The Call of Abram

A seventy-five-year-old man is packing up everything he owns. His tents. His flocks. His whole household. If his neighbours asked where he was going, the honest answer would be, “I don’t know yet. But I know who told me to go.”

His name is Abram. Much later, God will rename him Abraham. His family came from Ur of the Chaldeans, a great city in southern Mesopotamia. His father Terah set out with the family toward the land of Canaan, but they stopped partway, in a town called Haran, far to the north, and settled there. Abram is married to Sarai, and Genesis tells us something painful about them. Sarai is not able to have children. In a world where your future lived on through your children, Abram and Sarai seem to have no future at all.

Then the Lord speaks to Abram. “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household, to the land I will show you. 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 the families of the earth will be blessed through you.” Listen to how much God asks, and how much he promises. Leave your land, your relatives, your father’s house. Go to a place I haven’t even named yet. And in return? A great nation, from a man with no children. And a blessing that will reach every family on earth.

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him. That is all Genesis says. No argument. No list of questions. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took Sarai his wife, and Lot his nephew, and all the possessions they had gathered, and the people who had joined their household in Haran. And they set out for the land of Canaan. Picture the long line of travellers, flocks raising dust, tents rolled and tied, moving slowly south and west, day after day, toward a land Abram had never seen.

They arrive in Canaan and travel through the land as far as the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. And Genesis adds a quiet, important detail. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. This country is not empty. Other people already live here. And it is right there that the Lord appears to Abram and says, “To your offspring I will give this land.” Abram has no children, and he owns no land. But he builds an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

From there he moves on to the hills east of Bethel, and pitches his tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. There he builds another altar and calls on the name of the Lord. Then Abram keeps going, travelling in stages toward the Negev, the dry south country. Notice what he leaves behind him as he goes. Not cities. Not towers with his name carved on them. Altars. Wherever Abram stops, he worships the God who called him, and trusts him for a future he cannot yet see.

Ur and Haran, the two cities where Abram’s family had lived, had something in common. Both were well-known centres for the worship of the moon god, called Sin in the Akkadian language. Much later, the book of Joshua remembers that Abram’s father Terah and his family, long ago, beyond the river, served other gods. So when Abram leaves Haran, he is not only leaving a homeland. He is leaving behind the gods his family had known, to follow the one God who spoke to him.

The call of Abram. You’ll find it in Genesis chapter 12, verses 1 to 9. Abram didn’t know where he was going, but he knew who he was following. So here’s the question to carry with you. Is God asking you to take a step this week, before you can see where the path goes?