God introduces himself to Abram by reawakening a dream that was in danger of never happening. When was the last time you heard a high street evangelist calling out to passing people to follow the God who awakens dreams?
Abram is already three quarters of the way from Ur to Canaan, and living in Haran, when God calls him in Genesis. And yet, through Joshua and Stephen, God later claims credit for Abram leaving Ur.
Joshua said to the people, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Long ago your ancestors, including Terah, the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River, and they worshiped other gods. But I took your ancestor Abraham from the land beyond the Euphrates and led him into the land of Canaan. I gave him many descendants through his son Isaac."
— Joshua 24:2-3 NLT
And when Stephen is speaking to the high council in Acts, he says this about Abram.
"Brothers and fathers, listen to me. Our glorious God appeared to our ancestor Abraham in Mesopotamia before he settled in Haran. God told him, 'Leave your native land and your relatives, and come into the land that I will show you.' So Abraham left the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran until his father died. Then God brought him here to the land where you now live."
— Stephen in Acts 7:2-4 NLT
According to Joshua, God "took" Abraham from Ur, the land beyond the Euphrates River. While Stephen claims that “God appeared to our ancestor Abraham in Mesopotamia before he settled in Haran.”
Neither statement is accurate according to the biblical text as we have it in Genesis 11 and 12. The author of Genesis never states or implies God is involved before calling Abram in Haran in Genesis 12:1. God is not even mentioned in Abram's story until that point.
So what are these passages saying?
The only way these two passages make sense is if God is responsible for the birthing of people's dreams. In the book of Joshua, God is saying he planted the dream of Canaan into Terah’s spirit, so when Terah took Abram (Gen. 11:31), God can also say he took Abram, too (Josh. 24:3).
Whereas Stephen takes this a step further. He's saying that God "appears" somehow to Abram as he dreams about leaving Ur and one day having children with Sarai. Therefore, Abram was following God’s call before he even realised that's what he was doing.
God restores people's dreams because he is the one who births those dreams within us. Unbeknownst to Terah and Abram—who "worshipped other gods" (Josh. 24:2)—and maybe unbeknownst to us, is that God is the great encourager of our dreams.
Why?
The seven promises that follow God's calling of Abram hint at why pursuing our dreams are so important.
The seven promises to Abram
The first three promises each start with an "I will," as do the fifth and sixth ones. God continues to remind us how he will keep calling out to us to pursue our dreams, just as we saw in the previous article, God will show you.
“I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
—Genesis 12:2-3 NIV
I will make you into a great nation
One of Abram's dreams is to have at least a single son with Sarai, and yet God encourages him to dream bigger. He reignites Abram's dream of Canaan and expands his dream of having children into something larger.
God encourages Abram to think beyond simply growing a family to growing a whole new tribe of people with a whole new way of interacting with the world. It's wild! He and Sarai infertile, and he can count the number of people in this new tribe using just his fingers. There's him, his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and a few servants.
And yet God wants him imagining the impossibility of creating "a great nation."
Without dreams, we settle for what we know. We accept our place in the world, and very little changes.
But by dreaming, we imagine something different and reach for something greater.
A dream is not just a wish—it is the seed of change.
— Dr. Maky Zanganeh
[Source: The Power of a Dream Is Enough to Rewrite the Future]
I will bless you
In ancient times, blessings were often linked with wealth and how many sons you had. This is why biblical authors like to point out the number of sheep, goats, servants, and boys someone has. They want you to know who is being super blessed by God.
However, as you well know, wealth is not always a sign of blessing. It can also be a sign of greed or abusive power or a heart pursuing the wrong things. Both God and happiness can be absent in wealth.
Kathleen M. O'Connor describes "bless" in this way:
["Bless"] refers primarily to the power of uttered speech that brings about good for someone or refers to the good that comes from that speech.
— Kathleen M. O'Connor
Smith & Helwys Bible Commentary: Genesis 1-25A p.192
To me, blessing is experiencing goodness. It's when you're working towards your dream, and while it’s perhaps the hardest and most challenging work you’ve ever done in your life, it still brings you joy and fulfilment. You feel alive and fortunate to have this opportunity to devote yourself to it.
I will make your name great
This is the second time "great" appears within these seven promises, yet we are extremely uncomfortable with greatness in the Church. There is a prevalent it-wasn’t-me-it-was-God mentality, where we give all credit to God for our achievements.
This false humility is damaging, for it reduces the meaningfulness of our efforts, disparages those with ambition, and makes God out to be a puppet-master of some kind.
There's a conversation Mark recounts in his gospel where the brothers James and John express their ambition to Jesus.
“We want to sit next to you when you come into your glory,” they said, “one at your right hand and the other at your left.”
— Mark 10:37 TPT
At this point in the story, these brothers are imagining Jesus ousting the Romans from their homeland and victoriously ruling Israel. Little do they know Jesus will only be crowned King of the Jews while he's hanging on a Roman cross in seeming defeat.
But Jesus doesn't respond by squashing their ambition as we'd expect, but by telling them, “If you want to be the greatest…” (Mark 10:43 TPT, emphasis mine).
Whoa! Hold the presses.
For too long have we kept our dreams small because we thought that any form of greatness wasn’t a Christian thing to desire. Yet here we have Jesus’ permission to dream about being great! Of course, the Jesus route to greatness is counterproductive to greatness in the world's eyes because it involves living "as one called to serve others" (Mark 10:43 TPT).
But the first and third promises given to Abram, reminds that greatness is still possible.
All too often our dreams are too small or too easily achieved. This brings us no real purpose or passion. Do you have a long-term dream that seems next-to-impossible right now? Is there a dream where going for it will require you to step out of your comfort zone and embrace a combination of hard work and God coming through for you? That’s probably closer to the vision God has laid upon your heart.
You will be a blessing
This middle promise doesn't say that what you do will bless others (even though serving others will do so). It's saying that you—who you are when you are pursuing your dream—will bless others.
Let's look at this from a place of stagnation. Who are you blessing when you are disengaged, unhappy, frustrated, or short-tempered? Are the people around you glad your life causes you to feel this way? Are you freely giving God's love away to others while you live in regret or grief or boredom?
That’s the thing with dreams. If we aren’t pursuing them, we risk dying in the places where we settle for something less than our dream. The longer we devote our time to doing things that do not fulfil us, the more our passion for life ebbs away and our ability to love freely erodes.
Since work occupies most of our waking hours, this leads to God’s call being frequently confused with our career choices. However, while our dreams are not always about our jobs, they depend upon having paid-work.
Surprisingly, some life challenges (a cancer diagnosis, being the victim of a natural disaster, being homeless) prove beneficial to the dreaming process... On the other hand, we did find that one life adversity, unemployment, can undermine the dreaming process.
— Janet M. Ruane, Ph.D. and Karen A. Cerulo, Ph.D.
[Source: How We Dream of Our Future]
Employment—as well as being paid a fair wage for that employment—is key to seeing our dreams become reality. That's because we need to afford to pursue them!
Can you imagine doing something with your time that causes you to be engaged, full of joy, and enthusiastic about your life, inside and outside of paid-work? Can you see how you would naturally become a blessing to others by pursuing a God-given calling?
God's call always grows the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (see Gal. 5:22-23)—and lots of it. So, if you're wondering whether a dream is from God, consider the fruit you may bring to others through it.
I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse
Promises five and six are best taken combined. They're a reminder that many will not get what you're doing and why.
Not everyone sees the value in pursuing dreams instead of something more "evangelistic," or "spiritual," or "religious." Others will not appreciate the way your dream seeks to make the world a better place for others instead of for your own family, tribe, or nation. Some will seek to hold you back because of the inherent impracticalities and risks of pursuing a dream when you could seek financial security or simply something more assured instead. But more on all of that in a future article!
Whereas other people are going to get excited by what you're doing. Your enthusiasm and joy are going to rub off on them, and they're going to be inspired to pursue their own dreams. Some may even want to join you or support you in your endeavours.
You will end up blessing the people who allow you to be yourself, while others who attempt to box you in will miss out on that blessing.
All peoples on earth will be blessed through you
Many times I've heard it said in churches that our calling is the place where our greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need. Which, to me, puts undue pressure upon your dreams when you feel obliged to link it with tackling poverty, inequality, hunger, clean water, terrorism, woman’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, sex trafficking, or global warming to name just some of the world’s greatest issues.
I don't think our dreams need to be linked to one of these issues; however, this seventh promise to bless "all peoples on earth" reminds us how we cannot divorce our own dreams from the outworking of God's dream. It's his desire to see his people embody his love and share it with all people.
This seventh promise was unachievable within Abram's lifetime. Instead, it's a promise of legacy. As we consider our own dreams, we need to be asking what kind of world we're helping to create.
Who benefits the most from our dream?
Who financially profits?
Who, if anyone, will you be exploiting or taking advantage of?
What's the environmental impact?
If our dream is from God, then it will contribute to bringing a small slice of heaven to earth within our own sphere of influence.
Abram was the father of a new kind of tribe whose purpose was to exist for the benefit of outsiders, rather than for just their own self-interest and self-protection. It's a new way of living in this world that began with just a small group of people following a dream and holding on to these seven promises from God.
According to his good pleasure
When we talk about what God's plan for our world and for our lives might be, we typically miss out one of the most important factors. God's pleasure.
[God] made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfilment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.
— Ephesians 1:9 NIV (emphasis mine)
Why does God want to awaken our dreams?
I think there are three simple reasons. The first is that it brings him joy. He takes great pleasure in us pursuing our dreams because of the blessings they bring to us and others. The second reason is that it helps bring about the positive change he desires to see. And the third is that following our dreams holds the potential of leading us to him—the planter of our dreams.
However, while everyone can dream, many in this world do not have the agency to act upon God's call. I don't think God finds pleasure in this inequality of dreaming.
Our research findings indicate that people don’t enjoy a level playing field when it comes to dreaming. What we found instead is that people’s social locations with regard to age, gender, race, social class, and life circumstances clearly impact the nature of dreams.
— Janet M. Ruane, Ph.D. and Karen A. Cerulo, Ph.D.
[Source: How We Dream of Our Future]
As I said above, our own dreams do not need to be directly linked with removing systemic poverty or social inequality in our world. However, our dreams are not the only way we can impact these issues. Our financial investments, Christian beliefs, political views, and voting habits can all help bring positive change to our world.
One last thought to reflect upon. With rising nationalism putting a focus on immigration, would Abram's dream of moving to a foreign land been possible in today's world or would stringent border controls have blocked his entry to the land of Canaan?