Genesis 12:1-3

THE CALL OF ABRAM, Genesis 12:1-3.

The history now narrows again to a single branch of the family of Terah Abram and his descendants. The other branches, which are only incidentally alluded to hereafter as they are connected with the fortunes of the covenant people, remained in Chaldea at least for generations, and a large portion of them settled around the wells of Haran, where, in the days of Isaac and Jacob, we find them forming a community which furnished these patriarchs wives of their kinsfolks, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah, while the sons of Abram were still sojourners among the children of Ham. It was now more than four centuries since God’s last revelation to Noah, and the blessing of Shem. The scattered nations were fast sinking into idolatry; but that the knowledge of God was yet in the earth, incidental notices, as that of “Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of the most high God,” sufficiently declare. Where there was such a priest, and a royal priest, there must have been established worship and a number of worshippers. Probably the history of Job, the patriarch of Uz, wherein, as Ewald says, the manners, customs, style of thought and expression are all of the pre-Mosaic age, furnishes another example of genuine faith in the true God among a people who had never heard of the Abrahamic covenant.

But Abram was now called from the family of Terah to be a blessing to the whole earth; the father of a missionary nation, who should preserve and disseminate the knowledge of the true God through all nations and ages. His whole life was to be an education in faith, which is the root of true religion. “Every movement in the physical and ethical history of Abraham is fraught with instruction of the deepest interest for the heirs of immortality. The leading points in spiritual experience are here laid before us. The susceptibilites and activities of a soul born of the Spirit are unfolded to our view. These are lessons for eternity.” Murphy. It is in this way that the biblical history is so profitable for doctrine, counsel, and instruction in righteousness.