GOD'S BLESSING AND PURPOSE

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 dishonours you I will curse, and in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
                                                                                                -Genesis 12:1-3
 
In the previous post in this series, God’s Heart for the Nations, we saw that at the end of everything God does is the purpose to reveal His glory, to show Himself glorious. And we saw that this means that mankind is not at the centre of God’s plan and the Bible is not about us.
 
In this post we hope to see the Bible not as 66 books that happen to be bound by one cover, but as one book. The Bible has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. The introduction is the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the body starts at Genesis 12 and goes through to Jude, and the conclusion is Revelation.
 
Do you read the Bible as a collection of 66 different books that are just collected and bound together? Or do you read the Bible as a single book with a beginning, the main body, and a conclusion?
 
Now, in a well-written book, the author will begin to reveal major themes in the introduction. One of the keys to the correct interpretation of the Bible is to detect these themes and follow how the author develops them throughout the book. It is silly to try to interpret the Bible without some idea of its emphasis and purpose. This post looks at two fundamental themes that first appear in Genesis 1:28.
 
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
 
The first theme is that God wants to bless His creation. In the context of the blessing, we discover the second theme, dealing with God’s purpose for the blessing which involves man’s responsibility.

The two themes are restated in Genesis 9:1 and further defined in Genesis 12:1-3. Before we go to Genesis 12, here is a summary of what happens in the introduction of the Bible.

1. God has created the heavens and the earth and all living things, the final created thing being Adam and Eve. They sinned and destroyed their relationship with God; God pursued them, judged them and the serpent, and He sacrificed animals, revealing that the shedding of blood is necessary for the covering of sin.
2. Man continues to multiply but in so doing continued his rebellion against God to the point that man’s sin was so grievous that God had to judge mankind with a flood. We continue to see God’s redemptive character revealed in delivering Noah’s family from the flood.
3. The generations after Noah continued to reject God’s authority. In the land of Shinar, the people sought to make a name for themselves by building a city and a tower whose top reached to the heavens, in order to not be “dispersed over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4), even though this was an act of disobedience to God’s first command to fill and subdue the earth.
4. With a catastrophic judgment, God confused their language and “dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:8). The result of God’s judgment was the creation of approximately 70 distinct family groups (nations) listed in Genesis 10.

 
This is the backdrop from which God calls Abram to leave his country and declares His covenant with him.
 
Genesis 12:1-3, which begins the main story of the Bible, outlines the covenant God makes with Abram. And as you might imagine from the introduction, there are two elements to the covenant. There is the blessing element and the responsibility element. Don Richardson, who wrote the book “Eternity in Their Hearts” calls these two elements the top line and bottom line of the covenant. The top line is God’s blessing and the bottom line is Abram’s responsibility.
 
So God promises to bless Abram by giving him land (v1), making him into a great nation (v2) and a great name (v2). But along with the blessing comes the bottom line, the responsibility. Abram was to be a blessing (v2) and that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed (v3). And so the implication is that Abram is blessed in order to be a blessing. That’s the top line and the bottom line of the covenant God made with Abram. You will be blessed but you must be a blessing.
 
God later confirms His covenant with Abraham and repeats it to his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, giving clarification of its themes. Check out the following passages.

1. Genesis 22:16-18
2. Genesis 26:3-5
3. Genesis 28:14

 
As you read the Bible you will discover the parallel nature of the two themes of blessing and purpose/responsibility. The danger is in failing to keep these two themes in their parallel tension. Our tendency is to see God’s blessings apart from our responsibility and His purpose for the blessing. That failure leads to an egocentric faith with ourselves at the centre of everything.
 
I want to challenge you to look at the following four stories and think about what God was doing in each instance. We will look more closely at these questions in the next blog post.

1. Why did God part the Red Sea?
2. Why did God give Solomon wisdom?
3. Why did God give Israel His commandments?
4. Why did God deliver Daniel from the lion’s den?
5. Finish the following verse from memory. “Be still and…”

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