[Text: Genesis 12:1-9]

Two weeks ago we saw that grace is always unexpected and never earned. It comes by the choice of a powerful, gracious God. To Abram, the least likely choice, God says in effect, “It’s not you, it’s me” as He sets his love on him forever, no matter what. And Abram believed God. This week we’ll consider the substance of the promises God made to Abram and what grace received led Abram to do. In the framework of the Story of Redemption, this is the real beginning of the rising action. Redemption is beginning!

[read and pray]

Intro: Have you ever heard someone say in parting, “Take care of yourself.”? As if you needed reminding to do that! It’s like reminding someone to breath…I don’t need a reminder to do what comes naturally to me. But what comes naturally isn’t always good…

Once upon a time, there was a scorpion and a frog who happened to meet on an island in a river during a flood. Scorpion was frantic. “Frog,” said Scorpion, “I’m so glad I found you! The waters are rising so quickly and I can’t swim. But you…you’re such a good swimmer! Can I get on your back and ride with you to the mainland? “Ohhhh, nooo,” laughed Frog, “I’ve seen what you have done to other Frogs before me. You speak nicely just to get close and then you jab them with your stinger and make them your diner. Nooo, sir, you can’t ride on me.” Scorpion looked hurt. “But I promise I won’t do it! Besides, if I sting you, then I’ll die, too! I can’t make it through these waters on my own! Please help me! You can’t just leave me here!” So, against his better judgment, Frog allowed Scorpion to crawl up on his back. Scorpion thanked Frog profusely and ever so slowly, they waded out into the current, Frog beginning with short, quick strokes, but gradually shifting to long, flowing strokes. They made great progress and soon found themselves past the mid-point of the deep floodwaters. Frog said, “We’re almost there!” But in the corner of his eye he saw that Scorpion had his long tail raised with his stinger ready to strike. “No!” said Frog, but it was too late. Scorpion plunged his stinger right into Frog’s spine, half-way down his back. As Frog felt the toxins begin to flood through his body, his legs beginning to twitch and then not respond at all, he said, “What have you done? You’ve killed us both!” Scorpion replied, “What else could I do? It’s my nature.”

FCF: It’s my nature to take care of myself. I see it in me when I become resentful of having to spend time and energy doing things that I don’t want to do. I see it in me when my son wants a piece of the bacon I’m enjoying and I have to decide whether or not to give him a piece. I see it in me when I say in my actions to God, “I would rather you didn’t bother me with your words about how life works best. Just let me do what I want to do but please save me anyway!” There is so much in my nature that needs to be restored to working properly. There is so much in my nature that I need God’s grace to cover. Even when it comes to my redemption in Jesus, my nature leads me to focus solely on my own need for salvation and forget that my redemption is for a larger purpose.

But the good news is that God takes people like us and through His grace and blessing transforms us into people who want to live in obedience to Him, even though we still fail again and again. In Jesus He is restoring us to Himself and giving us the ability to look outside of ourselves and join in His mission of making Himself known in the world. In Jesus, grace changes what comes naturally to us. A scorpion is a scorpion is a scorpion, but there is hope for sinners as God’s grace and blessing transforms us.

That’s what we see happening to Abram in this passage. We see God blessing this old moon-god worshipper and it transforms him.

A Question: How does God bless? He blesses…

with a name (a new identity).with the promise of offspring for Abram (a family).with a land (a home).

I. Verse 1 tells us that God revealed Himself to Abram and gave him something to do. Abram is told to leave behind his country, his kindred and his father’s house in order to go to the Land that the LORD would show him. These things were (and often still are) the building blocks of someone’s identity. You are who you are because of where you came from and what family you belonged to. We see it today in the distinctions we make between Cary and Fuquay, Lillington and Angier, Wake Co. and Harnett Co. God is here calling Abram to leave all of those things behind.

But God is not leaving him without an identity! In the very next verse God promises to make Abram’s name great! That isn’t just talking about everyone knowing his name in some celebrity kind of way, but is means that Abram’s name will be significant, which is very different from being a mere celebrity! God promises to give Abram an identity in relationship to the LORD that will far surpass any name he could make for himself. Verse 3 actually teaches us that God will interact with other humans in light of their relationship to Abram! His name before God has become “Covenant Representative.” God appoints him as the representative of humanity here, so that as people embrace God’s promises to Abram through joining themselves to Abram, they will be embracing God himself and will enter into the blessings for themselves.

II. And God blesses Abram more! He tells Abram that from him God will make a great nation. Notice again the word “great.” The offspring that will come from Abram will be significant in the earth through the purposes of God. Remember that we just found out a few verses earlier (in chapter 11) that Abram didn’t have and couldn’t have any children! Abram didn’t know how God could make this happen (and we’ll later see that he still has questions about this part of God’s plan and promise), but God promises it anyway and it seems as though Abram believes him as we’ll soon see.

III. In verse 1 God told Abram to leave his own land to go to a land that the LORD would show to him. Down in v. 7, as Abram is actually passing through the land of Canaan, God appears to him, one of the first times since the Fall that mankind and God interact in such a personal way, and tells him, “To your offspring I will give this land.” The land promise is a strange one in a way. What was it about the land of Canaan that would prompt God to promise it to Abram’s offspring? There is an old Jewish tale that when God finished creation he had a handful of boulders and rocks left over. So, he simply tossed them all in Canaan. There were certainly more fertile, more beautiful lands that God could have given, but God had a reason for promising Canaan to Abram’s offspring that becomes evident very soon.

These three promises: Identity, Offspring and Land are all part of the blessings of God’s covenant relationship with Abram. As Abram responds to God’s grace in obedience and faith, all these promises will come upon him and we’ll see how these three things will come up again and again throughout the OT and the NT, too! But we have to ask another question about these blessings. Because these things, as one theologian put it, “cannot be taken as the substance of the covenant or as its goal.”[1] That is, the blessings of identity, offspring and Land were meant to be tools in the work of Redemption, not an end in and of themselves!

When God promised in Gen. 3:15 that sin and evil would not have the final word over his creation, he was promising His complete victory over evil and the brokenness it brings. And after the flood, through which God made it possible for the restoration of all things to take place, he made a covenant with all flesh in the earth. If we’ve already seen that God’s redemptive purpose is large and expansive, we need to ask another question to understand why God’s love here is set on just one man and his (not yet existing) family:

So, why does God bless Abram? We see the answer in two clauses in the text.

- First, we see it at the end of v. 2. God ends his promises of a new identity, significant offspring and a land with a purpose clause. Some English translations capture this and make it more explicit than others, but in the Hebrew there is a purpose statement being made here. God blesses Abram with all these blessings for a larger purpose; “so that you will be a blessing.” God’s grace poured out in such rich ways upon Abram is not meant merely for Abram. The blessings are meant to lead Abram into being an agent of God; bringing blessing to the whole earth. That is perfectly in keeping with the wide view of restoration that God has already demonstrated earlier in the Story!

- Second, we see it in the final phrase of v. 3, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Just a little before now, we’ve seen how all the families of the earth were dispersed throughout the world as they tried to make an identity for themselves apart from God, tried to keep themselves together as a powerful family without God and tried to secure themselves in a single land in opposition to God’s desire for humanity to fill the earth and take the knowledge of God with them. Now we see that God has not forgotten them in their rebellion, but promises that, in some way not yet revealed, in Abram blessing will return to them and they will know the LORD once again.

So, why does God bless Abram? He blesses so that he might restore the whole world to Himself. Of course, Abram enjoys the benefits of his relationship with the LORD. It is a beautiful thing to be blessed by the Living God, but the blessing isn’t merely about Abram.

Consider the Land promise again, that God would give Canaan in particular to Abram’s offspring. We already know that there are better lands, even if Canaan is later described as a land “flowing with milk and honey.” But think bigger picture. Where is Canaan located? God promises Abram’s offspring, the nation of Israel, a land that is truly the crossroads of the world at the time. Mike Williams calls it “a doorway to the world, on the way to everywhere else…It is the most traveled, most fought over, most conquered land in the history of the world.” And as people passed through the land belonging to the people of God they would have heard about and met Israel’s God, the LORD, and in that meeting they, through faith in YHWH, would have been blessed same blessings given to Abram. Even God’s choice of Canaan was meant to serve the larger purpose of redeeming the world.

As the passage goes on, Abram buys into this mission of restoration that God is on and enters into that mission himself. The grace and blessing God promises to him and his offspring, Abram makes known to others and he brings people with him. Here we see a man transformed by grace.

In. v. 4 we should note two things. First, Abram gets the call from the LORD to go and then he goes. Look for this pattern elsewhere in Genesis where the LORD speaks and the listener immediately responds. Second, note that Lot goes with Abram. And, if we accept Stephen’s word in the book of Acts (which the Hebrew here in Genesis allows for, “The Lord HAD said to Abram…”), the LORD had given this command and these promises to Abram while he was still in Ur of the Chaldeans, which means that his father, Terah, was actually following Abram to Haran, rather than Abram following Terah. Abram has heard the promised grace of God, obeyed by setting out in faith and has understood that the blessings of God are not meant only for him.

Now Abram doesn’t immediately embark on a worldwide crusade to make God known. He simply acted in faith in the setting God had placed him. For him, that meant telling his family about what God said he would do and inviting them to believe and act along with him. So Terah and Lot join him on the road from Ur to Haran and after Terah dies in Haran, Lot still follows Abram on the road to Canaan. But they are not alone. Verse 5 tells us that they left Haran with Sarai, Abram’s wife, all their possessions and “the people that they had acquired in Haran.” I always assumed that was talking about his servants or slaves, but now I believe it is possible that the language is pointing us in another direction. The word for “people” here has nothing to do with servants or slaves. It actually refers simply to a soul or living being. One translator (Cassuto) suggests that we take it as “souls won” in Haran, meaning that Abram’s faith had not been silent, but he had gathered others who were embracing God’s promises to Abram for themselves, which means that when Abram built those altars to worship the LORD in vv. 7 and 8, he did not do so alone, but built them as God’s representative leading God’s people in worship.

As the Story of Redemption unfolds, we know and believe that in Jesus, all the promises of God find their yes and amen in him. Jesus is the greatness of Abram’s name. Jesus is the truest Israel who was faithful to God always and obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross, which he died to purchase our forgiveness for sin. Jesus is the promised offspring of the woman in the Garden and of Abram that would bring the blessing of God to all the families of the earth by conquering sin and evil. And after his resurrection, he promised that he went to prepare a home for us, a land of perfect rest and blessing where we can fully enjoy the redemption he has accomplish by restoring us to God.

Through faith in Jesus, we enjoy all the blessings of God ourselves. We are given a new identity in him and are promised a home with him. But like Abram, we must understand that the grace that is given to us is meant to transform us. Our selfish nature belongs to the old man and through Jesus we are new creations; redeemed, but not redeemed merely for our own sake.

Understood rightly, redemption in Jesus becomes so much larger than the normal western Christian “me and Jesus” salvation allows for. With that mindset, it is inevitable for thoughts and feelings and actions to become inward faced and for sole focus to rest upon one’s own standing before God. But when we see the expansive nature of God’s redemptive focus, starting with one man but including the whole world, we can enjoy our individual salvation in Christ AND turn outward from ourselves to make the redemption that is in Jesus known to others by our words and life before the world.

For Abram, it looked like leaving behind everything else and following the LORD’s calling and bringing Lot and others with him. For Israel, it meant being a light to the nations. For Jesus, it meant leaving behind perfect and eternal glory and becoming a cursed man upon a cross so that we might be blessed and our wrong made right. And because he did that, for us it means entering into the mission of God to make him known by making Jesus known as King in every area of life. In Jesus we have restoration. In Jesus we have a home. In Jesus we are blessed. Let that lead you into service as you turn out from yourself and present yourself, body and soul, in obedience to God’s call.

A wise pastor told me, “Until you know the grace of God, you can never focus on others because you are too busy trying to save your own soul.” (Denton) But once grace is experienced, you are freed to be a blessing to others.

The question then becomes, “Now that I know God’s grace has been shown to me through Jesus, how can I be who I already am?” If by faith you are a child of God, a follower of Jesus, how does that being true lead you into action?

Application points:

- Grace leads us into deeper obedience, quicker repentance and faith in Jesus as we know we are already accepted by the Father

- Grace leads us into giving up our rights so that we can put the blessing of others ahead of our own needs. Jesus satisfies our deepest needs and restores us to the Shepherd of our souls who knows our every need, physically and spiritually. Because we don’t have to look out for ourselves, we are freed to look out for others; the poor, the widow, the orphan, the outcast, the friendless, the oppressed. Name a person in your circle who would fit one of those labels and then pursue how you might hold out the blessing of Christ to them.

- Others?

Illustration: If ever there was someone who understood the transforming power of God’s grace, it was the apostle Paul. He once trusted in his birth as an Israelite and his obedience to the rules of God to save him, but when the risen Christ appeared to him and showed Paul his need of grace to save him, Paul was transformed. His nature was transformed and he ceased being an angry persecutor of the church and became the servant of all people, turning outward from himself in love and service of others so that others might know the super-abundant grace (his words, not mine) of Jesus. He knew that his security and blessing came from his union with Jesus, and that knowledge led him into action. His calling was that of an apostle, to make Jesus known to the Gentiles, our family.

We aren’t called to be apostles, at least not in the same way Paul was called. But we are called by Jesus to make disciples as we leave behind our old selves and put on Jesus. The calling of the Great Commission Jesus gave before he went up to heaven opens much the same as Abram’s. To us, Jesus says, “All authority belongs to me, so go.” If Jesus has given you the gift of faith, then you are secure in him. Let that security lead you forward and outward from yourself in whatever situation the LORD has set you and through your words and actions, make disciples of Jesus and bring people with you into the blessedness you have received from God.

[Move to table]

And here is your motivation. Here in the body and blood of Jesus is the strength and encouragement you and I need desperately. Here is your promise from God that you are blessed and you will be blessed because Jesus died for you….

[1] Mike Williams, Far As The Curse Is Found, 110.