GENESIS 12 (Part 1)
Read Genesis 12:1-9
The redemption story starts with God calling Abraham, known as Abram at the time. He originally lived in Ur of the Chaldes in what is modern day Iraq. At the end of Chapter 11 we are told that Abram’s father, Terah, took his family to Haran and they settled there (Genesis 11:31). It was while Abram was in Haran that God called him saying, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I show you” (v2).
Along with this command from God came promises to Abram. He would found a great nation, God would bless him and make his name great and he would be a blessing to others. These promises would form the basis of the covenant that God made with Abram (Genesis Chapters 15 and 17) and later with the nation of Israel. The covenant would be the foundation of the relationship between God and his people throughout the Old Testament.
Abram’s response was obedience. This is a stark contrast with the previous chapter in which the people were disobedient. As we saw with Babel, one of their motivations was to make their own name great whereas here it is God who promises to make Abraham’s name great. Another difference is that the people of Babel wanted to settle, while Abram did not settle, but moved at God’s bidding. Abram is seen as the antithesis, the exact opposite, of Babel.
What also comes through in this part of the chapter is the faith of Abram. God told to go where God would lead him and Abram did so without question without knowing where he was going. He trusted God implicitly, although we will see that wasn’t always to be the case.
When Abram had travelled as far as Canaan, the land that in due course was to be the Promised Land for God’s people, God made that clear to him, “To your offspring I will give this land” (v7). The land was not for Abram, but for the many descendants that God had already promised him. Abram’s reaction was to worship God. The main form of worship in the Old Testament was sacrifice and we are told that Abram built an altar. While it doesn’t actually say that he sacrificed, the Hebrew words for ‘altar’ and ‘sacrifice’ are almost identical and an altar is ‘a sacrificing on thing’. The response to God’s grace is worship, and that applies to us as much as it did to Abram, although these days we worship God in other ways. Abram also called on the name of the Lord. We first met this expression in Genesis 4:26, “At this time men began to call on the name of the Lord”, indicating a close personal relationship with God including prayer.
God called Abram to leave one situation and go to another. He might do this with us. The challenge for us is how willing are we to leave our current situation, which may be very comfortable, to answer God’s call on our lives – to be obedient to that call. Jesus said, “No-one who has left home . . . for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much, and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:-29-30).