Author: jetbrane

12 Now the Lord had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father’s house,
To a land that I will show you.
2 I will make you a great nation;
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

As we consider this passage this morning we want to note that this passage is one of the peaks of the Old Covenant. Here in chapter 12 there is a turning to a new theme from what has gone on previously. In the past few weeks you have been with me as I have tried to teach the children that the Bible can be read in terms of macro themes as Creation, Fall, Redemption and Glorification. In Gen. 12, the acorn promise of Redemption in Gen. 3:15 begins to be fleshed out. There in Gen. 3:15 we learned that the seed of the woman, being wounded by the Serpent, would eventually crush the head of the serpent.

After that glimmer of hope though the first 11 chapters of Genesis for the most part, following the Creation account and the Fall brings to light the horrid consequences of the fall and sin. However, when we arrive at Gen. 12 w/ God’s promises to Abram there is a turn to a focus on what Redemption, blessing and reconciliation w/ God will look like. At Gen. 12 there is growth in the acorn of redemption that was first stated in Gen. 3:15. We learn here that God intends to bless His people through the progeny descending from Abraham. We learn that Redemption and reconciliation and blessing is going to be related to the offspring of Abraham.

So, as we launch into this we would say that this call of Abram here, rightly interpreted per the witness of Scripture, is a sneak preview for the unfolding of Redemption. Here we find the beginning of the story of how God intends to bring salvation to all the tribes and nations of the earth through God’s keeping of these promises to Abram. The parameters of this promise to Abraham will be further expanded with subsequent covenants with Moses, and David but those subsequent covenants are always rooted in these promises to Abraham and God’s promise to raise up a Redeemer to crush the serpent’s head. All of these promises are then fulfilled with the coming of Jesus Christ to whom they all ultimately refer.

The elements of Abraham’s call are reaffirmed to Abraham (12:7; 15:5–21; 17:4–8; 18:18–19; 22:17–18), to Isaac (26:24), to Jacob (28:13–15; 35:11–12; 46:3), to Judah (49:8–12), to Moses (Exod. 3:6–8; Deut. 34:4), and to the ten tribes of Israel (Deut 33). They are reaffirmed by Joseph (Gen. 50:24), by Peter to the Jews (Acts 3:25), and by Paul to the Gentiles (Gal. 3:8).

In this promise to Abram we find four promises that we will look at briefly. We will consider how God kept His promises penultimately … and then how those promises were ultimately focused on Christ and how they are kept in Christ. Then we will seek to spend a little bit of time noting how badly this Scripture has been mauled by modern Evangelicals.

Very well then … in this promise of Redemption we see four promises. As we go into this remember the context. Gen. 11 is the tower of Babel where men are seeking to make a name for themselves Independent of God. In Gen. 12:2 God promises to make Abram’s name great as a means of making God’s own name great. As a macro consideration this is the great anti-thesis we find in Scripture. Fallen men apart from God are forever seeking to make their name great while God’s people are blessed with a great name as they pursue the greatness of God’s name.

As we get into the text we see here that God makes four promises. God promises to

1.) Bless Abram Himself
2.) To give Abram a Land 12:1 made explicit in vs. 7

7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your seed I will give this land.”

3.) To give Abram offspring – 12:2 (I will make you a great nation)
4.) Bless nations through Abram 12:3 (In you all the nations of the world will be blessed.)

As we said a few seconds ago, these promises are reiterated to Abraham’s descendants in the Pentateuch.

Now as we consider the fulfillment of these penultimately we note that

1.) God did indeed bless Abram. The man was given a son in old age who in turn had two sons who in turn had many many sons. Abram was the head of a large household and was considerably wealthy. God did make the name of Abram great via the triumph of his later Son King David. Abram died in peace seeing God’s blessing upon him.

2.) As to the land promise Abram was given the land of Canaan. In vs. 7 we see Abram in Canaan building an Altar

And there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. (7)

The building of altars is not insignificant. That altar was a means of claiming the land. It was the equivalent of an explorer planting his nation’s flag on newly discovered soil and claiming it for one’s people. In the building of that Alter Abram was claiming the land as his.

3.) Abram promised offspring was emphasized in Gen. 15, a few chapters later;

And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.

And of course as we read the record of the old covenant we do see that Abraham’s seed was prolific. God kept his promise.

4.) Now as to the promise to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, well, that comes to pass but only eventually.

Now, keep in mind that we said at the outset that there were two fulfillments here. There is a penultimate fulfillment that we have just considered but there is also a ultimate fulfillment that we are about to consider. But before we consider the ultimate fulfillment let us say here we live in a time and have for some decades now where many if not most Christians consider the penultimate fulfillment as the ultimate fulfillment. They misread the text in Gen. 12 errantly because they have been convinced that Gen. 12 does not have an ultimate fulfillment that makes the previous penultimate fulfillment obsolete.

In this regard much of the church in America reminds us of the problem that the writer to the book of the Hebrews was dealing with. There in the book of Hebrews the writer is dealing w/ people who want to go back to the old covenant, leaving Christ who was the fulfillment of the old covenant. Over and over again the writer to the Hebrews reminds them that Christ has fulfilled the Old covenant and so provided a new and better covenant.

The fact that people want to live in terms of the old covenant is seen in our time by the fact that people want to see Israel – The descendants of Abraham – as still being the nation that we Gentiles are required to bless. People want to understand Genesis 12 as if it is still operative in its old covenant penultimate sense.

This errant reading of Gen. 12 was put on display recently when being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, Sen. Ted Cruz said, seeking to clarify his reasoning for his support of Israel;

“The reason for supporting Israel is twofold. No. 1, as a Christian, growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible, ‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.’ And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things…  “So that’s in the Bible. As a Christian I believe that.”

This kind of errant understanding is prolific among the Church today. Indeed, I would hazard to say it is the majority reading of Scripture today. But this reading of Scripture like this was never done in all of Church history until the rise of a heretical teaching beginning in the mid 1800s or so that went by the name “Dispensationalism.”

To see how the errant reading of Scripture has taken hold take an informal poll among your own Christian friends. Ask them if, according to Scripture, it is important to support modern Israel. Don’t argue with them. Just listen to their answer and then change the subject on to something else.

We are contending here that Genesis 12 has now to be understood in light of its ultimate meaning and to read it according to its penultimate meaning is to go back to the shadows of the old covenant. The great witness of Scripture and of most of the Church through the centuries until the mid to late 1800s is that these temporal fulfillments found in the OT expansion of Israel were not the ultimate teleos or end or goal of the promise in Gen. 12. In other words, as we are going to learn, the ultimate goal of the promises of Gen. 12 was not the rise of the nation State of Israel, or the continuation of the nation State Israel. The ultimate teleos or end or goal of Genesis 12, as we are going to see from Scripture was the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and by extension the building up of His church.

As we turn to the new covenant so as to rightly interpret the old covenant we see that these promises in Genesis 12 were always located in Christ and by extension His Church.

As we turn to the NT we see that the promise to Abram to have a land we find in Gen. 12 was never ultimately about Canaan but pointed to something more that is provided in Christ. As we consider the land promise we are reminded that the land promise indicated that God was not going to abandon his plan to establish His concrete Kingdom on earth. God had a land in Eden that was violated and so the land was given up when our first parents fell. God had a land in Canaan but with the disobedience of Israel God vomited them out of the land.

Paul tells us in Romans that this land promise is still in play;

For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world was not given through the law, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. Romans 4:13

God still has a Kingdom though and that Kingdom and the land of that Kingdom is answered in Christ who says, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” The earth is now God’s Kingdom. Yes, there remain rebels in His Kingdom but God’s people shall inherit the land in due time. We find this articulated subtly again in Ephesians 6 where the promise from the 10 commandments that honoring Father and Mother will mean living long in the King’s land that He is giving them is now applied to New Covenant children in the context of obeying their parents. The promise of land is now unto the meek who shall inherit the earth. The earth is God’s land and God’s people as the King’s subjects are promised to inherit the earth. So the promise to Abraham is not limited to Old Covenant terms. The middle East is not a land that belongs to Jews by divine right. The Jews violated that covenant and God via the Romans Vespasian and Titus cast them out of the land. The middle East and the whole earth belongs to God’s people… To Christians. The promised land to Abraham finds its ultimate fulfillment in God’s people inheriting the earth under the authority of King Jesus.

To read the promise to Abraham that the modern Jews, if you can genetically find any, still have a divine right to the land, per Gen. 12, is to warp the meaning of Scripture. It is to set Scripture on its head so that the New and better covenant no longer exists.

So, that is the land promise. We have the promise that we shall inherit the earth, and we know that in glorification we will move on to that eternal city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. (Hebrews 11:10).

II.) Seed

We move on to the next promise that was penultimately fulfilled for Abram but which always had a grander fulfillment in view. That promise is the promise of offspring. God tells Abram that He is going to make of him a great nation.

In Genesis 22:18, after Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, God reaffirms His promise of future seed;

“And through your offspring all nations of the earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” (Genesis 22:18)

The penultimate fulfillment of God keeping His promise is seen in the growth of the Hebrew people. Abraham has one son… that one son (Isaac) has two sons (Jacob & Esau) and Jacob has 12 sons and eventually the Hebrews become so many that the Egyptians are worried about the Hebrews would become too powerful and become an internal threat to them resulting in Pharaoh enslaving them and they continue to grow as a people from their forward.

However, that is not the ultimate fulfillment of the promise to Abraham that he will be made into a great nation. The ultimate fulfillment of this promise to Abraham of having a seed we are later taught by Scripture is the Lord Jesus Christ;

“The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say, ‘and to seeds,’ meaning many, but ‘and to your seed,’ meaning One, who is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16)

The ultimate fulfillment then of this Gen. 12 promise to Abraham of future seed is Jesus Christ and His people with Him, which we learn a few vs. earlier in Galatians;

7 Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham. 8 And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, “In you all the nations shall be blessed.” 9 So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham.

29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

Now what impact does this have on us in 2025. Well, if Christ and His people are the ultimate fulfillment of the promised seed to Abraham then by necessity that means Jews who still embrace their false religion should be in no way referred to as “the chosen people.” Talmudic Jews or secular Jews are not God’s chosen people any more or any less than unbelieving people group. In point of fact it really is blasphemy to own a theology which speaks of unbelieving Jews as if they remain God’s chosen people. God’s chosen people …. His seed … are those who are of faith who are blessed with believing Abraham. This is so true that we can rightly say today that God’s promise to Abraham to make a great nation finds its ultimate fulfillment in the Church where God draws people from every tribe, tongue, and nation to create a redeemed nation of nations.

The Scripture thus requires us to abominate any theology that teaches that God loves Talmudists or secular Bagels any more or less than He loves Hindus, Mooselimbs, or Satanists. The Scripture thus requires us to abominate any theology that teaches that God loves ethnic Bagels (if you can find any) any more or less than He loves ethnic Mongolians, Intuits, Venezuelans, or Hutus. It is Christ and His people whom are God’s chosen. It is Jesus Christ and His Church that are beloved of God.

We dishonor Christ when we own a theology that prioritizes Bagels simply because they are Bagels (if indeed they genetically are).

If the Church is ever to return to health it must give up this line of thinking that somehow it is incumbent upon us to bless those who hate Christ.

The mind of Christ will plead with all men – unbelieving Bagels or Gentiles — Han Chinese or Ethnic Bagels, to understand their peril before a Just God and to repent before it is too late. This is the greatest love can give to unbelieving Jews. This is the greatest blessing I can bless upon Jews.

Conclusion

Promise and fulfillment.

The Old Covenant is a book of promises that will often find penultimate fulfillments that await ultimate fulfillments that reveal Jesus the Christ and His Church. Once that ultimate fulfillment has come the penultimate fulfillment slips away.

Now, however, this once standard way of reading the Scripture – a way of reading the Scripture that is required by the Scriptures – is now derisively labeled by some as “replacement theology,” where the accusation is that we who read the Scriptures, Scripturally on this subject are guilty of the crime of replacing God’s intention towards nation-state Israel with God’s intention towards Jesus Christ and His Church.

The irony here is that those who accuse Biblical Christians of replacement theology are the ones guilty of what they accuse us of doing. Those who bring this charge against us are guilty of replacing the substance of the covenant Promise (Christ and His Church) with the shadows. They are replacing the ultimate with the proximate.