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 … . . .
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.
The word “Hebrew” means migrant. So it is Abraham the migrant. There the word has two meanings, indeed he is a Hebrew—he is from Eber—and also he was a migrant who came from beyond the land of Canaan and was migrating around within it.
