Hey everybody and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast as we kick off another week and
we are really in many ways shifting gears.
You have podcasts on your mind.
Did I say,
oh, sorry everybody.
That’s all right.
Well.
We know what it is.
Don’t miss Thursday’s podcast release.
That is on my mind because I’m going to be working on that.
It’s going to be, don’t miss it.
Welcome to Bible study.
Thursday, we do have an interview with a former professor of both of ours and I think you’ll
really enjoy it.
If you can take the time to watch it or listen to it,
I think it’ll be helpful.
You get to listen to two pastors be intellectually outmatched.
Oh, and it’s not even close.
No.
No, it’s not even close.
Okay.
Well, thanks for being here today.
We move into a new thread of Genesis as we narrow the focus down to a particular family
group for a while and in some sense a people group,
at least the forerunners of that people group, the Israelites.
Chapter 11 ends
by mentioning Abram and where he lives.
And then chapter 12 is one of those
stories that begins just kind of out of the blue.
It just drops in on us and it’s fascinating that the Bible does not feel compelled to
provide much context in this.
So let’s go a few verses and then we’ll talk it through.
“Now the Lord said to Abram,
‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s
house to the land I will show you.
I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you.
And I will make your name great so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse.
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”
So we’ve said this before,
but the book of Genesis as a general rule doesn’t have a lot
of interest in explaining why God does what God does.
And that is true in abundance in this case.
God shows up,
God says to Abram, “Pack your stuff.
I’m going to take you to a new land.
I’m doing this because I want to bless you and through you I want to bless others and
I will make you a nation.”
Now there’s been no talk of nation making,
there’s been no talk of why Abraham or Abram
at this point is special or why he would be blessed in such a way.
God simply,
at God’s own choosing,
decides to do this and issues what is
primarily known as the call of Abram.
That’s actually right where I wanted to start here,
Clint, was to talk just for a moment
about that idea of
being special because fundamentally we’ve only seen this in maybe the most distant
forms where God has chosen or called one particular person.
We certainly had a vision of it with Noah where Noah’s chosen out of all of this unrighteousness
and depravity and Noah is a faithful righteous man we’re told.
But that’s not quite the same sense as what we get for the first time here with Abram
because here it’s very clear in this early text,
“Go from your country,
your kindred, your father’s house.” How much of Genesis so far has been about the lineage,
about the family connections?
It’s been about how you get from Adam and Eve and then we have fathers all the way down
to Noah and then we have this genealogy that follows the Noah story.
Here we are again back to another character.
But it’s interesting because when God chooses Abram,
God is doing so out of God’s free will.
We’re not given any reason just to maybe restate in different words.
Yet we are not told that Abram is more righteous than anyone else or that Abram deserves this kind of call
as opposed to someone else.
We’re simply told that God has chosen Abraham and gives him this command and promises a blessing.
But if we’re going to be honest,
it’s a vague blessing.
I mean just a few short verses.
So the monumental ask here is to pick up,
uproot and move somewhere where I tell you
the promise is going to be that you’ll be blessed and that your family among all others will be blessed.
But we get this sense very early on that this is not like a common occurrence or that Abram and God
haven’t been talking.
It’s not like there’s a previous relationship here.
We have this new character,
new call from God,
and this big question,
what’s he going to do with it?
Right, and all callings are faith moments.
But I think that’s especially apparent in this Abram story.
Pick up and go to the land I will show you.
Where are we going?
I will show you when you get there.
And so this is this sort of poetic and profound metaphor of a call.
We are called to something that we don’t fully understand.
And Abram here is called to a place that he doesn’t know.
He’s not told, “Oh, it’s on the other side of Egypt,” or,
“Oh, it’s over there,” or,
“Oh, it’s going to take us five days.”
He simply says, “Go to where I will show you.”
And then as a kind of restatement of this idea,
we saw a little bit of this.
It’s possibly you could say there’s a little of this in Noah.
There’s maybe a little bit in the Cain story,
but Cain is being punished at the time.
Here, God says, “Such is the nature of this agreement that those who bless you,
I will bless those who curse you,
I will curse.” In other words, I’m on Team Abram.
I’m with you.
Your struggles are my struggles.
Your successes are my successes that we are in partnership here.
This isn’t simply, “You do what I tell you.”
This is that you and I are going to be in relationship.
So this is not only a locational call,
a geographic call, it’s a relational call.
And I think that’s very significant.
And it also should be pointed out in the end of verse 3
that the ultimate point of this call is,
“All the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
It’s easy to forget that as the focus narrows more and more on the Israelites,
and particularly through parts of the Old Testament where Israel is front and center in the story.
But this initial call to Abram is a worldwide call.
My goal in calling you is to be a blessing to all the families of the earth,
to all the people of the earth.
Now,
there’s some ways you could kind of slice that up and talk about it.
But I think it’s important at this point of the story to know that
while Abram’s call is particular,
it is universal in its goal.
Yeah, I think this is really helpful, Clint.
And I’ve always had a way of sort of visualizing that.
I hope this will work here,
see if I can show you this.
So here in Abram’s story,
I think you have this really large sort of universal,
it’s a wide universal call.
And as you go throughout the Old Testament,
you find yourself finding that made more specific
as you go, step by step, like each person of that story.
So you’ve got like Moses,
and then you go all the way down to King David.
I’m skipping lots of important people,
right?
But you have the story of Israel,
a particular nation.
It’s very pointed.
And then of course,
that comes at the center here,
who we know is going to be at the center of everything.
That’s Jesus.
Everything flows to Jesus in this important narrative.
Out of that,
then, notice or just think for a second,
oh, man,
I didn’t leave enough space.
Think about where you end at the end of the scripture in revelations is once again,
a universal call for all nations,
where all people are circling the throne.
You have this sort of global presence once again.
The question is, is that accidental?
Right?
The question is, is this just the way that it panned out?
Or has this been God’s intention from all along?
And I think your point to say that we shouldn’t read by the Abram story without seeing that God
has a much larger frame from the start,
because when you get to the end of the scriptures,
the other side of the promise of Jesus Christ,
you discover that very promise has been kept.
God does the thing that God had said from the very beginning.
And all nations are blessed because at the end of all things,
all nations will have come through the grace of Jesus Christ.
And so just the point to make that this is absolutely essential.
And this is maybe the pivot point in the book of Genesis,
where we stop talking about how things
began in the created human order sense.
And we start with the story of how God’s now building up this plan to meet the promise He’s
just made to Abraham.
It’s just the essential story,
an important change in the text.
And there are some tensions that it creates down the road when God is displacing some
nations to make room for Israel,
or when God is not as favorable to some people groups or some people,
some persons,
because of God’s attention to this specific group.
It gets a little hard to see,
but this is where we start.
And ultimately,
those things are generally understood to serve the greater point,
which is to bring blessing upon the whole earth.
And so this is the call.
God has made this call to Abram.
And Abram is a character.
We’ll talk about this at other points in his story.
But
Abram is a character that in many ways,
perhaps with one exception,
really exhibits faithfulness.
And so the typical response we see right here in verse four,
“So Abram went,
as the Lord had told him,
and Lot went with him.”
Abram was 75 years old when he departed Haran.
Abram took his wife Sarai,
his brother’s son Lot,
all the possessions they gathered,
and the persons they had acquired in Haran.
And they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.
When they came to the land of Canaan,
Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the Okomorrah.
At the time, the Canaanites were in the land.
We’ll leave off there,
I think, today.
But Abram is the epitome of faithful response in the Old Testament,
in many ways.
There’s a little bit of wiggle room in that, in another story.
But you have this call.
Just out of the blue,
this call drops in.
Go to a place I haven’t shown you yet.
Leave all your people.
Take all your stuff and let’s go.
And Abram went.
There’s no conversation.
There’s no sort of like we saw in Noah.
God said build an ark.
Noah built an ark.
The scripture really appreciates that kind of response.
Now, there is leeway in some of the other characters.
There’s some back and forth.
But in Abram’s moment here,
he simply,
God called,
Abram did.
Yeah.
And in many ways,
that probably fits the detail of the story that we have.
I mean, we just covered six verses here.
And in many ways,
this is the setup for Abram.
This is the character building.
The scriptures actually,
if you’re going to compare the scriptures to modern literature,
they’re not interested in teasing out all of the dark foils of the characters.
They’re not interested in sort of mining all of the relational things that we might find interesting.
Instead,
the scriptures are far more interested in actions.
And so to your point, Clint,
ultimately, when God makes an address,
Abram now chooses,
will he follow in God’s way or will he make his own way?
And the only thing that matters in the scriptures is Abram chose what God called him to do.
And that faithfulness is ultimately rewarded.
That said,
where the scriptures will point out all of the dark foibles of humanity
is in the actions of the people,
many of which we’ll see ahead in Abram’s story,
are either suspect or outright faithless.
Well, no,
I don’t know that you can say outright faithless.
But certainly, where Abram is considering his own choice as opposed to what God has called him to do.
And so as we discover that,
we discover, I think,
a very practical kind of faith,
where the question that comes to each and every one of us is,
not just what do you believe,
but what do you do?
And how are you faithful to God’s command in your life?
That is, in many ways, much more simple than we sometimes make it to be.
Love God, love your neighbor.
And yet, that is the thing that we’re called to do,
to reflect the faith in pure, simple action.
And so the journey has begun.
Abram has been called.
Abram has gone.
He has begun his way to the place God will lead him in the promise of being blessed.
And in the promise of being a blessing.
And that is the beginning of the story that we now follow,
the trail that we now walk in the scripture.
And so we will pick up there tomorrow.
Thanks for being with us,
everybody.
We will see you tomorrow.