25 years or so ago, the way I read Genesis 12 changed, though I didn’t realize it until much later. I know we’ve told some of you that Iain’s name is spelled the way it is in honor of one of my professors at Regent, Dr. Iain Provan, because he and his wife blessed us greatly during the months after Lydia’s birth. They hadn’t been at Regent long at the time, having only moved to Vancouver in 1997; before that, Dr. Provan had been teaching at the University of Edinburgh. He’s a Scot, and if I recall correctly, his wife is Irish or Scots-Irish, so the British Isles had always been home for them and their children—until Regent called, and in 1997 they ended up moving across an ocean and a continent to Canada’s Pacific Coast.
At some point during that fall semester, Dr. Provan gave his introductory sermon in chapel. He turned it into an introductory sermon in truth, preaching on Genesis 12 and filling in the story with all the details of his own life and his own move with his family. There are a couple lines from his message that I remember to this day, because he was quite funny, but that’s not all that has stuck with me. In telling Abraham’s story as his own—or maybe vice versa, I’m not sure—Dr. Provan literally shifted my perspective on this passage in a small but crucial way. You see—and I alluded to this two weeks ago—if we’re familiar with the Bible, we tend to read its stories from above, from something of a God’s-eye view. We see things the people in them didn’t, we’re told things they didn’t know, and we know how the story goes and what it means. (At least, we think we know what it means.) That perspective has its advantages, but also a downside: it cuts us off from reading the Bible experientially. It keeps us from reading from Abraham’s point of view and thinking how everything might have looked to him. Dr. Provan changed that for me, at least for this text.
Now, before we dive into the story, we need to do one thing more to set the stage. If you have your Bible open to Genesis 12, look back a few verses to 11:27. We think of this as the story of Abraham—or Abram, as he was before God changed his name—but that’s not how Genesis frames it. I don’t know how your Bible renders the first sentence, but I’ve used the NRSV because it’s completely literal: “these are the descendants of Terah.” The Hebrew word here is toledot, and though there’s no question as to its literal meaning, it gets translated a bunch of different ways because of how it’s used in Genesis.