The Call of Abraham

Introduction: Hey everyone, if I can just have about ten minutes of your time. Starting in the Fall, we are going to start going through the book of Matthew on Sunday nights. Matthew was written for a Jewish audience to show that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures. In doing this, Matthew talks a lot about how Jesus was a descendant of Abraham and a new Moses. So we are going to spend our four summer gatherings looking quickly at these two characters. We are going to start by looking at the call of Abram, or Abraham as he was later called. We are going to see that by changing Abram’s direction, God changed the course of history. We see this in who Abram was, the call God placed in his life, Abram’s response and God’s promise. We need to start with what we know about Abram. That is found in Genesis 11:27-32 “Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot. Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. 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. Now Sarai was barren; she had no child. 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. The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.” So we know Abram was the son of a man named Terah and the husband to Sarai. He and Sarai had no children. He left the land of Ur with his father to go to Canaan, the land that would become Israel, but they stopped short in Haran. It was there Abram’s father died. That prelude gets us to the passage we are looking at. Genesis 12:1-9

Genesis 12:1–9 ESV

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. 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. 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.” 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. 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. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 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. 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. And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.

Exposition: Verses 1-3 say Genesis 12:1-3 “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. 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. 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.”” God starts in verse 1 by telling Abram to leave everything he knew and his family and to go to a land that God would show him. He is telling him to leave everything behind. But he does this with a promise. He says in verse two that he would make Abram into a great nation. There is only one problem, we saw in the previous chapter we read a few minutes ago that Abram did not have children. It was through a son that a man’s name was passed down from generation to generation. It was through descendents that one became a great nation. Abram had none of that. So in this promise, is a promise to do something big.

Application: Have you ever felt that God was asking you to do something impossible. Have you ever felt that God was asking you to do something and was skipping a step. Don’t worry, God can see the ending. He knew that he would give Abram a son. He was in control then and he’s in control now. We just need to trust him.

Exposition: He goes on to say something else. He says that this blessing wasn’t just going to be for the nation that he would make of Abram’s coming descendant. But that all families of the world would be blessed through him. This means that families in china, Russia, and every other nation of the world for all time would be blessed through him. There isn’t a lot that people throughout the ages have had in common. The one thing that stays the same is that we are born, we live and then we die. And this death is unavoidable. The only blessing that could apply to all people is one to avoid death. It’s one to defeat that which could not be defeated.

Application: We are all sinful and therefore we are all deserving of death. Paul tells us that the wages of sin is death. But this promise given to Abram is that through a descendent he did not have, a blessing was coming that would defeat sin and death. And several thousand years later, a baby boy was born in a crib in Bethlehem that was a descendent of Abram.

Transition: It’s important to point out that a part of a call is whether or not one is obedient. Verses 4-6 say Genesis 12:4-6 “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. 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. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.”

Exposition: I love the beginning of verse 4, “So Abram went as the LORD told Him. He took all he had, only his wife and one nephew, and left for Canaan. He left behind all he knew because some God he did not yet worship called Him to do so.

Application: This may seem like an easy choice. The creator of the universe tells you to go and He will bless you. Easy decision. But what if God called you to go somewhere else as a missionary. What if God called you to pick up, leave your parents and other non-immediate family members behind and go. Or parents, what if He called your child to go overseas or across the country as a missionary. Would you be willing to be obedient. Abram was. And through the entire world his obedience was blessed.

Transition: Lastly, we see that God gave Abram a promise of the future. We read in verses 7-9 Genesis 12:7-9 “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. 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. And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.”

Exposition: Notice, God doesn’t tell Abram that he will settle this land. He doesn’t say he is giving it to him. He tells him he will give it to an offspring that doesn’t even exist yet. But what does Abram do, he builds an altar there in the land. Then, he keeps going, and builds another altar and calls upon the name of the LORD. Abram had a hope of the day that was coming based on God’s promise, and it led Him to worship the one true God.

Application: There are a lot of different things in life we can place our trust in. We can place it in our family, our jobs, our wealth, other religions, our popularity or even virtues we think we have. But that doesn’t get us very far, because it will always fall short because all of those things are based on what is now and what is now is flawed. They are all without hope. But when we trust in Jesus, when we trust that he gives us an eternal hope, it’s different. We don’t do good things to get to heaven. Those that are saved do good things because they realize that they have a promise that comes only from the grace of God and Jesus’ sacrifice. We have a hope that one day we will be in heaven forever. And that hope comes from the blessing of the whole world that is a descendant of Abram. So tonight, I ask, who is your hope in? Is it in Jesus, or is it in the things of this world? Are you willing to be obedient to Him because of the hope He has given you? Are your allowing that hope to help you see past the things of this world and live for the day that’s coming?