ABRAHAM’S LIFE:  HIS JOURNEY TO THE PROMISE LAND

CHARLES e. WHISNANT, TEACHER

June 17 2012

https://vimeo.com/44312143

The video from this lesson is found on the above link.

May I say  that the material that I used in this lesson comes from a number of resources that I found on the websites. I do not take credit for all the material you see in this outline. I would be more than happy to provide any websites on this subject.

My objective in this lesson is to show the substance of this biblical account in history and how we can see the truthfulness of the narrative of Genesis.

Abraham lived 1,948 years after the Creation. He lived in the early part of the second millennium.

Abraham was founder of the Jewish religion and ancestor of the Jewish race. Abraham was a predecessor of the Hebrew nations, the Israelites, the nation that God called out to be the people from whom His Son would be born and be the Messiah and the fulfillment of Genesis 3:15.

Genesis 15:18-21 God Called Out Abram

            Archaeological findings enable us not only to confirm but to explain episodes in the patriarchal stories..   

What these archives accomplish is they enable us to relate them both to archaeological records and to the various literary archives which have now emerged from Bronze Age Syria and Mesopotamia. These are important because they enable us not only to confirm but to explain episodes in the patriarchal stories.  They help us to create a picture of the patriarchal society which illuminates the Bible text. This helps us to begin to place Abraham and his descendants in their true historical context.

Genesis 17:4-8 God made a covenant with Abraham.

Genesis 13:7, 15, 17 The Hebron Purchase

Genesis 21:22-32 The covenant with Abimelech.

All this is mingled with two other types of material which constitute the real purpose of the Bible narratives:

1 The depiction of individuals, the ancestors of the people, in a moral context and,

            2 Still more important is the origin and development of their collective relationship with God.

The early Bible is above all a statement of theology.

 

            It is an account of the direct, often intimate, relationship between the leaders of the people and God.

            Here the role played by Abraham is determinant.

The Bible presents him as the immediate ancestor of the Hebrew people and founder of the nation. He is also the supreme example of the good and just man.  

If Abraham was the founder of the Hebrew nation, was he also the founder of the Hebrew religion? 

In Genesis he appears to inaugurate (begin or introduce a system, policy or period) the special relationship with  a sole and omnipotent God. 

Early these people were primitive desert people, but moved out in the days of Abraham. He was a man familiar with cities, complex legal concepts, and religious ideas which, for their day, were sophisticated.

Abraham came from Ur and from a flourishing moon cult: his family names were associated with moon-cult. (Sarah, Micah, Terah, Laban)   Abraham came a long way in his belief.  God redeemed Abraham.

The movements of the Semitic people (denoting a family of languages that included Hebrews) westwards  along the crescent, is usually presented as a drift under the pressure of economic forces.

But it is important to grasp that Abraham’s compulsion was religious. He responded to an urge he believed came from a great and all-powerful, ubiquitous (present, found everywhere) God. 

Abraham left Mesopotamian society precisely because God called him out. 

Abraham may perhaps be most accurately described as a henotheist: (worship of one god among many). A believer in a sole God, attached to a particular people, who none the less recognized the attachment of other races to their own gods.

Abraham is the founder of the Hebrew religious culture, since he inaugurates its two most important characteristics: the covenant with God and the donation of The Land.

THE GENESIS ACCOUNT BETWEEN ABRAHAM AND GOD:

The dialogue between Abraham and God suggests that Abraham’s grasp and acceptance of the momentous implications of his bargain were gradual, an example of the way in which the will of God is sometimes revealed in progressive stages.

The truth was finally brought home to Abraham, as described in Genesis 22, when God tests him by commanding him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac

This request by God testified to Abraham’s detachment from any other custom or any other ruling passion except the love of God and his recognition that we must give God what we value most, confident that, God being just, we will not lose it.