We return now to our study of the book of Genesis. We left our study after the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, and the genealogy of Shem that ended with a man named Terah and his three sons in verse 26. We dubbed the first 11 chapters, part 1 of Genesis, “Primeval History.” We move now to Part 2 which focuses on one of Terah's three sons, a man named Abram, who is later renamed Abraham.

Now, for all the puzzling things about the first eleven chapters, there is no question that what we are about to see here and how we interpret it will affect how we understand the entire plotline of Scripture.[1] The Bible succumbs to all sorts of interpretations and applications. “The Bible says” is a phrase that doesn’t always precede a direct quote but often comes before a summarizing statement that enforces some interpretive application. What we are forced to do here at this point in the story is in fact to come to grips with what “the Bible says” about the world, its problems, and what can be done about it.

The Bible tells the story of a creator God who made all things and how he rescues, redeems, and restores his creation from utter destruction. It is therefore immensely practical to all of us. The Bible is not telling a different story than the one we live in every day. It is about this world, our lives in this world, and whether or not there is any hope for either of them.

In that sense, the Bible is not so much a religious text—telling us about the great mysteries of the afterlife—as it is a political or sociological text. The first 11 chapters of Genesis tell us a story of creation and its problems. Five times we are told about the curses that have fallen on God's world. Most people acknowledge there are problems in the world.

But here in this passage, we are also told five times, in verses 2-3, about God’s promised blessing, effectively reversing the five curses from the first eleven chapters.[2] In other words, this right here is the biblical doctrine of salvation, a doctrine that is based on the doctrine of creation.[3] Salvation is not about escaping the world as it all burns up. Salvation is not about “going to heaven” while your body lies dead in a grave. Salvation is about the God who made the world ensuring that his world is rescued, redeemed, and restored, including you and me.

Now, how will he do this? It starts right here with God’s promise to bless Abram and his family. All the curses that plague creation are conquered by the blessing of Abram's royal family. In this passage, we see God's promise to Abram, Abram's response of faith, and the challenges that confront all who, like Abram, dare to believe in this God and the hope of salvation.

If you are looking for real hope that when all is said and done there is good news for the real-life world, and all of us who live in it, then follow along with the story of Abram and the life of faith.

The Promise to Abram

We begin with the promise that God makes to Abram in the first three verses of chapter 12. But let’s be sure before we look at those promises closer that we see what is being signaled to us in the story. Anyone who has a general familiarity with the Bible will know that Abram is a very important character in the story, but it is important that we understand why, from even the way the story is told to us. Like the other books of the Bible, Genesis is a masterpiece of ancient literature. Whoever put the book together did so with great skill.

The Start of the Solution

Notice, for example, that in Genesis 11:27, we see our familiar literary signal that we have come upon a major division in the book of Genesis. “Now these are the generations of . . .”  It’s the sixth time we've come across it in the first eleven chapters, but now we won't come across it again until we get to chapter 25. It’s as if time slows way down; the pace of the story of Genesis slows. The rapid passage of time in the first 11 chapters is replaced by a slow, concentrated narrative, beginning with the family line of a descendant of Shem named Terah.

The narrator signals something else to us by telling us that Terah had three sons (Gen 11:26) just as Noah had three sons (Gen 5:32) just as Adam had three sons—three named sons anyway (Gen 5:4). “This parallel is a literary technique inviting the reader to compare Abram with Noah and Adam.”[4] What is the comparison? With each of these three figures, the Creator God was making a new start, something like a new creation. But now, with Abram, with the pace of the story slowing, God seems to be doing something more than he did with Noah and the Flood story. It seems as if in part 1 of Genesis, God is more or less doing damage control for the problems that plagued the creation since Genesis 3. What happens now is a turning of the page, where God begins to erase entirely the stain on his creation. Note this: with Abram, there will be no more major new beginnings in all the rest of scripture, until, of course, we come to the new creation claim of the New Testament.[5]

But even then, the New Testament will be eager to explain that the “new creation” that comes with Jesus is the completion of the project launched here with Abram, a project which has as its aim the rescue of all that God has made. As the new Adam, we are to see in Abram how it is that God brings his salvation and restores order to his world.

Command and Call

So, God’s command to Abram in Genesis 12:1 is not teaching us about how God calls people to leave home for a better life someplace else. This is a far more radical demand on Abram than we who live in such an independent, highly-mobile society will be able to recognize. It is a highly unusual expectation in Abram’s culture, so God is signaling that he is doing a highly unusual and unexpected thing with Abram.

Of course, Abram is paradigmatic for all those who want to be in on the good news the Bible claims to deliver to our real-life world. Abram is an example of the radical call of faith, but it is not first about our own personal experiences in life. This is a story not of personal salvation—though that is obviously included—it is a story about the salvation of the world. God calls Abram to be a part of a much bigger story than anything he could hope for in his own life experience. That’s the reason for the dramatic call.

The Divine Promise

This is also what explains the divine promise in verses 2-3. What is the promise?

There are actually six promises made here.[6] The first three are in verse 2: God promises to make of Abram a great nation, to bless him, and to make his name great. God is basically promising to turn Abram and his family into royalty, into a kingly line. It's the same thing he promised to David in 2 Samuel 7, but what is often missed is the connection these blessings have with the original story in Genesis. To be made in God’s image means that the human design was that God would rightly exert his authority over his world through that human image; “let them have dominion” (Gen 1:26). The promise to Abram is that God will restore that image for him and his family.

This “great name” promised to Abram contrasts with the failed attempt of human beings at the tower of Babel (Gen 11: 4). While it is certainly wrong for human beings to exalt themselves over God, it is also wrong for us to have a theology that undermines God's own intentions for us. In our desire to be God-centered, let us not lose our grip on what God himself desires for us.

After all, to lose our grip on that would be to concede hopelessness for the world God made. He goes on to make three more promises in verse 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.” The attention here shifts from the promises God makes personally to Abram to the way in which those blessings will, in turn, bless the rest of humanity.[7] Having promised Abram a kingdom, he now promises him a priesthood. A kingdom of priests that will bless everybody. Put together, the six promises God makes to Abram is nothing less than total salvation for the whole world.

The Response of Faith

Now, look, that’s quite a promise! Whatever you may think God has promised you, it pales in comparison to this. I don’t know how exactly God made this promise to Abram, but I can imagine anyone with whom he shared it must have thought he was crazy. But what Abram does next is also instructive. The great promise of God requires him to respond in faith.

Faith Demands Participation

Christians are taught quite clearly about the importance of faith, but faith needs to be based upon what exactly it is God has promised to do.

A major reason why we often misunderstand the Bible is because we have misunderstood the purpose for which God made human beings. Right from the beginning we are told that God made human beings with almost unbelievable glory. To be made in his image (Gen 1:26-27) means that our design and purpose is that creation can only work and flourish through human agency. God's purposes for creation depend upon his purposes for us, so, if the world is broken, if it is cursed because of our sin, then it can only be fixed, it can only be blessed, by the sin issue being resolved and our full human glory restored.

The biblical story is a grand story of salvation. It is a story that we Christians believe truly does deliver on what it has promised. And it all begins here, with an ancient Mesopotamian man named Abram, called to not just be a recipient of salvation but a participant in it.

Notice how different this is to the way we often tell the biblical story, making it all about the promise of going to a disembodied heaven when we die, when the focus here is upon the world God made for human beings to inhabit. God’s promises to Abram are earthly. He has promised to make Abram and his family into “a real Kingdom with eternal power and significance, while the so-called kingdoms of this world are of no lasting power or significance.”[8]

Here again we see why our interpretation of this passage will set us on the trajectory for how we read the rest of the Bible. What God promises to Abram here, though couched in different language to what we read in Genesis 1, is identical to what God promised to Adam and all humanity through him. This is where salvation begins. To put it as simply as possible, “God intends to establish his rule over all his creation through his relationship with Abram and his family.”[9]

The question is, will Abram accept the call? Will he believe the promise? Will he become a participant in this grand plan by faith?

Obedience of Faith

But what is faith? It is not merely affirmation, agreeing or saying” yes” to some offer or promise. Since the promise of God to Abram required him to act, faith in the promise of God required him to obey. We read in verse 4: “so Abram went, as the LORD had told him.”

The promise of God to save the world requires us to take action, to obey what God commands, in order to get in on the promise. Christians often get all confused about how important our obedience to God is in the question of salvation. Much of that confusion comes from not understanding what the promise is. The promise of salvation is not simply something that happens to us, so that we get to go to paradise when we die. Salvation is just as much something that God does through us, for the sake of all creation. There is no salvation without transformation. There is no saving faith without obedience.

It's not because we must somehow earn salvation. You can't earn a gift. But what God wants to give us is not simply a gift we can take and consume for our own pleasure. What has God offered to Abram? A kingdom. To accept the gift is to accept the responsibility that comes with it, to be a partner with God in the rule of his creation.

Obedience and Worship

If faith looks like obedience, then what does obedience look like? In a word: worship. In verses 4-9, Abram goes to the land of Canaan and passes through it, journeying on and on, until he stops at a sacred place where he hears God tell him: “To your offspring I will give this land” (v. 7). Abram responds with building an altar to the LORD. And after moving on in verse 8, he builds another altar and worships, calling upon the name of the LORD.

Abram’s worship of God is interesting given that he can only look ahead in faith that God’s great promises will be fulfilled. But he worships because he believes, and his belief—his faith—is one that calls for his active participation. Eugene Peterson puts it best when he writes,

[Faith] is far too complex to explicitly define or explain. . . . It cannot be predicted or programmed; it can only be realized by participation, by setting out and continuing on a journey . . . . [It] cannot be learned by copying, not by imitating, not by mastering some ‘faith-skills.’ We are all originals when we live by faith.[10]

The Challenges to Belief

Similarly, we all have our original challenges, too. The things that come our way and test our faith, that cause us to doubt, that reveal our weaknesses, that make us question if God really does want us to be part of his great plan. The little episode in the last half of chapter 12 reminds us of the challenges to belief.

Does Faith Make Sense?

“Now there was a famine in the land,” verse 10 says, “So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.” Did Abram do the right thing?

The story that follows does not look good for Abram, and it seems that at the very least he has a falter in his faith as he hatches a plan of deception to save his own neck while putting his own wife at risk. But then again, what would you have done if you were him? Wait out the famine? If you did go to Egypt looking to survive, would you have been truthful even if it might cost you your life?

Does faith make sense? You know that’s a question that has no definitive answer. Often God calls us onward in faith in ways that defy human logic and reason. Other times it becomes clear that what we might call faith God calls presumption and recklessness.

The Failure of Faith

Now the author does signal to us that Abram has had a lapse in faith here. The Pharaoh’s response to him in verse 18 reminds us of the Lord’s response to Adam and Eve after they sinned, “What is this you have done?” (Gen 3:13). And then, just like Adam and Eve, Abram is driven out of the land.[11]

Let us not romanticize the life of faith. This is no easy road, and the temptations to give up are frequent and varied. This may be Abram’s first lapse of faith, but it certainly won’t be his last.

And the whole episode is interesting for the many echoes it receives in the subsequent stories of Israel. What happens to Abram here is what, by and large, will happen to his descendants as a whole several centuries later. There’s a pattern developing here, which is even picked up in the New Testament. The family of Abram, who aim to live by faith as he did, should learn to see the pattern.

The Strength of God’s Faithfulness

In simple terms, the pattern is one of failure and fear, of sin and suffering, but also of promise and deliverance. Gordon Wenham observes that “Abram’s failure in the face of hostility, like Israel’s sinfulness in the wilderness, is surely recorded as a warning for later generations and as an illustration of the invincibility of the divine promises.”[12] Indeed, although Abram was faithless here, God remained faithful, and he ends up leaving Egypt a more prosperous man than he was before he went down there.

Now only a fool would conclude that the end of the story justifies the means, and that the life of faith does not call us to be biblically wise about all our decisions.

But only a saint can conclude that the end of the story demonstrates that our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. Jesus, the one who himself was called out of Egypt (Matt 2:15) to bring about our redemption.

Yes, only a saint knows the truth of the classic revivalist hymn:

Just as I am, though tossed about
with many a conflict, many a doubt,
fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

We come to Jesus to receive the promised blessings of Abraham, and we find in him the blessings that overcome all the curses and offer salvation to the world.

_____

[1] Peter John Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, Second Edition (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 266.

[2] Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 1, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glenn W. Barker (Dallas: Word Books, 1987), 270.

[3] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 258.

[4]  Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 260.

[5]  Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 264.

[6] For this conclusion, see Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 266-67.

[7] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 274.

[8]  Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 280.

[9]  Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 281.

[10] Eugene H. Peterson, The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways That Jesus Is the Way (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co, 2011), 48.

[11] Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 291.

[12]  Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 292.