NOTES for Gen 12:1-20
The history of the people of God begins with the calling of Abraham. God begins it with one small tribe, from which He will later grow His people. God's plan evidently included the intention to create a people that would at the same time be a community of the faithful. Perhaps this is why He begins to create it in exactly this way, although, it would seem, both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia there were many people who knew something about the One God. But this knowledge was still mostly theoretical. It had almost no influence on the spiritual life of society, and in the lives of individual people, it evidently changed little. Such a change requires not theological theories, but a real encounter with the real, living God. Theological knowledge can not only help here, but sometimes hinder: often the revelation received from God does not confirm, but instead refutes, established and generally accepted ideas both about Him Himself and about spiritual life in general. It may be precisely for this reason that at the first meeting God tells Abraham nothing about Himself. He simply calls Abraham to follow Him, promising later to turn the small tribe into a people (vv. 2-3). But for this he must leave, move to a new place, and leave the land of his fathers (v. 1). Of course, Abraham was not the first to move from Mesopotamia to Palestine. The movement of Semitic tribes from Mesopotamia westward, all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, evidently began almost a hundred years before his birth. But at the moment of his encounter with God, Abraham is already seventy-five years old (v. 4), and at that age, as people thought in those days, it was already too late to decide on such undertakings. In addition, God tells Abraham nothing about Himself, so that in heading for Palestine, Abraham had to trust an unknown God about whom he knew nothing. In such a situation neither theological reasoning nor common sense will help: theology can say nothing about an unknown God, and common sense will incline its possessor to answer "no" rather than "yes." Abraham is clearly guided here neither by common sense nor by theological knowledge. He acts as his heart prompts him, in the sense in which the authors of the Bible understand this word: for them the heart was the spiritual center of the human person, that spiritual "I" which hears God and makes a choice. And God trusts him, giving him complete freedom. People sometimes ask: could Abraham have refused? Could he have answered God "no"? And what would have happened then to the people of God? We do not have answers to these questions, because everything described in the Bible has already happened as it happened. One can only say that then God would have had to seek another chosen one for Himself, and He undoubtedly would have found him. But that would have been another story of another people.