I had picked Abraham as the subject for our learning experience since he is a guy who’s DAN contributes to much of the Middle Eastern peoples and who’s “spiritual DNA” is a basis for understanding a lot of the  rest of the first group of writings called the Old Testament.

We read his story in the bible starting at Genesis chapter 11 verse 27 and to get it all we read up to Chapter 23.

In this week’s blog on the subject we start with

Sub-step one : Understanding the daily life of the key person in the story.

The key person in this story is Abraham and he had an amazingly complex life, doing many things. However, by reading through the story we get some facts of his daily life.  Here are just a few facts

• He had about 318 fighting men with him
• He was rich
• He didn’t live in one place long
• He seemed to travel along the caravan routes of the ancient middle east (You need to research his life and the history of the time to figure this out, but the places mentioned around his life were part of a significant trade route).
• His wife was one of the most wonderfully beautiful woman in the known world of the time (i.e real sexy woman!)
• He had difficulty getting children (probably practiced quite a bit as people with this difficulty do)
• He was expected to lead people every day.
• He moved in and out of places where important people treated him as a significant person.

Okay, so given some of these facts we can build up a picture of what we think his daily life was like. We can assume he got up in the morning and after breakfast looked out at a small tent town. 318 men and their families would have meant a lot of tents, livestock and stuff around him. These people would have looked to him for guidance and for their livelihood. i.e. he had to give them work and then pay them for it. Probably he was a trader. That meant they had to carry valuable goods and protect them. (those days were a bit more lawless than today). So each day he would be expected to help sort out squabbles, direct peoples lives, negotiate taxes with local people who’s land they were living on or traveling through. He would have been busy, had lots of guys helping him.

The temperature was probably hot and dry sometimes, and hot and humid others. He had to deal with people of different languages (this was after the time of the tower of Babel).

He had to organise for pastures for their animals, which animals would be killed for the evening meal on a bonfire. Where they would buy their green food and wheat to make bread.

Basically the events of life would have been significant work for him every day. He was a busy, family man who lead a small town. A bit more important than the major of a town, but with more hands on control of running day to day activities.

Well this background, let’s look at

Sub-step two : Understanding the sufferings of the main character.

Let’s understand that no character in the sacred writings gets away without suffering of some sort and generally the greater the man, the more significant the lessons to be learned from their suffering.

Abraham doesn’t seem to have much suffering is his life, but a discerning reader would have picked out an important point very early in his life. Abraham’s father, Terah, had planned to go to Canaan, probably at the direction of God, but had missed his purpose in life and had stopped off at a place called Haran. He never got to Canaan, and instead the whole family lived at Haran.

Abraham together with his nephew Lot, left the family to completed the journey that Terah had never made.

While this is not emphasised, this must have been a point of suffering. Leaving your family, brothers and sisters behind, and going off into a world that was hostile and dangerous to a traveller, without having ever seen the place you were going too, and not knowing you will ever see your family again is not something one could do without anguish. Particularly as the ancient people were very family focussed. (note: They lived in huge family groups that us modern people can hardly understand).

Abraham's pain was part of the process of stepping out and trusting God to make things right, even when it didn’t seem logical! This was the great pain that followed Abraham around. All the time he had to trust God when it looked like he was going to get hurt or have to suffer in some way. |Each time God waits until the last moment to bail Abraham out. This was brought to a focus at the point when he was asked to take the son God gave him and sacrifice him back to God. How do you trust God in that type of situation? This was the point of maximum suffering that I can discern in the story of Abrahams life!

Abraham, I believe, had two key purposes (you will probably find more of them but these are the main ones I found).

The first was that he was to bless many nations through his descendants. So God wanted him to have sex with his wife and produce heirs that would in turn have a good time with their wives, and all would produce lots of children.(basically populating a good portion of the known world of the time).  Ultimately one of his great, great, ... great grand offspring would be Mary, who would give birth to Jesus who would bless every person on this Earth(if they accept him for who he is and let him do so). That was a key purpose to Abraham’s life.

The secondary purpose was to show us what great trust was like (the Christian folk call this trust “faith”). Abraham is an example of trusting God fully! How did he do this? By doing what God wanted him to do each day. He didn’t do much other than believe God’s promises and live each day believing they were true. He didn’t know how each day would work out and had a busy tough time each day. He just followed day after day of trusting God for years and years!

What a great way for us all to live? Do we believe God’s promises and live each day that way? How about today, is that the way we are living today?