I left on the overnight train from Edinburgh to London. All I had with me was a big red backpack (a “K2” made by Karrimor) and my guitar. It was 1977, I was almost 21, I had just quit a very good job as a draftsman, and I was off to travel Europe.
My plan was to go to Amsterdam and work for a while. I had heard you could make a lot of money really quickly there. Then I would set out across Europe and Asia along the “hippie trail” and maybe meet up with my Dad in Singapore.
It never happened that way. All kinds of events got in the way, not least getting married and a six year side trip to Canada, before I finally got to Asia. Even then it wasn’t as a world traveller, but as a missionary and a relief worker.
You see, one of the things about travelling is that, once you start moving, you don’t have the same kind of control over your future that you might normally have if you just stayed home; something I’m sure Abram would have identified with.
[Series and Title]
Last week we looked at the tragedy that drives human history; the fact that we are all in rebellion against God. I suggested that you try and read Genesis 3 through 11, just to get a sense of how badly things deteriorated. Genesis 3-11 is really an extended genealogy with a few events picked out for illustration. I’m not going to ask for a show of hands as to how many of you actually read those chapters but perhaps some of you can tell me some of the main events in them.
- Cain killing Abel
- Lamech’s ‘lovely’ attitude (Gen. 4:23-24)
- The Flood
- The Tower of Babel
Not really an uplifting section of the Bible is it? True, there are glimpses of God’s grace. [His provision of clothing for Adam and Eve (clothing that entailed the shedding of blood). His care for Cain, even as he was cast out. His promise after the flood, not to destroy all of humanity.] But the overall trend of these chapters is downward. Even if there is a little upswing when he saves Noah’s family and they experience his grace, it isn’t long before we’re on our way down again as Noah’s descendants build the Tower of Babel as a way to “make a name” for themselves apart from God.
Chapter 11 is a dead end! Humanity is scattered. There’s no unity. They couldn’t even understand each other. Even though we meet Abram at the end of chapter 11, there’s not much prospect of anything positive happening. We are told matter-of-factly in verse 30 that Abraham’s wife Sarai was barren, she couldn’t have children. [Still in Asia today to be a wife and have no children is a shameful thing. Women kill themselves out of despair because they can’t have children.] In the same way, in the culture of Genesis, not having children was an ending, a symbol for hopelessness. Where there’s no children, there’s no future.
Let that sink in, because we can’t appreciate the change in tone that comes in chapter 12 until we feel the heaviness, the depression, the darkness and deadness that fills the end of chapter 11.
Then we get to Genesis 12 and it’s like
someone has struck a match in the middle of a dark basement.
1Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your
country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show
you. 2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and
make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless
those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all
the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
A few weeks ago, in Jeremiah, we were talking about God stepping into situations and changing them. Here we are again, encountering God as he steps into a dark, barren, futureless situation and changes it.
Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your
country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show
you.
In
an Afghan proverb, God says, “Start moving so I can start blessing.” Have you
noticed the number of times that God starts a conversation with “Go”?
Genesis 7:1, The LORD then said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and your whole family…
Genesis 16:9, Then the angel of the LORD told Hagar, "Go back to your mistress…"
Genesis 31:3, Then the LORD said to Jacob, "Go back to the land of your fathers… and I will be with you."
Genesis 35:1, Then God said to Jacob, "Go up to Bethel and settle there, and build an altar there to God…"
Exodus 4:19, Now the LORD had said to Moses in Midian, "Go back to Egypt…"
Exodus 4:27, The LORD said to Aaron, "Go into the desert to meet Moses."
Those are just some of the references
between here and the beginning of Exodus. Last week we heard the Dr.
But we’ll miss the point if we just focus on the actual travelling. In the years after I left Scotland I travelled through England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, France, Spain, what was then Yugoslavia, and Greece. But, although it all sounds very exotic (it wasn’t, lots of sleeping in tents and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches) what is important is what God did in my life during that time. I learned that I could trust him to provide for me and that he could use me to touch others’ lives. In the same way when we read the story of Abram (and I encourage you to read it in Gen. 12-25) it tells us something about learning to know God. It’s a journey, a pilgrimage through life. The early church understood that and referred to themselves as “followers of The Way”.
The last major event in Gen. 11 is people trying to build themselves a city so they can build their own reputation and be independent, even of God. In a city you have security. (Thick walls to keep out unwelcome guests.) In a city you have prestige. (Paul described himself as a citizen of Tarsus, “no ordinary city.”) In a city you have resources. (Cities thrive by controlling the resources of the countryside around them or controlling trade routes. Hamilton wouldn’t have grown to be the industrial centre it became in the 20th century without a great natural harbour.)
In contrast, the first event in Gen. 12 is God calling Abram out of a city and into a life of wandering around the middle east living in tents - no security there. Moving from place to place - hardly a way to build a reputation for yourself. Always looking for water and good grazing - far from controlling the resources, the resources controlled where he travelled.
This is what it means to follow God. You may not be called to leave home and travel. But we are all called to lay aside the things that we put our faith in: the security of a house or apartment or a good job; the reputation that comes from being a longstanding member of the community; the resources that we’ve saved for a rainy day. We are called to lay those aside as objects of faith and take the risk of putting our faith wholly in God. Because, you know, where there’s no risk involved, there’s no need for faith.
That’s what God called Abram to, to take the risk of faith. But God is nobody’s debtor, and in the very next verse he gives Abram a promise, a promise of blessing.
“Blessing”
is one of those Christian “code words” that sometimes confuses people.
Christians will often say they are “blessed” by a book or by a song or a
person. Sometimes, “I was so blessed” just means, “I felt good.” But I think
what we often mean is that in some way, through some event or person, we have
personally connected with some aspect of God’s goodness. From the perspective of Abram’s world,
however, where life was a lot less secure than it is for us, the most direct
evidence of God’s goodness in an unstable world was long life, prosperity and
lots of kids, and that’s the primary meaning here, although it does expand.
Both
aspects are true. To be blessed is to experience God’s goodness. That can
happen in an intangible way, through a song, or a book, even a sermon, as we
recognise something new about who God is or as he works in our lives. But it is
just as much a blessing to receive a meal, or a bed for the night or food for
the pantry. In either case we are experiencing God’s goodness.
I will make of you a
great nation and I will bless you. Abram had a choice. He could stay where he was,
safe and secure in Haran, or he could respond to God and leave. You realize, of
course, that the only reason we know anything about Abram at all is because he
obeyed God, got up and left. If he had stayed in Haran he would have been just
another moderately successful businessman who lived in the middle east 4000
years ago.
But he didn’t stay in Haran. He left at God’s command, and spent his life wandering. The result was that God kept his promise, blessed him and made a great nation from this one man. In Deut 26:5, hundreds of years later, the people of Israel are to be led in a confession of faith: 5Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: "My father was a wandering Aramean, (that’s Abram) and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. And it was true. By the time they were making this confession the nation of Israel had grown, perhaps to be as many as 2 million people. Remember, these are the descendants of a childless old man and a barren woman! God keeps his promises.
So God promises to bless Abram and make him a great nation. Then comes the next part of the promise I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. To have a great name is to have a heritage. For Abram that would have meant having a family and descendants who carry on his name and legacy. (If you look in the Psalms, often the fate of the wicked is expressed as “no-one will remember their names.”) Children and descendants connect the past with the future. But remember, Sarai was barren, without children. We’re talking about impossibilities here. But as Jesus said, “What is impossible with men is possible with God.” The promise is that God will continue working with Abram and that God will provide the future. Sarai can’t have children without God, and yet children are the key to the future. In other words, the future lies with God, not with Abram or Sarai.
The same is true for us. Our futures all lie with God, not with ourselves. We can fool ourselves that we’ve got all the angles covered, but then something happens: a hurricane hits; a family member dies; we have an accident and can’t work, and we realise that we are not the masters of our own fate.
But
once we realise that, and give our lives over to God, we can move from people
with a problem to becoming part of the solution, because God tells Abram that
he will bless him so that he will be
a blessing. God didn’t call Abram just because he wanted to be nice to this
one old man. That wasn’t the point. God was looking to the future. This
is his plan to reverse all the evil that began to grow in Genesis 4-11. No
great sweeping response like the flood. Just a promise to one childless man and
his barren wife. God was going to bless Abram, he was going to pour out his
goodness on Abram, so that he in turn could be a blessing to others.
This
is why God called Abram. It’s why he called David. It’s why he called Peter,
James, John and the other apostles. It’s why he’s called us. To be a blessing!
There’s a temptation for Christians is to think that we are somehow better than
other people because we have come to know God. We’re tempted to think that
Christianity is about getting our lives sorted out and getting ourselves to
heaven and the world can go to Hell in a hand basket.
That’s
not the way it works. Like Abram we are blessed to be a blessing.
With
being blessed comes responsibility. I
will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse; and in
you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Again God links the
blessing of other people to Abram. Those that bless him, God will bless. Those
that do good to Abram, God will do good to them. Those that do evil to him, he
doesn’t have to worry about because God will deal with them. That relieves him
of the temptation to take revenge.
Do you realise how profound this is? God has chosen to bring his blessing to the world through human beings. That doesn’t mean that God is helpless without us, but it does mean that he has chosen to bless the world through those who respond to him. A big part of Abram’s faith journey is his own struggle to figure out what it means to be that blessing and how he should live in the world as a result.
He doesn’t always get it right. A few
verses later Abram brings God’s curse on others because of how he behaves
(passing off his wife as his sister.) And if the church, if we, were doing a
better job of being a blessing in our society we wouldn’t have so much of the
curses of violence, homelessness, abortion, pornography, you name it. Much of
the responsibility for that can be laid at the door of a church that has
retreated from society.
Blessings are not automatic, they are connected to actions, and with God’s calling comes the responsibility to live out that calling in ways that bring blessing to others. When Abram fails, or we fail, to respond faithfully to God, we can bring a curse into the world just as easily as we can bring blessings when we are faithful.
The scope of God’s blessing in this promise
began with Abram, (I will bless you)
then it spread out to those that he influenced, (I will make you a blessing) finally it becomes global, and in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed.
If you want to know the basic text for missions in the Bible it isn’t the “Great Commission” in Matt 28. It isn’t even in the New Testament. It’s right here. Paul recognises that in Galatians 3; 6Consider Abraham: he writes "He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." 7Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. (that’s us) 8The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: "All nations will be blessed through you." 9So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
God’s
plan in calling Abram was always to bless all of humanity. The word translated
“families” in Genesis is the same word used for the twelve tribes of
Israel. It isn’t talking about individual, Western, nuclear families but about
societies or communities.
We went to Asia to be a blessing to the tribes of Afghanistan, in a culture where most of the people in one village are related, they’re one tribe. The challenge before us now, before all of us as a church, is to discover how to be a blessing to this community in North Hamilton. That is why God has called us and planted us here. Like Abraham we have a journey of faith ahead of us and we won’t always get it right. But if we stay faithful to God he will lead us, just as he led Abraham. And he will make us a blessing to those around us, and even to the ends of the earth.