Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse 14:

Then God said to Abram, after Lot separated from him, “Lift your eyes now and look from the place where you are, northward, southward, eastward, and westward. For all the land you see I give to you and your seed forever. And I will make your seed as the dust of the earth, that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then your seed also could be numbered. Arise, walk in the land through its length and its breadth, for I will give it to you.” Then Abram moved his tent, and went and dwelt by the oak of Mamre in Hebron and built an altar there to the Lord.

There’s altar number three, near Hebron, which is going to be in Judah’s territory, later. And he goes to stay by the oak of Mamre. We’ll come back to the oak of Mamre. Mamre’s a person. [Laughter] This is an already impressive oak at this point that is on his— an already ancient oak tree that is on his property, and it serves as a landmark. By the fact that it’s included here in Genesis—remember, we’ve been seeing these names that date to later periods, showing up here in Genesis—the fact that it’s mentioned, this oak, it’s still there later on when the Israelites get there, post-Joshua. So when Caleb and son come to Hebron, this oak is there. This is being pointed out because you can still go there and see that oak: This is where Abraham stayed; this is that altar that Abram built. This is that spot.

The identification of these spots— We mentioned a little bit the issue of a single sanctuary, multiple sanctuaries, last time in terms of the altars, but another important thing is just these geographical locales and their importance. We’re going to keep seeing this going forward. This shows something about religion as it’s presented in the Torah. This shows that it has a reference to specific places, that particular places in 3D space that you can actually go are relevant religiously, meaning you’re going to have, like, pilgrimage sites. People would go to see this oak. They would go to see this oak, and part of that would be recounting what had happened there. More is going to happen there later, but what had happened there in Abram’s life. That was part of their faith, that was part of their heritage, that was part of their inheritance. So there’s an idea of sacred space already here in Genesis, because God is the God of what? As we talked about last time, he’s the God of Abram. So that makes these important places in the life of Abram places that are holy or sacred to the God of Abram, and Isaac and Jacob later on.

God comes to be associated with these places, and these places become identified as sacred because he has identified himself with Abram, and these places have become important in Abram’s life, with God. Some of our friends from other Christian traditions don’t like the idea of sacred space like this, and of pilgrimage. Some of them will decry it and then go to the Holy Land anyway. [Laughter]

Q1: I told my parents about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and they didn’t believe it was real.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q1: That was just astounding. They didn’t believe it. “Oh, we don’t believe this.” What? [Laughter] Like, really?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. So this is a built-in thing—to ancient Israelite religion, to Judaism, to Christianity, that this idea of particular places where particular things happened being significant.

Q1: Well, we kind of have that still in some ways. People don’t realize it, but any time you go on any kind of historic landmark or battlefield or a tour, the tour guide’s telling you the story of the place.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. What happened, particularly in the early 19th century is that the formerly religious sensibility became attached to political realities.

Q1: We need to have ritual. The tomb of the unknown soldier.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So you get the Lincoln Memorial that’s built after a temple of Zeus, with a statue of Lincoln instead. But also: “George Washington slept here,” in, like, every house in Virginia and the rest of New England. [Laughter] “This battle was fought here.” And it’s soldiers who died in war instead of martyrs. Those things that were attached to in traditional Christianity to these religious realities, which then some forms at least of Protestantism found problematic, get diverted to political realities.

It’s not sort of a recent coincidental accident that certain Evangelical churches in the United States have American flags and stuff. This is part of a development that happens surrounding the Second Great Awakening, where those instincts, those things that are proper to Christianity but that had been— even though they had been displaced, sort of: “Well, no, we don’t believe in saints any more, but we’re going to paint a big painting of George Washington mounting up to heaven and becoming a god in the Capitol rotunda. But we would never do that with, like, St. Augustine,” whom we were just mentioning. Or St. Gregory the Theologian. Thomas Jefferson, sure! But not a saint. [Laughter]

Q2: The Founding Fathers were all Deists.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so that gets sort of shifted, and it gets smuggled back in. This is a thing that happens, because people—and Christian people are Christian people, and so if you take away confession, you’re going to end up with pastoral psychotherapy. You’re going to end up with some other thing, generally “secular,” to try to meet that need, because it’s a need Christians have, to talk with someone in pastoral authority about the sin in their life and their struggles. So if you take the sacramental way of doing that away, it comes back in some other form. This was, in the early 19th century, a political form. It didn’t just happen here; it happened in Europe, too. Look at the iconography of the French Revolution and Napoleon and stuff; it’s very obviously Roman Catholic iconography flipped political. So it’s not just a US thing; this happens in the early 19th century all over the place. But, yeah, so these things, the reason— They’re built into humanity. That’s why they’re reflected even here in the book of Genesis, 4,000 years ago, because humans were the same and God is the same.

Q3: Is there some connection also to the way the body as in a physical, human body, began to be disconnected in certain views? I forget what is… But that would seem to be— Not acknowledging a sacred space would seem to be the next step, if you separate your own body from being a body carrying a soul.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The more you lose a sacramental sense of religion, the more iconoclastic your religion becomes. You’re automatically dissociating religion and the spiritual from the material.

Q3: Would you define “iconoclasm”?

Fr. Stephen: Meaning… Well, literally it means smashers of icons. [Laughter] But the idea that the holy or the sacred cannot and/or should not be represented artistically, be represented in a physical, material way. So there are extremes of this. I have Presbyterian friends who don’t think you should have a cross, just a bare cross in a church, because it will become an idol; it should just be white walls, because you should just be focusing your mind on the sermon that you’re hearing. And that’s a very immaterial mode of religion; it’s very disassociated from the physical and the material and the tactile.

But here from the very beginning, God appears to Abram. Abram sees him with his eyes, and, we’re going to see, touches, eats with, etc., etc., very material. These places become very significant and important. There’s a sense of time, space, place, and materiality to it. It’s not disassociated from the material world in any way. And even, as we said, calling upon the name of the Lord, worship, is taking an animal, killing it because you have to do that before you eat it, but cleaning it, taking a portion and offering that portion to God, eating the rest with your family: you’re sharing a meal with God. This is a material moment. This is what worship is, because it’s very material, very participatory experience here from the very beginning.

Chapter 14, verse one: “Now it came to pass in the reign of Amraphel, king of Shinar; Arioch, king of [Ellasar]; Chedorlaomer, king of Elam; and Tidal, king of nations.” So we’ve got four kings there. These are different cities. Chedorlaomer has the best name, and that’s because every time we have a feast of the holy Fathers—and in a minute we’ll get into why—we read this at vespers as an Old Testament reading, and some poor soul who got picked to read this Old Testament reading will have to figure out how to pronounce “Chedorlaomer.” So we’ve got these four kings.

Verse two: “That they made war with Bera, king of Sodom; Birsha, king of Gomorrah; Shinab, king of Admah; Shemeber, king of Zeboiim; and the king of Bela (that is, Zoar)”—who doesn’t get named, because, apparently he’s, I don’t know, even lamer than the other ones? Junior partner?

So it’s four on five. These four northern cities that are farther up north in the Jordan Valley decide they’re going to come and attack these five cities that are down in the southern part of the Jordan Valley, near what’s now the Dead Sea. It’s kind of implied in the text—we’ll talk about this more when we get to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah—that the Dead Sea isn’t necessarily the Dead Sea yet. But we’ll get to that. And that’s kind of what’s being alluded to when it said this is before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, but we’ll get into that more in a minute.

But for right now, kings up north decide: “We’re going to go and attack those kings down south and pillage ‘em right good.” So they’re not trying to come and take over, because that would just cause management problems. They’re each the king of a city; that’s about what they can handle. They’re not building an empire here under one emperor, but they’re conducting a raid, basically robbing, pillaging, taking slaves from the southern kings as their goal.

“All these gathered together in the Valley of Siddim (that is, the Salt Sea),” so what is now the Dead Sea Valley.

“Twelve years they served Chedorlaomer, and in the thirteenth year they rebelled.” This is saying why they decided to go down there and rampage, is that they had a deal where they were paying tribute to Chedorlaomer and the others. So they were sending tribute up north, that tribute being basically protection money. This is how— This is actually how originally these empires— We talked about Ur and it being the Ur III period—even though there wasn’t an Ur II period—that what that meant when we’re talking about “dynasties” is not a succession of kings who were genetically related to each other, but the ability of one king to project his will over neighboring cities.

This is really what that constituted. It constituted: “Hey, you got a nice city here. Be a shame if anything happened to it. And if you send me some tribute once a year in a certain amount, send me some gold, send me some slaves, send me some livestock, then we’ll make sure nothin’ bad happens to you.” Heavily implied: “I’m going to be the one to do something bad to you.” [Laughter] But it did carry with it these agreements. It did carry with it the idea of a suzerain and a vassal, that “if someone else attacks you, I’ll defend you.” Just like the Mob in one of those neighborhoods, you paying the Mob, giving them a cut of your business, would keep the Mob from doing anything to you, but if somebody else tried to move in on the Mob’s territory, the Mob would take care of them, so you also didn’t have to worry about anybody else. Same kind of thing here basically with these cities.

They had this agreement, Chedorlaomer and the other kings of the north with the kings of the south, for twelve years. Everything went fine. Year 13, they didn’t pay the tribute. We don’t know exactly why. Maybe they thought— Maybe they were reading the winds. Maybe they were like: “Hey, I don’t think they can mount an attack right now.” Maybe they thought, “Hey, we could fight them off if we have to. Let’s get our own thing going.” We’re not told exactly, but, thirteenth year, they don’t pay up, so:

“Now, in the fourteenth year, Chedorlaomer and the kings with him came and cut down the giants in Ashteroth Karnaim and strong nations with them: the Zuzim in Ham, the Emim in Shaveh Kiriathaim”—say that five times fast—“and the Horites in the mountains of Seir, as far as El Paran, which is by the wilderness.” These northern kings come and, while they’re on their way to go get their tribute, they decide to take out a bunch of giants. That’s literally what it says; that’s a direct translation of the Greek, gigantes. That’s where we get the English word, “giant.”

This is an early appearance. So we had—we talked all about, in the beginning of Genesis 6, the nephilim and the giants. Now we’ve got— We talked about Nimrod and that kind of recurrence of that phenomenon, leading up to the Tower of Babel. This is our first appearance of sort of the giant clans, these clans that are called giant clans. These are going to be a problem going all the way into the book of Joshua. In fact, a lot of what’s going on in the book of Joshua is going to be dealing with these clans.

What makes these clans giant clans? I know people are going to get excited, because I’m talking about giants. What makes these clans giant clans, as I’ve said many times by now, but, hey, it always bears repeating: “giant” does not just refer to someone who’s really tall. Both nephilim, which is the Aramaic word for “giant,” and gigantes could also mean a thug, a bully, a tyrant. And it’s sort of like the way we use the phrase “strong man” in English to refer to a dictator, like “Panamanian”— This is dating me, I know. I’m looking at people who probably weren’t around when we invaded Panama, but “Panamanian strong man Manuel Noriega,” whom we were told about all the time. “Panamanian strong man”: it wasn’t “This man’s got an amazing bench. This guy’s really ripped”; it was: “He’s a dictator.” That was a way of saying he’s a dictator; it’s a way of talking about his evil.

What we know about these giant clans is basically that they were doing what those giants did back in the time of Noah, back in the time of Nimrod, meaning— What made you a member of a tribe or a clan in the ancient world was not your genetics. We think very much in terms of genetics and ethnicity. This is going to be super important when we get into Exodus. Of course, they didn’t know DNA existed, so there were no DNA tests to see whom you were descended from. And it wasn’t based on skin color, and it wasn’t based on any other phenotype stuff. They weren’t measuring people’s skulls. [Laughter]

It was based on— You were a member of a clan, a tribe, a people-group: that was all based on ritual. It was based on the ritual life of the group. Biblical example, later in the Torah, what makes you an Israelite? If you’re male, you’re circumcised; if you’re female, you’re the wife or daughter of a circumcised male—and you eat the Passover. That’s what makes you an Israelite: participation in those two rituals. That’s sort of your bare minimum. Obviously, there’s a whole ritual life that is going to be unfolded as we go through the Torah of everything that involves in terms of dress and eating and all those things, all those cultural things.

But you have rituals of initiation, like circumcision, like baptism for us, and you have rituals that perpetuate the unity of the clan, tribe, group, society. In the ancient world, these are all focused around sacrifice, because these are all focused on sharing a meal with each other and with the god that you worship, which is primarily what sacrifice is. That’s what maintains it. So that’s what makes you part of this group.

What makes a Horite a Horite, since that’s one of the giant clans mentioned here, is that they’re participating in a particular kind of ritual life that’s going on with the Horites. We know that this involved two things that made it an abomination, because God is going to point these things out very specifically. The book of Wisdom, when we get there in a few years, in the Old Testament is going to name these very explicitly when talking about the giant clans. These are human sacrifice, which, since sacrifices are meals, involves cannibalism of one kind or another; and this is sexualized rituals: it involved sexual immorality and demonic possession. Participating in those things is what makes you a Horite. So there are no innocent Horites, because if they’re not participating in those things, they’re not a Horite; they’d have to leave that tribe and go join another one, and if they do that they’re not a Horite.

This is what constitutes these groups, are these demonic rituals. Again, we’re seeing a pattern here that’s telegraphing things that are going to come later in the Torah and later in Joshua and even into the story of David. He fights more giants than just the one. And that is that God is going to say these groups have to be wiped out. Does that mean you need to kill every single one of them? No, because if a person goes and becomes a member of a different group, they’re not a Horite any more, they’re not a Girgashite any more, they’re not an Amalekite any more. So when God says there cannot be any more Amalekites, he means the Amalekite way of life, the demonic ritual way of life that constitutes the Amalekites as a people, that has to be put to an end. It doesn’t require that every single one of them die. We’re going to see it does require that any unrepentant ones do, any who refuse to cease participating in those acts do. If the only way we can stop you from sacrificing humans and engaging in cannibalism is to kill you, then that’s what we have to do. That’s where the Torah’s going to go, kind of unapologetically. If that’s the only way we can stop you, then that’s what we have to do.

While people love to get up in arms and be deeply upset about the idea that, you know, a kid might’ve been killed in Palestine by Joshua 3200 years ago—first of all, I’d point out they’re not all that upset about children getting killed in Palestine today, but also I would submit to you that any one of us, if we knew our neighbor, was murdering people— If we knew our neighbor was Jeffrey Dahmer, for sure, no doubt, this is what he is doing, we would not sit there and pray that he would repent. We would call a person with a gun to go to that house and stop him from doing that. And if, in the process of that person with a gun trying to stop him, our Jeffrey Dahmer neighbor ended up getting shot, we might be motivated by Christian piety to pray for his soul, but if that’s what had to happen to stop him from doing that, then… So that’s what’s presented here.

Why? Who cares that these northern kings like Chedorlaomer went and killed a bunch of giants on the way to go get their tribute from these other cities? Well, this is Genesis telling us who the good guys and the bad guys are in this fight that’s about to happen. [Laughter] Who’s the good guys, who’s the bad guys. We’ve already been told the men of Sodom are exceedingly wicked, so that’s already kind of telegraphing to us who the bad guys are: the king of Sodom, the king of Gomorrah, being on the one side. But now we see, on the other side, that these guys, whether purposely or indirectly, are sort of doing God’s will as it’s going to be laid out later in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 2 is actually going to be talking about God driving out these giant clans before all kinds of groups, Edomites, Ammonites, descendants of Abraham. So that’s why this is included, to give us a sense: these aren’t the bad guys—because there’s going to be some conflict between them and Abram here, but—getting ahead of myself.

Q1: They’re only mid-tier.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter]

Q2: That’s not the way the Edomites were, too. There wasn’t always 100% in this point in Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, one of the groups in Deuteronomy 2 is the Philistines, who drive out some of the giants in Deuteronomy 2. So, yeah, this isn’t necessarily a full-on endorsement of that people-group! [Laughter]

Q2: But Edom’s related to Israel. Are we supposed to make the assumption that these are somehow, like, connected to Abraham in a similar way?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re going to see there’s kind of a— But this is telegraphing something even bigger in the history of Israel, because even if we don’t want to say they’re really good good guys, they’re kind of doing God’s will. And they’re coming from the north and they’re disciplining these wicked people in the south.

Q1: Kind of like a foretaste of Babylon?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s what’s going to happen in the exile, eventually. Well, both—and in the destruction of Israel, really. Israel’s going to get invaded from the north by pagans, but those pagans are going to be doing God’s will to discipline Israel for their sins. So this is another one of those broad-outline patterns again that we talked about last time, the beginning of a pattern that we’re going to see play out.

Q1: So is this like when Joshua— I’ve always thought it was strange. They said the hornets or something went before him? Is this kind of this God’s will is going to be done, either through his creation or through…?

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Q1: There’s all these different manners, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: Right, like the plagues. God can send locusts. God can send— God can discipline in many different ways. And sometimes what he sends is an invading army. That includes Joshua’s army coming to Canaan to take out the giant clans. That also includes Assyria coming to take out the ten northern tribes and Babylon coming to take Judah into exile as a result of their sins.

Q1: Do pagans invade from the north cause the symbolic idea of demons coming from the north as well?

Fr. Stephen: It’s related. It’s related—so that’s part of it: invasions come from the north. The other big piece, though, is going to be particular things in the northern part of the land of Israel surrounding Dan and Mount Hermon and those kinds of things that are in the north of the piece of land. But, yes, it is also where attack and invasion comes from.

Q1: The invaders are coming from there, and you’re also the reason why.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q4: And the north is on the left, too—didn’t you say that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, if you’re facing east. And, yeah, I did mention that, when Abram was saying, “If you go right, I’ll go left; if you go left, I’ll go right.” That wasn’t just a vague reference. That’s actually the original sort of: “If you go north, I’ll go south,” saying, “We’ll go in opposite directions.” Yeah.

So, yes, they’re coming from the north to discipline wicked kings. God’s will is being done, even if they’re not totally in the right.

Verse seven: “Then they turned back and came to En Mishpat (that is, Kadesh)”—that’s the place of justice, that is, Kadesh—“and cut down all the princes of the Amalekites and also the Amorites, who dwelt in Hazezon Tamar.” Now, one of the most interesting things about this is that he doesn’t just mention the Amalekites. Amalek is a descendant of Esau, according to the genealogies we’re going to read in a few chapters. So this is another place where names are being projected into the past, number one, and, number two, where tribal groups again are being identified by their ritual life, by their cultural life, not by ethnicity or biological descent. Even though the Amalekites are going to end up named after this descendant of Esau, they’re going to be practicing this way of life that pre-existed that guy whom they came to be named after.

Q1: Which is why he ended up on the bad guys side.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’re going to see when we get to that genealogy we’re tipped off there, too, about Amalek, right in the genealogy.

Verse eight: “Now the king of Sodom, the king of Gomorrah, the king of Admah, the king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela (that is, Zoar)”—just in case you forgot the list before—“went out and joined together in battle in the Valley of Siddim against Chedorlaomer, king of Elam; Tidal, king of nations; Amraphel, king of Shinar; and Arioch, king of Ellasar—four kings against five.” Just in case you forgot from a few verses ago. So these are the two sides arrayed in battle.

“And the Valley of Siddim was full of asphalt pits”—tar pits, basically—“and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell in there, but those left fled to the mountains.” So the five kings from the south lose. When they try to flee, they get stuck; their armies get routed pretty thoroughly. The ones who do manage to get away flee off into the mountains. They don’t even go back into the cities; they go and hide!

“Then they took all the cavalry of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all their provisions, and went their way. They also took Lot, Abram’s brother’s son who dwelt in Sodom, and his goods, and departed.” So now the army is scattered. “Time to get that tribute that they didn’t want to pay us.” So they go and seize all the wealth from the cities, pillage everything, take the horses, and take a whole ton of the city folk as slaves, and Lot is one of them.

Now, if they’re pillaging the cities, Lot’s starting to become part of the local culture, shall we say; he’s starting to become one of the people of Sodom. This is progressing in a bad way. But so they all get rounded up, they all get taken, Lot included gets taken as a slave.

Verse 13: “Then one who escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew, who at that time dwelt at the oak of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eschol and brother of Aner; and they were allies with Abram.” So Mamre is around at the time; it was still going to be named after him much later, we know, but he was around at the time. And he and his fellows in his family, they have an agreement, so Abram’s not just squatting on his land and grazing it. They have an agreement with each other.

You may notice here he’s referred to as an Amorite. Giant fans may know Amorites are generally a giant clan. The word “Amorite” is used in different ways. “Amorite” technically comes from Amurru and just means Westerner, so any person from northern Palestine, what’s now Lebanon, western Syria, would have been called an Amorite; being from that region made you an Amorite. So “Amorite” is not always referring to a specific people-group. I know that’s confusing, because—

Q1: Would that be like saying you’re European, but there are different cultures, either good or bad, within that very broad category?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah…

Q1: Or even less of an implication?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of like…

Q1: It’s kind of like calling someone Cajun.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or kind of like calling a Canadian an American.

Q1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because they live in North America, versus calling them a Canadian. “American” is used to mean “citizen of the United States,” but technically it could also be used for anyone who lives on the continent, yeah. I mean, that’s not quite it, but closer, yeah. So it could just mean you’re from this region—that word can both mean you’re from this region, or you’re part of this particular people-group, that is originally from that region.

It might be like calling a Cajun person French. So a French person could be a person from France; it can also mean a French speaker, someone who’s from a French culture. Someone Quebecois could be called French. French-Canadian. Sort of like that.

So this is not saying, at any rate, that Mamre is a giant. [Laughter] It’s not trying to associate him in that way. It’s just that he’s— That’s where he’s from. We’ll have a similar conversation later on in the Old Testament about the word “Hittite,” because that is another word that gets used in two different ways. “Kushite” gets used that way, too. There’s an actual kingdom in Africa called Kush, and the people there are Kushites, but the Egyptians also called anyone from south of them a Kushite. [Laughter] So Ethiopians they called Kushites, people from Sudan area they called Kushites, people from the southern part of Libya they called Kushites.

Q1: You have the same thing only… Usually you have most groups, like, I think the Apaches did the same thing. They were “the people.” As for everybody else…

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so “Kushite” can mean an actual person from Kush, or it could just mean someone from that area around Egypt. Same kind of thing with “Amorite”: it could mean someone from that area in western Syria, or it can mean an actual Amorite.

Verse 14: “Now when Abram heard his brother Lot was taken captive, he armed his 318 trained servants, born in his own house, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.” Here’s another one of those city names, because Dan, of course, is named after his great-grandson, Dan. [Laughter] And not by his great-grandson Dan: by the tribe of Dan, when they come and take it, and it’s explicitly called Laish before that; Judges is going to tell us that. So, yeah, this is using a later place-name, early. In fact, Dan isn’t even going to be called Dan during the time period covered in the Torah. So this is a name that was updated sometime after the time of Moses, after even Joshua.

But so he takes his 318 trained servants. People didn’t have standing armies, so he rounds up his 318 military-age men. They’re probably using farm implements: they’re using clubs and sickles and that kind of thing. They don’t have armor; they don’t have weapons per se. They’re using those kind of things as weapons. So this is why this gets read… Nah, I’m going to wait. Never mind. Put a pin in that, because we’ve only got a couple verses left.

Verse 15: “So he divided his forces against them by night, and he and his servants attacked and pursued them as far as Hoba, north of Damascus. So he brought back all the cavalry of Sodom and also brought back his brother Lot and his goods, as well as the women and the people.” So Abram goes up there, he waits until after dark, he takes his 318 men, he splits them up into a pincer move, they come in, and they rescue the slaves and the stuff that they took from Sodom, and get away. He does this rescue operation.

A lot of people will tell you that the whole reason that this passage that we just read gets read every time we have a feast of the holy Fathers—and by “the holy Fathers,” I mean usually the holy Fathers of an Ecumenical Council; there’s a few other places, too, but any time— First Ecumenical Council, Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Seven Ecumenical Councils, the first four Ecumenical Councils. The night before, at vespers, we read this. They’ll say, “Well, at the Council of Nicaea there were 318 bishops, and, see! Abram has 318 men!” And sometimes they’ll do an even wonkier version of that and say, “Ah! This passage prophesied the Council of Nicaea,” in which case you’re just being wacky. [Laughter] This is very surface-level.

Like, the 318 number is interesting. It’s an interesting detail, but that is not really what’s going on here, because what’s the story about here in Genesis? The story is about: Lot wandered off, he got enraptured by the world, by the wisdom of the world, the civilization, the culture. He got drawn in; he got taken captive. He got enslaved. And Abram, his father, the patriarch, the head, who has this position from God, went and found him, defeated those who had enslaved him, sets him free, and rescues him. So the reason we read this before one of those feasts of one of the councils and the Fathers of the councils is that this is the Church’s understanding of what’s happening at these councils.

So using the Council of Nicaea as an example, well beyond the number of 318, what happened? Arius. Learned scholarly guy from Alexandria, the center of learning and scholarship for the whole world, comes up with this teaching, starts drawing people off from the Church to become his followers, taking them captive with his doctrine, with his ideas, causing them to become enslaved. The Fathers of the Church, who have that position from God, are coming in the council to rescue the Church, to set the Church free from this threat. That’s how the Church sees the councils. That’s what the Church is communicating to us when we read this story. It’s not just: “Oh, hey, look! 318! See, the Council of Nicaea is from God!” But this is the Church’s self-understanding of what’s going on there. This isn’t about fine points of theology; this isn’t about imperial power. This isn’t about any of those things in the Church herself’s understanding.

This is about the fact that we, as unflattering as it is, are sheep, and we have shepherds. That includes me. I have a shepherd; I have a bishop. Everybody has shepherds. The shepherds have a chief shepherd, who has been entrusted with that position. We, like sheep, tend to wander astray and get into trouble and go the wrong way. Sheep will wander into a stream, and their wool will start absorbing water, and they will drown standing there, because they’re too dumb to walk out of the stream. That’s why I say it’s kind of unflattering that we get compared to sheep a lot. [Laughter] But if you think about how sin works in our lives, we kind of do that, too, because we’re too dumb to abandon it. We just stand there and drown. And so there are shepherds to come, appointed by God, to rescue us from ourselves and to set us free from that and to deliver us from that.

When Church discipline happens, when correction happens, from above, from our shepherds, to put us back in line, this is also how we should see it. We shouldn’t see this as an attack—on us, at least. We should see this as concern, as rescue, as being set free from what we’ve allowed to take us captive. That’s the goal. It’s for our benefit.

I think, even though we’re not at the end of a chapter, that we will stop here, because we’re going to get into Melchizedek, and that I have a feeling might be a long discussion, yeah. [Laughter] So we’ll go ahead and stop here for tonight, and we’ll pick up next week in verse 17 of chapter 14. Thank you, everybody!