This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 6: “The Roots of Abraham”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- The author treats the call of Abraham and his journeys as a series of moral lessons instead of as the foundation for His unconditional covenant with its eternal promises.
- The lesson misses Abraham’s foreshadowing of his own descendants in Egypt.
- The author ignores Hebrews 7 in explaining Abraham’s interaction with Melchizedek.
As an Adventist I learned all the stories of Abraham; in fact, none of the stories covered in this week’s lesson is new. Yet the lesson addresses these accounts just as I remember them: as discreet events in the man’s life intended to show us how Abraham’s faith or lack of it caused him either trouble or blessing.
In a nutshell, I learned—just as this lesson is teaching—that the stories of Abraham were for my moral instruction. They were stories of a man who managed to obey God and to have faith much of the time, but he had lapses as in the case of his sojourn in Egypt.
What Scripture reveals, however, is an account that is completely inside-out from the way Adventism (through EGWs interpretive grid) teaches it. The story (I intentionally use the singular word “story” instead of “stories”) of Abraham is actually the story of God accomplishing His will by choosing one man from whom He would bless all nations and through whose physical descendants of promise the Messiah would come.
Abraham was a real man, but his role in human history is archetypal. Abraham is the one from whom we first learn that believing God is what God credits to one’s account as righteousness (Gen. 15:6). Abraham was an idol-worshiper along with his family when God called him out of Ur (Josh. 24:2), yet he responded to God’s call and followed Him out of Mesopotamia. Abraham is the one to whom God made unconditional promises with no input from Abraham himself (Gen. 15)—promises which God has fulfilled and is still fulfilling.
Abraham is the father of all who believe God (Romans 4), and in His story we learn of God’s faithfulness and of the ways He foreshadowed His eternal work in the world. In other words, the story of Abraham is not a series of moral lessons; it is the story of God. Abraham was the trusting human heart on which God worked to reveal His eternal purpose and faithfulness.
Leaving and Believing
The lesson emphasizes what appears to be a major point, since it occurs both in the daily studies and also in the Teachers Comments: that when God called him Abram had to leave first his past and then also his future. The rationale is this: Abram left the pagan culture of Ur—the idolatry of his family’s history—and followed God to someplace completely new.
Later, God asked him to abandon his future as well when He asked him to sacrifice his promised son Isaac. The Teachers Notes summarize this double “leaving” this way:
Suspended in the void, disconnected from his roots, Abraham depends only on God. Abraham exemplifies “faith.”
Superficially this analysis makes sense. Contextually, however, there is no rationale for saying Abraham was ever “suspended in the void” of loss of history as well as his sense of the future. His call to leave Ur occurs in Genesis 12—the first communication from God with men since He confounded Babel and scattered the people to form the nations after the flood. This leaving was early in Abraham’s story.
The account of his offering Isaac is recorded in Genesis 22—many years and experiences after his first obedience to God’s call. Besides his call out of Ur, Abraham had lived through God’s making His unilateral covenant promising seed, land, and blessings to Abraham and his descendants. He had received the sign of circumcision; he had received the birth of his first son—his son of flesh as opposed to the son of promise—and he had watched God protect and bless him, confirming His covenant to him in many ways before that fateful day that he walked up Mt. Moriah with Isaac.
Abraham’s obedience to offer up Isaac was not a void, disconnected, blind faith as he contemplated losing his future. Rather, Abraham never doubted the future God promised him. God had clearly promised that Isaac was the son of promise who would inherit and pass on the blessings He promised to Abraham, and he knew God would keep that promise. He had become deeply bound to God because of his belief in God’s faithfulness which never wavered.
In fact, we learn in Hebrews 11:17–19 that Abraham offered up Isaac not in a blind void of loss but in the confidence that if necessary, God could raise his son from the dead. Abraham knew God, and he never wavered in his belief that God’s promise of seed, land, and blessing through the son of promise born to Sarah would come to pass. Even when God called him up that mountain, he believed God would keep His promises that He had made regarding Isaac. He believed that, if necessary, God could raise his son from death.
The lesson never connects these “faith moments” with the bigger picture of God’s faithfulness. Instead, the lesson applies Abraham’s faith as an example to us, challenging the reader about how to trust God more.
Yet Abraham believed God because God never fails. It wasn’t Abraham’s spiritual insight that caused him to believe; God Himself gave Abraham the faith to believe Him, and He kept His promises to Abraham even when they seemed utterly impossible…and Abraham believed God!
What About Egypt?
The lesson develops the point that Abram’s detour into Egypt because of a famine in the land was because he lapsed from trusting God. The author states that God led Abram out of Ur, but He didn’t lead him into Egypt. According to the lesson Abraham resumed following God when he left Egypt and worshiped God at Bethel. Egypt, then, was a sinful detour of Abram’s fleshly desires.
The Bible does not make this point, although we can assess that Abraham took a little bit of Egypt with him in the person of Sarah’s Egyptian maid, Hagar. Because of Abraham’s eventual attempt to bring about an heir through Hagar, a multi-millennial conflict between the son of the flesh and the son of promise was launched. Even so, instead of the Bible’s indicating that Abraham should not have gone to Egypt, the account explains how the Lord blessed him in spite of his faithlessness and foreshadowed his own descendants as God increased them and led them out of Egypt.
Many theologians have referred to “the womb of Egypt” as they have seen the repeating theme in Scripture of the Lord protecting and growing His people in that pagan land. This phrase is often applied to the children of Israel who became a great nation under the sometimes cruel control of Egypt—yet before they left, God had the children of Israel ask their Egyptian acquaintances for jewelry to take—and they left Egypt with great wealth from the Egyptians.
Similarly, Abraham left Egypt with great wealth: sheep, cattle, donkeys, camels, and servants—gifts that Pharaoh gave to Abraham as “payment” for his taking Sarah into his harem when Abraham lied about her being his wife. At the same time, God protected Sarah and struck Pharaoh and his household with “great plagues” because of Sarah (Gen. 13:16-17).
Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt foreshadowed his descendants’ as they grew to a huge nation while in bondage. Prior to their leaving, God sent great plagues upon Egypt and Pharaoh, and He caused the Egyptians to lavish wealth on the Israelites just before He led them out of Egypt.
Centuries later, the Seed of Abraham fled—at God’s command—to Egypt to escape the death sentence of the murderous Herod who killed all male children two and under when he heard the Jewish King was born. God protected Jesus and Mary and Joseph in Egypt until He led them back out and into Nazareth after Herod’s death. Thus Matthew wrote:
And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Matthew 2:14–15).
The prophecy Matthew quoted was Hosea 11:1:
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.
We see that the great story of God’s rescue of Israel from Egypt formed the structure for understanding much of the Bible’s revelation of God’s saving faithfulness. His rescue of Israel out of Egypt was even a shadow of His protection and rescue of the Lord Jesus from Egypt!
Abraham was a foreshadowing of his own descendants—Israel—and ultimately of the Lord Jesus. All through the history of the post-flood world, God has used the image of shelter in and rescue from Egypt as the paradigm for His faithful protection of His own. He doesn’t need perfect believers to provide for His people; sometimes God provides for His children by using the resources of Egypt to keep His loved children safe. But always, in the fulness of time, He rescues His children from Egypt!
Melchizedek: A Priests Of A Different Order
Finally, a discussion of Abraham and Melchizedek is incomplete without referring to Hebrews 7. There the author develops the identity of Melchizedek as a type of Christ: without (recorded) beginning or ending, a priest of God and a King of Salem—the precursor to Jerusalem. Melchizedek’s roles as priest and king preceded the law, and Hebrews 7 explains that Levi, the father of the priestly tribe, was still in the loins of Abraham when Abraham paid tithe to him.
Hebrews explains that Melchizedek blessed the one who had been given the promises of God and received tithes from him. In other words, according the Hebrews 7, the one greater receives tithes from the one who was less. So, the man to whom God made His unconditional, eternal promises paid tithe to Melchizedek, and Levi also paid tithe to Melchizedek because he was still in the loins of Abraham!
The point is that Melchizedek foreshadowed the Lord Jesus; both of them had priesthoods APART from the law. Both are greater than even Abraham who was considered the greatest of Israel’s fathers.
In fact, Hebrews 7:11-12 explain that when there is a change of priesthood from Levi to another order—such as Melchizedek—there MUST be a change of the law as well, because the law was established on the foundation of the levitical priesthood. With a change of the priesthood, the sacrifices are different, and the law must be different.
Abraham, who was the father of Levi, was nevertheless less great than Melchizedek, and Scripture explains (see Galatians) that the promises made to Abraham are greater than any part of the law! Yet Abraham was subservient to Melchizedek who was a foreshadowing of the Lord Jesus.
The point of Abraham’s paying tithe to Melchizedek was NOT the importance and unselfishness of tithe! Rather, it was a sign that Abraham was SUBJECT to Melchizedek—and he is also subject to his own Seed, Jesus!
This lesson manages to reduce Abraham to an example of good behavior performed by faith. That is not Abraham’s purpose in Scripture. Instead, he is the One whom the Lord God chose and to whom He made promises that would be eternal and would bless ALL nations throughout eternity! †
- May 4–10, 2024 - May 2, 2024
- We Got Mail - May 2, 2024
- April 27–May 3, 2024 - April 25, 2024
Colleen,
Thank you for another good lesson commentary! You always help to make it clear when the lesson author hides behind Adventist tradition.
There are a couple of things the lesson says that you did not address that I want to mention. (Not that I think you missed anything! With the amount of messed up SDA theology, you have to pick and choose!)
One was in Thursday’s lesson. It is a minor point but it is one of the ways that Adventism changes the Bible to fit their theology.
In discussing Melchizedek’s interaction with Abraham, the lesson says: “ “bread and wine,” an association that often implies the use of fresh-pressed grape juice…”
Even though it is a relatively irrelevant point in the story, an Adventist author has to insert the idea that there could not have been alcohol involved because it is “sin”. But a quick look at Strong’s concordance reveals that the word used, #3196, means specifically fermented juice, not “fresh” juice as the lesson says. Like I said, a minor point, but a very telling one that one’s theology can arbitrarily adjust the Bible so that it is more acceptable.
I had one other problem with the lesson-that of the tithe. For one thing, this was before the Law was given, so there was no recorded word from God about tithing and no record that anyone, even Abraham, ever tithed before or after this story. Secondly, what Abraham gave—tithed—was not taken from income or even the first part of produce and animals as the Law ordered. It was simply a gift of the spoils of war. There is no indication that he ever tithed again so to strongly imply that it was a regular occurance is apparently done to bolster the Adventist claim that some parts of the Law apply to the church.
As you well know, there are many, many such nuggets of private interpretation buried in Adventism that, as Adventists, we never really saw because we had been taught such things. Now when I see them slipped in and just assumed, it is so foreign and wrong.
Thank you again for your clear comments on the lesson and for repeatedly bringing us back to the Bible and the salvational truths we find there.
In Christ
Jeanie