Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #3 of Genesis, chapter 24, and I am going to read Genesis 24:2-4:

And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house, that ruled over all that he had, Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: And I will make thee swear by JEHOVAH, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: But thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac.

In our last study, we saw that this eldest servant who ruled over all Abraham’s house was more than likely Eliezer, whose name means “God of help.”  He was from Damascus, and we saw in Acts and Galatians 1 that Damascus is a place that identifies with the grace of God.  God can use places to identify with spiritual truths.  For example, when we think of mount Sinai, we immediately think of the Law, and Damascus carries the connotation of “grace,” so Eliezer is one who came from Damascus or someone who has experienced the grace of God.  We could understand it that way, but I do not know, historically, if this man was saved.  I know he was a “faithful steward,” and that is also telling insofar as who he represents, because the Bible commands the people of God to be faithful stewards, as we read in 1Corinthians 4:1-2:

Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.

It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful, and this man Eliezer was certainly a faithful steward in Abraham’s household.  The Bible speaks of being faithful with “the mysteries of God,” and “the mysteries of God” have to do with the hidden meaning or hidden truth that God has placed in the Bible.  When Christ spoke a parable and the disciples asked why He spoke in parables, He said, “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.”  You see, the parable was a way of speaking that served to hide truth.  The truth is not quickly apparent; one has to search it out.  Likewise, that is the nature of the whole Bible.  The whole Bible is a parable because the whole Bible hides truth whether it is plainly stated to be a parable, or not, like when Jesus would speak a parable or when we read the book of Proverbs.  There is hidden truth within even those apparently plain verses like John 3:16.  People get John 3:16 wrong all the time because they do not see the hidden truth there.  They are not understanding the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, as they do not understand the parabolic nature of the Scriptures.

So Eliezer, as a faithful steward, would be a picture of God’s elect.  He is also going to be “sent.”  He is going to be sent on a mission to accomplish a very important task for his master Abraham.  With all of that, he is a type and figure of God’s elect because we have also been sent.  Of course, this more particularly identifies with the sending forth of the people of God during the day of salvation because the task Eliezer was sent to perform was to find a wife for Isaac, and Isaac is a type of Christ.  Therefore, it is a picture of the finding of the wife through the sending forth of the Gospel, which ultimately found the spiritual bride of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We know that Eliezer is a type of the children of God, but he is also a type of Christ Himself.  The Bible tells us that Christ was sent on the same mission as we were sent, as it says in Isaiah 52:7:

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!

Here, it refers to the beautiful feet of Him that publisheth salvation, and in Romans 10 we see a quote from this verse, except there is a slight change made, as it says in Romans 10:15:

And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!

Here, it is the feet of them.  It does not say “him,” but “them,” and that is because the Lord Jesus Christ works in His people and we were co-laborers together with Him in building the house of God.  We were co-laborers with Him in finding the spiritual bride of Christ.  He moved within us to will and to do of His good pleasure, so all the glory goes to Him in the works we were ordained to do after we obtained the grace of God, as it says in Ephesians 2:8-10:

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

So God saved us by His grace through His faith.  It was all of God.  Salvation is 100% of the Lord.  Then He sent us forth, and this was the work we did in the day of salvation to bring the Gospel to all that would listen that they might be saved.  That work was “before ordained,” and it was according to the will of God.  It was performed by the Spirit of God moving within us to accomplish this, and so forth.  Therefore, “How beautiful…are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace…that publisheth salvation.”  So Christ gets all the credit, but we were also involved because we literally and physically took sail in centuries past and traveled the seas to bring the Word of God to foreign lands.  Or, it was the people of God during the little season of Great Tribulation that flew to Africa or flew to India and brought Gospel tracts, and God blessed that message.  You see, we cannot say it was all Jesus and we certainly cannot say it was all the believers, but it was in cooperation that we have done this work.  This is also in view in Revelation 19:7:

Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.

You know, that statement kind of strikes us as wrong when we first read it.  What does it mean that the wife has made herself ready?  That sounds like the elect have done some work and contributed to their salvation?  But, no, what God is doing is that He is recognizing that the sending forth of the Gospel into the world was done by His people in unison with His Spirit.  Of course, without God it could not have been done.  It is really all of God, and He gets all the glory, but His people were involved.  As the Gospel went forth over the centuries right up until May 21, 2011, the wife was making herself ready because it was those that had already become saved and become identified as the bride of Christ that went forth with that same Gospel message until the last one that was to become saved was saved, and then the “bride” was complete.  So, in a sense, the bride has made herself ready, and it is the eternal church. 

We see this in Genesis 24 with the task Abraham is asking his servant to do, but before we get to that, let us look at the end of the verse, in Genesis 24:2:

… Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh:

Abraham is speaking to his servant.  Why did he tell him to put his hand under Abraham’s thigh?  We find this word translated as “thigh” translated as a different word that helps us to understand it, in Genesis 46:26:

All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, which came out of his loins, besides Jacob's sons' wives, all the souls were threescore and six;

The word “loins” is a translation of the same Hebrew word translated as “thigh.” 

Also, it says in Exodus 1:5:

And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls: for Joseph was in Egypt already.

Again, it is the word “loins,” so this is pointing to all the descendants that came out of Jacob’s “thigh,” so we can see that it has to do with lineage or genealogy or those that came forth or were begotten.  And that is why it is such an important thing that this servant put his hand under Abraham’s thigh because that is where “Jacob” came from.  There was Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and it goes on down the line, and remember what we read in Matthew 1:1:

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

That is, Jesus Christ came through the loins of Abraham.  He was a descendant.  We could trace His lineage back to Abraham, and that is the spiritual figure involved here.  Of course, this has everything to do, spiritually, with God’s salvation program and the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ who would finally bring forth a people for Himself to be His bride.  So God is moving Abraham to do this, as Abraham tells his servant to put his hand under his thigh (loins) as a figure of Christ who would come forth through the line of Abraham.

It goes on to say In Genesis 24:3-4:

And I will make thee swear by JEHOVAH, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: But thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac.

This is something that I think is often overlooked.  We just do not notice it, and that is this picture of the Great Commission, as that is basically what is in view here.   At the end of the chapter in Matthew 28, Christ sent forth His people, in Matthew 28:19-20:

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

There is the well-known Great Commission that the people of God were involved with for hundreds and hundreds of years or almost two centuries of the New Testament era.  The focus was on “going forth.”  Our focus was to share the Word with everyone, like sowing seed on the ground – sow it everywhere and let it fall where it may, and let God do with it what He will.  That was a true and good and right way of doing it.  And, yet, there is another aspect of the Great Commission that the churches did not look at and, in fact, they overlooked it.  They spent no time on it whatsoever, and that is what Abraham first told his servant Eliezer.  First, he caused him to swear by JEHOVAH, the God of heaven and earth: “…thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell.”  It was a negative command:  “Do not do this.  You are not to do this.  You are to go forth to find a wife for my son, but when you go, do not look in the land of Canaan.  Do not take a daughter of the Canaanites for a wife for my son.”  That was the top priority.  It was the first thing Abraham mentioned before he told his servant where he could go to find a wife for his son.

You know, this is not limited to Abraham.  We find this command running through the whole Bible.  We saw it back in Genesis 6 right before God destroyed the world with a flood.  It said in Genesis 6:1-3:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And JEHOVAH said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

God gave a timeline at the end of which He would judge the world, and from all we can gather, it was a response to the sinful conduct of the so-called “sons of God” because they took to wife the “daughters of men.”  There are numerous other verses we could go to, like Deuteronomy 7:1-3:

When JEHVOAH thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when JEHOVAH thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

Basically, that covers the whole history of Israel.  That was the Law: “Do not take a wife of the land of Canaan.”  A Jew was to marry a Jew.  An Israelite was to marry an Israelite.  The people of God have always been commanded by God to marry people of God, those that are like-minded.  Of course, it is also in the New Testament, in 2Corinthians 6.  If Deuteronomy 7 is the Law of the Old Testament, we would say it applied at least from the exodus of Egypt all the way to the cross.  So that Law not to marry the Canaanites and those of other nations spans almost 1,500 years.  And even prior to that, as we are seeing in Genesis 24, the Law predates Israel.  We can go back to Genesis 24 where it is very obvious that Abraham was commanding his servant not to take his son a wife from the daughters of the land of Canaan.  Isaac was born in 2067 B. C. and he would have been age 40 in 2027 B. C., so right around that time was when Abraham was giving this command to his servant Eliezer.  So that was over two thousand years before Christ and the New Testament era that this command was in effect.  Then in the first century A. D. after the Lord Jesus went to the cross, we read in 2Corinthians 6:14-17:

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you,

This Law that was given in 2Corinthians would apply to the entire New Testament era, right up until today and until the end of time.  Therefore we can trace this Law back thousands of years to the first century A. D.  Prior to that, we can trace it back thousands of years to Abraham.  Prior to that, we can trace it back thousands of years to the time before the flood.  In other words, this is an eternal principle or eternal Law of God that was never rescinded and was never to be disobeyed.  It is sin for an elect child of God to marry someone who is not a child of God.  That is the longstanding Law of God in the Bible, and that is why the first thing Abraham told his servant was this: “Do not take a wife for my son from the daughters of Canaan.” 

But as I mentioned, the churches did not obey, and they ignored this Law to a large degree.  That is one reason there were so many tares sown among the wheat.

Lord willing, we will continue this discussion in our next Bible study.