Genesis 15:1-12,17,18; Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35
Although he was a nomad, Abram was an extremely wealthy man. He had several hundred people in his household, including his own private army and vast flocks of sheep, cattle, donkeys and camels. He was out and away the wealthiest rancher in all of Palestine.
But Abram had a problem. All his wealth would pass to a man who was not related to him – a man called Eliezer – because Abram had no son. It was the biggest concern of his life. A very personal matter.
We can all feel compassion for a parent who is childless and longs for children. In Abram’s culture having a son and heir was crucial. What was the point of prospering (see Genesis 13:2) if one had to leave it all to someone else (Genesis 15:3)? Who would remember you and tell the stories and carry on the family values? So when God speaks of rewarding Abram (v1) he feels it all rings a bit hollow.
There are times when I identify with that and maybe you can too. Times when we get to thinking that God has blessed us in many ways but in the one thing that really matters it may seem he has withheld his blessing. Of course this train of thought may not be entirely accurate.
God’s promise to Abram
The first promise God made to Abram was in response to the personal need Abram had expressed – his own son would be his heir (v 4). This promise seemed impossible to fulfil as Abram would soon be 99, and his wife Sarai, 90 (Genesis 17:1,17). So God helped him with a gigantic visual aid – the starry sky (v 5). Abram, having proved God’s faithfulness up to this point, believed the stark word of God, and was therefore reckoned as righteous (see Romans 4:18-23).
But wait, there’s more. The promise of an heir came with a promise of land, again of crucial importance in that culture. God generously gave Abram a guarantee of the truth of the covenant he was making with him, in terms of a practice common at the time. The significance of the blazing torch passing between the pieces of the animals (v 17) was that God was saying, ‘I will be totally faithful to this promise – even if I have to die to keep it.’ (One can’t help thinking of Calvary.) And in that same ceremony Abram made the same commitment.
It is easy to sing songs about the times when faith and trust in God comes easily, but it is harder to sing our songs of lament and our songs of doubt. And yet even the most faithful and righteous among us—even Abram—occasionally struggles. Not only do we struggle with trust, but we struggle with accepting it when God blesses us so abundantly. Darryl M. Trimiew writes, “Perhaps it is (God’s) incredible generosity that is so difficult for many of us to accept. We like to think of ourselves as being people who inherently trust God. Yet H. Richard Niebuhr, Sterling Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, repeatedly maintained that the first response of humanity toward God is that of distrust. Although God is good to us, we do not trust God. Like most of us, Abram knows that he is not all that good or all that deserving. Accordingly, it is difficult for him to believe and accept that he might be blessed beyond measure. Yet miraculously God gives Abram blessings.” Rather than being totally grateful, however, Abram is inconsistent in his trusting.
Consider
Pause for a moment and consider: God has blessed us beyond measure.
How has he blessed us?
What stories do we tell?
What songs do we sing in praise?
When do we struggle with trust in God? Why?
What songs do we sing when we are struggling?
How is our inability to accept God’s blessings tied up in our inability to trust in God?
David affected by the promise to Abram
Let’s look at how some of Abram’s descendants experienced the promises of God. One of them was King David. He wrote the Psalm 27 and lots of others. By the time he was born, Abraham’s descendants (God changed Abram’s name to Abraham) had indeed taken possession of the land and David could look back over the entire history of God’s dealings with his people – how he rescued them, conquered their enemies, met them in worship, showed them mercy and gave them strength. So David’s confidence in the promises of God was great – ‘Whom shall I fear?’ ‘The Lord will receive me.’ ‘I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living’. This is confidence built not only on personal experience of God’s goodness, but collective, national experience.
Paul affected by the promise to Abram
Then there was Paul, another direct descendant of Abraham. He too could look back over many centuries of history in which God had fulfilled his promises, from Abraham onwards, right past David and up to the first century AD. Therefore he was certain that the promises made by Jesus during his lifetime would be fulfilled. Through the power of Jesus’ resurrection, Paul and all those living as Jesus’ disciples (including us) can look forward to the coming of the Saviour, when we will experience ‘citizenship in heaven’, and ‘transformed bodies’.
Paul said to the Philippians, “Copy me – trust God the way I trust God.” The primary way most of us learn how to be Christians is by imitating the actions, practices, rituals, and words of the Christ-followers that we have known in our own lives. I have learned how to be a Christian by imitating quite a number of people and I’m still adding to my list. It is such a blessing to have so many wonderful followers to imitate!
Consider
Think about who you have imitated, whose words and actions and practices and rituals have shaped you into the kind of Christian that you are. What was it about the saints who have walked before each of us that have helped us to stand firm in the Lord? How has their witness to the faith given shape and substance to our own?
We are affected by the promise to Abram
In many ways, we too are living in expectation of the same promises of which Paul wrote. Some have not yet been fulfilled. But we belong to that same, unbroken chain of Abraham’s descendants, who can look back to see what God has done and, like Abraham, simply believe his promises.
Like David, we can ‘seek his face’ in confidence and trust.
Trusting in the promises of God will help us ‘stand firm’, as Paul says.
And it’s not over yet…
We too may say with the psalmist, ‘I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living’ and be determined to ‘be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord’ (Psalm 27:13,14), knowing that ‘the future is as bright as the promises of God’, to quote Adoniram Judson, a pioneer missionary to Burma. Jesus shows God’s attitude to all people, however wayward, in his musing over Jerusalem (Luke 13). We are valuable and we are vulnerable, but he protects those who trust him. The story is told of a farmer who was looking over his farmyard after a fire had swept through. All the stock that had been there were dead. He came across one of his hens. She was cooked but he flipped her body over and under her wings were her chickens, alive and well. A great analogy for our Saviour who died that we might live.
While we’re with birds there’s an old Scandinavian Proverb which says, ‘Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark.’
Ever since Adam and Eve distusted God so do we all find it hard to trust. Hard to believe God, hard to trust him. What do we do with things that are hard to believe? How do we cope when we’re under pressure? A couple of good things to do: remind ourselves of the character of God and look again at the saints we imitate. We may look at the world and see a bad mess but “Christ alone knows the whole story; the real reasons; the deepest motives and he alone may be trusted to judge justly. The ‘judge of all the Earth’ will do right and that’s extremely good news. We may rely on it.” Mike Parker, MECO.
Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch evangelist, said, ‘Let God’s promises shine on your problems.’
Dwight L. Moody, the American evangelist, said, ‘God never made a promise that was too good to be true.’
Consider
1. Where in your life at the moment do you need to hear God say; “Do not be afraid. I will shield you from danger and give you a great reward”?
2. What situation are you in at present which should make you seek shelter under God’s wings?
3. Are you trusting God or are you looking in other places for shelter and reward?