In every text in Genesis, we have to remind ourselves of the purpose of the Pentateuch and the book of Genesis. The writer of the Pentateuch shows that the God of the covenant is the God who created the universe and has a plan of blessing for all peoples. His purpose of blessing is always under siege—first, by the fall, then by the proliferation of violence, man’s inhumanity to the man (flood), and finally by man’s darkened mind that created gods in his twisted, violent, power hungry, fallen image (Babel).
In a global context of dispersed humanity in rebellion against God, in the aftermath of Babel, how would God move forward with His purpose of blessing? God called Abram out from among the nations, He dispersed, to go to the nations. Abram and his descendants were to not only to live in the blessing of God but to be a channel for God to pour out His blessing on the nations. The paradigm for understanding blessing is God and man dwelling together in Eden.
This text, as well as all the Abrahamic narratives, shows us that God will accomplish His purpose of blessing for all peoples through fulfillment of His promise no matter how impossible it may seem. In these stories, several themes are repeated through a variety of circumstances. 1) The promise of God is always under attack, 2) the promise always seems impossible to fulfill, 3) the more impossible the fulfillment of the promise the more glory God gets and the more His nature and character are revealed, 4) and, therefore, God always acts powerfully to keep His promise.
So in this text let’s see how God will accomplish His purpose of blessing for all peoples through upholding His promise in spite of the how impossible it seems.
11:27-32 gives us the historical background for the call of God on Abram’s life. A quick reading of this text seems to indicate that Abram and a few of his family members inexplicably set out from Ur to Canaan but just as mysteriously settled in Haran. That is a misreading of the text. Acts 7:2-4 helps us sort out the chronology:
[2] And Stephen said: “Brothers and fathers, hear me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, [3] and said to him, ‘Go out from your land and from your kindred and go into the land that I will show you.’ [4] Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran. And after his father died, God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living. (Acts 7:2-4 ESV)
When you look closely at the Genesis text, Abram and company set out from Ur in route to Canaan due to the call of God. These verses give us the setting for God’s call to Abraham. Why is the background of the call important? It is important because it puts in high relief the truth that God graciously calls sinners to Himself. He reaches into the most unlikely places and calls the most unlikely people, sinners! No one can say, “God would likely call me.” This betrays a misunderstanding of God, ourselves, and graciousness of salvation.
In this text, the call of Abram is placed after the dispersion of the nations (11:1-9) to show that God reached into the epicenter of His judgment and called out Abram from Ur. This continues the theme of salvation in the midst of judgment (Adam and Eve expelled from Eden and skins; Noah and flood).
Abram was a pagan. Joshua reminded Israel of their heritage: Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods. You can see the paganism in the names of Abram and his family. They were moon worshipers. Their family was prominent in the moon cult. Terah sounds like the word for moon, Abram means “exalted father.” He was princely, priestly fellow. Sarai and Milcah’s names mean “queen.” I guess we could them “moon queens.” In the call of Abram, you see God reach powerfully into the heart of paganism and idolatry and put Abram and Abram’s father in the line of Christ—the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram (Luke 3:34).
God reached powerfully into a brothel in the ancient city of Jericho and redeemed a prostitute so thoroughly that He not only gave her a godly husband and children but put her in the line of Christ. Into a family that started in incest and was the enemy of the people of God, God reached and called Ruth out to himself and put her in the family of Christ.
You are not too messed up for God to save. He still reaches into brothels, crack houses, jail houses, abusive families, out to the fatherless, in the homes of single mothers, and even into Christian families to call their children. One call is no less or more gracious than the other. How unlikely it is to the human mind that God would save sinners, but He does. God calls people form the most unlikely life circumstances to advance His purpose of blessing among the nations.
The call of Abram is the Word of the Lord to a pagan. Like so many call stories in Scripture, Abram’s call to salvation was also his call to future service. We cannot separate his call to faith and his commission to go to a land God would show him and be a blessing (12:1-3). We will see in the forthcoming narratives how God worked out this calling in Abram’s life.
We have to proceed with caution as we look at this text and not make it a paradigm for how God calls people to salvation and service. Abram’s call is unique in that God is establishing him as a covenant head as He had done with Adam and Noah. Abram’s call echoes the covenantal language to Adam and Noah of blessing and descendants. The covenant proper is not recorded here but the promises that the covenant seals are. This text is the beginning of God rolling out His covenant with Abram, which is established in Genesis 15 and reaffirmed in Genesis 17.
In 12:1-3, God gives Abraham 2 commands and 3 promises with each command. First, God commands Abram to “go” (12:1) and promises that when Abram goes, God will make him a great nation, bless him, and make his name great (12:2). To be a great nation (goy) is to be a geopolitical, governmental entity and that requires land. To make Abram’s name great implies a kingly role. David is the only other OT figure to be promised a great name. Blessing is necessary for Abram to fulfill his calling.
The second command is the result of the first command with its promises. Abram is commanded to “be a blessing.” God then promises to bless those who bless Abram, to curse the one who curses Abram, and to bless all the families of the earth through Abram.
Genesis 12:1-3 shows that Abram functions as a type of Adam, in a new creation shaped from the ruins of Babel, called to spread the Kingdom of God in a new Eden (Canaan 13:10), and to extend the borders that Kingdom to the encompass all the peoples of the world in Edenic blessing. This is why the writer of Hebrews says Abraham was “looking for a city” (Heb. 11:10,16), and Paul said, “the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be the heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith” (Rom 4:13).
The promise to Abraham is fulfilled in Christ so that all who have faith in Christ are counted righteous. The only way that all peoples will be blessed in Abraham is through justifying faith in the ultimate offspring of Abraham, Jesus. Paul said, “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Gal 3:8).
There are unique things about the call and commission of Abram, but there are things that are common to all. Like Abram, we are called to a radically obedient faith. The call to faith in Christ is a call to radical obedience in the mission of Christ to bless the nations.
Like Abram, we are called to have no higher allegiance than Christ. In the ancient world, to leave one’s country and relatives was a death sentence. God called, and the text says Abram “went, as the Lord told him” (12:4). Obedience to His call may mean leaving family, friends, possessions, and even cost you your life.
For Abram to fulfill his call, the blessing of God was essential. Abram was not a lonely nomad, He was a caravan (12:5). He had to learn that God’s blessing did not terminate on him. To be sure, he benefitted personally from God’s blessing. Yet, he had to learn that God had more, much more, in mind than Abram.
When Christ calls you to faith in Him, there is nothing about your life that you can call your own. He calls you into community, and through community, to be His channel of blessing to the world. We are not a church that dreamed up a vision and mission. We, like every other church in the world, have been given a mission by a crucified and risen Lord to disciple the nations. This is not optional, Christ calls you to be all in.
We have a tendency to come to church, soak up sermons, and live totally disconnected from what we have heard. It’s like what goes on here is not really real or consequential. The Bible is the world of the ideal but no one expects that its commands should be taken seriously. We have a cafeteria style religion.
Such is either an indication of serious immaturity in the faith or simply that one has never been converted. It is time for God’s people to mature, put away childish things, and take their place in the call and commission of Christ. God calls us to a radically obedient faith, a faith that sets us apart from the values and fads of this age.
God wants us to do things, but what He wants us to do we cannot do without His enabling, empowering grace. For example, I am convinced that God wants me to preach this sermon, but I cannot do what God has designed for preaching to do. The truth not only must be preached, God must make it effectual in your life.
God’s interest lies not in what we can do, but in what He intends to through us and with us. Our ability is not that big of a factor. As able as Paul was, the Lord said to him, “It’s your weakness I use to show my strength.” In popular, churchy jargon, I hear people talk about “God-sized” vision. I know what they mean, but I don’t like the language. I don’t know what size God is? I don’t think He has a size. His size is usually well within the reach of our budgets. Vision and budget campaigns aside, it is impossible to even exist without God holding our molecules together, less off preach, mish, and have church. God does not need us to dream up some convoluted scheme of busyness. He has told us to disciple the nations. Is that God-sized enough? We need a fresh appreciation for our dependence on God to believe, to sing, to give, to preach, to go, to plant, to water, etc.
In this text, there are a few circumstantial clauses that highlight the impossibility, humanly speaking, of what God called Abram to do (11:30; 12:4b; 12:6b; 12:10).
We live in a world in which the effects of sin have permeated every area of life. The purpose of God is opposed in this world, because it is always in diametric opposition to course of the age. What God calls us to do is not only difficult, it is impossible to do without His enabling, life-giving, game-changing blessing. Although, God’s purpose is opposed in the world, He is firmly in control and mitigates the circumstances to show Himself glorious.
Our mere humanity is a weakness that makes what God calls us to do humanly impossible. When you read that Sarai is barren; she had no child (11:30), you see the impossibility of the promise of God to make Abram a great nation. Sarai’s barrenness is the major conflict in the Abrahamic narratives all the way to chapter 21. Abram and Sarai try to cope with the seeming contradiction between the promise of God and their life reality. Trying to fix this problem for God brought nothing but trouble.
If Sarai’s barrenness is not enough, we are told Abram was 75 when he left Haran. You say, “Yeah, but Abram’s father lived to be 205, and Abram is going to live to be 175” (25:7). If 75 is not difficult enough, God would wait another 25 years before He would give Abram and Sarai a son. At that time, Sarah was past the age of childbearing, and the writer of Hebrews said Abram was “as good as dead.”
Human weakness does not hinder the purpose of God but serves to increase His glory and redounds to His praise. When God called Abram and made promises, Abram did not say, “This is impossible. Sarai is barren, and I am old.” He simply went as the Lord had told him (12:4).
If our mere humanity is not a large enough obstacle, there is the fact that the world is not buying what we are selling. Abram’s first recorded stop in the land was Shechem. This was the epicenter of idolatry in Canaan. The land God intended to reclaim as the beginning of a new Eden was not only occupied by Canaanites, the Canaanites were opposed to God’s rule.
When we set out to fulfill the calling God has given us, we will be opposed. God commanded Abram to be a blessing and promised that in him the nations would be blessed. The problem was nobody told the Canaanites that. The Canaanites cared nothing for the blessing of God. Was Abram expecting such a reception by his host culture? This is an eye-opener in the missionary task. The world is not excited about what has us all pumped-up.
In the face of fierce opposition, the Lord appeared to Abram and reaffirmed the call and the promise. What did Abram do? His trek through Canaan was laying claim to the land. To make that more pronounced, He built and altar at Shechem (12:7). He claimed their worship site as a worship center for God. This site would become a place of renewal for Abram’s descendants (35:4; Josh 24:26). He traveled on and built another altar between Bethel and Ai, proclaiming the Name of the Lord.
There is a continuity in Abram’s calling and the missionary task. What is God doing in this outrageous task of sending His people all over the world? That missionary in that mega-city, or village, or jungle proclaiming the Name of the Lord is offering blessing to the nations, cities, villages and peoples of the world and laying claim to their lands. He is the foretaste of a global Eden in which all the nations will be blessed. More is going on in this missions task than meets the eye. The missionary is offering terms of peace before the judgment of God sweeps away unbelievers in a flood of judgment.
Things were going quite well. Abram has met all opposition. He believed that God was able to make a “great nation” out of Sarai and him. In the face of rooted paganism, Abram built altars and proclaimed the Name of the Lord, transforming pagan worship centers into gospel preaching venues. He continued his trek through the length of the land.
When he arrived in the south, there was a famine (12:9-10). This story is going to be repeated in the life of Jacob and his family. Relying on human reasoning, Abram decides to go to Egypt and wait out the famine. Along the way, he becomes fearful that the Egyptians will kill him to take Sarai. About the time, he arrives in Egypt, he hatches a cockamamie plot to claim Sarai is his sister in order to save his own pathetic life. We have Abram’s speech recorded in the text (12:11-13). I wonder if he cleared his throat before he spoke.
This art of deception is going to run deep in Abraham’s offspring. Abram is going to learn that you cannot accomplish the will of God by human deceit. When I read this story, all kinds of things come to mind. I think, why did Abram go to Egypt to start with? Had a continuous string of obstacles to the divine call gotten the best of him? Did he simply succumb to the pressure and try to find an easy fix to famine? Did he reason in His mind that the call of God was going to be easy? Did he think that to be in the place of God’s appointment exempted him from suffering? Did he not have room in his theology for God to send him into famine?
Lest we try and baptize this story in some way, the text will not allow it. When Pharaoh confronted Abram, the language parallels God’s confrontation with Adam and Eve after the fall (12:17-20). The text is saying, “This is sin.” Abram was to be a blessing to the nations. Instead, he was a curse to Egypt. Let, the fact that a pagan kinds is rebuking God’s man for his sin sink in! The gain Abram received in Egypt would be a curse to him (Strife with Lot and Hagar).
God has not called us to ease, self-reliance, and the values of the world. When you set out to fulfill your calling, He is going to try you with famine, with opposition, your own sinfulness, and the furnace of suffering. God has to teach you trust Him.
Develop a theology of suffering! Most western Christians don’t have one. On the heels of many high points in walking with God, severe testing comes. In the Scripture, the trial of faith confirms and strengthens your faith. You will see person after person jump out at the first sign of hardship. If you make a commitment to start giving, the next week, you get a rock through your windshield, a speeding ticket, and a root canal. What are you going to do? Are you going to say, “Well, kids, it looks like God doesn’t want us to go on vacation”? We could go on with this in every area of the Christian life all the way to the family who goes on the mission field and loses 3 of 7 children. This is extreme, but it is reality. Do we really think, though, life will be better if we disobey the call of God?
You can’t base your call and the will of God on how easy things are. God intends to display His glory in your calling. He has to take you past you. He must be your highest value. We will see Abraham come to terms with this is Genesis 22.
It was not Abram’s scheming that got Sarai and him out of Egypt. It was divine intervention. When God had to deliver His people, it was often due to some weakness or failure that got them in a position where the promise of God was at stake. It was impossible that Pharaoh could have Sarai. In spite of their deceptive, self-reliance that brought on this irresolvable dilemma, God would afflict Pharaoh’s house to uphold His promise.
I don’t think this means that we can think of the craziest thing to do to try and put God in a position of acting to save us. I would first remind you that God’s promise to Abram is fulfilled in Christ. Nothing could stop God from sending His Son into the world. I don’t think Abram was thinking, “We can go to Egypt and do this thing, get more wealth, and God has to deliver us.” The problem is that Abram was not thinking in the first place when he went to Egypt.
What is at stake in the OT is the fulfillment of the promised Son, Christ. Now what is at stake is preaching the gospel to all nations. You can get yourself into all kinds of situations doing that. God may deliver you in life or death, but He will deliver you.
At any rate, the point of the text is that we will fail in the pursuit of the divine call, and when we do, God call us back to Himself. Abram went back to Canaan from Egypt (13:1). Our failures are not the end of us or God’s calling. Don’t wallow in the self-pity of failure in service to God. The Lord opens the way for us to come back.
We are people who need a constant affirmation and tangible expression of our faith. We come to the Table week after week to affirm our faith is in Christ alone. From that firm foundation, we pursue God’s calling knowing His acceptance of us even when we fail.