Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #15 of Genesis, chapter 26, and we are going to read Genesis 26:15-18:

For all the wells which his father's servants had digged in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped them, and filled them with earth. And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us; for thou art much mightier than we. And Isaac departed thence, and pitched his tent in the valley of Gerar, and dwelt there. And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.

Before we move on, I just want to point out that where we read in verse 15 that the Philistines had stopped them (the wells) and filled them with earth, the word translated as “earth” is #6083 in Strong’s Hebrew Concordance, and it is not the typical word for “earth” that we have seen used repeatedly in these early chapters of Genesis.  For example, in Genesis 1:1, where it says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” that word “earth” is #776.  That is the more typical word, and it is also translated as “land.”  But the word in verse 15 about the Philistines stopping the wells and filling them with earth is #6083, and it is translated seven times as “earth” in the Old Testament and, yet, this Hebrew word is found 110 times in total.  This word is most often translated as “dust,” and we will look at several verses where it is translated this way, starting with Genesis 2:7:

And JEHOVAH God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Also, it says in Genesis 3:19:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

So far, we see this word “dust” is identified with the creature man. 

It says in Genesis 18:27:

And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes:

Abraham is recognizing that he is “dust,” and that is true of every one of us because that is where we came from, as we have all descended from Adam.  Adam was literally made from “dust.”  You know, sometimes people think there are no literal statements in the Bible, but this is a literal statement.  Adam was made of the dust of the ground.  God took some dirt that He called “dust” and He made man: “For dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return,” God is saying.  “You will again be dust.”  And, of course, that is what happens whenever someone physically dies, and they are buried or whatever way their body is disposed of.  Even if they are cremated, the funeral parlor will hand you an urn full of ashes or dust.  That person has returned to their original state prior to God’s forming of the first man, and this is what Abraham is recognizing, as he was still in a body of flesh.  Even though he was saved and had a new, born-again soul, yet while he was residing in his human body, there was a proper recognition that he was “but dust and ashes.”

We can also go to 1Samuel 2:8:

He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are JEHOVAH'S, and he hath set the world upon them.

This language is pointing to salvation: “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust.”   It can be a figure of the salvation of the soul and also the salvation of the body, because that is what God is going to do when He resurrects the dead (that are saved).  What does the Bible say?  The dead have returned to the dust, so in an action reminiscent of the original creation of man, God will resurrect the bodies of His saints that had turned to dust, and He will reform them into a new creature, a new man that will receive a new resurrected spiritual body.  And that is our good expectation.  That is what we are hoping will be here soon, and from everything we can read in the Bible, it will be here soon, without question.  That is one positive and good thing, considering the utter chaos in the world today.  It is a sort of insistent reminder to us that we are at the end of the world when men marry men, and women marry women, and men turn into women and women turn into men.  We can be 100% certain that we are living at the very end of time.  This cannot go on indefinitely.  It is not progress.  It is not a kind of “evolution” of man.  It is the complete reversal of that, and it is evidence that the wrath of God is presently on the people of the world, and that it is Judgment Day, because the things we read about in Romans 1 are being fulfilled right before our eyes.

It says in Job 4:18-19:

Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly: How much less in them that dwell in, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?

We dwell in “houses of clay,” and our foundation is of the dust.  This language is accurate.  It is honest.  It is reminding us of the truth that we are a created thing – we are a creature that God has made, just as a potter takes the clay and forms one vessel to honor and one to dishonor.  God has taken dust and fashioned a man, a creature in whom He breathed the breath of life.  He filled the creature with the spirit of life.

 I do not want to get far off course, so let us go on to Psalm 103, and this will be the last verse where we will look at “dust,” although this may lead us somewhere else.  It says in Psalm 103:13-14:

Like as a father pitieth his children, so JEHOVAH pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.

This is what we often forget.  It is what man has forgotten.  Man thinks he is really something today.  He thinks he knows it all.  He thinks he is the one that can explain all things: “Oh, yeah, here is how we came to be long, long ago.  Billions and billions of years ago, the universe began.”  And, of course, man does not know that.  He does not know the time.  He does not know how.  He does not know any of that, but he says he knows, in his arrogance.  “And then we began to evolve and develop, and we are getting better, and better, and better.”   But all the evidence points to us not getting any better.  We are not progressing in any way.  Man is turning into savages and into the condition of man without God, in the jungles, and where he develops gods of stone and of wood, decked with gold and silver.

But, here, God is the one who is saying that He knows “our frame.”  He remembers we are dust.  God is aware as He looks down from above and sees the billions of people that these are “creatures of the dust.”  These are the ones that He Himself had framed from the dirt.  He formed us and made us and breathed that initial breath of life into us.  Remember, we are even told in Acts 17:28: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.”  The continuation of our lives is of God.  God is in control of our very existence.   He is the one that made us.  He is the one that keeps us, and He is the one who will take our lives and return us to the dust.  God is the absolute power and the absolute Almighty that controls all things in all existence and, certainly, of this world and this universe.

Just one more thing that was interesting to me is the word “frame,” which is also used in Isaiah 29:16:

Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding?

We are the thing “framed,” and God knoweth our frame, that we are dust.  God is the one who framed us, and the gall of man in his sinful rebellion to speak as clay back to the Potter and to rebel against the one who has literally formed and fashioned him, and framed his very being, and brought him into existence.  The word “framed” is interesting because it is the same word translated as “imagination” in a few places.  For example, it says in Genesis 6:5:

And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

The word “imagination” is the same Hebrew word translated as “framed” in Psalm 103:14, so if we take that and we apply it to Psalm 103:14, it would read: “For he knoweth our imagination; he remembereth that we are dust.”   He knows what is in us.  He framed us out of His imagination.  God thought, “I will make man after our image and in our likeness,” as the plural pronoun was used in Genesis.  So God framed man from His mind and created a form from the dust of the ground as the body, and this is the way He has put us together and fashioned us.  It was all out of the mind of God.  That is what this word gives us a glimpse of, as He remembers our “imagination.”  He has imagined us and brought us to pass.  It was interesting to me, but it may not be to you, but it was interesting to me.

Let us go back to Genesis 26.  We have discussed the wells and how the Philistines stopped them and filled them with earth.  They filled the wells with “dust,” and we saw that the word “dust” leads us, repeatedly, to the creature, man.  And we can understand that in the sense that mankind gets mixed up with the Gospel, the Word of God, and when mankind places himself in that kind of position where he intermeddles with all wisdom in the Bible and the truth of the Word of God, he is able to “stop it up.”  Maybe one way of looking at this is to look at the time during the church age when the churches were established.  Initially, for the most part, they started out as a faithful congregations, as was at the beginning with the churches that were listed in the book of Revelation.  That is how they started out.  They were a faithful congregation and they had the water or life of the Gospel.  They had the “well of water.”  They had salvation available because they had the truth and they were faithful to the truth, initially.  People would enter into the congregation, and the pastor would preach, and through faithful preaching they would hear the Word, and the Word would accomplish its purpose as people became saved and were added to the heavenly kingdom of God.  They were not just “church members” any longer, but they were part of the eternal church comprised of all those that would become saved.

But, after a while…and, again, this gets into the idea of what happened after Abraham’s death.  After a while, what happened?    Satan sowed tares among the wheat, as the unsaved began to enter into the congregations.  It may not have been immediately, but after some time passed…you know, some of the unsaved can be pretty impressive people.  They might be rich people and well-educated people.  They might be people that speak well and, therefore, the pastor might look at that person and say, “Oh, he speaks every well, and we need a teaching elder or deacon.”  Then he goes and says (to this person), “Will you be an elder?”  And that person become an elder.  Or, the pastor goes to another person: “Oh, the Lord has blessed this man with great wealth, so it must be that God’s blessing is upon him because he is a faithful man because, after all, he is regularly coming to church, so that is an evidence that he is a faithful man.  He has an understanding of the truth, and God has richly blessed him with wealth.  Yes – let us ask this man to be a deacon or an elder.”    Or, he might say, “Oh, this man is a medical doctor, and he has to be highly educated.  He has a well-respected job, and we need highly educated people to teach others.  Let us ask this man to be an elder or a deacon.”  And maybe of those rich, educated people that are good speakers, there were some of God’s elect, but for the most part, they were not. 

The test that the pastor was using was not all that faithful to the Bible.  He was looking at a couple of things, but he should have really examined them and talked to them and given them verses, asking, “What do you think about this?”  And as he talked to them over a longer period of time, he should have prayed, “O, Lord, we need an elder or deacon,” and he should have waited on the Lord to do the selection.  Let God lead an individual and not to use his own understanding so much, but pastors often failed at this and they set up “tares” in positions of authority.  And, after a while, that “elder” would become the pastor, and the deacon would become an elder, and then that church would be overcome.  Now they (the tares) are in positions of power, but they are emissaries of Satan because they had never become saved, so Satan now had a foothold.  He had not only a foothold, but he had the whole church if he wanted, but he may not have let it become “too wild and crazy.”  That is, he might not allow them to go too far astray, doctrinally.  Why not?  Because that church may be one church within a denomination of fifty churches, and he wants that church to have an influence.  So they send their representatives to the church synod, and they have one voice in the synod, but slowly over time as Satan works in other churches, they will have more voices in the synod, and these churches will become more powerful.  They become more well-respected because they are established.  And then, slowly, it would get to the point where the emissaries of Satan are ruling in the majority of churches in the denomination, and they have the majority of votes in the church councils and synods.  And now they say, for example, “We have been teaching this thing about baptism that I do not think is correct.”  There is agreement from other churches, and then they change the doctrine of the Word of God, and they err.  Or, they change the doctrine on marriage and divorce, and they err.  Or, they change doctrine on this issue and that issue, and now they are erring more and more, to the point where they become “another gospel,” like the huge denomination of the Roman Catholic Church.  They add and subtract (to the Word of God) in so many ways that they have become another gospel with their worship of Mary and their setting up of idols, and so forth. 

So the “wells of water” has been stopped up by the Philistines; that is, the servants of the king of Gerar, who typifies Satan.  They are the servants of Satan.  They are using “dust” or man in order to stop up the well, and the well of water is stopped up, to begin with, in an individual congregation, and then it slowly expands to the entire denomination, and it grows to the point where it is now as it expands to the entire corporate church world.  Of course, God finally came in the year 1988 and ended the church age: “You are no longer my representatives.  I will no longer dwell in your midst, and I will loose Satan, and he will come into your midst because the majority of you have been serving him anyway.”   So God made the punishment fit the crime.  They had already been serving Satan, who is their spiritual father, with their lies, falsehoods and other kinds of gospels.  Therefore, God let Satan take his seat (in the temple), showing himself that he is God.

And that is what is in view here with the Philistine filling the wells with earth.