Genesis 12, verses one through nine. Now the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 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. I will bless those who bless you, and on him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.' So Abram went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran, and Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran. And they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land, the place at Shechem, to the Oak of Morah. At that time, the Canaanites were in the land. 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. From there, he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west, Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on. still going toward the Negev. Again, may God bless the reading and now the preaching of his holy word. What do you do if you experience disappointment after disappointment after disappointment? Maybe a promised family vacation does not happen. Maybe a friend breaks a promise to you that they make. Kids, maybe you save up your money for a long time to get that toy or that game, and after you've had it for a while, you think to yourself, this thing is just junk. Why did I waste my money on this? Well, in many ways, up to this point in the book of Genesis, we see a road littered with disappointments. Not disappointments in God, disappointments again and again in man. There is, of course, the great initial disappointment of Adam's rebellion against his creator. There is the whole world's rebellion in the days of Noah. And then last time when I was here, I've been preaching through Genesis, but kind of the greatest hits, so to speak, not verse by verse and chapter by chapter, high points. Last time when I was here, we saw another disappointment as rebellious humanity gathered and sought to gain heaven autonomously, to gain a name for themselves at Babel. And so again and again, disappointment in humanity. Clearly the message being set forth in this book is that if there is to be any good thing coming forward to humanity, any blessing at all, blessing and not curse, then God himself, by himself, is going to have to accomplish that. We saw that when I preached to you Genesis 3. We looked at Genesis 3.15 and see the great promises that God says, I will do these things. I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. He shall crush your head and you shall crush his heel. Well, today we see it again. The passage breaks down this evening into two parts, or two sermon points. We'll consider, as we consider Abram's exodus, God is calling him out from the land that he belonged to. We'll consider God's call to Abraham, first of all, and secondly, God's promise to Abram. I slip back and forth between calling him Abraham and Abram. Please forgive me if I do. I'll try to stick with Abram, which he's called at this point in the text of Genesis, although I've been used to calling him something else. God's call to Abram, and then secondly, God's promise to Abram. Well, as we look at God's call and promise, we'll see the God who brings hope to the hopeless, the God who seeks those who do not seek him. We will see the electing God of the covenant who graciously seeks and saves the lost, declaring to them a good word, a word of gospel, of good news. And so again, we'll look first of all at God's call to Abram, then his promise to Abram. Well, first of all, this call, the call of God to Abram, Now, in Genesis 12, 1, we read this. Now the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. God's call to Abram involves telling him to leave, to go out from, verse 1, your country and your kindred and your father's house. This call involves Abraham being told to leave his old life entirely behind. Well, what was that old life like? You may be saying, well, we're not told in the book of Genesis. Well, we're not told in the book of Genesis, but we do get some insight elsewhere in scripture. In fact, we read this in Joshua 24, verse 2. And Joshua said to all the people, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel. Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, and they served other gods." Note that. They served other gods. This is so important to understand about Father Abraham. His life before God's call was not a life of him seeking and serving God. Abraham before then is serving other gods. In short, he is an idol worshiper. like Adam and Eve who worshipped the creature rather than the creator. They listened to Satan's call, you can be like God, which is really to say you can become God yourselves. After the fall, what do they do? They run from God, they hide from him, but God seeks after them. They don't seek him, he seeks them. We see that here in the life of Abram as well. The serving other gods shows us he's fleeing. He's running from the presence of God and hiding like our first father and Eve were doing. But our passage shows God seeking him. What a powerfully clear passage concerning the sovereign, gracious, electing love of God for his people. Our text shows us, it shows us not only that Abram's old life was marked by idolatry, but it also shows us that that life was a dead end. It is dead, it is a fruitless life. This is the point being made in, actually in the previous section of Genesis, Genesis 11 verse 30. We read that there concerning Sarai, Abram's wife, 1130. Now Sarai was barren. She had no child. Now notice the repetition there. She was barren. She had no child. In Hebrew, a language all about economy, minimizing words, a repetition like that serves to emphasize. is God saying, oh yeah, Sarai was barren. She was barren, barren. She is lifeless. And of course, that will be the situation that God will rectify as you look further on in the book of Genesis and see the promises made to Abraham and Sarah. Indeed, in the Old Testament, barrenness always symbolizes lifelessness and curse. from which people need deliverance from. As God calls Abram out of this condition of lifelessness, fruitlessness, death, we begin to see how Abram prophetically resembles the people of God who are to come. He resembles what God is going to do for his people, for Israel, in their exodus. showed them, especially in the 10th plague, that unless deliverance comes by his hand, by the blood of the Lamb, all remaining there are under a death sentence. He must deliver them out in an exodus event. And there is an exodus here as well. The first exodus, we might say, Abram's exodus. God calls Abram out of darkness, out of sin, out of misery, out of death. Brethren, sister in Christ, this is what your salvation in Jesus Christ is. Paul says in Colossians 1.13, He says that God in Christ has delivered you and me from the domain of darkness, the power of darkness, and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son. That is a supernatural exodus event in the life of the one who was once dead in their sins and trespasses, but whom God makes alive. And when God does this for you in Christ, when he calls you out of darkness, he calls you and he empowers you to leave the old life behind. You see, like Abram, you and I, we once too were enslaved to idols, worthless idols who only give death. In 1 Thessalonians 1.9, Paul describes the Christian life as one where we have, quote, turned to God from idols to serve the living, the living and true God, and to wait for his son from heaven. Your former life apart from Christ was an empty, barren, a fruitless life, a life of death, where you served vain, empty idols and not the living and true God. And what? When God calls you out from that domain of darkness, the call is total and absolute. As we hear Paul say in 2 Corinthians 5, 17, the old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All of that old world is behind. And for the believer, just like for Abram, it must be left behind. Of course, that does not mean that we move forward in some kind of life of sinless perfectionism. There are all kinds of struggles in the Christian life. And guess what? When you look at Father Abraham, you see that even though he's the father of the Old Testament church, His life is full of problems. His life is full of struggles. You only need to go forward to the very next section in Genesis and see the pitfalls that he falls into. Because of God's power working not only for you and me, but also in us, there is a definitive break from the old world, from the old life. In the New Testament, Peter expresses that this way when he says to Christ in Mark 10.28, Peter says, see, we have left everything and followed you. Can you say that of yourself in your following Jesus Christ? I leave everything behind to follow Jesus Christ. And if so, what does your life look like when you leave everything behind to follow Christ? Well, that's a question which arises from our text and beckons you and I to answer it in our own mind and our own heart. Again, it's not a life of sinless perfectionism that we move on to. It will involve many struggles, but here's how the break from the old life, from the old world is described in Genesis 12, 4. So Abram went out as the Lord had told him. So look at this passage. It's not just that believers are marked by a negative sort of a thing, leaving behind the old. As believers are called out, as God's people are called out of that old life, they are also brought into something new. That newness is accomplished once and for all in a definitive act of salvation, which Christ works as he dies and as he rises into new life for his people. The New Testament reflecting on that and reflecting how Abraham goes out, leaving what's behind, going to that land which God promised him. The New Testament says this, the writer of Hebrews says this in Hebrews 11, 8 and 10. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was going. By faith, he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land living in tents. with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise, for he was looking forward to the city that has foundation, whose designer and builder is God. And what that means for us, my friends, and this is so very, very important, what that means for us, for all of us, is that we must understand that we too leave the old behind and we come to a new life. to the city whose builder and designer, whose architect is God. It is that heavenly city. That is where our life is now. And therefore, again and again, we are called, by the very same terms that Abraham and the patriarchs are called, we, the New Testament people of the God, are called pilgrims, because our life belongs to another land, a promised land, which we have not yet entered into full possession of. Again, Hebrew says this in Hebrews 11, 13 through 16, these all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. People who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had an opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country. That is a heavenly one. Therefore, and these are such wonderful words here. He says, therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them. We see all of this packed into what I've called Abram's call, illuminated as it is by the New Testament. Now let us look at the second point. We've looked at God's call to Abram, now let's look at God's promise to Abram. You see, in addition to calling Abram out of that old land where he worshipped idols, God makes promises to Abraham. The strong promissory character of this section is seen in a series of divine I wills. Seven times, God says, I will do this, or I will do that. Verse 1. Go to the land that I will show you. Verse two, I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great. Verse three, I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who dishonor you. Verse four, I will give this land to your offspring. Never, not once does God say, I will do this and you'll help me do it. I'll get a little help from you. Help me out as I try to do this. These are seven solitary divine I wills. They sound again very much like God's speech in Genesis 3. I will do these things. I will break the alliance that is between you and these people who have rebelled with you. God will accomplish salvation, and he will do it alone. This ought to be a passage which reminds you and me why we are Protestants, not Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox. For the rallying call of the Protestant Reformation is found in the so-called solas. You and I contribute not the desire for salvation, not faith, not even any good works on our own. God alone works salvation from beginning to end in the scripture and all those seeking to gain heaven by themselves in any way by themselves or leaning on God somewhat but partially on their own works as well to make a name for themselves, which by the way is what we did see when I was here a previous time and I preached Genesis 11. That is what those gathered at Babel do. They try to make a name for themselves. They find that in seeking to make a name for themselves, what happened? They come under a curse. Their names will not be great. However, isn't it interesting, ironically, as we look at this passage right in verse seven, God says this of Abraham. The one who God has called not on the basis of Abram making his name great, or in order that he might make his name great, God says this in verse 2, I will make your name great. I will do it. What an ironic twist. Only as one is enabled by God to leave their own homeland, their own name behind, and does so seeking now through the new life granted in the spirit to glorify God and to exalt his name. Only then will someone actually gain a great name. God promises he will do it. The last shall be the first, and the first shall be the last. God's economy of greatness. Now, we're still thinking right now about God's promises, this second point, God's promises to Abram. And as you look at all of God's promises in these verses, It's important to see that as God promises Abram to bless him and to make his name great, all of the seven I wills that I've spoken about, they coalesce into three basic promises. This will, I think, be helpful to you as you think about the Old Testament, the book of Genesis particularly, but really the entire Old Testament, all rotate around these three basic promises, which I'm going to alliterate with Ps, the three Ps of God's kingdom, so to speak. They concern a people, a place, and a presence, namely God's presence. Those three things, a people, a place and a presence. We see the people, the people promise in verse two, I will make of you a great nation. Now it's clear that this people promise will extend well beyond Abram's ethnic Jewish genealogy. At the end of verse three, Abram is told that in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. And then Paul makes that blessing from Abraham to all of the world explicit. In Galatians 3.8, he says this, the scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abram saying, in you, quote, appealing to this very same verse, in you shall all the nations be blessed. Beloved, here in our passage, God declares the gospel. God preaches a sermon to Abram, a gospel concerning Jesus Christ, who in the fullness of time extends well beyond the bounds of Jewish national ancestry, a blessing to the remotest ends of the earth. And for Paul, the globalness of God's promise, that globalness is set forth in the gospel. Because if the gospel is for all the nations of the earth, then clearly the blessings of the gospel are not secured by Jewish works of the law, but by God's grace alone, through faith alone. We've seen the people promise, now what about the second P? The place. For God to have a kingdom, he not only needs a people over whom he is to rule, he must dwell with them in a place, in a realm, in a land. That shines forth most basically in verse 7, where God says to Abram, to your offspring I will give this land, this place to which I have called you. Now, I'm going to move quickly through the place promise to God's presence promise, but what's the land? Of course, it is the land of Canaan. And by the time Abram hears the words of our text, to your offspring I will give this land, he's already in that land. Remember, he's left the old behind, he's come to this new land, he's in it. That's made clear of Abraham and his family when we read this in verse five, when they came to the land of Canaan. What was it that Abram saw when he came and he and others came into the land of Canaan? Well, verse six tells us at that time, the Canaanites were in the land. That means that Abram was seeing these mighty people. They were mighty. He's going to give them the land, the land occupied with people with fortified cities. So surely Abraham must be thinking, you brought me here? How will I ever survive among these powerful, powerful, bloodthirsty people? It was precisely here that God's presence promise shines so brightly. It might seem like the presence promise is actually absent from our passage because you don't see it stated in the form of a promise, but it is actually in the passage in the most powerful of ways. God just doesn't promise, like he does to Abraham, that one day he will be made into a great nation, or that one day the land will belong to his descendants. In the midst of Abram's fears and doubts, as he comes into the land and sees these mighty people, God's presence is with Abram right then. And God manifests that presence to Abram in a powerful way. Look at verse 7. Then the Lord appeared to Abram. Now God does not just speak to Abram. He visibly appears to him. This is what we sometimes refer to as a theophany, a shadowy, typological way God shows Abram how he will one day come to him permanently in the person of Jesus Christ. You need to know this. Because though Christ has already come and you and I now are awaiting his second coming, right now, you and I, like Abram, where do we live? We live in the land of the Canaanites. We are pilgrims among a people from all external appearances, much mightier than we are. Over and over and over again, you and I are tempted to think, How can we survive in this place, on this earth, with such people as this? Do you know what the Old Testament's most frequently repeated command is? It's this. Do not be afraid. That most frequently repeated command is almost always given a reason. Do not be afraid. Why? Because I am with you. Beloved, as God has called you out of an old world of idolatry and death, as you are tempted all the time to be afraid and to compromise a life of a heavenly pilgrimage, because all around the people of this world appear very different, very wicked, and they appear to be triumphing. Do not be afraid, for God is with you and he will remain with you until the end. When the mighty Canaanites of this world, when those who do seek a name for themselves, they will be eternally denied that name. And those who seek the ownership of this world, they will be eternally dispossessed of it and the meek. You and I who look to the Lord and wait humbly upon the Lord, it is those meek who shall inherit the earth, a heavenized earth forever and ever. And therefore, what should you and your life look like and my life? What should it look like until that great day comes? Should not be taken up in schemes of global domination? but rather precisely what we see in the life of Abraham in our passage. Toward the end of verse seven, here's what our life should primarily show forth. Verse seven, so he built there an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. Is that the case of you? and your family, as God calls you out of this world, as he makes promises to you, as he called Abraham out and made promises to him, the greatest promise of which is his presence, which you have in a far greater way than Abraham had because Jesus Christ has come and he has poured out his spirit upon the church. Are you resting in those promises and are you living out a life Worship. Yes, we know that you have a vocation. You busy yourself probably eight or nine hours a day or more at work. But then you, weekly, you gather as God's people. And in your homes and privately, you again and again give yourself to worship, as we see Abram doing here, building an altar, calling upon the name of the Lord. May the rest of your life be marked by worship, public, family, and private, and be assured that as you do, God promises to you that he will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. So you do not need to be afraid of anything. Rest in the Lord and follow him as he gives himself to you in Christ. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your promises, which are yes and amen in Jesus Christ. Be with us now as we think about and digest this word and see how you spoke the gospel to Abraham. You called him out of an old life of darkness and brought him into a new life where you were with him. He still had many problems, many struggles of faith, but you delivered him from them all. You gave him the power of a new life to follow you and Though he did struggle and fail time and time again, he did have true faith and you drew him to yourself. Do the same for us, rid us from fear as it very much seems like sometimes we are alone or that we are overpowered in this world. Cause us to rest in the greatest of your promises, which is your presence given to us in Christ. We ask these things in his name, amen.