Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #2 of Genesis, chapter 26, and we are going to read Genesis 26:1-5:

And there was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech king of the Philistines unto Gerar. And JEHOVAH appeared unto him, and said, Go not down into Egypt; dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of: Sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, I will give all these countries, and I will perform the oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father; And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; Because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.

I will stop reading there.  Last time were looking at verse 1 and discussing the famine, in Genesis 26:1:

And there was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that was in the days of Abraham.

We went to Genesis 12, and I will read that again, in Genesis 12:10:

And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land.

We see in this verse that when Abram experienced the famine, he went down into Egypt.  But in Genesis 26, after telling us about the famine and Isaac going unto Abimelech king of the Philistines unto Gerar, it says in Genesis 26:2:

And JEHOVAH appeared unto him, and said, Go not down into Egypt; dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of:

That is the big difference between this famine and the earlier famine. (A famine is not listed anywhere else I could see between Genesis 12 and Genesis 26.)  And Abram experienced that famine early on after entering into the land of Canaan, so it would have been over 100 years before.  It was possible there were other famines, and God just did not record them.  But as far as these two famines, there were some similarities and some differences, and one of the differences was that God commanded Isaac, “Go not down into Egypt; dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of.” 

That is also similar to Genesis 12:1-3:

Now JEHOVAH had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

In these verses, the Lord told Abram to get out of the place he was at in Ur of the Chaldees, and to go “unto the land That I will shew thee.”  And he did not know where he was going, but he was following God’s guidance and direction.   I do not know if we spent time covering that, or not, but this is always what God’s people do.  This is what we are doing today.  We are following the Lord Jesus Christ:  “Take up the cross, and follow me.” Actually, in these days after the Tribulation and after the great multitude has come in, as we read of that great catch of fish in John 21, and after that the Lord told Peter three times, “Feed my sheep,”  then we find language of taking up the cross as Jesus gave the command, “Follow me.”  It has special application to Judgment Day.  And how do we follow Christ?  It has always been a very curious thing, has it not?  We know that Jesus says very clearly, “Follow me.”  It is in the Gospel accounts.  “Take up the cross, and follow me.”  We have come to understand how we do follow the Lord, once we have learned some other information in the Bible.  For example, we learned that Jesus is the Word made flesh.  He is the Word of God, and Jesus is not in the world “in the flesh” at this present time, so we cannot follow Him like His disciples could literally follow Him as Jesus went from one town to another town.  They could follow His bodily form, and follow Him in the flesh, so to speak. 

We cannot do that and, yet, we follow the Lord Jesus Christ.  And we follow Him through the process of studying the Bible, and this is why Bible study is so important to the elect people of God.  It is not just a way to pass time, and it is not something that is done to just do something interesting that is “Christian.”  That is almost the idea that is given by many, many churches: they go on Sunday, take their seat, and they go through the bulletin: “We pray, we sing, we read the Bible, and the pastor preaches for 15 minutes; we sing, we pray, and we leave. Let us get it done.”  Then they have done their Christian duty.  Of course, that is all most of them do – they have no real interest or strong desire toward the Bible itself.  That is very telling, because the Bible is the Word of God.  Christ is the Word made flesh.  There is a strong identification between the Lord Jesus Christ and the Bible.  Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  The Bible says of itself, “Thy word is truth.”  And the Bible tells us that it reveals the pathway to the kingdom of God in heaven.  And the Bible tells us: “For faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”  Faith brings life.  So the Bible is the way, the truth and the life.  What is true of Christ is true of the Bible.

And God’s people may not understand this initially, but all we know is that after the Lord saved us, we are just fascinated with the Bible.  We are extremely curious, and we are extremely interested in the things the Bible says, and we enjoy hearing the Bible taught and truth proclaimed – especially truth.  And, yet, often during the church age, we would come under the hearing of preachers and pastors, and many of them were natural-minded individuals that taught a “lifeless” form of the Bible because they taught the historical, grammatical method of interpretation.  They taught the plain, literal meaning of Scriptures, and once they had that, they would seek no other meaning; and in that process, they emptied the Bible of its power, glory and riches of the deep spiritual treasure that lied beneath the surface meaning of the Scriptures.  Yet God’s people endured those hardships and we listened, being thankful for any little nugget of truth we might receive. 

But then God did away with the churches (as His representation) and, interestingly enough, He did away with the church’s methodology and hermeneutic at about the same time that He opened the Scriptures.  Was that a coincidence?  No – it is very probable that God permitted the churches to have their erroneous way of approaching the Bible, with its methodology and hermeneutic that did not allow for digging into the Word for the nuggets of gold and silver, in order to help hide the truth.  Now the true people of God would have understood, and the Spirit of God would have directed us to some degree throughout the ages to compare Scripture with Scripture, and the Holy Ghost would teach.  But, often, we would have gone to the pastor, excitedly, and say, “Pastor, when we start here and go over to this verse and follow this other verse, it brings up this conclusion, and it is a new and interesting conclusion, right?”  And he would reply, “What do you mean by jumping around like that?  You cannot do that.  Every verse is in its own context, and over here the Apostle Paul wrote this, but over there it was Peter, and over there it was Jesus Himself speaking.  You cannot mix them all up and treat them like they are related.”  So, in essence, the church hermeneutic of looking only at the plain, literal meaning (the dry “wooden” understanding of the Bible) helped to serve God’s purpose to hide the deeper things of the Scriptures until we got to the time of the end. 

Then God opened up His Word, simultaneously with ending the church age, and He commanded His people to come out of “her,” the churches.   As we came out, many of us were blessed to be under the hearing of a faithful teacher like Mr. Camping, teaching the Word of God by using the Bible’s own hermeneutic of comparing Scripture with Scripture, with the Holy Ghost teaching, and making sure that our conclusions were harmonizing with everything else the Bible says.  We were being spiritually nourished like never before.  It was “manna from heaven.”  You see, that was God’s working at that time and during this time as the Word continues to be opened up during this time in the Day of Judgment, we follow the Word of God, exclusively.  Of course, since we are still in our fleshly bodies that are tainted with sin, there are imperfections, but we are not talking about men – we are talking about God’s leading, just as Abram heard the voice of God and he went out, not knowing where he would go.  But God said, “I will show you.  Follow me, and I will direct you into the Promised Land, the land you will inhabit, the kingdom of God.  I will show you the way.” 

Likewise, here we are today, following the Bible.  Of course, the churches are appalled.  They cry, “Heresy!  What heretics they are.  They do not listen to us.”  (That is really their main problem)  “They do not listen to church tradition.  They despise church tradition.  They despise our confessions and creeds.  They despise godly authority of pastors and elders and deacons.  They refuse to acknowledge our God-given authority to lead them, direct them and teach them.”  No – it is not despising their authority because they no longer have any authority.  God has removed the authority of the pastors, priests, bishops, popes and all church authority, as God says in Ezekiel 34:10: “I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock…”  So it is not that we are despising them, it is simply that we do not recognize their authority any longer.  There was the time that lasted for 1,955 years wherein God would have His elect people to sit obediently in the congregations, and listen to and respect the preacher.  When he was teaching truth, we were to do what he was saying, insofar as it was the true teaching of the Word of God.  And the people of God did that, but now that time is past.  We are living after the end of the church age.  Mr. Camping’s book was titled, “The End of the Church Age and After,” and that is where we are in time – we are after the church age.  So we would no longer listen to a preacher any more than we would listen to a Rabbi teaching the Jewish tradition.  They serve no purpose for us.  They have no meaning or influence, and we are not interested in them.  As a matter of fact, we should really not be under the hearing of their teaching.  Instead, we should be under the hearing of the Word, and by the Word, I mean the Bible.  To come under the hearing of the Bible means to allow the Bible to do the teaching.  Again, the Bible or the Word is completely identified with Christ, and if we allow the Bible to teach, we are allowing Christ to teach us.  If we are following the Bible, we are following Christ.  It is very significant that we read this in John 12 concerning Judgment Day, in John 12:48:

He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.

The Word that Christ has spoken is the whole Bible.  The Bible is judging the ungodly at this time, because this is the Day of Judgment.  And we can understand it as being “the last day” in its entirety, but, of course, there will be an actual last day, which the Biblical evidence is indicating will take place on a day in 2033.  It is on that last day of Judgment Day (the last day of the last day, we could say) that there will be the day of resurrection or rapture.  But the Word is judging all throughout this time, and that is why we read this of Judgment Day, in Revelation 19:13:

And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.

This is the Lord Jesus, the faithful and true One, on the white horse.  In order to teach us, the Bible is describing Him as the Word of God because it is the Word that will judge us in the last day.  Then we read in Revelation 19:14:

And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.

We just looked earlier at verses 7 and 8, and it is the “bride of Christ” that is in fine linen, white and clean, and the armies in heaven are the saints.  They are the “ten thousands” of saints, or the completeness of God’s elect, all those the Lord  has saved.  The elect children of God that are alive and remaining on the earth are following the Word of God into “battle” or into Judgment Day.  “Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world?”  How are we judging the world?  It is through the Word that is judging the world.  We follow the Word (the Bible), and it is really as simple as that – we follow the Word.  We will not turn back from it.  We cannot turn back from it because God is holding us fast, and He will not let us go.  We also have nowhere to go, so we do what the people of God have always done, and we search the Scriptures with an intense interest because God has given us a love for Christ and a love for the Word, as they are one and the same.  And as the Word produces a teaching (through the comparison of Scriptures) like the shut door of heaven, the prolonged spiritual judgment or the elect appearing before the judgment seat of Christ, and so forth, we follow those teachings because we see it is taught in the Bible.

No – churches of the past have not taught these things.  That is true.  Reformed theologians of the past have not taught it.  These things are not memorialized in confessions and creeds, but we do not care about that, because we understand that they had partial understanding in their time, but God has done away with that which was in part, and now He is revealing the “clarity” and the fulness of His truth as the Holy Spirit guides His people, and His people will follow.  And so we do (follow), and this is why we study the Bible in the way we do, and why we are so interested in it and fascinated by it, and why we are continually doing so.  It is the way God has established for the people He has saved to follow Lord Jesus Christ.

That is why it indicates a real problem when people do not have that interest, that love and that fascination with the Bible.  You know, they like the idea of being a Christian, and they like some of the things the Bible says about salvation and living forever.  They like that kind of security, but, really, their interest is not in the things of God in the Bible.  They are much more comfortable and much happier as they enjoy themselves to a greater extent when they are involved with the world and the things of the world.  Well, on Sunday, they come back to the Bible just to “show their faith” and get the idea that they are “Christian” renewed, and they can put that in their back pocket in case anything happens to them.

But that is not the heart the Lord has given His own people.  We have a “heart after His own heart,” and the people of God want to immerse ourselves in the Bible.

Back in Genesis 26, after commanding Isaac not to go down into Egypt, God commands in Genesis 26:3-4:

Sojourn in this land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and unto thy seed, I will give all these countries, and I will perform the oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father; And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed;

God is reiterating the promise that He gave to Abraham, and there is good reason for that, if we turn back to Genesis 17:5-8:

Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.

The Lord spoke this to Abraham.  And now it has gotten to the point where Abraham has died, and we read that he “gave up the ghost,” in the previous chapter.  So now there is Isaac who was figure of the promised seed, and we know that, ultimately, the “seed” pointed to the Lord Jesus.  So God is reaffirming and reiterating the covenant promise given to Abraham, and it is now given to Isaac, concerning multiplying his seed as the stars of the heaven for multitude.  No – God had not forgotten.  And this is helpful and encouraging to us, because He spoke this to Abraham, but He reiterated it to Isaac, and later He would do the same to Jacob.  And that means it is a “line of descent” all the way down, and the Word of God, the Bible, has reiterated the same covenant to you and me, if we are counted among the seed of God’s elect.