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When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan!  The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers”  He also said. “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem!  May Canaan be the slave of Shem.” (Genesis 9:24-26) Let’s clarify something before we get into the meat of this matter.  The “youngest son” who had offended Noah was not named Canaan.  He was named Ham.  When Noah was offended by Ham, he placed the curse of slavery on Ham’s youngest son whose name was Canaan. Noah had three sons.  They are listed here in order of their birth: Japheth Shem Ham Shem is listed first in scripture because he was the son who carried forward the history of Noah in the form of the legacy of God.  In this brief study, we want to pay attention to the youngest of these three because of his offense against his father.  There is no evidence in scripture, by the way, that God reversed the curse that Noah pronounced. At the time of the building of the Tower of Babel, these various kinships were dispersed throughout the earth through the changing of their languages.  It appears the language change affected people in family groups that were based on [...]

Before we begin, I need to provide a disclaimer.  Any attempt to speak of God the Father in human terms is inadequate.  He cannot be reduced to some sort of anthropomorphic representation.  It is not my intent now, or ever, to reduce God.  On the contrary, we are in our best places when we exalt Him.  On the other hand, He wrapped Himself in flesh in the person of His Son so that we could see Him more clearly.  Furthermore, He breathed of His very own Spirit into inanimate matter to create man.  He has, thus, presented Himself to us in both modes (spirit and flesh) that we might more clearly grasp His reality.  My position is that it is clear He wants us to know Him.  Herein, I will speak in fairly intimate terms regarding the ineffable.  In so doing, I can only address a portion of the topic.  The shortcomings in this treatment are my own, not His. God created.  Before anything was created, the Godhead was.  Because time was created along with the rest of the Creation, there was no time before time was created.  I say time was created because it wasn’t needed when there was only the uncreated Eternal.  Time and space were created with the rest of the Creation to give the Creation [...]

The patriarch Abraham, in early life known as Abram, is introduced to us in scripture in the eleventh chapter of Genesis.  He was the son of a man named Terah, who was a descendant of Shem, the son of Noah.  Abram’s place in the specified scripture amounts to a simple statement of his ancestry back to Noah, and is pretty straightforward.  At that point, beginning in the twelfth chapter, Abram takes center stage. Genesis 14 contains the story of the capture of Abram’s nephew Lot, along with a large number of the folks from Sodom, and Abram’s rescue of him.  After the description of the brief Babylonian campaign that resulted in the capture of Lot along with the people from Sodom, a messenger came to Abram to tell him of the events.  At that point, the word Hebrew is used for the very first time in scripture.  It was “Abram the Hebrew” who received the news and began the rescue expedition.  It was not one of the kings of the Canaanites who set out to rescue the hostages.  For example, the coalition had not captured the king of Sodom.  We would expect that king to raise the rescue expedition.  Or, it might have been another one of the Canaanite kings who was not directly affected by the raiders who [...]