Genesis 12:1–9 — The Blessing of God

I want to begin today by asking a question that I think it is very important every Christian

is able to answer.

What does it mean to be blessed?

Specifically, what does the blessing of God look like?

You don't have to sit at too many tables in the Midwest, at least, before having someone

say a blessing over a meal.

And I've had a few baristas tell me to have a blessed day over the years, and I'm not

entirely sure what they mean, and they might not either.

If you want to get a pulse on what people think blessed means, just search the actual

hashtag blessed. And you'll find an odd assortment of Bible verses, many of them taken out of context,

and pictures of people's pets, and the occasional person showing off their really expensive new car

or mansion. So is blessing a condition of having wealth or health or good luck of some kind?

Or is it some kind of mysterious peace that comes from choosing to be thankful,

uncomfortable with what you have? Does being blessed have anything to do with being comfortable

at all? As with all things, the world will define blessing in a self-serving kind of way,

but as followers of Jesus, we have a higher authority. We want our thoughts and beliefs

to be formed and shaped by the word of God. And so today, that's where we're going to go.

And we're going to learn a lot about the blessing of God, what it is and what it isn't,

and how we are to respond to it and obtain it, actually.

Last week, we read about these nations who existed for their own glory

and in their own wisdom, they tried to provide for and protect themselves and glorify themselves.

And the result was literally towers that were unfinished and fell apart

and kingdoms that crumbled to be nothing more than a footnote in history.

But we were also introduced to this humble man right at the end who came with no qualifications,

but who God was going to make into a nation.

And today, we're going to see God make this promise to the man Abram.

And in his life, we'll see an example of what it looks like to respond rightly to that blessing of God.

Ultimately, this blessing promised to Abram is not just for him, but for us too,

because this blessing is fulfilled in the coming of Christ.

So as we find a biblical answer to the question I asked,

what does the blessing of God look like?

We're going to see two things really clearly.

First, the blessing of God is found in belonging to Christ.

And second, those who are found in Christ are marked by a living faith.

There's one passage that kept coming back to mind as I mulled over this one and this sermon

over this week, and it's Proverbs 3, verses 5 and 6, and it says,

Proverbs 3:5

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

So over the next 20 or so minutes, I want you to evaluate your own heart in light of

God's word and really examine your own faith to determine, am I really seeking the blessing that

comes from trusting Jesus with all my heart? Or am I leaning on my own understanding and seeking

my own comfort? Am I acknowledging him in all of my ways? And am I proclaiming him? So you examine

and I'll do the same. And let's grow together thanks to the work of the spirit through the

word of God. Let's read first verses one through three of Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

Now the Lord said to Abram,

Abram would not have been my first pick for the man to make into a great nation.

Abram came from originally Ur, the place called Ur, which was a known center of idol worship

to a moon god.

And if you remember that tower or what we would call a ziggurat today that these prideful

people tried to build at Babel, well, the Chaldeans finished theirs.

And we actually know what it looked like because we found it in the early 1900s.

Ur was a deeply pagan land.

And we know from Joshua chapter 24 that Abram's father, I think I misspoke last week and said

Joshua 24 · chapter mention

father-in-law, but it was his father was known for his ongoing idol worship.

So Abram is also an old man at 75 with a wife who has never been able to have children and

is only a little bit younger than he is. And unlike Noah, Abram is not praised as being

particularly righteous. He has not been walking with God. And to our eyes, he seems very unimpressive.

But God chooses him and calls him and promises to bless him. And you'll see this pattern all

throughout scripture with God choosing people who are rather unassuming and unqualified and

unexpected to us and blessing them. And all of the initiative or the work to provide this blessing

is clearly on the part of God alone. Abram is called to go follow where God is calling him,

but he has not earned any of what God promises to give him. Look at the way God describes this

gift. He says, I will show, I will make, I will bless. I will show you where to go. I will make

you into a great nation and I will bless you. Look at the posture of God towards this unworthy

man who has nothing to earn God's favor. It's a posture of unearned blessing and favor.

And we have a word for this. It's grace. The grace of God is shown to Abram, this unearned

favor and blessing. But at the end of verse two and three, we have some additional context for this

blessing. Earthly blessing in the ancient world and today was largely thought of as this accumulation

of wealth or comforts or success or power to be enjoyed by the individual. But at the end of verse

two, God says he's going to do all of this so that you will be a blessing. Huh. So unlike the blessing

of the world. The blessing of God is meant to not only be to his chosen people, but it is meant to

flow through his people. And in Abram's case, this blessing will flow potentially to a whole lot of

people. According to verse 3, all the families of the earth will be blessed. So what does this mean?

Well, the first hearers of Genesis would have heard the echoes of chapter 3 verse 15,

with the one who is coming to crush the serpent's head.

They would have remembered this blessing of Shem at the end of chapter 9

with the expectation of these scattered peoples of the world

finding rest in this kingdom of the descendant of Shem.

They would have remembered the family line that led to Abram

and known that this promise was pointing forward to some sort of savior

that they would eventually call the Messiah.

Later Old Testament readers would have also remembered what God said to Israel just before

Moses went up on the mountain to receive the law, saying in Exodus 19 that you shall be

to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Holy means set apart.

And a priest is a representative of God to the people.

And the nation of Israel was to be a representative nation ministering to the nations.

And we have even greater context than that because we know that the Messiah has come.

And we know that his name is Jesus.

Jesus is at the end of this messianic thread that begins with the coming of the serpent

crusher foretold in 3.15.

And it is Jesus who is actually the fulfillment of every single one of these promises.

And in verse 7, jumping ahead just a little bit, when God appears to Abram in the land of Canaan,

he talks about how this land will be given to your offspring.

Now, there are people who will argue strongly and biblically the case that ethnic Israel

will be given this land forever.

But we're not going to get into that today because this verse is not a part of that argument,

or at least it shouldn't be, because this verse is promising something even better.

It says, this land will be given to your offspring, but the word for offspring is singular.

So this verse is saying that dominion over this land will be given to a specific one

of Abram's offspring. And we know who this is because this is Jesus to whom belongs not only

this land, but all dominion and authority in heaven and on earth. And so when we are talking

about the blessing of God, that blessing is ultimately found and understood in Jesus Christ.

Because ultimately, all of humanity is under the curse of sin, right? Which means the blessing

of God is going to be the reversal of that curse. And that is exactly what Jesus has accomplished

through his death and his resurrection. The gift of salvation that we are unqualified for,

that we have not earned, is given by God's grace and it is received through faith.

So now that we've clarified this incredible blessing of God, let's talk about how we get it.

Galatians chapter 3 verse 7 says,

Galatians 3:7

Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.

So that blessing was going to be available to all the families of the earth,

meaning every person can be brought into this blessing of God, and it is through faith.

So let's look at Abram's faith for starters, his response to this blessing in verses 4 through 9.

So Abram went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him.

Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran, and Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot

his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered and the people that

they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan.

When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem,

to the oak of Moreh. At that time, the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram

and said, To your offspring I will give this land. So he built there an altar to the Lord who had

appeared to him, and from there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched

his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord,

and called upon the name of the Lord.

And Abram journeyed on, still going toward the Negev.

I love how straightforward verse 4 is.

So Abram went as the Lord had told him.

There's a few things that actually make Abram leaving a big deal.

And this is not as easy as like calling the moving company

and giving them the address to your new house.

He's leaving his family behind.

And these people that are his tribe and his support network and his flesh and blood.

And also, Abram is no spring chicken.

He's a 75-year-old man at this point.

He would have been considered middle-aged at best compared to the standard lifespan.

And his wife is only a little bit younger than him.

Finally, Abram doesn't even know where he's going exactly.

This gives me anxiety just thinking about it.

There's no itinerary.

There's no clear destination.

It's just leave everyone behind and go and I will show you.

The choice to go required faith.

But already the faith of Abram is different from what we would hear some people call faith sometimes, right?

We've just finished defining blessing differently.

And now let's take a shot at defining faith with scripture as well.

What do we learn about faith from Abram's example?

Well, first, it's more than a feeling.

And its existence is proven by action.

I've heard people try to define their faith often as a kind of feeling or something that

they think personally might be true.

But if the truth that you say you believe doesn't cause you to actually respond and

live in a specific way, I think you and I would both question, is that really real faith? If I

stood in a burning building and told people, I really believe the building is on fire and is

burning down. And then I sat down and had another cup of coffee. I feel like people would question

whether I really believed what I was saying or not. Hebrews 11, 8 in the New Testament actually

brings up the example of Abram saying that he walked by faith, not by sight, going to

an unknown place.

It's similar to what the Proverbs verse told us, right?

That we trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not on our own understanding.

In the absence of a map, a plan, and a promised child who, by the way, would not be born for

another 25 years. Abram has faith that God will fulfill his promises. He trusts God with all his

heart. And real active faith like that of Abram is proven by obedience. So don't misunderstand me

here. This is really important. Faith is not the same as obedience. Remember, you can't earn God's

gracious blessing. But as James says in his letter, a faith that doesn't result in actions is a dead

kind of faith. That's my paraphrase. And we want to be people who, like Abram, have a living faith

that causes us to go, right? So Abram goes, and he ends up coming to the land of Canaan, which

interestingly is a land filled with pagan people who were very serious, in fact, about their idol

worship. They had a couple of places to them that were really important. They had this place called

the Oak of Moreh, and this was a place with big trees where they believed their gods would use

them as oracles to speak to them. So instead of reading tea leaves or checking their Enneagram

number, these people were listening to the leaves on the trees, quite possibly with the aid of some

hallucinogenic substances, which, by the way, is a practice we see in almost every pagan religion

worldwide. There's a reason that God warns his people against practitioners of magic and witchcraft,

and it has everything to do with the spiritual forces behind those practices. The Canaanites had

another place in the hill country called Bethel, where they had a temple for worshiping their head

god, who is called El. So armed with that knowledge, it's interesting that the Lord leads Abram first

to Shechem, to the Oak of Moray. And what does Abram do there? He builds an altar to the one

true God and worships God in the very place that false gods were sought after.

And then where does he go from there?

To Bethel.

And what does he do there?

It says he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.

And it's here that God says to him, I will give to your offspring this land.

Almost as if God is specifically saying this land belongs to me and it is mine to give.

Abram does not go creeping quietly through this land of pagan worshipers.

He boldly goes and intentionally proclaims that the Lord is God.

Isn't it interesting that in all of Abram's wandering through Canaan, he doesn't leave

a single city or tower or building as his legacy in that place.

The only thing that he leaves behind are altars of worship to the one true God.

His faith in promised blessing of God caused him to boldly proclaim the goodness of God.

Worship is a right response to what we believe about who God is and what he has done.

This kind of hits me in a special way because I served as a worship leader in a few churches

over about 15 years from my late teens to my early 30s.

And the one thing I always struggled with was getting people to actually sing, which is

the whole purpose of having a song leader.

It's not supposed to be a performance.

It's not a show.

It's not a concert.

At least that's what we say as we put people on a huge stage, give them microphones and

stage lights and fog and professional musicians.

Over the years, I started to figure out that there were a multitude of things that were

contributing to this lack of singing. There were songs that were written with a range designed for

opera, not for congregational singing. There were songs that said things that weren't quite true

or were confusing. There were songs that were in a key for performing, not for congregational

singing. And the more I got into God's Word, the more I was convinced of the importance

of the people of God actually responding to God in the songs that we sing. More than just singing,

we needed to respond and worship him, to proclaim who God is and what he has done

because we believe it. And what I found out was that the core issue had nothing to do with music

at all. It had almost everything to do with the heart of the people. This wasn't primarily

an issue that musicianship alone could solve.

This was going to require discipleship.

Abram shows us that people who have faith in God

and are responding to that faith by walking according to his instructions

have a desire to proclaim his goodness that almost can't be contained.

How appropriate that Taylor is preaching a sermon next week for us on John chapter 4,

John 4 · chapter mention

which is the infamous conversation with the woman at the well who has some questions about worship.

So as we close up this passage today, I want to come back to those questions that I asked in the

beginning. Are you seeking the blessing of God in Christ Jesus? This blessing that reverses the curse,

that gives us peace with God, that gives us life abundantly and eternally. These are the

blessings that are promised to us in Christ. This blessing is better than earthly comforts that will

come and go. And in the next part of this passage, we'll actually look at in about two weeks,

there's this famine that comes to the land and Abram starts to lean on his own understanding

and it causes trouble. The second question was, are you acknowledging God in all your ways?

Put another way, how's your faith? Is it a living faith that is actively responding to the God you

trust by obeying his word and seeking after his heart? Is it a living faith that is causing you

to regularly proclaim the goodness of God in a land that is filled with idol worship?

If these questions are making you very uncomfortable, join the club. But the good

news is that the solution for all of us is the same. If you've been living your life trying to

manufacture your own blessings according to the world, accumulates all of your own blessings,

you can leave all those empty desires behind and you'll actually find fulfillment in Jesus. You can

have peace like a river attending your soul no matter how dry the rest of your life looks and

feels because Jesus says he is the living water. He is better than any earthly blessing. So seek

the blessings of God first and find them in Jesus. If you're having a hard time proclaiming the

goodness of God, worshiping him wholeheartedly, sharing the good news, the good news is that

there's a remedy for that too. And it's also found in knowing Jesus. When we come to Jesus,

when we get to know his heart for us, the way that it is revealed through his word,

when his spirit begins to turn our heart of stone into a heart of flesh,

worshiping him is not a tall order. In fact, it's something that we can't help but do.

Ekklesia is a church of house churches

gathering weekly in Council Bluffs, Iowa

and in homes throughout the week.

We are a Bible-centered church

focused on preaching from Scripture

and making disciples of Jesus.

You can learn more about what we believe

and contact a pastor at ekklesiachurches.org.

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