SECTION II. THE CALL OF ABRAHAM. HUMANITY had attained the age and condition when general providences and special interpositions of judgment and mercy applied to all, or occurring promiscuously amid the varied families and nations of the earth, would not preserve the race from continued degeneracy in sensuality and false religion. If its sensuality tolerate any religion, it must be such as submits to be subservient to the flesh. The very gods it worships will have the passions and practices which itself delights to cherish. It will not recognize deity as a spirit, and worship him in spirit, but will have sensual media obscuring his pure spirituality, and ultimately tolerating the thought that God is such a one as itself. It is the age of idolatry, and in that point and period of its cultivation and experience, humanity will everywhere tend to nature-worship, hero-worship, or image-worship, and all connected cruel and debasing superstitions. The wise expedient divinely taken is, to concentrate special instruction and influence upon one nation, which shall secure their acknowledgment and worship of the true God, and set this peculiar people conspicu ously among the nations as a missionary people for the world. But no one race or nation can at the time be found distinctively spiritual and godly enough to set forth as the teacher of the world; and the necessary process is to begin with one Man, and lay accumulating influences enough on him and his rising descendants to make and keep them a special people for the Lord. The end in view is the elevation of the race, and not partiality and favoritism for the chosen people; and for the sake of the whole, that man must be taken which omniscience shall see shall secure the end best and surest for all. In making such selection God designated Abram, a son of Terah, the eighth in descent from Shem, the son of Noah. The native place of Terah was in Ur of the Chaldees; but on removing from Chaldea to go into the land of Canaan, he journeyed so far as to the north-western border of Mesopotamia, and built a city for his followers, calling it Haran, after a son, who had died and been buried in Chaldea. This was his subsequent residence and burial-place, and the early home of Abram and country of his kinsmen. Here, when Abram was seventy-five years old, the Lord said to him, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I shall tell thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing; and I will bless. them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be 1 blessed." Abram obeyed, and with his family and substance carried out his father's old intention of removing to Canaan; and upon his arrival at Sychem, in the land of Canaan, the Lord again appeared to him, and promised to give the land in which he was to his seed. After having journeyed in different directions in the land with his family and substance, and Lot, his brother's son, and built altars to God where he rested; and having also, on occasion of a famine, been down to Egypt, and returned again to Canaan with great wealth, and when Lot had separated from him to dwell in the plain of the Jordan; Jehovah again promised him the land for his seed with greater particularity. "Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art, northward and southward, and eastward and westward; for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth; so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered." 8 The import of this Abrahamic promise needs to be carefully noted. It was in substance repeated to him, and subsequently to his son Isaac, and again to Jacob, and through following centuries was the basis of religious life and Christian expectation. The Old Testament church rested upon it, and the New Testament church is in fulfilment of it. In one part, it was an enlarged repetition of the promise to Adam 1 Gen. xii. 1-3. Gen. xii. 7. Gen. xiii. 14-16. after his fall, and renewed to Noah through Shem after the flood, that some great deliverer from the curse of sin should come in the seed of Eve. Here, to Abram, who had descended from Shem, it was particularized that the deliverance should be from his seed, and for all the nations of the earth. And another part promised a national possession of Canaan, and an innumerable posterity. The last national part was preparatory and subsidiary to the universal spiritual part. The national part was clear and full; the spiritual part made the first promise at the fall more clear and full, but no one was yet able to see in it what the apostle Paul drew from it" He saith not, And to seeds, as of many, but, Unto thy seed, which is Christ."1 Besides frequent repetitions of the promise, there were significant interpositions and institutions in connection with it, giving prominence to the importance with which God regarded it; once, by instituting a special sacrifice, and giving a remarkable signal of his presence; 2 again, by changing his name Abram to Abraham; and then, again, by the ordinance of circumcision.1 On this promise the hope of a lost world rested. 3 1. MEANS FOR SECURING ABRAHAM'S FAITH AND DEVOTION TO GOD. As the ancestor of the chosen nation, Abraham must be made eminently a man of God. He had already been taken away from the 1 Gal. iii. 16. 3 Gen. xvii. 5. 2 Gen. xv. 9-17. 4 Gen. xvii. 9-14. idolatries of Haran, and made to be a pilgrim and stranger in Canaan, and had thus been thrown upon the sole protection of God, who had intimately befriended him; and this pilgrimage life was perpetuated to the end of his days. The land was promised to his seed, but he had no possessions in it, save the purchased burial-place of the cave of Machpelah. He was greatly prospered in flocks, and herds, and numerous servants, but he constantly wandered from place to place. And then there was the long deferring of children, apparently inducing the expectation that the heirship must come by adoption.2 Then Ishmael is born, and 'Abraham would have God accept him, for Sarah has been barren, and is now aged. Then Isaac is promised of Sarah, and again the time of his birth is foretold, and at the set time he is born, Abraham a hundred and Sarah ninety years old. And then, at the destruction of Sodom for the great wickedness of the people, God communes with Abraham, and hears his requests and conditions for sparing the place if at length ten righteous persons could be found in it; and saves Lot from the overthrow; and more signally tries his faith, by demanding the sacrifice of Isaac; and further confirms it, by substituting a ram providentially supplied as the sacrificial victim.5 The result of all God's discipline was, notwithstanding manifest faults in Abraham's life a steady-growing confidence in God 1 Acts vii. 5. 2 Gen. xv. 2-4. 3 Gen. xvii. 19. |