Monday, April 19, 2010

Genesis 12:2 A Great Nation

"The Lord had said to Abram, 'Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation...'." Genesis 12:1-2 (NIV)


Imagine Abram's thoughts when he first found out what God had promised him. He and his wife are old, and childless, yet here God is promising him not only an heir, but a nation, and a great one at that. He must have been thrilled, and puzzled. How would God bring this about? The seventy-five year old Abram set off for Canaan with his wife and nephew Lot and their possessions and servants. At Shechem, an important Canaanite city and the site of the great tree of Moreh, the Lord appears to Abram and tells him that He will give this land to Abram's offspring. (v.7) Abram builds an altar to the LORD, as if to acknowledge that he is continuing to trust and to serve the true God. He continues to travel until he comes to the place between Bethel (north of Jerusalem) and Ai, where he builds another altar. He builds several more of these altars as he travels (see Chapters 15, 18, 17, and 22), probably both to use for worship and also as if to say that this land belongs to God.

Flash forward to the present, where Israel is indeed a great nation, both in numbers and in its contributions to the world. More on this later. God always keeps His promises.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Genesis 12: God's Promises to Abram

God now outlines the benefits which Abram will receive from following Him:

"I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you;
I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."
Genesis 12: 2-3 (NIV)

There is a sevenfold structure to these promises. I will take it piece by piece and discuss each part.

1) I will make you into a great nation.
2) I will bless you.
3) I will make your name great.
4) You will be a blessing.
5) I will bless those who bless you.
6) Whoever curses you I will curse.
7) All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

I remember that when I first read these promises, some of them sounded redundant, like they were just repeating the fact that Abram would be blessed. However, there are subtle differences. I will explain each one, and hopefully, not bore you to death with the details. Not that the details are boring -- just that I hope I can express them in a way that is interesting and accurate. I think we should be excited at this point, because God is beginning to explain exactly what it is that He is doing. Some of these things will take years to accomplish. However, God always keeps His promises. If Abram could have seen the entire picture of what God was planning, he would have been overwhelmed. Living in these days when we can see more of what God did through Abraham and what He was planning, we, also, could be astounded. Then, when we realize that we, too, do not see the entire picture yet, well....

Genesis 12: Why leave Ur?

In my previous post, I discussed how we seldom think about the real-life implications of Abraham's (actually, at this point he is still called 'Abram', because God hasn't changed his name yet) obedience to God. He had to leave everything that was familiar and set out to follow God to an unknown place. If you have searched out information about Ur, where Abraham had lived, you have seen that he was leaving quite a significant city. Why did God make him leave in the first place? Aside from the obvious test of obedience that this action entailed, in the thinking of people in those times, a 'god' was usually associated with a place and a person or group of people -- like, say, the god of a certain city, or of the mountain, or of the desert, or of a certain family. Ur, for example, was known as the city of the moon 'god'. In this case, God is calling Abram to be the head of a people who will worship Him as the only true God, in a place which God will claim for His own. This would make perfect sense to the people who held such a mindset. It didn't make it any easier to leave, mind you, but Abram would know that in order to follow this God, he would have to go to wherever God commanded him to go. Of course, God is the creator and God of the whole world, but He would in some way be especially connected to the land where He was leading Abram. So Abram goes. He begins to follow the light which God has given him, and steps out of his idolatrous past and into the beginning of what God has promised him.