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reading the Revelation, no millennium is possible until that city and its system is judged
before earth and heaven.
No.32.
The Foundation Covenant (Gen. 12: 1 - 4).
pp. 84 - 88
TERAH is the watershed of the O.T., even as his generation is the central one of the
eleven in Genesis. His most famous son, Abraham, not only left his city and his home
but we nowhere read, `these are the generations of Abraham', the whole of his wonderful
life being ranged under the `generations of Terah'. Abraham beyond all things else
sets forth the principle of faith. He is the first one of whom the O.T. records that he
believed in the Lord. The twelfth chapter of Genesis opens with the words:
"Now the Lord had said to Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred,
and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee."
Stephen in his speech before the Council said:
"The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia,
before he dwelt in Charran, and said unto him, Get thee out of thy country" (Acts 7: 2,
3).
The Lord not only called Abraham out from Ur of the Chaldees, but from his kindred,
yet the first movement after the words were spoken to Abraham is that of Terah:
"And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's son, and Sarai his
daughter-in-law, his son Abram's wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the
Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there
. . . . . and Terah died in Haran" (Gen. 11: 31, 32).
The call of God to Abraham involved separation of a very drastic character, and we
shall see that the Lord did not lay upon him the whole burden at once; he was to leave
country and kindred, but not at first his father's house; he obeyed the call so far as
leaving his country was concerned, and Heb. 11: records the step of faith with Divine
approval. Scripture does not say, `and Abraham took Terah'; it is put the other way,
"and Terah took Abram his son". Terah's name means a `traveler', or a `wanderer', and
as a type he may well represent that class who `go out', not by faith, but by reason of
temperament; the call that quickened Abram with a living faith acted upon the fleshly
mind of Terah, and he too felt attracted by the journey.
A glance at the map shows that Terah and his family journeyed about 600 miles with
Abram to get to Haran, but the map also reveals another thing, the route never took them
across the river Euphrates. Even though 600 miles separated them from Ur of the
Chaldees they were not separated from all that Chaldea meant to God. Haran was famous
not only as a frontier town of the Babylonian Empire, but for the worship of the self-same