The Lord said unto him, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house." This was the character of the call of Abraham. It was not a call from moral pollution, or from idolatry or the like; it was a call from the associations of nature and of the earth. There were idols to be left, I doubt not. See Joshua 24:2-3. But it was not the leaving of them that constituted the nature of the call. He received no commission to cultivate the land of Canaan for the Lord, or to conquer and govern the people there. The arrangements of the world were left just as they were. Abraham had nothing to say to the nations through which he passed on the way to Canaan; and when he reached that land, he found the Canaanite there, and he left him as he found him.
He came, however, rather to sojourn than to dwell there. He moves from place to place, and in every place it is but a tent he pitches. He had been told by the God of glory, that the land should be shown him. He should have it in his seed for ever, but in his own person he was but to see it. And accordingly, we find him surveying it carefully, but not occupying any of it. He went first to Sichem and to the plain of Moreh; from thence, southward, to the neighbourhood of Bethel and Hai.
Quickly, however, another man in our Abraham is before us; for, like all of us, beloved, he was a man of nature, as he was a man of God; and there is none perfect in the life of faith, as we said before, but the Master Himself. Famine touches the land into which the call of God brought him. A strange surprise this may well be thought to have been. But faith would have been equal to it. Faith in Paul was equal to a like surprise. Called into Macedonia by the voice of God, a prison awaited him. But Paul stands the shock, though Abraham falls before it. Paul and his companion sing hymns in the prison of Macedonia; but Abraham practises a lie, seeking help from the famine of Canaan in another land, of which his call under the glory of God had made no mention whatever. J. G. Bellett.