Genesis 12:1-8
The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s
household to the land I will show you.2 “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.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.
6 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. 7 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.
8 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.
What Is the Greatest Nation on Earth?
What do you think the greatest nation on earth is? As a foreigner currently applying for permanent residency, I should say Canada, right? Of course, if you listen to the president south of the border, that title would belong to the U.S. Depending on what study you read, Switzerland might offer the best quality of life,[1] Portugal the best health care.[2] You could make the case for any country.
What matters is what criteria you choose. Are you making your decision on the basis of the economy, the military, education? Is culture or morality the most important piece? How about history or influence?
What if I were to tell you that the title “Greatest Nation on Earth” belonged to a group of people that didn’t have a military, or a public school or healthcare system? What if I were to tell you that the “Greatest Nation on Earth” was a group of nomads wandering through other nations’ lands without a permanent home, whose president was a cattle baron who made decisions based on the voices he heard in his head? Those aren’t usually the qualifications for greatness, or the criteria to be considered a nation, for that matter. And yet, that was God’s promise to Abram:
“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.”[3]
Those are some bold promises from God! But it makes you wonder, why Abram? How did Abram find himself in this situation to receive this blessing from God?
Let me take you back in time a couple thousand years. Last week we read about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We heard about their sin and the consequences that came with it, but we marveled at God’s grace and mercy. He didn’t strike them dead. Instead he promised to send “the seed of the woman” to strike the devil dead. That’s Jesus.
A long time passed from Adam to Abram. A lot of things happened. Adam and Eve’s oldest son murdered their youngest, perpetuating this cycle of sin from one generation to the next. Things got so bad that within 10 generations God wept over the wickedness of this world. He regretted having made mankind and sent a worldwide flood to cleanse the earth, killing everyone and everything except for Noah and his family and the animals God had saved with him in the ark.
You’d think the Flood would be a wakeup call to the world, that Noah’s sons would tell their children about the seriousness of sin and the wrath of God, that they would use that as a reminder of God’s promise of salvation. But we find out that even while Noah’s sons were still alive, their children had already turned their backs on God.
Abram’s family was no different. In the book of Joshua we read,
“Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods.”[4]
Abram’s family had turned away from God.
And yet, God comes to Abram and the first thing we hear him say is, “I will make you into a great nation.”[5] How did Abram deserve that!? He came from an idolatrous family. He lived in a land and among a people who had long since rejected God. Why would God choose Abram?
I suppose the same question could be asked of you. Why would God choose you? Obviously, I only know a small part of who you are, but I can tell you it’s not because you’re a good person or you do good things. God doesn’t pick you because of your pedigree or your family tree. God hasn’t chosen you because you deserve it. Like Abram – and anyone – God chose you purely by his grace.
There wasn’t a soul on earth who deserved to receive these promises from God, and yet that’s what God does – he makes promises to sinners, to rejects and rebels, to nomads and wanderers who have no home here on earth. God makes promises and he keeps promises.
Last week we heard that the offspring of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. God would send Jesus to destroy the devil. Mankind very nearly messed that all up when things got so wicked that God had to send the Flood, but even then God kept his promise – he preserved the line of the Savior through Noah and his family and he kept this promise going.
Things got bad again by the time of Abram. There were so few who still believed in God. But God kept his promise by picking Abram and preserving the line of the Savior and making these promises to a childless, 75-year-old cattle baron and his 65-year-old barren wife.
There literally, physically wasn’t anything about Abram or Sarai that made them worthy of this promise, but this promise inspired faith in their hearts and transformed their bodies, making the impossible an inevitability.
Abram would become the father of many nations. In fact, that’s what “Abraham” means and that’s why God changed his name after the birth of his son. Sarai would go on to give birth to Isaac, who fathered Jacob, whose sons became the 12 tribes of Israel. Their descendants would number in the millions within 500 years.[6] God kept his promise to make Abram into a great nation.
But a couple million people in a backwater province of the Middle East doesn’t necessarily sound like the greatest nation on earth, does it?
That’s because that was only part of the promise. If all God were promising to Abram was a land to call his own and throne for his descendants to sit on, Genesis would be a mostly boring history book. But there’s so much more to it than that. The part of the promise that makes Abram’s family the greatest nation on earth is the last part:
“All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”[7]
To be chosen and made a nation at all was a blessing of God’s grace to Abram, but with these words God makes it clear that he intended Abram to be a blessing to everyone on earth. It wasn’t all about Abram for Abram’s sake. This promise wasn’t about a precious strip of land next to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel is not the Greatest Nation on Earth, but because God chose it by grace, it would bring a blessing to all people on earth.
From Abram’s family would come the promised Savior. God’s promise to Abram was the continuation of the promise God had made to Adam and Eve about a seed to crush the serpent’s head. He would come from a family of sinners to save a world of sinners. And so, the selection of Abram was important not because of who Abram was, but because it showed God’s faithfulness to faithless people, his commitment to keep his promises no matter what, to send his Son to be your Savior.
You don’t deserve that promise any more than Abram did. You may have a good and godly, church-going family; you may be well-respected in the community, but like all of Adam and Eve’s descendants you have sin living in your heart. And we can see it in the kinds of decisions we make. God may not ask you to leave your country, people and family behind to go to a place he hasn’t shown you yet, but God does demand that you love him more than your country, friends and family. Can you say that you always do?
What do you spend more time reading or listening to – God’s Word or the news? What do you spend more time doing – going to the movies, museums, concerts, sports practices and games or worshiping God with fellow Christians, praying privately, having personal devotion with God? Given the choice, who do you drop everything for – God or your family?
None of those things are bad. It’s good to stay informed. Recreation is a blessing. Family is gift, but idolatry is rarely loving a bad thing. Idolatry is often loving a good thing too much. And we do an awful lot of that.
Could you be like Abram and leave all those things behind? Well, neither could Abram without God’s promises, and that’s the point. Abram wasn’t this pillar of faith who was begging God to tell him to go on a grand, unknown adventure. It was the promise that God gave Abram that inspired faith in Abram. It was listening to the Word of God that enabled Abram to act so suddenly and definitively, so boldly and confidently. And it’s the same for you.
God doesn’t choose you because you are so able; it’s his act of choosing you that enables you. It’s his promises that give you something to hold onto by faith and inspire you to action. So that even in today’s climate, with all the fears of something like coronavirus which has reportedly reached Edmonton, we can be bold in our faith and trust in God.
God’s promises put it in context. This virus isn’t his act of judgment against our sin. That judgment was carried out on Jesus on the cross; God promised that it is finished in Christ. We need not fear the penalty for our sin anymore; it’s been forgiven.
We can also have a measure of peace amid the panic, because even if it turns into a worldwide pandemic, God promises that
“as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”[8]
This world and God’s people will survive until Judgment Day.
And even if coronavirus were to take your life or if Judgment Day were to come tomorrow, we know the hope that we have in the promises of Christ – forgiveness and freedom from judgment through Jesus’ perfect life on earth, eternal life in heaven by Jesus’ death on the cross, the resurrection of the dead into a glorified, heavenly body just as Jesus was raised to life and lives and rules eternally.
The promises of God enliven faith in our hearts and enable our hands to take action. They don’t diminish the challenges and problems that we will face. Abram still had to leave his country and his friends and his own father behind to go to unknown land that was already occupied by someone else, but the promises of God made it possible. We may still have to deal with uncertainty and difficulty and fear in this life, but we have the promises of God to make it possible – and as we see in Abram’s example God keeps his promise alive.
He made Abram into the father of nations – and not just the Jews, but you and me and everyone who, like Abram, believes in God’s promises. Whether you are from B.C. or Alberta, South Sudan, Nigeria, Norway or Nebraska, you are a part of the Greatest Nation on Earth because of the faith God has planted in your heart to believe the promises of his Son, our Savior. Listen to those promises. Prioritize them in your life. And see how God continues to bless those who believe in him.
Amen.
[1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/best-countries/
[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/the-5-countries-with-the-best-healthcare-in-the-world-2020-internationalliving-com-1028832135
[3] Genesis 12:2,3
[4] Joshua 24:2
[5] Genesis 12:2
[6] Exodus 12:37
[7] Genesis 12:3
[8] Genesis 8:22