The Patriarch with the Longest Vision Wins
This is the first part of Chapter 4 in the unfinished Book: The Ruling Household.
Here’s a link to The Intro.
Abram: The Exalted Father
Alright, I’ve been looking forward to turning to this topic ever since starting to work on this book. In the first eleven chapters of Genesis, God primarily deals with humanity as a whole. Adam’s name means humanity so from the Garden up through the reset God initiated during the time of Noah God’s actions in these stories implicated the entire human race. But as we turn to the next chapter of the Story God’s strategy is shifting. He’s choosing a specific family. From this point forward we’re going to learn about God and his ways through one multigenerational family line. And if you want to tell a multigenerational family story you’re going to need a patriarch and the patriarch God chooses is named Abram.
Abram’s name in Hebrew means “exalted father”. A more literal way to translate the meaning of this name is “meta father”. Meta means above and it has been increasingly used to refer to something archetypal. This is how Abram functions in the Story. Abram is not the perfect model father. If he was perfect he wouldn’t be an effective archetype since no human father is perfect. But Abram does represent a perfectly inspired description of how God interacts with fatherhood. And in an era that is losing our memory of the essence of fatherhood, we need to do a deep dive into the character of Abram and mine it for everything we can learn about God’s design for the essence of fatherhood in a ruling household.
A Patriarch is a Father Following a Vision
Chapter 11 of Genesis gives us Shem’s genealogy (the Semetic family) tracing the line of the first-born male descendants of Shem until we reach Terah who had three sons. We zero in on the household of Terah who travels from Ur to Haran.
The genealogy contains a tragedy within the line of Shem; Sarai, Abram’s wife, is barren. Will this be the end of the unbroken line from Shem? There’s a special irony for childlessness to strike this branch of the family because it appears that the man whose name means “exalted father” will never experience what it’s like to be a father.
But God is about to act. Terah dies in the land of Haran (Genesis 11:32 Acts 7:4) and then Abram hears the voice of God.
“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3 ESV)
Abram then sets out to a land he’s never seen. His decision to follow a vision begins the process of transforming him from a man into a patriarch.
For thousands of years Jewish families have lifted the final Passover glass saying, “next year in Jerusalem” because Abram, through obedience to the voice of God, went in search of a special piece of land that would root the identity of his future descendants.
There’s much to unpack in the three verses that make up God’s call to Abram. God’s call contains the seeds of how to build a ruling family that can last a thousand generations.
Those themes include:
Being captured by a long-term vision
Hearing, trusting, and obeying God’s voice
The role of promise and blessing
Supernatural protection over future generations
The role of patriarchal fame
The move from family-building to nation-building
And the mission of multigenerational family building: blessing other families.
The Patriarch with the Longest Vision Wins
The difference between a father and a patriarch is a compelling, multigenerational vision.
Having children makes you a father but when a father casts a vision that inspires his descendants he becomes a patriarch.
The words of this new vision begin with what historian Thomas Cahill called “two of the boldest words in all of literature ``lekh-lekha'' or in English “Go forth''.
Go forth from your country and family and begin a new family, a new country.
Our family makes an annual pilgrimage to Israel and the minute we enter Israeli airspace I become conscious that we are now inside of the vision of Abraham.
No place depicts this reality better than a city in Israel called Hebron where stands the Tomb of the Patriarchs. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are all buried here in the cave acquired by Abraham whose deed to the land we have described in detailed land negotiation in Genesis 23.
What is most remarkable about this location is the standoff between the two sons of Abraham at the tomb itself. Half belongs to the Jews the descendants of Isaac and the other half to the Arabs the descendants of Ishmael.
Only a wall separates these warring brothers and both can look from their side into the tomb of their father.
If you ever doubt the power of a patriarchal vision look to Hebron. Historian Paul Johnson begins his book, The History of the Jews, by detailing what this remarkable city symbolizes.
“The Jews are the most tenacious people in history. Hebron is there to prove it. It lies 20 miles south of Jerusalem, 3,000 feet up in the Judaean hills. There, in the Cave of Machpelah, are the Tombs of the Patriarchs. …Its stones are mute witnesses to constant strife and four millennia of religious and political disputes. It has been in turn a Hebrew shrine, a synagogue, a Byzantine basilica, a mosque, a crusader church, and then a mosque again…Despite much fear and uncertainty, it has flourished.
So when the historian visits Hebron today, he asks himself: where are all those peoples which once held the place? Where are the Canaanites? Where are the Edomites? Where are the ancient Hellenes and the Romans, the Byzantines, the Franks, the Mamluks and the Ottomans? They have vanished into time, irrevocably. But the Jews are still in Hebron. Hebron is thus an example of Jewish obstinacy over 4,000 years...
No race has maintained over so long a period so emotional an attachment to a particular corner of the earth’s surface. But none has shown so strong and persistent an instinct to migrate, such courage and skill in pulling up and replanting its roots. It is a curious fact that, for more than three-quarters of their existence as a race, a majority of Jews have always lived outside the land they call their own. They do so today.”
How did the Jews become, “the most tenacious people in history”? How did they become the people who in the words of Charles Krauthammer, are “the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago.”? One reason we are here to explore in depth is that their patriarch had the longest and clearest vision of any patriarch in history. Their patriarch gave rise to more patriarchs and their patriarchal visions stacked until you have a family that, despite every effort to stop them, will continue to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule until the end of time.
Tool: Casting a Vision for Your Descendants
In recent times business thought-leaders have rediscovered the power of vision. Some have even suggested that title CEO should be rebranded as Chief Explainer as Drift co-founder explains, “I think my role has been and will continue to be Chief Explainer Officer…I would just have to keep repeating the vision or mission. ‘Why are we here? What are we doing?’”
A mission articulates why we are here but a vision is a picture of where we are going. God gives Abram a fuzzy vision. He tells him there is a land out there but he doesn’t tell him exactly where the land is.
Every father seeking to become a patriarch must become comfortable sharing his fuzzy vision.
Writing a fuzzy vision is easy. Take out a piece of paper and put a date at the top. This date could be 5 years, 50 years, or 500 years into the future, you pick.
Then try and write one full page about what you see about your family on that date.
Remember, vision is literally seeing something and every father sees something in the future. The farther away the more fuzzy the vision is likely to be until it’s so blurry you can’t make out any details.
25 years ago I saw myself working on assets alongside my adult children.
20 years ago I saw my parents and grandchildren around the same dinner table every week.
15 years ago I saw our family putting down roots in a small walking town close to Cincinnati.
10 years ago I saw our family training other families to become multigenerational teams on mission.
5 years ago I saw our family forming a disciple-making community that reproduces spiritual children.
By God’s grace, all of these visions have happened or are happening.
Sometimes we have to let visions go. That’s OK, it’s so much better to aim at something and then to see it as clearly as you can with the wisdom and vision you’ve been given.
It’s not OK to aim at nothing. This will blow your family apart and send them to the four winds.
The reason Abraham’s family kept coming back together was because their father had a God-given vision, each generation continued to share it, and virtually every spiritual blessing that has come upon the Earth ever since came through that channel of this one visionary family.