A Promise to Abraham

Read it: Genesis 12; 15

At Babel, people tried to make a name for themselves and ended up scattered. In Genesis 12 God starts a new plan, and it begins with one man and one sentence.

His name is Abram (later God renames him Abraham, “father of many nations”). He grew up in Ur, a great city in what is now southern Iraq, and his family later moved north to Haran. They were not especially godly. Centuries later Joshua reminded Israel that their ancestors, “including Terah the father of Abraham”, once “worshiped other gods” (Joshua 24:2). God did not choose Abram because he was better than anyone else. He chose him because that is what grace does.

Go

Then the LORD said to Abram: “Leave your country, your kindred, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).

Think what that meant. In the ancient world your family and your land were your safety, your identity and your pension. God asks Abram to leave them for a place He doesn’t even name yet. And then come the promises:

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and all the families of the earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:2–3).

Count the word bless. Five times in two verses. After the curses of Genesis 3 to 11, God is speaking blessing again. And notice: at Babel people wanted to make a name for themselves. Here God says, “I will make your name great.” And the blessing isn’t only for Abram’s family. It’s for “all the families of the earth.” From its very first page, God’s plan to rescue one family is a plan to rescue the world.

“So Abram departed, as the LORD had directed him” (Genesis 12:4). He was seventy-five. He travelled hundreds of miles with his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot and everything they owned, into Canaan, the land roughly where Israel is today. There God appeared to him and said, “I will give this land to your offspring” (Genesis 12:7). Abram built an altar and worshipped.

Not a superhero

Then the story takes a turn that tells you the Bible isn’t a collection of hero legends. A famine hits, and Abram goes down to Egypt. Afraid the Egyptians will kill him to get his beautiful wife, he tells Sarai, “Please say you are my sister” (Genesis 12:13). Pharaoh takes her into his palace, and God has to step in to rescue her. The man of faith has just put the promise in danger to save his own skin.

The Bible is honest about its people. God’s plan doesn’t depend on Abram being impressive. It depends on God keeping His word.

Count the stars

Years pass. Still no child. In Genesis 15 God speaks to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward” (Genesis 15:1). And Abram, honestly, pushes back. What good is any of this, he says, if he has no son? A servant will inherit everything.

So God takes him outside at night. “Now look to the heavens and count the stars, if you are able.” Then He told him, “So shall your offspring be” (Genesis 15:5). Picture the sky with no streetlights, thousands of stars from horizon to horizon, and an old man with no children staring up at it.

Then comes one of the most important sentences in the Bible: “Abram believed the LORD, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). Abram didn’t earn God’s approval. He trusted God’s promise, and God counted him as right with Him.

God takes the oath

Abram asks how he can know he’ll receive the land, and God answers in a way people at that time would understand. In the ancient Near East, two parties could seal a covenant by cutting animals in half and walking between the pieces, as if to say, “May this happen to me if I break my word.”

Abram prepares the animals. As the sun sets, he falls into a deep sleep, and God tells him what lies ahead: his descendants “will be strangers in a land that is not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13), but afterwards God will bring them out. Keep that in mind; it is the story of Exodus. Then, in the dark, “a smoking firepot and a flaming torch appeared and passed between the halves of the carcasses” (Genesis 15:17).

Only God walks between the pieces. Abram doesn’t. God puts the whole weight of the promise on Himself. If it fails, it will be because God failed, and God doesn’t fail.

Where Jesus is in this

The New Testament opens with these words: “This is the record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1). Jesus is where Abraham’s family line was always heading. Paul notices that God’s promise was to Abraham’s “seed”, singular, “meaning One, who is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). And he says that when God promised blessing to all nations, He “foretold the gospel to Abraham” (Galatians 3:8).

So when the good news of Jesus spreads to every nation, that is Genesis 12 coming true. And the way in is the same as Abraham’s. Paul says the words “it was credited to him” were written “also for us, to whom righteousness will be credited—for us who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (Romans 4:23–24). Anyone, from any family on earth, who trusts Jesus belongs: “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29).

Think about it: Abraham was counted right with God not for what he did but for trusting what God promised. Is your faith resting on your own performance, or on God’s promise?

Go deeper: He Holds My Tomorrows by Gareth Evans — Evans reads Abraham’s story through Hebrews 11, showing that God chose a man from an idol-worshipping family as “the starting point of divine recovery from the fall”, and that Abraham simply obeyed and went out, not knowing where he was going. Start with chapter 10, “Abraham”.