Abram Leaves Civilization by Faith

Genesis 11:27-12:4 English Standard Version (ESV)

Terah's Descendants

²⁷ Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot. ²⁸ Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. ²⁹ And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. ³⁰ Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.
³¹ Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. ³² The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.

The Call of Abram

12 Now the Lord said^[a] to Abram, “Go from your country^[b] and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. ² And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”^[c]

⁴ So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.


 
At the age of seventy-five, Abram a citizen of Ur of the Chaldeans follows the lead of his Two Hundred and Five year old father into the land of Haran. There his father dies, and he is visited by the Lord who tells Abram to go to Canaan, where God would make him a great nation, bless him, and make his name great around the world, that he would be a blessing and his offspring a blessing to the entire world. When I think about this passage, I realize that it takes faith to step out against the flow of society. We don't know much about Terrah other than he was the father of Abram. We know Terrah was very old. So why would an old man uproot his entire family and move to a far off land?

First, Ur of the Chaldeans was a nation of idolatry, later we read more about the nations that rise from this area of the world, and all of them are polytheistic.   Abram was being molded into a different type of man.  At the age of 75 our narrative begins, we don't know much about the first 74 years of his life.   We know that Sarai was probably his half-sister, his father's daughter from another wife.   We know also that Nahor took Milcah his neice to be his wife.   We know that it's Terah who prompts for the relocation, but it's Abram who gets the visit from the Lord that give him a promise.  From this point on, Abram, an old man in our standards goes forward to the claim this purpose... by faith.  

Why was Abram selected?   Well it was God's Grace, reaching out to a broken man, a man who lived in the shadow of his father for seventy five years.   God had a purpose that he poured out into Abram, maybe this gave him the faith to move forward?   We don't know his motivation.  We also learn something else, Sarai his wife/half-sister was barren, she in her 65 years of life had not yet had a child and the assumption was she was not able to conceive a child.  We know from the genealogy of the Bible, people lived a lot longer, and we know later from the next passage that Sarai was a beautiful woman, so in perspective both Abram and Sarai were in their middle age years. 

When God calls we must follow, even when the road doesn't make sense.