Please read The Story Chapter 2 God Builds a Nation
Genesis 12-13, 15-17, 21-22, 32-33, 35,
Romans 4, Hebrews 11
“I will.” These are
words of covenant commitment and promise spoken by a sovereign God to
Abraham. God’s master plan to restore us
to Himself gets a fresh start with these words.
God is determined to fulfill His promise in spite of the frailties and
failures of His people. God chooses to
create a new nation through Abraham, revealing himself to, and working through
this new community of faith. God
promises Abraham saying “I will...”
• make your
descendants into a great nation• give this nation a land in which to dwell
• bless all other nations through the nation of Israel
And two thousand years later God’s Son was born, a descendant of Abraham, thus fulfilling the covenant promise.
This chapter demonstrates a striking duality: God using broken
people to fulfill His unbreakable promises.
But on a day-to-day basis, God’s people continue to make bad choices
that expose their ever-present sin nature.
Abraham and Sarah, waiting for years for the child God promised, opt for
a workaround to conceive an heir through Sarah’s servant, Hagar. Isaac and Rebekah raise a very dysfunctional
family. Jacob perfects the “workaround
method” by conniving and cheating his way through life.
But what sin changes, faith overcomes. In spite of their failures, God’s people
respond in faith. Abraham picks up
stakes and travels to a foreign land just because God said to. He gives his
relative Lot the choice real estate having faith God would still bless him.
Abraham and Sarah, through laughter and tears, finally see God fulfill his
promise through the birth of a son, Isaac. In a dramatic episode, Abraham shows
he is willing to go so far as sacrificing his only son, Isaac, just because he
trusts God. This foreshadows the willingness of God to do the same to his own
Son. The key verse of the chapter is:
"Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as
righteousness." Therein lays the
Gospel itself.
His family continues to demonstrate faith. By faith, Isaac finds a wife for his
son. Jacob, comes to faith after
literally wrestling with God. By faith, Esau also shows Jacob grace and
forgiveness. With every story, we are
reminded that God works through flawed people who take steps of faith.
God chose the most unlikely people upon which to build a new
nation, to cause people to look to God to explain how it happened. This gives
people today a lot of hope. God’s strategy of picking the least likely
candidate to succeed could be my opportunity to be picked for a God-sized
project, so others will be able to see him when great things happen.
