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"Abraham" My original plan had been to preach through the first eleven chapters of Genesis only, as they do, in certain ways, form a separate portion of Genesis and of the Bible, the comprehensive introduction to the teaching of the Scripture concerning God, man, and salvation. But, staring the history of Abraham in the face as we were, I could not bring myself to cut off our progress, and so we move on into the account of God's making his covenant with Abraham and his seed, through which covenant the history of salvation will be revealed in successive stages throughout the rest of the Bible. It is of some importance now to set this narrative in its historical context. Up to now we have been unable to date any of the events of chapters 1-11 with any assurance. But counting backward from information the Bible will give us later, Abraham can be dated with confidence at approximately 2,000 B.C., that is, he lived as many years before the birth of our Savior as we live after it. Further, we know a good bit more about the world in which he lived than was known even a few generations ago. The older, skeptical view of this history was based on an evolutionary theory of human history in which it was supposed that human history moves from the primitive toward the sophisticated and that, therefore, this earlier human life must have been a primitive culture, lacking much of what we associate with civilization. The influential German scholar of the 19th century, Julius Wellhausen, who popularized this view, argued that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch in the 14th century B.C. 600 years after Abraham because writing had not been invented by that time. Now, however, we know that the world in which Abraham lived was a world, except in non-technological respects, very much like our own. His was already an older civilization. Nations carried on voluminous international trade regulated and taxed by government bureaucracies. The people were widely literate and often in more than one language. Abraham, as we know him from the Bible, fits into this picture neatly: a wealthy merchant, able to travel, to develop new commercial ties and maintain his position in an international economy. We even have a description from a near contemporary, Sinuhe, an Egyptian nobleman who became the governor of a large Amorite tribe in the 20th century B.C, of the Palestinian highlands where Abraham was to spend most of his time: There were figs in it and vines, This was the rich and fertile country to which Abraham came when God called him. And what an epoch in human history it was when God called this man and he left his home in Ur and then in Haran to journey to Canaan. This man becomes the great patriarch of biblical history and, what is more, the great exemplar of faith and of salvation by faith and of the life of faith. We know more of his life than anyone else in biblical history save Moses, David, Paul, and the Lord himself. He will be called in the Bible "the friend of God," and "the father of all those who believe in Jesus Christ." Jesus, in a particularly striking statement, said that Abraham was a believer in him, in Jesus Christ, those long ages before the Lord came into the world. "Abraham rejoiced to see my day and was glad." Paul will use Abraham's life story as his crowning demonstration that men are made right with God by faith in Christ and not by works, the author of the letter to the Hebrews will use Abraham as an example of what it means to live by faith and to be a pilgrim in this world. Indeed, throughout the remainder of the Bible, God himself will refer to himself and identify himself as simply "The God of Abraham." The covenant that God made with Abraham, first announced here in vv. 2-3, has compressed within it the entire story of salvation -- for Christ is the seed of Abraham through whom the nations will be blessed. The entire history of the world can be seen as an unfolding of this promise that God made to this man. In other words, in the life of Abraham, we are face to face with the greatest themes of biblical revelation, set out in flesh and blood in the personal history of this great man, a man whose world, in all really important matters, was exactly the same as ours, who inhabited the same spiritual world as we do, with the same principles, laws, opportunities, dangers, promises, and requirements. He is the prototypical Christian in the Bible, with no peers except perhaps Moses, David, and the Apostle Paul. As the founder of the Jewish race and the Israelite people, as the most significant ancestor of Jesus Christ, who is often identified as the descendant of Abraham, as, therefore, the sire of the Judeo-Christian tradition, there are very few people in all of human history with a claim to importance or greatness equal to Abraham. Islam reveres him as does Judaism and Christianity. He is one of the very few greatest men of human history and of the history of salvation. But, more than that, much more, he is and his life is one of the central vehicles in Holy Scripture's revelation of the way, the truth, and the life. So let us begin there: with Abraham as the exemplar of the Christian, the father of all who believe in Christ. Already in these opening verses of his history we are being taught the nature of the Christian faith and the Christian life. The themes introduced here we will have ample opportunity to elaborate in coming Lord's Days, but we can at least take note of them here at the very beginning.
Where did this great man come from? Why does he suddenly appear as the centerpiece of biblical history? Was he a man who all his life had loved God and sought God and for his reward was made the father of a great nation? No! He was born into an idolater's family in Ur of the Chaldeans. So we read in Joshua 24:3. No doubt he was raised in that family to worship idols as his parents did -- perhaps especially to be a devotee of moon worship as, apparently his father, Terah, was -- and no doubt he was content to be an idolater. We have absolutely no reason to think otherwise. What completely changed this man and all of history with him, was the voice, the call, the summons of God. He would have lived out his life and died and his name fallen into perpetual oblivion had God not singled him out and spoken to him We have no idea how that summons came, though we know it came to him when he was still in his father's house in Ur. But like multitudes of people after him, he received a divine summons and his life was turned upside down. As the Puritan, John Arrowsmith put it: "Election having once pitched upon a man, it will find him out, and call him home, wherever he be. It called Zaccheus out of accursed Jericho; Abraham, out of idolatrous Ur of the Chaldeans; Nicodemus, and Paul, from the college of the Pharisees, Christ's sworn enemies; Dionysius, and Damaris, out of superstitious Athens. In whatsoever dung-hills God's jewels are hid, election will both find them out, and fetch them out." [BOT (Jan 1983) 6] And so with every Christian and so with us -- whether we have been Christians all our lives or heard God's voice for the first time only recently. The Christian life begins and continues with God's speaking to us and our listening to and responding to what he says. And so let us all be reminded, brothers and sisters. This is what the Christian life is -- a hearing of God's voice, a listening to him speak to us and a response on our part. Which is to say, entirely unlike the other religious visions of the world, the salvation that Christianity preaches and proclaims and offers to the world is mediated to human lives in an actual communion with God, a conversation between God himself, the living God, and an individual soul. It is not a calculation of merit and reward, it is a personal conversation, fellowship, between the High God and a lowly and sinful human being. That is what is so utterly extraordinary about it. Is it so for you? Is your life such a conversation, communion, and fellowship with God? Last century the Scottish lay evangelist, Brownlow North, published a little pamphlet entitled "Six short rules for young Christians." The first two of these rules read as follows:
Just as it was with Abraham, so it will be with you and me, our salvation, our relationship with God is carried by a real, personal conversation, his speaking, our listening, our responding to him. That is the true Christian life and nothing else.
This man, from an idolater's family, had no knowledge of the one true God. Those around him and in his family worshipped many Gods who were, though they would have hotly denied it, creations of their own imaginations, God's of their own devising. And then, somehow, we know not how -- for the Bible did not yet exist -- God spoke to this man and everything suddenly was completely different.
And now he opened his eyes each morning on a completely new world, God's world, the God he knew. Abram knew the living God had spoken to him and that the idols his family worshipped were nothing at all. He saw his life in utterly different terms than he was accustomed to. But that was only the beginning. When God spoke to him, he summoned him to another country far away, to leave behind family and friends and business and perhaps the accumulated property of generations of his family. And suddenly he finds himself on the road to who knows where. That divine voice that came to him picked him up and put him down a different man in a different place with a different life. His nice tidy world was in shambles as off he went following God. And so it must be, will be for every Christian. God will not leave you where he finds you. He is interested in taking you places and doing things with your life you never thought of. The Christian church is literally full to the brim with people who are doing things with their lives they never could have imagined themselves doing before the heard the voice of God in their souls. I know women, now happily the mother of a number of children who once hated the very idea of motherhood, but God spoke to them and everything changed. Or, I think of Eta Linnemann, the German Professor of NT, the only woman in that very exclusive and august fraternity back in the 1960s. She had reached the pinnacle of her profession. And then God spoke to her. And a few years later she was a missionary in Indonesia, telling everyone who asked to burn the books she had written in the German University. Could she have ever imagined the revolution in her life, the leaving of her homeland, the completely new set of associations, the forsaking of all that she had sought and obtained at such great cost in the academic world? No more than Abraham could have imagined himself on the road to Canaan, even one day before the sound of the Almighty's voice reached his ears. Brothers and sisters, don't be surprised that your life is often turned upside down, that God takes you across difficult country, and forces you to leave behind much that was once important to you. He summoned you precisely because he intends to take you someplace else. That is the Christian life and always and everywhere the Christian life.
Think, now, and visualize Abraham's situation when God speaks to him and afterward. He's to go, he knows not where; to do, he knows not what; to receive a promise which, as he and Sarah are already past expecting a child, seems incapable of fulfillment. And off he goes! The Bible has a word for that behavior: FAITH! And from the beginning to the end of every Christian life, this is what is supremely required. And here is the power and glory of faith in God and faith in Christ. Look what it makes of a person. An early church father put it this way:
Look what a titan faith made of Abraham. It made him a pilgrim and it made for him many difficult things, but it made him the friend of God and the father of all who believe in Christ, a great nation no man can number! Abraham will waver from time to time, as we will see; but faith, once it has got hold of man or a woman, that woman can never, never go back to the old world, the old life, the life only of sight and sense. The life when one knows nothing more than what one can see, sees no heaven, hears no voice of God, grasps no great promises, has no pilgrimage to complete. After all, the Christian is in the same world as the unbeliever. He can no more see God or heaven with his eyes than can any non-Christian. He can no more see his sins lifted off his conscience and being erased from his record than an unbeliever can see them still written there in indelible ink. But God has spoken and faith knows it all true and has its confirmations and demonstrations every day that sight knows nothing of. I've known, you've known people who claim to have faith but never act on it, never do anything like what Abraham did in following God and forsaking his world. They say they believe the world is passing away but they live as if it would exist forever. They say that God will give us the desires of our hearts if we delight ourselves in him, but they seem to find no delight in God only in the world. No, faith is not such a small thing. That is what Abraham shows us. As Adolphe Monod put it, "Faith is nothing less than the power of God placed at the disposal of man." Let us not sell its power short to ourselves, brothers and sisters. We are always doing that! Always living by sight because we put so little stock in faith. "But faith is the victory..." "with as small as a mustard seed..." Let us, as he did, always, and for everything, LOOK UP! For, faith is, as Luther was wont to say, "nothing else but a sure and steadfast looking to Christ." You spend your life and each day, looking to Christ and listening for his voice, and you will find yourself not only a true pilgrim as Abraham was, but a man, a woman who leaves a mark on this world while he or she passes through! |
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