Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church of Manhattan, KS, 11 Aug. 2019
In the fourth century A.D., a Christian philosopher from Tyre named Meropius travelled to India with his wards, Frumentious and Aedsius, to speak at a Christian conference. On the way home, they fell prey to pirates in the Red Sea and were shipwrecked. Meropius and the rest of the ship’s company were massacred, but the two boys survived and landed on the East African coast. The locals brought the boys to the court of their King, Ella Amida; and since these boys were well-educated the king made Aedsius his cupbearer, and Frumentius his treasurer and secretary. When the King died and his son Ezana took the throne, Aedisius and Frumentius headed back home to Tyre, but Frumentius stopped in Alexandria, Egypt, on the way, to recruit a pastor for the folks who had become Christians through his witness. Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, responded by ordaining Frumentius and sending him back to Aksum as its first pastor. So, by faith, Frumentius, instead of going home, spent the rest of his life in Africa. Archaeologists have found that King Ezana’s monuments and coins provide a fascinating story of the gradual adoption of Christianity in Aksum. Early inscriptions are dedicated to the South Arabian gods Astar, Baher, and Meder, later they invoke the “Lord of Heaven,” and finally, the Trinity. Christianity became the official faith of that state! Faith often involves leaving what is familiar in order to fulfill God’s call; but God uses our obedience richly.1
Remember from verses 1-2 that “faith is the understanding of things being hoped for; it is the making of a case concerning matters which are not being seen, and it was for this that the ancients got a good reference.” (NAW)
Over the last three weeks we looked at three of those elders: Abel, Enoch, and Noah, and how they illustrate that righteousness, pleasing God, and salvation, come with faith in God.
Now were moving into a more extended passage in Hebrews 11 on the faith of Abraham and Sarah, and how they persevered in trusting God to make good on His covenant promises to provide them a land of their own and a big family, even when they couldn’t see the fulfillment of those promises.
The “call” which Abraham received is recorded in Genesis 12:1 “And the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth [εξελθε] out of thy land and out of thy kindred, and out of the house of thy father, and come into the land which I will shew thee.’” (Brenton)
According to Steven the Evangelist2 in the book of Acts, Abraham, at the time of this call, was living in a big city in what is now Iraq.
His Dad was the patriarch of a wealthy clan, and they had a tight-knit family. But God told him to leave it all.
Now it’s possible that the sudden deaths of Abraham’s grandpa and of Abraham’s brother were part of the reason that Abraham’s Dad and Abraham’s orphaned nephew Lot went with him and Sarai, but he left behind at least one brother.
God just told Abraham to leave. He didn’t tell Abraham where to go; He just said He’d let him know later.
It was only natural to make a stop at the community founded by his deceased brother Haran, where there may have been a family cattle business established by Haran that was going strong3, and it isn’t surprising that Father Terah – who worshipped Yahweh plus other idols – wanted to stay there. [Show map]
But when Terah died, Abram and Sarai were released to obey the call from God again, and they left all their extended family, keeping only Lot with them.
Not knowing where they were going, they continued East between the natural barriers of the mountains to the north and the desert to the south until they ran into the sea, then trekked 400 miles down the Mediterranean coast across Syria, Lebanon, and modern-day Israel. And, only after all of that travel in blind obedience to God’s call, “...the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I will give this land to thy seed.’(Gen. 12:7, Brenton) So, the land of Israel was to be the land he would inherit, but at the time, it was full of Canaanite tribes, so he couldn’t claim it as his own yet.
But the thing is, when God called, Abraham obeyed. He packed up his belongings, got his wife and nephew ready to go, said good-bye to his family and left – without delay, without demanding more information from God, without complaining – just obeyed.
You can’t obey somebody like that unless you really trust them, and that’s what Abraham and Sarah did; they trusted Yahweh.
Don’t forget Sarah. She moved with Abraham, and she’s mentioned here in Hebrews 11 too. “Yahweh told you what? You mean He didn’t even tell you where? Well, we left the worship of Nanna (the moon goddess) behind when we left Ur, and we’re not Terraphim worshippers like the Haranites are; Yahweh is our God, so we’ll just do what He says and trust that it’ll be for the best.”
This lesson from the life of Abraham and Sarah was aimed at first-century “Hebrew Christians to break through bands as strong as those which bound Abraham to Mesopotamia, in abandoning Judaism, and to take a course in a determined attachment to Christianity, the consequences of with were as apparently hazardous, and as completely unknown to them and beyond their control, as the circumstances of Abraham’s journey from Mesopotamia to Canaan. Nothing could enable them to do this but faith – a full persuasion that the command to embrace Jesus of Nazareth as the ‘end of the law for righteousness,’ and all the promise of eternal life...” ~John Brown of Edinborough, AD 1862
What about you? Are you willing to pick up and go if God calls you to do something unexpected?
About twenty years ago, I was planning a mission trip to the Middle East, and I realized that it wouldn’t be safe to travel alone, I needed a travelling companion – It might not have even been safe WITH a travelling companion, but anyway... That evening, as I was eating dinner with some other seminary students, I asked one of the single guys if he would consider going to Yemen with me. Joshua Sturgill’s eyes met mine and, without a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Yes!” I said, “Uh, I know that’s kind-of a big commitment, so you don’t have to give me your answer right now. You want to pray about it and think it over first and then get back with me?” He said, “No, I’ll go with you!” I was a little uncertain about whether Joshua would actually follow through with it, but he really did made the trip with me, and he was a great travelling companion – a blessing to everyone we met on that trip!
There is a second step which Abraham took which required faith as well. It took faith for Abraham and Sarah to get up and go when God called, but it also took faith for them to hang around Canaan for as long as they did, waiting until God gave the land to them as their possession.
What was the promise that made the country of Israel the “promised land” for Abraham and his descendants? It is recorded in
Genesis 12:6-8 “And Abram traversed the land lengthwise as far as the place Sychem, to the high oak, and the Chananites then inhabited the land. And the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I will give this land to thy seed.’ And Abram built an altar there to the Lord who appeared to him. And he departed thence to the mountain eastward of Baethel, and there he pitched his tent in Baethel near the sea…
13:18 And Abram having removed his tent, came and dwelt [κατῴκησεν] by the oak of Mambre, which was in Chebrom, and he there built an altar to the Lord.”
The promise comes up again in Genesis 17:8 “And I will give to thee and to thy seed after thee the land wherein thou sojournest [παροικεῖς], even all the land of Chanaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be to them a God.” (Brenton)
Since the promise was to both Abraham and to his “seed after” him, his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob were, in succession, fellow-heirs together with him of that promised land.
It was a real step of faith for Abraham and Sarah to set foot into a foreign land and believe that God was going to transferr ownership of that land from the Canaanites – who had settled the land – to Abraham’s family.
It involved being treated as strangers, going through all the uncomfortable feelings of not knowing what people were saying because they couldn’t understand the language (or accent) and not understanding what was going on because the customs were different.
I remember a friend visiting from France when I was living in Alabama and attending Briarwood Church. The church had grown so big that the elders had told everybody to wear nametags at church, and, over time, people started adding the names of their church affinity groups to their name tags. I was in the choir, so I had the word C-H-O-I-R below my name on my nametag. My French friend leaned over and asked me one day, what does this mean “shwar”? It took me a minute to realize that he was pronouncing the word on my nametag according to a French pronunciation of the letters. For a year he had been wondering why some church members had this word “shwar” on their nametag and others did not.
That’s a snapshot of what it’s like to live as a foreigner. It’s not comfortable. But Abraham and Sarah did it anyway because God called them to trust Him in a foreign land.
Now, Abraham seems mostly to have made his living (and a good living at that!) by raising cattle, but he seems to have done it as a roaming outfit rather than as a rancher in one place, so the Genesis history has him pitching his tent and living all over the place. That made it easier for him to fulfill his calling as a stranger in a strange land, but it also lent to his unsettledness.
As we’ll see in the verses to come, that unsettledness, that living in tents instead of in castles, was intentional. Abraham and Sarah lived in tents and never settled down permanently because they were waiting expectantly for something different – looking forward to it.
This verb exdechomai also shows up in James 5:7 “Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain." (NKJV)
What was it that Abraham and Sarah were waiting for? Why did they travel light and not settle down? It was so that they could pick up and go somewhere else as soon as God revealed it. They were “expectantly waiting” for “God” to “build” them a “city that had foundations.”
“To denote the stability, the immutability, and the eternity of this state of happiness, the heavenly city is said to ‘have foundations.’ It is not a collection of tents or tabernacles, which have no foundations….” ~John Brown
In the Bible, the “city with foundations” is Jerusalem – both the earthly one and the heavenly one, and the “foundation” is Jesus. Abraham didn’t actually mention this in the book of Genesis, but the author of Hebrews appears to be allegorizing a bit to to make the connection between Jesus and Abraham’s faith:
Psalm 87:1-3 “His foundations are in the holy mountains. The Lord loves the gates of Sion, more than all the tabernacles of Jacob. Glorious things have been spoken of thee, O city of God.” (Brenton, cf. Ps. 136:7)
Eph. 2:19-20 “Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone” (NKJV)
1 Corinthians 3:11 “for no one is able to lay another foundation besides the one which is being laid, which is Jesus Christ.” (NAW, cf. Eph. 2:20, 2 Tim. 2:19)
Revelation 21:10&14 “And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God... Now the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” (NKJV)
The heavenly Jerusalem where God and His people live together happily could not exist without the foundational work of Jesus dying to make people right with God. The earthly Jerusalem was supposed to be a model pointing to the real heavenly one.
God is “the craftsman and builder” of the heavenly Jerusalem.
The Greek word technites describes a skilled craftsman who can both design & build well,
and the Greek word demiourgos describes a contractor or builder who works for the benefit of his people4.
v.16 affirms that God has already prepared a city for them, and didn’t Jesus also say in the Gospel of John, “Behold, I go to prepare a place for you”? (John 14:2-3)
Abraham and Sarah’s example of not living in a castle (which they could have afforded) but instead living in tents because they were trying to keep themselves ready to move in with God is a lesson to us all.
We need to carefully guard our hearts against a fixation on earthly houses that proclaims to the world that we prefer the “city of man” to the “city of God” (Augustine),
and we need to “travel light” enough that we could extract ourselves from our current life if God called us to obey Him somewhere else.
And we need to persevere in the callings God has given us, “setting up the shield of faith [Eph. 6], by which to repel all the assaults of doubt and unbelief.”~J.Calvin
And, like the O.T. patriarchs, we should “not confine [our] thoughts… to this earth, but penetrate… even into heaven...” ~J. Calvin
Obviously, “there’s a ditch on the other side of that road” of “being too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good,” so it takes wisdom to find the right balance there, but for most of us, we lean toward the other extreme.
Abraham’s and Sarah’s life illustrates that faith determines where you will “go,” how you will “live,” and what you will be “looking for.” And they were not only looking for the city of God but also for the Godly Seed:
There are three places in verse 11 where your Bible might say something different, so let me quickly try to reconcile those:
Most Greek manuscripts (including the majority of the oldest-known ones) do not call Sarah “barren” in v.11,
and most Greek manuscripts state explicitly that Sarah “gave birth.”
Disagreements over whether the original letter to the Hebrews had (or didn’t have) these words has resulted in different English versions using slightly different wordings,
but there is no essential difference in meaning, for, whether or not the original wording of Hebrews 11 stated it explicitly, the context is clear that Sarah was barren but then had a child, so those textual variants are just an editorial debate, not a doctrinal debate, and we can leave it at that.
A bigger translation difference shows up in the 1984 edition of the NIV, where they added “Abraham” into the verse to be its subject, even though his name is not in any Greek manuscript. (Sarah’s name is the subject in all the Greek texts.)
The NIV editors were probably trying to fit verse 11 together with verse 12 (which switches back to Abraham as the subject),
but for their 2011 edition, they took Abraham’s inserted name out and made Sarah the subject, effectively admitting that they had made a mistake there in their 1984 edition. So much for the variants; now for the meaning of the verse.
The Greek wording expresses appropriate amazement over Sarah’s pregnancy with Isaac because she had been barren so long and was so far past childbearing age.
It would be like if MaryBeth started showing off a baby bump along with all our younger moms; we’d all say, “Whoah!”
But “even Sarah herself received power to conceive” (literally “for the purpose of the implantation of a seed”).
The same Greek word used of the power/strength/ability that Sarah received (dunamis) is used in Hebrews 1:3 of Jesus’ sovereign power, “...being the radiance of His glory and the stamp of His substance and carrying all things by the word of His power" (NAW)
The Greek wording, which literally reads “received power into the foundation of a seed,” is a little ambiguous as to:
whether it is physically describing the implantation of Isaac in Sarah’s uterus,
or whether is it figuratively describing the fulfillment of the promise that she would have a descendant5
But both meanings are what happened. Sarah got pregnant, and God’s promise of a descendant was fulfilled.
And indeed, it was a promise, and an unexpected one at that:
Yahweh appeared to Abraham in Gen. 17, “And God said to Abraam, ‘Sara[i] your wife --her name shall not be called Sara[i], Sarrha shall be her name. And I will bless her, and give thee a son of her, and I will bless him, and he shall become nations, and kings of nations shall be of him.’ And Abraam fell upon his face, and laughed; and spoke in his heart, saying, ‘Shall there be a child to one who is a hundred years old, and shall Sarrha who is ninety years old, bear?’ ... And God said to Abraam, ‘Yea, behold, Sarrha thy wife shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name Isaac; and... I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarrha shall bear to thee at this time, in the next year.’” (Gen. 17:15-21, Brenton)
Then shortly afterward Yahweh appeared to Abraham and Sarah again at their tent at noon, with the visitation of three mysterious men, who promised that within the year Sarah would have a son (Gen. 18). Then in chapter 21 of Genesis we read of the miraculous birth of Isaac.
The Apostle Paul commented on this in Romans 4, including Abraham with Sarah as having faith that God would make good on His promises, and showing how our faith in Jesus is a type of their faith, “Therefore [the promise] is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all (as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations’) in the presence of Him whom he believed-- God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did; who, contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations, according to what was spoken, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah's womb. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully convinced that what He had promised He was also able to perform. And therefore ‘it was accounted to him for righteousness.’ Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, but also for us. It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification.” (Romans 4:16-25, NKJV)
And so a 90-year-old woman who had never before had a child, gave birth...
“Since/because she considered/judged/decided that the Promiser is faithful/trustworthy”
We’ve already seen in Hebrews that God is a promise-making God:
Hebrews 10:23 “Hold onto the unrelenting confession of our hope, because the One Who Promised is faithful."
Jesus is called the “One who promises” nine more times in the New Testament6.
And we’ve also seen already the faithfulness/trustworthiness of Jesus in passages like: Heb. 3:2 that Jesus “is faithful to the One who appointed Him - like Moses also was in the entirety of his administration," (NAW) – and Jesus is also called “faithful” in over a dozen other scripture passages7:
So, for Sarah to decide that Yahweh could be trusted to keep His promises merely brings her into line with what all God’s people have also believed.
But I think it’s a little strong to translate the Greek conjunction επει as “because,” as though it was “because” Sarah “decided that God is trustworthy” that she made herself pregnant.
I think it is more of a temporal and conditional idea that is being put forth here.
It was after Sarah decided she could trust God to make good on this promise of a baby that she had the baby. (It was 12 months from the time the promise was given, which gives 3 months for her to make up her mind and then 9 months of pregnancy).
And the larger context does not attribute the pregnancy to Sarah but rather to God (“for nothing is impossible with God” ~Luke 1:37, NIV), but God was looking for her to trust Him before He established the pregnancy, so there was a contingency of her faith to the pregnancy in that case.
Are there any things God has promised you that you are not willing to believe or accept? I’ve seen people called to ministry who ran pell-mell, like Jonah, in the opposite direction and encountered hardship after hardship, but once they took steps in the right direction in obedience to God, they were blessed.
Could it be that God is waiting for you to trust Him before He acts? It may not always be the case that God is waiting for you to trust Him first, but I’ve seen lots of singles who idolized marriage and strove for it vainly without trusting God, then got so frustrated they finally gave up to the Lord their ability to get married – and only then did God provide a spouse.
God is not waiting for you to be perfect. The first time God promised a son to Abraham and Sarah, they both laughed at God. Their faith wasn’t perfect, and yours won’t be either, but God works with us even so. We should just pray like the guy in Mark 9:24, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
But let me add a word of caution against expecting from God what He has not promised. He didn’t promise everybody a spouse or a child or wealth, so it would be silly to resent Him if He doesn’t provide these things to you. Sometimes it’s not our faith but our hopes that need to be re-examined. John Calvin commented, “Let us then learn that it is a thing to be observed through life, that we are to undertake nothing to which God does not call us.”
But God had promised a child to Abraham and Sarah, and their experience illustrates yet another event that could not be foreseen except by faith: the birth of a baby to a 90-year-old barren woman who believed God when He said he would do it.
The next verse focuses on Abraham’s faith in the same event, but I will have to save that for later...
Rev. 19:11 Now I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war.
Rev. 1:5 and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth. To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,(NKJV, cf. Jer. 49:5 LXX/42:5 Eng)
1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
1 Pet. 4:19 Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator.
1 Thess. 5:24 He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.
2 Thess. 3:3 But the Lord is faithful, who will establish you and guard you from the evil one.
2 Tim. 2:13 If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.
1Cor. 1:9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
1Cor. 10:13 ... God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able…
Isa. 49:7 Thus says the LORD, The Redeemer of Israel, their Holy One, To Him whom man despises, To Him whom the nation abhors, To the Servant of rulers: "Kings shall see and arise, Princes also shall worship, Because of the LORD who is faithful, The Holy One of Israel; And He has chosen You."
Deut. 7:9 "Therefore know that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; (cf. 32:4)
Greek NT |
NAW |
KJV |
8 Πίστει καλούμενος ᾿Αβραὰμ ὑπήκουσεν ἐξελθεῖνB εἰς [τὸν]C τόπον ὃν ἤμελλε λαμβάνειν εἰς κληρονομίαν, καὶ ἐξῆλθεν μὴ ἐπιστάμενος ποῦ ἔρχεται. |
8 With faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed [and] went out to the place which he was going to receive as an inheritance – indeed, he went out, not knowing where he was going. |
8
By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which
he should |
9 Πίστει παρῴκησενD εἰς [τὴν]E γῆν τῆς ἐπαγγελίας ὡς ἀλλοτρίαν, ἐν σκηναῖς κατοικήσας μετὰ ᾿Ισαὰκ καὶ ᾿Ιακὼβ τῶν συγκληρονόμωνF τῆς ἐπαγγελίας τῆς αὐτῆς· |
9 With faith he migrated into the country of the promise like it was a foreign one, residing in tents with Isaac and then Jacob, the sucessive-heirs of the same promise, |
9 By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange [country], dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with [him] of the same promise: |
10 ἐξεδέχετοG γὰρ τὴν τοὺς θεμελίους ἔχουσαν πόλιν ἧς τεχνίτηςH καὶ δημιουργὸς ὁ Θεός. |
10 for he was expectantly-waiting for the city that has the foundations, the crafter and builder of which is God! |
10 For he X looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. |
11 Πίστει καὶ αὐτὴ ΣάρραI δύναμιν εἰς καταβολὴν σπέρματοςJ ἔλαβε καὶ παρὰ καιρὸν ἡλικίας [ἔτεκεν]K, ἐπεὶ πιστὸν ἡγήσατο τὸν ἐπαγγειλάμενον. |
11 With faith, even Sarah herself received power for the purpose of the founding of a seed -{She gave birth} indeed beyond the standard-time of age [for it], once she decided that He who promised is trustworthy. |
11
Through faith also Sara herself received strength
to conceive seed, and |
1SOURCES: Latourette, A History of Christianity, p.104, and Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa, p.32.
2Acts 7:2-5 "...Brethren and fathers, listen: The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran, and said to him,`Get out of your country and from your relatives, and come to a land that I will show you.' Then he came out of the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran. And from there, when his father was dead, He moved him to this land in which you now dwell. And God gave him no inheritance in it, not even enough to set his foot on. But even when Abraham had no child, He promised to give it to him for a possession, and to his descendants after him.” (NKJV)
3This hypothesis comes from Ruth Beechick’s book Adam And His Kin
4Vincent: “Δημιουργὸς ... originally a workman for the public (δῆμος); generally, framer, builder. It is used by Xenophon and Plato of the maker of the world (Xen. Mem. i. 4, 9; Plato, Tim. 40 C; Repub. 530 A). It was appropriated by the Neo Platonists as the designation of God. To the Gnostics, the Demiurge was a limited, secondary God, who created the world; since [they believed] there was no possibility of direct contact between the supreme, incommunicable God and the visible world.”
5Classical
Greek expert, Marvin Vincent, explained in his Word
Studies of the New Testament,
“The
sentence may be explained either, ‘received
strength as regarded the deposition of seed,’ to fructify it;
or, ‘received strength for the foundation of a posterity,’
[The
Greek word for ‘seed,’]
σπέρμα[τος]
being
rendered [‘descendant’]
in
accordance with Hebrews
2:16 and Hebrews 11:18,
and [the
Greek noun]
καταβολή
in
the sense of foundation,
as [it
is rendered] everywhere
else [it
occurs]
in N.T.”
P.E.
Hughes favored “foundation of a posterity,” saying, “the
Greek terminology does not properly mean that she received power to
conceive seed.”
6Acts 7:5; Rom. 4:21; Gal. 3:19; Tit. 1:2; Heb. 6:13; 10:23; James 1:12; 2:5; 1 John 2:25
7See appendix on this topic
AThe
Greek is the Majority text, edited by myself to follow the majority
of the earliest-known manuscripts only when the early manuscript
evidence is practically unanimous. My original document includes
notes on the NKJV, NASB, NIV, & ESV English translations, but
since they are all copyrighted, I cannot include them in my online
document. Underlined words in English versions indicate a
standalone difference from all other English translations of a
certain word. Strikeout usually indicates that the
English translation is, in my opinion, too far outside the range of
meaning of the original Greek word. The addition of an X indicates a
Greek word left untranslated – or a plural Greek word
translated as an English singular. [Brackets] indicate words added
in English not in the Greek. Key words are colored consistently
across the chart to show correlations.
BThe KJV, NKJV, NIV & ESV connected the infinitive “to go out” with the participle “called,” four words previous to it, and while “called… to go out” seems more natural to an English speaker, I don’t think that it is as natural to the Greek grammar. It seems more natural that the author would have intended the infinitive “to go out” to be connected to the verb “obeyed” immediately previous to it, as the NASB interpreted it. Once again, in God’s providence, it doesn’t make a difference, because the verb “he went out” is repeated, clearly indicating that this was how Abraham obeyed. Because of this repeated verb, I interpreted the introductory conjunction as ascensive “indeed.”
CThe traditional Greek editions (Textus Receptus, Greek Orthodox, Majority) all include the definite article (“THE place”), and this is how the NKJV renders it, but about a dozen Greek manuscripts don’t contain the definite article (“A place”) including all four first-millennium manuscripts, so the UBS and Nestle-Aland GNT’s omit it, as do the NASB, NIV, ESV – and surprisingly the KJV.
DInterestingly, the only other time this verb is used in the NT is when Cleopas described Jesus with it!
EAlthough the Majority of Greek manuscripts (and the Greek Orthodox editions and Textus Receptus) include this definite article (“THE land”), it’s not in over two dozen Greek manuscripts (among which are the three oldest-known), so it’s not in the contemporary critical GNT’s. It makes no real difference though, and all the English versions make the “land” definite – even those that follow the critical text!
FThis verb only occurs three other times in the Greek Bible: Rom. 8:17 (joint heirs with Christ); Eph. 3:6 (Jews & Greeks co-heirs of Christ); 1 Pet. 3:7 (wives are co-heirs with their husbands of the grace of life).
G“Εξεδεχετο may well be intensive in force. Spicq, for example understands it to mean, ‘he expected with an absolute confidence’” ~P.E. Hughes
HRev. 18:22 (generally translated “craftsman”) is the only other instance of this word in the Bible.
ISome 20 Greek manuscripts (including one of the four oldest-known ones) add the word στειρα (“barren”) here, thus it is in most of the ancient versions and in the contemporary critical GNT editions (and therefore in the NIV). While the adjective was true of Sarah up until the time she conceived Isaac, I lean toward the majority of the Greek manuscripts (supported by the majority of the oldest-known ones) and the traditional editions (Textus Receptus, Patriarchal, Contemporary Greek Orthodox) which did not include that word, and I see that Chrysostom, Augustine (contra the Vulgate), the KJV, NASB & ESV also went that route with me.
JThis is the only place in the Greek Bible where spermatos is the object of katabolen; in all 10 other instances the object is kosmos (Matt. 13:35; 25:34; Lk. 11:50; Jn. 17:24; Eph. 1:4; Heb. 4:3; 9:26; 1 Pet. 1:20; Rev. 13:8; 17:8). “The sentence may be explained either, 'received strength as regarded the deposition of seed,' to fructify it; or, 'received strength for the foundation of a posterity,' σπέρμα being rendered in accordance with Heb. 2:16 & 11:18, and καταβολή in the sense of foundation, as everywhere else in N.T." ~Marvin Vincent
K“Bore a child” is in the majority of Greek manuscripts and is in all the traditional editions of the Greek New Testament (Greek Orthodox and Textus Receptus) and therefore is in the KJV, but it does not appear in the four oldest Greek manuscripts (the earliest appearance being in the 6th century Claramontanus), thus it is not in contemporary critical editions of the GNT. It was not in the ancient Vulgate or Coptic translations (although it was in the ancient Syriac), and it is not in the contemporary NAS & ESV. The dispute is not over whether Sarah gave birth to the child conceived, for the next verse makes it plain that she did; it is more a dispute over how many words the original author used to recount the facts. NIV has a very curious translation of this verse.