Bible Text: Genesis 12:1-9 | Pastor: Eric Danielson | Series: Abraham

Sometimes it would be nice if we each had a set of step by step instructions for what God wants us to do next in life, but we don’t. God doesn’t call us to follow a list of instructions, he calls us to live by faith. This sermon explores the beginning of Abraham’s journey of faith and takes us back to the basics of what it means to live by faith.

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The Journey Begins
Genesis 12:1-9

If you have kids, especially boys, there’s one kind of toy that you probably have in your home, and that’s Legos. Of all the toys my kids have, their favorite has to be Legos. Caleb and Matthew each have their own tub, and then there’s the community tub, and I think Ayla has one as well. We have all kinds of Legos. And no matter how many we have, they always want more. But it’s interesting because Legos are very complicated. You have a picture of what the end result is supposed to look like and then you have dozens of little pieces that you’re supposed to put together to make the thing in the picture. And if that’s all you had, there would probably be a lot of weeping and wailing. But kids love them and play with them intently – Why? Because they have step by step instructions. Those instructions show them exactly what to do in order to get the end result. So kids don’t freak out – they just follow the instructions until they get to the end.

Sometimes I wish life worked that way. But often it feels like life is like a Lego set without instructions. We have all these pieces to play with and we kind of know where things are going to end up, but what are we supposed to do in the mean time? How do we put all the pieces together? Our lives are all so different and complicated and it would be nice if we each had a set of instructions to tell us exactly what to do next. But we don’t. Some of you are facing things that you don’t know what to do with right now. Life is like a bunch of Lego pieces laying on the floor in front of you, and there are no instructions, and you kind of feel like freaking out: “What am I supposed to do?”

God doesn’t give us step by step instructions for our lives. And though there are times we wish he did, it doesn’t work that way. He isn’t just trying to get us from point A to point B. He’s more interested in everything in between. He wants us to have a personal relationship with him where we learn to live by faith. So today we are going to begin a new sermon series that will help us learn what it means to live by faith.

I wanted to do a sermon series from the Old Testament and I wanted to focus on the life of a biblical character that we could relate to, and when I started looking at the life of Abraham, I decided to look no further. Abraham is a lot like us in many ways. God called him out of a life of unbelief to follow him, and he was told what things were going to look like in the end, but he had no instruction manual to go from – he didn’t even have the Bible. So he learned to live by faith through his personal relationship with God. So for the next several weeks we are going to look at his life and how it unfolds in Genesis chapters 12-23, and we are going to seek to learn what it means to live by faith.

This morning we are going to look at the very beginning of his story up to the point where he really began to worship God and have a personal relationship with him. We’re going to begin to see Abraham in a fresh and probably different way that will remind us of the importance of the basics of what it means to live by faith. To understand the story of Abraham you have to know some the historical setting and the background of his life.

You first read about him at the end of Genesis 11. As you piece the details together you see that he’s born around 2,000 B.C., which is about 400 years after the great flood that destroyed mankind. We know that after the flood Noah’s family began to slowly repopulate the human race in the area we call the Middle East. Several generations were born and they all stayed in the same area and spoke the same language until the Tower of Babel where God confused their language so that people began to spread out in every direction.

Abraham’s ancestors ended up in an area of southern Iraq known as Ur of the Chaldeans, which was in the fertile land near the Euphrates River, off the northwest coast of the Persian Gulf. (picture) Abraham’s father lived there and was named Terah and he had three sons: Abram, Nahor and Haran. Based on the information I found, it appears that Haran was much older than his brothers and was the first to die – he died long before his brothers and even died before his father. The main reason that’s significant is that he had a son named Lot and Lot shows up several times in Abraham’s story because Abraham apparently took him under his wing after his father died.

When Abraham became an adult, he got married and his wife’s name was Sarai. And one thing you’ll notice about both Abraham and his wife is that their names change. At the beginning it’s “Abram and Sarai” and after Genesis 17 it’s “Abraham and Sarah.” The name change is significant because the meaning of their birth names, given to them by their parents, focused on their ancestors, but the new names that God gave them focused on their descendants, which is very significant in their story.

Abram and his family were probably prosperous farmers and herders, living off of the land near Ur. Abram had many possessions and servants and his prosperity and influence would have continued to grow over time. He had a good thing going. As for religion, the city of Ur was known at that time for being a center of moon worship. The Reformation Study Bible says, “Ur and Haran were important centers for worship of the Mesopotamian moon gods Nanna and Sin.” So it is most likely that Abraham worshipped these gods as well, which is very important for us to know in order to understand the significance of what happened to him. He didn’t have a long family history of worshipping God, like we probably assume – he didn’t even know God.

So Abram would have been a well-established man in his community with a lot of promise in his future, living a life of prosperity and comfort, and worshipping the moon gods like the rest of his people. But then something happened that changed his life forever. He had a personal encounter with a God he would come to know as Yahweh, and that is where the story of Abram that is recorded in the Bible begins.

Read Genesis 12:1-3.
Now the LORD [Yahweh] said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I 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 him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

I don’t know if Abram had a vision, or a dream, or heard an audible voice, but whatever happened had a huge impact on his life. The God that spoke to him called him to do some drastic things – to leave his country, Ur of the Chaldeans, the land he had always known; to leave his kindred, or his birthplace; and to leave his father’s house – to separate from his kin – the people he knew and loved. And in leaving this all behind, he was to go to a new land that this God would show him – but as of then was unknown. “Leave everything you know and follow me to a new life I have waiting for you.” That’s what God called Abram to do.

But he also dangled some incredible promises in front of him. If he followed this God, he promised to make a great nation of Abram; he would bless him and make his name great- he would give him power, prosperity, and great influence, so that he would be a blessing to others. This God also promised him that he would protect him – he would bless his friends and curse his enemies. And the extent of blessing would be so great that in Abram all the families of the earth would be blessed. Abram had no way of knowing it, but this promise would later be fulfilled through Jesus of Nazareth.

So there was a high calling, but there were also incredible promises to go with it, and Abram had a big decision to make – stay where he was at, or leave it all behind and launch out into an unknown journey with this unknown God that had spoken to him… It is not unlike God’s call on each or our lives – “Leave your old way of life behind. Come up out of that and follow me in a new life where I promise to bless you and give you an inheritance.” We who are here this morning have found that call to be irresistible, and Abram did as well.

Read Genesis 12:4-5a.
4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan.

So he did it. He set out on a journey that changed his life forever. (picture) He left Ur originally, knowing he would never return. The historical account shows us that when he left Ur, he traveled northwest along the Euphrates River until he came to the city of Haran – a city that I think his older brother Haran might have founded before he died – and Abram settled there temporarily. Genesis 11:31-32 tells us that Abram’s father went along on this stage of the journey, but while in Haran, he died, and apparently his possessions went to Abram. And at some point after that, when Abram was 75 years old, he gathered up the people and possessions he had acquired and left Haran, the leader of this nomadic tribe, and they headed south toward the land of Canaan.

Read Genesis 12:5b-9
When they came to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the LORD and called upon the name of the LORD. 9 And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negeb.

So when Abram arrived in the land of Canaan, Yahweh appeared to him a second time, this time near the city of Shechem (picture), and said, “This is where I wanted to take you and the land you see all around you I will give to your offspring.” I don’t know what was going through Abram’s mind at that time, but it would have been very obvious that they weren’t the only ones there. The Canaanites were in the land, presenting a major hurdle to cross in order for God’s promise to come to pass. In those times you didn’t just set up camp on someone else’s turf. They didn’t take too kindly to that. You had to find land that nobody else was on. If you tried to establish yourself in occupied territory, you’d have a war on your hands. But Abram apparently didn’t question God. Instead he trusted him and built an altar to consecrate the land to God, and then moved on.

He settled in an area south of there, near Bethel, until there was a famine (see vs. 10) that forced him into the dessert of the Negeb, before going to Egypt. It was while he was camped near Bethel that he built another altar to God, and it says he “called upon the name of the Lord.” That same phrase is used back in Genesis 4:26 before the flood, to describe the descendants of Seth who “began to call upon the name of the Lord.” I looked into that a little bit more and learned that phrase was used to describe occasions when a person or group of people set themselves apart from those around them by their worship of Yahweh rather than the other gods. They were identifying themselves as worshippers of Yahweh. So when Abram built an altar to Yahweh and called upon the name of Yahweh, for the first time he was parting ways from his father’s religion and the gods he worshipped and he was identifying himself as a worshipper of Yahweh. Up to that time Yahweh had called him and appeared to him and Abram responded to that call, but now it is clear that Abram was entering into personal, intentional worship of Yahweh as well.

So as we see the beginning of Abram’s journey we see that he wasn’t following an instruction manual; he didn’t have a Bible; he didn’t have a mentor telling him what to do; or a church family to help him. It was just Abram and Yahweh. Abram heard the voice of God and obeyed. His faith was as simple as that and that was all it needed to be. He listened to Yahweh’s voice; he followed what Yahweh told him to do; he trusted him even when the road ahead was uncertain; and he devoted himself to worshipping him.

Sometimes we can forget how simple the life of faith really is, especially if you’ve been following the Lord for a long time. We gain Bible knowledge and we form our theology and that’s all good, but sometimes it can also get in the way and we need to see the simple, straightforward faith of a new believer like Abram.

Maybe you are facing things in life that you don’t know what to do with – like a Lego set without instructions. Maybe you’ve been trying to figure out what to do, but all your theology is just getting in the way. What are you supposed to do? Sometimes it simply boils down to this – God wants us to seek him, to listen to his voice, and then obey… It sounds so simple, especially with the complexities of life that we face, but living by faith really isn’t any more complicated than that.