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The God of heaven and earth, Who made the vast cosmos and upholds it by His power, invited Abraham to become His friend and companion, to dwell in His presence, and to know the fullness of joy and pleasure that only God can give. This “blessing” of God – which Abraham would then be able to extend to others as well – is the beginning of God’s promises.
We cannot enter the worldview of the promises of God unless we come through this door of blessing. In being blessed our sins are forgiven through Jesus Christ and the scales are removed from our eyes, spiritual scales that keep us from seeing the beauty, goodness, and truth of God. Being blessed leads to blessing others. In the second set of promises God graciously offers to make of Abraham a great people and to give him a great name. If we have entered into the blessing of God we can claim this second set of promises for ourselves as well.
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The promises God offered to Abraham, vague as they seem at first glance, must have been very compelling. Abraham, after all, was a wealthy man, with a bright future. He was from a prominent family and worshiped the local deity along with all his neighbors. He had it all, or so it seemed. But having it all apparently wasn’t all it was cut out to be. Something in Abraham longed for brighter prospects, bigger challenges, greater promises. For when God appeared to him in his native land and spoke His precious and very great promises to Abraham, he did not hesitate to abandon everything he knew and loved in order to go in pursuit of the promises of God. What did God offer young Abraham that so enthralled and captivated him?
God made six promises to Abraham. We read about these in Genesis 12:1-3. These six promises, as Paul tells us, are offered to all who, like Abraham, are willing to set aside their own comparatively puny prospects in order to receive the grace of God and follow Him in faith.
That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring – not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. Romans 4:16
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Human beings are made to live by promises. But very often those promises elude or disappoint us, leaving us flat and unfulfilled, and looking for more and better promises. Jesus, the Scriptures tell us, offers “better promises” to those who trust in Him, who live within the framework of a Biblical worldview and hope in the glory of God.
Peter describes the promises of Jesus as “precious and very great” and says that, as we lay hold on these promises, we actually participate in the very life of God (2 Pet. 1:4). Since God has in Himself all life, power, beauty, goodness, truth, joy, pleasure, and fulfillment, there can be no higher promise than that which enables us to partake of Him. This is what Jesus offers – life with God, every day, all day, in every aspect of our lives, forever and ever. No set of promises drawn from the most imaginative human thinking can even begin to compare with this!
The Apostle Paul shows us where to look in order to understand and grasp these precious and very great promises. In the promises God made to Abraham are the seeds of the full and abundant life everyone seeks, and for which everyone conjures up promises they hope will satisfy their deepest longings. But the promises of Jesus, first offered to Abraham, do not come from our own imaginations; they are held out to us by grace, and we lay hold of them by faith. The better we understand the life which Jesus offers, the more we will rejoice in the grace of God so magnanimously offered, and the more we will desire those precious and very great promises as our own.
But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. Hebrews 8:6
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Whereas animals perform their daily routines – hunting, mating, raising their young, and whatever else animals do – largely on the basis of past experience, human beings take an altogether different approach to life. Animals are instinctive in their behavior; human beings are anticipatory.
What I mean by this is, animal behavior is guided, for the most part, by built-up experience and genetic inheritance – what animals have known and done in the past. On the other hand, while people are not unmindful of past experience, and can benefit from or be harmed by it, they tend to be oriented in their behavior toward the future. People live each day for the prospect of what they hope to gain, not merely what they’ve always known. People are motivated by promise. They engage in relationships, choose careers, settle in communities, make friends, take up avocations, choose their investments, and do practically everything else on the basis of what they hope or expect to gain from their actions. It is built into the human soul to live toward the future and the prospects and hopes of what our decisions and actions may produce. One of the primary points of schooling, indeed, of all child-rearing, is to hold out the prospect of what their lives can be and to encourage the young to dream and work toward their dreams.
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A day of harvest is coming, and Jesus is working to cultivate the world as His own cherished harvest field. He is sowing the good seed of the Kingdom of God throughout the world, and everywhere that seed takes root and begins to grow, it reproduces the righteousness, peace, and joy of Jesus Christ into all of life and culture. In the final day, when Jesus uproots and condemns the weeds in His Kingdom field, only the righteous will be left, only the good seed of the Kingdom will remain to populate the new heavens and new earth; thus they will shine without hindrance of any darkness or sin, radiating the glory of God to the ends of the world, forever and ever.
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The day is coming when the Lord of the Harvest will gather His precious Kingdom wheat and take it to be with Him forever in glory. Then the weeds of sinfulness, and every unrepentant sinner, will, first, bow and acknowledge the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ (Phil. 2:5-11), only to be cast into the eternal fires and torment of separation from God. What does the Lord expect to find when He comes? A weed field, with isolated pockets of trembling wheat, sheltering from the onslaught of evil and pleading for the Lord’s return? Hardly. The field of the world is to be sown with the good seed of the Kingdom, and the Lord of the Harvest expects that field to be radiant with fruitful boughs, overcomers in the struggle against evil who have reached their maturity, produced nourishing fruit, and bow in joyous expectation of the coming of their King.
