Sabbath: Abraham: The First Missionary
Read for This Week’s Study: Gen. 12:1-3; Gen. 14:8-24; Heb. 11:8-19; Gal. 3:6; Gen. 12:6-7; Gen. 18:18-19.
Memory Text: So also Abraham
(Galatians 3:6-8 NIV).believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.
Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: All nations will be blessed through you
It’s no coincidence that three of the world’s major faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are sometimes called the Abrahamic faiths.
That’s because all three, in one way or another, trace their roots back to this great man of God.
Though Abraham is admired as the defining example of faithfulness, this week’s lesson will examine this faithfulness from a different angle. That is, we want to view him as a missionary, as someone called by the Lord to go to another land and witness to the people about the true God, the Creator and Redeemer.
God gave Abraham, and his family after him (see Gal. 3:29) a threefold purpose:
- to be recipients and guardians of the divine truth of God’s kingdom that had been lost in the earlier history of humankind;
- to be the channel through which the Redeemer would enter history; and
- to be, as God’s faithful servants, a light to the nations, a light to those who needed to know the Lord.
Study this week’s lesson to prepare for Sabbath, July 11.
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Noah was actually a missionary before Abraham was. In one sense Noah was to the antediluvian world what Abraham was to Sodom, God’s witness before judgment. Both the Flood and destruction of Sodom were types of the end of the world and the activities of the period immediately preceding the events are said to be repeated towards the end of time (Luke 17:26-30).
Three Messengers brought a message to Abraham (Genesis 18:1, 2) concerning his future and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:20, 21). Abraham proceed to plead for Sodom, asking the Lord to spare the city if a certain number of righteous could be found (Genesis 18:24-33).
It appears Abraham had previously revealed Jehovah to the people of Sodom and certainly to Lot, his nephew, so that he had an appreciation of how many might be saved. Unfortunately his witness garnered a smaller remnant than he hoped (Genesis 19:12-17)
The second and third messengers (angels) proceeded to deliver the final warning to come out of her (Sodom – Genesis 19:12) and to mark those who would be saved (Genesis 19:1). The others were marked for destruction.
Abraham had first shared the everlasting gospel so that the citizens of Sodom were without excuse. Before Abraham Noah had appealed for people to get into the ark, then warned of the consequences of rejecting, before Jehovah delivered judgment.
Through missionaries God first appeals, then warns, before He executes judgment. It is the pattern which plays out in the last days of earth’s history and is represented by Three Angels flying in the midst of heaven (Revelation 14:6-12).
Two truths that speak to me from this lesson:
1) "the divine truth of God’s kingdom that had been lost in the earlier history of humankind" through out the Bible we find people "losing" divine truths and God having to repeat them or make them clearer - what truth may we have forgotten or which has been obscured?
2) "Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham" God doesn't reveal all the truth right away because we can't bear it at that time (John 16:12) so what new light may the Holy Spirit be wanting to reveal to us at this time?
Abraham lived a righteous life that pleased God,and even before his call to be the first missionary by God,He knew him even in before he was born...He had a strong faith in God'
I find it interesting that for the first time Christianity commends Islam and Judaism to have the same origin. I hope this will do something about some hostilities we hear in the media
In my opinion Abraham was not a missionary in the same sense we think of Jonah or Peter or Paul. According to Genesis 12 the purpose for Abraham leaving his country was to establish a nation and to be a blessing wherever he went. Of course we could think of many reasons why he had to leave that part of the world in order to do that just as we can think of many ways he could be a blessing besides verbally. We can implicitly figure that he was to be a witness but God didn’t explicitly state that and in one of the lessons this week we will see how Abraham fulfilled that simply by being the kind of a person he was supposed to be.
He obviously was not to be the father of all nations through the blood line but only spiritually. Paul explains the blessing in this way:
Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, In you all the nations shall be blessed. So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham. (Gal 3:7-9)
To Paul a definite part of the gospel is that righteousness comes by faith in God rather than by works so that believing as Abraham did in the promise of God would yield righteousness just as it did to Abraham, “he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness” (Gen 15:6)
Like Hugh said in his comments above, I do not believe that Abraham was the first missionary. Noah was a missionary before Abraham. The only difference perhaps between Noah and Abraham was that Abraham left his native country and journey to another country to witness, while Noah remained in his own country. I believe that this was the reason the author of our lesson regarded Abraham as the first missionary. This point of view reinforces a very wrong notion (in my opinion) that many in our church has held that it is only people that come to our country from foreign lands that are missionaries, while natives that do the work of mission in their own countries are not missionaries. The discriminatory treatments and attitudes engendered by this view has often been a source of discouragement to the nationals sincerely working for the Lord's soon coming. I speak from experience. May God help us to understand and acknowledge that whether at home or abroad, a missionary is a missionary; and let us encourage one another in the work.
I thank God for letting his people become missonaries.
When the author says he was the first missionary it's true and was the first man to be sent by God to leave the land. Whatever God did always had a purpose to somebody like we see the hope and trust of this man. Now we don't bother to go to a foreign country, for you to be ministering, you can do wherever your work. A missionary is to minister and in all we do as Christian we do for him.