Well now, we have felt constrained at this
time to begin a series on the life
of Abram.
Abram, who was called the friend of God
in two or three places in scripture.
Not only was he the friend of God,
but he is also called the father of
those who believe.
Whether we realize it or not, every Christian
person here this morning is intimately related to
Abram.
Abram is our father, in a sense in
which no one else is.
Abram is our spiritual father.
We meet with Abram in Christ.
Abram's place in the fulfillment of God's plan
of redemption is one of incalculable significance.
With him, God began to do a new
work.
Sin had disintegrated the whole of the cosmos.
You've already had the judgment of the flood,
but water was not able to exterminate the
evil of sin from the universe.
At the point immediately before the call of
Abram, God seems, I say seems, and we
must we must not read too much into
this, we must not take it literally, but
God seems to have turned his back upon
the rest of mankind.
He seems in judgment to have done what
Paul speaks of in Romans chapter 1, to
have left men in their sin to go
their way.
Now you have to qualify that really, but
it seems like that.
And he himself turns aside and he calls
a man from the heart of paganism, who
knew nothing at all about him, never heard
of him.
But God appears to him, and with this
one man he begins an entirely new thing
that will eventually culminate in all things being
made new.
For the seed of Abram has said, behold
I make all things new.
It's a very significant life, the life of
Abram.
Now I would also like to stress this
before coming to the point.
I have been amazed, always have been in
reading the book of Genesis, as to how
relevant it is.
Some people may say the exact opposite.
But the thing that strikes me is that
when we walk the chapters of Genesis, we
meet circumstances which are almost identical with the
circumstances in which, in which we find ourselves
today.
Now superficially of course, things are so different.
But in terms of principle, they're so very
much the same.
And we are going to find that as
we study the life of Abram, God's friend.
We shall be amazed at the way in
which we today, in this year, 1980 after
Christ, are faced with the identical situations that
challenged this man years and years, the other
side of the great divide, the incarnation of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now then, we begin this morning with the
call of Abraham, as that comes before us
in the passage that was read by Blaine,
1131, Genesis 1131, going right through to 129.
Now this is going to be our subject
in the morning service and the evening service.
It's a vast one, and it's one whole.
You can't divide it.
My suggestion would be that you should cancel
your lunches and we stay here through the
afternoon.
But I'm thinking you might not be prepared
to do that.
I suggest the second alternative, that we come
back this evening and take up the threads
where we lay them down this morning.
God's call and Abram's initial response.
It's not quite correct as you have it
in the calendar.
We are going to deal with some measure
of Abram's response even this morning, but it
was a partial and an initial response, and
something had to be done later to make
it far more definite.
Looking at the passage as a whole, and
it forms a unit as you will see,
I detect within its summarized record a threefold
picture of Abram.
And if you keep these three pictures before
you, I think you've got the whole in
embryo.
First of all, we see Abram trustfully moving
out of his native land, and the relevant
words are moving out, moving out.
Then we see Abraham temporarily settling down in
Haran, and the relevant words are settling down.
But then the third picture is of Abram
in the land going from one end of
the land to the other on the go.
And it's a remarkable picture that we have
of it.
Abram on the move.
Abram tenaciously moving forward in the will of
God in the land to which God originally
called him, and where he has by this
time arrived.
It's a beautiful picture, but it is a
picture in which we shall find so much
means of grace, if we can look at
it with confidence that it is the word
of God to us.
Now let's begin with the beginning.
Abram trustfully setting out.
I want to read verses 31 and 32
of Genesis 11 again, and then two New
Testament comments alongside Genesis 11 31.
Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot
son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law
Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and
together they set out from Ur of the
Chaldeans, and I'm sorry, to go to Canaan.
But when they came to Haran, they settled
there.
Now alongside of that crisp historical statement from
the book of Genesis, I have two comments
from the inspired scriptures of the New Testament.
One, a comment by the first Christian martyr
Stephen found in Acts chapter 7 verses 2
to 4.
Stephen said, brothers and fathers listen to me.
The God of glory appeared to our father
Abraham while he was still in Mesopotamia, before
he lived in Haran.
Leave your country and your people, God said,
and go to the land that I will
show you.
So he left the land of the Chaldeans,
and he settled in Haran.
The other comment is from the epistle to
Hebrews chapter 11 and verse 8.
By faith Abram, when called to go to
a place he would later receive as his
inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did
not know where he was going.
Now the first thing that we must say
a word about, relates to the conditions in
which Abram lived.
We could deal with this for a very
long time, and there are those in the
congregation this morning far more able than I
am really to deal with it, and I'm
sure they will say when I'm over that
I've not done any justice to it.
Well all right.
But we must say a word about it.
Time was of course when in total ignorance
of the real situation, folk thought of Abram
as the product of a very backward community,
who sought adventure in life in a supposedly
more vigorous and promising civilization.
Very much as the prodigal son, fed up
with home, it was too cribbed.
He was too cabined and confined at home.
Everything grated upon him, and he wanted to
get to the land yonder.
So was Abram according to the old tale.
But when you come to know the truth,
you will discover that that myth was exploded
long ago by the archaeologists spade, if by
no one else.
And we are now in a far better
position to assess the realities of the case,
of the truth about Abram's background.
Ur of the Chaldeans has now been clearly
identified as the place currently known as Tell
el-Muqayyar, nine miles west of Naziriyeh, which
is on the river Euphrates in southern Iraq.
A contemporary writer describes what was the seaport
of Ur, Ur of the Chaldeans, in these
words.
The ruins are not far from the confluence
of the two great Mesopotamian rivers, and four
millennia of river silt have built a plain
which now separates Ur from the sea by
many miles.
Harbour works may be identified in the ruins
of the town, and in ancient times it
was obviously the gateway to the Middle East,
and therefore to the caravan routes which wound
up the Euphrates, curved around what is called
the Fertile Crescent of Damascus, and down to
the other river valley civilization of the day,
namely that of Egypt on the Nile.
The same writer goes on, looking east, and
we're still talking about Ur of the Chaldeans,
looking east, Ur faced the sea lanes of
the Persian Gulf, where men first learned to
sail the high seas.
Ur lay at the very center of this
vast web of human activity.
It was a stimulating place for a man
of intellect.
Nowhere more than at this nodal point of
the ancient world's communications could a man gain
a greater and more detailed knowledge of the
inhabitant, the inhabited globe, and so we could
go on.
In other words, far from living in the
backwoods of civilization, Abram lived at the heart
of things.
Abram lived at the place where civilization met
with civilization.
Everybody went through Ur.
All the lanes met and converged in Ur.
Abram knew the cosmopolitan communities of the ancient
world.
He knew something about their philosophies.
He knew something about their religions, and he
knew much else that I have no time
to refer to.
Ur was, however, as spiritually bleak as it
was commercially blessed, and we are not surprised
to learn from Joshua chapter 24 and verse
2 that Abram's family served other gods.
The name of Abram's father, Terah, by the
way, we shall have occasion to refer to
this later on, but Terah's name is really
a name that is associated with the name
of a moon god that was worshiped in
Ur.
To quote the same author once again, summing
it up, he puts it like this, the
world of that day was lost in degrading
views of God.
From the bull worship of Crete, to the
animal deities of brilliant Egypt, from the worship
of the sun god on the Phoenician coast,
to the sadistic and sensual deities of which
the sailors who traded in the Indus and
the Malabar coast could tell.
It was one wide story of burdensome corruption,
and if you want me to add one
other authority to that, Professor Donald J.
Wiseman, whom I've had the privilege of knowing
for years, he says religion in Babylonia at
this time was polytheism of the grossest kind.
The texts mentioned the names of at least
three thousand Sumerian deities, many of course titles
of the same one god, but this shows
however that more than 300 distinct gods were
worshipped at that point in time.
Now such spiritual poverty stood alongside the commercial
plenty.
Have you got the picture?
We're right in North America, commercial plenty, spiritual
poverty, idols galore, cults galore, and here they
are.
Though Abram may have known what was sheer
luxury in his own particular day, he was
reared as a devotee of idolatrous practices.
He was spiritually starved.
He was fed on the ashes of idolatry.
Those are some of the circumstances.
Now the call which said Abram are going,
you might well say to me, all right,
if that's true about Abram, why on earth
leave an opulent country such as that, and
a place where he has so many options
as far as religious practices are concerned?
Why leave a situation such as that and
go a thousand miles along the Euphrates valley
as it ultimately turned out, to a land
he'd never seen before?
Why indeed, let's see.
Now reading the last few verses of Genesis
11, one might easily conclude that this movement
of the few family members from Ur to
Haran was initiated by Terah.
You will notice the statement that it was
Terah took his son Abram, verse 31.
Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot,
etc.
And you might well conclude that it was
so, that somehow or other Terah was responsible
for it.
Stephen's words in Acts 7 correct that impression.
That is one reason why I refer to
Stephen at this point.
I think it is necessary for us to
take everything that the inspired scriptures tell us
in order to get a correct understanding of
what really happened.
Stephen's words in Acts 7 correct the impression
and tell us that they actually went out
of Ur in consequences of the God of
glory.
Appearing to the man Abram and calling him.
Well you say, why then does it say
in Genesis that Terah took his sons and
the rest of the family and went out?
Well John Calvin is probably right when he
puts it like this.
In those days it was the father that
invariably took the initiative in everything.
Nowadays it's the children that rule the family,
rule the parents.
Sorry, I don't want to tread on anybody's
corn, but you know it does happen like
that in the 20th century.
But a way back there it was the
parents that ruled.
And it was what the father said that
carried.
Mother and the boys and the girls went
with pop.
Pop led the way.
And so this is a natural way of
saying it.
But it is quite clear from what Stephen
says that the vision came to one man,
that was Abram.
And the call came to Abram.
But somehow or other, and this is part
of the wonder of God's grace, somehow or
other you see Terah, his father, got mixed
up in it.
He couldn't deny the reality of it.
He listened to Abram dreaming about going out
having seen a God of glory.
He knew not where he lived.
He knew not where he came from.
He had no idol to represent him.
But the God of glory had appeared to
Abram.
And Terah the old man, conservative as he
was, felt there's something in this.
And even Terah took the lead as the
head of the family.
Though in reality the whole momentum, the whole
issue began because God appeared to Abram.
Now let's just take cognizance of some of
these points.
We look first of all then at the
revelation of the glory of God that was
instrumental in calling Abram.
Act seven two again.
Brothers and fathers, listen to me Sir Stephen.
The God of glory appeared to our father
Abram while he was still in Mesopotamia before
he lived in Haran.
Now here we encounter the first theophany since
the fall of man.
If we were here at great leisure I
would love to deal with that.
God for the first time appears in some
such manner that human beings in their finitude
and limitations can see his form or his
representation, hear his voice if not touch him.
Our God is the almighty God of creation,
and it is given him that at times
he can appear in different ways.
And so he appeared here, and this is
what we refer to as a theophany, an
appearance of God.
We can't give you the details, the Bible
doesn't, so we mustn't try.
But God so appeared that he was heard
and he was seen.
His glory was beheld.
As sure as the disciples could say concerning
Jesus of Nazareth, we beheld his glory.
The glory is of the only begotten of
the Father, full of grace and truth.
So could Abram say, I've seen his glory.
A spectacle overwhelmed Abram.
Oh, that I had the words of a
seraph this morning to bring this across.
May the spirit of God write it on
our hearts.
A boy reared upon the ashes of idolatry.
God comes to him, and God reveals his
glory to him, so that a pagan idol
becomes an obscenity in his eyes.
What devotion can you give to a lifeless,
motionless, speechless idol, when once your eyes have
seen the Lord of glory, and your ears
have heard him speak and command you, you,
Abram, do this.
And trust me, you see the spell of
their attraction, these other deities, was broken by
the splendid sublimity of a God who had
objective reality, and who speaks of himself in
introducing himself to Moses as, I am that
I am.
Moreover, the God of glory which robbed those
petty deities of their previous attraction, also devalued
the luxury and the pump of the ancient
society.
I have no doubt that Abram was very
much like myself, and like you, and like
all of us.
He would have liked to hold on to
his luxuries.
He would have liked to hold on to
the opulence of earth.
He would have loved to be there at
the center of trade, and try to make
a few pounds or dollars.
I wonder what the currency was.
Of course he would, but you see he'd
seen the Lord of glory.
And when you see the Lord of glory,
the craze for gold gradually wilts.
Not only the objective pagan idols, but the
idol spirit in my heart that would worship
Mammon there.
The spell is broken.
The revelation of the God of glory.
My good friend, do you know anything about
this?
You see, the possibility is, unless you have
seen the image of the glory of God,
you'll never get out of where you are.
You're stuck forever in your circumstances.
Nothing can ever take you away.
But, but, but, but, but, glorious but, if
only you see the glory of God, as
it is revealed in Jesus Christ, you'll be
able to leave this, and shed that, and
get away from this, and away from that.
And if the Son shall make you free,
you will be free indeed.
Now come to the next thing.
You've got a few minutes more.
In the wake of what revelation, that revelation
of the glory of God who was calling
Abram, we next note the requirements which God
addressed to him.
What did God say to him?
Well, he said quite crisply to him, probably
this is shorthand, I don't know, but at
any rate, this is how it goes in
Genesis.
Leave your country, in Acts, I'm sorry, leave
your country and your people, and go to
the land that I will show you.
So you see, the Lord of glory is
able to communicate with people.
And he's commanding.
He assumes the sovereign role.
He says, Abram, leave your country, your kith,
your kin, your kind, leave them, and go
to the land that I will show you.
And such obedience was as nothing, was nothing
short of self-mortification.
I wonder how can we get this across.
I believe that here God demanded of Abram
the most costly thing he could ask him
to do.
When he asked Abram to come away from
his native soil to an unspecified destination without
any relationship whatsoever between that land, that unseen
land, and Abram's history and ancestry.
In ancient times, banishment from one's native land
was often the equal of death.
It was a lingering death to be torn
away from my physical human roots.
And to be thrown into a land or
onto an island I knew not where I
was.
I'm severed from my physical roots and my
ancestry.
This was death.
And there are philosophers of history who will
enlarge upon that theme.
This is virtual death.
Such was the death that was required of
Abram.
Look around your family for the last time
and leave them and go out to the
land that I will show you.
Please note that if our understanding of the
biblical record is correct, this took place in
Ur of the Chaldees.
And it is quite distinct from what is
recorded in the beginning of chapter 12.
I think that is a reiteration, with a
little bit of enlargement, a reiteration of what
happened in principle back in Ur of the
Chaldees.
I'll come to that later on sometime.
That means that when Abram set out in
obedience to God's initial call, he knew nothing
at all about the promise of a great
nation springing from him, nor of such divine
blessing as would make his name great, nor
of God's promise to bless those who blessed
him and curse those who cursed him, nor
of the benefits that would accrue to all
the families of the earth on account of
him.
He knew nothing about that.
That was given him, I say, in Haran.
Now I guess I ought to explain why
I'm saying this.
In your King James Version and even in
your NIV, you have one word which should
never be there.
God had said.
That little word had makes it a pluperfect.
There is no such thing as a pluperfect
in Hebrew.
That is an interpretation of the Hebrew text
and not a translation, with apologies to the
folk responsible for the NIV.
In the RSV, you have it correctly.
It says simply, God said, not had said
in the past, but at that point in
time in Haran he said it.
In other words, in Haran, God repeated what
he had said back in her with additions.
And so verses 2, 3, and 4 of
chapter 12 were spoken in Haran when Abram
had settled down there for a little while.
But Abram didn't know all about that when
he was back in her.
When he was originally called, he was only
told, go to the land and I will
show you where it is.
I'll take you there.
In other words, I've a place for you.
Trust me.
Follow me.
Do what I command.
That was the original call.
Why then did Abram go out?
Why did he obey?
What was there to allure him?
My friends, just one thing, just one thing.
The God of glory appeared to him.
Nothing else.
The promises of the God of glory only
come in at Haran.
I believe that's what the Hebrew requires of
us.
The promises about, there are seven of them
there, there's a seven-jeweled promise, we shall
come back to that tonight.
But that only comes, that only comes at
Haran.
There were no promises other than the promises
of guidance originally in her, in her.
The God of glory says, Abram, go.
And seeing the God of glory and hearing
the God of glory, there was no more
argument in Abram's heart.
He went.
Now that's faith, you see.
That's obedience.
And we're told in the epistle to the
Hebrews, that what put him among the west,
Minster Abbey, art gallery of Hebrews 11, is
this.
By faith, Abram went out.
Not knowing whether he went.
He didn't know where he was going, but
there was one thing he was sure of.
Before you say he was a fool, listen
to this.
The God that had appeared to him was
a living God.
He was the God of glory.
There was nothing like him.
There was no one like him.
He stood apart.
He stood alone.
He stood above.
He was the Lord of glory.
And that was enough.
Now my friends, I have to conclude this
morning with this.
You may well ask me, you may say,
well at the beginning you said that this
was relevant to us and that there are
certain respects in which the circumstances of Abram
are fairly similar to ours.
Indeed they are.
Let me end with just this.
You see, whether you and I realize it
or not, we are living in days when
the same God of glory has revealed himself,
not only partly, as was the case with
Abram, however great it was, but he has
revealed himself in all his undimmed and undiminishing
glory in the person of his co-equal
son, Jesus the seed of Abram.
So that Jesus Christ could say to the
men and the women of his day, listen
he says, they that have seen me have
seen the Father.
And the Apostle Paul can say in him,
that is in the Lord Jesus Christ, there
dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead as
in a body, in one corpus, in one
whole entity, indivisible, God in flesh.
That is what we see in the babe
of Bethlehem.
The immortal, the invisible, the God, only wise,
comes down and is contracted to a span
in the virgin's womb and is born as
man, takes our humanity to his deity, and
there he dwells in all his glory, albeit
veiled in such meanly circumstances.
Have you scrutinized the babe of Bethlehem long
enough to see the glory of God in
him?
Now this is the point.
We, unfortunately, shut our ears to the truth
that is proclaimed to us, or only partly
open them, or we shut our eyes to
the truths that are written for our prophet,
and we only partly read.
And even what we read, we do not
ponder, we do not meditate upon them, we
do not let the truth of God saturate
our minds and our souls that they master
us.
So many of the things we have read
and we say we believe, they're only in
the outer vestibule of our thought region.
God, my friend, has appeared in his co
-equal Son, Jesus Christ, and the message of
it is this.
Come, follow me.
Leave your kith and your kindred.
Leave your gods and your idolatry.
Leave your false ways of sinning.
Leave your opulence and all its false promises.
Let everything go.
Let everything loose.
Follow me and I will make you to
become what I want you to become.
I'll take you into the land where I
want you to be.
I'll lift you onto a plane where I
want you to live.
That's the message.
It's exactly the same in principle.
Blessed is he who can say with all
honesty, in the words of one of my
favorite hymn writers, Jesus, I, my cross, have
taken, have taken all to leave and follow
thee.
Destitute, despised, forsaken, thou from hence my all
shalt be.
Perish every fond ambition, all I've sought and
hoped and known.
Yet how rich is my condition.
God and heaven are all my own.
Have you stepped out because you've seen and
heard the Lord of glory?
My friend, if you haven't taken that first
step, dare I come back to our word
to the children.
I want you to see this morning service.
I want you to see it in this
beautiful, simple way.
God is here with his motherly arms outstretched
and he's saying to some of you, come
on sonny, come on lassie, I want you
to take the first step into my arms
and I'll teach you to walk.
Just trust in me and I'll take you
to the land that I've meant you to
live in and I'll make of you what
I have in mind for you from all
eternity.
Take the first step.
Is there anyone here this morning who's not
done that?
Now that's not the end of the story.
Tonight we shall have to take up the
strain with Abram temporarily settling down short of
the goal that God had in mind, that
is in Haran.
There's a possible tragedy even after this initial
decision, but nevertheless that doesn't cancel the necessity
of making a firm break with things and
in answer to the call of God going
out by faith with faithful Abram and the
men and women of faith who have adorned
the ages of history.
If we can be of help to anyone
to make that initial decision, please come to
us at the end of the service or
at any other time.
This is our business here and it's a
great privilege.
We shall not badger anyone.
I want to assure visitors of that, but
brothers and sisters, this is our prime business.
We would love to know that you are
following in the footmarks of the Lord of
glory into the ever enlarging vistas of his
will.
Let us pray.
O Lord, please let your voice be heard
above the feeble voices of men.
Out of this word which you have caused
to be written, speak the word that you
will yet cause to be heard, that will
enable us to leave the slough and the
despond, the mire and the clay, the prison
house, wherever it is and whatever its nature,
and to walk in the way of obedience
and faith.
God of glory, hear our prayer and hear
our cry in Jesus' name.
Amen.