God’s Promise to Abraham
God’s Promise to Abraham
It was some time after the year 2000 BC that a new beginning of immense importance took place with God’s call of Abraham. It seems to have come to him first in Ur of the Chaldees, then in Haran. It summoned him to leave his country and his people in exchange for another country and another people which God would later give him:
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.” (Gen. 12:1–3)
Fundamentally, God’s promise was “I will bless you.” This was spelled out later:
I will establish my covenant … between me and you … to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. (Gen. 17:7)
It came to be recognized as the essence of God’s covenant with Israel, repeated again and again in the Old Testament: “I will be your God and you shall be my people.” In addition to this covenant relationship, God promised Abraham both a land and a seed, a line of descent. It may truly be said without exaggeration that not only the rest of the Old Testament but the whole of the New Testament are an outworking of these promises of God. In Old Testament days Israel was the promised seed and Canaan the promised land. But the covenant included a reference to “all the families of the earth” and their blessing. Only now in Christ have these promises begun to be fulfilled. For Jesus Christ and his people are the true seed of Abraham. As Paul wrote to the Galatians:
If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Gal. 3:29)
The final fulfillment lies beyond history. Then Abraham’s seed will be “a great multitude that no one could count,” as many in fact as the stars in the sky and the sand of the seashore, and their inheritance will be the new Jerusalem, “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Rev. 7:9; Gen. 22:17; Heb. 11:8–12, 16,39–40).
God kept renewing his covenant with Abraham during his lifetime, and then confirmed it to his son Isaac and to his grandson Jacob.5 The Palestine of their day was in the Bronze Age, but they never settled down to enjoy it. They were nomads. The only territory they possessed was a field near Hebron, which Abraham bought so that he could bury his wife Sarah in its cave (Gen. 23).
Jacob (whose other name was “Israel”) had twelve sons. They were, in fact, the original “children of Israel.” But these progenitors of Israel’s twelve tribes all spent their declining years and died not in the promised land of Canaan, but in Egypt, to which famine had driven them. Joseph had become a very senior administrator in Egypt, perhaps even a kind of grand vizier. Such a promotion is not as improbable as some have thought, for the ruling Egyptian dynasty from about 1700 BC were the Hyksos, the so-called shepherd-kings, who were themselves Semitic in origin. But Joseph also died in exile, and the Book of Genesis ends with the statement: “After they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt” (Gen. 50:26).
When the bald statement is made in Exodus 1:8 that “a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt,” one of the succeeding dynasties is meant. This is likely to have been the nineteenth, whose early Pharaohs built the cities Pithom and Raamses, the latter as a royal residence in the Delta area, where the Israelites had settled. It was convenient, therefore, to use Israelite slave labor. And as the years passed, the bondage of the Israelites became crueler and harder to bear, until their lives became “bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields” (Exod. 1:14).
The Egyptian exile lasted altogether 430 years (Exod. 12:40–41). What had become of God’s promise?