God calls Abram to a New Land
Abraham is descended from Noah. Noah had three sons; Shem, Ham and Japheth. The family line of Abraham was Shem – Arpachshad – Shelah – Eber – Peleg (who was born around the time of the division at the tower of Babel [Gen 10.25 & 1 Chron1.19]) – Reu – Serug – Nahor – Terah – Abraham. The time between Shem’s birth and Abraham’s was a period of 300 years.
Eber’s two sons, Peleg and Joktan represent a separation in the descendants of Shem into two distinct lines. One ends up at Babylon and the other at Abraham. One family line represents the city of this world, Babylon, which still spoken about in future in Revelation. The other family line includes Abraham, the man without a city in this world, but with an ambition for the City of God.
During the period from Shem to Abraham there is no record of anyone living by faith in God in either stream of descendants. At Babel, God forcibly dispersed the mass of Noah’s descendants because they were in danger of using their corporate strength to ruin themselves. Babylon is the archetypal city/kingdom that is built in opposition to God. Human history is a chain of such successive ‘kingdoms of this world.’ At Babel, God broke up the corporate strength of peoples into competing families, tribes and nations because humanity was sliding back down into the same spiritual emptiness and viciousness that existed before the flood.
Abraham’s family was no exception to this decline. Joshua tells us (Joshua 24.2,3) And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan, and made his offspring many. I gave him Isaac.When we meet Abraham, he is an idol-worshipper in the city of Ur. The city of Ur worshipped Nanna (the moon god). A tower like the one built at Babel was dedicated to Nanna.
God called Abraham when he was not following him and set him on a totally new path, separating him out from the idolatry handed down to him by his forefathers. God was not just blessing Abraham, he was working in and through Abraham in order to form and deliver a people out of the spiritual emptiness and pointlessness of sinful humanity trying to live without God.
God’s Call 11.27-12.3
God appeared to Abraham when he was still in Ur, before Terah took the family to Haran. It was Abraham’s call to go to Canaan, but for some reason Terah took the lead. We are not told how God gave his call to Abraham, except that it was verbal and specific. It may have been in a dream or vision.
Go away from your country, your land.
Leave your people.
Leave your family (father’s house).
Go to the land I will show you.
The reasons given for this uprooting were:
I will make of you a great nation. (Leave your people and I will make you a people)
I will bless you.
I will make your name great, so you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you.
I will curse those who curse you.
In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
That is a big promise. It is not a promise about stuff, but about having a life with meaning and purpose - God’s purpose. The implication was that God’s purpose is not had by looking back into your culture, your family or your land. It is had by looking to God.
Abraham’s response? He went (12.4). His going was faith in action. He believed God. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out not knowing where he was going. Heb 11.8. Faith without works that express it is dead. Abraham’s faith was real.
When Abraham left for Canaan, he went into a place he didn’t know, but he believed that God would make his life significant. We can learn from the value Abraham placed on God’s call. This was not a call to health and prosperity – as if those things were ends in themselves. It was a call to significance – a call to a position in God’s scheme. We are added to God’s plans, we don’t add him to ours.
Getting Started in God’s Way 12.4-9
Abraham entered the land occupied by the Canaanites. He had moved from security among his people and with his father, into relying on the bare arm of God. He first travelled through the land of Canaan to Shechem right in the heart of the land.
He took Lot with him. Lot was his nephew. Lot was a passenger on Abraham’s journey. His personal standing with God always looks uncertain and in the end, after many compromises with the world, we will see that Lot ends up producing children who are the enemies of Abraham’s descendants. Lot teaches us about the dangers of half-hearted belief. The world is too strong for it and it proved too strong for Lot.
At the oak of Moreh, near Shechem, Abraham built an altar to the Lord. This was his response to God’s further word to him, “To your offspring I will give this land.” And again a little further south near Bethel, he builds another altar to the Lord and he calls on the name of the Lord. The fact that the Canaanites were in the land (v6) must have increased Abraham’s sense of insecurity. He had no city to retreat to, no walls to hide behind. God helped him by giving him promises. The plain word of God to him reminded Abraham that God was his refuge. God would see him safely through.
The word of God is incredibly important to our stability and security in life. God’s word and his name are an impregnable fortress.
Psalm 138.2,3
I give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness,
for you have exalted above all things
your name and your word.
On the day I called, you answered me;
my strength of soul you increased.
Proverbs 18.10
The name of the Lord is a strong tower;
the righteous man runs into it and is safe.
Our safe place in the exposed and spiritually hazardous world we live in is found in the name and the word of our God. You can’t separate God’s name (identity) and his word. If you ‘get’ his word, you get God too. Abraham found his safety in the words God said to him. Taking refuge in those words was the same as hiding in the name of the Lord.
An altar was a stone plinth or table on which an animal was slaughtered and burned. Abraham got this from his forefathers Abel and Noah, both of whom responded to God correctly by committing themselves to him with an animal sacrifice (Gen 4.4,5; 8.20-22).
So Abraham’s response to God’s word to him was to offer sacrifices which demonstrated that he understood that he was not worthy of God’s help and yet he wanted to please God. Abraham’s altar sacrifice was an act of worship and submission to God and his purposes expressed in promises. What God promises is what he wills for us. Our response, like Abraham, is to own up to our unworthiness and incapacity to ‘do’ what God offers. Instead we ‘call on the name of the Lord’. We are telling God that we are depending totally on him to act in us consistent with his promises.
There is also an element of celebration by Abraham in the making of the sacrifices on the altar. Abraham is full of thankfulness that God has his back. Even in the most exposed and dangerous world of Canaan, he delights in God’s ability to protect him now and given him that very land in the future.
So Abraham traversed the land from top to bottom.
Side Trip to Egypt 12.10-13.4
A famine drove Abraham to Egypt. The Nile delta would provide water and pasture for his large flocks of animals. Should Abraham have gone to Egypt? Why didn’t he just trust God to provide water for him in Canaan? To answer those questions we need to notice how ‘going down to Egypt’ is a repeated theme throughout the Bible:
Abraham goes down to Egypt here.
Joseph goes down to Egypt as a result of his brother’s conspiracy.
Jacob and his family go down to Egypt to escape famine and God has provided Joseph there to preserve them.
Jeremiah is taken against his will to Egypt.
Joseph, Mary and Jesus flee to Egypt to escape Herod.
In every case Egypt is portrayed as a temporary place and a departure from the Promised Land. You don’t want to go to Egypt and you certainly don’t want to stay there. Egypt represents slavery to the Pharaoh who controlled everything.
Abraham was driven into Egypt by the famine, not because he wanted an alternative to God’s promises. God tested Abraham. Something greater than Abraham could cope with seemed to be invading the land of the promise and dislodging him. The text gives us the clue that Abraham still retained his faith in God, even though it seemed that the promised land was ejecting him. The word sojourn (v10) means to stay a while, or as we might say, ‘visit’. He was not committing to remain there. He expected that the circumstances would eventually change and that God would restore him to the promised land and that his descendants would own it.
We learn from this to expect that the promises and the visions that God gives us for our future will at times seem to be getting further out of our grasp, rather than closer. Faith says, ‘I will stay a while in these circumstances, but I will not put down roots in them. I expect God will deliver me from them so I can occupy his promises.’
In Egypt, Abraham took precautions to protect himself from Pharaoh’s domination. Sarah was an intelligent and attractive mature woman. Abraham feared that if she was known to be his wife, that some Egyptian would kill him and take her. Hence Abraham’s plan to represent Sarah as his sister. And just as he had predicted word even reached Pharaoh concerning this rich visitor’s sister and he arranged for Sarah to be taken into his harem in preparation for her to become another of his wives. Pharoah treated Sarah’s ‘brother’ , Abraham, extremely generously. His existing wealth was dramatically increased.
Abraham acted unwisely. His intention was good. He was trying to preserve their lives (for the promise of offspring depended on them being alive to produce a child). But his means were wrong. In the pressure of the danger, he acted rashly in his own wisdom.
God then acted to protect Sarah from Pharaoh, as Abraham’s plan had failed to do so. God sent sicknesses on Pharaoh’s household. Abraham is rebuked for his dishonesty by the godless king. Although Abraham is the man of God’s choice, he is not perfect and like all believers we are not exempt from the need to be rebuked for our errors by unbelievers at times.
Pharaoh clearly senses that he is not just dealing with a man and his wife, here, but that that Abraham’s God is also involved. The sicknesses that strike the royal household underlined this in Pharaoh’s mind. He is very cautious in the way he extracts Abraham and Sarah from his life and sends him back where he came from.
God’s providential care and planning is seen in the way that God provides for Abraham during the famine, even from the heart of the world’s kingdom, Egypt. Abraham was right to assume that God’s promise meant that his stay in Egypt would be temporary.
Abraham, Sarah, his vast possessions (and his passenger, Lot) return to the place where he had last offered sacrifices to God (near Bethel). And he again calls on the name of the Lord. He does this in a public way, so that all of his household should understand that this man honours and seeks God for his protection and purpose.
Big Picture Lessons:
1. In this passage, it is made plain that God chooses, calls and separates out people for himself. Abraham is a clear example of this. He was ‘plucked’ from a declining family line falling away into idolatry. Abraham did not pull himself out of the quarry to become the rock on which God would build his people. God cut him from the quarry. He was a lone man with a sterile wife (Is 51.1-2). God’s call has power in its word to make what isn’t anything exist! Abraham believed in God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
2. We learn that God makes promises and we receive those promises by faith. God’s promises are not a schedule of tasks for us to go away and carry out to the best of our ability. We step into God’s promises obediently, but with full confidence in God to make us equal to path he has put us on. Abraham’s response was the right one; he went as the Lord told him (12.4) trusting God to provide security and give him room to move.
3. We learn that only God can fulfil his promises and he intervenes to do so. Even when circumstances seem to make God’s promises seem further away from fulfilment, God uses even his enemies to grease the machinery of his will. We see this in the way God delivered Abraham from the famine, from his own foolish efforts and from the danger posed by Pharaoh.
4. We learn from the deliverance of Abraham from Egypt that God what God did in the past does not remain there. It assures us that he will do the same in the present and in the future, too. Abraham’s deliverance from Egypt became a pattern for the deliverance of Joseph and all Israel, and the child Jesus. God won’t allow the kingdom of this world to swallow up his people, nor will he allow the king of slaves (Pharaoh/Satan) to have his people for his own purposes. This encourages us that though we live away from the Promised Land, in a kind of exile, we are not owned by the world. What God did for Abraham, Joseph, Israel and Jesus, he will do for us; he will give us room to move. Like Abraham, we will continue to take territory by faith and we will secure for ourselves and others a place in the City of God.
