However, upon a close comparison of the opening of the seventh of Acts, with the first verse of this twelfth chapter of Genesis, we get an important principle. From the time that God appeared unto Abraham, until he finally gets up into the land of Canaan, an event occurs involving much deep instruction to us. I allude to the death of Abraham's father, as we read in Acts vii. "From thence, _when his father_ was dead, He removed him into this land wherein ye now dwell." (Ver. 4.) This will enable us to understand the force of the expression in Gen. xii., "The Lord _had_ said unto Abram," etc. (Ver. 1.) From both these passages, it would plainly appear the movement made by Terah and his family, recorded in Gen. x. 31, was the result of a revelation made by "the God of glory" to Abram, but it would not appear that _Terah_ had received any such revelation from God. He is presented to us rather as a hindrance to Abram than any thing else, for until he died, Abram did not come into the land of Canaan--his divinely appointed destination. Now, this circumstance, trivial as it may seem to a cursory reader, confirms in the strongest manner the statement already advanced, namely, that unless the call of God--the revelation from "the God of glory" be _personally realized_, there can be no permanency or steadiness in the Christian course. Had Terah realized that call, he would neither have been a clog to Abram in his path of faith, nor yet would he have dropped off, like a mere child of nature, ere reaching the future land of promise. We get the same principle illustrated in Laban afterward in Gen. xxiv. Laban, as some one has well observed, was fully alive to the value of the gold and silver jewels which the servant of Abraham had brought with him, but he had no heart to value _the report_ concerning future things, which dropped from his lips. In other words, he did not receive a revelation from "the God of glory," and as a consequence, he remained, as the same writer has observed, "_a thorough man of the world_." In the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, we are taught the same truth. There were other persons with him when he was struck to the ground by the lustre of the glory of the Lord Jesus; these persons "saw indeed the light"--they witnessed many of the external circumstances which had arrested the furious zealot; but as he himself states, "_they heard not the voice of Him that spake_ TO ME." (Acts xxii. 9.) Here is the grand point. The voice must speak "_to me_"--"the God of glory" must appear "to me," ere I can take the place of a pilgrim and stranger in the world, and perseveringly, "run the race that is set before me." It is not _national faith_, nor _family faith_, but _personal faith_ that will constitute us real witnesses for God in the world.