God’s Promise to Abraham 2
From Michael Williams As Far As the Curse is Found
Seed, Land and Blessing
God’s promises to Abraham in Geneesis 12:1-3 include four elements (three promises and a purpose statement)
seed or offspring
land, namely, the land of Canaan (more explicit in Gen. 12:7)
Israel will be blessed
Israel will be a blessing to all nations
These four elements reappear as God repeats the promises of the covenant to the patriarchs: again to Abraham (Gen. 22:17-18), to Isaac (Gen. 26:3-4), and to Jacob (Gen. 28:13-15).
The Promise of a Seed
Abraham’s wife Sarah was barren (Gen. 11:27-32). Yet God promises Abraham that he will be the father of a great nation, a nation whose numbers will be as numerous as the dust of the earth (Gen. 13:16; 28:14). As we know, the promise of a seed is not new in Genesis 12. The seed promise began when God cursed the tempting serpent:
And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel. (Gen. 3:15)
God made this Garden promise to all people, to all creation. It extended hope to all that the problem of sin will be dealt with, that the absurdity introduced into God’s creation by Adam and Eve will be removed, done away with. As a means toward the fulfillment of that promise, God now focuses on a particular individual. He chooses one person out of the nations that had developed from Noah’s son Shem. God would now keep his promise to raise up a seed of the woman through the line of the Shemite Abraham. This seed, stretching back through Shem to Noah, from Noah to Seth, and from Seth to Adam, will be the divine vehicle for bringing redemption to the world, a vehicle that will ultimately bring forth a Messiah, a Savior.
Thus the goal of the seed promise goes beyond the birth of Isaac, the child according to the promise. It even goes beyond the birth of the nation of Israel (the larger concern of the Book of Genesis). In light of the reality that it is through Abraham and his descendants that God plans to bring redemptive blessing to all the nations of the world, and that that redemption takes place only in Jesus Christ, we are, of course, right to see that Genesis 12 refers ultimately to Jesus.
Abraham’s immediate concern, when he receives the promise, is not the Messiah. It is clear, from the rest of the chapter, that Abraham receives the promise as a promise of reproductive fertility. What he hears is that he is going to be a father. He does not see Jesus; he sees Isaac. Yet the seed promise in Genesis 12 is more than merely a promise of reproductive fertility. God promises not merely that Abraham will be a father, that a seed will come from him, but that he will be the father of a nation. The word used is not zero (“seed”), but goy (“nation”).
A nation is more than just people, a mere collection of individual persons, even persons who share a common ancestor. A nation is a people bound together by geography, speech, religion, and culture. A nation is characterized by common descent, history, and experience. And often a nation shares a common political structure. A nation has a recognizable character and presence in the world beyond its individual citizens, a character that gives identity to its individual members, and in terms of which those members are known by others.
In short, a nation is a cultural force within the world. Abraham will do more than be a father. He will be the progenitor of a political, cultural, and religious entity that will stand for the kingdom of God in the world.
By his calling of Abraham, God begins the business of nation building, the formation of a nation that, unlike the Babelite search for a human presence without God, will derive its character and reason for being from the redemptive purpose of God. Four key elements of nationhood appear here. With the seed promise, God inaugurates a common people, a population. The Abrahamic covenant also designates a territory, a geographical location. This covenant also indicates implicitly the new nation’s leadership, some person or group who will provide direction and governance. As the Lord of the covenant, as the speaker of the divine word and King of creation, as Abraham’s Redeemer, Yahweh himself is King over the nation that will come from Abraham’s loins. Covenant leadership will develop in priestly, prophetic, and political-monarchial directions as the issue of covenant mediation will diversify in later covenant history. Finally, God will furnish this nation a common rule, or constitution. Abraham and his descendants are called to walk in the way of the Lord, to keep covenant (Gen. 17:9; 18:19). The specifics of this rule will await its expression in the law at Sinai.
The Promise of Land
Implicit in Genesis 12:1-3 is the promise of a land, for Abraham is called to the land that Yahweh will show him. God later states the land promise explicitly: “To your offspring I will give this land” (Gen. 12:7). After the seed promise—the particular theme of Genesis—the promise of the land is the second most frequently repeated of the Abrahamic promises, appearing twelve times in Genesis alone. The patriarchs will receive only a general description of the borders of the promised lands: a land west of the Jordan River and extending from the Negeb to the Euphrates (Gen. 15:18). A detailed description of the land’s borders will await the conquest of the land, some four hundred years after the patriarchs.
God does not fulfill the land promise in the lifetimes of any of the patriarchs. The patriarchs lived as aliens in the land of Canaan. As semi-nomadic wanderers they left no artifacts of a material culture there. Only the revelation of the Book of Genesis bears their history.
The final words of Genesis close the patriarchal story with a brief mention of Joseph’s death in Egypt. Whereas the promise of the seed shows signs of development, the promised occupation of the land seems far from realization. The reader is left wondering how it will be fulfilled.
Why Canaan?
Why was Abraham promised the land of Canaan rather than some other piece of real estate? If God had chosen Abraham and Israel for some pampered and coddled existence in which the nation would relate only to him and not bear an active mission toward the rest of humankind, then Canaan was an exceedingly poor choice on God’s part. But it was neither a mistake nor happenstance that Canaan, the crossroads of the ancient world, was chosen to be the dwelling place of Israel.
There is nothing particularly inviting about Canaan simply as real estate. To be sure, the Book of Joshua records that when the spies surveyed the land, they returned and reported that it was a rich land flowing with milk and honey. Idyllic descriptions of the land are common throughout the Pentateuch. Certainly, there were fertile areas in Canaan at the time of the conquest, and undoubtedly the land was more inviting then than it is today. But overall the climate of Canaan, then as now, was semi-arid. The encroachment of the Sahara across North Africa and into Canaan began in the third millennium B. C. And the ground is extremely rocky. An old Jewish saw quips that when God created the world he had a spare handful of rocks left over. With no particular intent he tossed them to the ground, and they covered the land of Canaan.
Agriculturally, God could have done much better by the people he made for himself out of Abraham. They were not getting the choicest piece of property for their crops and herds. If that had been the goal, the Nile River valley would have been far better. Or if safety from marauding neighbors or security from social and cultural corruption had been God’s intent, the island of Madagascar or Iceland would have provided security and isolation for his chosen people.
But God’s choice of Canaan as a land for Abraham was intentional and central to the redemptive mission for which Abraham was chosen. What was important about this particular piece of real estate was its geographic relationship to other lands. It was a doorway to the world, on the way to everywhere else.
Bounded by the Mediterranean to the west and the vast expanse of the Arabian Desert to the east, Canaan is a natural bottleneck between Asia Minor, Asia, and Africa. It is no wonder that Canaan is the most traveled, most disputed, most fought over, and most conquered land in the history of the world. Located astride the major trade route between Asia Minor, Asia, and Africa, the land of Canaan was ideally situated to serve as a focusing point for cultural exchange. It was God’s intention that Canaan would serve as a staging area for the dissemination of the faith to the heathen nations that surrounded Israel. God did not call his people to a mountain-top monastery but to a strip mall on Main Street.
We Christians sometimes think of the land promise as a reward for Israel’s four-century-long sojourn in Egypt or as a respite from the ardors of its wilderness wanderings after the exodus out of Egypt, a place where Israel could bathe those feet that had trudged through the desert for an entire generation. But Canaan was not a payoff or a perk of election. It was not the end but rather just a beginning. It was not an end but a means. When Israel finally entered the land under Joshua, it was beginning its mission in earnest.
The generation in the desert was going to school. Those forty years in the desert between Sinai and Canaan were crucial, not merely because they would see the passing away of the generation that had been faithless at Sinai; but because those were years in which Israel learned to live by the word, love, promise, and grace of Yahweh. Now the real work would begin, the building of Yahweh’s kingdom, the shedding of Yahweh’s light.
The Promise That God Will Bless Abraham
Accompanying as it does the seed promise God makes to Abraham and repeats to the later patriarchs, God’s promise that he will bless Abraham does not apply to him alone but to that seed as well. The promise of blessing includes the protection of the seed and God’s covenant presence in the lives of the patriarchs.”
God seeks to be with his people, as he had been in Eden. Thus the blessing of divine protection and presence are inseparable from covenant intimacy and relationship with God. James 2:23 tells us that because Abraham believed God and in his promise, he was declared righteous in God’s sight and “was called God’s friend.” Even people outside of the covenant, Genesis records, testified to God’s presence in Abraham’s life. The goal of this promise is that God’s presence should be evident in Israel’s existence. The transformation of men from hostility and enmity toward God to covenant intimacy and friendship was the ultimate goal of the Abrahamic covenant.
A BLESSING TO THE NATIONS
As we have observed, God promises Abraham a seed, indeed a nation, a land, and God’s covenant protection and presence. He promises these blessings to Israel so that the seed that comes from Abraham will in turn be a blessing to all. It is right to see this as a messianic promise, for ultimately Jesus—God come in the flesh to take away the sin of the world—is the seed par excellence (Gal. 3:16).
But a strong missional declaration is also being made here about Israel. God is calling Israel to be a missionary nation. He intends its life among the nations to demonstrate its allegiance to Yahweh, and thus to be a beacon to others. “What is being written in these few verses,” Dumbrell claims concerning Genesis 12:1-3, “is a theological blueprint for the redemptive history of the world.”
Far too often, books about mission begin with the missionary mandate of Matthew 28:19 and cite New Testament Scripture exclusively. The strong missional element of the Old Testament gets overlooked.
Happily, in his recent survey of biblical theology, Roger Hedlund finds a missional impulse running throughout the entirety of the Christian Scriptures. Hedlund finds it already in the Garden:
God reveals himself to be the missionary God. In the Garden God comes seeking man (Gen. 3:8ff.). The world’s religions represent man seeking for God. Here we see the reverse. In Genesis God takes the initiative. Men may seek God but they also flee from him. Adam tried to hide from God. But God entered the scene of Adam’s disobedience. God, someone has said, was the first missionary. He came, he sought and he found, and he provided salvation for his lost creature (Gen. 3:8). Man is not left in his predicament. God provides the remedy (Gen. 3:15) for the human race. This is the gospel of the Garden.”
Israel’s birth certificate bears the mark of divine purpose. Yahweh has elected it for service. Abraham is to be the father of a chosen people, a people chosen for a purpose, chosen to participate in God’s mission of redemption. Israel is elected to be God’s channel of blessing to all nations. Again, the three promises given to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 (a seed, a land, and God’s covenant blessing) are given for the sake of the fulfillment of Israel’s missionary mandate. The goal of God’s covenant with Abraham is that people from every nation, not just Israel, will be redeemed. The Old Testament is a missionary book because Yahweh is a missionary God.
COVENANT PROMISE, COVENANT RESPONSE
The seed and land promises offer an opportunity to observe something of the dynamic of covenant promise. God’s promise does not annul human agency and responsibility. While the promises of the covenant are divine promises, this does not suggest automatic fulfillment, as if they are to transpire apart from human involvement. Stating it crudely: the fulfillment of divine promise does not fall out of the sky.
In his relationship to his covenant people, God’s initiation, his gracious promise or action toward his people calls for our response. The complement of divine grace and promise is not human passivity, a let go and let God attitude. Grace always calls to action, to response.
The seed promise to Abraham exemplifies this dynamic of human involvement in divine promise. At one hundred years of age and ninety, Abraham and Sarah were well beyond their childbearing years when Isaac was born. While this child’s birth was a minor miracle, it was not a virgin birth. Isaac, the child of the seed promise, would not have been born unless Abraham and Sarah responded to the promise in an appropriate fashion.
Years later, when Israel finally enters the land under Joshua, its army must conquer in order to take possession. Thus Moses instructs the people:
The LORD your God has given. you this land to take possession of it. But all your able-bodied men, armed for battle, must cross over ahead of your brother Israelites. (Deut. 3:18)
The people of God are called to act in conformity to grace, in the light of grace, and in the power of grace. What we are and what we are called to do is a result of God’s grace and promise. But he calls us to walk in its light, and walking is a matter of a believing conformity to his promises.
