Get Thee Out

A seventy-five-year-old man with no children packs up everything he owns and walks out of the most advanced city in the world, because a voice told him to, toward a place the voice would not name. That is how the people of God begin. Not with a law, not with a temple, not with a book. With one old man and a sentence that starts "get thee out," and a promise he would not live to see.

The other side of the flood

Joshua, at the end of his life, told Israel where they came from, and he did not make it pretty: "Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham… and they served other gods" (Joshua 24:2). Ur of the Chaldees was a great city with a great moon-god, and Abram's family worshipped it. There is no hint that he went looking for the LORD. "And I took your father Abraham from the other side of the flood" (24:3). Took. Stephen, on trial, says the same: "The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia" (Acts 7:2). God went and got him.

The family gets as far as Haran and stops. Terah dies there. And then the sentence:

Look at what he is told to leave, in order: country, kindred, father's house. Each ring smaller and closer than the last. And look at what he is told about where he is going: "a land that I will shew thee." No name. No direction. The promise is enormous, a nation, a great name, all the families of the earth, and the instructions are one line: go, and I will show you. The writer of Hebrews says it exactly: "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went" (Hebrews 11:8).

So Abram departed

"So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him… and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran" (Genesis 12:4). No argument, no delay, no verse of deliberation. Seventy-five, childless, married to a woman the text has already told us is barren, and he goes. He arrives in Canaan and the LORD appears and says "unto thy seed will I give this land," to a man with no seed, and Abram's answer is to build an altar, and then move on and build another one. He never builds a house. Hebrews notices: "By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles… For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:9-10). He was given the land and lived in it as a stranger, in tents, his whole life. The only piece of it he ever owned was a grave.

And the Bible does not tidy him. The first thing that happens in the promised land is a famine, and Abram goes down to Egypt and tells Pharaoh his wife is his sister, and is thrown out. He will do it again in Gerar. This is the friend of God, and he lied about his wife to save his skin, twice, and God kept the promise anyway.

Faith opposed faith, and command promise. Chrysostom saw that the whole of Abraham's life was God's word set against God's word, and the man holding both. That is the shape of it from here to the end.

Tell the stars

Years pass and there is no child. And Abram, who has never once talked back, finally does. "LORD God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?" (Genesis 15:2). What is the point of all this if my servant inherits it? It is an honest question and God does not rebuke it. He takes him outside. "Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be" (15:5).

That is the verse Paul built Romans on, and James too, and they do not disagree about it as much as people say. An old man stood under the desert sky, with nothing in his hands and a barren wife in the tent, and took God at His word about a thing that was biologically impossible, and God called that righteousness. Not the altar-building. Not the leaving of Ur, though that was faith too. The believing. "Who against hope believed in hope… he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform" (Romans 4:18-21). Considered not his own body. He did not pretend the facts were other than they were. He weighed them and weighed the One who had promised, and the promise weighed more.

He still laughed. When God told him at ninety-nine that Sarah would bear a son, "Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed" (17:17), and Sarah laughed behind the tent door, and God asked the question that answers itself: "Is any thing too hard for the LORD?" (18:14). Twenty-five years after "get thee out," the boy was born, and they named him Laughter, Isaac, and Sarah said, "God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me" (21:6).

Where this lands

Isaiah calls him "Abraham my friend" (Isaiah 41:8), and James says that is what the believing under the stars made him: "Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God" (James 2:23). The first thing God ever did with a human being after the flood, when He set out to make a people, was to make a friend. Everything else, the nation, the law, the kings, the prophets, came through that friendship. And the promise in the middle of the call, "in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed," Paul says was the gospel, preached early: "the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham" (Galatians 3:8).

Which is why Jesus could say to men who claimed Abraham as their father, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad" (John 8:56). The stars Abraham was told to count included one over Bethlehem. The seed he was promised, Paul says, was singular, and was Christ; and everyone who believes the way Abraham believed, taking God at His word against the evidence in their own body, is counted in: "if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:29). It still starts the same way. A voice, a "get thee out," no map, and a promise you will not see the end of. He went out not knowing whither. He knew Who.

Related: Faith Is a Verb, The Book of the Generations, The Binding of Isaac, and Servants and Chosen. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.