The Call of Abram: The Word He Left Everything For (Genesis 12)

So Abram departed

Abram took God at His word and went. "So Abram departed, as the LORD had directed him" (Genesis 12:4). Seventy-five years old, he gathered Sarai, Lot and everything they owned and set out for a country God still had not named (Genesis 12:5). This is what it looks like to know the God who speaks: you weigh the word against everything you can see, and then you move on the word. Terah settled in Haran and died there. Abram heard, and went.

Watch where he stopped. At the Oak of Moreh at Shechem the LORD appeared and said, "I will give this land to your offspring" (Genesis 12:7). Abram was standing in a land full of Canaanites, owning none of it, with no offspring at all, and God called it his children's. So Abram built an altar there. He moved on toward Bethel, built another, and "called on the name of the LORD" (Genesis 12:8). Those altars were markers. Abram was pinning the word to the ground at the exact spot God spoke it, so he could come back and remember what was said there on the days the promise ran slow.

The promise the whole Bible is chasing

Abram's journey led to Jesus because the blessing promised through his line came at last in Christ, born of Abram's family. That last line, "all the families of the earth will be blessed through you," is the promise at the heart of the whole Bible. Paul read it and wrote that the offspring God meant was finally "One, who is Christ" (Galatians 3:16). The blessing for every family on earth walked out of Abram's line and into a manger in Bethlehem. And the way Abram received it, hearing a word and leaving on it before he could see the end, is the very faith the writer of Hebrews held up: "By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, without knowing where he was going" (Hebrews 11:8).

What this means when God has spoken and you cannot see the land

Here is the lift. You may be carrying a promise from God that came with no map, a sense of where He is taking you and no clear sight of how you will get there. Abram shows you what to do with it. Build your altar. Write the word down at the place He gave it, plainly, with the date, so it is kept somewhere outside your own memory. Then read it back on the days the land is still out of sight, and let it hold you the way it held a man of seventy-five walking toward a country he had never seen. What has God said to you that you once set out on, and have you written it down where you can find it again? Get it into the Doxa app today; that is what the app is for.

Deeper study today in the Doxa Deeper Dive, on the command lech-lecha, the altars Abram built at Shechem and Bethel, and why the blessing of all nations leads straight to Christ. Read it here.