“Now the Lord had said to Abram.” The Lord had said, past perfect. It indicates something said in the indefinite past. We know from Acts 7:2 that it was said while he was still in Ur. So it indicates something that was said in the indefinite past, but how far in the past, is not given. Now look at verse 31.
The word dwelt does not indicate an overnight stop at a hotel. It indicates a fairly considerable length of time. How much time is pure conjecture, but I will just throw out something. It may be a period of several months, at least long enough to say, they lived there, that they dwelt there. Let us go to Joshua 24 to pick up another interesting piece of information.
Something I never noticed before today. “Terah took Abraham”! Abraham was not in charge at this point. Terah was the patriarch. The verse does give at least some indication that Terah was at least agreeable to what Abraham was doing. Notice,
Now all we can do is conjecture, but whatever, God did not want Terah along, so He permitted him to die, and then apparently, Abram quickly left. The indication to me is that he was having some trouble leaving his father’s house. I do not know what the reasons are, but there was still authority there that he feared leaving. Terah took Abram, and Abram followed, even though Haran was in the opposite direction from Canaan.
Now, I would have to agree that it was entirely possible that God wanted Abram to go from Ur to Haran and then down to Canaan. That is certainly a possibility, and I am open to any other ideas. But the fact that it says that Terah took Abram, not the other way around, indicates that at this time Terah was still in charge as the patriarch and Abram was following.
He was battling, I think, some of the same things that we do. The desire to not upset our family anymore than it had been upset, the desire to keep peace in any way that he possibly can, the desire to not bring dishonor or pain or whatever it might be to his father. But at any rate, there is at least an indication that Abraham was having a hard time tearing himself away. So even the father of the faithful had a hard time leaving his roots.
Let us look a little bit further into Lot's background because his pedigree, as we traced Moses’ last week, is even in a way more interesting than Moses' was.
Very early Lot is associated directly with what the scholars call the holy line. That holy line came through the flood in Shem. Remember from last week’s sermon that Adam's life overlapped Methuselah's by 243 years. So we start all the way at the beginning. Adam, we jump to Methuselah, and Adam still lived another 243 years. Now Methuselah lived right up to the flood. He died in the flood, but while he was alive that last 98 years Shem was alive. Shem, then, was a direct connection, along with his father Noah, from the beginning with Adam all the way through the flood.
Now Shem lived for another 500 years after the beginning of Arphaxad who came when Shem was 100 years old. Shem lived to the ripe old age of 600 years. The last 150 years Abraham was alive. Now we have a direct connection from Adam to Methuselah to Shem to Abraham, and 150 years that Shem could relate things directly to Abraham that took place even before the flood. All of that experience, all of that personal history could be passed on directly to Abraham who was the uncle of Lot.
Haran died and Abram became Lot's adopted father, I guess you might say his guardian. But do not think that Lot was young, because I have calculated that even if Lot was only 25 years younger than Abram (and he might have been very close to his age), when they left his own land and went to Canaan, Lot was already 50 years old, and for 100 of those years he had lived side by side with Shem. So the righteous Shem could pass on the history and the purpose of God right to Abraham and right to Lot directly.
Moses was a couple of generations removed and yet his faith was far greater than was Lot's who lived right during those times. We are not dealing with somebody who had no background and had no access to hearing these things directly.
It is interesting that Terah was moving with Abram. We also read there in Joshua 24:2 that Terah worshipped other gods. Now perhaps what we are seeing here is at least the beginning of the conversion of Terah, that Terah was either being converted or maybe he repented. I do not know because he was beginning to move with Abraham from the land of Ur to Haran, but he died before they could actually leave.
Now I do not think that I am going too far in saying that, as we would look at it today, what Abraham had gathered around him was what we would call the church on earth at that time and that they were beginning a period of pilgrimage, a wandering. There was a forerunner of the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness, and even today is a forerunner of our spiritual wandering in this world that is opposed to God.