ABRAHAM: THE CITIZEN OF UR OF THE CHALDEES

05-26-57

Genesis 12:2

You’re sharing with us the services of the First Baptist Church in Dallas.  And this is the pastor bringing the early morning message entitled: “Abraham, the Citizen of Ur of the Chaldees.”

Now in our Bibles let us turn to the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis.  And then as the message progresses from time to time, you can turn with me to these places in the Bible of which we shall be speaking this morning.  Abraham, of the City of Ur of the Chaldees.  In the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis, the twenty-sixth verse: “And Terah lived seventy years and begat three sons, Abram, Nahor, and Haran.”

The twenty-ninth verse, “And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai; . . . and Terah—the thirty-first verse–and Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, (his grandson), and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran”—which is the northern part of the Mesopotamian valley—“they came to Haran and dwelt there.”

Now the twelfth chapter, “Now the Lord 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 show 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 them that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”

Now I have just read to you, and read in your hearing, the first tremendously great turning point in the Bible.  Isn’t it an unusual thing as I hold this Bible in my hand and close its covers like this, I take the first eleven chapters of the book of that Bible, just the very few first pages, and that is the account of the whole creation and the whole human race until comparatively recent times.  Then as I hold this Book in my hand, all of that vast, vast majority of the whole Book of God is concerned with one family, with one race, with one story. 

Well, on the face of it, there is a thing that is very, very evident.  And that is this: that the Bible is in nowise a chronicle or a history of the race.  The Bible has a purpose.  There is a redemptive program it is unfolding.  That is its only concern.  Those eleven chapters of Genesis are just introductory.  God tells us how He made the world.  God tells us the first beginnings of the race.  Then all of that is dropped; it is hardly referred to again. 

And in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Genesis, God chooses out one man and one family and one race, and thereafter the story is the unfolding redemptive purpose of God through that one man and his seed.  That is an identical thing that you will find in the life of Christ.  In nowise and in no sense are the gospels biographies of the life of Jesus.  Of the life of our Lord, after He was a year old until He was thirty years old, there is nothing told except one little incident when the boy of twelve visited the temple. 

Now of the three years of the public ministry of our Lord, more than one-third of the gospels is taken up with the last few days and almost few hours of that ministry.  So the thing that lies back of the Scriptures is a great purpose, not historical, not educational, not scientific, not of the race or of the world; the great purpose that lies back of the story is the redemptive plan of God. 

So when I read the Bible, I am reading God’s unfolding redemptive appeal for my heart.  That’s its purpose and the things that I read back there in the Bible are written in the Book for examples.  In nowise is it just history or chronicle.  But these things are for our admonition upon whom the ends of the world are come.  And we are to be instructed thereby, and our souls are to be saved thereby, and we are to be encouraged therein.  The Bible is God’s word to our hearts.  It is manna for our souls.  It is water of life for our thirsting spirits.  And we are to receive the Bible as the very Word of God.  It is the entrance, God’s door into heaven, without which no man can ever be saved.  Apart from the Word of God, no man shall ever see God.  Born-again, by the Word of God “which liveth and abideth forever.”  And this is the Word by which the gospel is preached unto you.  I Peter 1:23-25: “Of his own will beget he us by the word.  Now, you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.  Now you are sanctified.  You are cleansed with the washing of water by the word.”  All of us are saved by the gospel of Christ, the Word of God, and by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. 

So this thing that I hold in my hand is “quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword.”  It is the Word of God.  It is the quickening presence of God.  It is the living Spirit of God.  God is in the pages the Book and God is in His Word.  “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.”  “And I saw heaven open and behold he who his name is called the word of God,” the incarnate Word, the spoken Word, the living Word, and all three are one.  And when I study the Word, I study God, and when I follow the Word, I follow God.  And spiritually, when I know the Word, I know God. 

When I study the Gospels, I am studying Jesus Himself.  Outside the gospels you’d never have a Jesus, you’d never know a Jesus.  This is the quickening power of God, and it is the instrument of the redemptive salvation of the world.  That’s the reason we magnify this holy Book and lift up these exalted revelations. 

When I minimize the Word of God, I minimize the Lord Jesus Christ.  When I magnify the Word of God, I glorify Jesus Christ.  So I say, it isn’t just a Book.  It has a tremendous redemptive purpose that reaches down to each one of our hearts and we are saved thereby in that revelation. 

Now to begin with Abraham.  Abraham is vital in this redemptive purpose.  If we dismiss Abraham, we do the same thing as if we tore down the structure of one end of a suspension bridge.  The bridge immediately will collapse into the abyss or the sea or the ocean.  So it is with Abraham.  If we do away with Abraham, the whole structure collapses of the redemptive plan and program of God as it is revealed in the holy Book.  Abraham is the great beginning.  He’s the father of the faithful, called “the friend of God.”  Isn’t it an unusual comment upon him that all three of the great monotheistic religions look back to him as father?  Judaism, Islam and Christianity.  Abraham is vital I say, in this redemptive purpose of God. 

Now wherever you find a tremendously vital adjunct or pillar or foundation of the revelation of God, such as the deity of Christ, such as the resurrection of our Lord, such as the inspiration of the Scriptures, or such as the call of Abraham, wherever you find a great pillar of the redemptive program of God, there will you find the hosts of historical critics assailing, trying to undermine it, trying to tear it down.  So it is with Abraham. 

You know, it’s a strange thing.  Preparing this message this week I wrote—I mean in this week, while I was studying, I made a trip.  And coming back on the airline there was a man who sat across the aisle from me.  He looked over to me and said, “You either are a lawyer or a preacher.”  I don’t know why he put a lawyer in there, “You’re either a lawyer or a preacher.”  Usually, they say you look like a gambler or something else.  “You’re a lawyer or a preacher, which are you?” 

“Well,” I said, “I am a preacher.”  “Well, fine,” he said.  “Come over here and sit down by my side and let me talk to you.”  So I went over there and sat down by his side.  He himself was a lawyer.  He was a very smart fellow, and among the things that he said, he said, “I don’t think those people back there in the Old Testament were actual personages.  I don’t believe they were actual people.”  He said, “I believe they were tribes.  They were whole families of people, and these names back there are just personifications of the tribe, and that’s all.  They never actually lived.” 

Well, I thought, isn’t that strange?  That is the identical thing that I had been reading this very week in preparation for this message, reading what some of these tremendously famous higher critics say about the Bible.  The most famous, I suppose, of all the higher critics was named Wellhausen.  He was a German, and now I quote from Wellhausen:  “Abraham is a free creation of unconscious art, a tribal personification, an unsubstantial solar myth.  If he ever did exist he was an illiterate, uncultured, semi-savage Bedouin sheik, a nomad from birth.” 

Now that is just typical of all of them.  If I quoted 40 dozen, it would be just that again.  Well the only thing about those things, a half a century ago what a man like Wellhausen would say was law and gospel.  Why there wasn’t an intellectual in the land that would dare dispute a thing like that.  And in all of the pulpits, practically, in all of the intellectual circles of seminary life, why that was the accepted thing, no other thing.  Isn’t it at this time a marvelous come to pass, how God in His own way subverts these conclusions of men? 

There was appointed an expedition on the part of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania under the Leonard Woolley.  And that expedition went down to Ur of Chaldees just to dig, just to see if they could find anything about this man Abraham and about the times in which he lived, and if there was such a man and was such a time and was such a civilization. 

Why bless your heart, you just ought to read the volumes that these learned archaeologists have written about Abraham, and about Ur of Chaldee, and about the civilization of that day and that time.  What a marvelous thing the archeological spade has unearthed. 

Now this morning, for just a little while, I want us to look at Abraham as a citizen in Ur of the Chaldees.  Ur is located about ten miles west of the Euphrates River, and about halfway between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf, right in the middle of Mesopotamia.  The country is very bleak and forbidding now.  I have flown over it.  I’ve looked at it.  It’s a featureless expanse of drab clay and yellow sand.  Its climate is very forbidding, as much so as the landscape. 

In the summertime it is hot, and for days on end the sandstorms blot out the sun.  And in the wintertime the icy fingers from the winds of the deserts of the north reach down, and I read in one place where these excavators were chilled to the bone, and the water that they would drink out of those pitchers would freeze solid in the pitchers. 

Now it is a very forbidding and inhospitable land.  But in Abraham’s day it was lush and prosperous.  And when you fly over that land you can see the marks of those great canals and irrigation projects that were built thousands of years ago.  Back there in that day that country was irrigated with great canals and systems and it was greatly prosperous and it was the birthplace of civilization, not in Egypt, but in Mesopotamia. 

In the plain of Shinar and down there in Ur of Chaldees, that’s where culture and learning and civilization came from, in Ur and in Babylon and in that Mesopotamian Valley.  That’s where the Bible says the Garden of Eden was.  The cradle of humanity is there where the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers run down to the Persian Gulf. 

Now that city, Ur of Chaldees, was a highly advanced civilization two thousand years before the days of Abraham.  What an amazing discovery.  They had art and science and literature and law and musical instruments and stringed instruments and all kinds of appurtenances of civilization, such as we enjoy today.  They had it there in Ur two thousand years before Abraham.  That goes back to four thousand years before Christ.  They had a system of mathematics.  We base ours on a decimal, on ten.  They based theirs on the number six. 

When I was a boy, they taught me that the arch in architecture, the arch was a product of the Roman people.  The Greeks as you know, all built their temples and their architectural designs in straight lines.  Above a door, always straight—never an arch.  If anything is arched, it is not Greek.  The Greeks never used an arch. 

I was taught when I was a boy, that the arch was a Roman innovation in architecture that the Roman’s invented it.  Why bless your soul.  When those excavators got down to dig in Ur of Chaldees, they saw Roman arches fifteen centuries—one thousand five hundred years before Rome itself was established or built as a city.  Way back there, those Chaldeans built those beautiful arches in their public buildings. 

They had wheels.  They had four-wheeled vehicles.  They had those four-wheeled  vehicles a thousand five hundred years before the wheel was introduced in the land of Egypt.  And they had a fine postal system, between Babylonia and the land of Canaan.  They had that postal system worked out and working in the days of Naram-Sin, who lived seventeen hundred fifty years before Abraham. 

Well I can remember in my day, when the critics used to laugh and make fun of the idea that Moses wrote, because they said in his day nobody could even write.  My, what of the archeological spade has dug up!  Here they are finding a postal system; talk about writing!  Oh, a postal system, between Canaan, Palestine, and Babylonia and the Mesopotamian Valley, seventeen hundred fifty years before Abraham.  And Abraham lived two thousand years before Christ. 

I say, by the time those excavators had dug out that city, and classified those ruins, and told us what they had found, we know as much about the days of Abraham—you can read the letters of his contemporaries—we know as much about the days of Abraham as we know about Assyria in the days of Isaiah or as we know about the land of Hellas, the land of Greeks, in the days of Pericles, in the golden era of the Greeks.  It’s a marvelous thing.  It’s a wonderful thing.  And wherever in this earth there is a spade digging up archeological evidence, every time it comes out with a new fact it corroborates the Word of God. 

Isn’t that a wonderful thing?  There has never yet—now you listen to this—there has never yet been a piece of archeological evidence uncovered but that it corroborates the Bible, and that in a thousand instances where the historical critics used to laugh at the Word of God, and make fun of the Word of God.  I can remember, when I was a boy, I can remember when the critics made fun of the fact that the Bible speaks of the Hittites, and they said there never lived any such people as the Hittites, that was a figment of somebody’s legendary imagination. 

Why in your Life Magazine of about a year ago, there came out a whole issue on the Hittite empire—empire!—the great Hittite empire, just like it says in the Bible.  Now you surely have a good illustration of that—what the archeologist has done to the Bible in the fourteenth chapter Book of Genesis.  Now let’s turn to it. 

The fourteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis.  Some while ago, there was a great Semitic scholar named Noldeke, N-o-l-d-e-k-e, and he published a treatise entitled, “The Unhistorical Character of the Fourteenth Chapter of Genesis.”  And he declared, in that treatise, that learned historical criticism had forever dispersed, dismissed, disproved the claim of this record to be historical. 

 Now, you look at the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, and this is one of the chapters concerning which the historical critic made such unending fun, mocked and ridiculed its historical character.  Now summarizing, the fourteenth chapter of Genesis says that the cities of the Pentapolis, Sodom, Gomorrah and other cities there in Palestine, were tributaries to Chedorlaomer, who was the king of Elam. 

Now it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar–now look to the next one—Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, twelve years.  Fourth verse, those Palestinian cities paid tribute to Chedorlaomer.  In the thirteenth year they rebelled.  Then it says in the fourteenth year Chedorlaomer and those men came down and laid siege to those cities in Palestine, conquered them, took away their goods, and among those cities was Sodom and Gomorrah and among those they took away were Lot, Abraham’s brother’s son and all Lot’s family and Lot’s goods.  Now that’s the story in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. 

Now that’s the story that the historical critic laughed at and mocked and made fun of, no syllable of that, they said, was historical.  So the archeologist began to dig.  And he took down his spade and he turned over all of those things over there in that land, and what did he find? 

All right, this is what he found.  Amraphel has another name in another language, and his name in another language is Hammurabi.  Shinar, of course, is Babylon.  Babylon is built on the plain of Shinar.  There is not a schoolboy that doesn’t know Hammurabi.  He was the first Semitic king of Babylonia.  That is, he founded the first Semitic dynasty in Babylonia.  Hammurabi and that man Chedorlaomer, king of Elam.  Elam today you call Iran or Persia.  Its western boundary was the Tigris River. 

Now here briefly is what those archeologists have discovered.  They have dug down, and they’ve found out that there in this day of Abraham, this man Chedorlaomer, the king of Elam who’s capital is Shushan, he came over there with a confederacy and conquered Babylonia.  And not only did he conquer Babylonia, but his armies marched clear into Palestine and conquered Palestine.  And the archeologist’s spade turned up these documents, these tablets, these cuneiform inscriptions, and found out that after these cities down there in the plain in Palestine had served Chedorlaomer twelve years, just as it says here, that they rebelled.  And in the fourteenth year it says Chedorlaomer, with that confederacy, came down and overwhelmed them and took spoil and great numbers of people away, just like it says here in the Bible.  Word for word.  Word for word.  Just like it is in the Book, and that is always true without any exception.  Wherever the archeologist’s spade turns up evidence, every little piece of evidence that they turn up will corroborate the Word of God and there’s no exception to that, no exception to it.  Out of the thousands and thousands and thousands of documents and pieces of evidence that the archeological spade has turned up, every piece of it corroborates the Word of God. 

Now, I want to show you something else.  Turn to the sixteenth Chapter the Book of Genesis.  In the sixteenth Chapter of the Book of Genesis is the strangest story that you will read in the Bible.  Now the story is that Sarai the wife of Abram was barren.  So Sarai had an Egyptian slave by the name of Hagar.  And Sarai said to Abram her husband, “Let me lay in your bosom, Hagar, my slave.  And if she shall conceive, then I will raise up children by my slave Hagar.”  And Abram consented, so Sarai gave her slave into the bosom of Abram her husband that the slave might raise up children unto Sarai, who was sterile. 

Now where’d you ever hear a thing like that in all this world?  That’s not God.  That’s not the Bible.  You wouldn’t find anything like that in the Mosaic code.  Nothing.  Where’d that come from?  Well, it used to be a mystery.  Where in the world did that come from, that strange thing you read here in the sixteenth Chapter of Genesis?  And when you read it here in the sixteenth chapter of Genesis it seems altogether a usual and practiced and normal procedure, and yet it’s so strange there in the Bible. 

All right, here’s where it came from.  When the archeologists got through digging down there in Ur of Chaldees and in Babylonia, they uncovered that famous document called the code of Hammurabi, the laws of Hammurabi.  And in the code of Hammurabi, he has a law that goes like this, namely, “When a mistress takes her slave and gives her to her husband through whom to raise children,” the code of Hammurabi says, “thereafter the slave can no longer be sold as a slave, but must remain forever a member of the household.”

Why, it evidently and easily then becomes evident what happens here.  Abraham was a citizen of Ur.  Sarai grew up in Ur.  They were Babylonian people.  That was the normal practice of all of their lives.  And when they turned aside from God and did stagger at the promise of God and refused to believe in God and took things in their own hands, and instead of waiting upon God, for Sarai was an old woman and Abraham was an old man and they didn’t have any children, so they just worked out this plan on their own. 

And God didn’t approve that.  That wasn’t pleasing to the Lord.  That was a Babylonian custom.  And they reverted to those old Babylonian ways that they had known all their lives, and that’s where that story came from.  It was very typical of the times and of the days in which Abram and Sarai lived.  And has that been a hurt to the world ever since—Ishmael sticking out his tongue at Isaac, and he’s still doing it.  The seed of Ishmael warring against the seed of Isaac—that thing came from those Babylonian customs.  Now we could just spend hours talking about these things. 

Now, let’s turn back to the twelfth chapter of the Book of Genesis and I will close.  I want to say one other thing just sort of by way of summary, then we have to close.  Now the Lord 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 show thee.”  And as Hebrews 11 said, “So Abram went out not knowing where he went, trusting the promises of God.”

Now there are two things.  One: faith is a separation.  God said unto Abram, “Get thee out.  Get thee out.”  To have faith in God is to separate yourself from this world.  Yesterday I talked to somebody who has become a great Christian and a member of this church.  And I baptized that somebody and that somebody works in a big office here in Dallas, and on the inside of that big office here in Dallas there is a member of another faith. 

And that other member of another faith said to this young man whom I baptized and now belongs to this church who was wonderfully converted right there in that aisle, she said to him, “So you have joined the Baptist church, am I surprised at you,” she said.  “Why,” she said, “you could have joined our church and you could have kept on drinking and you could have kept on living just like you always have and not have changed at all.”  And the boy said, “But that’s what my conversion meant to me.  I have changed,” he said, “in my heart and in my ways, and the old life and the old ways and the old world no longer appeals to my heart.  I have changed.  I’ve been converted.”  I say, that’s the first thing that faith in God means.  It means a separation. 

Now the Lord said unto Abraham, “Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house.  Get out.”  Get out.  Get out.  Well what was the matter with Ur of Chaldees.  And what was the matter with his father’s house?  This is it.  The Bible says in Joshua 24:2, “That Terah, the father of Abraham,” Terah was an idolater and that all in his house was idolatrous and down there in Ur of Chaldees they dug up those enormous, they call them ziggurats.  Ziggurat—that’s an Assyrian word meaning “hill of heaven.”

They were great tremendous built-up edifices of solid brick, solid brick, no passage ways, no chambers, solid brick.  And the one of Ur of Chaldees was 200 feet this way, 150 feet that way, and 70 feet high with three stairways going up to it and built like that Parthenon in Athens, not a straight line in it actually but for optical illusion built in those curves it looks straight and on top of it was this idolatrous temple.  God said to Abram, “Get out.  Get out.  Get out.”  You don’t belong in that idol temple.  You don’t belong in that bar.  You don’t belong in that saloon.  You don’t belonged in that off-colored party.  You don’t belong in that world.  “Get out.  Get out.  Get out,” says God, and He still says it. 

Now the Lord has said to Abram, “Get out.  Leave thy country and leave thy father’s house.”  Now I want you to see how Abraham was committed to that separation.  Turn to the twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis.  The twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis.  This is possibly the most beautiful story, sweetest story of romance in the Bible.  Abraham was old, well stricken in years way over a hundred years old, way over a hundred years old.  And Abraham took Eliezer, the steward of his house and made him swear, with his hand under his thigh, that he wouldn’t take a wife for Isaac, among the other women of the land.  My soul, when I read this Bible how I wish our young people would read it too!  Made Eliezer swear that he wouldn’t take a wife for Isaac out of the women of the land. 

Off of that dance floor and in that honky-tonk, that’s no place for a Christian boy to find his wife.  Out there in the world, and in all of the debauchery that goes on in this world, that’s no way for an Isaac to find his wife.  He took Eliezer the chief steward of his house, made him put his hand under his thigh and swear that he would not take a wife for Isaac out of the women of the land.  But he said, “You go back and in my old home among my people, up there in Haran, not in Ur not in Babylon, up there in Haran, up there in my brother’s family get a wife for my son.”

So Eliezer says–now look at this–Eliezer says, fifth verse, “Peradventure the woman will not be willing to follow me unto this land, must I needs bring thy son again unto the land from whence thou camest?”  Shall we go back, Abraham, shall we go back?  And Abraham said unto him, “Beware that thou bring my son not thither again.”  No. 

Now look in the eighth verse.  Abraham says unto Eliezer, “If the woman will not be willing to follow thee, then thou shall be clear from this thy oath, only bring not my son thither again.”  Abraham left and he left for good. 

We’re not going back, back to the old life, back to the old gang, back to the old world, back to the old compromise.  No, Eliezer, “If the woman won’t come, then you’re free from the oath, only you’re not to take my son thither again.”  We’re on a pilgrimage.  We’re on the way to God.  We’re on the way to heaven and we’re not turning back. 

Our face is toward the city which has “foundations whose builder and maker is God.”  “Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath built for them a city.”  Oh, I love to read that book, and to talk about it with you.  How we need it, strength, food, help, encouragement, God in us revealed in His Word. 

Well, every Sunday morning at 8:15, if you want to come you come.  Where we leave off, we just pick up and start again.  Now we sing a song and while we sing the song, if there’s somebody this morning to give his heart to the Lord, or somebody to put his life in the fellowship of the church.  A family, or just one somebody you. 

While we sing the song, you come and stand by me.  Now may we sing the song, just a stanza.  You come on the first, the first verse if God bid you here, while we stand and while we sing.