Genesis 12:2-3

“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 first promise, I will make you into a great nation, must have stunned, and possibly confused Abram, since he was already seventy-five and had no children at this point. I’m certain that Abram, even though he believed God, could have had no idea what this promise would mean. He could have never dreamed that this promise would reach so far – even into 2011!! This was the nation from which the Messiah would come – and within which all of us would eventually be counted. Amazing!

The second promise: I will make your name great… Do you see the irony of this when we look back to Genesis 11, in which the builders of the Tower of Babel were out to make a name for themselves? We learned then that our goal is to make God’s name great, not ours! But, here, God promises to make Abraham’s name great, because of Abraham’s faith!

The third promise? … all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Apparently God likes to bless! In just these two verses, the word, “bless,” or a form of the word is used five times! Beth Moore says, in her study, The Patriarchs, “God’s purpose in blessing one is to bless many.” ALL the peoples on the earth were to be blessed through Abraham, because salvation was to come through his line.

The promise of salvation was not just to the Jews, but to the entire world! For God so loved the world we’re told in John 3:16. I find it interesting that the Jews never seem to have caught the evangelical fervor that this promise implies. Have you? We are blessed in order to be a blessing. Even as Abram was to be about the work of spiritual reproduction, so are we! And even as Abram could never have foreseen what God truly had planned, we cannot fathom what God longs to do through us and what He will do through us when we believe Him and go where He has called us to go – into all the world - the world of our families, our neighborhoods, our workplaces -  all beyond anything we could imagine.

One of my life verses is Ephesians 3:20 - Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us… My prayer this morning is that, as heirs to of the promises made to Abram, we will trust God to use us in ways that bless others way beyond the scope of our imagining!