I was reading about Abram, the usual passage in Genesis 12 where God tells him to go out from his home to the promised land. Here’s verses 1-7:
1 The LORD had said to Abram,
“Go from your country,
your people and your father’s household
to the land I will show you.
2 “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.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”
4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.
6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
Okay, this is a pretty familiar story: Abram leaves what he knows and heads out into the unknown, because God told him to.
And we all know this as the evidence of Abram’s great faith, that before he was called Abraham, before he received the son of the promise ( a full twenty-five years before that!), he had faith in God and obeyed His word. He heard God speak and he packed up and went straight to Canaan.
As Genesis 15:6 says:
Abram believed the LORD, and He credited it to him as righteousness.
But backing up just a bit, to Genesis chapter 11, we see a little about Abram’s family: his father Terah and his brothers Nahor and Haran.
Their native land was Ur of the Chaledeans, but they weren’t actually there when Abram received this call from God.
As Genesis 11:31 says:
Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Harran, they settled there.
So it turns out they were already on their way to Canaan when Abram received this call from God. Except they had stopped along the way and settled somewhere in between Ur and Canaan.
Had Terah heard the same call from God that Abram had?
This makes me wonder what would have happened if Terah had actually gone all the way to Canaan. What if he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do? Would he have been considered the father of God’s chosen people, instead of Abraham?
But that wasn’t God’s plan, or else that’s what would have happened!
So maybe God intended for him to just get started in that direction, so that Abram would be ready to carry out the rest of the journey his father had begun when the time came?
There’s no way to know the answers to these questions, but what this story shows me is the mighty hand of God reaching across history in ways that we can’t understand.
The Bible tells us Terah was 205 years old when he died, and that Abram was 75 when he received his call. That’s a lot of years, from the perspective of a human lifespan!
But from God’s perspective, of course, it’s not much at all.
God is working in ways we can’t see, all the time.
I can imagine Terah’s disappointment in never reaching his goal and never seeing the results of his journey. I can imagine Abram’s frustration, in reaching the ripe old age of 99 before he ever saw evidence that God was going to do what He’d promised. And even then he only saw partial results.
As Hebrews 11:13 tells us, when speaking of Abraham and the forefathers of faith:
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.
So we never see the final fulfillment of God’s promises in our lifetimes. We never see the end of the story.
Because of course the story isn’t over! God’s still writing it.
For our part, all we can do is trust Him, that He will be faithful to keep His promises.
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