But not all preachers. Will Willimon, who held forth for many years in the pulpit of the Duke Chapel, recently wrote that the Christian faith depends upon three words from the first chapter of Genesis. Can you guess what those three words are?

“And God said …”

It’s not too strong a statement to say that the entire structure of Christianity stands or falls on that foundation: “And God said …” If we believe that, then everything else follows from it.

But “any claim of revelation is preposterous”! And what was it that God said, anyway? “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” But science has shown us that that couldn’t have happened, right? So we fall back on the idea that this is a beautiful myth that arose out of the storytelling imagination of some very gifted and spiritual human beings.

Actually, the creation story is a myth, in the sense that a myth is a pictorial way of expressing a fundamental truth — in this case, the truth that God created the world by his Word. That’s not what the history-of-religion people have in mind, though. A lot of them, and a lot of biblical scholars also, read and teach Scripture as though it was produced by human initiative out of human religious imagination. A lot of big-name speakers show up regularly at big-name churches to teach that God has evolved out of our understanding of God. What sort of god is that? The Old Testament prophets would have said it was an idol. Maybe the atheists are on the right track in thinking that a god projected out of human wishes isn’t God at all.

On the other hand, the book of Genesis says that God was there before there was anybody to imagine a God. That’s what it says. Look, we don’t have to believe what Genesis says, but why do we want to make it say something it clearly does not say?

In the mainline churches today, there is a theological problem. Those who think that maybe God not only exists but has actually said something are often written off as fundamentalists. The opinion-makers miss no opportunity to suggest that it’s only the unenlightened people in the “Bible churches” that believe such things. So what are our choices? Do we have to give up believing in a God who speaks in order to be up-to-date?

This morning we have heard a reading that sets the whole Judeo-Christian story in motion. Actually, that’s too feeble a way to put it. Listen to what a Jewish scholar says about the story of Abraham leaving home. “It is an event of universal significance, produc[ing] far-reaching consequences for [hu]mankind as a whole, and constituting a major turning-point in human history.”² How does this uniquely consequential story begin? It begins with these words: “The Lord spoke to Abraham.”

The whole Bible is based on the claim that God has spoken. Now the ruling classes in our mainline churches don’t generally say outright that this claim is preposterous. That would be going too far. We still read the Bible in church and theoretically hold it in high esteem. But what happens is that we read the Bible anthropologically — the Greek word anthropos meaning “humanity,” and theos meaning “God.” The way that we wiggle out of the claim that God speaks is to read the Bible anthropologically instead of theologically.

What does that mean?

Here’s an example of a theological reading. A theologically oriented Old Testament scholar says this about Genesis 12: “[God] is the subject of the first verb at the beginning of the first statement and is thus the subject of the entire subsequent sacred history.”³ God is the subject of the verb. In other words, it’s not the more or less elevated religious notions of human beings that make biblical history; it’s God who makes biblical history.

But we don’t like this, so we’ve changed the subject of the verb. The story of Abraham has become an anthropological story. In today’s versions, God no longer speaks. Abraham thinks that God speaks. There was a TV series on Genesis a few years ago, and hardly anyone noticed that God was not the subject. Only the very alert and biblically oriented viewers were aware that it was all about the human authors, their religious ideas, their concepts of a God who existed because they had thoughts about him. In a video version of the story of Abraham, when the voice of God speaks, it’s actually the voice of the actor who plays the part of Abraham. Do you see what I mean? Without our realizing what was happening, the speaking, acting, procreating God was removed from the story and was replaced by human religious sensibility, or spirituality if you will. Our spirituality becomes the main subject, and God becomes the object.

There will always be those who prefer the story of the human search for God. But that’s quite different from the biblical story of the God who came searching for us. The opening chapter in the saga of that search is right here — “God spoke to Abraham.”

Now we always want to think that Abraham was chosen because he was a great man of faith: God saw him being faithful and approved of him and chose him. But that’s not what happened at all. The biblical account tells us only two things about Abraham and Sarah before God spoke: (1) Abraham was the son of Terah, and (2) Sarah was barren. That’s no way to begin a story! This couple is going to become the father and mother of all humanity! We want to know more about them! But this is not a story about a couple. This is a story about the living God.

Let’s see if we can get this. We’ve been talking about “and God said…” Well, what did he say? Did he say he was going to send another flood to kill all the ungodly people? Noooo … we already heard that one. This is a new chapter. God told Abraham something that sounds very simple but isn’t. He said, “Leave home and go to a place that I, God, will show you.” Now I’m sure most of you have heard it explained that it was almost inconceivably more difficult for a man of ancient times to leave his roots than it would be for a young man today, when all young people are expected to leave home. For a man of Abraham’s time it was nothing short of crazy to set out from home for no economic reason, just because God said so.

But there was a promise attached to the command of God:

This isn’t primarily a promise to Abraham at all. It’s a universal promise, a promise reaching to the ends of the earth and to the end of time as we know it. The offspring of this one man Abraham will be blessed by God, and through those offspring all other families who will ever live will be blessed by God. This is the promise that Abraham lived on for the rest of his life. But isn’t this rather odd, to say the least, that an elderly man and an elderly, infertile wife should be promised gazillions of descendants? Have we really thought about this? Why did God choose Abraham for this unique role? Why not someone younger? Someone who already had a child or two? And by the way, remember that after this first call from God, Abraham and Sarah continued to be childless for decades. There was absolutely nothing concrete to show for their long, long waiting.

The reason for this is that God is demonstrating the power of his promise. This is not a story about human potential. This is a story about what God did in the life of a man and woman who had no human potential — that’s the whole point.⁴ As they say in the African-American community, this is a story about a God who makes a way out of no way. That is the way the story of redemption begins: with a God who promises to do what is humanly impossible. Only God can do what Paul the apostle said: the God of Abraham “raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). God promises that he will make Abraham’s name great. It is the power of God and no other power that makes this no-name couple famous over the millennia. They would have been lost in the dust of Mesopotamia for all these thousands of years if God in his majestic purpose had not caused them to be revered today as Father Abraham and Mother Sarah.

Now listen to the rest of Paul’s words concerning Abraham:

What God had promised. What is the power of a promise? President Obama has discovered that promises are easy to make but hard to keep. That is the reality that all politicians have to face when the campaigns are over. Have you had the experience of wanting to promise something and then being unable to do it because you didn’t have the ability to follow through? Imagine being able to promise your friend with cancer that she will be healed. Imagine being able to promise a hard-working jobless man that you will definitely be able to find him a good position so that he can support his family. Imagine being able to tell a child with a drug-ridden mother and an absent father in a poverty-stricken neighborhood that he will have a brilliant future. Imagine being able to promise a person with early Alzheimer’s that the disease will get better instead of worse. We want to make promises to people, and sometimes we want to make them so much that we do make them, and then we fail because we can’t follow through.

This is the reason that it matters so much that God actually speaks. Preposterous it may be, humanly speaking. But here are the words that the church lives by: “God is able to do what he has promised.” In spite of all the deconstructionists and the skeptics and the scoffers, there is something about the Word of God in the Bible that eludes them all. There is a mysterious life in the Scriptures that renews God’s people generation after generation.

How can this be?

It’s because God is real, and he is our God, and he speaks the Word of life, and his Spirit cannot be quenched, and he — God alone — is able to keep his promises of blessing and redemption and abundance and righteousness and fullness of joy and eternal life in his presence.