What was Abraham's religion before God called him?

We pass from the consideration of the world at large to the elect family. For God is interested in giving us, not the history of nations, but the history of His purposes as worked out through faith. The narrative rapidly narrows down, therefore, to those descendants of Shem, the son of Noah, who are the forerunners of the line of faith of which Abraham is the great head. Evidently, idolatry had taken possession of all. Even Abraham himself seems not to have escaped the universal superstition which had lost the knowledge of the true God. Idolatry is not human ignorance blindly groping upward out of darkness into the light, seeking after the true God, eventually to find Him. It does not represent man with his face to the light groping toward it, but rather with his back turned upon the revelation which he once had, going off into ever-deepening gloom.

Here, first of all, you have Abraham obeying the call of God. We read in Stephen's address, in the seventh of Acts, that "the God of glory" appeared unto Abraham, and called him out from the country where he was. It was "the God of glory;" the God whose glory had manifested itself to his faith. We are not distinctly told that Abraham was an idolater, and yet there are suggestions that he was. (See Joshua 24:2.) We know that the whole family connection, in company with all the rest of mankind, had gone off into idolatry. But the God of glory reveals Himself: He tells Abraham to come out from his country, from his kindred, to give up everything that nature held dear and go to a country of which He would tell him; and Abraham believed God. There was the beginning of faith. We know there had to be a work in his soul deeper even than that, which he learned in the land of Canaan; but he learned the lesson of believing God in the beginning when he went forth, not knowing whither he went.

Nor can we entertain for a moment the Jewish tradition which tells of Abram faithful to the true God from his boyhood. That Terah and his family served other gods, we know on divine authority. That Abram, when at fifty years and trusted to sell the idols which his father manufactured, took in hand the practical measure of demonstrating to Terah the sinful folly of idolatry, is a story suited for the credulity of the Jew Apella, even without the legend of Nimrod's punishing Abram in the flames, and the fountain springing up to extinguish them, with a delightful garden, wherein were seen angels sitting and Abram in their midst. Truth needs neither fables nor more miracles to exalt man. It humbles even those whom it blesses to God's glory. "The God of glory (says Stephen, Acts 7:2) appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia before he dwelt in Charran." Here is the truth of God in its simple and sure and satisfactory light. It was he that believed and acted accordingly. Of Terah we are told nothing which gives happy confidence. Of Haran, father of Lot and of Milcah, we only learn that he "died before the face of his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldeans"; he did not reach Charran, the halfway sojourn in the migration; he died before any left their common Chaldean abode. Nahor, it is evident, did not relinquish Ur for Charran till a later day; but there he stayed, so that he made it "his city" in Aram-naharaim or Paddan-Aram.

The Lord said to 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. Yet Abraham, touching the earth, was to be like Adam outside the garden. He leaves Ur of the Chaldees, as Adam left Eden. 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 his way to Canaan; and when he reached that land, he found the Canaanite there, and there he left him as he found him.

Turn now to Acts 7:1-2; the call of Abram is there most touchingly described. "The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia before he dwelt in Charran, and said to him, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and come to the land which I shall show thee." There came thus the moment when God — "the God of glory" — made Himself known to a poor dark idolater, and won his heart for ever. It was not a new religion that Abram learned, nor a new set of opinions, but he came to know a Person. The result was that, like the Thessalonians later, he turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God. Has the God of glory revealed Himself to you, beloved reader? He has raised up His Son from amongst the dead, and enthroned Him at His own right hand on high. All the glory of God now shines in His face (2 Cor. 4:6), or in other words, all that God is has been told out in the man Christ Jesus. Do you know Him? Is your heart entranced with what it has found in Him? If so, but not otherwise, you are in a position to take the pilgrim's place.

'The God of glory' is no mere Hebraism for 'glorious God', but directs the heart from the beginning to One altogether above the world not only in Himself but in His purposes, whatever His ways meanwhile on the earth. 'Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood [river] in old time, even Terah the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods' (Joshua 24:2). It was in sovereign grace that God thus appeared. Even the line of Shem, the father and kindred of Abraham, were idolaters. Grace gives, not finds, what is good. Not only did the God of glory appear: it was to Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia and thus when he was at the farthest point of his distance from 'the land', as well as in idolatrous associations. How little the Jews understood the God of glory or His servant Moses! Stephen, full of grace and power, did. Nothing was more foreign to him than 'speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God.'

Even Abraham, blessed as he was, moved slowly in the path of faith at first. He did not quit Mesopotamia to dwell in Canaan all at once. Before this he dwelt in Haran. He got out of his land, but not so quickly 'out of his kindred', so that there was a remarkable delay in coming into the land which God was to show him. 'Then came he out of [the] land of the Chaldeans, and dwelt in Haran; and thence, after his father died, He removed him into this land in which ye now dwell' (ver. 4).

It is then in Joshua 24 we read that Joshua said to all the people, "Thus saith Jehovah, the God of Israel, Your fathers dwelt of old on the other side of the river [the Euphrates], Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor; and they served other gods." It is the first notice the Bible affords of idolatry; and this not when it began, but when it corrupted the immediate progenitor of Abraham. There was abundant and flagrant evil in the antediluvian world; but of serving other gods we never hear. Nor is there any hint of its existence after the deluge till scripture thus speaks of the fathers in Terah's day, though self-will wrought strangely in the race generally and in Nimrod particularly. God was in none of their thoughts. Human association only drew out dispersion; and individual energy subjugated mankind, as it had the beasts previously.

There is no mention of idolatry amongst the evils that filled the earth during the antediluvian age. By the time of Abram the post-diluvian apostasy that started with Nimrod and Babel, had developed; idolatry was overspreading the peoples, and threatening to exclude the true knowledge of God. It had got amongst the descendants of Shem and even Terah, if not Abram himself, had been infected by it. To preserve a testimony to Himself God called Abram clean out of the evil, to become a pilgrim and stranger in the earth. Mankind was already divided into nations under the Divine government: it was now to witness a division of another kind — the separation of a godly seed from the mass of the ungodly. This was a division produced by Divine grace.

Abraham lived in Ur of the Chaldees, a place of high culture, as recent excavations have proved. He was a worshipper of stocks and stones, when the great crisis in his life occurred. We read:

To stem its evil and to recall to the true knowledge of Himself, God separated Abram from his kindred and his country. He was called out from idolatry. His family in common with other families of the country were idolaters. His separation from the family did not separate the family from idolatry, for we find it with Laban long after.