“Considering the Call of God” Genesis 11:31-12:9

Father Abraham

A Sermon Series

“Considering the Call of God”

Genesis 11:31-12:9

Introduction

Abram’s story begins with a calling given to his family, Genesis 11:31 “Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there.” Joshua 24:2 tells us they worshipped false gods, “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.”

In Stephen’s speech in Acts 7:2-4 we get some insight into what has happened before chapter 12 of Genesis, “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.”

When we are first introduced to Abram, he is with his father and family and they have a call from God to leave Ur (their home) and go to Canaan. But when they got to Haran, they settled there. They stopped moving toward the call upon their lives, so when God tells Abram to leave his “father’s house” it was because his father and kindred wanted to settle but God wants them to move.

In (v. 2) we are told, “Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold.” So during their time of being settled in Haran Abram became very rich. “The influences of nature are ever hostile to the full realization and practical power of “the calling of God. We are sadly prone to take lower ground than that which the divine call would set before us.”[1]

Jesus even says in Matthew 29 “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.” There may be a time when you have to leave those you love because the call upon your life is movement, but they want to settle. What Abraham learns from the first time God calls him, and the second time is that this place and the things of this world, are not our home. We are just passing through this time and place, as strangers in a foreign land.

B. Meyer once said, “They eat, they drink; they buy, they sell; they plant, they build; they marry, they give in marriage – though the flood is already breaking through the crumbling barriers to sweep them all away.”[2] How do we move from being so focused on this world and all that attracts us to it, to what we cannot see, yet is truly what is of any importance? God does this with Abram by giving him promises.

God moves Abram from being settled to moving.

Abram moves from being focused on this world to what is to come.

Don’t settle for this world.

The Promises of God Given to An Underserving Man ( 1-3)

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.”

With the introduction of Abram, God uses the words, “I will” multiple times – God is telling Abram what He is going to do. God promises Abram seven things that He will do in Abram’s life;

There are other examples of where others say they will do something, (Promises in Arrogance) Isaiah 14 records Satan’s words, “I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God, I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’” Because of Satan’s arrogance and pride, he was cast out of heaven. He desired to be in place of God, or to be above God.

(Promises in Ignorance) We even say as in James 3:14-16, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance.”

The first promise is one of seeing a land, “the land I will show you.” You are going to go to a place, and you will see it. Then later, with the last promise (v. 7), we says, “To your offspring I will give this land.” “What started out as a promise of a land to be seen becomes in God’s gracious fulfillment a land not only to be seen but also to be possessed.”[3] God often times allows us to see something before He calls and directs us to do something about/with it.

Isaiah 6:8 “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” God made Isaiah aware of a need; someone needed to go to and give a message. Isaiah filled with thankfulness of his own salvation, wanted others to experience it as well – “Here am I, Send me!”

This is why we should let God chose the land that we go to – let His will lead in our lives. It doesn’t matter where it is, if that is the land that God desires for us to see and that He wants to give us, then it will be good. When we say “I will,” it is a promise made in ignorance and pride.

(v. 3) “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” – another way to say this “all the families of the ground,” In Genesis 3:17 as a result of Adam’s sin, the ground is cursed, “cursed is the ground because of you;”, but Abram will bless the earth and reverse the curse.

Paul uses this text in Galatians to show that salvation is for everyone in the world, and that salvation is by faith – Abraham believed God’s promises, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Galatians 3:16 “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring, who is Christ.” Paul’s point is that the Messiah, the Savior would come through Abraham’s lineage, and the promises being made to Abraham will be ultimately be fulfilled through one man, “who is the Christ,” Jesus.

Abram would become a blessing for others – the promise of God was that Abram would be a way for others to be blessed. Mankind wants blessing to mean more power, money, wealth, etc., but God wants us to get to a place where others can be blessed through u We get to bless others by telling them about how God has broken the curse of son by sending Jesus.

Then God promises, “I will make you into a great nation,” – but notice there is no condition attached. I am going to do this for you and your descendants, separate from how you behave. The promise is unconditional. Then God promises, “. . . make your name great, so that you will be a blessing,” Earlier in Genesis the people of the earth wanted to build the tower of Babel, Genesis 11:4 “Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, . . .” Their building was for their glory. God tells Abram I will make your name great, “so that you will be a blessing.” The world will come to know the name Abram, but it is in the context of God bringing salvation to the world.

So the name Abraham stands for a God who made unconditional promises to a man who did not deserve the (blessing, the land, the wealth, etc.) just because God chose to do so. This is grace. The ultimate blessing for the nations is that a Savior would come through Abram’s lineage. God would bless the nations through him, by sending a Savior. Galatians 3:14 “so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”

Then God promises, “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse,” You are either blessed or cursed depending on what you do with who Abraham is – the father of faith, the beginning a nation of people who would bring the Savior into the world.

All of the promises are a call to abandon – abandon your country, and I promise to make into a great nation, abandon your kindred, and I will multiply your numbers (even though his wife is barren), abandon your faither’s house where you are known, go to land of foreigners, and I promise to make your name great. Abandon your earthly home, and I will give you an eternal home where God himself builds the foundation. God requires that we abandon everything, in order to pursue a calling. All of the promises are directly related to what God is asking Abram to give up.[4]

An Undeserving Man Obeying The Will of a Gracious God (vv. 4-5)

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.[5]

Abram was seventy-five years old, and his wife Sarai was ten years younger than he was (and she was barren). God was telling him to leave some things behind that would have been very important to him, “your country and your kindred and your father’s house,” – He left it all behind, “So Abram went.” There is the promise that if you leave certain things behind, trust God to keep his promises, God will do certain things in your life. This is faith. God has spoken, and Abram responds by believing God.

Hebrews explains that this is where Abram’s journey of with God began, 11:8 “By faith[6] 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.”

 Faith includes two things: belief and action.

Abraham believed God’s promise so we went.

The Man Worships Because of God’s Promises Given (vv. 5-9)

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.

Abram was called by God to leave “your country and your kindred and your father’s house,”— leaving behind all that he knew, then as a stranger he would live in a foreign land, moving from place-to-place living in a tent, later there would be a famine, later Lot his nephew is going to be captured and carried off – God says go, and Abram went – so while God promised to bless him, God did not promise that his life would be easy.

God promises, “I will bless you,” – This is where the things you place your hand to goes well, things prosper. In (v. 2) we are told, “Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold.” The promise is unconditional, just like all the promises, but it was different than what may be expected.

Hebrews 11:9-10 further explains how this was an act of faith, “By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” When God promises to bless, He will keep His promise, but it will not necessarily be with more “livestock, silver, or gold.”

Abraham would be the man that God chose to start the long story of the salvation of the world (it would begin with one man’s faith). But the way Abram could endure the hard times was to focus on the promise of what was to come, “for he was looking forward to the city . . .”

“So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.” – Traveling five hundred miles from Haran to Canaan, he stopped along the way (Shechem, Bethel, Ai, etc.) and built alters and worshipped God. So God wants Abram to see “I will show you” what one day his people will possess (the promised land), as he goes through the land he is praying and worshipping, “To your offspring I will give this land,”

 When God shows you what He wants you do,

then pray over, go to work, and wait for His promises to come to pass.

I want to point out one more man from the text, Genesis 11:27 “Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot. 28 Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. 29 And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah.”

The whole family was called and they set out to Canaan, but when they arrived at Haran they settled. From there Abram left and Nahor stayed. There is no reason not to assume that because Abram was wealthy then the other brother would be also. Genesis 24:10 tells us that he built his own city. Who was truly the successful man in God’s eyes? The man who had cities names after him, or the man who began to lay the groundwork for the salvation of the world?

______________________

[1] C. H. Mackintosh, Genesis to Deuteronomy, Notes on the Pentateuch (Neptune, New York; Loizeaux Brothers Publishing, 1972) 60.

[2] James Montgomery Boice, Genesis, An Expositional Commentary, Volume 2 (Grand Rapids, Michigan; Baker Books, 2002) 466.

[3] Boice, 445.

[4] God is not going to call you to do something that goes against his Word – A man who has a wife and children will not be called to abandon them to pursue a calling. God is not going to call someone to cheat on their spouse to do some kind of ministry within the church, etc.

[5] Nehemiah 9:7 ff.

[6] “A faith which laid hold of the word of promise, and on the strength of that word gave up the visible and present for the invisible and future, was the fundamental characteristics of the patriarchs” (Delitzsch). C.F. Keil and F. Delitzch, Commentary on the Old Testament In Ten Volumes, The Pentateuch (Grand Rapids, Michigan; William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1985) 183.