The Calling of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-9)

01/04/12 Genesis 12:1-9 GUMC Youth

Tonight we are starting a new series for the teaching part of our Wednesday nights together. I've been reading the Bible pretty seriously for about eight years now (remember, if you start now, you will be way ahead of me when you get to be old like me) and I'm a pretty seriously analytical thinker. I like to get things worked out in my head, figuring out how all the pieces fit together. The point is that, just because I have gotten to the point where I understand the timeline of the Bible pretty well, it doesn't mean that everyone else has done it, too. What I thought would be helpful is to look at the Old Testament for a while and look at some of the really hugely important stories, events and people that help us to understand Jesus and our faith as Christians, and to do it in something close to chronological order. We can even make a kind of timeline to keep things straight. Just so you know, you should do your best to try to be here every week, because every passage we look at is going to be a really big deal; seriously, they are going to be stories and passages that we really need to take seriously if we want to understand who Jesus is. It isn't like if you miss one, you'll be lost, so you can jump back in if you have to miss, and you can totally still invite your friends. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to invite them, especially if they don't know anything about the Bible or God, because we are going to be covering a lot of groundwork in the next several weeks and it would be a great introduction to God's interaction with us. After all, we are asking the question, "What in the world has God been up to?"

So, in order to kick things off with this, I wanted to start by looking at the story of the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12. You see, though the story of Adam and Eve is interesting, when we are looking at most of the Bible and especially if we are trying to understand Jesus and the New Testament, we are looking at the history of a particular nation, Israel. So, we need to understand the people who lived in this nation and where they came from. The Jewish people have been known for a long time as the people of God or the "chosen people," but they didn't drop out of the sky one day or anything. They came from a particular place at a particular time. The Jewish people trace back their heritage to a single man, named Abram, whose name God changed to Abraham.

Now, Abraham was seventy-five years old when God called him. Up until that time, Abraham lived in a city called Ur in the Ancient Near East, actually in modern day Iraq. God called Abraham and simply said, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 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. 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."

One of the things that I hope to show you as we go through the Bible is that lots of people have taught us to look at the Bible in a certain way that, to be perfectly honest, is not all that helpful. Not only that, but it often leaves faithful people open to attack by the hostile secular world who are looking for every opportunity to poke holes in Christian faith. The atheists in our culture want to treat the Bible as if it were nothing more than a collection of fairy tales and, unfortunately there are plenty of Christians who don't help to set them straight. I want to try to give you the information you need and to provide you a way of reading the Bible that will help you to stand strong when people try to ridicule your faith.

When we read the text, all we read is that God said to Abraham, "Go," and that he goes. There are many people who would argue that Abraham just believed everything that he ever heard, that he just had a weird dream one day and just followed blindly. They would also say that Abraham lived in a primitive time, where people just attributed everything they couldn't understand to some mystical force that they called "God." And yet, if we actually look at the story of Abraham carefully, we find that this isn't the case. There are lots of times when God tells him things that he simply doesn't believe. God says a little later, "You are going to have a son." The only problem is that Abraham was called when he was seventy-five years old, and it was several years later when he was told this. Abraham didn't believe God so he was going to name one of his servants as his heir, which was a totally common thing to do at the time, but God said "no." Abraham and his wife tried over and over again to do things their own way because they just couldn't believe that they were really going to have a child of their own when she was pushing ninety and he was pushing one hundred. So much for Abraham being someone who just blindly believes everything he is told.

It is true that Abraham believed he was called by God to get up and move and do what he does, but it was not as if everyone who heard of him fell back in amazement and said, "Surely God has chosen you." Lots of people tried to take advantage of him, lots of people fought with him. If everyone believed it every time someone said "God told me to do this," they certainly wouldn't behave toward Abraham as they did. The people at the time weren't any more prepared to actually take God seriously than we are today. Basically, what I am trying to encourage you to do is, in spite of all the strangeness of the Bible, in spite of the fact that the people in the Bible speak differently than we do, in spite of the fact that we might need to learn about some of the differences between their culture and ours, they are still people just like you and me. In spite of all the things that have changed, there is a lot that hasn't changed at all. The people we read about in the Bible are real people who do all kinds of stuff that real people do, regardless of what someone who wants to make Christians look foolish would like to say.

God calling Abraham out of his city and to a new place isn't just some neat story, it actually is incredibly important for our understanding of all God's interactions with humanity. You see, one of the things that God tells his people over and over again, over the course of hundreds of years, is that he is not like the gods that the other nations worship. He is trying to establish a whole new way of living, believing and even thinking that is very much unlike what the people of Ur were doing. You are all in school, you all know how serious a thing peer pressure can be. It is incredibly hard to live in a way that is completely different than how everyone else is living. If God wanted to actually have Abraham learn who he was and not immediately forget that he was supposed to be different, he had to get him out of his hometown.

But that's not all. We are going to spend a fair amount of time in the next several weeks looking specifically at Jewish history. Some of you might wonder why we would do that if none of us are Jewish and if the gospel is meant to be for everyone. The reason is because we are all products of our culture. You look at the world in certain ways because you were born and raised in twenty-first century America and not in ancient India or anywhere else. There are things about twenty-first century America that are, for right or wrong, embedded into your cultural DNA, as it were. You believe in things like Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, you believe that all human beings are created equal, you believe that government should be of the people, by the people and for the people, you think that democracy is always a better choice than a dictatorship, you think that capitalism is the best choice, really the only choice. You believe that the freedom to speak your mind is a right that must not be taken away by the government. None of these things are in the Bible, not in those words anyway. They are all taken from American culture.

The point is that every single culture in the world has the same kind of baggage. If God wanted to communicate with people and wanted to avoid all that baggage that can confuse people, how would he have to do it? He certainly couldn't just take a group of people who live in the middle of one of those cultures and hope that they could just forget their whole culture while they were living in the middle of it. The only way that God could deal with this is to create a culture from the very beginning. He had to take someone and their family out of their comfort zone and put them in a totally different place, he would have to take that family and all their children and their children's children, and set them aside as people with whom he would interact in a special way, reshaping the way they think and live, to give them ways to understand him that they could never have so long as they allowed the surrounding culture to tell them what to think.

That is why the calling of Abraham is so amazingly important. It is God doing exactly this. God is taking Abraham and forging a brand-new community, a brand-new culture, where he can shape their very lives into something that will let them hear the word of God clearly and be able to live like we were meant to live and know God like we were created to know him. Now, as you might imagine, you can't just take someone and have them forget where they came from. It isn't like God was able to reshape Abraham's culture overnight. It took hundreds of years and it took lots of interesting and difficult experiences for God to be able to do what he needed to do and we are going to look at some of these experiences of the Israelites over the next few weeks. The point is that God knew that it was going to take a long time to prepare the way for Jesus, but that didn't stop him. He knew that it was worth it and so he took all the time he needed to get humanity ready to experience and receive Jesus.

Look at the story of Abraham being called by God this way. God had a plan. It was God's plan all along to send Jesus and reach the whole world through him. Jesus came at a particular place and at a particular point in time. But we can't forget that Jesus didn't just drop down out of nowhere. God had taken a whole nation into his plans, to work with them and help them to be the people that could make sense out of Jesus. Abraham was an absolutely key player in these plans, but he seems like kind of a funny key player. He wasn't even called until he was seventy-five, then he didn't actually have the son that God promised him until he was a hundred years old. God took him from his hometown and had him walk around the Promised Land, but he didn't get to settle down and put down roots. He had to wander all over the place, looking at the land that God had promised him but that his family wouldn't really get to move into for another four hundred years.

What I want to point out to you is that you have no idea where God might be calling you in your life. You might have all kinds of plans about what you want to do when you get out of high school, you might have all kinds of hopes and dreams that you think are pretty amazing, but you have no idea but that God might have some even better plans for you. Abraham seems at first glance to not be that big a deal, but he was so important that the Israelites always traced their relationship with God back to their father Abraham. On the one hand, he didn't do that much because he was old and just wandered around where God told him, but he becomes such a symbol of faith, such a hero of God's people, that both Jesus and those who hated him could agree that Abraham is one of the most important people in the history of the world.

Think about how amazing Abraham's role in our Christian faith really is. If Abraham hadn't listened to God, the whole history of the world would look different. I don't mean that God wouldn't have come if Abraham hadn't left his home. God would have found a way. God could have chosen someone else, but the fact that God actually did choose Abraham has shaped the whole course of history.

There wasn't much about Abraham that made him special. He was old, he made a lot of mistakes, and he actually had his share of doubts. But that didn't stop God from taking him, ordinary though he was, and making him a great leader. Who knows? God might be calling you to a greatness you never even imagined. Listen carefully to God, because if he is calling you, no matter how difficult it might seem his plans are, they are better than anything we could come up with. Let us pray.

AMEN