In Hebrews 11:8, “By faith Abraham, 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.” He was totally stepping into the unknown.
Unlike Noah, Abraham had no idea what the future held – and nothing he could do to prepare for it either. Noah could get to work building a boat, with a clear goal from God at the end of it, the saving of his family, but all God told Abraham was, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).
Somehow, then, God got it through to Abraham (or Abram at the time), that he was real, and real enough for Abram to enact a swift exit. But not without God revealing himself as personal too, because – just as he did with Noah – God made a personal promise to Abram. With Noah God had said, “I will establish my covenant with you,” personally promising safety for Noah and his family from the flood (Genesis 6:18). With Abram, he promised in Genesis 12:2-3 to make him “into a great nation,” but also, staggeringly, that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
So Abram had this ringing in his ears – as he hurriedly made preparations to leave his homeland – that God was both real and personal, which enabled him to step fearlessly into the unknown doing exactly “as the Lord had told him” (4). He too, then – just like Abel, Enoch and Noah before him – “became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Hebrews 11:7). Their actions were all totally the result of faith.
The day came, then, when Abram – now 75 years old – along with “his wife Sarai and nephew Lot, and all the possessions they’d accumulated and people they’d acquired in Haran, set out for the land of Canaan” (Genesis 12:5) – 400 miles (640 kilometres) to the south. Which also happened to be in the opposite direction to the one Abram’s father had taken in Genesis 11:31, when he’d moved his family 600 miles (950 kms) northwest from the moon-god worshipping Mesopotamian city of Ur (in modern day southern Iraq) to settle them all in Haran (in south eastern Turkey).
Abram was in Haran, then, when God got through to him, by which time Haran was very much Abram’s home, and the source of his wealth too. So why leave to become “A stranger in a foreign country”?….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 