Some commentary that I read said that this is the Bible’s first glorification of war. Do you not believe it! The Bible does not glorify war. There are many occasions where important personages, including Abraham, including David, including Joshua, including Moses, and I think many others besides them whose lives we look to as examples, they did take part in war. But God is hardly glorifying war. Just because some of these heroes of the Bible were involved in them, and God may have indeed given them victory, the Bible is not saying that anyone should ever go to war. This is a report of a time when Abraham did go to war. I mean he literally got into battle.
Now, human existence has always been a struggle, including much war, and that of course is because of Satan. A Christian is not relieved of his burden because we wrestle against principalities and powers in heavenly places. Our war is spiritual and it is very real. It is swirling around us all the time. There are not many occasions where we are very far from the battle that the Bible talks about.
Warfare, and I am talking about the kind that nations get involved in or city-states, does at times represent or show qualities that are noble. For example, physical hardihood. The apostle Paul picked up on this back in a letter that he wrote to Timothy, and he says that a soldier has to endure. So we see in some of the accounts of biblical warfare, examples of physical hardihood.
We find discipline as well. We find at times uncalculating courage, where a man does not consider the risk to his own physical wellbeing and sometimes people have been willing to give up their lives. You might recall times where some of David’s mighty men, without any calculation at all as to what they could get from it, volunteered to go get David a drink of water in the heat of battle. They went out and they got it and they brought it back and David poured it out on the ground and he said he would not. He did not have enough vanity to drink the water that these men risked their lives for, but they were willing to spill their blood to relieve their commander of a little bit of discomfort.
Well, it is these kinds of things that warfare does show, and the lesson, the type, the principle is applicable to our spiritual warfare and that is the main reason that God gives us reports of these people going to war. He is not glorifying war—He is glorifying character, courage, faith. He is glorifying examples of people. We understand people in the New Covenant are not to go to war, but we are to pick up on the examples of the exemplary actions of those people.
When Christ comes, He is going to make war, He is going to stop the madness through His warfare. God only makes war in righteousness. That is why He has forbidden man to go to war. Man, no man including Abraham, should go to war because he does not have the nature, is not equipped with the nature, and therefore the character, you might say the heart, to wage war in righteousness against each other.
Abraham lived in a different time, a different era, you might say, a different dispensation of God’s work, at times when God’s Kingdom, as it were, was of this world and it fought even though it was not God’s will for it to do so. God’s purpose must stand, and if God’s servants decide to go to war, God’s purpose is going to be worked out regardless.
Now I do not think that Abraham thought of warfare in terms of being a noble idea. His warfare symbolized his depth of feeling and love toward Lot, his brother, as it is said, but literally his nephew. It exemplifies his willingness to lay down his life for him. Does that remind you of anything that Jesus said there in John 14 and 15? “That greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.” Lot was Abraham’s flesh and blood, and he risked everything. He did not calculate at all what the cost was going to be to him. His only thought was to rescue his nephew Lot, and this … . . .
That is interesting. Where was Abram living at this time? He was in Hebron. Apparently the warfare never got close to him. See, he was walking to the beat of a different drummer than Lot was. He took a different road, a different path than Lot did. You can see very plainly that when Lot had the choice, he took the low road. He said, “Hey, I want to live in Sodom. It’s just like Egypt down there.” Lot felt comfortable in the world. That is the lesson here. Many things that happen in the world come upon us because we are not where we ought to be.
Where should Lot have been? Literally, he should have been with Abraham or somewhere nearby. I think we can assume this would have never happened had not Lot chosen to go into Sodom. Lot was asking for trouble when he chose to go there. Would you have chosen to go there? To the most violent, crime invested area of the city? I do not think that most of us would choose to do that. Lot did. He was not using his spiritual smarts. He was not using his good common sense.
Now God does call the weak of the world and sometimes we do some very foolish things. I am not overly concerned about that particular aspect of things. This is in here as a type, you see, Lot physically did it. But there is a spiritual lesson involved in this. The spiritual lesson is that even as Lot was not where he should have been physically, many times we are not where we should be spiritually. Now for me, the prime example in all of the Bible for those of us in this era of God’s church is the Laodicean. They are in the church, but they are also in the world. They are not where they ought to be spiritually. So whenever the tribulation comes, because of where they are spiritually, they are caught up in the problems that come on the world.
Where are the Philadelphians going to be? Because they are where they should be spiritually, they are going to be in the Place of Safety while the Tribulation is going on. This is a powerful lesson! The Laodicean says “I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing”. You can tell by that statement where he thinks he is spiritually, just like Lot. “Oh, I won’t be tempted if I go into Sodom.” Just like the alcoholic that allows himself to get alcohol in his hands. When he gets it in his hands he is as good as hooked, Satan’s already got him. Very few addicts can walk away from it once they get it in their hands. This same principle applies to people who eat too much.
Now I am not so concerned about that as I am concerned about the spiritual principle that is involved here. The Laodicean gets what they get because they are not where they should be spiritually.
One more thing before we leave this particular section. There is probably no more irreligious group on the face of the earth than the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet, in the mix of things somehow or another, Sodom and Abraham, who are poles apart, end up on the same side against the Babylonians and Assyrians. You know what? That is really not all that as strange as it seems at first look.
Genesis 14 took place only a few years after the events of chapter 12. Now we see that Abrahams trained servants, in this particular case he was fighting a small skirmish, he had 318 trained servants. Now because of the circumstance, I take that to mean that this was a personal bodyguard, a retinue of soldiers that he had with him, you might say his crack troops. This would be the ones that surrounded a man of position, the patriarch, and protected him and others that were on the journey with him. Three-hundred and eighteen who were born in his own house.
Let us just make some assumptions to that. These are all soldiers, 318 soldiers. Now suppose each one of those soldiers had a wife. If they were soldiers, I would say they were probably about 20 or 30 years of age, it is very likely that they had wives, and I think just for the sake of counting here, let us say each one had two children. Now by this time we are multiplying four times three-hundred and eighteen. We are now in the neighborhood of twelve hundred people that may involve just his crack troops, the bodyguard that surrounded the patriarch that protected him and his party as they went along.
Now what about cooks? What about people who took care of the herds and the flocks, the shepherds, the caretakers of one kind or another? What about household servants? We know that Abraham did not have a house per say, but I am sure, when we get into chapter 13 where it says Abraham was very rich, even though he lived in a tent it was probably one of the nicest tents you will ever see. Maybe a ten, twelve, or fourteen room tent. I do not know. At any rate, I get the picture of a man who led a group of somewhere in the neighborhood of at least one-thousand people and maybe up to two thousand people.
We are talking about a large portion of Terah’s family, Lot’s family, all of that group of people, all of their possessions, and the people whom they had acquired. These are not, I get the impression here, those born in his house, the three-hundred and eighteen, but the people he had acquired. Remember that I was on that verse the last week. These could have represented people that he hired to be carriers, scribes, whatever, mule drivers, donkey drivers, you name it, whatever they needed in the way of beasts of burden. They could have been people who were convinced by the teaching of Abraham and decided to attach themselves to him and made the pilgrimage with him down into Canaan and down into Egypt.
Now by comparison the area that is encompassed by these five kings that is confederated here against them, is very tiny, and I do not think we would consider them to be much more than mayors of small city-states. When they rebelled in the fourteenth year of Chedorlaomer, who seems to be the chief king here, they counter attacked against these five kings. They did alright. They defeated the five kings.
We have moved one chapter. He is no longer outside the city; he is now living in the city and chapter 19 confirms that he was living in the city whenever the angels showed up. Step by step. Abram lived his godly life and God chose him, separating himself from the people of the land. Lot lives his life by faith, and even though he is converted, even though he knows the work of God, he chooses to mix himself in with the people of the land, and we see him sucked right into the midst of it. Now maybe he never intended when he made that choice—“Well, we can live there but we won't live in the city. We'll be in the outskirts and we'll kind of live the kind of life that we live out there,” but he ended up in the city. So he did not do it right away.
What we are seeing here is the contrast to Moses. Moses deliberately chose to turn his back on the world. Lot deliberately chose to go toward the world and what occurred then was the association wore down his spirituality, wore down his resistance until his true spirituality was such that he did not really know much of the difference between right and wrong any longer. He really did not know what he wanted. He lingered in the city while it was getting ready to be destroyed. There is no surer way to go backward in one's spirituality, to blunt your feelings and knowledge of sin, to dull your spiritual discernment, than by mingling with the world. That's the lesson.
