FA-02 The Life of Abraham: Original Meaning

Sincere followers of Christ love the Scriptures. We find that they speak to our lives in many different and very personal ways. This is a precious truth about Scripture that Christians should never forget. But many times this wonderfully personal dimension of Scripture can actually cause us to lose sight of something that we must always remember. The Bible was not written directly to you or me. In the first place, Scripture was written to other people who lived thousands of years ago. So as we try to understand how the Scriptures apply to our lives today, we must always be careful to base our modern applications on the original meaning of Scripture.

This is a series of lessons that we have entitled Father Abraham. And in these lessons we are exploring the account of Abraham’s life that appears in Genesis 11:10–25:18.

This is the second of three introductory lessons, and we have entitled this lesson “The Life of Abraham: Original Meaning.” In this lesson we will see how important it is to read the stories of Abraham’s life in light of when they were written and to whom they were written. We will explore the original impact these stories were intended to have on the nation of Israel as they followed Moses toward the Promised Land.

We will explore the original meaning of Genesis 11:10–25:18 by looking at two main issues. First, we will point out how Moses drew connections between the history of Abraham’s life and the experiences of his original audience. And second, we will summarize some of the implications these connections had for the original audience.

Before we look at the original meaning of the life of Abraham, we should take a moment to review what we saw in the previous lesson. Up to this point, we have focused on two critical issues. First, we suggested that Genesis 12:1-3 reveals four major themes in the story of Abraham. God’s kindness to Abraham (the many ways God showed mercy to the patriarch), Abraham’s responsibility to be loyal to God (the many ways God expected Abraham to obey him), God’s blessings to Abraham (the promises of a great nation, many children, a land, and a great name) and God’s blessings through Abraham to others (the promise that Abraham would be a blessing to all the families of the earth).