Genesis 12:1-4 Commentary

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In chapter 12 of the book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller tells the story of his friend Jason. Jason and his wife had a 13-year-old daughter. And their 13-year-old daughter had pot stashed in her closet. She had a boyfriend too. And she had a father who was terrified of the story his daughter was telling with her life.  She was telling a story that kept her father up at night. And one night (since he was up anyway) he began researching opportunities to do something big, something that would require sacrifice but that would be worth it.  He found an organization building orphanages in other parts of the world and, in the morning, he pitched this idea to his wife: Our kid is on the path toward a terrible, rebellious, self-sufficient story.  But, if I’m being honest, I don’t think we’ve given her a better story to tell — nothing compelling enough to sacrifice for. I think we should go all in on a project like this.  Because our daughter needs the opportunity to live a better story.  This marked a pivot in Jason’s family, a turn toward a better story. Genesis 12 is the beginning of a better story for the people of God.

Commentary:

In the beginning, God created the whole world and, along with it, a beautiful story of dependence upon God and partnership with one another. And then Satan, in the guise of a serpent, introduced a new story—one of human autonomy, where people are best served by looking out for number one, whatever the collateral damage may be. “Do this and you will be like God You will be able to decide for yourselves what is good and what is evil.”

When these two stories collided, Adam and Eve were ejected from the Garden of Eden. God was afraid that these beloved children, bearing God’s own image, would live forever as characters in their own rebellious, self-sufficient story. And, in fact, a quick summary of chapters 4-11 seem to indicate this fear was well-founded.

• Cain wanted to decide for himself what kind of sacrifice would appease God and then, when it didn’t, he turned against his brother in jealous rage, murdering him.
• The generation of Noah — a people still intent on figuring it out for themselves — “the LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”
• Noah himself, saved from the rising flood waters, doesn’t even wait for the shadows of God’s promise to lengthen. In the very same chapter, Noah makes a drunken, naked fool of himself.
• The people collaborate to build a tower all the way to heaven “so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

Genesis 4-11 tells story after story of people who had forgotten who they were, rebellious, self-sufficient stories. And in the aftermath of Genesis 3 and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, they were in desperate need of a better story.

So, “The Lord said to Abram”: GO “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household.” GO “to the place I will show you. Leave behind everything that has been your comfort. Every place that has been your identity. GO. As crazy as it might sound, GO in order to do something so big that God is the only One who can accomplish it.

The author, or more likely the compiler of stories who provided the world with Genesis, had a reason for the way he collected and placed these stories.  Coming up right after Genesis 4-11, God’s call to Abraham is a giant rebuttal to all the stories that come before it. And God’s call to Abraham is the foundation for all of the rest of the stories in Genesis. Stories of sometimes faithful, more-often-mediocre men and women who fill out this book and the rest of Hebrew Scripture. In fact, there isn’t a story told between here and Revelation 22 that doesn’t reverberate with the driving beat of Genesis 12:1-4.  If you were to copy these verses out and use them as a bookmark in whatever part of Scripture you are reading, holding the two side-by-side, you’ll begin to comprehend how comprehensive this promise to Abram really was.

It is a three-fold promise:

• Land: I will make you a great nation. In verse 7, God continues “Tell your offspring, I will give this land to you.” I will give you a PLACE.
• Descendants: I will make you a people. Not only that, God says, “I will make you MY people.” I will give you an IDENTITY.
• Covenant: More important that the preceding physical, tangible blessings, God has made a promise to Abram, to the whole world that He will be our God and we will be God’s people. The promise of relationship is the core, the non-negotiable center of God’s promise to Abram. It is this promise that plays out through the rest of Scripture.

In Exodus, God directs his people to leave slavery, to cross the Red Sea on dry ground, to adjust to God’s economy and reign and then, finally, into the Promised Land.

In Leviticus, that strange book of regulations and celebrations, the point of the whole system is summarized in chapter 26: “I will walk among you and be your God and you will be my people.”

In Psalms, God’s covenant is celebrated.  God’s covenant also forms the basis upon which God’s people make their appeals, even protesting when life does not seem to match the covenant promises.

The prophets who spoke to disobedient people were constantly beckoning them back to God’s covenant until, the in New Testament, we hear the ancestors of Christ, which beings in Matthew, chapter 1, like this: “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” And, at the end of Christ’s earthly ministry, Jesus leaves his disciples—leaves US—with a familiar command and promise: GO…and surely I am with you until the very end of the age.