Abraham prayed in Chapter 18 that God not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of the small number of righteous people who lived there. This is presumably Lot and his family (if we connect the dots), but the story makes a lesser deal about their righteousness and a bigger deal about Abraham’s intercession. We’re supposed to see Chapter 19 as an answer to Abraham’s prayer.

A prophet, however, is more than a servant and more than a ruler. The prophet is the friend of God. Yahweh has a Divine Council, made up of angels (like the two with him here in Genesis 18). A prophet is one who has been admitted into the Divine Council. Like Joseph in Pharaoh’s court, or Daniel in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, the prophet is the advisor and councilor to the King of kings.

This is a strange sign. The bloody cutting of part of the body is the sign of God’s covenant? Why? What does it mean? In order to answer that, we need to understand the rest of Genesis 17. There is still more newness and detail. In the second half of the chapter, we discover something else about the promise of Abraham’s offspring. Not only did God not forget Hagar, he didn’t forget Sarah either.

God never gave a schedule to Abram for when he was going to fulfill his promise, but apparently for Sarai ten years was the schedule she had given God — and since she still didn’t have a child according to the schedule she had given God, she concluded that God had prevented her from bearing children.

In other words, Abram’s faith in God and his refusal to seize the promise before the time, his trust in God’s goodness and wisdom and his patience in waiting for God to bring his promises to pass in his own time—these demonstrate that Abram’s ultimate hope was not in any earthly homeland. Abram doesn’t ultimately want an earthly country.

In other words, God says to Abram, I am your payday. Which means Abram didn’t need the stuff from the king of Sodom because the promises are God were enough.

So living by faith in God’s specific promises makes us open handed, rather than self-asserting. It frees us from trying to seize what we want on our own, and frees us to submit to God and his good timing.

This is something that shows up over and over again. We know that God calls his people out. Every time God calls us to himself, he is calling us to leave something else.

There’s a lot to say about these two, but for our purposes today, I want to highlight the simple claim that grace (or super-nature) glorifies nature. Grace brings nature to its highest and proper perfection. And I want to demonstrate this by focusing on the three elements in today’s worship service—child dedication, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. Let’s begin by highlighting the natural features of each of these acts.

When it comes to this joy in God that we want restored, we should ask, restored for what? What’s the point? Because there is a point. There is a purpose, and it’s two-fold. First, our joy is about the glory of God. And then second, our joy is about the good of others.