When God encountered Abraham, he asked him to have this second kind of faith. First we have to understand Abraham’s situation.
Verse 4 makes it sound like he was in a city called Haran, but other passages like Acts 7 make it clear that the actual call of God came while Abraham was in Ur.
Ur was a fabulous city. It was near the Persian Gulf, over by Iran, and even in 2000 BC it had an advanced culture.
Back in the twenties and thirties Sir Charles Leonard Woolley excavated Ur and came up with some of the greatest treasures of archeology. In Ur’s royal cemetery they found 16 tombs, each one filled with golden headdresses and gold and silver harps. Each tomb also contained up to 74 bodies of servants who were buried alive with the king.
Woolley’s excavations also revealed that the houses in Ur were 2 stories high and were whitewashed to be pleasing to the eye. The larger homes had up to 20 rooms, with well-equipped kitchen, good plumbing and sanitation. Their schools taught mathematics, astronomy and medicine.
Abraham was not a yahoo from the back side of the desert who didn’t know anything. He probably had a very comfortable life in the most advanced culture of that time. He was also in his golden years.