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Japanese The Bible never says why God chose Abraham. Genesis says only that the LORD spoke and “Abram departed” (Genesis 12:4). What Scripture does give is the purpose: “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Later books add that God took him from a family that served other gods, and found his heart faithful.
So the question has two halves, and the Bible answers the second far more fully than the first. Why this man, we are not told. Why any man at all, we are told again and again: God chose one person so that every family on earth might be blessed through him. When Paul read Genesis 12:3 he heard the gospel in it, “preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed” (Galatians 3:8). If we belong to Christ, we are among those families. The choice of Abraham was made with us in view.
Does the Bible say why God chose Abraham?
Not in the place where we would look for it. Genesis 11 ends with a family record: Terah’s sons, a brother, Haran, who died in Ur in his father’s lifetime, a move toward Canaan that stopped at Haran. Then, with no introduction, God speaks: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing” (Genesis 12:1–2). We are told nothing about Abram’s goodness, his prayers or his wisdom before this moment. The next thing we learn about him is that he went.
Jewish readers notice the silence too. The Posen Library, introducing an ancient midrash on Abraham, puts it plainly: “the biblical text is vague regarding Abraham’s familial and religious roots and why he merits this great reward.” The rabbis filled the gap with stories, and Christians with theology, and both are worth hearing. Genesis itself leaves the reason with God.
Was Abraham chosen because he was better than others?
Nothing in Scripture says so, and Joshua points another way. Centuries later he reminded Israel where their father came from: “Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other gods. And I took your father Abraham from the other side of the flood” (Joshua 24:2–3). God took him out of a house of idols. Isaiah remembers only that God acted: “I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him” (Isaiah 51:2).
Moses told Israel the same thing about their own election, and it fits their father’s: “The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers” (Deuteronomy 7:7–8). God’s choosing rests on his love and his promise.
The Reformer John Calvin pressed this hard in his commentary on Genesis. “This calling of Abram is a signal instance of the gratuitous mercy of God,” he wrote. “Had Abram been beforehand with God by any merit of works?” For Calvin, Abraham was “an example of the vocation of us all”, a picture of how God calls every believer, because in him “by the mere mercy of God, those things which are not are raised from nothing.”
Christians differ on one part of this question: whether God’s choosing looked ahead to faith. The Westminster Confession, a Reformed statement of faith, says God chose those he saves “out of his mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith, or good works”. John Wesley, in his sermon “On Predestination”, taught the opposite order: “He knew, he saw them as believers, and as such predestinated them to salvation.” Both speak of God’s choosing of people for salvation in general, and neither text is about Abraham alone.
Why did God choose a man with no children?
Here Genesis is not silent at all. Just before the call, one short line stands alone: “But Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:30). God promised a great nation to a man who could not give himself a son. Abram was 75 when he left Haran (Genesis 12:4) and 100 when Isaac was born (Genesis 21:5). For twenty-five years the promise rested on God’s word alone.
Paul saw in this the very shape of faith. Abraham “against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations… And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb” (Romans 4:18–19). The God he trusted is the one “who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Romans 4:17). Hebrews says that from “one, and him as good as dead” came descendants “as the stars of the sky in multitude” (Hebrews 11:12). Whatever else God saw in Abraham, he chose a man whose nation could only come as a gift.
What did God choose Abraham to do?
To be a blessing, first of all, and to raise a household that would walk with God. As the LORD’s visitors rise and look toward Sodom, with Abraham walking beside them, the LORD says, “Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do; Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do justice and judgment” (Genesis 18:17–19). The choice looks outward, to Abraham’s children and through them to the nations.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads the call the same way, under the heading “God chooses Abraham”: “In order to gather together scattered humanity God calls Abram from his country, his kindred and his father’s house, and makes him Abraham, that is, ‘the father of a multitude of nations’.” It goes on to say that his descendants would be “the root on to which the Gentiles would be grafted, once they came to believe.” Calvin, writing from the Reformed side, marvelled at a related purpose: in Abraham’s call he saw “that the Church should be revived in him, and he himself constituted the father of all the faithful.” The promises themselves are set out in what the Abrahamic covenant is.
How do Jewish teachers explain why God chose Abraham?
Jewish tradition answered the silence with stories of a young man who found God before God called him. These are rabbinic teachings from the centuries after the Bible, and they are told as midrash, not as Scripture.
The best known is in Genesis Rabbah, a collection of the third to fifth centuries. Abraham’s father Terah makes idols and once leaves Abraham in charge of the shop. A man of fifty comes to buy one, and Abraham tells him, “Woe to that man who is fifty years old and worships [that which is] one day [old].” Later he smashes the idols with a club and puts the club in the hand of the largest, and when his father protests, “They have no awareness!” he answers, “Do your ears not hear [what] your mouth [is saying]?”
Another midrash in the same collection pictures a traveller who sees a birah doleket, a palace that the phrase leaves either “full of light” or “in flames”, and asks whether it has no owner, until the owner looks out and answers. “Similarly, because our ancestor Abraham said, ‘Is it possible that the world lacks a caretaker?’ the Blessed Holy One looked out and said to him, ‘I am the Sovereign of the Universe.’” In this reading Abraham was a seeker, and God answered his question with a call.
Midrash is commentary. The tradition that keeps these stories reads them as filling a silence in the text, as the Posen Library’s introduction says of the idol shop. Genesis itself opens Abraham’s story with God’s word to him.
Did Abraham’s faith and obedience matter?
Very much, and in Genesis they follow the call. The great prayer of Nehemiah 9 keeps the order exactly: “Thou art the LORD the God, who didst choose Abram, and broughtest him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and gavest him the name of Abraham; And foundest his heart faithful before thee” (Nehemiah 9:7–8). The verse names God’s choosing first, and his finding of a faithful heart after it.
Abraham’s faith was his answer to the choosing. Under the night sky God told him to count the stars, “So shall thy seed be. And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:5–6). Paul makes much of the timing: faith was reckoned to Abraham “Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision” (Romans 4:10), so that he might be “the father of all them that believe” (Romans 4:11). And when Abraham had offered Isaac on Moriah, God renewed the promise in words that honour his obedience: “And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Genesis 22:18).
So Scripture does not answer the question of why him. It tells us instead what God made of a childless man from a house of idols, and for whom. Paul gives the last word, and it is meant for us: “So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham” (Galatians 3:9).
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