The Faith of Abraham

Abraham is easily one of the most important figures in all of the Bible. If you exclude all divine persons, the only other people you could even consider being as important are Moses, David, and Paul. He is one of the most referenced figures throughout scripture, and the covenant made between him and God possibly the most important. Although it may seem hard to believe, the story of Abraham is simply more inspiring than we normally think it is.

One of the pictures we have of Abraham is the first monotheist in a world of polytheists. While the Canaanites, Egyptians, and Babylonians had their plethora of gods Abraham served YHWH God alone. While this is more true towards the end of his story, the truth is that isn't how it starts. It is almost a certainty that Abraham, back before God called him, was a run of the mill polytheist like everyone else.

This doesn't in any way diminish his character or example. If anything, this only serves to make the story of Abraham and how God worked through him all the more incredible. 

You see, the ancient world had a complex system of beliefs about the gods and goddesses they worshipped. There were thousands of gods, each with their own domain and needs. Humans, according to most ancient near eastern myths, were created by the gods to fulfill their needs. The gods got hungry, so humans fed them (sacrifices). The gods needed houses, so the humans built them (temples). In return the gods would offer people safety and justice. It was a symbiosis between human beings and the gods.

Abraham grew up in this world. He had national gods, city gods, tribal gods, family gods, and household gods all around him. These deities were very important to the overall functioning of the world as Abraham would have known it. They provided him with safety, rain, and plenty of harvest in exchange for his sacrifices and the temples. This is a system as familiar to Abraham as the market economy and consumerism is to us today. 

Then Abraham hears a voice telling him to pack up everything and go to some foreign land. That prospect is already scary enough, as many of us who have moved far away from home can tell you, but for Abraham this suggestion is even crazier. Moving to a new land means abandoning his extended family, which was a far tighter knit community than typically is today. The family was the safety net, the retirement plan, and everything else. Without family you had nothing.

More than that, though, Abraham was being told to leave behind the gods of his homeland. He was being asked to leave behind the security and safety of his worldview. The gods were local and bound by geography. They had to be left behind. This is like if we were told to move to a place where there were no stores or markets in which to buy things. How many of us could even comprehend such a place, let alone decide to live there?

The amazing thing is that Abraham listens to God and follows him into the unknown. He leaves it all behind, is stripped of his very identity in the way the ancient peoples saw it, and went off to some distant land with only the promise of an unknown God to trust in. Abraham through his life learns to inhabit this new identity as God's covenant partner, but the road is not so smooth. Still, the faith of Abraham to uproot everything and follow God in spite of all else is truly incredible.