Responding to God’s Call – Genesis 12:1-9
Bethel Baptist Church, David Rising
Genesis 12:1-9; April 26, 2026 Sunday PM
Responding to God’s Call
When God calls us, we should respond. Easy to say. Hard to do.
Who is God? He is the Creator, the One who made us. He is the sovereign One who is self-existent, dependent upon no one, and has all power in His hands.
From the dust He made Adam and breathed into His nostrils the breath of life.
Who are we? We are creatures, humans, made in the image and likeness of God. We are man and woman, dependent upon our Creator God.
By comparison to God, we are like tiny bits of sand along the seashore – a seashore that is known to God in every single detail.
When God told Noah to build and ark, Noah obeyed. God rescued Noah and his family and after the flood they began to populate the earth again. Joah’s three sons have begun to refill the earth and our study has taken us now to the person known as Abram.
Last Sunday evening we began to look at Genesis 12 and saw the call of God to Abram. God made promises to Abram that would include his lifetime and extend out into the future of all mankind.
What God promised to Abram would change the world.
When Abram’s father, Terah, was living in Ur of the Chaldeans, Terah moved his family toward the land of Canaan, but they ended up well north of Canaan in the land of Haran.
There in Haran he and his family dwelt.
At the age of 105, Abram’s father dies. There they are in Haran. Now what?
We pick up again in Genesis 12. Pray.
God comes to Abram and promises him this:
1. God’s promise (12:1-3)
12:1 Now the Lord had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father’s house,
To a land that I will show you.
2 I will make you a great nation;
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
God promised Abram (1) land – a land God would show him; (2) family – God would make Abram a great nation, would make his name great; (3) blessing – God would pour out on Abram and his family His abundant blessing, favor.
That favor extended to those who would bless him. This also would mean curse upon those who would curse his family.
As we consider these first three verses in Genesis 12, we ask the question: what action was put upon Abram?
He had to go. “Get out of your country…to a land I will show you.” Go. Head out. Where? God would show him. Which direction: N, S, E, W?
The text does not say, but we know where he ended up – south.
Notice verses 4ff:
2. Abram’s obedience (12:4-6)
4 So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him.
Just as the LORD had instructed to Abram, so he did. As we noted last week, it is not easy or often desirable to pack up all that you have and head out to some new place, especially if it is a place that was mostly or completely unknown.
We typically don’t do that in our day, and we would be unwise to do it unless we had a similar voice from God assuring us of direction.
I suppose it would make an interesting YouTube series to do that, but it may not be advisable.
We read verse 4a quickly, and we can easily skip over this simple point that Abram simply did what God asked him to do, but we should ponder it.
He had to convince his wife and family, including his nephew Lot, to make this move with him. The text does not address this point, we can see the results. They all left.
When God calls, we should hear and heed.
Notice the biographical information about Abram when he left:
And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
Even though the average age of these individuals at this time was still higher than what we have today, still 75 years old is not a man with the strength of a 20-year old. This mention of his age will help establish later in our study the time Abram and Sarai waited on the Lord for a son.
Who went along with this move?
5 Then Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people whom they had acquired in Haran, and they departed to go to the land of Canaan.
Abram packs up, prepares for the journey, and off they all go. It was not just Abram, Sarai, and Lot, but all the people they had acquired in Haran.
Were these hired helpers? Were they assistants of some kind? As these stories unfold, we will discover that Abram was a man of great wealth and so it was no small matter to pack up and move.
But he did, and we see that he headed south to the land that was also once his father’s target land, though never fulfilled.
What is interesting is that we don’t have any record here of God telling Abram which way to go or even the land to seek, but we see him heading toward the land of Canaan.
Now, of course, as we have been going through Genesis, the name Canaan recalls to us the curse of Ham’s son because of his disobedience.
We are also given geographical information for the land of Canaan in 10:19: “And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon as you go toward Gerar, as far as Gaza; then as you go toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha.”
Those who lived there were Canaanites because they were of the family of Canaan.
An initial thought is this: why there? Was not this a land of those who were associated with a man whose grandfather, Noah, prayed a curse upon him?
But let us not forget Noah’s prayer for blessing toward Shem, Ham’s brother. Noah desired that the God of Shem might be blessed, and also that Canaan would be Shem’s servant.
Where did Shem’s family settle? Generally speaking it was northeast of Canaan. One could look at a broad map and see that indeed God was sending the family of Shem into the land of Canaan whereby we could see the blessing and curse come to pass.
In any case, Abram heads out with everyone. The rest of verse 5:
So they came to the land of Canaan. 6 Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh. And the Canaanites were then in the land.
Now if you have a bible with maps, look at one of the early ones in your collection and you will find some familiar names.
Notice Shechem. It is between Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim. It is almost a location right in the middle of this map.
And so they are there in Shechem, and the text then tells us who lived there: Canaanites. We might say: of course. Who lives in Vestal? Vestalites.
But remember that when Moses wrote this there was quite a bit of history already past, and the name “Canaanite” had a lot of weight that would come to mind when it was noted.
The map does not point out the terebinth tree of Moreh.
The fact that the land was already occupied presents a problem.
That issue, of course, continues to the present day.
And so there they are in the land of Canaan, in Shechem.
3. God speaks again (12:7a)
7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” And there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.
Now that he has his feet on the land, God says that God would give his family, his descendants, his seed, that particular land. The focus is land, dirt, location, that very place. It will not be until 13:17 that God tells Abram that He would give him this land. It is for now a promise for his descendants.
4. Abram’s response: worship (12:7b-9)
His reaction was just like Noah’s – he built an altar.
Right after Noah exited the ark, experiencing the wonderful rescue by God, he responded in worship.
Abram here, after hearing the promise of God in this appearance, builds an altar to the LORD.
The LORD did not just speak but also appeared to him. This appearance of God to Abram was no doubt a strong assurance to him that His promise would stand. He was in someone else’s land – the Canaanites – but God was going to give it to his descendants.
And so in speaking again to Abram, God again promised land but also a family, descendants. Now we see Abram moving again:
8 And he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.
From Shechem Abram he moves further south, around 20 miles, and in that place between Bethel and Ai.
No doubt, this is because there were people already there, and so he pitched his tent outside the cities in this place.
And what does he again do? There he builds to the LORD an altar and worships Him.
Abram did not set about first to build a house, a city, or things like that. Sure he pitched his tent, but the priority seems to be clearly the worship of God.
Building an altar in Shechem and now near Bethel and Ai signals that Abram is very eager to keep their focus upon God.
They are there, after all, because God has called them to this place. They probably had a lot of questions, but they were calling on the name of the LORD.
But they did not stop there as they continued their move south. Verse 9:
9 So Abram journeyed, going on still toward the South.
Some bibles say the “Negev” or “Negeb” instead of the South, but it is both south and also known on some maps in some literature as the Negev. These are the southern lands of Palestine or Canaan. This is a reference to a large area in the south of Canaan.
“the Hebrew construction indicates he repeated the pattern of journeying by stages, where he built altars to the Lord. The Negev is the region south of Judah where Abram and Isaac resided for brief periods (13:1, 3; 20:1; 24:62). “Negev” in Hebrew means “dry, south country.” The wilderness generation lived in this area during its period of punishment (Num 13:17, 22, 29; 21:1; 33:40; Deut 1:7)”.[1]
Mathews, K. A. (2005). Genesis 11:27–50:26 (Vol. 1B, p. 120). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
The text continues with the famine in Egypt and the details that follow, but for this evening we’ll stop here.
These verses move quickly and are not dramatic in the sense that anything unusual takes place. God has asked Abram to get up from his place there in Haran and Abram moves. He sets up his tent in Shechem and builds an altar to God, worshipping Him. Then he moves a bit farther south to the area between Bethel and Ai, and there he also builds an altar and worships God, calling on His name.
What strikes me about this narrative is two things:
(1) The only appropriate response to God’s call is obedience. Abram heard the voice of God and Abram obeyed. I do not believe that we will hear God’s audible voice in our lives, but we certainly can “hear God’s voice” as we hear, read, and study the word of God.
We need to be careful we hear it properly, but God’s Word does call to us. The gospel calls us to repent and believe, and the word of God calls to us continually to know the will of God and live it out. We will not get a promise like Abram, but we benefit in God’s promise to Abraham through our grafting into the root by the work of Christ.
(2) The second response to God’s call is worship. Abram built an altar and this was for worship. We don’t build altars, but we are here listening to a preacher preach from God’s Word. We are here to sing songs that help our minds focus on spiritual things, on the work of Christ. We are here to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and put Him ahead of other things. Truly all of our lives are to be given to God through our living sacrifice, as well as when we formally gather like this to praise God and hear from Him.