What's in a Name?

I have something of a confession to make. My wife was home sick this week, and while staying home with her to help her through it, I did something I haven't done in months: I took a day off. I'm lousy at sabbath, I know that – my wife rightly exhorts me to get better at it, to take more time off – but this week, well, I actually took a day or two, and I reminded myself what it's like to have a hobby. Truth be told, I haven't had the luxury of hobbies in a good, long while – again, something I should probably fix. But at the start of the week, my wife got a call from her uncle, the one on our prayer list, thanking our church for the card we sent. Anyway, the course of that conversation put me back working on their family tree, and wouldn't you know it, I finally broke through a roadblock I'd had before her great-great-grandparents left Belgium a bit over a century ago. Over the course of a beautiful couple days poring over jumbles of handwritten records in Dutch and French and Latin, I began piecing together the stories of forgotten generations, back to the days of the Holy Roman Empire. Genealogy is my hobby – she's always telling me I could make a living at it – and this week, as she recovered, I got to regale her with the recovery of name after name, life after life.

Of course, I was primed that that week's activities by the fact that, just this past Sunday, we heard the word of God in the shape of a genealogy: the bruised and battered line by which Abram, son of Terah, descended from Shem, son of Noah (Genesis 11:10-26). Terah's line has come down to him and three sons, one of whom, Haran, died young but left a few children behind him (Genesis 11:27-29). Of Terah's son Nahor, we haven't yet heard of any children, though expect to hear of his twelve sons ten chapters from now (Genesis 22:20-23). We've come to realize that this genealogy ends, not with Haran or with Nahor, but with Abram. And “the name of Abram's wife was Sarai... Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:29-30). So long as Abram remains resolutely faithful to that marriage, and so long as her condition doesn't change, a corollary is that Abram will be a man without a son, a man with his future in jeopardy.

People in Abram's neck of the woods were deeply concerned and troubled by that sort of thing. They had this story about an ancient king named Etana, who ruled a vast city but had no heir. Etana prayed to his god daily, offering constant sacrifice to the powers of heaven above and hell below, desperate to be blessed. He'd say: “I have honored the gods and revered the spirits; dream interpreters have used up my incense, gods have used up my lambs in slaughter. O lord, give the command! … Relieve me of my disgrace; grant me an heir!”¹ Though the exact resolution is lost to us, this snapshot gives us a sense of how a younger Abram, maybe still under the sway of the gods of Ur, might have reacted, as season came and season went and Sarai wasn't conceiving. In time, Genesis will reveal it as Abram's infected wound.

Combing through family histories, I've come across couples in Abram's situation. Much more often, I've met children who died young, so young that their memories weren't otherwise passed down. But saddest of all have been the records like one that caught my attention this week, because the name of the child looked so peculiar. But when I translated it, it wasn't at all what I thought. It was just the word 'Unnamed.' That brings a tear to my eye all the quicker. Is there anything quite as tragic for a human being as to never have borne a human name?

In the Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian way of thinking, things really only started existing once they had names, once they had distinct social recognition. That's why Babylon's creation stories began “when heaven on high had not been named, and the ground below was not given a name.”² And to people in the Middle East in those days, your name in effect was you, “in some way of the same substance as the human being.”³ No wonder it was so important for your name to keep functioning in the world, at least in the family orbit. It was as a reflex of concerns like that that, in ancient Israel, “if brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man” would marry her former brother-in-law, “and the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name not be blotted out in Israel” (Deuteronomy 25:5-6). Children were, in Israel as in Sumer, a “vital mechanism in perpetuating ancestral names” in the face of death.⁴

Such death was a terrifying prospect to the people Abram grew up with. The Sumerians thought not only that the underworld was dark and dreary, but that human needs don't end at death. The spirits in the grave must be fed and watered and satisfied, because everything left to them is sheer misery. To satisfy them, regular offerings had to be made to the dead; if they weren't, then the spirit of even the kindest person in life might return as a bloodthirsty ghost, driven insane by hunger and fury until appeased. Responsibility for such offerings fell to the heir – a son, if there was one, or a daughter if not.⁵ As a result, the traditions of Sumer held that your condition in the afterlife was based in part on how many kids you'd left behind: they said a man who died childless got nothing to eat but bricks he couldn't bite through, whereas a man with seven sons sits among junior gods in bliss.⁶ To Sumerians, it was “paramount for the welfare of an individual in the netherworld to have as many descendants as possible.”⁷ And so “descendants, the name, and the afterlife are interconnected” for them.⁸

Everybody needed to have a name – but people wanted, not just a name, but a great name, that “your name will be made famous in Sumer,” they'd say.⁹ A famous name is harder to forget, and more likely to find charitable support in the hereafter, but even aside from all that, people have always wanted to feel that they matter, and fame is telling you that you matter, that your existence is recognized and ratified by more people than most. So the elite in Abram's world were concerned with how their names could be made famous in Sumer.

Some of their favorite stories were about heroes who, horrified at death, wanted to spend their precious days doing great things so they could make their mark on the world and be remembered. That's the saga of the hero Gilgamesh, probably a real ancient king who inspired mythical tales that were super popular in Ur when Abram grew up there.¹⁰ Abram definitely heard these stories. In one of the oldest such stories, Gilgamesh explains to his best friend Enkidu that he's consumed with anxiety about his own mortality: “In my city, a man dies, the heart is stricken; a man is lost, my heart recoils. … I myself will do the same, I indeed will come to this. However tall the man, he cannot reach the sky; however broad the man, he cannot span the highlands.”¹¹ Gilgamesh understands, at least in this story, the limitations humans face. He can't climb to heaven, can't win hide-and-seek with death. Burning to do something to quiet his crippling fear, he resolves that “since no young man can elude life's ends, I shall enter the highlands, I shall set up my name. Where a name can be set up, I shall set up my name; where no name can be set up, I shall set up the names of the gods.”¹²

The rest of the story features Gilgamesh venturing off to the distant Cedar Forest to harvest its biggest trees: “I want to cut down the cedar and make for myself an everlasting name,” he insists.¹³ The only trouble is that the forest is guarded by a monster called Humbaba. But to Gilgamesh, even that's an opportunity. “If I die, I will only have made a name for myself: 'Gilgamesh battled the brutal Humbaba!'”¹⁴ On the other hand, his friend reminds him, if he succeeds, he'll “make for yourself an everlasting name: how Gilgamesh killed the brutal Humbaba!”¹⁵ As the story goes, they do succeed; but when their further misadventures and foolish pride lead to his best friend being cursed to death by the gods, Gilgamesh hopes that everybody left behind “will cherish your name,” he tells him.¹⁶ For heroes like these, everything was about making a name to outlast death.

Gilgamesh is the kind of guy the Bible had in mind a few chapters ago when it spoke of the gibborim, “the mighty ones who were of old,” the great heroes of legend who went on far-flung adventures – like Gilgamesh to the Cedar Forest – or who were accomplished in battle – like Gilgamesh and Enkidu killing first Humbaba and then the Bull of Heaven. No wonder the Bible explains that these “mighty ones of old” were “men of the name” (Genesis 6:4) – obsessed with their name, their reputation, their renown, by whatever daring feats would cement it beyond the decaying reach of time. That's the Bible's picture of the heroic age before the flood, and in all likelihood, whatever “name they acquire for themselves is illegitimate in God's sight.”¹⁷

After his best friend Enkidu “whom I loved has turned to clay,” Gilgamesh becomes once more acutely “afraid of death... Am I not like him? I too will lie down and never get up, for all of eternity.”¹⁸ The result is an urgent quest for “the secret of life and death,” in hopes of winning himself eternal life;¹⁹ and all along the way, he relies on his reputation to open impossible doors.²⁰ In the end, though, Gilgamesh trudges home empty-handed, with nothing to boast in but the mighty wall of his home city Uruk, the same wall Abram would've seen while passing by on the way to Harran.²¹

Aping Gilgamesh, one real-life Sumerian king went an expedition and “set up my great name and my monumental inscription in the land Lebanon on the shore of the Great Sea.”²² But even when they couldn't venture out on big adventures, kings in the days of Abram loved to build and brag. Construction was a major way for kings to perpetuate their names, often stamping their names into all the baked bricks. One king reversed erosion to the riverbank and thus “set up my name for the distant future,” he said.²³ Another king built a city wall “in order to establish my name forever.”²⁴ A third “wrote my praise there on a foundation inscription which proclaims my royal name, in order that the numerous peoples sing my praises forever”²⁵ – we found those words at Ur. Understandably, such kings were always worried someone would rewrite their inscriptions to claim credit, and so they usually ended with a curse: “As for the man who... has my handiwork destroyed or erases its inscription and writes his name on it..., may that man not get a name or beget any descendants!”²⁶ The kings prayed that the gods would, in such a case, “destroy his name, his seed, his clan, and his kin from the land.”²⁷

Theirs is the mentality the Bible lampooned in the last chapter. Remember those people with so many bricks and an open plain to build on? What did they want to do? “Let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” And what purpose would that serve? One thing above all else: “Let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). Just like Gilgamesh wanted to put up signs memorializing his own name first and the names of the gods only if he couldn't exalt his own,²⁸ so the builders of Babel built a religious tower, not to acclaim the name of any god (much less the true God!), but to establish their own name, their own legacy.²⁹ In so doing, the Bible suggests, such builders “pathetically strove for permanence... in their own strength.”³⁰ “To seek to make a name for oneself is to assert one's self-made autonomous independence, to claim once more to be 'the master of my fate..., the captain of my soul.'”³¹ And that's what all their construction was about.

That's what Gilgamesh and the gibborim, the Babel-builders and the kings, and even average Sumerians raising their kids all had in common. They wanted to make their name, exalt their name, preserve their name against the terrors of death, all through their own efforts. Whether Gilgamesh and his adventures and battles, or the builders trying to leave a lasting mark on the landscape, or Abram's neighbor begetting wildly for the sake of a better afterlife, all of them were living out a works-based script, one in which a name is an attainment, provided for by human labor more-or-less independently from the actions of God.

And it's a script still at play in the world today. Not too many of us worry about being world-famous, whatever fantasies we entertained in youth. But in our local communities, we'd like to be known. In our families, we'd like to be remembered. We don't want to be forgotten for centuries until some genealogist dusts off our name – or passes it by. We want to know we've mattered, that we've made our impact on the world around us, so we'll be missed and not forgotten, and that, as the years roll on, our name won't be shaded in oblivion. But because we want these very reasonable things to wish, we go about living one or another version of a purpose-driven life. But it's generally our purpose that drives us: our conception, upon which we've decided, for why we're here in the here-and-now, for how we want to spend our days, trying to be remembered on our terms.

The way we think, the way our society thinks, “we must all make a name for ourselves, and failure to reach the pinnacle of society is morally culpable. In a world that catechizes us into the dream that 'you can be anything you want to be,' citizens are faced with the twin responsibility of first choosing what to be and then becoming what they have chosen, on pain of namelessness.”³² We may not journey to the Cedar Forest, but we go to the beach and snap some candids for the photo album. We may not fight Humbaba or the Bull of Heaven, but we wrestle the causes we oppose for the sake of the ones we support. We may not build towers, but we build careers we hope will impress. We may not expect our children to feed our ravenous ghosts, but we direct them to pass down our name for a little while – and beyond that while, we prefer not to think. And so, staving off the anxieties of death by human effort, we sacrifice ourselves a little each day to society's “ever-provisional, ever-changeable verdict... on the name we have made for ourselves.”³³

So let's turn the corner. Abram, accompanying his father Terah, has left Sumer; but Terah settled the family in Harran (Genesis 11:31), repeating the settling on the plain that led to the city and tower (Genesis 11:2). Though Terah's left Sumer, Sumer clearly hasn't left him. But in the midst of this, we hear the voice of God to man for the first time since the days of Noah.³⁴ Abram hears it clear as day: “Go! Get away from your land and from your family and from the house of your father, to a land that I will show you!” (Genesis 12:1). These words of divine urgency demand that Abram “abandon all that is familiar,”³⁵ that he “give up the security of his social sanctuary and familial support.”³⁶ The result, if he obeys, “will turn him into an isolated individual with no familial ties.”³⁷ He's asked to slip away from everybody who has a natural reason to remember him when he's gone, to go dwell among strangers who won't gather his bones to Terah's in the family tomb and won't feed lost Abram in his unmarked grave. Abram is called to hurl himself off the map, to risk living and dying in obscurity, to erase his own name. For all Abram can tell, he's being asked to move to hell.

God asks of Abram something even more intense than the worst fear of the builders of Babel. Their worst-case scenario, remember, was to “be scattered over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:4). In fact, up to this point in Genesis, the only times people have left their settled place was by judgment: Adam and Eve kicked out of the garden (Genesis 3:23-24), Cain cursed to be “a fugitive and wanderer in the earth” (Genesis 4:12), and now “the LORD scattered [the Babel-builders] over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). What all these felt as a punishment, this Voice asks Abram to embrace voluntarily. And at the point of asking, Abram barely yet knows the God who asks it.³⁸ A half-familiar God offers him an unfamiliar country, and unlike Gilgamesh trudging back to Uruk, Abram's journey offers no prospect of a restful homecoming.³⁹ Abram's found himself on an episode of Let's Make a Deal, and he has to trust that this God isn't hiding a big zonk behind that curtain. No wonder God goes on to detail how his Big Deal for Abram addresses “Abram's likely longings and ambitions.”⁴⁰

The first promise God gives to Abram is, “I will make of you a great nation” (Genesis 12:2). The only other time so far we've heard about nations was as “the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations” (Genesis 10:32). Abram wasn't on that list, and for much of his life, he's been all but nationless. Now, God doesn't pledge to include him in some existing nation, the Sumerians or Amorites or Arameans or whoever, but to raise up a nation just for Abram. If Abram has to give up his family and land, then on the other side of the exchange he can bank on “the promise of a new community” of which Abram will be the heart.⁴¹ God takes away his past only to give him a more astonishing future.⁴² In spirit if not in letter, Abram's going to become a king.⁴³ What God offers Abram “mirrors the aspirations and ideals of ancient Mesopotamian political leaders like Gilgamesh,” allowing Abram to move forward in life “acting with regal confidence and power.”⁴⁴ Spoken by anybody else, it's the voice of implausibility, irrationality, idiocy, delusion. But this is thus saith the LORD.

The second promise that God gives Abram is, “I will bless you” (Genesis 12:2). Now, that could mean material prosperity – bigger flocks, broader tents, better toys, plenty of grain and cheese and figs, precious metals and fine crafts – but Abram already found a lot of that in Harran (Genesis 12:5). God could just be assuring him that going on the road doesn't mean missing out on future opportunities. But maybe it's not a stretch for Abram to wonder if this means the blessing all the money in the world couldn't buy. After the flood, “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'” (Genesis 9:1). But Abram isn't fruitful. Abram hasn't multiplied. Abram fills a very, very small corner of earth. And the only conclusion one could draw is that the blessing of God has passed him, and just him, by. Now, God declares, “I will bless you” (Genesis 12:2). Could it be that, without needing to sacrifice like Etana, Abram's heart has been heard?

Before Abram can puzzle over it, there drops a third promise: “I will greaten your name” (Genesis 12:2). After Genesis 6 and 11, “this is now the third time we have seen the motif of making a name.”⁴⁵ Abram, don't forget, is a descendant of Shem, a man whose name literally meant 'Name.' Before brick ever touched brick at Babel, God had already provided a Name for the world.⁴⁶ God calls Abram to step forward as the true heir of Mr. Name, thus “assuring him of renown.”⁴⁷ But how? Will Abram go on great adventures? Star in a compelling story? Win big battles? Reshape the landscape? Raise a large family? Well, yes, but that's not where his great name will come from. Abram “doesn't need to do anything except go and let God fulfill his promises.”⁴⁸

And in this, Abram is absolutely “a counterexample... to the model of Gilgamesh,” absolutely a counterexample to the kings who've lorded over him all his life, and absolutely a counterexample to the builders of Babel.⁴⁹ Where the builders insisted on making a name for themselves, Abram understands that his only hope of such a name is to wait on the God who is “the sole arbiter of what is impermanent and what endures,” of what counts and what doesn't, of what's remembered and what's forgotten.⁵⁰

“God promised to give Abram essentially what the Babel-builders desired, only more so.”⁵¹ “The builders' aggressiveness is matched by Abram's passiveness,” so that Abram's name and blessing and nation “will be a gift, not an achievement.”⁵² Babel shows us how “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled,” but Abram hears that “he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11). Where the builders at Babel built themselves a tower, a 'great thing,' God pledges to make Abram's name tower higher still. What all humanity together tried to make themselves and thus royally botched, God wants to promise Abram in the form of a gift, one Abram could never afford with anything he could muster to barter, even the whole of his life.⁵³ Whatever comes to fruition for or through Abram, at root “it will not be his own doing.”⁵⁴ “God is the source of Abram's name being made great,”⁵⁵ making him at last a true 'son of name,' a gift as unearned now as was Abram's first breath on the day he was born. In some marvelous way, Abram here is born again, with the LORD taking over the place of Terah.⁵⁶ As one theologian put it, from one perspective, this passage here is “the beginning of the gospel.”⁵⁷ For the name God alone gives is “the only name grounded in grace.”⁵⁸

We know God did bless Abram, whose name he literally greatened a whole syllable to 'Abraham.'⁵⁹ God multiplied him from just “one” to many (Isaiah 51:2), to “a nation great, mighty, and populous” (Deuteronomy 26:5), for whose salvation God “divided the waters before them to make for himself an everlasting name” (Isaiah 63:12). The Lord called them “to dispossess nations greater and mightier..., cities great and fortified up to heaven” (Deuteronomy 9:1), and to “make their name perish from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:24). But Israel felt deeply anxious over whether God would keep his promise. They feared the prospect that those greater nations “will surround us and cut off our name from the earth” (Joshua 7:9), just as they threatened: “Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more!” (Psalm 83:4).

To quell such anxieties, God eventually raised up a young man named David to Israel's throne. And while God denied David the privilege of harvesting the Cedar Forest to build God “a house of cedar” (2 Samuel 7:7), God looked on David as he'd looked on Abram. “I have been with you wherever you went and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth” (2 Samuel 7:9). David reacted, as is only meet and right, with wonder and awe, extolling how God made himself a great name through the power of invincible love (2 Samuel 7:23-26). Decades later, as David lay on his deathbed, his court officials reminded him of the promises and prayed that God might even “make the name of Solomon better than your name” (1 Kings 1:47). Ever after, all Israel would pray for each new son of David: “May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun!” (Psalm 72:17). But none of these kings received a name greater than David's or Solomon's. None made Abram's heirs into a truly great nation in every sense of the word. None showed what the fullness of God's blessings should look like. None of them became a perfectly Abrahamic king. Until, suddenly, after a long and dark Advent wait, one did.

The Eternal Word of God, you see, personally “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). He came as “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), “and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David..., and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32-33). He lived his whole life to “manifest [God's] name to the people whom [God] gave me out of the world” (John 17:6). He said he'd one day “sit on his glorious throne” (Matthew 25:31), and invited his followers to “eat and drink at my table in my kingdom” (Luke 22:30). But until then, his was a hidden kingdom, a kingdom “not of this world” (John 18:36). And so it had to be. “None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8).

On the cross, Jesus could well have cited the psalm: “I call upon you, O LORD, I spread out my hands to you” – spread out as wide as from nail to nail (Psalm 88:6). But then Jesus, King of Israel, Lord of Glory, died as real a death as any before or since. Where moments before, the nature of God had been united to a living body animated by a human spirit, now the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was united to a human nature stretched between lifeless corpse and separated soul. As his stiff flesh and bones were enclosed in the earthly darkness of a tomb, Jesus – God and human soul – descended to the house of clay, to “the depths of the pit, in regions dark and deep,” where heroes and builders and poets had so feared to be lost and forgotten (Psalm 88:6).

The psalmist had asked God, “Do the departed rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave?... Are your wonders known in the darkness?” (Psalm 88:10-12). That weekend, finally, the answer was yes. Yes, God's steadfast love was declared in the grave, when Jesus came and declared his triumphant love to the lost souls whose names were long forgotten on earth. Yes, God's wonders were known in the darkness when Jesus confronted the warden of hell's gates and despoiled him for every spirit to see. And yes, the departed Jesus rose up by resurrection to praise his Father forever – a hallelujah homecoming! “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11). Our Lord Jesus Christ is King of the Universe!

“Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day,” Jesus said, “he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). In Jesus, and in him alone, would be fulfilled the prophet's further promise: that to those who, like Abram, would trust the LORD and “choose the things that please” him, God would “give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 56:4-5). Much as Abram could say while gazing from the gates of Harran, God “saved us and called us with a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began and which has now been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:9-10). This gospel is the news that a Perfect Son of Abraham has become “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9) “called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD” has given: the Church (Isaiah 62:2).

Through the hands of that holy nation, you and I have been “baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Christ our King promised that to all “who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12), a genealogy better and richer than mine or yours or Abram's by Terah. “By believing, you may have life in his name” (John 20:31), life richer and brighter than all Gilgamesh quested after, a legacy longer than Etana's wildest dreams. “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men” – not to Etana or Gilgamesh, not to Abram or David – “by which we must be saved,” than the name of King Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12). And now we're all on Abram's journey to somewhere we haven't yet been shown, but which our faith knows to be “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16). No longer, then, do we face the prospect of the grave as doom and gloom, clay and dirty water. No longer do we fear and fret over being fed, not when the King saves a seat at his table. No more do we worry about being forgotten, about our legacies being a dying breeze, about our names as broken symbols lost to time, “for as the new heavens and the new earth that I make shall remain before me, declares the LORD, so shall your offspring and your name remain” (Isaiah 66:12) – a tower time can't topple.

Christ our King says of each disciple who perseveres on the Abrahamic journey to its end that “I will never blot his name out of the book of life; I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels” (Revelation 3:5). Christ our King offers each such disciple “a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17), engraved more indelibly than all the monuments of all the kings of old. But Christ our King promises us still more: that “I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God..., and my own new name” (Revelation 3:12). If we but follow him to his promises, that name above every name, that name greater than any, will be stamped on me and on you, securing us with its significance eternally. What good grounds for thanksgiving! Hail to Christ the King!

Oh, We're Halfway There!

So in Genesis 11:10-26 we've come to another genealogy, the partner to what we had in chapter 5. Just like that one, this one is structured “to show the legitimate descent of God's election,” tracing forward not just anybody and everybody, but only the human lineage that God is choosing, or electing, to carry his promises.¹ This one, though, has the added bonus that it forms a bridge between the two main pieces of Genesis. Chapters 1-11 – everything we've been looking at since June last year – is called the primeval history. Everything yet to come in Genesis is called the patriarchal history. And today's passage is what ties the one to the other.

The first few names of it should be pretty familiar, because it repeats a line we partially traced in chapter 10. It starts off with Noah's son Shem, and then introduces his son Arpachshad (Genesis 11:10-13). It's a wild name to have, but it probably means “border of the Chaldeans,”² and it might indicate a people group living in “the desert regions of western Mesopotamia.”³ Then, Shelah's name suggests someone being sent forth or going out, thrown forward like a spear or arrow.⁴ The next name is Eber (Genesis 11:14-17), whose name means 'across' or 'beyond,' and might look to a nomadic people crossing over the Euphrates River.⁵ In the Table of Nations, “to Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided, and his brother's name was Joktan” (Genesis 10:25). In chapter 10, we learned a lot about Joktan ties to southern Arabia; but now we move forward with Peleg's story (Genesis 11:16-19), which might have something to do with the way people in the south needed to create irrigation canals to make their land fertile.

The rest of the genealogy takes us further north, to the steppe region of north Mesopotamia above the bend in the Euphrates. The people up here were organized into confederations of tribes, and each tribe had sub-tribes in it, and smaller groups in those; everybody had a place.⁶ Following after Peleg, Reu's name seems to mean 'shepherd' (Genesis 11:18-21),⁷ and the semi-nomadic lifestyle these tribes adopted was all about raising small livestock on the steppe land while having a few settlements here and there to farm wherever there was rain.⁸ It wasn't bad when they had a strong grip on wool production, because they could command high prices for it.⁹

Zeroing in on just one area, there's a stretch above the Upper Euphrates where two main rivers flow south to feed into it: the Balikh in the west, and the Khabur in the east. And the next two names in the genealogy (Genesis 11:21-26) are settlements there: Sarugi, to the west of the Balikh, and Nahur, on a west branch of the Khabur.¹⁰ So it's people living in this area who are coming into clearer and clearer focus as this genealogy tells us that God's plan for the world is still advancing, that his original blessing is still working itself out, narrowing in on its goal.¹¹

But there's a big bump in the road. Around the year 2200 BC, changes in the ocean currents set off a massive multi-century period of drought in much of the known world, one of the most severe climate shifts in known history. When that rapid-onset drought gripped the areas around Sarugi and Nahur, settlements there collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of people began to move south in search of survival.¹² They were, by some definitions of the term, refugees.¹³ But their movement away from their home was “an exodus of unprecedented proportions” in human history,¹⁴ and it seems as though the family line our Bible is tracing was part of it.

Naturally, people in Sumer and Akkad, weren't necessarily thrilled with all of this. All kinds of foreign peoples “descended in increasing numbers on southern Mesopotamia during the decades following 2200 BC.”¹⁵ They eventually – a century or so too late – built a 110-mile wall from river to river, trying to keep this wave of northern immigrants out.¹⁶ But myriads upon myriads had already made a “persistent infiltration of the south,” bringing a “substantive influx of immigrants” into their cities and lands, until their kind made up about a tenth of the total population.¹⁷ That included the immigrants who, unbeknownst to all, carried the hope of the world.

If they went far down enough, then where the Euphrates poured into the Persian Gulf, they found a Sumerian city called Ur. Ur was a very old Sumerian city – from the Bible's point of view, the same kind of city as Babel¹⁸ – and its position where the river met the gulf meant it could prosper heavily from the metal trade in addition to its lively textile industry.¹⁹ Back when Sumer was united by the rule of Sargon and his kids – you might remember them the other week as the inspiration for the Bible's Nimrod – Sargon appointed his daughter Enheduana as high priestess at Ur.²⁰ Once the Akkadian Empire weakened and was overrun by mountain tribes, eventually a governor of Ur named Ur-Nammu rose up, claimed kingship, and established the Third Dynasty of Ur around the year 2100 BC; and in the city's heart, he built a ziggurat, a big ol' Tower of Babel all Ur's own.²¹

The other month, as we compared the Bible's flood to pagan stories, we remembered that they thought it was their storm god Enlil who unleashed the flood. Well, the same people thought that their moon-god – Sumerians called him Nanna, and Akkadians called him Sin – was “the firstborn of Enlil.”²² Ur was a city wholly devoted to the moon-god, thinking of him as “king of heaven and earth,”²³ as the “lord who lights up the darkness” all through the night.²⁴ They pictured him as a rancher whose field was the night sky and who kept the stars as his cattle. He was especially popular in southermost Sumer, places like Ur, where the economy depended on herds, since shepherds so often watched their flocks by night beneath the moon's protective gaze.²⁵

This is the Ur where some of the immigrants from up north found themselves. Since the kingdom had plenty it wanted to get done, and the immigrants needed work to do, they were ripe to draft for labor in building “massive boundary walls, fortifications, temples, ziqqurats, and canals” at Ur and neighboring cities.²⁶ But the kingdom didn't last. Around the year 2000 BC, it got invaded, and its last king, Ur-Nammu's great-great-grandson Ibbi-Sin, was carried off captive amidst the destruction.²⁷ The kingdom's disintegration meant “largely unchecked migration into the region,” not to mention grain shortages that had stomachs growling.²⁸ And even as kings in other cities (some of foreign background) seized power, Ur was being rebuilt bigger than before: a fourth of a square mile inside the city wall, but lots of settlement beyond the wall.²⁹

It's in this rebuilt Ur of the Middle Bronze Age that we at last meet a man named Terah, who either was born in the area or came there through his or his family's migration (Genesis 11:26). As the story of Shem's legacy closes and a new story begins, we're twice told that Terah “fathered Abram and Nahor and Haran” (Genesis 11:26-27). The one given pride of place, though not necessarily in order of birth, is Abram – whom we'll later know as Abraham, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. The way the genealogies in Genesis are artfully designed, Noah was the tenth generation from Adam, and he had three sons. Now, Terah is the ninth generation from Shem, and he's also got three sons – one of whom will rise into that same tenth-place position Noah had. The question this story has to answer is: which one of them is it going to be?³⁰

So let's come meet Terah as he tries to raise these three boys into men. It's not clear whether Terah lives inside Ur's city walls or in the settlements and tent camps stretching outward from the city. But whatever the case, his life is a lot different from what his ancestors knew before they came south. There just wasn't enough land for all these newcomers to be shepherds roaming free.³¹ So Terah, and his boys as they came of age, likely did seasonal labor: cleaning canals, making bricks, working construction jobs, hiring out to farms during the harvest.³² They might have even been drafted into military service now and then.³³ Have you ever pictured Abraham as a kid, playing board games with his brothers? Have you ever imagined them running through the winding streets of the city? Can you see a teenage Abraham doing those kinds of jobs? Because he would've.

What about their family's religious life? Based on the parallel to Noah, it'd be easy to assume that this chapter traces the family that kept the knowledge of the true God alive, even as every other candle smoldered and died, one by one.³⁴ But the shocking thing is, they didn't. Whatever was true about his fathers before him, Terah “happened to be a heathen.”³⁵ Centuries later, as Joshua reviews for Israel where they came from, he explains that “beyond the River lived your fathers in olden times – Terah, father of Abraham and father of Nahor – and they served other gods” (Joshua 24:2). Other gods, plural, besides the LORD – they were pagan polytheists! And which other gods? The gods of Ur, especially the moon-god and his wife. In fact, Terah's name is likely related to his language's word for 'moon,' and the names of several of his family members seem to be linked to the moon-cult.³⁶ No wonder later Jews spoke of Abraham's background as “ancestral godlessness.”³⁷ “His family was steeped in pagan idolatry.”³⁸ Luther went so far as to charge that Abram himself “lived in idolatry, had no true knowledge of God, and lacked both faith and the fear of God.”³⁹

So what happened in Abram's life that, in an environment of moon-worship and polytheism and idols and all the many rituals of Ur, led him to turn instead to such a different kind of religiosity? Now that's the big mystery. A common speculation later on, since God's “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20), was that a young Abram “recognized... from the pattern of the stars the One who arranged them,”⁴⁰ that he “intuited that there must be an invisible, single, intelligent source behind the visible, many, but silent heavenly bodies.”⁴¹ Moreover, people figured that Abram must have realized that an idol could never be worthy of its own craftsman's devotion.⁴² As an early teenager, maybe, Abram “began understanding the straying of the land, that everyone went astray after graven images and after pollution..., and he began to pray to the Creator of All so that he might save him from the straying of the sons of men.”⁴³ Thus, Abram “stopped worshipping idols and started believing in one God,” a radical move to make in the depths of ancient Sumer.⁴⁴ Perhaps, as one Jewish writing imagines, a voice from heaven answered his prayer: “You are searching for the God of gods, the Creator, in the understanding of your heart. I am He!”⁴⁵

Later Jewish readers imagined that, once Abram came to this new conviction, he became a bold witness, first and foremost to his dad, urging him to “worship the God of heaven, who sends down rain and dew upon the earth, and who makes everything upon the earth and created everything by his Word, and all life is in his presence. Why do you worship those who have no spirit in them?”⁴⁶

Whatever the story there, Abram and his brothers grew up. One of those brothers, Haran, had children, such as a son named Lot (Genesis 11:27). But then, tragedy struck. “Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans” (Genesis 11:28). This is the first human death actually stated in Genesis since the Flood itself; that's a big deal. Ignoring later legends about Abram committing arson against a temple and Haran dying in the blaze as he rushes in to rescue his gods,⁴⁷ all the Bible actually tells us is that something happened – maybe execution, maybe an accident, maybe an illness – that led to Haran dying, not just during his dad's lifetime, but in front of Terah's own two eyes.⁴⁸

Only now, in the wake of disaster, do we read that “Abram and Nahor took wives” (Genesis 11:29). Nahor marries a woman named Milcah, who is “the daughter of Haran.” Apparently, besides his son Lot, Haran had two daughters, “Milcah and Iscah.” While Terah cares for Lot as his own, Nahor marries his niece Milcah, which was “one way to provide for orphaned daughters who were not yet married at the time of their father's death.”⁴⁹ So we might expect that Abram will naturally marry Iscah, the other daughter. But instead, Abram marries a woman named Sarai. Unlike Milcah, we aren't told anything of where Sarai comes from; she's “the one woman here without genealogy.”⁵⁰ And while many early Jews and Christians tried to turn her into Iscah to make things neat and tidy,⁵¹ she just isn't. We're left in suspense for nine chapters until finally Abram admits that Sarai is “the daughter of my father, though not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife” (Genesis 20:12). Sarai needs no genealogy because she's a child of Terah by a second wife.⁵²

We're told just one thing about Sarai at this point: “Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:30). It's just six even words in Hebrew, but it packs a punch, becoming “central to everything that follows.”⁵³ This is the Bible's first use of the word 'barren,' finally fulfilling God's warning to Eve about an uphill battle to conceive children (Genesis 3:16). Of all the pairs for God's blessing of fruitfulness to skip over, why Abram and Sarai's?⁵⁴ Aside from them being half-siblings, of course, which I can't imagine helped matters.⁵⁵

So here we are, and of Terah's three sons who could be heirs to the line of promise, Haran is prematurely dead, which leaves him out, and Abram's childlessness is, on first glance, “leaving no doubt that Abram is a minor character” in the story.⁵⁶ The obvious conclusion, for a first-time reader, is that there's only one hope for the future, and it lies with Nahor and his niece-wife Milcah. All told, though, the painful plight of two-thirds of Terah's sons gives him considerable cause to worry about the future of his family.⁵⁷

So we read that “Terah took” – and what did he take but what family he could? “Terah took Abram his son,” for one, and “Sarai his daughter-in-law, Abram's wife.” Terah doesn't desert them, even if he's losing hope of them providing him any more grandchildren. Terah also took “Lot the son of Haran, his grandson” (Genesis 11:31), to whom Terah had effectively become an adoptive father.⁵⁸ But Genesis says nothing about Terah taking to himself Nahor and Milcah – which is a strange omission, if they're really the hope for the future. They likely do join the action that follows, but Genesis elides mentioning them here to refocus our attention.

“And they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans” (Genesis 11:31). This home they'd made, this place where they lived – why leave it? Some speculated that they quit Ur, and indeed all of Sumer, owing to religious persecution due to Abram's religious defiance – that the locals “expelled them from the presence of their gods.”⁵⁹ That's not very likely. What's a bit more likely is the suggestion that Haran's death was so traumatic that Terah just needed to get away from the place where it happened, however it happened.⁶⁰ By this time, the Gulf was starting to retreat from Ur, which would eventually weaken it as an economic powerhouse,⁶¹ and maybe Terah worried that his family wouldn't survive in Sumer.

On a human level, it was Terah who instigated their move away from Ur and out of Sumer,⁶² even if maybe Abram urged his dad toward the decision.⁶³ But all this was in the hands of divine providence.⁶⁴ Four chapters from now, Abram will hear the words, “I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans” (Genesis 15:7), and based on that, centuries later Jews would remember the LORD as “the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans” (Nehemiah 9:7). Maybe there's hope that, by freeing the family from immersion in his old environment, Terah can break all the old chains and be fully converted to the LORD.⁶⁵

Saying goodbye to Ur, Terah and his family begin their journey, heading northwest along the banks of the Euphrates River, since following the river is the easiest way to navigate. They pass by Uruk and its famed walls; in the eastern distance, they spy Nippur, the city of Enlil, and Shuruppak, where local traditions say the ark was built; they march right past Babylon, probably with scarcely a glance.⁶⁶ They get to Hit, where all the best bitumen is found. They make their way into the territory of the kingdom centered at Mari. And somewhere along this way, Abram has an experience that changes his life.

In the New Testament, the first martyr, Stephen, looks back and suggests that “the God of glory” revealed himself to Abram “when he was in Mesopotamia” (Acts 7:2), before Abram “went out from the land of the Chaldeans” (Acts 7:4). Apparently “it was on that journey that God, we understand, spoke to him.”⁶⁷ Once Babel is in the rearview mirror, that's when Abram deepens his sense of a purpose for his life, that's when Abram begins to hear this God of Glory speaking to him. Despite his disqualifications, he's been chosen.

Terah's still in the driver's seat, but as Abram is realizing, Terah's decision to uproot the family was actually at the LORD's instigation, whether or not Terah knew him. And now we're told that Terah's destination for this trip was “to go into the land of Canaan” (Genesis 11:31) – again, whether or not Terah realizes that's where he's headed towards. That is his God-decreed destination. That is where Terah belongs. Every step Terah takes in these two months thus far is meant by God to bring him closer to Canaan, so that Terah can become patriarch in a new land and, once fully converted along the way, become someone truly great and majestic. God has a profound purpose for Terah, this idolatrous man who's on his way to deliver his family to their destiny.

So, since the goal is to get to Canaan, then they should soon be taking a westward turn. The Fertile Crescent curves downward through Syria and Lebanon into Canaan, and they should follow that path. But... they don't. The next words we read are that “they came to Harran” (Genesis 11:31), a town “situated on the Jullab river near the source of the Balikh.”⁶⁸ Reaching Harran on a journey from Ur to Canaan requires missing a big turn and taking a few unplanned ones. Harran is just too far north of the curve, 550 miles from Ur. Apparently, Terah stayed on the Euphrates until he reached the mouth of the Balikh, then veered north and followed it up.

What's going through Terah's mind? Why does he detour to Harran? There's a lot of mystery here – the Bible doesn't outright give us an answer – but it's important. First of all, remember that Terah's ancestors probably came from that region around the Balikh river valley a couple centuries earlier. For maybe the first time in his life, Terah's journey had taken him close to where grandpa was born. How could he not at least pay a visit? He reasons that it isn't too far out of the way. But once he does, Terah finds that this place makes him feel “comfortable in a culturally similar environment.”⁶⁹ He recognized his roots. He felt at home there.

This journey is likely after 1900 BC, by which time the drought in the region had subsided, and plenty of people were flooding back north to this area; one scholar called it “a veritable land rush,” with “tribes and kingdoms vying for access to and control of pastureland” in that region.⁷⁰ Communities were being revived, and many of the descendants who'd multiplied elsewhere were on their way up. For Terah to have led his house to Harran meant just following the well-worn path, going with the crowd, letting the flow of traffic bear them along.

What's more, Harran's very name suggests a crossroads for caravans, and Harran was indeed at the intersection of several major international trade routes. It was a natural stop for merchants going between the Mediterranean to the west, the Hurrians to the north, and the river civilizations to the southeast.⁷¹ In fact, some scholars suggest that Harran was originally “founded as a merchant outpost by Ur.”⁷² A place like that makes the dollar signs fill Terah's eyes. And given that the next chapter will mention the many possessions and servants that the family “acquired in Harran” (Genesis 12:5), Terah was right about the “economically promising conditions.”⁷³

As a fourth reason for Terah to stop, Harran was religiously familiar. Ur and Harran were united by both being “thriving centers of moon worship.”⁷⁴ In fact, it isn't until after the time of Jesus that we have clear evidence of anyone or anything worshipped in Harran other than the moon!⁷⁵ The moon-god had a major temple in Harran called the 'House of Rejoicing,' and its promised joy tugged at Terah's heartstrings and drew him in.⁷⁶

And as if that weren't all enough reason to stick around, Terah realizes that, even if Canaan were more of what he was looking for, it's hundreds of miles further. And he has to ask himself: Is any marginal benefit of Canaan worth that added work to get there? Why bother going on, when Harran is at least good enough? So Terah sees Harran, and he judges it to be “an excellent alternative without necessitating further travel.”⁷⁷ Tired from a two-month journey as it is, Terah throws in the towel. He taps out. He opts for Harran “rather than their original destination.”⁷⁸ Terah makes the decision on behalf of his family that this is the end of the trip. “When they came to Harran, they settled there” (Genesis 11:31). And “in settling in one worldly location, he is absorbed into the world.”⁷⁹ For Terah, that's where the story ends. Genesis flashes-forward through “the days of Terah,” revealing that, in the end, “Terah died in Harran” (Genesis 11:32). Terah never went further.

Terah had gotten derailed on the journey he was meant to take in life. He could have kept the course. He could have turned away from the river of ease when he needed to. But he saw that Harran would give him cultural comfort and a sense of family tradition. He could tell that Harran fit with the flow. He saw the lucrative prospects, the strategic opportunities, that setting up shop near Harran could yield. He recognized in Harran all the values ingrained in him by habit, including his old spiritual values. Harran offered him all the things he really wanted, without mustering any more effort for them than he already had. So it's not surprising that Terah turned aside to Harran. But by doing so, Terah veered away from where he was meant to go in life. And as the years and even decades passed him by, Terah stubbornly rooted himself in that decision. Terah never had a change of heart. Terah never escaped his old chains, just set them up in a new place. Terah never saw the destination God had in store. He was “unable to enter because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19). And so he never became what he was meant to be. Terah got stuck halfway to his goal, and gave up. And there he died.

Do you ever see Terah when you look in the mirror? God had a purpose for Terah, but Terah veered away; and sometimes, so do we. Sometimes, like Terah, we're tempted off-track by the appeal of a legacy we want to uphold. Terah had his ancestral roots near Harran; we might have our attachment to a particular idea of what it means to be an American, or we might have a family legacy, or some other tradition or custom or cultural bubble, and it's possible we can cling so hard to such things that it derails us from what we're meant to be about. Or sometimes, like Terah, we're tempted off-track by the flow of the crowd. The traffic of our society beats its path in rather predictable directions, toward certain ideas, toward certain practices. Our society travels toward consumption. Our society travels toward self-satisfaction. Our society travels toward particular views of what it means to be a good human, what it means to be a good citizen. Resisting that traffic is hard, and if you track the polls of what Christians in our society actually confess believing, much less what we end up doing, well, we increasingly follow the ways of the crowd. We don't want to swim against the current. We go with the flow.

Sometimes, like Terah, we're tempted off-track by the promise of an opportunity. Terah hoped for riches if he went to Harran – and it sounds like he got 'em. He decided that he could provide better for himself in Harran than God could provide for him on the journey into the unknown. But don't we routinely make the same choice, and don't we choose what will make us feel secure and prosperous? Don't we aim to bless ourselves, to gain and gain? Sometimes, I'm sure we do – just like Terah did – and we'll step off the path of the call to get it.

Sometimes, like Terah, we're tempted off-track by a familiar vice. In Terah's case, it was moon-worship, which was such a familiar habit that it once again took hold of his religious life. For us, though, it could be any vice, any number of things we like to do, are habituated to do, and find that it's just too irresistible to not steer toward this one time... and then another... and then another...

Or sometimes, if we're honest, we – like Terah – find ourselves off-track, for one of those or some other reason, but once we are, we decide it's easier or more comfortable or more pleasing to give up and stay there, rather than to get back on track and go the distance. We settle down where we've gone off-track. And depending on whether it's just our personal potential we're avoiding or else the broader human call to virtue, we might become – in the words of the New Testament – “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13) – because isn't that, after all, what it is to “fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and so miss what we're meant for?

That's the tragic story of Terah, and sometimes it can be the story of you and me. But the fantastic news is that “if we get stuck for some reason, it doesn't necessarily mean that God has lost interest in or finished dealing with us.”⁸⁰ Abram stopped in Harran, the same as his father Terah did, precisely because Terah did. And that was a threat to God's plan for humanity. So what we read in the very next verse is that “the LORD said to Abram: Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). God calls Abram again. Even if Terah won't go with him, even if Terah's old age seems to justify staying put, God tells Abram that the movement comes first. God calls Abram to get back on the road.

It's going to cost Abram, this journey. It asks him to become an exile from his land. It asks him to abandon his clan. It asks him to leave the people closest to him, including his increasingly elderly father. It asks him, in effect, to shear himself of his entire identity. And for what? To step out into the unknown, to a destination not even yet specified. It asks Abram to defy the direction of traffic, to give up the cultural comfort and traditional legacy, to risk losing every ounce of profit he's made in Harran, to forget entirely about the religious influences and habits that have been plying themselves on Abram's soul again and again in pagan Harran. It asks Abram to go hundreds of miles into a grand mystery – all out of trust that this voice won't lead him astray. Can Abram do what Terah couldn't? Will Abram reveal a different love moving in his heart? So we read that Abram “went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). He gambled it all on God.

And in so doing, he embodied the hope which Terah's apathy and despair had denied, and in some distant way, Abram redeemed his father. For one day, in the very land which Abram's sandals trod down, there would be born a little boy whose heart beat with a rhythm older than the moon. He would be Jesus, “the son of Abraham, the son of Terah” (Luke 3:34). Because Abram refused to live his life merely halfway there, Terah the idolater became Terah the ancestor of God-made-Man. No wonder, as Jesus grew and began ministering to all the other descendants of Terah and beyond, he declared that he “came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17) – people who'd lost their way and turned aside to their own Harrans, giving up or mistaking their journeys.

And Jesus simply wouldn't stand for that. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself,” as Abram did when he gave up land and kindred and father's house. “And let him take up his cross,” embracing the potential for shame and suffering on the road. “And let him follow me” (Matthew 16:24). “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” Jesus said. That was the lesson Abram had to learn: not to be so attached to Terah as to cling to him in Harran when the LORD was saying go on. “Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37-38). Jesus practiced what he preached. One wouldn't need to take a cross to follow him unless he were carrying a cross as well. “He humbled himself by becoming obedient,” not merely as Abram did, to the point of departure, but “to the point of death, even death on the cross” (Philippians 2:8).

Jesus obediently offered his life, for the salvation of Abram, and for the salvation of Haran and Nahor and Terah and Serug and Reu and Peleg and all the rest, if they'd take it. But Jesus refused to make the grave his Harran to settle down in. Taking the lost souls whom he acquired in the realms of death, he journeyed up and out of the grave to the realm of life, and refused to tarry long halfway to heaven. Neither does he bid us settle down at the cosmic halfway marker. The Apostle Paul speaks to us of “the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). Where Terah stopped short, we must not. Where Abram continued on in trusting obedience, we have all the more reason to. To close with one of my favorite verses from a seldom-sung hymn: “I do not ask to see the way my feet will have to tread, / but only that my soul may feed upon the Living Bread. / 'Tis better far that I should walk by faith close to his side; / I may not know the way I go, but oh, I know my Guide!”⁸¹ Amen.