God’s redemptive activity on behalf of the human race took a significant change of direction with the call of a middle-aged man who lived in ancient Mesopotamia. His name was Abram. Genesis 1—11 implies that up to that time God had acted without mediation. These eleven chapters do two things: (1) they answer the question of why the human race is in such a predicament—seeking but never finding lasting happiness, and (2) they picture the Creator endeavoring to make people aware of their need and attempting to create barriers to their further unhappiness.1 Genesis 3:9 records the Lord God speaking directly to Adam and Eve, asking the question, “Where are you?” in an effort to elicit the sense of need required for restoration. In general, God apparently used the stimulus of conscience to guide the human race in living out his creative intention for it.
The great flood of Noah’s day was an act of judgment resulting from the reversal of creation, not just a punishment for the sin of the flood generation. As Joseph Blenkinsopp put it, “The world in which order first arose out of a primeval watery chaos is now reduced to the watery chaos out of which it arose—chaos come-again.”2 Thus the pattern could be seen as moving from creation to uncreation and then to re-creation. The words of Gen. 6:12 that “all flesh had corrupted its way upon earth” suggest that natural laws had been broken by all levels of created beings and that the orderly work of creation had been dissolved.3 The flood could be viewed as an attempt not only to bring the human race back to its original destiny but also to restore creation to its original order. Although deeply sorry he had created humans, God did not totally destroy them but found one righteous man who was the agent in this second attempt at a paradise. However, all this was to no avail, as the postflood events in Noah’s immediate family demonstrated and the incident of the Tower of Babel validated.
Two of the major interpreters of Gen. 1—11, Gerhard von Rad and Claus Westermann, emphasize that while these chapters reflect the spread of sin and the intensification of moral evil, the structure also emphasizes that each major violation of the order God intended for the human race was accompanied by the manifestation of grace. Each transgression resulted in the declaration of judgment, but in each case, they point out, the punishment is lessened. This pattern is so pervasive that, following the insights of von Rad and Westermann, David Clines suggests that one can inscribe over this prepatriarchal history the words of Paul: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom. 5:20).4
On the surface, God does not seem to manifest his grace by the lessening of the punishment following the ill-fated attempt at building a secular city (Babylon), whose tower served as a brash monument to an alternative religion. Nevertheless, if we recognize that the break at chapter 12 was not original, the call of Abram was the most dramatic and obvious of all the manifestations of grace.
With the awakening of Abram and his call, God was choosing a partner in this redemptive enterprise. Abram himself was to be a recipient of God’s blessing, but in this position he was to be not only the model of the Lord’s creative intention for humanity but also the source of the family through whom God intended to put the world to rights. By living out the divine design, Abram could provide what an abstract voice and the guidance of conscience could never adequately do. This “election” purpose was expressed in the outcome of Abram’s faithful response to God’s call, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (v. 3).5 In making this same point, N. T. Wright refers to a Jewish tradition based on Gen. 12 that said, “Abraham will be God’s means of undoing the sin of Adam.” Wright adds,
Thus at key moments—Abraham’s call, his circumcision, the offering of Isaac, the transition from Abraham to Isaac, and from Isaac to Jacob, and in the sojourn in Egypt—[the Old Testament] narrative quietly makes the point that Abraham and his family inherit, in a measure, the role of Adam and Eve.… We could sum up this aspect of Genesis by saying: Abraham’s children are God’s true humanity, and their homeland is the new Eden.6
He further quotes a Jewish rabbi who said, “God made Adam first so that if he went bad, he could send Abraham to put things right.”7
We have referred to Abram’s call. Some have suggested that a more appropriate word is “election.” It is true that the call of Abram was quite different from other calls about which we read in the Old Testament, such as the call of Isaiah or Jeremiah. Moreover, the term “election” in Scripture does carry the connotation of vocation. One distinctive feature of Abram’s call or election is that it was in the form of a promise. In the light of Abram’s background and context, as we shall see below, one could suppose that his election would have emphasized the consequences of maintaining a certain lifestyle. However, it was the summons to neither law nor discipline. If either had been the case, he would have responded from fear rather than faith.
An important issue we need to address is the nature of Abram’s election. Was it unilateral, as some have suggested? If so, it would have been arbitrary, because others would have been excluded. God would have been playing favorites. This is unacceptable in the light of later revelation. We must also reject the suggestion that Abram was chosen because he possessed certain inherent gifts that made him uniquely qualified for this vocation. If we do otherwise, we would be excluding the fact that the choice was by grace alone. These are important matters that have exercised the minds of theologians and biblical students from the beginning. From the Wesleyan perspective the response to them takes a specific form, but that form finds support from within the Jewish faith itself. In a video series exploring the various world religions, 8the researcher was interviewing a Jewish rabbi and asked him the crucial question, “Why did God choose the Jews?” We ask the same question about Abram. The rabbi responded, “God was calling everyone; only Israel (Abram) heard the call and responded.” The prophet Amos seconds this very Wesleyan way of answering the election question: “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? says the Lord. Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7).
Abram’s election was a critical moment in human history that set in motion a movement that wove its way across the succeeding centuries through the “children of Abraham.” Thus Abram became the fountainhead of a redemptive race that took many forms over the years and reached its ideal culmination in Jesus Christ and his church (composed of both Jews and Gentiles). That church became the children of Abraham in the Spirit (see Rom. 9:6-8) and so inherited the vocation of being God’s redemptive agency in the world.
When Matthew, writing to a Jewish audience, began his gospel by identifying Jesus of Nazareth as the son of Abraham, he was implicitly declaring that the mediation of redemption was taking a radical new direction. And in recounting John the Baptist’s declaration that the Pharisees’ claim was empty when they asserted they were children of Abraham according to the flesh (see 3:7-9), Matthew was explicitly proclaiming that the redemptive community God had all along intended was coming into being.
The old community had, by all standards, failed to fulfill its intended function. It had frustrated its election purpose by failing to understand why it had been initially chosen in Abraham. It had repeatedly failed to embody God’s design for the human race in its corporate life. These failures resulted in divine judgment, culminating in the Babylonian captivity of 587 BC, which eclipsed the nation of Judah.
It is altogether possible that Matthew had this background in mind when summarizing the lineage of Jesus. The theological significance of arranging his preparatory history (1:1-17) in a sequence of fourteen generations, concluding with the Babylonian captivity, suggests what N. T. Wright has argued: from the perspective of the Jewish community at the time of Jesus’ birth, the Babylonian captivity had never really ended.9 True, some had returned home and a community of sorts had been restored under the Maccabees. However, as John Bright observed, “It was a singularly unlovely state.”10 Except for this brief period, they had never recovered the independence of the Davidic era. They had never actually been “redeemed.” They never really became what they were called into being to be, a model of the kingdom of God.
Abraham himself was more than the ancestor of Israel and the spiritual ancestor of the New Israel, the church. He was (or became) a model of what God’s partner in the redemptive task was to be. This claim is reflected in the extent to which a number of New Testament writers use Abraham as a pattern to be imitated. Paul uses him as an illustration of his teaching about justification by faith both in Romans (4:1-3) and Galatians (3:6-9). In both these passages Paul is referring, at least in part, to Gentile believers as children of Abraham. The author of Hebrews refers to Abraham’s faith and stewardship in affirmative terms (6:13; 7:1-2; 11:8-10), and James uses Abraham’s obedience to the command to sacrifice Isaac to support his argument for the importance of works as the proper expression of authentic faith (2:21-24). Peter also brings Abraham into his description of proper household relations and in doing so describes female Christians as “daughters” of Sarah (1 Pet. 3:5-6). Peter may have conveniently forgotten the Hagar incident (see below).
Abraham was not an instant saint, but he had to experience a number of “tests” to bring him to the maturity God desired him to achieve. He was a human being, finite and fallen like all of us. He did not always respond in the ideal way. But as Oswald Chambers reminds us, “The inconsistencies we find in Abraham reveal the consistency of God, and the thing to note is that Abraham remained true to God both before and after his lapses.”11 From the Genesis narratives we can conclude that by means of these tests he eventually came to the relationship described as a “friend of God” (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8; James 2:23). The validity of this observation is reinforced by the fascinating observation of Oswald Chambers in summing up the essence of his book The Psychology of Redemption: “In the Life of our Lord, as Son of Man, when He transformed innocence into holiness by a series of moral choices, He gave the pattern forever of how a holy character was to be developed.”12
His growth by way of these tests provides a series of situations that seem intended to elicit the kind of spiritual qualifications all of us, as his children in the Spirit, should desire to develop in order to be the most effective agents in the Lord’s plan to redeem humankind. As we explore these tests in Abraham’s pilgrimage, let us by God’s grace avoid any failures he may have made and emulate the right responses that led him to the level of maturity God desires of us.
Abraham’s experience reminds us that spiritual and moral growth does not occur by simply willing or wishing that it would occur. All such development takes place in the context of specific occasions in which the right responses contribute to making virtue a matter of habit. As the philosopher Aristotle said, “One swallow does not make a spring.”13 His point is that one good act or response does not create character. Rather, a lifetime of practicing the virtues is required in becoming a good person.
Two interpretive assumptions inform the following discussions. The first is the belief that Abraham and the other patriarchs (Isaac and Jacob) were real human beings. The fact that as actual human beings they were finite and fallen is the basis for Charles F. Pfeiffer’s classic statement that they were “men of faith but not always faithful men.”14 On the surface, this assumption may seem obvious to the average Bible reader. However, in earlier years the existence of these men was viewed with considerable skepticism, and their stories were interpreted as mythical, the result of stories told in later times for apologetic purposes.15 More recently, as Pfeiffer tells us, though the names of these men do not appear in nonbiblical documents, “archeological discoveries during the past half century show us that the patriarchal narratives fit in the period in which the Bible places them, and in no other. The clay tablets from Nuzi and Mari have helped us to visualize the political and the social world in which the patriarchs moved.”16 James Muilenburg reinforced Pfeiffer’s conclusion: “Archeology has revealed an extraordinary correspondence between the general social and cultural conditions portrayed in Genesis and those exposed by excavations. Discoveries from such sites as Nuzi, Mari, and elsewhere, provide the geographical, cultural, linguistic, and religious background against which the stories of the patriarchs are laid.”17
This assumption that the patriarchs were real people aids the interpretive process in two ways. First, it enables us to legitimately use a measure of imagination to suggest realistic human responses and attitudes beyond what the text actually says.18 Second, it enables us to evaluate the setting of Abraham’s life and behavior more adequately by knowing his historical context.
The second interpretive assumption takes into account the structure of biblical theology that informs the entire Bible. Broader in scope than the study of a single text, this assumption allows us to interpret the experiences of Abraham theologically within this larger context. This assumption is what informs the opening discussion of this introduction and explains the point of view from which these devotional studies proceed. This assumption is also the basis for treating the biblical text as we have it. Many critical scholars fragment the text by identifying different sources that have been merged to produce the present form of the narrative. Even if these analyses are in some measure credible, the final form of the material is still informed by the central theological thread that gives unity to the story of God.19
There is an additional theological assumption that is relevant to contemporary religious experience. Genesis 15:6 plainly asserts that by his faith in the promise of God, Abram was declared righteous—that is, justified in status. This is the meaning of “righteousness” as used in that verse. Both terms—“righteous” and “justified”—translate the same Hebrew word group. This will be explored more fully as we proceed. But for our purposes here the term “righteous” (or “righteousness”), when understood correctly, does not imply anything about moral character or virtue. That means that Abram was brought into a right relation with God by grace alone, apart from any kind of moral worthiness. But on the basis of that status, he was called to develop the kind of moral character consistent with his vocation as God’s redemptive agent. It is this moral development in Abram’s life that we are exploring in these studies. The order of experience in Abram’s life is precisely the pattern that appears when we attempt to understand the biblical relation between justification and sanctification.20 As John Wesley insisted, sanctification begins with justification, although he insists that the two should not be confused, since justification is a relative change while sanctification is a real change. For the New Testament believer, justification is understood as the beginning of a process of increasing conformity to the “mind of Christ.” This process will continue throughout life and beyond and, as Wesley put it, is “faith working by love.” Thus the aspect of Abram’s development explored here really provides us some insights into the developing life of holiness in the justified Christian believer.
However, we need to include one caution. The theme of Abraham’s testing is not new but is found in rabbinic teaching. His tests or trials are usually considered in the Talmud as being ten in number, although there is no precise agreement on what they were. However, for our purposes, what is important is that they are always considered meritorious both for Abraham and his posterity.21 We must reject this interpretation of Abraham’s tests because it would invalidate the biblical teaching about his justification by faith and distort the New Testament teaching about sanctification. So rather than the attainment of merit, the tests result in the development of character. Keeping these details in mind throws some interesting light on John the Baptist’s accusation of the Pharisees’ dependence on their descent from Abraham as a basis for divine acceptance.
In summary, the purpose in these studies is twofold: devotional and theological. These two emphases are related, since a sound devotional life is, or should be, informed by sound, scripturally based theology. The perceptive reader will recognize that the author has derived some tremendous spiritual insights from Oswald Chambers’ small book on Abraham, a work he discovered well into the development of this project and which for him has provided many scintillating pinpoints of light. Theologically, the relation of Abraham to God has numerous important theological implications that open the door to discussions of issues that reflect the Wesleyan theological perspective. These studies have thus drawn from John Wesley’s analysis of the divine-human relationship several insights that throw light on the spiritual life.