Genesis
12:1 ¶ Now the LORD had said unto Abram,
Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house,
unto a land that I will shew thee: 2 And
I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name
great; and thou shalt be a blessing: 3
And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee:
and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
What had been
brought about in the land of Babel, Babylon, was a religion counterfeit to the
true worship of God. It was not long after men and women left the ark of Noah.
What I said in my comments on 4:16 bears repeating a little at this point.
From Cain’s time the ancient city had become religious entity, a type
of church, started all at once with invited families who would share in the
same worship and the same gods as can be seen in Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, although the
individual family would have its own singular worship and gods which
represented their lars familiaris or familiar spirits (see Leviticus 20:27),
the guiding divinities of ancestors dead.[1]
It is likely that Cain’s false religion was carried on through his city and it
is possible and likely that Shem, Ham, and Japheth would be worshipped as
venerable ancestors in different names under the confusion of languages long
after their death.
In addition, each home in the ancient world was to have a sacred flame
which was the religious center of the home and must not be permitted to go out.[2]
This eternal flame, like the lamp in the tabernacle in Exodus 27:20, must never
go out. This was a counterfeit city in the ancient world, a city of man’s
creation, man’s poor attempt to replace what God intended. Cain’s false
religion, which infected the rest of human history after the Flood, began to be
expressed by his brethren in his city, Enoch, and the eventual religion of the
city-states of Canaan, Greece, and the worship of Rome and India would have
begun there, reinforced by Babylon after the Flood.
The king of an
ancient city was also the high priest, who offered up sacrifices, and was the
highest religious authority. This is evident in a number of ancient writers
such as Aristotle, Euripides, and Demosthenes. Sometimes there were two kings,
a most famous example being Sparta of Greece or the two consuls or Rome and, we
will see later, perhaps in ancient Canaan.[3] This is the world that Abram moved and lived
in, a world awash in everyday religious ritual, a world that had no problem
believing in a distant God the Creator but also a whole pantheon of gods that
were much closer to him and had more of a role in his daily home life. Every
man or group of men desired to have a personal god, it would seem, to make up
for the lost relationship with their Creator, which their ancestors had
willfully eliminated in disobedience. Perhaps also this worship of gods
represented the power the sons of God who had come to earth, mated with women,
and produced giants, the mighty men of renown worshipped in deities whose
presence on earth had been remembered and spoken of by Noah and his three sons
and their wives.
Some things to
note about the ancient world include that from this earliest time human
relationships, such as a family, were a religion symbolized by the meal they
would take together. Also, in their minds all authority must have some
connection with this religion. Law was just another part of religion. In
addition, it should be noted that two cities were religious associations that
did not share the same gods. When war was made it would be made, not only
against the soldiers, men, women, and children of a city but against its crops,
its slaves, its gods.
Here is the reason
for the family leaving Ur. Abram is commanded to do something very brave, to
leave the protective confines of the gods of the hearth, of the family, where
the dead were worshipped, where the eldest son had no choice but to inherit his
father’s property, and his gods, and the father and the son were joint owners
of what the father possessed.
Here, now, God
calls Abram to come away, not only from a city, but from an entire worldview,
to renew the relationship with the one who created him, something lost to
mankind as the darkness spread to every corner where men and women had been
scattered. He is called to obey God, to leave this world while living in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment