Verse of the day · October 19
Why did Abraham obey a call that did not tell him where he was going?
Abraham was to be shown the land after he arrived in it.
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By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
Hebrews 11:8
He was living at Ur of the Chaldees, in his father's house, among his father's idols, when God appeared to him and spoke to him. He had grown up in the idol-worship of that house himself, and the call took him out of it. Nothing in him had earned the call. What God said to him was exact about everything but where he was going: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee." Three things to leave, and he was told each of them — the country he lived in, the people he was related to, the household he had grown up inside. Where he was to go he was not told at all; there was only an undertaking to show it to him later. The land was left unnamed on purpose: he was being tested on whether he would trust God further than he could see.
He did not go alone, though the call had come to Abraham and to no one else. He took his wife Sarai and his nephew Lot with him. He told his father Terah what God had said, and his father listened and came with him. Leaving his father's house was the part of the order that had to wait: his father was walking beside him. They got as far as Haran, and there they stopped. They had meant to go further, and they were there about five years. Most likely it was Terah who kept them there: the old man was too far gone in age to travel any further, and he died at Haran. With Terah dead, the rest of the family meant to settle at Haran, and Abraham might have been inclined to stay with them; that is what the second call was for. It was the same call again, carrying the first one forward. He was seventy-five when he went on from Haran with Lot and Sarai and his servants, into the land of Canaan. The household he had been told to leave stayed where it was. Those five years fell between the two commands. Each time the command came, he went: no delay, and no argument.
What he did not know was which country he would in fact be led to. He may have had some general notion of the sort of place it was, and roughly which direction it lay in, but a notion like that would not have helped him. Geography was very imperfectly known then, the country was distant, it lay on the far side of a desert with no road through it, and probably no traveller had ever come from that land to tell him what was there. The way from Haran to that country lay straight across that desert.
Even the promise he was relying on had not been given him in full when he set out. The land was not named to him until he had reached Canaan, and it was there, once he was standing in it, that God told him this was the land. When the promise of the land was given him, the Canaanites were still living in it and he himself was a stranger there. Canaan was called the land of promise because it was still only promised to him, and not possessed. He lived in it as a stranger passing through rather than as its heir and owner: the land had been promised to him and he still raised no war on the people already in it to turn them out, and he put up with being treated as a foreigner. He had no claim on the country and no power to take it; he went in peaceably, and was certain all the same that it would be his. When Sarai died he bought a plot to bury her in, and that was the only ground he ever owned there; he built no house. To him the land was only a pledge of a better country, and he kept that country in view the whole way. He was still in tents at the end of his life, with his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob camped the same way beside him — heirs with him of the same promise, and content, like him, to wait. Jacob was fifteen when Abraham died.
The verse says the place was one he would receive later, as an inheritance — and later meant after his own lifetime. The land itself went to his descendants, in time; what he was to have for himself was a heavenly inheritance, further off still. Being promised the land and being put in possession of it were two different things, and in his own life they never became one. He was an heir who spent his whole life waiting. A few lines later the chapter names the better country he was looking for: "a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God." He believed there was such a city, and waited for it.
Because he went out not knowing where he was going, his obedience was a full proof of his faith in God. He left his own country with no prospect of good or success in front of him except what his trust led him to expect from God. And the trust behind it was unconditional: he put himself into God's hand to be sent wherever God pleased, letting God's wisdom decide the way and God's will decide everything else that concerned him. That kind of trust is due to God, and to him only. The call he had was God's own, and that was reason enough to believe it and authority enough to obey it. In the verse's own words, he "obeyed; and he went out." He did not know his way. He knew his guide.
Drawn from Albert Barnes, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke and Matthew Henry. How these teachings are made