Abraham: Blessed to Be a Blessing

So God intends to bless all peoples, and he started with Abraham. But he made it clear in doing so that Abraham, and the people Israel after him, were to be the instruments through whom God would eventually bring a way of salvation that would be for everyone on earth.

The role that God assigned to the Old Testament people of Israel was a crucial one. They were the first recipients of God’s gracious promises. To them belonged the covenant, the wonderful agreement by which God first established a relationship with a community of people from among the estranged human race. God gave Israel the law, the revelation of his holy nature, of his character and expectations. Supremely, Israel was the instrument God chose to give his Messiah, his Servant, to the world, his Chosen One, who would be the means of salvation for everyone. As the New Testament makes clear, these promises of blessing that God made to Abraham ultimately point to Jesus Christ and find their fulfillment in him (Gal.3:16).

So this promise shows us God’s heart. It reveals that God’s love has always been for the whole world, and his plan was always to offer salvation to all the world’s peoples. I’m afraid that many Christians think of missions as a sort of add-on to the church’s work, as though the Great Commission to “go into all the world and make disciples from every nation” were an afterthought. It’s as if Jesus paused just before going back to heaven and exclaimed, “Oh, I almost forgot; I want you to go into all the world now and preach the gospel to all nations.” Many Christians don’t seem to think that doing this is all that important. But Genesis 12 shows that from the very beginning God’s purpose to bless and save has always had a universal scope.

If you want to know what God has really been up to from the start, here it is. God, you see, is not chauvinistic. Even with Abraham the Lord was not forming an exclusive club for the private enjoyment of his blessings. God is not a tribal deity, the God of one particular race or nation to the exclusion of all others. He has never intended to bestow his love upon just one chosen group while shutting out all the others from his favor and barring them from his presence.

It’s our natural tendency as human beings to think of our own nations or ethnic groups as the best and most important people on earth. For example, the traditional Chinese name for their land is the Middle Kingdom, because they saw China as the center of the world, with all other countries being on the edges. The prime meridian – zero degrees longitude – runs through Greenwich, England, just outside London, because the British measured everything from there.

This same ethnocentric perspective is evident in human languages as well. The ancient Greeks called all non-Greeks barbaroi, or barbarians, because to their ears foreign tongues sounded like “bar-bar-bar-bar” – the braying of animals, not the speech of real human beings. Many tribal languages use the word that simply means “person” or “human” in their language for the name of their group, thus implying that all others are something less than that.

We humans are incurably tribal. We all tend to believe that our tribe, however we think of it – our country, our race, our ethnic group, our region, our clan or family – is superior to all others. Ethnocentrism is among the most deep-seated of all prejudices. And it is one that God is most determined to overcome.

So God intends to bless all peoples, and he started with Abraham. But he made it clear in doing so that Abraham, and the people Israel after him, were to be the instruments through whom God would eventually bring a way of salvation that would be for everyone on earth.