The Legacy of Abraham

January 10, 1993

Genesis 15:6 "And Abram believed God and it was counted unto him as righteousness."

It may be that you have started the New Year by beginning again to read your Bible through. I visited Mary Rankin this week, and as sick as she is, her Bible was open at Genesis 12.

Abraham is the first three-dimensional character of the Old Testament. Oh, we think we know Adam and Cain and Abel, and Noah, but they really are pretty shadowy in my mind. But somehow Abraham comes across the millennia as a real person, great enough to be the father of three great world religions, and real enough to be shown as fudging the truth when he was in a dangerous place, although in the end no one ever came across with more integrity before God.

Abraham is a good person to think about in the formation of our own walk with God. Every stop along the way of Abraham's life is worthy of concentrated study. But come with me for a brief overview of the whole sweep of his magnificent faith walk.

  1. A second generation pilgrim. His father, Terah started for Canaan, but settled down in a civilized place and died there. Abraham had the formidable task of respectfully surpassing his own preceding generation. Maybe that is no problem to the hubris of the youth today. It certainly was for me.
  2. A trail-blazing obedience. (12:1) Abraham started for Canaan even though he had never been there before, nor knew anyone who had. He made his mistakes; he lived in tents; he fled to Egypt. He prospered. But in it all he walked by faith.
  3. A self-effacing humility. ( ) He would rather give up things than to stand and fight with friends and loved ones. He said to his nephew "You choose!" And in effect he was saying to God "When it comes to my pathway, YOU choose!"
  4. A noble faith. (15:6) Abraham was unwilling to accuse God, even though he did not understand why he seemed to be misunderstanding the original promise. "Maybe I need to lower my idea of what you meant?" he seemed to ask.

    In reply God took Abraham out under the stars. Sometimes I wish our children could look at the stars more than they do! It is hard to hear a word from God when all our leisure time is filled with spiritual emptiness at best— and spiritual garbage at worst.

    Perhaps a comment or two on our viewing habits is in order here? I don't think it is totally irrelevant that we are a generation of faith-pygmies and we watch TV, while Abraham was taken out of his tent and under the canopy of the heavens to get a perspective on just how small he really was in comparison to how big God's Creation really is. I've seen some pretty awesome things on the 19-inch tube, but they're still just images of the real thing.

    And some of the things we absorb from that tube positively stunt our possibilities of nobility and growth in faith!

    In the latest Herald of Holiness there was a powerful paragraph written by Paul and Marilyn Turner in their "marriage enrichment" column. Listen:

    "We do not arrive at a healthy self-esteem by absorbing the voyeuristic daytime public confessionals, erroneously called talk shows. These are strange programs in self-esteem that reward people for amassing weird aberrations but dispute others for claiming to be healthy. If you're healthy you may be accused of being "in denial." We pay a big price for a pathology that lessens our inner peace and fills our minds with trash." [J. Paul & Marilyn Turner in Herald of Holiness, January, 1993 issue.]

    This noble faith of Abraham joined with the promise of the Eternal God in this seemingly uneventful chapter (15) and became a COVENANT. Perhaps this is the essence of the Bible: God is a covenant making God dealing with believing men and women! "Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness!"

  5. Abraham was a major-league intercessor. He saw his nephew delivered even as he saw God's judgment on the evil citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah ( ) The dialogue "Will the LORD spare Sodom for 50, 45, 40, —down to 10...??" Perhaps we stand closer to God's wrath than we realize today; perhaps we are more like Lot than we are like Abraham. But we do see the principle that righteous people are somehow a deterrent to judgment day wrath. And we see the powerful influence of one person who has the courage to ask God to spare others!
  6. Abraham tried to help God along, and instead produced forces that eventually became rivals to his own interests. Ishmael should never have been born, although the Arabs believe the other way 'round!
  7. Abraham gave up his dearest love for the love of God, and in so doing he became actually a living portrait of God the Father in His love for a needy world. (22)
  8. Abraham rates 10 chapters in Genesis, and countless references in the New Testament. In Romans 4, and Galatians 3, and in Hebrews 11 we are reminded again of the "father of faith," Abraham, the man who dared to believe God. James ( 2:21,23) calls Abraham "a friend of God."

We cannot be giants of the same stature as Abraham. But we can have the very same quality of integrity in our dealings with God. We can be honest. We can be obedient. We can give God our most precious gifts in the confidence that He will not waste them... "God will not waste a consecrated life!"

Prayer

#397 Where He Leads Me