This promise is general. It is not detailed at all. But it is hardly insubstantial. God makes it clear to Abraham that He—God—is going to be the source of all blessings for Abraham. God's is the task to show Abraham a new land. God will lead Abraham. God will morph Abraham into a "great nation;" God will make his "name great." Notice also that God says He will extend the blessings far beyond Abraham himself, or even beyond his immediate family or his clan or a nation coming from him. God says that "all the families of the earth" will be blessed in him. This is far more than a personal promise. This is a promise global in scope.
Both the promise of land and what I call fecundity—that is, population—are natural outgrowths of the Genesis 12 promise that we looked at just a moment ago. In that promise, you will recall, God assures Abraham he will become "a great nation."
Secondly now (and I have five points here), let us turn our attention to God's promise that He will make of Abraham "a great nation." We saw this in Genesis 12:2. I think it was mentioned in a few of those other promises as well. God said that He would make of Abraham a great nation.
How did this promise preach to Abraham the gospel of God's kingdom? In answer to that question, let us start with a well-known scripture, I Peter 2:9. Peter is here quoting Deuteronomy, and he is speaking to the Church. I want you to notice that. He is not speaking nationally. He is not speaking to physical Israelites in that sense, but he is speaking to the church, to God's people.
God's children make up a nation. Now, please turn to Daniel 2. I want to spend a few minutes on Daniel 2 because I think sometimes we misunderstand Daniel 2 a little bit. This points to a kingdom, or nation, which is eternal. Daniel, in interpreting Nebuchadnezzar's dream, refers to the stone which strikes the image at its feet, destroying it. Of the image's successor nation, the nation which grows up after it, Daniel has this to say in verse 44:
The event to which Daniel refers takes place at the start of the Millennium, when Christ takes over the governments of the "present evil world." But this nation-building by God continues from that point. It just does not stop there. It is an ongoing matter. Daniel's comments do not speak of a physical nation that is established at the start of the Millennium with its head in Jerusalem because that physical nation established it.
The Millennium itself is a time which is going to end. Daniel's nation is going to last forever. It will last beyond the Millennium, and it will last past the White Throne Period. Daniel speaks of a spiritual nation, a nation outside history. It is beyond history. It is a great nation that is so special, so very different from other nations, because it will not decay or fall into oblivion with the ebb and flow of history like every other nation has done.
We saw that God's promises of land to Abraham had imbedded in it the idea of eternity—inheritance forever. Likewise, God's promise to him regarding great-nationhood also has imbedded within it the idea of eternity.
Now, of course, this does not deny that God's promise to make of Abraham a great nation has typical fulfillments, or national fulfillment. It certainly does. In the kingdom of David, that of Solomon, and even in the ascendancy of Ephraim and Manasseh as hegemonies in this day and age, these are all typical fulfillments of those promises.
But, these are only types. The final great nation to come from Abraham will devolve on his heirs, those "in Christ," as Galatians 3:29 puts it. The great nation of which God speaks to Abraham is the nation without end—the Kingdom of God.
As we finish chapter 11, it is immediately followed by the calling and separation of Abram in Genesis 12.
I want you to see verse 3 in relation to chapter 11, verses 1-9. All the nations are put under a curse because of what they did at Babel and so they are away from the blessings of God. But God has not forgotten His purpose, and now we see in chapter 12 that He is going to separate one man away from the families and nations of earth, and through him all of the nations of earth will be blessed.
You can see a pattern developing that helps the church to understand its unique position in relation to God and the world. The pattern here is going to be repeated in the church. So we look at the Old Testament and what do we see? One family being separated out from the nations of the world; being a blessing to all the families of the world that are now being cursed.
Now, you might not be aware of it, but that blessing is so important, that it is repeated five times within the book of Genesis alone. If something is repeated that often, God wants us to get something—there is something important here. We will only look at two of them. Turn to Genesis 22, and see why there needs to be this blessing. This is being repeated to Abraham:
That is in the past tense. It is directly tied to Abraham’s obedience. Then in chapter 26, we find that it is spoken to Isaac,
The nations of Genesis 10 and 11 are going to be blessed because of Abraham’s obedience. This includes every nation on the earth.
That puts a bit of a responsibility on the world—on the Gentiles. This was repeated in Genesis 27, only this time it was spoken to Jacob.
What that original promise to Abraham contained, then, were two conditions: (1) Israel had to be faithful, and (2) the nations had to respond by blessing God's covenant people.
This is the beginning of the promise we just read of there in Deuteronomy 1:8, but that promise is gradually expanded to include more.
Instead of just being a vague promise of land, now we have some dimensions that are set, and those dimensions go all the way from the River Nile to the River Euphrates. I am not going to go through the whole promise as it has expanded from time to time, but we are going to jump all the way to Romans 4 and update this into New Testament, New Covenant times.
The promises expanded out of the land of Palestine from between the two great rivers, the River Nile and the River Euphrates, and now we find Abraham is going to inherit the entire world. It gets even greater than that because we find in the book of Hebrews:
Well, that includes, if we can believe what the Bible says, everything that God has created, that has been inherited by Jesus Christ, and we are coheirs with Him. Think of that in terms of what is said all the way back there in Deuteronomy. The land is before you. And brethren, the land is before you, but now it is exceedingly greater than it ever was all the way back in that time. God is not offering us some puny and unusable knickknack, but we are to be coheirs with Christ of God's awesome creation, and eternal life in addition so that we might enjoy it forever! That is something that is almost too big. It is impossible for my mind to encompass that. But in Hebrews 11:
This is what we see in the Exodus Passover. Israel's sins were mercifully overlooked because of God's faithfulness and covenant loyalty to Abraham (Genesis 12:2-3; 15:13-16; Exodus 2:23-25; 6:4-6). The Passover represents the beginning of Israel's relationship with God. It demonstrates God's profound grace in initiating fellowship with a sinful nation, and delivering those who believed Him at least enough to follow the Passover instructions.
