Times man of the Year

Genesis 11:26-32

I could write a small book on my dad, not because he was famous, but because he was my dad.  Our dad’s shape us, they give us their name, some do better than others at guiding us to manhood, giving us direction and goals, but the bottom line is they are important because they are our dads. 

I believe in the hearts of most dads’ is a desire for his son to excel, to far exceed his goals and expectations, that is what happened with a dad named Terah.  There is not a lot of ink on Terah, but his son is one of the most important men in history, he would have made "The Times man of the year", many times.

It is important to go back to the beginning to get a time line on Terah and his son, and the time line must start at Creation.  So Creation is 0 on our time line and my source is “The Genesis Record” by Henry M. Morris.

                   Creation      Birth of Seth     Birth of Noah    The Flood      Confusion of Tongue        

                   B.C. O               130                 1056                 1656                        1757                            
Birth of    
 Birth of       Birth of Terah    Birth of Abram  

                      1878                  1948

From the flood to the birth of Abram is 292 years and from the confusion of tongues to the birth of Abram was 191 years.  This is the account in Genesis 11:31,32, “Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there.  The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.”

 It is significant to note that Ur was known only by its mention in the Bible, until it began to be excavated in the nineteenth century.  Now it is known that it was a great and prosperous city, though highly idolatrous, exactly as Genesis suggest.  Most significantly, Ur has yielded a vast library of books, business documents, and other written materials.  Not only did the “intelligentsia” of Ur know how to read and write long before the time of Abraham, so did even the ordinary citizens.  When Abram lived there, Ur had already begun to decline somewhat from a former glory.  Haran also has been excavated, and as a matter of fact, is still in existence as a town today.   It is significant that these excavations do not show primitive, half-bestial cultures, newly evolved from an animal ancestry, but a high civilization, exactly as suggested in Genesis. (Taken from page 307 of “The Genesis Record”) 

The son of Terah was born with the name of Abram, he lived in a city not that different from one we live in today, they had large buildings, it had numerous canals coming from the Euphrates River, they may have had a literacy rate higher than what we have today, but they were also a godless society.  That is what Abram was told to leave, by a God he had not been taught about or had ever seen.  

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice