the Flood (Noah) got drunk and exposed himself, demonstrating that human nature had not changed. But God did not give up. He was concerned about human beings; he had created them. He had one son already and he enjoyed that son so much he wanted a bigger family, so he was not about to give up on the problem of mankind.
His solution began with Abraham. Philosophers call this ‘the scandal of particularity’, suggesting that God was being unfair in choosing to deal only with the Jews. Why does he not save the Chinese through the Chinese, the Americans through the Americans, the British through the British? God’s rescue programme is an offence to us – summed up by the poet William Norman Ewer:
How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews.
Then Cecil Browne decided to add a second verse in reply:
But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God,
But spurn the Jews.
We might explain God’s approach by considering a simple domestic situation. A father decides to bring home sweets for his three children. He could bring three bars of chocolate and give them one each, or he could bring a bag of sweets, give it to one child and tell them to share. The first option is the most peaceful one, but treats the children as unconnected individuals. If he wants to create a family then the second approach would teach them more.
God’s way, therefore, was to start a plan whereby his son would come as a Jew. He told the Jews to share his blessings with everyone else, instead of dealing with each nation separately. He chose the Jews, with the intention that all other peoples might know his blessing through them.
This is why he calls himself the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Old Testament. Chapters 12–50 of Genesis are basically the stories of just four men. Three are classed together while the fourth, Joseph, is treated separately – for reasons which will become apparent later, when we focus on him in some detail.
Built into the stories of the first three men are contrasts with other relatives. The counterpoint to Abraham is his nephew Lot; the counterpoint to Isaac is his stepbrother Ishmael; the counterpoint to Jacob is his twin brother Esau. The relationships become progressively closer, from nephew to stepbrother to twin. God is showing that there are still two lines running through the human race in very stark contrast to each other. The stories invite us to line ourselves up with one side or the other. Are you a Jacob or an Esau? Are you an Isaac or an Ishmael? Are you an Abraham or a Lot?
ARE THESE STORIES REAL?
There are some who argue that these chapters are legends or sagas. They say that while there is a nucleus of truth in them, they cannot be confirmed as historically accurate. What such people forget is that ‘fiction’ is a very recent form of literature. Novels were totally unknown in Abraham’s day. There would have been little point in writing invented stories. Indeed, if you were committed to inventing a story about a hero figure, you would doubtless ascribe miracles to them. The Genesis record includes hardly any at all. There are dozens in the book of Exodus, but Genesis has very few. Yet legend is usually full of miraculous or magical happenings.
Furthermore, nobody has found a single anachronism in these stories (an anachronism being the inclusion of material which could not have taken place in that time period). The cultural details that emerge in these stories have been shown by archaeology to be totally true.
The one feature that cannot be accounted for by natural explanation is the part which angels play, but they are involved throughout the Bible. If you have problems with angels you have problems with the whole Bible. Apart from that, these stories are very ordinary – they are about ordinary men and women who are born, fall in love, marry, have children and die. They keep sheep and goats and cattle and grow a few crops. They disagree, they quarrel, they fight; they erect tents, they build altars and they worship God. All these things are totally within the range of normal human experience.
WHY DID GOD CHOOSE THE JEWS?
What is different about these stories, however, is that God talks with the people in them and they talk to him. So we find that the God of the entire universe makes a special friend called Abraham. Indeed, God calls him ‘Abraham my friend’. This is the scandal of particularity. People cannot cope with a God who makes personal friends. They feel that somehow it is inappropriate, and yet that is the truth of what happens here.
The big question is: Why should God choose to identify himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? What is so special about them? This has been the question asked by other nations, other peoples, down through the ages. What is so special about the Jews? Why should they be the chosen people and not us?
The answer lies in God’s sovereign choice. These three men had no natural claim on God. He freely initiated the relationship with them and they could not claim that the relationship was due to them. Indeed, in each of the generations it is striking how the typical rights of inheritance are overturned. The first son would normally inherit the family wealth from the father, but in each generation God chooses not the eldest but the youngest son. He chooses Isaac, not Ishmael, and Jacob, not Esau. He is thus establishing that no one has a natural claim on his love: it is just his love to give as he chooses. It was not, therefore, a question of a straight hereditary link through the eldest son. Neither Isaac nor Jacob were the first-born. What they inherited was a free gift.
More striking is the fact that none of these three men had a moral claim on God either, for they could not claim to be better than anyone else. In fact, the Bible states how each man lied to get himself out of a tricky situation. Both Abraham and Isaac lied through their teeth about their own wives to save their skins, and Jacob was the worst of the three. Not only were these men liars, they also took more than one wife. We are given a picture of very ordinary men like us who all had their weaknesses.
The only thing they had which did mark them out was faith. These men believed in God. God can do wonders when a person believes. God would rather have a believing person than a good person – he even said to Abraham that his faith went down in his book as ‘righteousness’. Good deeds without a belief in God count for nothing.
Isaac and Jacob shared that faith, although they were very different in personality and temperament. The one common thing between the three men was that they had faith.
The faith of the patriarchs
Abraham’s faith was especially evident when he left Ur of the Chaldees. The city was a very impressive, sophisticated place, one of the most advanced anywhere in the world, but God told Abraham he wanted him to live in a tent for the rest of his life. Not many of us would leave a comfortable city and live in a tent up in the mountains where it is cold and snows in winter, especially at the age of 75. God told him to leave a land he would never see again in order to go to a land he had never seen before. He must leave his family and friends (although in the event Abraham actually took his father and other members of his family halfway as far as Haran, from where he and his nephew Lot continued the journey). Abraham obeyed. He even believed God when he told him he would have a son despite his wife Sarah being 90 years old. (When the boy came they called him ‘Joke’. Isaac is Hebrew for ‘laugh’. When Sarah first heard that she was going to be pregnant at that age she just roared with laughter.)
Abraham’s faith had considerable knocks along the way. Eleven years passed after God’s promise and there was still no sign of a son. Abraham, at Sarah’s suggestion, sought offspring through her maidservant Hagar. The Bible makes it clear that Ishmael was not a ‘child of faith’, but a ‘child of the flesh’ whom God did not choose (although God went on to bless him too with many generations of offspring which make up the Arab peoples today).
When Isaac eventually came, Abraham exercised faith when he was prepared to sacrifice him on an altar at God’s request. The Bible tells us that Abraham was willing to kill Isaac as a sacrifice because he believed God would raise him from the dead after he had killed him. Considering that God had never done that before, this was some faith! He reasoned that if God could produce life (Isaac) from his old body, he could