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.
The phrase “these are the toledot of . . .” introduces each of the major sections of the book. In Genesis 2:4, “These are the toledot of the heavens and the earth” introduces the account of God placing his sacred image—humanity—in the center of the temple he had made for himself—the created world—and of course how the order of worship promptly went pear-shaped. In Genesis 5:1, “These are the toledot of Adam” begins the genealogy that gets us from Adam to Genesis 6:9: “These are the toledot of Noah.” Genesis 11:10, “These are the toledot of Shem,” starts another genealogy to get us to Abraham. Later, in Genesis 37:2, we see “These are the toledot of Jacob,” introducing the story of Jacob’s children, with Joseph of course hogging the attention. And here in 11:27, Genesis says, “These are the toledot of Terah.” Why Terah?
In part, it’s because the chapters to come aren’t just about Abraham and his descendants, they’re also—rather horribly—about Lot and his family line. I think there’s more going on here, though; I think this supports a possibility I suggested here a few years back, that God called Terah first. Why else would Terah have uprooted his family from Ur and headed off to Canaan? He just gives up partway. He follows the Euphrates—one of the two great rivers that were the cradle of his civilization—to the point where he would need to leave it and strike west . . . and he sits down and says, “No farther.” Then Terah dies and God comes to Abram and says, in effect, “OK, let’s try this again.” On the one hand, it’s a shorter trip from Haran than it was from Ur; on the other, it’s a dream that’s been abandoned, and God calls Abram to pick it back up.
Why would Abram do this? Here’s a small thought experiment. Imagine you’re walking along, minding your own business, and someone stops you and says, “I need you to move to a small town in northern Saskatchewan. It will be good for you, I promise.” How are you going to respond? Now take a moment to picture the person you love and trust most in the world outside your immediate family—ideally someone who’s been a mentor to you. Imagine that person calling you up and saying the same thing. Do you think you might respond somewhat differently?
God told Abram to leave behind almost everything and everyone he knew and valued to go someplace unknown, with all the details unknown, for a lick and a promise, and all Genesis has to say about it is, “So Abram left just as God said.” I think it’s easy for us to glance off that—of course Abram did that, it was God! If we get ourselves down at eyeball-level with Abram, though, I think it stops being an “of course.” Before you even get to the question of whether you trust God that much, you have to ask if you trust yourself that much: are you really sure that’s God talking? And of course, there’s a part of you that really doesn’t want it to be God, which is projecting every worst-case scenario it can generate.
Maybe you say, “Well, but there’s a promise attached”—but how much does that really help? The promise is grandiose and implausible, and for a time long after Abram is dead. If I’d been in his shoes, I think I would have said, “OK, God, but what about a job, a place to live, friends, and good health care? Oh, and good schools, in case we ever manage to have kids?” What God is proposing is nothing the world would call a good career move, and yet Abram obeys. That tells us a great deal about his relationship with God. “In hope he believed against hope,” Paul says, and that’s spot-on. That’s how much Abram trusted God and believed in God—which means that’s how well he knew God.
That, in turn, tells us how much Abram prayed, because prayer is the principal medium of our relationship with God. What, after all, is any relationship built on if not being present to one another and talking with each other? Our walk with God is no different. In prayer, we open ourselves to him to tell him the truth about ourselves as best we understand it. We tell him what we’re feeling and thinking, and we tell him what we want and what we think we need; we make ourselves vulnerable to hope by asking him to do things for us and provide what we need and want. In so doing, we make it possible for God to do things because we ask and not just because it’s what he chooses to do.
Prayer also opens us to God to hear him speak to us; and the more we listen to him, the more we learn to recognize his voice. There are a few key aspects to this. One, the better we know his voice, the more we experience the truth of his omnipresence, because the more we hear him speaking through everything in the world around us. Two, the better we know his voice, the more clearly we hear and understand him. This connects back to a point I made a couple months ago when we were looking at John 9 together, that God speaks to us according to how we listen and leads us according to how we follow. The better you or I as individuals know God’s voice and the more we listen for him, the better we learn how he speaks to and guides each of us as the particular people that we are—and the more we learn to trust that we can’t actually be so stupid he can’t get through to us, because he really is smarter than our stupid.
And three, the better we know God’s voice, the more clearly we hear him—and the less we’re able to avoid him—when he’s telling us something we don’t want to hear. In part, this means truths we need but don’t want. I know some of you have heard me tell of the time back in Colorado that I was yelling at God about a few of our elders, and I clearly heard him say in the back of my mind, “Show them grace.” I knew that was God by the simplest of all possible tests—I had no interest in saying that, so I knew it wasn’t me—and I told him, “They don’t deserve it.” Clear as a bell and quick as a flash, he responded, “I know. That’s why it’s called grace.” I’ve never recovered from that moment (which is a good thing).
The other category of “things we don’t want to hear” is God calling us out of our comfort zone. This can be in small ways; Beth Moore tells a painfully funny story of a time God called her to brush a man’s hair in an airport waiting area. (I’m not going to play it because it’s eight minutes long, but search YouTube for “Beth Moore brush hair” and you’ll find it.) It can also, of course, be in big ones; that’s how you end up like Abram, commanded to move halfway across the known world, or like Jonah, sent to preach to your nation’s worst enemy so God won’t destroy them before they can conquer your homeland. Either way, you’ll probably have lots of good logical reasons you can line up against doing it, and only one reason in favor: because God. But if you answer his call, there’s no telling what you might see him do.
You see, this is where Tom’s message last week on Genesis 1 comes to bear: we belong to a big God who has given us a big job. We like to say, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” but the truth is a little different: God loves you and has a wonderful plan to redeem the whole creation, and he has a part for you in it which will often seem the exact backwards of wonderful. His plan is literally cosmic in scope—but the thing is, the execution is anything but. When human beings want to address the evils in our world, we work from the top down, creating large-scale institutions like governments to direct and oversee everything. God is working from the bottom up. Instead of programs and structures and laws, he has chosen to redeem the world through relationship. He operates the same way in restoring the world as he did in creating it: one person at a time. He uses laws and rules and governments, but the heart of his work is not coercion but promise, and so his primary instrument is covenant.
Now, that’s an important word biblically, so we need to be sure we give it its full weight of meaning. You could call a covenant an agreement, but it’s more than that. “Contract” comes closer; we might define a contract as an agreement with enforceable penalties which is held by the government. The difference is, contracts are 50-50—if one side doesn’t meet their commitments, the contract is broken. A covenant isn’t just a contract, it’s a bond between people which is instituted and held by God. It’s 100-100, and isn’t necessarily ruptured by the failure of one side or the other. Think of blood brothers, if you have any familiarity with that custom—nicking the wrists and putting them together so that my blood is in you and yours is in me; and of course, biblically, marriage is a covenant, though our society has little sense of that now. The key point is that a covenant relationship with another person should mean you can stake your entire life on their faithfulness because you know they’re committed to you wholeheartedly, without reservation. That can never be perfectly true with another human being in this life, of course, because even the best of us are recovering sinners, and limited to boot; but it is perfectly true with God, because he’s both perfectly great and perfectly good.
So, God’s plan of redemption is cosmic in scope, but nearly molecular in scale; his focus is not on big important people doing big important things, but on ordinary people in ordinary relationships. Sure, he uses big important people, too, but mostly because even big important people are still ordinary people with all the same kinds of ordinary relationships. He’s given us a big job, but accomplishing it isn’t about us being big, it’s about him being big. For us, it’s about whether or not we’re plugged in to him so we can live by his life as we were meant to live.
Again, this happens first and foremost through prayer—which means prayer draws us into God’s plan. Given the wildness and cosmic scope of his plan, this means if we begin with prayer, there’s no telling where we might end up. I quoted Annie Dillard on this a couple weeks ago, but I could just as well invoke Bilbo’s words to Frodo from The Lord of the Rings: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reflecting on Jesus’ call to his first disciples: “Faith can no longer mean sitting still and waiting—they must rise and follow him. The call frees them from all earthly ties, and binds them to Jesus Christ alone. They must burn their boats and plunge into absolute insecurity in order to learn the demand and the gift of Christ.” This is where prayer is likely to get you sooner or later: bungee-jumping into the unknown without a bungee cord, trusting God has your harness.
Which brings us back to the question I posed two weeks ago: if that’s true, why would anyone want to run the risk? Why would that make any sense at all? To that, I think Rich Mullins had the right of it: “If you want a religion that makes sense, then I suggest something other than Christianity. But if you want a religion that makes life, then I think this is the one.” Our world is upside-down. Where it tells us we will find life will only bring us death, and what it calls a firm foundation to build our lives on will inevitably turn to mud and quicksand when the storms of life come in earnest. Whatever the world offers us to depend on, however trustworthy it may seem to us, will sooner or later turn beneath our feet and betray us.
This doesn’t mean we should take the first precipice we find and jump off—some things that look foolish truly are—but in midair halfway down, if God has called us over the edge, can be the safest place there is. The world is fickle about keeping its promises, but God is faithful beyond our capacity to believe. Just look at Abram. Look at the fact that you can look at him, because the only reason his name wasn’t forgotten millennia ago like the rest of his generation is that God made a grandiose, implausible promise to him—and kept it. The God who called Abraham into the unknown is the same God who is calling us; he was faithful then and he is faithful now. We have seen him make streams in the desert and roads through the wilderness for those who went before us, and we will see him do it again—if we’re willing to follow him into the desert in the first place. Let’s pray.
Photo © 2012 Wikipedia user Superhero Scramble, LLC; photo has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
