1.10.9 – Abram

Who here has a friend they can trust? The kind of friend if he tells you he’ll be there at 3, you look for him at 2:45. The kind of friend that if she tells you she’ll drive you to Amarillo on Tuesday for an appointment, you go ahead and tell the doctor you’ll be there on Tuesday.

How is it that we’ve come to trust these friends so much? It didn’t happen overnight, did it? It happened because over time we came to learn that promises made were promises kept.

“In all God’s teachings the near and the sensible come before the far and conceivable, the present and earthly before the eternal and heavenly.” – Murphy

In other words, God deals with us on two levels. He deals with us on the level where we are now (earth, 5 senses, etc.), but there’s also a promise of eternity. How do we know he’ll keep that promise? We look at his record.

Now, let’s imagine you’re on “Jeopardy!” and the category is “Old Testament”. For $400, Alex says, “The promise made to Abram.”

You ring in and say, “What is ‘that God will make him a great nation’?” Alex gives you the $400 and you select “Potent Potables” or “Things that Smell Like Ham” and move on. If I were Alex, I might give you the money, too, but did you know there was a whole lot more to the promise? Not things that Abram had to do, but things God promised to Abram.

Let’s look:

Genesis 12:1-9
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 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." So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there. Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him. From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. (NIV)

Did you catch that? God didn’t just make one “little” promise about nationhood (if “little” it can be called, which it probably can’t). God made Abram seven promises. Now, if you had a friend who had made and kept seven promises—big promises—wouldn’t you think him trustworthy?

Let’s look at the seven promises and see what learn about God’s faithfulness.

1] “I will make you into a great nation”

This promise is more than just to be great in numbers. While millions of people have come from the line of Abraham in the ensuing millennia, there are other tribes and nations that have had way more people.

God doesn’t think just in numbers. Greatness, in this sense, is kind of like what we saw back in Genesis 1 when God looked at what he created and pronounced it “good”. It was good because it did what God wanted it to do. Israel would be great by performing the function God had designed it to do.

Remember Israel’s purpose (from last week):
1. to preserve the knowledge of the living and true God
2. to preserve the knowledge of the moral law
3. to prepare the world for the advent and ministry of the Messiah
4. to build up a system of metaphor, type, allegory and prophecy to identify the Messiah when he came in the flesh
5. give the Messiah to the world.

Israel defined greatness as a nation because—even though there were self-inflicted bumps in the road—Israel carried out God’s purpose. Sometimes it even seems to have been against Israel’s will. Maybe it was. But God’s will is stronger and he made a promise—a promise he kept against all the odds.

2] “I will bless you”

God blessed Abram with material things and spiritual blessings. Later in this chapter you can read about how Abram—due to a drought—went to Egypt. The most famous part of the story is that the Pharaoh wants Sarai to be his wife (and Abram has lied, saying she’s his sister).

The question always comes up, “Was Sarai still ‘hot’ at 65?!?” Maybe she was. Remember, she’s just past middle age at that point. There’s something else to consider. Pharaoh thought she was Abram’s sister. It was common in those days for royalty to marry the sisters of other royalty as a way of establishing treaties. Maybe Sarai was still attractive physically, maybe she had wisdom and grace that made her more attractive, and maybe the kind of the most powerful nation on earth saw in Abram a prince he thought it would be good to be allied with.

A couple chapters later, Abram is—we are told—wealthy in livestock and silver and gold. In fact, his flocks have become so great that he and his nephew Lot can no longer share the same pasturage. And when a war breaks out, Abram’s got his own army, capable of defeating five kings!!

But the blessing wasn’t just temporal.

3] “I will make your name great”

In Genesis 17:5 he’s called the “father of a multitude”; and in 23:6 “a prince of God.” In 18:17-19 he’s said to be a man in God’s confidence; in 20:7 a prophet; in Psalm 105:6 the servant of God and James calls him the “friend of God.” IN Matthew 22, when Jesus says who God is, he says he is the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”.

The Christians, the Jews and the Moslems all trace themselves back to Abraham (or try to). Islam, in it’s ongoing effort to legitimize itself, claims Ibrahim as its patriarch. As is always the case, people like to associate themselves with famous people.

4] “You will be a blessing”

God has blessed Abram, so now he puts it on Abram: you be a blessing. Notice that God puts no strictures on Abram as to what will happen to him if he fails to be a blessing. I think that’s because God had every confidence that Abram would live up to his promise.

This is like the great commission we have.

Matthew 28:18-20
Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (NIV)

He’s blessed us, now he calls us to bless those around us.

5] “I will bless those who bless you”

God takes care of his people. This is a principle he keeps even to this day. The letter of Third John is an instruction on taking care of those who come from God. In 2 John, he warned the people not to have anything to do with false teachers, for to welcome them was to support their teaching. In 3 John, he tells them to take care of those who come in God’s name and preach the truth and to send them on their way in a “manner worthy of God.”

How we treat God’s people is how we treat God.

6] “I will curse those who curse you”

God takes care of his people. We see this later in the chapter when Pharaoh takes Sarai to be his wife. There’s no indication that he even touched her (in fact, usually, the Bible comes out and tells us “and he lay with her” if such activities took place), but Pharaoh and his whole household are struck down with some sort of sickness that it’s obvious even to Pharaoh that it’s divine punishment.

Abram got himself into this pickle by lying. Sarai may have been his half-sister in reality, but it was still a lie because he didn’t tell Pharaoh about the “half” part or that he was married to her. When God makes a promise, he keeps it.

Did Israel—or any of us, for that matter—deserve a Messiah? Nope. But God is faithful and provides one in spite of what we deserve! Hallelujah!

7] “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you”

By the time of Abram, the earth is already divided into family trees that don’t speak to each other. And it’s going to get worse. We can see that even today.

But it’s through Abram’s line that the Messiah came. The one true blessing of God—salvation through his Son Jesus—came from Abram’s descendants and blesses all nations. Obviously, Abram didn’t get to see this during his lifetime, but he knew it was coming.

We are not just part of that blessing, we are now the carriers!

What do I DO with this?

John 3:16
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (NIV)

Eternal life!! Now there’s a promise we can sink our teeth in!! And we’ve just seen that the one who made the promise is faithful.

What do we do with this promise? Trust it with our lives!