Why Abraham?
Scholars have long known that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are an extended prologue, an etiological grounding, among other things, of the accounts to follow. Chapter 12 features the calling of Abram. Why did the calling of Abraham become necessary?
Genesis begins by narrating how God, wanting to make creatures that can image him, prepares a fitting environment. He then creates Adam and Eve and gives them instructions to live by – instructions they can perform. However, other forces are vested in God’s project. Before long, the project was derailed when only two humans were involved. Things only got worse. By the time four named humans were in the project, there was a murder. By Genesis 6, things had gotten so bad that even God regretted creating humans. Clearly, the Project was not going well. What was God to do — scratch the project altogether? No, that would be a resounding victory for the sinister forces that thwarted his original plans. Start afresh? Yes, but not entirely from ground zero. So, in a sense, the restart is a continuation. Abraham would have to do.
What is Abraham’s qualifying attribute for this mission? The most noticeable feature is that he was childless, and his wife was past the age of childbearing. In other words, though God wants a nation of people, he has chosen a barren couple for that mission. God has picked someone who would require a miraculous intervention to get the project back on track. He said to Abram:
Genesis 12:2 ESV
And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
Of course, becoming a great nation implies having many children and descendants. Sounding like a good deal to the ancient Near-Eastern businessman, Abram obeyed. While he was on his way to where God sent him away from his home country, at the oak of Moreh, and as if to make the point transparent:
Genesis 12:7 ESV
Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
Again, Abram is assured that he will have children of his own. This, especially from Abram’s perspective, is a significant blessing.
It is worth stressing that before God called him, Abram was already a man of considerable material wealth (Gen 12:5). Of course, the rich can become more affluent. My point is that Abram was not a church rat when he was called. And as far as we know, he did not tithe or invoke any divine giving-and-receiving law to acquire his wealth. He seemed a regular, shrewd, Near-Eastern businessman. For emphasis, I repeat that Abram did not sow any seed before God told him he would inherit the land of the Canaanites. The only thing Abram, at this point, had given God was his obedience to leave Haran, his country.
Besides what Abram already had in Haran before Yahweh called him, the first material blessing he got was when Pharaoh treated Abram well because of Sarai (Gen 12:10-20). Notice, however, that this was a cunning and evil move: Abraham gave up his wife, the one through whom he was to become the father of many nations, for sexual exploitation to save his life! Put another way, the seed Abraham sowed to reap material gains here was his wife. Hence, whatever the pharaoh gave Abram was likely expected dowry. This indicates that Abram was not called because he was morally upright. Indeed, he would soon sleep with a slave girl, an act that likely would be a case of rape had the girl not been an enslaved person, who was likely 60 years younger. And when she became pregnant, Abram would let Sarai send her away without putting up a fight.
Even the famous encounter with Melchizedek does not teach anything about seed sowing, as I have written about elsewhere. In that encounter, Abraham once gave a tenth of the spoils of war to Melchizedek and then gave the rest to his men and the king of Sodom. He didn’t give out a dime of his own wealth. So, Abraham did not accrue material wealth through his encounter with Melchizedek.
So, God chose Abram in spite of Abram. Abraham was God’s means of getting the initial Adam Project back on track, though Abraham does not seem to know all that detail. God chose Abram so that he might become a blessing to all nations (Genesis 12:3). However, as Bible students know all too well, even the Abraham Project would soon go off-track. Events and choices in Abraham’s lifetime may have sown the seeds of the derailment. In no time, even the Abraham Project would need a rescue. So, God needed to rescue the Abraham Project to infuse life into the Adam Project, his original intent. Here, then, is another central point in the developing story. Will God scratch the project and start afresh? God remains committed to his promises to Abraham, just as he did with the Adam Project. The plan must continue with Abraham, but how?
Jesus Sent Only to the Lost Sheep of Israel
Enters Jesus.
The Gospel according to Matthew is well-known in scholarly circles as the most Jewish among the four Gospel accounts. This observation is well grounded. Here is the very first sentence of Matthew’s Gospel:
Matthew 1:1 ESV
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
If a novel begins this way, readers would immediately know to expect that what follows will be deeply connected to David and Abraham. Matthew wastes no time in revealing that the story is about to tell is a continuation of the Abraham’s story. (The Davidic reference is Matthew’s way of telegraphing the legitimacy of Jesus’ Messiah claims.) Consider the following passages:
Matthew 10:5-7 ESV
[5] These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, [6] but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. [7] And proclaim as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Matthew 15:22-24 ESV
[22] And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” [23] But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” [24] He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
These passages have Jesus himself saying his primary target audience at that point in his ministry was the ethnic descendants of Abraham. The first passage even excludes a vast chunk of Abraham’s descendants, the Samaritans, who traced their origin from the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of ancient Israel. Instead, Jesus here focuses on the descendants of ancient Judah. Yes, Jesus would make exceptions and attend to the needs of non-Jews like the Canaanite woman here and a few Romans, but he understood his mission to be to the lost sheep of Israel. By “lost sheep of Israel,” Jesus referred to the entire nation of the Jews.
In light of sermons we have heard on this subject, we should ask: did Matthew faithfully reproduce Jesus’s statements – did Jesus really say he was sent only to ancient Israelites and not the whole world? The answer is Yes; Matthew faithfully represented Jesus’ words, and, in a manner of speaking, Jesus was ONLY sent to the ancient Israelites.
Recall that Abraham was called to put the Adam Project back on track. Through Abraham, all the nations of the earth were supposed to be blessed. But no seed of Abraham was capable of delivering, as they all soon went their separate ways. Hence, Jesus had to come as a seed of Abraham to effectuate the divine promise to Abraham. That is why he had to be born a Jew. It is also why the very first sentence in Matthew’s Gospel connects Jesus to Abraham. Furthermore, since the ancient Israelites were also called to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, something they clearly were not in the first century, the Abraham Project must restart beginning with them. The Project needed priests to reveal the divine will to humans. Hence, it is no accident that all the early Apostles of Jesus were Jews. They had to be ethnic descendants of Abraham.
It is not only Matthew who realizes the connection between Jesus’ mission and the divine promise to Abraham. Even after the resurrection and just before the ascension, Luke writes of Jesus saying:
Acts 1:8 ESV
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
Notice how this verse yet prioritizes the Jews, much like Matthew reports – and Luke was a Gentile. This verse is, in fact, a very accurate map and thesis statement for the book of Acts. The events recorded in Acts were about Jews and Judaism until Chapter 10 when we read about Cornelius. But before that, Philip preaches Christ in Samaria (Chapter 8), and, as it is well-known, Paul would take the message literally to the end of the then-known world, Spain. So, the message of Christ traveled precisely as he predicted: from Jerusalem, the headquarters, through Judea to Samaria, and then to the rest of the world.
So, Jesus was not (directly) sent to all of humanity. He could not have been so sent. He was sent to Abraham’s descendants, who would then reach the rest of the world just as God promised Abraham: through you, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. Nevertheless, we read of Jesus occasionally “blessing” non-Jews like the Canaanite woman and a few Romans along the way. God is that gracious and kind.
After the message of Jesus reached the end of the earth, the ethnic component of the Abraham Project became redundant. This does not mean that Jews became useless or stopped playing active roles. It only means God had fulfilled his promise to Abraham. The new community God is gathering from all the nations, consistent with the promise to Abraham, can no longer be ethnically defined. The plan was always to create a multiethnic people group from the ethnic line Abraham started. In a multiethnic family, ethnic identity loses much of its meaning. That is why there can be no “Jews or Gentile” in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Indeed, the new community inherits the description and function once given to only ethnic Israel: a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:6; 1 Peter 2:9, Revelation 1:6).
Tying it all together
Being the man who took the message of Jesus literally to the end of the then-known world, we should expect Paul to have a deep understanding of the divine program as revealed in Scripture. He tells his knowledge in the letter to the Galatians. According to the argument of Galatians, the promised Holy Spirit came through the lineage of Abraham:
Galatians 3:8 ESV
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.”
Paul here says the gospel of Jesus, which was not fully revealed until Paul’s time, was preached beforehand to Abraham. That is, the gospel did not start with Jesus. That gospel message is this: “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” What nations? The nations whose stories were covered in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) and whose language God confused at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 before calling Abram in Genesis 12 – every nation outside Abraham’s lineage. God miraculously gave Abraham a family in the hope of using a descendant of that family to fix the problems Adam unleashed under the influence of sinister forces. That was always God’s plan. When God started afresh with Abraham, he engineered a solution for the nations. It was not an abandonment of the nations. The Gentiles (or the nations) were always going to be accepted by faith – by putting their trust in the faithfulness of God and his Messiah. And when they do, they will receive the Spirit of Jesus as a deposit guaranteeing things to come in the coming age. This, ultimately, is Abraham’s only relevant blessing to the world. It is not about material wealth, and it is certainly not about the land to which no non-Jew may make a claim.
As if to connect the dots, one of the first things the Spirit did upon breaking into human hearts in Acts 2 was a reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel just before Abram was called. The people’s languages at Babel were confused, so they could not understand one another (Genesis 11:7-9). In Acts 2:5, first, we are told that “there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.” Notice again how even the Holy Spirit, who continues where Jesus left off, began with Jews. These were descendants of Jews exiled all over the nations through the invasion of foreign armies like the Assyrians and Babylonians for their disloyalty to God. God would collect them first before collecting the rest of the world. (That is what Paul meant by the Gospel being for/to the Jews first, and then the Gentiles in Romans 1:16.) Next, all these people who then spoke the languages of the nations of the world they were exiled to heard the Spirit-enabled Galilean disciples of Jesus speak in their various languages! This is a reversal of the events at Babel, which finally precipitated the calling of Abram.
Abraham’s only blessing to the world is Jesus, and Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks.