The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. ‘I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
Genesis 12:1-3 NIVUK
There are always situations in life that we look at and think to ourselves that ‘There is no way that will happen.’
And yet, somehow, they do.
I could not envisage a day when the Berlin Wall came down and half of Europe was free.
Thirty-four years ago, it did.
I did not think I would ever find someone who would want to marry me. Twenty-two years ago, I did.
Having children seemed impossible. Nineteen years ago, we did.
I thought the Scottish football team would never qualify again for a major tournament. Four years ago, they did.
I wondered during the pandemic if life would ever return to normal. Now it has.
However, these verses describe a situation so utterly impossible, it would seem beyond comprehension that God’s Word would come true. And yet it did.
And how!
But why was it so impossible? And what had it to do with Christmas?
Well, let’s start by looking at an impossible man.
And make no bones about it, Abram was utterly impossible!
Not his temperament, but his position. Look at what the Bible says. He was the son of a pagan man who set out from Canaan from Ur of the Chaldeans (in southern Iraq), but stopped approximately halfway in the city of Harran (Genesis 11:31), believed to be in south-west Turkey. Archaeology tells us that Harran was founded by traders from Ur, so the people from there would also speak the same language and have the same customs, as well as the same religion – the moon was worshipped in both cities.
But God calls Abram to do something radical: to leave everything he was familiar with and complete the journey his father had begun. And he calls Abram to do this at the ripe old age of seventy-five (Genesis 12:4).
Now, let’s examine this in detail. You have a man called to the nomadic lifestyle with his family at the age of seventy-five. I don’t want to seem like I am insulting anyone who is seventy-five years old, but the nomadic lifestyle is anything but romantic or easy. It is arduous, no matter how old you are. So to obey and take on such a way of life at Abram’s age was really quite something.
Abram was not a prime candidate for someone who would bless the world.
He had a contemporary who seems to be a much more likely candidate: a man called Job.
Job was wealthy and respected. He already had children and was a godly man (Job 1:1-3). He was also scrupulously careful with his relationship with God (Job 1:4-5). He may have endured a really difficult period of suffering, but he came out of it even stronger (Job 42:7-17).
And yet, and this part should stun us, Job is not given the same promise as Abram. Instead, the promise goes to an obscure seventy-five year old nomadic shepherd with no land or home to call his own.
That fact alone is quite incredible.
We would not choose Abram. We would choose Job. But God chose Abram.
Apart from an impossible man, we also see an impossible situation.
Abram was childless. God had commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and populate the earth (Genesis 1:28). Abram could not obey this command. He wife Sarai was barren. She was sixty-five years old; he was seventy-five.
Their time had not come, and now had gone.
If we compare him to Job, again, he had a lot of kids. And twice: ten before he suffered (Job 1:2); ten after he suffered (Job 42:13). God had blessed him with a lot of children – twice – yet He hadn’t done it to Abram, not even once.
In our modern era, this might all sound very strange. Our world is overpopulated. There are those who decide they will never have children purely for environmental reasons.
It was very different in the days of the Old Testament. Not only were people commanded to rear children (Genesis 1:28), but doing so was seen as a positive thing, because the more children you had, the stronger your family was (Psalm 127:3-5).
Children were a blessing from the Lord.
A blessing Job had but Abram, at this point, did not.
And yet...
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.
Hebrews 11:8-12 NIVUK
More than that, it was through Abram’s line that Jesus came (Matthew 1:1-16; Luke 3:23-38).
So God's promise to Abram was fulfilled in a quite spectacular way of which even he could not conceive.
Let alone Sarai.
So we see an impossible man and and impossible situation. Lastly, we see an impossible call.
And what a call!
The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. ‘I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
Genesis 12:1-3 NIVUK
Now, here we must be careful of the tense. Genesis 12:1 says that ‘the Lord had said’. This is what grammar needs say is the ‘past perfect’ tense. In other words, this command was given to Abram long before he left Harran, not right before it.
Stephen goes further and, under the Holy Spirit’s guidance, states that this call took place while Abram was still in Mesopotamia, before he left for Harran (Acts 7:2-3). Abram stopped halfway, seemingly with his father, who then died before Abram continued on his journey (Acts 7:4).
So, having been commanded to leave his father’s household, it seems that his father’s household went with Abram, leading the way to the halfway house of Harran, where God’s call was fulfilled following Terah’s death (Genesis 11:31).
This tells us how hard it was for Abram to obey this call. We do not know how long Abram tarried in Harran, but we know it was too long. It took Terah’s death for him to move on and give God the full obedience He deserved.
We need to consider carefully what he was being asked to do. Terah at least seems to have had the idea that God was calling them towards Canaan (Genesis 11:31). But we have no idea how he knew this. The Bible doesn’t tell us. What it does tell us was that Abram – childless, seventy-five year old as he was – is called to leave the support of his father’s household and head off in an unknown direction to an unknown place to serve an unknown God.
It is extraordinary that he obeys.
The stunning thing is the level of faith that was required. Abram was promised the land for his descendants, yet the only piece of it he owned was the tiny sliver of land where he buried Sarai.
While his contemporary Job had a house and great wealth, Abram was a restless wanderer who obeyed God and became the father of many nations, as God promised.
This is all wonderful, you might say, but how does it relate to Christmas?
Apart from the reality that Jesus was born into Abram’s line, there are striking parallels with Jesus here.
He did seem to be an impossible man, and not just because He was both man and God. He was impossible because the Bible is clear that He was conceived of the Holy Spirit and his mother, Mary, was a virgin.
Jesus was a one-off – completely unique – and there will never be another.
Did you know, for example, that the odds of one person fulfilling just eight Old Testament about the Messiah are 1 in 10 to the power of 17? For those of you are maths nerds, that’s 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. Just eight prophecies.
Scolars believe that Jesus fulfilled anywhere between 300 and 570 prophecies in His lifetime.
The odds on that happening are beyond enormous.
That is what makes Jesus utterly unique. No-one else can ever or will ever make this claim.
But as well as an impossible man, Jesus was also, like Abram, in an impossible situation.
Look at what his opponents said about Him:
They replied, ‘Are you from Galilee, too? Look into it, and you will find that a prophet does not come out of Galilee.’
John 7:52 NIVUK
Even a man who went on to be His follower said these words:
Philip found Nathanael and told him, ‘We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ ‘Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?’ Nathanael asked. ‘Come and see,’ said Philip.
John 1:45-46 NIVUK
As a Galilean and a native of Nazareth, Jesus was devalued before He even opened His mouth.
And yet He was precisely who He claimed to be.
Jesus was also facing an impossible call – something no other human being could do:
No-one can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for them – the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough – so that they should live on for ever and not see decay.
Psalms 49:7-9 NIVUK
And yet that is exactly what Jesus did:
For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
Colossians 1:13-14 NIVUK
Why? Because Jesus is no ordinary man. Jesus is the Son of God.
And Jesus is the means through which all nations are blessed through the line of Abram.
How?
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
Matthew 28:19 NIVUK
And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
Matthew 24:14 NIVUK
So what can we learn from this?
In Abram, God’s plan of salvation seemed to have hit some huge, potentially insurmountable barriers. How could the Messiah be born of Abram’s line and bless all nations, when Abram had no children?
And yet even that barrier was nothing to God.
Not only did this thoroughly unlikely man father the Jewish and Arab nations, but through his line the Messiah was born.
Christmas is a reminder that God can, and does, do the impossible: that His plan will always prevail, no matter what lies in the way.
Christmas is a reminder that using unlikely people and doing unlikely things has always been, and will always be, God’s way.
Christmas is a reminder for all of us, no matter what circumstances we are in, not to give up.
Because when we hope in God, we always have hope.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, forgive me when I compare my situation with other people’s and become downcast. Help me to see that You always have a plan for me and that Your plan will always prevail. Help me to never give up and always to hope in You. Amen.
Questions
1. Why was it so unlikely that God’s promises to Abram would come true? What does this teach us?
2. How does this reflect the Christmas story?
3. What does this mean for you, in your situation?
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