Promise and Blessing

 
 
PROMISE AND BLESSING
 
The Blessings of Abraham.
Genesis 12:1 ‘The LORD had said to Abram, Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. 2I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing… and all people on the earth will be blessed through you.”
These blessings were spoken to a man who came from what is now Iraq. He was a man with a heart that wanted to find the one true God. The blessings he received were personal for him but they were corporate for both the Jewish Nation of Israel that was to come through him, and later to the whole world through Jesus. 
 
The Blessings to Israel
Israel first became a nation in Egypt, where they had been in captivity to Pharaoh for four hundred years. God then miraculously delivered them out of Egypt by the hand of Moses who led them through the wilderness on their journey to the Promised Land. God gave Israel the Covenant of the Promises and blessings of the Old Testament and the Commandments of the Law through Moses when they began their wilderness journey. God said to Moses “I am going to give you the land that I promised to Abraham” (Exodus 6:6-8). However, there were conditions that applied for Israel to receive the blessings (Deuteronomy 30:15-20). Moses was told to tell the people that if they loved God and obeyed all the Commandments he gave them, and worshipped God correctly they would receive the blessings of the land and its crops and have good rains in their seasons, but if they disobeyed God and worshipped other gods they would receive no rain, the enemy would take their land, and their crops would fail. In fact, the Bible records a whole page of curses for disobedience.
 
There was a command with a conditional blessing that God gave to them concerning the land which was that they had to give the land a rest for one year in every seven years. This was called the Sabbath Year. There was to be no work, just a happy life together as families and as a community of God’s people, and in that Sabbath Year God would give their crops three times the normal yield, and he would bless them with a holiday year during which time they would bless God back with joy and thanksgiving for their prosperity. 
Another example of a command with a conditional blessing to them as a nation was that if they strayed away from God but then repented and came back to him, to the temple, and prayed with a right heart then God would hear from heaven and forgive them and heal their land - meaning that he would send them rain and grow their crops etc. (2Chronicles 7:14). 
For about 1500 years there were seasons of blessing and obedience, but there were also long stretches of time of disobedience and confusion, and God’s judgment came on Israel. For example, they failed to obey the Sabbath Year for 490 years by not resting and for that disobedience they were sent into captivity in Babylon for seventy years for the land to get its one in every seven years rest (2Chronicles 36:21). The behavior of the people usually fell into line behind the behavior of the kings and the priests, and the prophets would have to call them back to repentance.
 
So what were these Old Testament blessings for and what was the point?
The blessings showed the nations round about them such as Iraq and Iran and Syria and Egypt, that a supernatural God was active and powerful in the heavens on behalf of his people.
The blessings were also simply an act of love and kindness from a good God to his people so that they could live a life of fulfillment and prosperity.
These blessings kept and preserved the nation of Israel intact so that they could become the womb and the cradle for Jesus to come to earth and bring the most profound and wonderful ultimate blessing to them and to the whole world – The gift of God’s life to humanity through Jesus, fulfilling the last clause in the blessing to Abraham which was ‘and all people on the earth will be blessed through you.’

God was telling Abraham here that there would be a new kind of blessing from a new promise about the New Testament Covenant blessing that is radically different from the Old Covenant. This supernatural blessing allows all of humanity to share in the life that Jesus has with his Father in heaven, as explained by Paul in Ephesians. 
Ephesians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with ALL spiritual blessings from Heaven.

The law of the Commandments was given to keep Israel from destroying their moral and relational integrity because the Law was perfect in its wisdom and order for the self-preservation of a community (Psalm 19). That was the best system that could have existed to achieve that end. The Commandments if observed faithfully by anyone, even today, will preserve the integrity of any community and produce outcomes of blessings of all kinds. They are designed to bring peace and order and harmony and prosperity and honesty and good health - and no corrupt politics. 

The new Blessings of the New Covenant are of a far greater supernatural order
The shortcoming of the Law of perfect wisdom and order was that it could not produce a life of oneness in spirit with Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. To receive this ultimate blessing of having God’s life living within us one has to believe the truth of what actually happened in and through Jesus’ life and death and resurrection – and that’s all! It has nothing to do with the Law. However, the Bible tells us that if we are truly living in the Spirit of the life of Jesus we will live out our lives demonstrating the reality and meaning of those Commandments through the grace and power of The Holy Spirit as he makes them real to us (Romans 8:4). Our outer life may become blessed with a new dimension of order and integrity, and that is great reward, but even that virtuous natural reordering of our outward lives is not the spiritual blessings of the promised blessing of Abraham. 

 

All Spiritual Blessings
The spiritual blessing is The Holy Spirit bringing to us the impartation of God’s nature of his goodness and his love and joy and peace into our hearts. This operates as an active spiritual energy of life wherever we are and in whatever circumstances we are, whether we are on a holiday or in the busy stress of work, in times of global peace or in times of a global pandemic, in a good economy under good government or under dictatorial rule. The shared life with Jesus has nothing to do with how life seems to be going on in our circumstances. The shared life with Jesus IS the blessing that reorders our life and brings all things into line with his will for our lives.
 
All the material blessings under the Old Covenant had a spiritual silver lining because of the supernatural manifestations of God to them in the wilderness and in the Promised Land, with miracles of provision and protection and angelic visitations. In the same way, all of our spiritual blessings bring the intervention of God into our lives in a supernatural way above what we could ask or think - and we don’t get to vote on what kind of blessings we receive. They are given by God and they are ultimately better than we could ever order for ourselves. 

So this life of faith is also a life of paradox because we don’t always see blessings in the same way that God does. God has the big picture for our lives and he wants us to trust him for the details. The Bible says he has written the days of our lives in a book (Psalm 139). We have a friend who is on every page of that book and he gives us wisdom when we ask. We put together imperfect prayers and he designs the perfect answers that take us closer and closer to his goal for our lives in contrast to ours.
Even good honest spiritual goals that we set for ourselves like becoming more holy, and serving The Lord more faithfully end up bringing us into a place of realizing our own powerlessness to achieve them. This sense of inadequacy drives us into depending more and more on Jesus and his kindness and compassion and grace to travel with us in our honest seeking for these things.  It then dawns on us that a process of total dependence upon God is the real goal. This is God’s goal for us. This is where REAL FAITH happens, and this real faith pleases God.

The real blessings are enjoyed in a life shared with a friend who wants the best for us. He is perfect love, and perfect love desires the best for the beloved (1 Corinthians 13). This relationship is a moment-by-moment journey that Jesus lives in – in the here and now and for all eternity. If the whole world came into this friendship with Jesus now there would be no wars, no poverty and no darkness and destruction. The world must give account in due time for the integrity of its relationship to its friend Jesus, here and now and in eternity (Romans 1:18, Acts 17:31). This eternity will exist as a new Heaven and a new earth one day, but the life of faith in Jesus as our friend can exist for us as a life of ALL spiritual blessings right here - right now. Amen
   
 
 
 
 
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