The Gospel Coalition

-3-

Not too long after this whole tower business God called a man named Abraham to leave his home and go to a new country. (Ok, actually his name was Abram at this point, but everyone remembers him as Abraham). When God called Abraham he made a lot of big promises. He promised to bless Abraham and to bless everyone who blessed Abraham. He promised to curse everyone who cursed Abraham. He promised Abraham a land and a child. God promised that Abraham would be the father of a great nation and that all nations would be blessed through him.  Pretty much, all the blessing that God wanted to give Adam and Eve he promised to Abraham. And the best part was this time God was going to do everything himself to make sure Abraham got his blessing.

You might think that God wanted to bless Abraham because he was such a swell guy. But if you thought that you’d be wrong. Abraham didn’t know God at all when God called him. And even after  God called him, Abraham could still be a liar and a bit of a scaredy-cat. Abraham only had two things going for him: God promised to bless him and Abraham believed God’s promise. That’s all Abraham had going for him. Good thing that’s all he needed.

At times it looked as if God wasn’t going to keep his promises to Abraham. For starters, it was like a hundred years before Abraham and his wife Sarah (who used to be called Sarai) had a baby named Isaac (who, thankfully, was always called Isaac). And then when the baby became a boy God told Abraham to kill him. That must have seemed like a not-so-funny way to make a great nation out of Abraham, but Abraham listened to God anyways. And at the last second, God gave Abraham a ram to sacrifice instead of his beloved son. It was God’s way of saying, “I’ll take care of the rescuing. Just trust me.”

Well eventually Isaac grew up, got married, and had some kids of his own.  Twins to be exact–Esau and Jacob. God picked Jacob to get the blessing even though he was the younger brother and wasn’t supposed to get the blessing. But God is God so he gets to pick. Jacob had twelve sons and this time it was the fourth son, Judah, who wound up with the blessing. Jacob told Judah that a lion of a leader would come from his family.

They may sound like pretty decent folks, but Abraham’s family was even more messed up than Abraham. Isaac was sort of weakling. Jacob was a selfish trickster. And Judah did such dumb stuff we don’t even want to talk about it.

But God kept his promises all the same. He blessed the whole lot of them despite themselves. Things were on track for the Snake-Crusher to come from the gnarled Abraham-Isaac-Jacob family tree.

-4-

Several hundred years later, however, it looked like things had gotten way off track. See, when God told Abraham to leave his home, he promised to give him a new land in Canaan. It was going to be a great land. It was supposed to remind God’s people of the Garden they once had. But Abraham and his sons never really possessed the land they were promised. And now four hundred years later Abraham’s family were slaves in Egypt.

How they got to Egypt is a long story, but basically they went to Egypt because their was a famine in Canaan, and when they got to Egypt Jacob’s sons found their long lost brother Joseph, who helped get them food and a place to live even though he was there because his ten old brothers had been jealous and sold him into slavery. (I told you it was a long story.)

Well, delivering them from famine was one thing. That’s when Israel’s family was still pretty small (Israel, by the way, was Jacob’s new name; I guess everyone needed two names back then). But how would God save over two million people from slavery? It’s not like he could just turn the Nile River to blood and send frogs and gnats and flies and disease and boils and hail and locusts and darkness and death until Egypt’s Pharaoh let them go. Actually, that’s exactly what God did. God raised up Moses to deliver his people, but in reality God did all the work. He sent the plagues. He led the people with a fire and a cloud. He made the sea turn to dry land so the Israelites could walk through, and he turned the dry land back to sea when the Egyptians tried to cross. It seemed that no matter what they did or what people did to them God always found a way to save his people.

to be continued…