The first three verses of Genesis 12 is perhaps the most important structural break in the Old Testament and certainly in Genesis. It is a "fulcrum" text: it links chapters 1-11 ("all the families of the earth") with Abraham’s and Israel’s future ("a great nation"). Abraham will not see that future, but his decisions will shape it (26:4-5).

• The close of the preceding chapter announces that Sarah is barren-neither cursed nor blamed, just fact. The family (and all the ancestors) has played out its future and has nowhere else to go. Barrenness is the way of human history. It is the Hebrew metaphor for hopelessness. No foreseeable future in barrenness. No human power to invent a future.

• Barrenness is the arena of God’s living-giving action as chapter 12 demonstrates. God speaks a powerful word directly into a situation of barrenness. That’s the ground of good news. Doesn‘t require human potential-as Abraham demonstrates. God speaks a word of promise to a family without any hope of a future.

• If there is any "human potential" at all, it is in response to the word of promise: "Now the LORD said . . . So Abram went . . ."

 

Describe your own call story; what were you doing? How did you respond? Did you gradually come to a quiet insight or illumination of God working in your life? Or was your "call" quite marked and distinct? Or yet a series of mini calls and invitations?

• Notice the blessing theme in 12:1-4a and throughout Genesis: berekah, or its cognates will appear eighty-eight times in Genesis alone. Blessing shapes the life of this family in a variety of ways as well as the outsiders that they encounter along the way. How has your life reflected this continual blessing-receiving or extending blessing and shalom to others?

• It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey. Soren Kierkegaard

 

Hold up the idea of barrenness as a metaphor for hopelessness and an apt description that summarizes chapters 1-11;

• Shift to Grace-God speaks a new word into the situation of barrenness: that’s good news!

• Elucidate divine promise in Gen. 12:1-4 with Paul’s word of life that God speaks to us through the resurrection of Christ (Romans 4:17).

• Define God’s call first into the world of chaos-as Creator, God calls the worlds into being; then God calls a community into life and gives them a future. Finally, Scripture announces the Godspell that God calls hopeless ones into a community with a future.

• Close with response-the summons to obedience is not discipline or law, but promise. The only way out of barrenness is to respond, to depart from our securities, to risk. To exist in safety is to remain barren; to leave in risk is to have hope.