“1 The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go 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 left, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, 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. 8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord. 9 Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev. ”
If you are an athlete, you might be familiar with visualization techniques. When you visualize, you imagine that what you want is yours. You imagine yourself performing at your best. You imagine the feel of the track under your feet as you sprint. You imagine the basketball leaving your hand. You act as if you can hear the roar of the crowd. What does the air feel like when you step off the football field? You imagine it all. You imagine that what you want is yours and then you step into that feeling.
Faith has similarities. If visualization imagines that what you want is yours, faith imagines that what has been promised is yours. Abram did that. He pictured every nation of the world enjoying blessings because of him because that is what God promised. He felt the ground under his feet when he entered the Promised Land and he treated it as if it were his own because that is what God promised.
That’s part of faith; “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” as Hebrews 1 puts it. This reality has sadly been abused as of late by health and wealth preachers. They say, “name it and claim it.” Abram didn’t name it and claim it. He heard a promise from God, and he trusted it. That’s faith.
Promises and faith always go together. Faith claims the promises of God. That is the claim of this sermon: faith claims the promises of God.
We will see this in three points. First: the promises of God. Second: faith without works is dead. Third: traveling through the land. In verses 1-3, we see the promises of God. In verses 4-5 we see that Abram’s faith was alive because he trusted. In verses 6-9, we see Abram traveling through the land he was promised.
First: the promises of God. So faith claims the promises of God. Abram claimed the promises of God. We see these promises beginning in verse 1, ‘The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go 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 peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”’
It is hard to overstate the importance of these promises. They govern the rest of Scripture and God’s interactions with humanity up to present day. If you don’t believe me, try to imagine the rest of Scripture without these verses. There would be no Exodus. There would be no covenant, no Promised Land, no temple, no kings, no prophets, no Christ, and no church. You would, at best, be left with a few Proverbs which Solomon had borrowed from the world by way of common grace. Without the promises, you are left with nothing that the world can’t offer, and you can see for yourself that what the world can offer is a disaster. God behaves as He does today because He is keeping these promises.
People of faith have always lived by the promises of God. “Man lives not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” as Jesus put it.
There are seven of them in verses 2-3. “I will make you into a great nation,” promise number one. “I will bless you,” promise number two, and so on. The number seven here underlines the totality of blessing. If you are looking for all-inclusive blessing look no further than the God of Abram. That’s the message of these seven blessings and that’s been the message to the world ever since. Be blessed. Know Abram’s God.
The book of Genesis is preoccupied with blessing. The root for the Hebrew word we translate as “blessing” occurs 88 times in this book while it only occurs 310 times in the rest of the Old Testament combined. Even Abraham’s name sounds like the Hebrew for “I will bless.” Walking away from these verses without recognizing the importance of blessing is like walking away from a Star Wars movie without recognizing that they were ever in outer space.
The first promise, “I will make you into a great nation,” has to do with descendants. Now one of the few truths we know about Abram at this point is that his wife was unable to have children, so God’s first promise is already called into question. This genealogical line is going nowhere without God intervening. God promised He would; Abraham trusted; that’s faith.
The second promise is more general; “I will bless you.” This promise covers the stuff of life. As Gordon Wenham put it, “God’s blessing is manifested most obviously in human prosperity and wellbeing; long life, wealth, peace, good harvests, and children are the items that figure most frequently in lists of blessing.” Abram was promised a life well lived. It’s no surprise that the descriptions of the new creation run along the lines of these blessings Wenham listed.
The third promise, “I will make your name great,” stands in direct contrast to the Tower of Babel, which comes only verses before this. The Tower of Babel was humanity’s attempt to make its own name great; “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” The message of the Tower of Babel is that those who exalt themselves will be humbled. The message of Abram is that those who humble themselves will be exalted.
This promise, “I will make your name great,” also implies kingship. Abram’s descendants would include royalty. Now it’s hard for us Americans and really for all of us alive today to get our minds around the reality of kingship. It’s not hard for us, however, to get our minds around us the idea that our children are exceptional. Abram was promised that everyone would know that his descendants were exceptional. The line of this commoner would include kings. That brings you to David. That brings you to Jesus. “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” This promise leads directly to Christ. In fact, they all do.
The fourth promise merely states, “you will be a blessing.” Now every good-hearted person wants to be a blessing. Right now people of all stripes are sewing masks to be a blessing. People are picking up groceries and prescriptions for those in need to be a blessing. Every decent person wants to be a blessing to others. We want to know that our lives matter, and we measure the meaningfulness of our lives by the impact we make upon others. As Marilynne Robinson put it, “To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.” Abram was promised that he would be a blessing.
The fifth and sixth promises go together, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.” We will see this play out in Abram’s life. Pharaoh will be cursed for the way he treated Abram even though Abram wasn’t honest with Pharaoh. Melchizedek will be blessed for the way he treated Abram. God would require an eye for Abram’s eye and a tooth for Abram’s tooth and He would smile upon those who smiled upon Abram. That, of course, is true for God’s people today too.
These promises, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse,” reach their climax in Christ. The idea that the Father blesses those who bless Jesus and curses those who curse Jesus isn’t the whole of Christianity, but I dare say that it is a great deal of it. If you bless Jesus, God will bless you. If you curse Jesus, God will curse you.
This is because the way you relate to Jesus is the way you relate to God. If you are ignorant of Jesus, you are ignorant of God. If you ignore Jesus, you ignore God. If you worship Jesus, you worship God.
As we come to the seventh and final promise, please notice that these promises widen in scope. They began with Abram and his descendants. They moved out to anyone would encounter Abram. Now they move out to the entire world. These promises encompass the whole world, which is another reason we have seven of them. This is the completion of blessing. There is no way to be blessed by God apart from through Abram; “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Consider how hard it is to truly bless one person. We rightly say statements like, “if VBS just blesses one kid, it was worth it.” Blessing just one person is a notable undertaking. Try to imagine the difficulty of blessing multiple people. Try to imagine the difficulty of blessing all the peoples of the earth. That’s what we see in Jesus. That’s why the apostles went into all the world. The apostles read passages like this one we are studying and knew what must be done. Verses like this are why we support missions. They are why we were posting sermons online even before this crisis. We want to see all the people on the earth blessed and we know they can because God promised.
Now Abram didn’t understand the full scope of those promises. I don’t understand the full scope of those promises. Abram did, however, know more than enough to grab hold of those promises with both hands. People with faith like Abram do the same. You know that you’ve got faith like Abram if you’ve grabbed hold of these promises with both hands, and you grab hold of them today by grabbing hold of Jesus. You don’t determine whether you have faith like Abram by imagining what you might done if God told you to leave your home and go to the Promised Land. You determine whether you’ve got faith like Abram by looking at your response to what He has said to you. He has told you, “this is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him.” This is where the promises of Genesis 12 are fulfilled. How have you responded? Faith grabs hold of Jesus with both hands. Anything other than faith does something else.
Anything else is dead. We see that in our second point: faith without works is dead. To this point we have studied God’s promises. Now we see Abram’s faith in God’s promises. We see it in verse 4, “So Abram left, as the Lord had told him.”
That is the only faithful response to verse 1, ‘The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.”’ Abram heard and Abram obeyed. That’s faith. ‘Faith always “goes public” in acts of obedience, since a “faith” that does not obey is not a true, justifying faith at all,’ as Scott Hafemann put it.
This is the faith that saves. Abram was already believing the Lord. He was already exercising faith that justifies. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have left Mesopotamia.
Abram left because he chose to believe the promises. He chose to taste them. He chose to smell them. He chose to live as if God’s promises were more real than what he could see around him because what he could see was his inability to have children. He believed the promises of God more than he believed what he saw.
You can and must choose to treat the promises as more real than what you see around you. Tonight we are going to study Romans 8:31-32, “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave him up for us all, how will He not also with him graciously give us all things?” Choose to treat those promises as more real than what you see around you. That’s how you have faith like father Abraham.
If you have faith like father Abraham, you get what faith can get you, namely the promises. If you don’t have faith like father Abraham, you won’t get what faith can get you. You will get what a lack of faith can get you. You will get nothing. Abram would have gotten nothing if he failed to obey verse 1, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.”
The promises were conditional. The promises were null and void without obedience. Abram couldn’t stay in Mesopotamia and live under the illusion the God would make him a great nation, bless him, and bless all the world through him. That was conditional and it was conditioned upon his response.
The same is true for you. You can’t remain a slave of sin and live under the illusion that you’re forgiven. You can’t bear no fruit and live under the illusion that you are part of the vine. “Faith is a living, busy, active, mighty thing,” as Luther put it. It was for Abram. It must be for you. If it isn’t, you don’t have faith like father Abraham and that is the only faith that saves.
You see the liveliness of Abram’s faith in the unnatural nature of this call. He left everything that was familiar. A man who simply went with the flow would never do what Abram did. “A dead thing can go with the stream; only a living thing can go against it,” as Chesterton put it.
Abram went against the flow. He was, in the words of Gordon Wenham, “bidden to do something of which God [was] the sole guarantor of its successful outcome.” Abram chose to be a wanderer for the rest of his life, and he made that choice based solely upon promises from God. That’s against the flow. You need to ask yourself if God’s promises are enough for you to go against the flow. If they are, you have faith like father Abraham. If they aren’t, you don’t.
The promises were enough for Abram and so he lived as a stranger. He called himself that when he bought a grave for his wife. Now some of you have moved to a new area and know the feeling of being a stranger. Some of you have recently moved here or not so recently moved here and you feel a bit like a stranger. If you have lived here your whole life and especially if your family has been here for generations, you don’t know what it is like to be a stranger here.
I’ve been welcomed by this community and for that I’m thankful, but I will never be as much of a part of it as you are. I could be here until I die and still not be as much of a part of it as you are. That’s just a fact.
I’m sure that you’ve made it far more comfortable for me than it was for Abram. He wasn’t always welcomed. He was an economic competitor to many of his neighbors. You see just a bit of that in the way the locals backfilled his son’s wells. Abram didn’t know who to trust which is why God was quite kind to say, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”
Abram endured that because he considered the promises weightier than the cost of obedience. God’s promises are always weightier than the cost of obedience.
Please remember that because while you will feel the weight of obedience whether you want to or not, you must choose to feel the weight of the promises. Paul felt the weight of obedience; he also chose to feel the weight of the promises, which is why he could say, “We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.” That was Paul. That was Abram. That can be you. That must be you.
Abram believed the promises. He put lively faith in the promises. He acted as if they were certain. We see him acting as if they were certain in our final point: traveling through the land. Abram reached the Promised Land surprisingly early. He left in verse 4 and arrived in verse 6. I would have thought that journey would be something like Israel’s forty-year journey from Egypt to the Promised. It wasn’t.
Abram’s difficulty was quite different. When he arrived in the Promised Land and was told, “To your offspring I will give this land.” Abram wouldn’t possess the land in his lifetime. As verse 6 makes clear there were already people living in it.
Abram had a choice between giving up on the promises of God because he wouldn’t see them in his lifetime or believing that God would keep His promises even after his own death. Abram chose to believe. He chose to make the promises so real that he could taste them. He chose to make them so real that he could touch them. Faith is, after all, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
You see his faith in the travelogue of verses 6-9. This describes his tour of the Promised Land. He built an altar to God at Shechem, which was roughly the center of the Promised Land. He was tasting the promises. He was smelling them. He was visualizing them. He did so until he arrived at the southernmost edge of it. He toured the Promised Land which was promised to him.
He had faith in the promises. You see this in his worship. At Shechem he built an altar to the Lord who had called him to take this journey. When he pitched his tents between Bethel and Ai because there were Canaanites in those cities, he, “called on the name of the Lord,” as verse 8 puts it. In Genesis, and throughout Scripture, calling on the name of the Lord is a reference to formal worship.
Abram’s heart overflowed with awe for God for making these promises. As he toured the land, Abram thought he was getting far more from God than he was giving and so he worshipped. He recognized that he had been called by grace and so he worshipped. He visualized the promises and so he worshipped.
Abram worshipped in the midst of nothing but promises. You might feel as if you are there this morning. Perhaps you feel as if you’ve got nothing keeping you going but the promises of God. Remember, that’s all you need to live. “Man lives not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
The promises are enough. You know how trusting in the promises turned out for Abram. God knew how it would turn out for Abram at the beginning, which is why He called Abram to trust the promises. God knows how it will turn out for you if you trust the promises, which is He calls you to trust the promises.
Abram trusted the promises that led to Jesus. The essential difference between you and Abram is that you see as a person what he saw as a promise. He believed the promise and was justified. You believe the person and are justified. That’s faith. Anything other than that is something else entirely. Amen.