FA-03 The Life of Abraham: Modern Application

If there is one thing that many modern people find difficult about the Bible, it is this: it’s hard to imagine that stories written thousands of years ago have the ability to guide our lives today. And this is certainly true about the accounts of Abraham in the Bible. Abraham himself lived about four thousand years ago, and the stories about him were written nearly 3600 years ago. But as followers of Christ, we are committed to the fact that these stories are part of Scripture and therefore are profitable even for modern people.

But even with this commitment the question still remains: how do these stories about Abraham apply to our lives today? How do we bridge that 4000-year gap separating us from Abraham?

We have entitled this series, Father Abraham, because we are exploring the life of Abraham as it appears in the book of Genesis. This lesson is the third of three introductory lessons in this series, and we have entitled it, “The Life of Abraham: Modern Application.” In this lesson, we will conclude our overview of Abraham’s life by concentrating on the proper way to draw modern applications from the chapters in Genesis that speak of Abraham. How should we apply the stories about Abraham to our lives? What kinds of impact are they to have on us today?

To understand how the life of Abraham applies to our world, we will look in two basic directions: first, the connections that exist between Abraham and Jesus, and second, the connections that exist between the original audience of Israel and the modern audience of the church.

Before we look at the modern application of Abraham’s life we should take a moment to review what we have seen in previous lessons. We have learned that the story of Abraham divides into five symmetrical steps. First Abraham’s life begins with Abraham’s background and early experiences in 11:10–12:9. Second, several episodes concentrate on Abraham’s earlier interactions with representatives of other peoples in 12:10–14:24. The third and central segment focuses on the covenant that God made with Abraham in 15:1–17:27. The fourth section turns to Abraham’s later interactions with representatives of other peoples in 18:1–21:34. And the fifth segment deals with Abraham’s progeny and death in 22:1–25:18. These five sections present the patriarch’s life in a symmetrical pattern. The third section, which deals with God’s covenant with Abraham, serves as the centerpiece of Abraham’s life. The second and fourth sections compare to each other as they both focus on Abraham’s interactions with other peoples. And the first and last sections correspond to each other by providing bookends to Abraham’s life, tracing his family line from the past and into the future. Beyond the basic structure of Abraham’s life, we have also seen in previous lessons that Moses had a purpose in writing Abraham’s life. Moses wrote about Abraham to teach Israel why and how they were to leave Egypt behind and to continue toward the conquest of the Promised Land. In other words, by seeing the historical backgrounds of their lives in Abraham, by finding models or examples to follow and reject in Abraham’s stories and by discerning how Abraham’s life foreshadowed their own lives, the Israelites, following Moses could see the ways they were to pursue God’s purpose for them.