Abraham: The First Missionary
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the July 11, 2015
Sabbath School Lesson
“They said to each other, ‘Come,
let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone,
and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with
a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves;
otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’” Genesis 11:3-4,
NIV
If we are to
give credibility to the biblical account, at some point after the events described
in the story of Noah and the Ark, men spread out upon the earth with some
heading eastward to what may have been the fertile plains of the Euphrates
delta. There they began to build a city and in conjunction, a great brick tower.
Memories of this tower may have been the impetus for the later proliferation of
ziggurats in the Mesopotamian culture, and perhaps even the pyramids of Egypt. This
project apparently became possible because of the size of the labor force and ease
with which men could communicate their ideas because all being descended from
Noah, all spoke a common tongue.
According to
the account, God became concerned about the power that men had and confused
their speech into various languages so that their goals could not be realized.
Perhaps this story was intended to explain why, if only Noah and his family survived
the flood, were there so many different languages? If it was really an attempt
by a Luddite God to thwart human innovation, it would seem only a temporary one
as any time a sufficient number of individuals speaking a common language could
come together, they would be able to resume their colossal achievements.
History is replete with examples of that very thing happening over and over.
There are the aforementioned Pyramids of Egypt, the Colossus of Rhodes, the
Roman Colosseum, the Parthenon, and several other wonders. We see the trend
echoed even today with the constant one-upmanship between countries to erect
the tallest buildings, buildings that actually soar above the clouds in several
cases.
Strangely,
the Babel story also presents another problem. For a God who is eager to present
His message to the world, why make it more difficult by confusing the primary
means of doing so, word of mouth? It might be argued that this limitation
contributed to keeping the teaching about the God of Israel bottled up
primarily in the Levant until the time of Jesus, when we have the famous
Pentecostal pouring out of the Holy Spirit and the resultant break down of the
wall of language that limited the spread of God’s message for mankind.
When God
called Abraham to follow Him, he did so in the context of a post Babel
civilization. Abraham’s family had apparently not traveled far from Babel as
they lived in Ur, in the same fertile plain,[i]
and when Abraham was sent out later from Harran, he was sent to dwell among those
who communicated with the same Semitic language family he was accustomed to.
This was at least nine or ten generations after Noah. When God called Abraham after
so many generations, it raises several questions. Was God only concerned about
the descendants of Shem? Is that why Abraham only traveled in areas of Semitic
culture? Or did God call others, who were speaking some of the other languages
and had dispersed farther afield?
The Bible is
primarily intended to be a history of one branch of the Semitic line, that of
Abraham. So not only are we not informed of what God might be doing elsewhere,
we are told little of what happened to the Semites between Shem and Abraham
beyond acknowledging that they existed. We are told that Abraham’s family members
were idol worshippers before Abraham received his call.[ii]
In that context, he traveled with them to Harran. Then when his father, Terah,
died, he left for Canaan per the Lord’s direction. We can see echoes of Abraham
in Gideon, the Judge, whose father was an idolater, yet God called him to rise
up in His name and deliver Israel.[iii]
God is apparently not averse to working with idolaters to bring about
reformation and revival, so it may be hard to believe that He was doing nothing
outside of the family of Abraham to save mankind. Nonetheless without a record
of those efforts we are left with Abraham.
Some might
consider Abraham a strange choice for a heroic figure. In some ways he is more
of an anti-hero. While he is called out of Harran and promised to become the
father of a great nation, he sees his and Sarah’s biological clocks ticking
away with no heir in sight. Impatient more than faithful, he chooses to have a
child by another woman so that he will finally have an heir. From this
impatience sprang all the centuries of conflict between the descendants of
Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, and those of Ishmael, the son he had by Hagar. Yet
even in this stumbling comes a valuable lesson. That lesson is shared much
later in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians where Hagar represents man’s attempts
to find righteousness through his own works, and Isaac is representative of
coming to God through faith in Him rather than our own works.[iv].
Sadly, the episode with Hagar brought great grief to the household. It not only
provided a child, Ishmael, but it highlighted where the fecundity problem might
be. If Abraham was able to father a child with Hagar then he was not infertile.
This became a very bitter pill for Sarah.
Since this
ancient account places the ability to have children in the hands of God, a
persistent belief even present in the time of Hannah and Samuel, one cannot
help but wonder what God had against Sarah. Was there a lesson she needed to
learn that took almost her entire life to discover? Was it because she lacked
the faith of Abraham, or his humility? The Bible does not tell us. Perhaps
there are hints in her willingness to go along with Abraham, even when he was
wrong. Twice she allowed him to represent her as his sister and not his wife.[v]
Interestingly, the second event appears to have occurred when Sarah was over
ninety years old if the sequence of events is to be taken literally. If we
consider Sarah’s death to have occurred at age 127,[vi]
then even with such a long life, she was well past middle age. One wonders at why
King Abimelech, who probably could have had his choice of women, would have
chosen to take a woman so “long in the tooth.”
Again if we
see the sequence of events as literal, Isaac’s paternity can become
questionable. After many decades with Abraham without a child, Sarah is taken
into Abimelech’s harem, and after she is released, she is pregnant and when her
pregnancy is completed, she gives birth to Isaac. It would perhaps be strange
if no one questioned his paternity under the circumstances, especially when we
consider how even today, two thousand years after His birth, some question the
paternity of Jesus. This very issue may have fueled the controversy between
Sarah and Hagar and their sons. Those questions would only serve to strengthen
Ishmael’s claim on the inheritance. Little wonder in that circumstance that
Sarah would choose to rid herself of the competition for the patrimony.
In the final
analysis, it becomes apparent that a central message to be gleaned from all of
this is that Abraham and Sarah were not much different than we are today. Their
family heritage was spiritually compromised with idolatry. Sarah and Abraham
had an unstable relationship with the truth. They both slept around, conforming
to the sexual practices of the idolaters around them as much as necessary to
avoid confrontation. Now some, who perhaps venerate Abraham a great deal, may
feel offended at these words. However, there is a purpose to all of this. It
helps us to understand that no one is righteous. Abraham, like us, was a
sinner, and as a sinner, his hope of salvation rested not in living a life of
perfection and obedience. It rested instead in a deep abiding trust in God’s
leading, and a belief that in the end, God would make everything alright. He
would provide the righteous sacrifice that would make our salvation possible.[vii]
This Sacrifice, the Lamb, Jesus Christ, is what makes it possible for Abraham
to be listed in the memorial of faith found in Hebrews, chapter eleven.
While there
is no record that Abraham, “the missionary,” ever preached that message to
anyone, yet his life demonstrated it, and in that, we all might be missionaries
of the Gospel. We need only answer the call to repent, be baptized, and receive
the Holy Spirit, and our lives will change as dramatically as Abraham’s did
when he left Harran.
