A Complicated Prologue

 

Genesis 12:1-9

June 7, 2026

 

Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.

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.

I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

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.

Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother's son Lot and all the possessions that they had gathered and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran, and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan,

Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.

Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.

And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

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            Genesis is largely a family epic.  Beginning with what we’ve heard today, it tells us about the ups and downs of an extended family that moved around the Middle East, from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast to Syria to Egypt, over a period of generations during the Bronze Age.  We cannot put solid dates on any of it, but we’re talking about somewhere from 2000 B.C. to 1300 B.C., give or take.

            There’s a lot in their lives that is strange to us.  Slavery and polygamy play a big part.  There are examples of fortune-telling and idol worship and echoes of child sacrifice.  We hear about desert chieftans and absolute monarchs.  There are horses, but camels had not yet been domesticated.  Many events hinge on finding enough water and pasture for the sheep and goats.

            Much of the tension comes from situations that are familiar, though.  There are marital arguments.  Parents play favorites.  Teenagers fall in love.  People try to scam each other on business deals.  Some of them become refugees from natural disasters or get caught between warring neighbors.  Disagreements over inheritance turn ugly.  Babies are born and people get themselves cushy jobs.  They worry about aging.  Life goes on.

            That life that continues from generation to generation is defined by the underlying guidance and protection of the Lord who singles out a seventy-five-year-old man named Abram who is living in Haran, in what’s now southeastern Turkey, and living (apparently) quite comfortably, and tells him to leave it all.

"Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  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.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." [Genesis 12:1-3]

There is so much missing from this statement.  Was Abram used to hearing from God?  Did he question his sanity?  Did Sarai, his wife, have a word or two to say about this?  They had a nephew who seems to be a part of their household.  What led them to take him with them and what led him to go along?  They had so much going for them:

“all the possessions that they had gathered and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran,” [Genesis 12:5]

and the trip was taking them through some decent land along the eastern Mediterranean, and as they passed through there

“the Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring [which he did not have] I will give this land.’" [Genesis 12:7]

Instead, Abram and Sarai and Lot and the crew kept traveling south toward the Negeb, that is the desert. [Genesis 12:9]

            Everything that happened to them, and to the family that they unexpectedly continued, had the same divine presence and divine promise in the background.  God spoke to some of them, but maybe not to all of them, across the centuries.  At times they are intimately aware of him and at other points they just wonder whether he has been at work without their knowledge behind the scenes, so that when you take not just the lives of Abram and Sarai but also the lives of their descendants all together, what we end up seeing is that rather than God being part of their story, they are part of God’s story.

            Their world was one filled with petty kings who considered themselves mighty warriors and overlapped with an age when the first large empires on earth were taking shape.  Yet it was into the seemingly insignificant and often messed-up family that looked back to Abram and Sarai and in the middle of that particularly chaotic part of the world that the God who had called Abram and Sarai to make some strange choices would himself, through a similarly inexplicable, miraculous birth, take on human form.  At that moment, another descendant of theirs would write,

“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” [John 1:14]

The blessing God gave that family made the way for all people of the earth to be blessed, to be redeemed, to be one family, fully his own.