Abram
Talk 3 of 3 given in the series The Promise-Keeping God at St Nicolas Coogee.
An edited transcript of the talk is below. Talk 1 is Adam, talk 2 is Noah.
Talk Outline
- The Promise of Peace
- The Promise-Keeping God
- The Promise of Abram
- Abram’s Offspring
- Keeping the Promise Today
Series: The Promise Keeping God; Talk 3 Abram
- The Promise of Peace
What an incredible week we’ve just had with the promise of peace in Gaza after two horrendous years of what seemed an intractable war. But what kind of peace is promised to a region that has been the centre of conflict for thousands of years? This land is where three continents meet, three religions meet, and three promises were given.
Canaan is the land bridge between three continents: Africa (Egypt), Europe (Greece) and Asia. The North-South road between continents goes through Canaan. The great desert east of Jerusalem is as inhospitable as the great Mediterranean Sea to the west. But this land bridge is also the place where three religions meet: Jews, Muslims and Christians, because all three look back to Abraham, whom they all claim is their father. All three claim to be the offspring of Abram.
Abram is the man to whom God made three promises about the future–not just his future but the future of the world. As we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks in church, this God is the true and living God, the creator of the universe. He is the God of the Bible, who is the promise-keeping God.
- The Promise-Keeping God
The promise-keeping God speaks his word, making promises about the future. He also keeps his word because he is able to do what he promises, and he is trustworthy, reliable, dependable and faithful. This is why, in the Bible, faith is looking back to God’s promises in the past, looking forward to God’s fulfilment in the future and looking upward to God in trust in the present.
In Genesis 3:15, God promised Satan (the serpent) that the woman would give birth to a son who would crush the serpent’s head.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.
So, as we read on in the Bible, we look for the serpent crusher. First, there is Cain, but he fails by giving in to Satan and murdering his brother Abel. Next, we have Seth, but he just has children. Next is Enoch, who walks with God, but he doesn’t crush Satan. Next is Noah, who looks to be a great one as he found favour with God. But after the flood, he continued in sin, as did his sons. Then, among his sons, we find a new possibility. From the family of Noah comes a new candidate – Abram.
Abram’s name means ‘father’, ‘exalted father’, but sadly, he has no children. His family left the city of Ur near the Persian Gulf. They travelled north, 1000km to settle at Haran on a tributary of the Euphrates River. Ur was a major Sumerian city in Southern Iraq, which was excavated in the 1920s. Haran, with its famous Beehive mud huts, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Southern Turkey near the Syrian border; the queen’s golden pendant from the era is in the British Museum.
After his father died, we read that God spoke to Abram in Genesis 12:1
The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”
So, Abram left Haran and headed south down the land bridge to Egypt, passing through Canaan around 650km away. This is the context of the promise of Abram.
- The Promise of Abram
He certainly looks like a promising candidate to be the serpent crusher we’ve been looking for. The LORD Yahweh has chosen him to leave his family and journey to a land that Yahweh will show him. But the promise of Abram is not simply that he looks like a promising candidate for serpent crushing. Much more important are the three promises that God made to Abram.
In Genesis 12:2 and following, we have 3 of the most important promises ever made by anybody to anybody else; made here by God himself to Abram.
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.
It all seems so insignificant and strange but the war in Gaza that came to its fragile peace last week is about this promise. Did you notice that President Trump spoke last weekend about extending the Abrahamic Accords? Back in 2020, in his first presidency, he had several Arab nations sign an accord with Israel, called the Abraham Accords. It all comes out of these extraordinary promises that God made to Abram, before he changed his name to Abraham.
The three things God promised Abram in Genesis 12:2-3 were
- a great nation
- a great name
- a source of blessing and cursing for all peoples.
“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.”
The rest of the life of Abram; the rest of the Bible; the rest of human history have been the outworking of these three promises.
All this is rather grand and simply unbelievable. Here’s a nobody living in Southern Turkey near the border with Syria told to head out to a land he doesn’t know, doesn’t even know where it is, and he’s given the promise that all the world’s peoples are going to be blessed and cursed through him. And he’s promised to become a great nation, but he hasn’t got any children or heirs, and his name is going to be great, but history had never heard of him. What is he going to do or be, that his name will become great or famous or important? Even the blessings or curses of God sound extraordinary, coming upon people as they bless or curse Abram. He’s the touchstone of the future of the world.
These three promises are further elaborated in verse 7 when he travels south to Canaan, where Yahweh appears again to him, and promises that Yahweh will give to Abram’s offspring the land he is showing Abram. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” It all seems preposterous that God would give to this landless, homeless Bedouin, a tent-dwelling traveller, this land around him.
Its absurdity is highlighted by two things
- Abram doesn’t hang around there but leaves for the desert (Negeb) and then down to Egypt and more significantly Abram has no offspring, so
- How is God going to give the land to the offspring?
Here we come to the crux of the problem and of the future, namely, Abram is not the man, not the serpent crusher. It’s not going to be Abram but rather Abram’s offspring.
- Abram’s Offspring
Apparently, it’s not Abram who is going to inherit the land but his offspring, a great nation and blessing to all. Is it the offspring who will crush the serpent? Who is the offspring? What will he do? Our attention is turned to the offspring of the childless man called Abram ‘exalted father’.
- At first, Abram adopts a son, Eliezer of Damascus, but God says no, not Eliezer, it will be your own son.
- So secondly, Abram takes his wife’s servant Hagar and has a son through her, a son called Ishmael. But God says no, not Ishmael, the son of your slave. You will have a son through your wife, Sarah and what’s more, your name will be changed to Abraham, father of a multitude.
- So thirdly, in old age, Abram and Sarah have a son called Isaac, and he’s to be the heir of God’s promises. But Isaac doesn’t do anything other than have children.
- Fourthly, after Sarah dies, Abraham takes a 2nd wife, Keturah, who has six sons who have Abraham as their father but none of them is the heir because Isaac is.
Genesis makes it quite clear that Isaac is the chosen one as his son Jacob is the next in line. But the Muslims claim that Ishmael is the true offspring, and the land was promised to him, not Isaac, and so the conflict has continued to this day as Islam and Israel fight over the promised land.
Who then is the true offspring of Abraham? The promises of blessing and curses are not fulfilled in Abraham’s day. The Israelites still look forward to the land as theirs, given to them by God when he promised it to Isaac. The Muslims still look forward to the land as theirs, given to them by God when he promised it to Ishmael.
But what about Christians? Are we the offspring of Abram? Are we supposed to inherit the land? The New Testament makes it clear: the true offspring of Abraham is the Lord Jesus Christ, who brings blessing and curses to all the nations as they accept or reject him.
The very first verse of the New Testament, Matthew 1:1 starts
This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of ……
Ever wondered why we have genealogies in the Bible? It is because to be the Christ, Jesus had to fulfil God’s promises, especially to David and to Abraham. As the apostle pointed out, the promise to Abram is not to offsprings but to one offspring–that is, the Christ. And that the promise was not really about Canaan at all, but what it represented. It represented the age to come in the new creation. Indeed, Abraham himself was looking for something more than Canaan when he lived by faith in God’s promises as we’re told in Hebrews 11:8-10
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
Note in that last sentence, he was looking for something more. Later in Hebrews 11, we read that his whole family were looking for a homeland
If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one.
Here is Abraham living by faith
- looking back to the promise
- looking forward to the fulfilment
- looking up in faith to the faithful promise-keeping God.
But what about today? What about God keeping the promise today?
- Keeping the Promise Today
What about Christians? What about non-Jewish Christians, Gentiles? The Jews look to Abraham, Isaac and Canaan. The Muslims look to Abraham, Ishmael and Canaan, and they continue in warfare over Canaan
and know no peace–even when a war ends like it did in 1949 and 1967 and 2025.
But Christians look to Abraham’s offspring, Jesus and the heavenly land. As with Abraham, we accept the promise was more than a scrap of real estate in the Middle East, and as with the gospel, we know that Jesus is the one who is the son of the woman Eve, who is the promised seed and who by his death and resurrection is indeed the promised serpent crusher. In addition, we know that in Jesus, we also become the heir of Abraham, because with Jesus we inherit the heavenly city.
This is how Paul explains it in Galatians 3:7-9
Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
He concludes the chapter with verse 29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Do you belong to Christ?
If you are not sure, ask your minister about it; tell him you’re not sure or you think you’re not. If you are, then you’re living the same life as Abraham
- looking back to the promise
- looking forward to receiving the promise
- looking up to God as we live by faith in the faithful promise-keeping God.
