“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:37-39).
The first eleven chapters of Genesis are sometimes called chapters of “primeval history” – that’s because they are the earliest history of the world, and because they are, they deal in matters common to all humanity rather than local history. And throughout those chapters, we have seen three occasions of God’s judgment for sin: we saw humans banished from the garden, humankind largely destroyed by the flood, and then human beings divided by diverse languages. In addition to those three judgments, we have seen five different curses: the serpent was cursed, the ground was cursed, Cain was condemned to wander the earth, Canaan was cursed to servitude, and the peoples were cursed with confused languages.
When you look at it like that, there hasn’t been a lot of particularly uplifting news. But Genesis 12 presents us with a new affirmation of God’s commitment to humankind.
The Lord said to Abram: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you” (Gen. 12:1).
Abram, along with his family, was in Haran, and God called him to leave. So there was a literal, physical leaving that needed to happen as part of God’s call. But that’s not all.
In 1938, Abraham Maslow spent time with the Siksika Nation in Alberta, Canada. He found a culture focused on generosity and communal success rather than individual scarcity. This experience, combined with his desire to study healthy, high-achieving humans instead of psychological illness, led to his 1943 theory of human motivation, which eventually became what we know as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
It functions like a pyramid, with the most basic needs of human beings at the bottom and escalating to the top.
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