Genesis 12:1 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Genesis 12:1

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‘Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house.’ Abram now begins the journey of faith. In the previous chapter we saw his departure from Ur of the Chaldees, and at the start of chapter 12 he is no longer in Ur of the Chaldees. He had already been called out and now he is in Haran, and he remains there with Terah his father for some years – a pause on the route. The instruction was to go towards Canaan. God would show him the destination in the course of time, but initially they appeared to know only the direction. When eventually Abram arrived in Canaan the Lord indicated to him, this is the land. There was a pause at Haran, and after the death of his father, Terah, Abram (as he was called then) continued the journey to Canaan when he was 75 and Sarai, his wife, was 65 years of age. Idolatry had spread throughout the earth, and other gods were worshipped. They were worshipped in Ur of the Chaldees, and Terah evidently had fallen into the worship of other gods (Joshua 24:2). There has been all kinds of speculation about the standing of Terah. Terah had been an idolater. In fact, all the family of Abraham, his immediate forebears, appear to have gone over to idolatry. Worship of the sun and the stars, the heavenly bodies, and worship of ancestors – both kinds of worship – are mentioned in the book of Genesis, and that had taken over. That was the whole cause of Babel. Sadly, Abraham’s family tradition as worshippers of the true God had been somewhat left behind. They surely had certain documents from the early days; all the way down from the early period referred to in Genesis 1, records were compiled and kept; things were passed down from generation to generation. Abram probably knew a good deal about his family history and its interaction with the true God. But he now received a call from God, an unmistakable call. He was in absolutely no doubt that God had called him out of Ur of the Chaldees to a place he knew nothing about, and he was to go into danger and difficulty in order to receive future blessing.Had Terah, Abraham's father, with Abraham, given up those gods? Perhaps he had, but he hadn't found truth, because he was to be the cause, it appears, of them pausing on the journey to Canaan. It was only after his death, we read in Acts 7, that Abraham proceeded on to continue his journey of faith in obedience to God. He is called out of ‘his father’s house’, and although Moses doesn't specifically say ‘from thy father’ it may be that this call was preparing him for the day when he must bury his father, and proceed on without him.From a human point of view, Abram received a call from a seemingly obscure God. Nobody believed in the true and living God, the Creator of heaven and earth. Idolatry was everywhere. Faith had been obliterated; people of faith were few and far between. In the chapters of Genesis, we come across Melchizedek who Abram met, and then there's Job himself, not mentioned in the book of Genesis but also from that time. So there were certain individuals, but by and large, nobody much knew about the true God. Abram, having been called by him felt isolated and alone, and God made promises to him, but they all were to find fulfilment in the future, and most of them in the distant future. Furthermore, it seemed inconceivable that they could ever be fulfilled, because of the circumstances that Abram was in, and as he proceeds in this life of faith, trusting God, some of those promises seem to recede even more into the future and God informs and they will not be for him but for his seed. And yet for all that the call is so clear that he must trust it; he dare not question it. He is to leave his country, his kindred, and his father’s house, into a land which has not even been revealed to him yet. All his security was lay in the integrity of God’s promise, and not in things he could see.

Application

Ur of the Chaldees was a very sophisticated place as revealed by relatively modern excavations. Abraham had to leave it and go into the unknown. This was the call of God. He had to leave the city of protection and comfort, from where his culture came, his lifestyle, everything he had. What a picture of conversion! That in a nutshell is what has gone wrong in many, many churches that appear in some ways to be Bible-believing churches. People have not been called out of their former culture, their former lifestyle, their former delights and entertainments and recreations, their former aspirations and ambitions. They are still in them. They are still living as worldlings. They call themselves culturally progressive as a kind of excuse for remaining in the old country, and yet claim to be trusting in the blood of Christ for salvation – taking the benefits, but not acting in obedience and coming out and repenting from the old life.

Questions

What were these other gods? Possibly they were the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon, and the stars, because we learn that they were being worshipped in Job chapter 31, and Job lived at about this same time. Then also the book of Job contains a mysterious reference in the words of Eliphas: ‘to which of the saints wilt thou turn?’, (Job 5:1). Would you consult the saints? Of course, Job would never have done so, but who were the saints? Well clearly they were venerated ancestors, people who had died, who were treated as gods. That is another very ancient form of human idolatry. There have always been alternatives to God, to the true God, and they are mentioned in those books. Today there are all manner of gods, material gods, ideological celebrities – all kinds of things are worshipped in this atheistic world.

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Genesis 12:1 Commentary and Bible Study