Genesis 12.1–11
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 5th January 2025
We are a quarter of the way through the 21st century and things don’t look good. Along with the rest of the world’s troubles there is a war being fought over who owns the land of Palestine. The beginning of that struggle goes back to the promise God made Abraham four thousand years ago. Strange that something that far back should still be an issue today, even stranger that it should be an issue for us. Three great faith systems—half the world’s population—trace themselves back to Abraham and what God was about to promise him. We should know something about him. The reason I chose this as our subject in January is mainly for what his story teaches us about God. And the first thing we see is that God spoke to Abraham.
Open your Bible at Genesis chapter 12, verse 1.
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.
God doesn’t speak to everyone. You might get the impression from reading the Bible that he does, but this is because the Bible is about God revealing himself, which he doesn’t do very often. Even in the case of Abraham it was unusual. At one point he doesn’t hear from God for fourteen years, though the Bible calls him the friend of God.
I know that people like to think that God speaks to them. Often what they mean is that some idea stands out for them when they are praying and reading their Bible. “The Lord told me …” they say, but if you ask them did he say it out aloud, of course, he didn’t. Or they may interpret some coincidence as God speaking to them. These sort of experiences are common enough, but they are not how God spoke to Abraham. Sometimes they can even get us into trouble. The Principal of a Bible College in South Africa phoned me up. He was a great man of God, but he was broken—shattered. He had been offered a job as President of a theological seminary in the USA. He prayed and sought the Lord’s guidance, and the Lord told him to go—or that’s what he thought. He resigned from where he was—a large successful college—burnt his bridges, and then just as he was about to leave for the States they contacted him to say there was no job. Someone had embezzled the seminary of a large amount of money; they couldn’t pay him. What upset him most was that the Lord seemed to have let him down, but it was not the Lord, it was his faulty idea of how God speaks to us. Good doctrine is important; wrong ideas can tear you apart.
God spoke to Abraham and to certain of his descendants, and as we shall see, what he said was meant for others as well as him. This is what we might call the prophetic principle. God doesn’t have conversations with us. He speaks to one person a word for many, and his word once spoken stands. It is good for all time. His word to Abraham is a word for us.
This business with prophets was something that happened in Israel, not in the other nations. I know that others claim revelations. You can read them yourself and see if you think God really spoke them. We learned this week that some English church leaders are telling their ministers to go quiet on Israel. We can’t ignore Israel in our preaching because it was in Israel that God made himself known. If we ignore Israel, we will find we have no revelation at all.
You might ask how God spoke to Abraham. “In various ways,” is the answer: sometimes a voice, sometimes an appearance, or a dream, or a visit from an angel. But in every case the word was sure and clear. Abraham didn’t worry about whether it was really God speaking to him. If God wants to, he can make himself clear, and his word to Abraham, repeated several times, was very clear.
But how can I, here in Australia four thousand years later know whether what Abraham heard was real? I mean, there are no miracles in Abraham’s story—other than God speaking to him. You just have to read his story and judge for yourself. But, of course, there is more. There is a history leading on from Abraham of God guiding and protecting his descendants, and speaking to some of them, over the next two thousand years. These are not random revelations—a thought here and a thought there. They make up a definite pattern, leading eventually to the coming of Jesus, when God did what he had said he would do, through his birth, life, death, and resurrection. You can make what you will of all this, but know for a certainty that if you decide for Abraham, and eventually for Christ, you will find yourself part of the family of Abraham, whether or not you are an Israelite. And that is big. Those church leaders who want us to go quiet on Israel have lost the plot. They are no friends of Abraham, and will never see the promised blessing.
How did Abraham respond to God speaking with him? The first thing we can say about this is that he obeyed.
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. 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. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oakof Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.
Obey is exactly what we don’t want to do. If God says something, but we want otherwise. we disobey. Sometimes we want to obey, but fear, or just plain laziness stops us. But Abraham’s obedience is not just any old obedience; it is what Paul calls “the obedience of faith,”[1] a special obedience which carries us into a new relationship with God. A chap told me he had heard a voice during the night. He had been watching television; the rest of the family were upstairs asleep. He was sitting there quietly and suddenly a voice spoke to him. He thought the wall phone had been left on and someone upstairs was speaking, so he checked it, and it was off. He sat down and the voice spoke a second time.
“Do you think it could have been God?” he asked me.
I said earlier that God spoke through Israel’s prophets, and hearing him speak is a very unusual thing, but, of course, he can, if he wants to. “How would I know?” I said. “You were there, what do you think?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation,” he said.
“What did it say? I asked.
“It just said, ‘Pay attention to my word.’ Twice.”
“If God did speak, it sounds like what he would say,” I said.
“But I haven’t heard anything since.”
“Have you done what it said?”
“No.”
“It sounds like God has pointed to a door; if you don’t go through it, I doubt you will ever know.”
He started reading the Bible then, gave his life to Jesus, and is powering on in his Christian life.
Abraham obeyed, and his simple act of obedience carried him to a new land. You see, God’s command was really a command to follow him. “Go to the land I will show you.” When Abraham obeyed he set out on a journey into the unknown—but a journey with God. That is what faith is like. Jesus calls us to follow him. We do not know where it will lead; he will show us the way. But unless we step out with him, we will never know life. This is the obedience of faith.
When Abraham arrived in Canaan the first thing he did was journey through from north to south. He was more than a tourist. He wanted to see this place the Lord had given him. And God spoke to him again. This time it says he appeared to him, near Shechem—the West Bank city of Nablus, and then again at Bethel.
To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him … And called upon the name of the LORD.
Abraham obeyed, he went with God, he explored the new land, and the third thing Abraham did was build monuments Every place God revealed himself he marked with an altar or monument. Why? So he would remember. Last week we asked how this story came down to us, here is the beginning of an answer. Things were happening that needed to be remembered.
But Abraham did more than remember: he called on the Name of the Lord. He spoke to God. He prayed. God wants his children to speak to him; this is why he reveals himself. Christianity is a relationship with God. But let’s come back to the meaning of the promise God made Abraham.
The first time he spoke he promised he would be a great nation and that other nations would find blessing because of him.
Go … to the land that I will show you. 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. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
This word “blessing” will ring bells if you listened to last week’s sermon. God blessed Abraham’s ancestors (Adam and Eve), but they disobeyed him nonetheless. The environment was cursed because of them; the Tempter was cursed, Cain murdered his brother and was cursed, and if you read the rest of Genesis 1–11 you would have seen how the curse spread: violence and revenge, slave kingdoms and a flood, men trying to reach God with their huge pyramids. Abraham came from the city of Ur where there was a huge pyramid-like Ziggurat, whose ruins are still visible today. It was built before Abraham’s time as a temple to the Moon-god.
Michael Farmer, the present Lord Farmer, was a member of St Helen’s Church in London, where he sometimes used to preach. After one sermon, the British press reported with amazement, “Lord Farmer says the world is under a curse.” This would have been common knowledge a few generations ago, but it seemed incredible to moderns. Anyone studying the state of the world today would find it hard to disagree, but, of course, even in good times one out of one persons dies. Death is the curse under which all people suffer. And sin—rebellion against God—is a curse which afflicts us all. God chose Abraham out of the sinful mass of rebellious humanity and blessed him.
He promised Abraham he would father a nation which would bring blessing to the world. Something very big is going on here. Every time God spoke to Abraham he added something: first a son, and at the end a relationship. And this is surely the most important part of the promise. “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” This promise runs through the Bible like a golden thread. It is God’s masterplan for the world.
God signaled to Abraham an end to the world as we know it, an end to rebellion, evil, and suffering. A new world will come about somehow in connection with this man Abraham, who was not a good man. That is our problem: no one is good but God alone, Jesus said. No, Abraham was not good, he was a man of faith, a man who believed God’s promise and set out to follow God. A man, his family, a nation … But then as we follow the story, a nation that was meant to model to the world a blessing-bringing relationship with God, but which wanted too much to be like the world, and which shrank to a remnant, and then to just one good man who stood firm for God, and by his steadfast obedience and death brought … brought what? Hold onto that question.
Not everything was revealed to Abraham. He had to trust God. Faith is believing that God is good, that he will be true to his promises, that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, as Julian of Norwich put it.
What must most have perplexed Abraham was what would be his own place in all this future blessing. Here, the detail that the Canaanites were in the land at that time Is important. Abraham didn’t own any land; he was a nomad, grazing his animals in the open country between sophisticated Canaanite city-states. Archaeologists have dug up their remains. This is history. And here God is telling Abraham he is going to give this land—Palestine we call it now—to his descendants.
“But what about me, Lord? Not a single hectare of this land flowing with milk and honey belongs to me. I am thankful for Isaac, but he’s hardly a nation. What about me? If it’s all in the future, and I am dead, is it really much of a blessing?” He must have thought hard and long about God’s promise and his own life. “Yes Lord, you have protected me and my wife in this dangerous land. You have made me a very rich man.” Most people would see this as more of a blessing than the descendants stuff. Abraham’s grandson, Esau, didn’t place much value on the promise; he was more interested in getting hold of his father’s hard cash (mostly animals). Jacob viewed it differently, but that is another story.
There is a clue in Abraham’s story that reveals something of his thinking. When Sarah died he negotiated to buy a field with a cave in it near Hebron to bury her.[2] The Hittites wanted to give it to him as a gift, but he was insistent on paying cash and having plenty of witnesses for the transaction. He didn’t want them ever to take it back. It was the only piece of ground he ever owned in this land God had promised would one day belong to his descendants. He and Sarah were buried there. That cave is still there. It is so closely guarded by the Muslims you will probably never get to see it.
“Lord, apart from what you have promised, I do not know what the future holds for me. But you are my God and I am your child; surely that is not just for now. I must make sure Sarah and I are here in the Land for the time when you fulfil your promises.”
Some people say the Old Testament has no concept of life after death, but it seems to me that even if Abraham had no clear revelation from God—he didn’t—he knew enough about God’s day to day blessing, as well as his great promises, to suspect death was not going to cancel everything out. He was God’s friend, for goodness sake.
This is why, when we come to the New Testament, there is so much about the resurrection. When Jesus argued with the Sadducees—the Sadducees denied there would be any resurrection—he spoke of Abraham. God is not the God of the dead, Jesus said, but of the living.[3] Abraham will not only share in the resurrection of the dead at the end of the age, he is alive now. When Jesus returns, people will come from north, south, east, and west and sit down with Abraham in the kingdom of God, but when Lazarus died he went straight into Abraham’s presence.[4] Peter, in his second speech after Pentecost, explains that God raised Jesus from the dead in fulfilment of his promises to Abraham.[5] Article 7 of our Thirty Nine Articles is right on the money then when it says,
“… for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ … Wherefore they are not to be heard, which pretend that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises.”
But I asked earlier what was it that Jesus’ death brought? What is this blessing God promised Abraham? It was the land of Canaan, right—the land we call Palestine? So, finally we must ask what this promise has to do with who owns the land today.
Let me say first that the land will belong to whomever God gives it. We stress over who is the rightful owner. The rightful owner is God. No one is the rightful owner of anything in this world, and that goes as much for Aboriginal title, as it does for the land your house stands on, as it does for Palestine. We are only tenants in possession, as long as God decides. Palestine has belonged to Canaanites, Perrizites, Hittites, Girgashites, Jebusites, Israelites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Arabs, Turks, British, and now Palestinian Arabs and Israelis. What the future will be none of us knows. Yes, God promised the Land to Abraham’s descendants, but he also took it away. And, yes, he has promised to bring them back to the Land. But whether that is what is happening now, or something lying in the future, only God knows.
But let me show you something.
According to Paul the promise to Abraham was not just about the Land. In Romans 4.13 he says that he and his descendants will inherit the world. The Greek word is kosmos, which could as well be translated as “the universe.” Paul thinks the blessing that was promised Abraham was only a taste of what God actually had in mind. Not just the land of Palestine, but the whole creation. God never gives less than he promises, but sometimes he gives more.
And now we get to see the value of this promise, and why it affects us. God had in mind for Abraham a new world, and Jesus died to lead his people into that new resurrected universe.
Once we understand this, we will see how wrong it would be for Christians to join in the scramble for territory in Palestine. True, it was once occupied by Christians, but it is not our inheritance. We are holding out for something bigger and better: the kingdom of God. As Peter put it in his second letter (3.13), “According to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” And God has promised a share of this to everyone who believes in Jesus, the promised “seed” of the promise-bearing Abraham.
[1] Romans 1.5.
[2] Genesis 23 and 25.
[3] Mark 12.18–27.
[4] Luke 16.
[5] Acts 3.24–26.