The Masterplan of Redemption Unveiled

The Call of Abraham, Part 1

The Father of Us All

Aside from Jesus Christ, Abraham is probably the most significant person to show up in Scripture. Jesus’ own qualification as the Christ, as the Messiah, even hung upon His relation to Abraham. That is to say, had Jesus not been a descendent of Abraham, He would not have been the Christ. That’s why Matthew, in tracing Jesus’s lineage, begins with Abraham (Matt. 1:2), and Luke’s genealogy of our Lord goes through Abraham (Lk. 3:34). The Apostle speaks of Abraham as the “man of faith” (Gal. 3:9), and if you are a Christian, you must follow in his footsteps (Rom. 4:12). You must become a son or daughter of this great man, “who is the father of us all” (Rom. 4:16). Abraham is important, and his life of faith is instructive for our own.

In Gen. 12, we come to Abraham’s beginning. But it is much more than that. It is the beginning of God’s covenant people. It is the beginning of God’s covenant relationship with the nation of Israel: the first nation that shall descend from Abraham. In this chapter, we have the beginning of the nation of Israel—and it is also our beginning, that is, us Gentile believers. All non-Jewish Christians are as so many wild olive shoot grafted into the people of Israel—the people of Abraham. Our descendants were once alienated from the commonwealth of Israel; they were strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world (Eph. 2). But then through Christ, through the true Offspring of Abraham, we were brought into the fold, into the household of faith. We have been adopted so that Abraham is now our father. And if he is our father, then the promises made to him are our promises. Gen. 12, then, is Abraham’s beginning, but it’s also ours—it is also yours, provided you love the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Text: Gen. 12:1-3

Now the Lord said to Abram: “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

A Book of Beginnings

Now, if we pan out a bit and look at Abraham’s beginning in the scope of the book of Genesis—remember we’re in the twelfth chapter—we also need to recognize that this beginning is not the beginning of God’s dealings with man. Actually, it is something like the third or fourth beginning.

The book of Genesis is a book full of beginnings. Gen. 1, of course, tells us of the beginning of the cosmos, of God’s creation of all things. But then with Gen. 2 we have a movement toward mankind; the camera zooms in on God’s relationship to mankind in particular. In Gen. 2, we’re given the beginning of mankind in the Garden. Gen. 4 tells of the beginning of mankind’s life outside of the Garden, after Adam’s transgression of the first covenant. Gen. 9 gives another beginning: this time of mankind after the flood. All of these beginnings look different, but they all seem to come to the same end. They start off with God moving toward mankind, with counsel, with kindness, with blessing. But they end with mankind turning away from their Creator and going their own way. With this apostasy comes disaster.

The Divided Race of Cain

For instance, in Gen. 4, we have the beginning of mankind exiled from the Garden. It begins with Cain and culminates with God’s decision to destroy mankind with a flood in Gen. 6. It is the story of mankind turning away from God and giving himself over to his passions. The Lord calls Cain to master the sin of envy and of anger that lurks in his heart, but Cain refuses to. He gives himself over to his hatred of his brother, and he slaughters Abel. Cain becomes a fugitive and a wanderer. The earth that soaked up Abel’s blood, refused to bring forth fruit for Cain (Gen. 4:12). And that whole race of men followed in his footsteps so that by Noah’s day—some seven or eight generations down from Cain and Abel—only one faithful household remained.

In Noah’s day, the whole earth was filled with violence. Men had given themselves over to envy and strife and fits of rage. Mankind was split against itself, tribal and destructive, with brother divided against brother: “The earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence [. . .] all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth” (Gen. 6:11-12).

The Lord was not pleased with this. He regretted having made man (Gen. 6:6), and He determined to blot out man from the face of the earth. He would de-create what He had made because of what it had become. Mankind was originally made to be united together. We have one common father and mother. We share the same blood and, most importantly, we have all been made in the same image—in the image of God, He made us (Gen. 1:27). But that race of man corrupted this image with divisiveness and strife. Instead of loving and supporting one another, mankind was filled with jealousies and violence. The Lord took and spared one man, one household that had remained faithful to Him in the midst of widespread godlessness, and He destroyed the rest. This was the end of Cain’s race, the divided race.

United in Rebellion

In the period after the flood, we have another beginning. The flood waters subsided and the Lord promised never again to curse the ground because of man. God blessed Noah and his son, and He repeated to them the commission given originally to Adam and Eve. He said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 9:1). From this household, mankind had another beginning. But this new beginning would also end in faithlessness. They did not give themselves over to their passions, to the violence and envy that marked Cain and the strife-driven race that followed in his ways. It was not a mankind divided against itself. It was, rather, a mankind united, but united in their rebellion against God—not much different than humanism and globalism in our own day.

God had called these descendants of Noah to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, but in Gen. 11, we read that they refused to obey the Lord in this. “Come,” they said, “Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 12:4). They were united in rebelling against God in order to form themselves into a great nation, and make for themselves a great name, and, ultimately, to create a home apart from God. But no home of that kind is to be found. All such attempts are dead ends.

The Lord noticed them. He took note of their self-exalting ambitions, and He came to visit them. He did not visit them with a flood; He would not break His promise. Instead He came down to their little tower, and confused their language, so that they could no longer understand one another. Their unity was fragile because it was not grounded in Him. The Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and their city was left incomplete—a monument of mankind’s failed shot at imagining a unity apart from God. It was left the Tower of Babel, the Tower of Confusion. And so ends the united but godless race of mankind.

Now at this point, you begin to feel a kind of despair for mankind. Will they ever get it right? You’re eleven chapters into Genesis, mankind’s about two thousand years old—and you begin to wonder where all of this is going. What’s God going to do? Is He going to just forsake mankind altogether now? If not, how is He going to deal with fickle mankind who is either full of envy and strife, brother turned against brother, or, when we’re united, united in rebelling against Him? We begin to ask the question: How is God going to get mankind to unite, but unite in the right kind of way? And then we come to Gen. 12.

We sense this despair, and then we come to a new beginning, the beginning of Abraham—and, as I’ve already said above, we come to our beginning. And not just our beginning, but the beginning of the new mankind which will live forever, united together and united together to God.

This means that as we venture into the life of Abraham, we’re not simply venturing into the life of a great saint. We’re venturing into the very future of redeemed mankind—a future certainly future to Abraham—but also future to us. Abraham’s story is not over yet, nor will ever truly end. It is a story we’re now in, and a story which will have its consummation, its dénouement, its finale at the resurrection.

The Masterplan Unveiled

In Gen. 12, with the call of Abraham—at the time, still named Abram—we see the beginning of God’s masterplan unveiled. Despite all of mankind’s waywardness, the Lord has not given up on us. He does not throw up His hands and say it’s hopeless. He intends to bless us. He intends to unite mankind back to Himself and to one another, so that we might be His people and He our God. With this chapter, He begins to show His hand. He begins to show us how He’s going to do it. The rest of the Bible—indeed, the rest of history—grows out of this.

With Abraham, God takes a rank pagan. He draws him out from the heathen darkness he’s surrounded by. The Lord draws him to Himself. And he does this by making Him a promise, or a set of promises:

Now the Lord said to Abram: ‘Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The Lord God promises Abraham four things. He promises him, first, to make of Him a great nation; second, to give him the land as his inheritance; third, to give him a great name so that all the nations will bless themselves by him; and, a fourth, the Lord promises to make him a blessing so that all the families of the earth will be blessed in him. Notice that the first three of these are just what those at Babel sought after. They wanted to be a united people—a great nation. They wanted a place—a city and a tower whose head was in the heavens. And they wanted to make for themselves a great name among men. They wanted these things, but they did not seek them from the hand of the Lord. And they did not seek them for the sake of the rest of mankind. In other words, they wanted them selfishly and godlessly. By promising these things to Abraham, the Lord acknowledged that these things are good. But He grounded them in His Word, and ordered them to their proper end. The Lord God will give Abraham a place. He will make of him a great nation. He will give him a great name. The Lord God Himself will do these things for Abraham and his descendants, and He will bless all the families of earth through them. This is the grand trajectory of God’s redemptive plan. It runs its course through the whole Old Testament, and is then fully manifested and secured in the New Testament.

God promise here to bless all the families of the earth through the faithfulness of His covenant people, descending from Abraham culminates in the faithfulness of Christ who secures the promises of the covenant through the shedding of His blood. Our Lord Jesus Christ purges our sin and puts away, once and for all, every obstacle that would hinder God from fulfilling these promises, thus perfecting our faith. All are welcomed into these promises made over to Abraham in Christ Jesus, God’s Yes and Amen (2 Cor. 1:20).