by Minister Jim Rach
Our reading today from Genesis is, in a way, how God commences his great rescue mission. But first let’s look back to last week, when we looked at Genesis 3 and the fall. We saw how God intended life, and life to all fullness, for us humans, giving us almost free reign over the garden. He only set one prohibition, eating from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were not to make of themselves the criterion of right and wrong.
They fell, precisely because they stopped listening to the voice of God, instead listening to the voice of the tempter, and the voice of their own desires. Mainly, the desire to make of themselves the decision makers of good and evil. Disobedient, yes, but more a refusal to listen. To listen to a higher voice. The voice of God summoning us beyond what we can imagine. Our desires lead to a buffered self, separating us from anything that is transcendent. Our desires lead us to that little space, our small, boring desires. Listening to God moves us to that infinitely wider space. Listening to your own voice really always amounts to, in some degree, playing it safe. Listening to God’s voice, that’s always an invitation to adventure. And, that’s the way to read the whole Bible, the Bible is full of narratives of adventure. And where does the adventure come from? Obedience. Listening to that higher voice. Summoning us beyond this narrow world.
Think of it as Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” where Bilbo and Frodo have to leave their safe space of the shire to go on adventure, they are called by a higher voice. That’s what a Christian life is all about, to leave behind the safe space of my own imaginings and go on adventure following God.
Then we look at the chapters of Genesis between 3 and todays reading from chapter 12 and what do we find. We find all the varying degrees of sin. All showing us what happens when we decide to stop listening to God. Cain and Abel, jealousy, rivalry, hatred, murder. We hear the story of Noah, how sin can start small and then spread through an entire community and covering the whole world. The floodwaters, meant to invoke the watery chaos at the beginning of creation, out of which God brings order, but the watery chaos returns through sin. Then the tower of Babel, work together to build this tower to the heavens, nothing more than cultural arrogance, human pride. We see what sin looks like, in our heart, and in wider society. The Bible is remarkably clear-eyed on this. Its clear what happens when we fall into disobedience.
Now we get to chapter 12, today’s reading, and we see the beginning of God’s great rescue operation. God does not want us stuck in sin. He wants people fully alive. He’s frustrated at our lack of true life. So, God sends out a people Israel. Could God have done it other ways? Probably, but it is the mark of God that he wants humans involved, he wants to affect our salvation but with our co-operation. And so, he’s going to form a holy people, Israel, after his own heart and mind, that from tis people may spread God’s way of thinking. They would become, as Isaiah says, a light for the rest of the world.
So, chapter 12 shows how this whole thing started. How it started through Abram. How come God chose him? Who knows, God certainly could have chosen someone who the world would have known better. And he was no longer young. And God was calling him to just get started with his mission. God calls him, “Go forth to a land which I will show you.” And then one of the most important lines in the Bible. “And Abram went as the Lord directed him” And that makes all the difference. Trouble began when humans refused to listen to God. The solution comes when one human being (Kind of a new Adam) listens.
Abram most likely wanted to stay right where he was. He was among family, friends, familiar surroundings. One would think he would say to himself “stay,” don’t listen to this crazy voice. But he chose not to listen to the voice of his ego, but to the voice of a higher power. And this higher power called him on an adventure. Like Bilbo and Frodo, come on get up, leave the shire, leave the comfort, I get it it’s a comfortable place, but leave it.
Jordan Peterson reflects on these Biblical stories and finds a similar rhythm. The hero has to always leave the familiar and venture into the unfamiliar. And thereby make it familiar, to expand the realm of comfort. But the hero was always called into an adventure to something more dangerous. God’s words to Abram, “come on, get up, go to this land which I will show you.”
After many centuries, Paul could say to the Ephesians, “There is a power already at work in you, that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine.” The implied message, “trust it, trust it,” there is a power at work in you, beyond your ego, beyond your comfort zone, that can do infinitely more than you can trust or imagine, trust it. Listen to it, let’s go an adventure, leave what your familiar with, leave the settled ways, which are probably the settled ways of sin.
Sin is a refusal to trust, faith is an openness, the willingness to listen. When you do that you become part of the solution for God in this sinful world.