Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: What’s Mine Should Be Mine (Genesis 13)
Date: September 1, 2024
We hear a lot of talk about rights these days. Political candidates of various stripes assure us that if elected they will be tireless in their fight for our rights. People claim to have rights to all sorts of things. Sometimes the government itself tells us certain things are within our rights as citizens. Our Constitution was only ratified when it got paired with a Bill of Rights, a set of things the Founders declared were inherent to citizenship in this nation and which cannot be taken from us by any state actor. In the opening lines of our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson declared life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be among a set of unalienable rights from our Creator that are common to all people everywhere. These are things we can claim as our own simply by virtue of being human.
Speaking of that, if something is a right, that means we should have it. If we don’t, something has gone wrong. Either someone has committed an offense against us, we have done something wrong to warrant our rights being denied us, or there is a flaw in the system somewhere. Whichever is the case, things aren’t like they ought to be. And, from the evidence of observation, we don’t tend to handle it very well when we feel like we are being denied something we consider to be a right. This is the case out in the culture at large. It is the case when it comes to personal relationships, especially those within a family.
This morning we are in the second part of our new teaching series, Stormy Waters. Over the course of these six weeks, we are talking about how to navigate conflict in our families. Conflict is something we can’t escape in this life. It happens for all kinds of reasons and in all kinds of situations. The question is not whether we will have to face conflict at some point in our lives, but how we will navigate those stormy waters when we sail into them. And while no conflict is enjoyable, conflict within a family structure can be especially hard to face. Conflict in those relationships we can’t easily escape means we are stuck having to either resolve the conflict or endure it. Well, given that resolving conflict requires the involvement of both parties, as much as we may want to resolve it, that’s not always up to us. This means enduring conflict is often par for the course in our families. When you are stuck in a storm, navigating it well is what will help prevent you from sinking. That’s what this series is all about.
We kicked things off last week by looking at how something as simple as differences in personality and temperament can be a source of great conflict in our families. In Adam and Eve’s family, differences between brothers Cain and Abel resulted in envy, anger, and, ultimately, murder. Cain’s response here shows us the extreme end of where this kind of conflict can land, a place we don’t generally go, but envy and anger, not to mention bitterness and hurt are probably much more familiar feelings than we’d like to admit. The way to navigate the storm of differences is by being committed to what is right. As we said last week, differences can divide us, but righteousness holds us together. When you are willing to do what is right, even if you’ve done what’s wrong in the past…even at the expense of your own interests, differences that might otherwise leave you hopelessly separated from family members don’t pose nearly as great a threat.
As much as natural differences can be a source of family conflict, feeling like we aren’t getting something we should be getting is an even more potent source of tension. This becomes all the more true when we perceive the lack to be the result of some unfairness or injustice on the part of another family member. We don’t like not getting what’s ours by right. Now, maybe we don’t use that kind of language out loud because it could make us sound petty, but we are often driven to make harmful relational choices because we feel like we aren’t getting something we think we should have and normal means of acquiring it don’t seem to be working.
Well, as frustrating as this situation can be, it is perhaps somewhat encouraging to know that it is not new. People have been complaining about siblings or cousins or parents or children keeping them from getting what is theirs by right for a very long time. This situation has been around long enough that we have a story about it from one of the earliest families we meet in the Scriptures. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way with me to Genesis 13, and let’s see how a man named Abram navigated this particular kind of conflict in his family.
Abram is of course more familiarly known to us as Abraham. God would later change his and his wife, Sarah’s, names in conjunction with the unfolding of His plans to make them the founders of the group of people through whom He was going to eventually reveal Himself to the whole world. We are going to pick up their story well before that name change when they were just Abram and Sarai. We first meet Abram at the end of Genesis 11 in the family genealogy of Shem, Adam and Eve’s third son who didn’t murder any of his siblings. In chapter 12, then, we find out that God has special plans for Abram and his wife, Sarai. They are to go out on an adventure that will take them…someplace. God will eventually show them the precise place He wants them to go, but it is what He wants to accomplish through Abram that’s most important. He wants to use his family to bless the world. The kick is, Abram doesn’t have a family yet. It’s just him and Sarai. As wild as this promise seems, though, they dutifully load up all their stuff, and leave behind their entire social network in obedience to God’s call. I’m not sure that it’s possible to overstate how radical a thing this would have been to do in that day. But they did. Because for some reason they were willing to trust more in God’s word than in what their eyes could see. And, whether or not you think that’s crazy, history hasn’t been the same since.
As it turns out, Abram and Sarai were not totally alone in their going. They seem to have come from a pretty wealthy tribe, and so they brought their stuff with them, stuff that would have included a variety of servants and their families as well as all of their livestock. They also brought along Abram’s nephew, Lot and his household. Well, a few years later, and after surviving an adventurous trip to Egypt, Abram and Lot were both doing pretty well. In fact, they were doing really well. Their households and holdings had expanded greatly. Their flocks and herds were enormous. And as they traveled around the region of Canaan together (which is where God eventually told Abram to stop), it began to become clear that the land was not big enough for the both of them.
Look at how this went down with me starting right at the beginning of the chapter in Genesis 13. “Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev [the southern tip of Israel]—he, his wife, and all he had, and Lot with him. Abram was very rich in livestock, silver, and gold. He went by stages from the Negev to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had formerly been, to the site where he had built the altar. And Abram called on the name of the Lord there.”
That’s just travelogue. Abram had gone to Egypt before this story picks up because of a famine in the land. That actually started a pattern that would be repeated several times across the story of the Scriptures. Now, after making it through that adventure, he’s slowly but surely working his way back to what had become home. People then thought of gods as regional in nature. Before going to Egypt, Abram had worshiped the God who called him on this grand journey. When he went to Egypt, though, he would have not worshiped in the same way as he had been able to do at home because he was separated from his God by virtue of leaving His region. This doesn’t mean he would have worshiped anyone else, but now that he was back home again, he could once again “call on the name of the Lord.”
Have you ever had to live for a season with extended family members? That’s a really nice thing to be able to do when you need it (or when they need it), but it doesn’t take too long for it to begin to become a bit more…claustrophobic feeling than it was at first. Well, not only was Abram really wealthy, so was Lot. The thing is, though, wealth in those days wasn’t measured by how much money you had in the bank. There weren’t any banks. Instead, it was measured by how much land you controlled and how big your flocks and herds happened to be. For Abram and Lot to both be pretty wealthy would have been like two families living under one roof in a small house with too much stuff. It started to get cramped.
Verse 5 now: “Now Lot, who was traveling with Abram, also had flocks, herds, and tents. But the land was unable to support them as long as they stayed together, for they had so many possessions that they could not stay together, and there was quarreling between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock. (At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites were living in the land.)”
So then, you see the problem. They had more stuff than the land could support. As I said: it was cramped. It was cramped, not just by them, though, but also, as Moses tells us, by the Canaanites and the Perizzites. Little side notes like that in the Scriptures matter. The trick is that it’s not always immediately clear why they matter. In this case it gives some important context on both why Abram and Lot were having issues, but also why getting their issues figured out was so important. Unless Abram and Lot were both wealthy on like an Elon Musk level, it wouldn’t make sense that the whole region couldn’t sustain their two households and all their stuff. But if there were two entire other tribes living in the land with them, things make a bit more sense.
In a similar vein, have you ever been through a season when you were having conflict within your family while things outside the walls of your tribe weren’t exactly on the level either? Abram and Lot were having these issues with each other while they were surrounded by people from these other tribes who would have been more than happy to see them knock each other out so they could swoop in and scoop up whatever was left for themselves. The Canaanites and Perizzites had been in the land longer than Abram or Lot. They had a vested interest in seeing them fail so they could benefit from their fall. Abram and Lot needed to get their issues worked out for both of their sakes.
Well, in a situation like this one in the culture of the day, the senior member of the family would have been given the first choice for how to see things resolved. If there was land to split, the best of it would go to him, and the rest of the family could divide up the remainder. This preferential treatment would have been considered right. More than that, it would have been considered the right of the leader of the clan which in this case would have been Abram. He would have been entirely within his broadly understood rights to tell Lot which land he was going to keep for his flocks, and which land Lot could have for his. Sometimes, though, what is ours by right doesn’t become ours in actuality.
Rather than claiming his rights out of the gate as perhaps we might have been inclined to do, Abram sought to take a more gracious and conciliatory approach. Stick with me in v. 8 now: “So Abram said to Lot, ‘Please, let’s not have quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and my herdsmen, since we are relatives. Isn’t the whole land before you? Separate from me: if you go to the left, I will go to the right; if you go to the right, I will go to the left.’”
In other words, Abram said to Lot, “You take the first pick of the land.” Now again, culturally speaking, it would have been assumed that the best land would go to Abram. Even though he appears to have ceded his rights of first choice to his nephew, the right thing to do in this case on Lot’s part would have been to respond with equal graciousness and give Abram the better land, or to say something like, “No, no, Uncle, you pick first.” Maybe you’ve done something like this before. You really had a rightful claim to something after a family member passed, but you didn’t want to come off like a jerk by demanding that you get what you understood to be yours. So, you graciously gave someone else the ability to pick first, trusting that they would follow your example of graciousness and make sure you got what was rightfully yours. And maybe things went that way…but then again, maybe they didn’t.
“Lot looked out and saw that the entire plain of the Jordan as far as Zoar was well watered everywhere like the Lord’s garden and the land of Egypt. (This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So Lot chose the entire plain of the Jordan for himself. Then Lot journeyed eastward, and they separated from each other. Abram lived in the land of Canaan, but Lot lived in the cities on the plain and set up his tent near Sodom. (Now the men of Sodom were evil, sinning immensely against the Lord.)”
Lot essentially took Abram’s gracious gesture and stomped on it. He saw the good land on one side and the not-as-good land on the other side, and grabbed up the good land for himself. He didn’t demonstrate any concern for Abram’s rights as patriarch of the clan, and ran off with what should have belonged to Abram.
And again, perhaps you have experienced something like this. It could have been a particular object like a family heirloom, some amount of money, or a house after a parent or other family member passed away. It may have been something less tangible like a parent’s attention or time. Whatever it was, you knew it was yours. And they took it. They took what was yours and made it theirs. There aren’t many experiences that create such fertile soil for conflict as this. So, how do we navigate these waters?
We navigate them with Scripture and a bit of critical thinking. It’s actually something Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence about those unalienable rights that gets us pointed in the right direction here. Jefferson may not have been a follower of Jesus like we are, but he was sufficiently well versed in the Christian worldview to recognize something that is essentially true. Do you remember where he said those unalienable rights came from? Our Creator. That is, they come from God.
You see, all rights come from somewhere. They have a source. Someone has to possess the thing we are claiming in order to be able to grant it to us as a right. If there is no God (or gods or any kind of generally divine being), then where do our rights come from? The universe certainly doesn’t grant them. It’s inanimate. Animals and plants can’t grant us rights. They aren’t capable of the kind of philosophical thinking necessary to even cogitate such concepts. If you try to have a discussion of rights with a bear, the bear will respond by eating you. No, absent God, rights can only be granted by other people. More specifically, they come from the government. The thing about rights granted by the government, though, is that they are only rights as long as the government that grants them exists and continues to grant them. Well, no government lasts forever, meaning any rights the government grants come preloaded with an expiration date.
But when we are talking about conflict within a family, government-granted rights only get us so far. The things we routinely claim as rights in that kind of a setting are often not those kinds of rights. In an inheritance squabble, for instance, unless there is a clearly delineated will, who the possessions of the dearly departed go to is not something that is going to be legally mandated such that we can make that kind of a claim on them. Yes, we can involve a judge, but that’s unfailingly evidence of a lack of graciousness on the part of the folks involved in the dispute. No, in family conflict over disputed and denied rights, we are generally appealing to that higher source of rights.
Here’s the thing, though, if God has truly granted something to us as a right, is there anyone who can really deny us access to it? If God has said we can and should have it, who is there to say no? Consider the love of God that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. That love is our right in Christ, and as Paul said, no one and nothing can take it from us. Now, if whatever the focus of the disagreement happens to be is clearly stated in a legally binding will, then, sure, it’s a matter for the courts to declare one way or the other. Absent that, though, we are appealing to God. And if we are appealing to God, the question is not whether we will lay hands on what is our right, but if we trust God enough to provide something we are confident He has determined to be ours by right.
If God has truly declared something to be ours, then to fight and grasp and demand it is evidence that we don’t really trust that He’ll take care of it or us. That will only lead us deeper into conflict. Rather than navigating our way through, this lived out belief that we are responsible for obtaining our rights will result in our sinking in this particular storm. We’ll sink ourselves, and we may sink the other people involved in the conflict as well. No, the way to navigate these dangerous waters is to trust that God will take care of us. When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide.
That’s certainly what happened for Abram. After Lot left Abram high and dry in terms of what should have been his by right, Abram could have been angry. He could have thrown a fit. He could have gone and driven Lot out of the whole land so that he could have what was his. But he didn’t. Instead, he trusted that the God who had led him this far, would keep on leading him and providing for him along the way. He trusted that God would fulfill His promises to use his descendants to bless the world.
“After Lot had separated from him, the Lord said to Abram, ‘Look from the place where you are. Look north and south, east and west, for I will give you and your offspring forever all the land that you see. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust of the earth, then your offspring could be counted. Get up and walk around the land, through its length and width, for I will give it to you.’ So Abram moved his tent and went to live near the oaks of Mamre and Hebron, where he built an altar to the Lord.” Abram couldn’t get what was his, but he trusted God to provide it. And God assured him that he would—a promise He would indeed keep. When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide.
Okay, but there are still all the emotions attached to our not being able to get it, whatever “it” happens to be. How do we deal with those? Because those emotions are a big contributor to the conflict that can explode in those moments when we feel like our rights are being denied. Well, again, like Abram did here, we put our trust in God. We trust that His character hasn’t changed, that He is still the God who can provide for His people what He wants for them to have whether their circumstances seem like they are going to work out favorably or not. When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide.
At the same time we exercise that trust, though, we let that trust lead us into a bit of critical thinking. Thinking about this thing we have determined to be ours by right, where did we get the idea that we have a right to it? Who gave us that right? Is it really that a right is getting denied, or are we just not getting our way? Sometimes those two things can be easily confused. When we have decided we want something, we can convince ourselves very quickly that we should have whatever it is. You know what, though, the other person involved in this scrum probably believes herself to have a right to whatever it is too. What makes her think that? If you both think you have a right to it, one of you is wrong. Why should it be her? What is more important to you? The right or the relationship? Why? What is so important about this thing? How are you going to handle it if you don’t get it? If your access to this thing really is a God-granted right, do you think He is capable of providing you that access even if your circumstances don’t seem like they are going to make that possible? If so, why bother getting upset about it? If not, what makes you think He has changed since He did exactly that for Abram in this story? Or, let’s turn things around just a bit. If you are the one who is getting something that the other person feels is her right to have, what would it cost you to graciously give up your rights for their sake? Is preserving and strengthening the relationship you have with her more or less important than your having what you see as your right satisfied? Why? Is there a chance a bit of graciousness here could result in a closer relationship with the other person? If you give it up and you really should have access to it, do you trust that God could still provide you access somehow? When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide.
Let me add just one more wrinkle to this. If you are a follower of Jesus, how do you factor His willingness to voluntarily give up His rights as God in order to make eternal life available for us only to have those rights restored and then some as a reward for His selfless faithfulness to the Father’s plans? Do you think that is a model worth following generally? How about in this situation? If not, why not? What makes your receiving what is yours by right in this situation more important than Jesus’ receiving what was His by right as God? If God honored Jesus’ sacrifice of His rights for the sake of others, do you think He would similarly honor yours? When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide.
Do you see how all of this begins to fall into place? If it’s not truly a right that is being denied, then the whole reason for the conflict begins to unravel. Or, if you are the one getting your rights fulfilled, you might be the reason for the conflict. Graciousness paired with an unwavering trust in God may be just the solution the situation needs to navigate through these stormy waters to peace on the other side. Either way, trusting in God and His character is the way to go. When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide. That’s a trust He will reward. It may not be with exactly the thing to which you are claiming by right. It may be that you don’t really have that right at all. But by placing your trust in Him, He can and will provide what you really do have a right to in Christ by grace. Those seas will always be calmer than the stormy waters of family conflict. When you can’t get what’s yours, trust God to provide. Everyone will be glad that you did.