing that can happen to a woman.
I was just lost as a ball in high weeds when we got married.
When I got saved and baptized in the Holy Spirit, I became an evangelist.
I wonder how difficult it is for a woman to live with a sinner or an evangelist.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr.markrutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
