God repeated his plan, his mission, and his intention over and over throughout his word. As God called Abraham, who would become the father of the nation of Israel, he repeated his plan.
The story begins with Terah
Abraham’s father, Terah, lived in the land of Ur, which today is in Iraq, just southeast of present-day Baghdad. At some point, and possibly because he knew of God’s call to Abraham, Terah decided to leave Ur and head toward Canaan. Along the way, though, he stopped in Harran, a city in northern Mesopotamia, and eventually died there.
Harran, though, was not where God had called Abraham to go. The final destination was to be Canaan, so following Terah’s death, Abraham continued on his journey toward Canaan because God had spoken to him directly:
The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
“I will make you into a great nation,
Genesis 12:1-3
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. ”
God had already spoken to Abraham (Abram) back in Mesopotamia. Stephen actually told us this more explicitly as he spoke at the Sanhedrin, as noted in Acts 7. So, as Terah died in Harran, Abraham continued the journey, following God’s plan to go to the land God would show him, and as we learned from the story of Terah, that land would be Canaan.
Soon after, God promised Abraham he would give this land of Canaan to his descendants, but in this initial calling, we see a restatement of God’s mission. He tells Abraham that he will make him into a great nation and bless him. What does that mean?
The blessing of the covenant
Is God saying that he will make Abraham rich? This could be part of God’s plan, yes, although Abraham and his family already had many possessions, so this is unlikely what God meant when he said he would bless Abraham.
Is God saying that he is going to have many children and, in this way, become a great nation? As we will find out, yes, this is also part of God’s plan and a central theme of Abraham’s story. After having Ishmael through a significant deviation from God’s plan for Abraham, after taking the fulfillment of God’s promises into their own hands by having a child through Hagar, Sarah’s servant, Abraham and Sarah would eventually have a child of their own. After waiting 25 years, following God’s promise that Abraham would have descendants like the stars in the sky, Isaac was born to Sarah, and their child would represent the continuation of the covenant God would make with Abraham.
While each of these physical components- these benefits of Abraham’s relationship with God, the covenant, the agreement that God would make with Abraham, would be the heart of the blessing that God would give to Abraham. The primary blessing God would give Abraham was his covenant: God would be Abraham’s God, and those who would inherit the covenant through his son Isaac and his son Jacob and onward would be God’s people.
This blessing, at its heart a covenant relationship with God, directly extends and continues God’s mission. From the beginning, God’s mission has been to spread his image all over the earth. In the beginning, that mission carried a physical dimension because Adam and Eve were made in God’s image and had not sinned. At that time, their physical beings were uncorrupted, and Adam and Eve’s spiritual nature was pure, aligned with God, and able to remain in his presence, living with him forever.
However, at Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God through their desire to be like God, a corruption of their nature had taken place. They were no longer perfect. They were no longer aligned with God in their physical and spiritual natures.
Yet God’s mission still hadn’t changed. God remained steadfast in his plan: his image would fill the earth, so he made a plan that, through Abraham, blessing would come, and God’s people could know him through the covenant he would make with them. At first, this blessing and covenant with God would come through Moses – a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – and as the law was given and the nation of Israel was established. In the future, though, the blessing would come through Christ – also a physical descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob- who would establish a new covenant through his blood and offer a relationship with God to all people. Through Christ, the true image of God, God established a relationship with everyone who would believe and place their faith in him. Through Christ, God would establish a relationship with people from every tribe, tongue, and nation.
Fulfillment of the promise
This would eventually fulfill the promise God made to Abraham. God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the stars in the sky. He wouldn’t even be able to count them all.
How was that possible? That was the question that Abraham was asking himself. He didn’t even have any children. At that pace, his heir would have been one of his servants, not a son. God promised him he would be a great nation. God promised him descendants like the stars in the sky, but he didn’t have any descendants at all.
God wasn’t making his promise to Abraham only through physical descendants. Because the heart of God’s blessing to Abraham was the covenant he would make with him, Abraham’s descendants would be through the nation of Israel to Christ, and through Christ to the rest of the world, like the stars of the sky. They would be so numerous that Abraham couldn’t count them.
Even today, God’s promise to Abraham is still being fulfilled. God’s mission is still being carried out as his image is being spread throughout all nations, to the ends of the earth. This mission, even today, gives us identity and purpose. Each of us who has been given a new birth, who has been made new in Christ…each of us carries the image of God within us. He is the true image of God, Christ himself, and we seek to make his disciples amongst all of those nations, such that there will be more and more true descendants of Abraham, descendants by the new covenant offered in Christ’s blood. We will continue to add stars to the sky until one day, it will be impossible to count the number of people included among those who are descendants of Abraham through Jesus Christ.
