Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Yahweh said to Abram, after Lot was separated from him, “Now, lift up your eyes, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for I will give all the land which you see to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring may also be counted. Arise, walk through the land in its length and in its width; for I will give it to you.””
(Genesis 13:14-17)

As soon as Abram was in obedience, the Lord spoke to him. Often the best starting place for us when we don’t think God is speaking to us is to go back to the last thing He told us to do and make sure we’ve done it. It isn’t that He is ignoring us or giving us the silent treatment. He is simply waiting for us to obey so that we are ready to take the next step. When we are in disobedience (and delayed obedience IS disobedience), we are not ready to continue the journey into Him.

The first thing God did was have Abram put the promise before his eyes. Abram needed to see it. First as a vision in the distance, and then up close and personal. He needed to walk the Land and see it. Both it and the promise within it. He needed room and time so that he could imagine it. Don’t underestimate the power of positive imagination. It isn’t us imagining something in order to manifest it. It’s us imagining the fulfillment of God’s promise so well and so often that there is no rest until it physically arrives. We make the space for God’s vision to be true for us and in doing so we prepare our hearts so that we can receive it.

Previously, Abram had been promised a land. Then he had been shown Canaan, but there were no clear boundaries involved in either. Now the Lord was showing Abram the boundaries. The more we obey, the clearer the vision gets.

Abram was around eighty years old at this time.

The sage Or HaChaim writes: ‘וה׳ אמר אל אברם. G’d said to Abram. The form of address is unusual. We would have expected ויאמר השם “now G’d said to Abraham, etc.” The reason for the form of address chosen by the Torah maybe that the Torah wanted to give us a hint that G’d had already waited a long time to tell Abraham what He now told him, but that as long as the wicked Lot was part of his entourage He could not do so. G’d now fulfilled the second part of what He had said to Abraham in 12,1 i.e. אל הארץ אשר אראך. וראה מן המקום, “and look from the place, etc.” G’d had to emphasise the word מן המקום to alert us to the miracle that He expanded Abraham’s sense of vision so that he could see the entire land of Israel from the place he stood on. He did not even have to turn around to look in the different directions.’