Abraham I - The Journey of Faith

Welcome to the daily bible study blog for the course, Discovering God's Vision for Your Life, facilitated by myself and Matt Wolfington. The emphasis is on our spiritual and natural gifts and how they shape God's vision (and hopefully ours) for our lives. The Bible study will look at several key biblical characters and how they discovered, developed and deployed their gifts. In each case, the process was messy with several mistakes, false starts, and quite a few sins. No doubt our own process has been and will be similar. We begin with Abraham, whom we will examine for the first four days.

Abram (his given name before covenant with God) was from Ur of the Chaldees, likely an adherent of ancient Babylonian religion. The placement of the call of Abram after the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is not accidental. Babel is one of the towns on the way from Ur to Canaan. In Genesis 11:31, we read,

"Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Cannan. But when they came to Haran they settled there."

This trip would have taken the North route around the Arabian peninsula (a distance of nearly 700 miles). The family had made it about 60% of the way to Canaan when they stopped. Terah, the father, died in Haran. This vision of God to Abraham invites him to finish the journey.

It's interesting to think about how this would have been for Abram. The Babylonian ziggarut looked much like "the pyramid building" at the loop and Indiana in Lubbock. At the top of the zigarrut was a temple that was a "window to heaven." Abram now has an encounter with the true God of heaven. There are Babylonian versions of creation and the flood. We have here the beginning of the emergence of the Jewish faith with one God (not fully defined until Jacob)from a Babylonian background of many gods.

One of the key differences between the Jewish and Babylonian concepts of the divine is that God takes the initiative. The Babylonian gods tended to regard people as a nuisance, where people are the object of God's love in the Jewish faith. The covenant with Abram is initiated by God. It has been said that religion is really about us reaching for the divine (inviting the response of the gods), where Judeo-Christianity is about the divine reaching for us (inviting our response). The call on Abram's life begins with God's promise.

"I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."

When we talk of spiritual and natural gifts that shape God's vision for our lives, the initiative is with God. We are discovering, developing, deploying gifts already created within and through us. The more our relationship with God develops, the more our gifts our awakened.

Abram receives his call at the tender age of 75. It's all relative. Abram is listed as the oldest of three sons, born to his parents when they were 70. Someone please tell my kids that I am not too old to have kids their age (lol!). If Terah did live to be 205, then Abram would have left his family about 60 years before his father died. As the oldest he would have had primary responsibility for his family. Breaking away would have been difficult. Abram is being required to discover and develop the spiritual gift of faith - the abiding trust that God has spoken to him and will be with him even in the presence of great risk. He will exercise that spiritual gift often throughout his life.

It's important to note the risk dimension of faith. The land to which Abraham was going was already inhabited. Genesis 12:7 reads "At that time, the Canaanites were in the land." The rest of the story of Israel will mean dealing with them, so this is a hint of things to come. Then the second problem occurs when famine comes to Canaan and the clan is forced to go to Egypt. That is also a hint of things to come in both the Joseph story and the New Testament flight of Jesus. But notice what Abram does with Pharaoh - he lies. Deception by the people God chooses is a recurring theme throughout Genesis (Abraham, Sarah, Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph). And hey, it worked. Abraham became filthy rich while in Egypt because of Sarah's good looks. Obviously, being spiritually gifted does not mean that we have great character. The church and the world are full of people who are extremely gifted but are tragically flawed in their motivations. As we study these gifts of the Spirit together, we will want to pay particular attention to our motivations - so that we may be fully used by God.

The rest of our reading (chapters 13 and 14) are about Abram and Lot. What other spiritual gifts can you see in Abram as he deals with the situations of choosing where he will settle his family and where Lot will settle his or in getting Lot out of his first mess (there will be others?).

God has called all of us to a journey that will call on our faith. But some of us seemed to exude that confidence and trust in God that inspires and strengthens people to believe along with them. I must confess that this gift is not among my primary gifts, but is rather in the second tier (we'll talk about that in future class sessions). I'm too analytical and too questioning. It takes the abiding trust I experience with others (on staff and even in our class) to keep in the fray of following Jesus in our world. Have a great day.