The Call of Abraham

(Gen 12: 1-3)

With the call of Abraham the curtain rings up on Act I of the divine drama. The stage has been set by the prologue. Our human situation has been depicted in all its desperate need. There is no way out for the world’s teeming millions unless God provides it. The message of the Bible is that God has created the way. Beginning with Abraham he will build up a community, the Israel of God, whose task it will be to witness to him in the world. It will never be synonymous with the nation of Israel, because even the people of God’s choice share in the common failure of mankind. But there will never be lacking within the historical national group that calls itself Israel at least a few who will respond to God as Abraham responded, and who will bear the name of God on their hearts throughout the centuries that lie ahead in the story that the Old Testament will tell.

As Christians we must recognise that the Old Testament is our story but we must at once add the qualification that not all of it is our story. If the Old Testament held the final answer to the world’s plight there would have been no place for Christ and his Church. God’s Messiah came and was rejected by Israel as a nation, but the line of Abraham’s obedience and response to God was continued by the twelve Israelites whom the Messiah chose to be his disciples, and upon whom he founded the new Israel., the Christian Church. Through their witness the Church expanded and the Gospel has been proclaimed to the whole world, so that Jews and Gentiles together form the Israel of God, of which Abraham was the founder,, inheriting the promises made to him and the mission appointed for him, together with the ever deepening insights into the wisdom and love of God which were given to his successors.

Accordingly, if as Christians we seek to enter into our heritage it must be with the recognition that the Bible is one continuous story from Genesis to Revelation. We must not regard the Old Testament in Carlyle’s phrase as “Hebrew old clothes” but as the preparation for and prelude to the Gospel, as the promise of which we know the fulfilment. As participators in Act III of the divine drama we must not treat these early chapters of our own story as a quarry for archaeological or anthropological research. There is undoubtedly a vast field of interesting and fruitful study for the ancient historian and the archaeologist in the stories of patriarchs, priests and kings. But as members of the people of God, we must look to the Old Testament to give us rather fore-shadowings of the Gospel, evidence of the same pattern of God’s saving activity in the world, embryonic tokens of the same themes as we have come to know in the fulness of his revelation of himself through Christ.

Since as a fact of history the people of the Old Testament as a whole rejected the Gospel, and Jesus and his disciples judged that many beliefs and practices in the Old Testament had been superseded by the Gospel, much that we find in its pages must have little or no direct value for Christian people. It is therefore a mistaken devotion which would seek to find in every incident and saying in the Old Testament some direct bearing upon Christ and the Church. If Christ is the true Vine whose roots stretch down into the deep soil of Israel’s past, it is equally true that many of the lower branches are dead wood which were cut off by the Lord himself. Let us not be afraid to acknowledge the presence in the Old Testament of much that has a relevance only for practising Jews or for literary and historical critics.

In reading the Old Testament as Christians, that is as participators in the same drama, we must be guided by the writers of the New Testament and by our Lord himself. We cannot go far wrong if we allow ourselves to be led by Paul. and the other New Testament writers to single out for our special attention those themes, incidents and words of the Old Testament which through their knowledge of the mind of Jesus and his purpose for his Church, the New Testament writers reckoned to be of paramount significance. We shall thus study the Old Testament story, beginning with the call of Abraham, not as if we were investigating the origin and development of some Near Eastern cult, but retrospectively from the standpoint of the Church today.

We shall expect to find, since it is all part of God’s revelation of himself to us, perceptions of the same truth about God and ourselves as we already know from the Gospel, albeit often imperfectly understood or expressed. We shall expect to find the same mixture of saints and sinners, and saints who are also sinners, as we find in the New Testament and in the, life of the Church. Remembering that the God of the Old Testament Church is also the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the final editors of the Old Testament were no primitive Levantine nomads, but highly trained theologians who could use simple tales to convey profound and startling insights into the mysteries of God’s way with men, we shall not dismiss the stories of the patriarchs as fragments of ancient folk-lore, but try to see them as the Old Testament compilers saw them, as vehicles of some aspect of God’s revelation, and above all as the New Testament writers saw them as harbingers of Gospel truth.

For Christians, therefore, as for Jews, the meaning of Abraham’s departure from Haran and his migration with his tribe into the land of Canaan is not exhausted by saying that he was responding to economic pressures, and the terms of God’s promise to him are not explained by attributing them to the wishful thinking of a landless nomad. Nor does it concern us as twentieth-century Christians what precisely was the conception of God held by a Semitic sheikh of the second millennium B.C. What does concern us is that both St. Paul and the author of the epistle to the Hebrews follow the writer of Genesis in regarding this departure of Abraham from Haran as the historical beginning of the mission of Israel, old and new, to be a people of God and a means of blessing for the whole world.

Here is the man, “the father of all” (Rom. 4: 16), through whom God purposed to save mankind. Summoned by God to a high destiny, that of being the founder of a great community through which new life and hope would come to all the “ families of the earth”, this landless, childless man went out “not knowing whither he went” (Heb. 11: 8), trusting only in the God who had bidden him, becoming thereby through his obedient faith the kind of man on whom God could build his Church. Into a world which lay under the curse of Adam, a world unable to extricate itself from the toils of its own making, God sends the possibility of the renewal of its life through his Church.

Abraham becomes the type of those in all ages of the Church’s history who live in the world but are not content with things as they are or with themselves as they are. They listen to the voice of God which calls them back to him and dedicate themselves to his service and the service of their fellow men. Unlike the men in the story of the Tower of Babel they do not seek to build a city or a civilisation to the glory of man, for they have responded to a call which makes them, like Abraham, landless wanderers in this world. They know that everything built by man’s misguided efforts is bound to topple and crash, so they look for “ a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11 : 10).

The Promised Land

Abraham, then, sets out into the unknown, in effect the first missionary of the Church, leading his tribe to the land of the promise. Canaan, the country to which he was guided, and which he was told was to be the land of God’s people (12: 7) was already occupied by a native pagan population. But he consecrates it to God as the Holy Land for all time by building altars and worshipping the true God there. In so doing he symbolically claims the whole earth for God to be his Holy Land (12: 4-9).

We may imagine Abraham and his tribe, camping in the hill country of Canaan, unmolested by the inhabitants who cling to the more civilised cities of the plain. In true nomadic fashion they settled with their flocks and herds for some time in each place, gradually moving southward to fresh pastures. Famine the perennial problem of the nomad, drives them down into Egypt, with its rich Nile lands, the granary of the ancient Near East.