Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3 ESV)
A heptad of blessing:
1) I will make of you a great nation.
2) I will bless you.
3) And make your name great.
4) So that you will be a blessing.
5) I will bless those who bless you.
6) Him who dishonors you I will curse.
7) In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
In a previous post we looked at the first one: "I will make of you a great nation." Now let's look at that second one.
I will bless you.
No greater words could be spoken to a human being by God. I will bless you. There are no conditions and no clauses. It is a promise without expected performance or precondition. I will bless you. What grace is this!
But Abram hadn't been previously blessed and was probably thinking by this time in his life that he was simply not to be blessed by the gods at all. He had no son. It is hard for us to imagine the impact of that simple fact on a person of his culture and time. He had no son. He has failed to meet the first criterion of a "blessed" person. Don't even try to tell us you are blessed, Abram, if you don't even have a son. It's like saying you're a golfer but you don't know how to hold a golf club. Sure. Right. Whatever.
But God comes down at this point in his life and says to him, based solely on his grace, "I will bless you."
To be blessed means to be the recipient of God's favor. How would Abram have understood this promise? He probably would have understood it to mean physical blessings: health, wealth, children. Obtaining the favor of the gods was an important endeavor in that society and how to do so an important study. The most widely accepted idea in human history has been that favor is obtained from deity in exchange for something offered to the deity. YHWH makes his grand entrance into this culture by making a promise to bless based solely on his goodness.
I will bless you.
How are we to interpret such a promise? How are we to apply it to our own lives? Without going into details as to how and why (details which I will get into later), understand that you, too, as a believer, are the recipient of this promise. How are you to understand this blessing? In what form will it take? Is this a health and wealth and prosperity promise? Well, yes . . . and no. Mostly no. But mostly yes. Confused? Good.
If you thought God's promises of blessing were all about health, wealth, and prosperity in this life as defined by our dominant media culture, then you are not unlike the people of the Old Covenant for whom this was mostly true. Just remember that in that time (before Christ) God was teaching them (and us) truths about himself through object lessons that they could understand. But when Jesus comes along he turns this kind of thinking on its head. Rather than give you a whole series of blog posts on how Jesus did that, let me just sum it up by saying that Jesus taught us to expand our viewpoint by taking a step back and looking at things from an eternal perspective rather than a temporal perspective. Jesus taught us that it was a good thing to suffer for a short time in this life in view of the eternal rewards we would receive in so doing.
Eternity.
That is how long we will exist. And in that context, any and all things we will experience in this life are very brief indeed. With that in mind, as believers we are blessed in Christ beyond imagination for all eternity, even if we do without and suffer for His name in this life, which is but a short time.
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. (Romans 8:18 ESV)
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, (Ephesians 1:3 ESV)Spiritual blessings in Christ. That is what we have as believers and every one of these stems from that first promise to Abram: I will bless you. Does that blessing extend to you? It does if you are in Christ. And if you are not, his arms are open wide. Come and be blessed.
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