Abram, The Obedient (MP 19)

In Ur of the Chaldeans Abram was born,
A man destined to sire many nations,
Among which was one with reason to mourn—
For piercing Him who brought men’s salvations!
Yea, Abram was one man who obeyed God
In faith, when God was but a wee, small voice,
“Leave this place, and go to where strangers trod;”
By those few words Abram made God his choice!
God told Abram, “I will make your name great.”
He promised, “I will bless those who bless you;
Who curses you will meet a curs’ed fate;
Much blessing to earth will through you accrue!”
For descended from him would Jesus be,
To redeem men from sin and set them free!

Scripture Quoted: Genesis 12:1-4a (NIV)
“The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless them who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’ So Abram left as the Lord had told him; …”

Commentary
Ten generations after Noah, a large population scattered about the earth, and God called Abram to leave his father’s home in Mesopotamia and go to a land that would be shown him. Abram obeyed the voice of God and became the world’s most important man, at least from God’s perspective. He sired the Chosen People, Israel, the nation of which Jesus was born, as well as all the Arab nations. He is the spiritual father of all Christians, too, some of which belong to every nation on earth; in fact, during the “millenium”, a thousand-year reign of the Lord Jesus Christ prophesied in the Bible, Abram will be the spiritual father of all nations on earth. Abram’s name was changed by God into Abraham later in his life. His obedience to God reveals him to be the kind of man God desired all men would be; if you compare Abram’s righteous behavior to the unrighteous lives of most other men, it is easy to see why God was disappointed many times by others. Of course, Abram committed sins, also. In Hebrews 11:8, we find that Abram is one of those whose obedience God counted as faith in Jesus Christ, and for it he was “elected” into salvation. We shall have several blogs about the historical acts of Abram and his importance to God’s Master Plan for the world.

The phrase, “Ur of the Chaldeans” (See Genesis 11:31), has been and still is, misunderstood by most Christians; it has also led critics of the Bible to claim that the first five books of the Bible, called the “Pentateuch”, were not written by Moses (about 1400 B.C.) but fabricated by a writer known as “J” about 1000 B.C. Until the mid-1970’s, only one city called “Ur” was known to exist, and it was a large seaport on the Persian Gulf in the south of present-day Iraq. In 1600 B.C., a people called Chaldeans migrated from northwest Mesopotamia down the Euphrates River to the area about the Persian Gulf. Therefore, everyone seemed to choose the Ur in the south as Abraham’s birthplace. If you look in the back of the New International Version (1978) of the Bible, and some others also, you will find a map showing Abraham’s journey to Canaan beginning at the Ur in Babylon, proceeding up to Haran in Mesopotamia, and thence back southwestward to Canaan. That map is incorrect; the Bible itself, though, is accurate.

We should have caught the error; when Abraham sent his servant to the place of his birth to bring back a wife for his son Isaac (See Genesis 24:10), he went north to Nahor, a city near Haran in Mesopotamia. The truth was discovered in the 1970’s at an archeological “dig” at Asshur. A batch of inscriptions were found mentioning “Haran” and several small towns near it; one was named “Ur”. That is the correct birthplace of Abraham; that long journey up the Euphrates in the backs of Bibles is incorrect. The nation of Israel was not sired by a Babylonian, but a Chaldean; or, to be precise, an Aramean, descendants of Shem, so of Noah.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him will not die, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9)