The Middle East seems to be constantly in the news, doesn’t it? Whether it’s a tragic earthquake in Turkey, civil wars in Syria and Yemen or ongoing tensions between Israel and the Palestinians. The Middle East is too often part of the world we associate with bad news, not good.
Thankfully, however, today’s passage from Genesis brings us some good news from the Middle East. Good news for the globe. Because Genesis chapter 12 marks a positive turning point in humanity’s relationship with God. It marks the first point in human history when a world enslaved to sin, distant from God and seemingly without hope, suddenly became hopeful, expectant and on the way back to God.
God’s promises…
Because Genesis 12 tells us when God made great promises to a man named Abram. Gracious promises of salvation offered to one man that meant good news for a lost world.
- Firstly, we see in verse 1 that God promised Abram a land. He and his family were to be given possession of Canaan. They were to be God’s family living at the crossroads of the world, a ‘light to the Gentiles’ sandwiched between the great powers of Africa, Asia and Europe.
- Secondly, in verse 2, God promises Abram that he will be the father of a great nation, and his name will become famous. You can see from our passage that Abraham was originally called Abram, but God changed it to Abraham after making this promise, because the word “Abraham” means “father of a multitude”. He would have many descendants.
- Thirdly, in verse 3, God not only promises Abram his blessing, but says that all nations will one day be blessed through him. Somehow the whole world will be blessed by a descendant of Abram.
As well as the scope and scale of these promises to Abram, the other thing that should strike us is that they are entirely gracious and free. Abram is just one man amongst many, with no particular moral, political or religious claim to God’s promises. God chose to bless Abram simply because he loved him and his family.
The same is true for us today. Each and every blessing we receive from God – health, wealth and happiness or even salvation in Christ – is an entirely undeserved gift. We can never put God in our debt – his blessings are always acts of grace.
Abraham’s faith…
God’s grace in this passage is mirrored by Abram’s faith. If you we were to flip your Bibles open to places like Romans 4 and Hebrews 11, you would see that Abraham gets special mention for his faith. Hundreds of years after he went to his grave, the first Christians were commending him as an example of great faith.
Unfortunately, Christian faith is often ridiculed and derided today. For example, Richard Dawkins has called faith a “great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”
Is Dawkins right? Or is there more to real faith than that?
Scientists like Dawkins examine and evaluate evidence by dissecting it, or by putting it under the microscope to see what it is made of. If we do the same to Abraham’s faith in the Bible, we see that it comprised of trust, obedience, and patient hope.
Firstly, Abraham trusted God’s promises, and so should we. Of course, from a worldly perspective trusting God is a great gamble – a calculated risk at best. But Abram knew that God is real, utterly true, perfectly good and supremely powerful. The God who made the world and every good thing cannot fail to deliver what he promises. This means it is not simply pious to trust God, but good old common sense as well.
For Abram, trusting God meant believing that he would have many descendants and become the father of a great nation. This can’t have been easy, when we remember that Abram and his wife Sarah were well past retirement age. For Abram to become a father must have seemed foolish. Nevertheless, he trusted God. He had confidence that the same Creator God who made the whole universe out of nothing could certainly conceive a child in Sarah’s womb. Does our trust in God go as far, I wonder?
The second component of Abram’s faith, described in verse 4, was his obedienceto God’s call on his life.
Whether it came by a dream, a vision or a voice in his ear, God’s call on Abram was a hugely demanding one, wasn’t it? It was a call for Abram to leave his comfortable lifestyle in Haran, leave his own people and move to Canaan where he would be an outsider.
Abram and Sarah were being called from the safety and security of a family home to become wanderers with no fixed abode. It was the ancient equivalent of going from being an owner-occupier in one’s own country, to being a refugee in a foreign land.
It takes faith and guts to obey God when he calls us to make sacrifices for him, and Abram clearly had it in spades. The question is, do we have the same determination to obey God when he calls?
- Do we have the same willingness to obey when God calls us to new areas of service, or higher levels of giving, to our church or community?
- When God opens doors for us, do we have the obedience to walk through them?
- When we hear his voice speak to us in Scripture, or in our conscience, will we take appropriate action? I hope so.
The third and final quality we find in Abraham’s faith was patience. He did not become a father overnight, nor did his family immediately inherit the promised land of Canaan. Both took years to take place. Abraham learnt the lesson that God always keeps his promises, but not always as promptly as we might wish.
In our contemporary society, patience is not popular. Low levels of saving, huge credit card bills and our appetite for fast food are evidence of our society’s desire for instant gratification and a ‘quick fix’.
But if we are to be faithful Christians today, we need to practice the virtue of patience. Indeed, God’s biggest and best promises to us, above all new life in a new creation, won’t come while we are in this world. As Christian people, we need patience to endure suffering and resist temptation, while we wait to see God’s Kingdom in all its fullness.
In verses 7 to 9 of our passage today, we see that Abram’s patience was sustained by being reminded of God’s promises, by being aware of God’s presence, and by him taking time to worship the Lord. We’re told in those verses that the Lord appeared to Abram and spoke to him – and that Abram responded by building an altar and calling on the name of the Lord.
The equivalent for us today is to establish good routines of Bible reading, personal prayer and corporate worship at Church. As we do these things our faith will be fed and we’ll be given patience to persevere.
You see, contrary to what Richard Dawkins and others might say, Christian faith is not ‘pie in the sky’, or foolish belief in the face of evidence. Christian faith is a combination of trust, obedience and patient hope. A faith that is marvellously modelled for us by Abram.