Lessons from Abraham (Pt. 1)
The Bible is full of examples of faithful men and women who heeded God’s call on their lives. In today’s post (the first of a two-part series), we’ll look at what we can learn from the life of Abraham, the father of faith.
Obedience brings us one step closer to His purpose (Gen. 12:1-9).
Abram and all his family were on the way to Canaan. Gen. 15:7 tells us that God led Haran to leave Ur and head for Canaan. For some reason, however, they stopped (Gen. 11:31-32). It was a journey interrupted. They settled in Haran. One day, the Lord spoke to Abram and told him: “Leave this place and go to a land I will show you.” The Lord then promised to produce a great nation from Abram, make Abram a blessing to all people. All Abram had to do was believe God. The journey could continue.
So, Abram believed God. He obeyed. Without knowing where he was headed, he set out with his family—and the Lord. Turns out they were headed to Canaan (12:5). When Abram got there, the Lord told Him something else: “To your offspring I will give this land” (v. 6). Now, if you know anything of Abram/Abraham’s life, you know of this promise to give what would be come the land of Israel to Abram’s descendants. But did you catch that? God didn’t promise the land to Abram until Abram took the first step of obedience. Each step of obedience on the journey of faith brings us one step closer to fulfilling His purpose in us.
When we try to help God, bad things happen (Gen. 12:10-20).
Because of a famine in the land of Canaan, Abram and his family traveled to Egypt. Abram was afraid. He had Sarai, woman very beautiful, and he was afraid that others would kill him to take her for their own. So, he decided to tell a lie. “Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me” (v. 13). The lie he told perhaps had an additional motive behind it. If he were killed, as he feared, what would happen to God’s promises to him? I have to do my part in this….right? That’s what his mind might have been saying.
We know what happened. He wasn’t killed, but Sarai was taken away from him—after all, according to both of their testimonies, she was his sister not his wife. And things went well for Abram—he gained wealth and possibly fame from that lie (v. 16). But that lie cost others. Pharaoh’s house suffered plagues because of Sarai. (The Egyptians just couldn’t get away from those plagues. Seems the Pharaoh of Moses’ time should have remembered those…. but I digress.)
The Bible doesn’t tell us how they knew, but the Egyptians knew that it was because of Sarai. And Pharaoh suspected correctly that Abram lied to him. You can hear the anger in his voice: “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife; take her, and go” (vv. 18-19). The text says they “sent him away,” meaning they kicked him out of the land. He was fortunate that his fear wasn’t confirmed then—he lived to tell the tale. Bad things often happen when we try to “help God out.” He knows what He is doing.
God is able to provide, no matter where we are (Gen. 13:1-18).
So, after being deported from Egypt, Abram and his folks returned to the land of Canaan. Abram was traveling with Lot also. Both of them, the text tells us, had a lot of stuff, and a lot of people (13:2, 5-6). The land was crowded, and strife developed between the herdsmen of Abram and Lot. They realized that they would have to part ways.
Abram gave the choice to Lot. Lot decided on the Jordan Valley, a place that was “well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt” (v. 10). Lot chose the better place for himself. The texts hints that perhaps he compared it to Egypt, perhaps his missed the lifestyle there (the Israelites in the wilderness could have learned a lesson from this). Abram, however, did not worry. He was in the place God had called him. And the Lord assured him: “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you” (vv. 14-17). He knew that God was faithful, and would provide whatever he needed, wherever God called him.
God is big enough to handle honest questions (Gen. 15:1-21).
Now we have Abram and his family (minus Lot) dwelling the land of promise. Everything seemed to be going fine. Then the Lord appeared to Abram in a vision and said THOSE two words: “Fear not.” Usually when the Lord says those words, He’s getting ready to lay something on you that you’ll say, “Uh….what?” The Lord continued: “I am your shield; your reward shall be very great” (15:1). So, Abram, thinking back to the earlier promises, decides to get real with God. A modern paraphrase in our culture might go something like this:
Look Lord, you brought me to the is land and said you’d give it to me and that I’d have more descendants than could be counted. There’s just one teeny problem with that. I DON’T HAVE A CHILD! So, um, Lord, I’m gonna have to leave all my stuff to some servant who’’s not even a relative and he will get all this land (v. 2, paraphrased).
The Lord, however, was not perturbed in the slightest. He assured Abram: “This man shall not be your heir. Your very own son shall be your heir” (v. 4). Abram’s wheels must have been turning big-time then. Wait. I’m gonna have a son? Me and Sarai, we’re getting along in years. God’s gonna have to work overtime on this one. So, old and childless, Abram would have a son. And that son would go on to have descendants more numerous than the stars in heaven and sand on the seashore. The Lord did lay something big on Abram.
But, even with the questioning, “Abram believed the Lord and He counted it to him as righteousness” (v. 6). His mind, however, still had trouble wrapping around the thoughts. So he had to ask the question, “Lord, how will I know for certain that I will possess it” (v. 8). At this point, we might have said, “How many times do I have to tell this guy?” Not the Lord, though. He is big enough for the honest and hard questions.
At the Lord’s command, Abram brought some animals, typically used in sacrifice. He cut them in half and laid the halves facing each other, creating a corridor of sorts. This was a common custom, called cutting covenant. Two parties making the covenant would walk between the pieces reciting the terms and the curses of the covenant. The idea was, “As has been done to these animals, may the same be done to me if I fail to keep covenant.”
But notice something here. We are told in verse 17 that God alone walked between the pieces. Abram was not part of the covenant. God alone made the covenant. It was not a covenant between God and Abram. He alone was responsible for keeping the covenant. The promise was established. Not only did God handle Abram’s doubts and questioning, but He went so far as to swear by Himself that what He said was true.
The next time we are tempted to doubt God’s promises, we should ask Him. He is big enough to handle our questions.
We’ll continue our look at Abram’s life in Part 2 –>
