Genesis 12:1 , etc.
I. In the call of Abram we see an outline of the great providential system under which we live.
II. Great lives are trained by great promises. The promise to Abram (1) throws light on the compensations of life; (2) it shows the oneness of God with His people; (3) it shows the influence of the present over the future.
III. There will always be central figures in society, men of commanding life, around whom other persons settle into secondary positions. This one man, Abram, holds the promise; all the other persons in the company hold it secondarily.
IV. Abram set up his altar along the line of his march.
V. The incident in Genesis 12:10-12 shows what the best of men are when they betake themselves to their own devices. As the minister of God, Abram is great and noble; as the architect of his own fortune, he is cowardly, selfish, and false.
VI. (Genesis 12:18-20). Natural nobleness ought never to be underrated. In this matter Pharaoh was a greater, a nobler man than Abram.
VII. The whole incident shows that God calls men to special destinies, and that life is true and excellent in itself and in its influences only in so far as it is divinely inspired and ruled.
Parker, vol. i., p. 192.
I. All the life of Abraham was a special training for a special end. Chosen, as are all God's instruments, because he was capable of being made that which the Lord purposed to make him, there was that in him which the good Spirit of the Lord formed, through the incidents of his life of wandering, into a character of eminent and single-hearted faithfulness.
II. This work was done not for his own sake exclusively. He was to be "a father of many generations." The seed of Abraham was to be kept separate from the heathen world around it, even until from it was produced the "Desire of all nations"; and this character of Abraham was stamped thus deeply upon him, that it might be handed on through him to his children and his children's children after him.
III. And so to a wonderful degree it was; marking that Jewish people, amongst all their sins and rebellions, with such a peculiar strength and nobleness of character; and coming out in all its glory, in successive generations, in judge and seer and prophet and king, as they at all realised the pattern of their great progenitor, and walked the earth as strangers and pilgrims, but walked it with God, the God of Abraham and their God.
S. Wilberforce, Sermons,p. 165.
References: Genesis 12:1. J. Van Oosterzee, The Year of Salvation,vol. ii., p. 337; J. B. Mozley, Ruling Ideas in Early Ages,p. 1; Parker, vol. i., p. 186.