Genesis 12:4,5

Genesis 12:4

(with Acts 16:10)

I. Taken together, these texts may be paraphrased geographically, by saying that they contain a direction to the Law and the Gospel to move westwards, like the sun. The forefather of the Jews was ordered to quit his home for a land that looked westwards; the Apostle of the Gentiles was ordered to commence travelling westwards, turning his back on the east. One text limited the earlier dispensation to a single branch of the Semitic race; the other threw open the later dispensation to all the families of the earth. As we cast our eyes upwards along the stream of time to the call of Abraham, we are met on all sides by decisive tokens of a worldwide purpose. Abraham was called 430 years before the law was given; but could any place have been selected more felicitously for its programme than the country to which Abraham moved? Palestine was, by desert, river, and mountain, as closed to the east as it lay open by sea to the west; and thus was as fitted for a nation that was to be kept separate for ages in utter exclusiveness and isolation, as it was also ready to become the starting-point at another time of a system with cosmopolitan aims, and designed especially to spread in the west. That system had hardly been inaugurated before it commenced moving of itself, slowly and majestically, to a destination traced for it by no human hand.

II. The inspired writers themselves never dreamt of the Gospel turning out, as it has done, an essential maritime power. Instead of the Gospel diverging eastwards to convert the east, the east poured westwards in countless hosts after the Gospel. Nation after nation burst over Europe with the vehemence of a cyclone, and shattered in pieces the whole fabric of the Roman empire. All the new comers became followers of Christ. The most striking part of the Gospel programme is yet to come namely, the conversion of the Jews. The Jews have been compelled to wait as long for their conversion as the Gentiles did for their call; yet both events were foretold with the 6ame clearness at the beginning of each dispensation. The conversion of the Jews, whenever it occurs, will be like the transformation scene of the old English play, a scene of overpowering brilliancy, the beginning of the end.

E. S. Ffoulkes, Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduates' Journal,Oct. 26th, 1876. Reference: Genesis 12:4. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. vi., p. 89.