Genesis 12:1-9--The Call of Abram

Genesis 12:1-9 English Standard Version (ESV)
LISTEN:  https://www.biblegateway.com/audio/mclean/esv/Gen.12.1-Gen.12.9

​The Call of Abram
12 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. 9 And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.

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We're probably starting to enter the part of the historical narrative (biography) that you'll be more familiar with.  I want to take just a moment to point out that what I mean when I say "historical narrative" is that it would be most closely associated with the genre that we might call "biographical," but it would definitely be something that you'd find in the Non-Fiction area of the library.  I do not mean "historical fiction" (like the book Vinegar Boy) nor is it epic literature like Homer's Iliad nor is it necessarily auto-biographical where we assume that each person wrote their own story--sometimes this happens in the Bible, and sometimes it doesn't.  In New Testament Scripture, I'd say that in some ways it would be best to read this like you would read The Acts of the Apostles as that closely parallels Genesis in that it's telling the "origin story" of the Church and in a similar fashion to how God told man to "be fruitful and multiply" in the beginning of Genesis, the Church is given this same command in a new way to "go and make disciples of all nations" in the book of Acts.  We don't doubt the historicity of the book of Acts and we know it was written by a historian who may have been there to see parts of it for himself, but may have simply done interviews and gathered materials from appropriate sources to write the historical narrative of the early Church.  Just because Luke may not have been present for say the stoning of Stephen (we simply don't know if he was or wasn't there) does not in any way make us doubt that the words and events recorded there are historically accurate, because we know the Holy Spirit was there and inspired the writer to use his gifts to write a historical account.

Let's return to today's portion of the historical narrative where we will now discuss the origins of God's chosen people, starting with "Father Abraham" (though he's not called Abraham yet, his name at this point in the narrative is still "Abram").  We see that Abram is going to receive a call from God that he must respond to in faith--that's the same with us, though this story is not about us, it will be used to talk about how God works with us in a similar way once we get to the New Testament.

God does not give Abram details.  He simply gives Him a command and expects Abram to obey.  We've also noticed from that last chapter that Abram's father seemed to be given the same command by God but he only partially obeyed and that partial obedience is disobedience, so God had to go to Terah's son and repeat the command and let the son be obedient where the father had been disobedient.  Doesn't God also work in this way today?  Many fathers see that they missed opportunities for blessings because they were not immediately, fully obedient to the voice of God when they heard it.  They don't want the same thing for their children, and they try to teach them with "do as I say, not as I do."  Sometimes the children understand and break the cycle of sin and disobedience, but other times the cycle is generational and leads on a downward trajectory--we've seen that many times already in Genesis.

Notice how many times God says, "I will" in his command to Abram.  This is not a narrative so much about what Abram would do and how great Abram would be, but about how great God is and what God would be doing in and through Abram.  God is the main character in this narrative since the beginning, and He continues to be throughout the entire Bible.  Just many people miss this because at times He moves from the foreground to the background.  What we see here is the beginning of what we'll start to call the Abrahamic Covenant.  God is promising a few specific things here (and will be more specific in His promises as we continue).  First, we see a promise of a Place (land), then we see promise of People (a great nation and many descendants), and finally we see a promise of Provision (God's blessing will be on Abram and through him all the nations of the earth will be blessed.  We'll understand later that this "provision" will be fully realized in the salvation provided by Jesus on the cross).  We also see a promise unlike any other to this point that God will judge the nations by how they treat Abram and his descendants.  Those who bless Abram and his descendants will be blessed, and those who curse Abram and his descendants will be cursed.

We then see that Abram obeys (sort of) and the way in which he disobeys here is going to be problematic for him later.  God told Abram specifically for him and his wife to go, but Abram decide that he needed to take care of his nephew and take him along for the journey.  Most likely this related to the death of Lot's father Haran and that the closest relative (probably Abram) had taken the responsibility for raising that child as his own, especially since Abram had no children of his own.  This might already be the first of a few times that we'll see Abram trying to do something that might make God's promise make sense to him.  Perhaps Abram thought if he treated Lot as an adopted son, that the promise could come through him, as you'll see that Abram was already 75 years old--older than his father when he had finished having children, and Abram hadn't even started yet.

Abram also took all of his worldly possessions with him on this journey.  and then we jump way ahead to to the point where Abram ends up in Canaan.  God doesn't tell us anything about the the journey to the promised land.  We again get specific places with real names and real geographical boundaries and "property lines" (even if the marker was a large oak tree that everyone would know about).

We see that God repeats part of the covenant--the part about the land--to Abram and Abram responds by making an altar and worshiping the Lord by building an altar there.  Remember us talking about building altars and Ebeneezers  to remember what God has done for you at specific places and specific times?  We'll see this throughout Genesis and the names of these places will receive names that remind everyone about who God is and the provision that He along had provided.

From there, Abram went to the place that would be later called Bethel (though it really doesn't have this name yet, as we'll see the story later about how it receives this name when Abram's grandson Jacob returns to this place).  This is one of the indicators that the person writing this story knew some future details and used the "common" Hebrew names of places instead of the Canaanite names of those places, even if those Hebrew names had not been given yet.  We also see the city-state of Ai mentioned here--we'll see that one come up again in the book of Joshua.  We see Abram once again stop to worship the Lord and call upon His name.

We end this part of the narrative with Abram making it all the way toward the Negeb  I'm going to post a link to a video that I think will be helpful in summarizing where we've been, talking bout where we are and talk about where we'll be going.  https://youtu.be/_7-UexPTm08.  Again, I just want to emphasize--real people, real places and real events marked by real altars made to the Lord.  We'll again see many of these same places as we go throughout the time of the Exodus and the time of the Conquest and Judges and Kings and Prophets.  It's very different for us to imagine this and it's not so much that people believed that the presence of God lived in a certain place, but that if they would go back to that place and remember the God that worked in that way in the past and call upon Him that He might once again work in that same kind of way again.  These altars and places will be important as we'll continue to see them be places that people will go to in order to call upon the name of the Lord for help and look for got to work in mighty and miraculous ways and to ask God to remember the covenant that He had made with His people.