When I was in college, I went with my home church on a week-long mission trip to Honduras where we did Vacation Bible School type programs in some villages, and I loved it. Long story short, I got connected to a school in a different area of Honduras that provided free Christian bilingual education to children from the surrounding villages that would otherwise not be able to afford it and I started praying about the opportunity to teach there. One of my biggest hangups was the thought of leaving my family and friends and really everything I knew to move to a foreign country whose language I only had a VERY basic grasp of. I think I felt a fraction of what Abraham might have felt when God told him to leave his country and family.

So fast forward a few months and I went back on another mission trip, really praying that the Lord would confirm if this was his plan for me and allay my fears. The trip leader shared a devotion one night based on the rich young man, and at the end of that story in Matthew 19:29 (ESV) Jesus tells Peter, “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.” That verse from God’s Word was all it took to calm my fears, and I came home from that trip, applied to teach at the school, and served there for four years.

I tell that story because it is a clear example in my life of the power of God’s Word. In Genesis 1, we see that God’s Word has creative power. All he had to do was speak, and everything was made. When God in his grace used the mission trip leader to read that verse from his Word to me, it gave me the peace to go live out my calling. And in Genesis 12, when God called Abram, we see the promise contained in his Word was motivation enough for Abraham to go. And because of God’s grace to call Abram, all people can be reconciled to God.

Genesis chapter 12 is a turning point in the first book of the Bible. The first 11 chapters were about God’s relationship with the whole world, but now God chooses one man and his family, and then He will use that family to bless the whole world. God wants us to get back to what he said was good in the garden, and he is going to do that by making a covenant with the family of Abram. Genesis was written by Moses to the generation of Israelites who were wandering in the wilderness, waiting to enter the promised land. Abram was the father of their faith, and each tribe could trace their family line back to him. In telling this story, Moses was reminding the people of their history and God’s promise that he was still being faithful to keep.

When God first speaks to Abram in Genesis 12, He tells Abram “go.” After this, almost every other verb in these verses is God saying, “I will.” If Abram will go, then God will do the rest.  Hebrews 11:8 tells us, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.” When God speaks to Abram, he tells him to go to the land God will show him, and then heaps promise on top of promise of blessing on Abram. Abram obeyed in response to God’s words of promise. I know I, in the past, have put Abram on this pedestal of being this man of great obedience, who set out for this unknown land with nothing to go on, but that is just not true. He had God’s words of promise motivating him to obey. This is not a story of Abram’s obedience, but of God’s faithfulness to his word, even when Abram fails to obey, which of course he does.

So, God commands Abram to go and leave his country, his kindred (which just means his relatives), and his father’s house. In this culture, by leaving his father’s household Abram was forfeiting his inheritance from his father, and any right to family property. This was a major source of security. But Abram had placed his security in something better – in the words of the Lord. Hebrews 11:9-10 says: “By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” God promised him this inheritance, and Abram was trusting in that. And the Israelites who were receiving these words through Moses were on the brink of occupying that land that had been promised to their forefather Abram.

In verse 2, God starts making His promises. First “I will make of you a great nation.” To be a nation takes two things: land and descendants. This part of the promise is reiterated a few verses later: “To your offspring I will give this land” in verse 7. But there is a problem. In chapter 11 there was a genealogy with a key detail. Genesis 11:29-30 says, “And Abram and Nahor [his brother] took wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.” God purposefully chose a barren woman to be the mother of this “great nation” to show his power, but this will be a major point of conflict in Abram’s story.

The second promise in verse 2 is: “I will…make your name great.” This promise is so cool, especially in light of the tower of Babel story in chapter 11. As the people were making their building plans, they said: “Come, 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” (Genesis 11:4). They were trying to make a name for themselves, but God said, “No. I am the one with the great name, and I am the one who makes names great.” So, he plucks Abram out of obscurity and says, “I will make your name great.” We don’t know the names of all the people at Babel, but we still know Abram’s name. All over the Bible we see how God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:8). This contrast of stories is the perfect example, and something we can easily miss when we read them in isolation.

The third promise in verses 2-3: “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Again, we’ve just seen the disaster at Babel, where all the people were judged and dispersed. But now we get the blessing and the promise that all those dispersed peoples will be blessed through Abram. When God tells Abram at the end of verse 2 you will be a blessing, that verb is an imperative. It’s a command, just like the verb go in verse one. God is commanding Abram to be a blessing. He is to go out into the world and image God, just as humans were created to do back in Genesis 1 and spread the blessing of God to a fallen and broken world. And he will fail at this, even in this very same chapter, but God will remain faithful to His word of promise, just as He remains faithful for you and me today.

If we look ahead to Paul’s letter to the Galatians in chapter 3, verses 7-9, we read, “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’ So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.” Paul not only tells us those of faith are offspring of Abraham, but he quotes the last part of Genesis 12:3, “in you all the families [or nations] of the earth shall be blessed” and calls it the gospel! This is good news because who was a descendant of Abram? Matthew 1:1: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” God, in his grace, chose Abram to leave his land and family, to receive a new land and family, so that He could be great-great-great… grandpa of Jesus Christ, who would bring the ultimate blessing to all the families of the earth by reconciling us to God. This is the gospel! This is good news!

Because God, in his grace, chose Abram, he began making a way for people to have a relationship with him. His son Jesus, the one who reconciles us and makes us right with God, came from the line of Abram. God was faithful to his words of promise to Abram and his family, even when they were not faithful. Their relationship with God was not dependent on what they did, but who God was, is, and always will be. Paul says it best in 2 Timothy 2:13: “if we are faithless, he remains faithful- for he cannot deny himself.” We who are of the family of faith have security in the knowledge that nothing we do can mess up this relationship. As we keep reading the story of Abram, we will see many more ways he fell and failed. And as we keep reading the story of his family, we will see them all fall and fail as well. And if you could read the story of my life, or I could read the story of yours, it would be full of falls and failures. But God’s grace says, “I want you. I choose you. Choose me. Be reconciled to me. Go out and image me, spreading my goodness and glory to those around you. Let me bless you so that you can be a blessing to others, so that you can bring the families around you to be reconciled to me as well.”

Just like Abram, that is the reason we have been blessed. The blessing is not for us, it is to share with others. Just as Abram was commanded to go, so are we who are in Christ. And just like Abram, our call also comes with a promise. We call it the great commission in Matthew 28:19-20: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, [here’s the promise] I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Like Abram, we don’t obey out of our own strength. His was not a pull yourself up by your bootstraps story, and neither is ours. God’s word of promise gave him the power to obey, and God’s word of promise at the end of Matthew gives us that same power. God is with us. In every area we have failed, Jesus has perfectly obeyed. And because of the work of the Holy Spirit, his righteousness is ours.

So, we, who have been called by God’s grace, the same grace that led God to call Abram, we who have been reconciled to God, are to go, spread that blessing, so that all people of all nations can be reconciled to God.