When it comes to events that change the course of human history, we often think of various wars, natural disasters, famines, and plagues. Certainly, these are major events in and of themselves, but what if I told you that there was a single event experienced by one ancient Mesopotamian man that overshadowed all of these? In the next few posts, we will be talking about that very event: the day when God appeared to a man named Abraham and promised him a land, a seed, and a blessing for all the nations. We first read about this calling on Abraham’s life in Genesis 12, where it is written:

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you; and I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and so you shall be a blessing; and I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed’” (Genesis 12:1-3).

Today we will be talking about the first part of the promise: the promise of land. One thing that is apparent right off the bat is a lack of detail concerning where this land would be. God didn’t say, “Go to such and such land”, but rather, “the land which I will show you”.  Abraham was called by God to leave behind his relatives and his homeland to a new land, a land unknown to him at the time. Yet, despite this lack of knowledge, Abraham obeyed God and left behind everything he ever knew (v. 4). In the very next verse, we read, “Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his nephew, and all their possessions which they had accumulated, and the persons which they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan; thus they came to the land of Canaan" (v. 5). But wait a minute…we just deduced from verse 1 that he didn’t know where he was going, and Hebrews 11:8 further corroborates this which says, “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going”. So how did he, his wife Sarah, and his nephew Lot know to go to the land of Canaan?

The answer is quite simple: he followed God’s direction by faith. Just as God would later lead the Israelites out of Egypt through a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13:21), God was leading Abraham to a land He would show him and promise to his descendants. Later on, God would appear to Abraham again in a covenant-cutting ceremony and further clarify the boundaries of this promised land (Genesis 15:18-21). When we get to verse 7 in Genesis 12, something interesting happens. God did lead Abraham to Canaan and told him, “To your descendants I will give this land,” but there was just one snag: the land was already inhabited by the Canaanites. How could God make such a promise concerning a land that was already inhabited? To answer that question, we return to Genesis 9, where Noah prophesied that God would curse Canaan as a consequence of Ham’s sin. As we touched on in the previous post, this consequence would eventually play out in history, and the promise given to Abraham, an offspring of Shem, was the beginning of that fulfillment.

Canaan would indeed one day be the servant of Shem, but that time had not yet come in Abraham’s day. In fact, according to Genesis 15, Abraham’s descendants would first be enslaved in a foreign land for 400 years (v. 13), and only after the iniquity of the Amorite is complete would they finally conquer the land promised to them (v. 16). Though he would sojourn in Egypt to escape famine on one occasion, Abraham would live out the rest of his days in a land that was rightfully his, yet as a sojourner. Though he knew the land promised by God belonged to his descendants and demonstrated his faith when he bought a permanent burial plot at the time of Sarah’s death (Genesis 23), his eyes were ultimately not set on the temporal land, but on “…the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10). This city the writer of Hebrews speaks of is the very same city that the apostle John described in Revelation 21: the New Jerusalem, a place where, “…He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away" (v. 4). As Paul wrote in Galatians 3, all the promises made to Abraham are for all who are children of Abraham by faith. As Christians who have been grafted in, we too share in this wonderful inheritance because of the work of Christ, and in Him all the promises of God are yes (2 Corinthians 1:20).

As wonderful as the eternal significance of the promise truly is, let’s not forget about the temporal aspects of the land promise. There indeed is a literal offspring of Abraham, namely the Jews, that inherited the land of Canaan historically and will one day inherit the fullness of it when Christ returns. The blessing of Abraham was passed down to Isaac, then to Jacob, who would be the father of the nation of Israel. It is these people who would be under bondage in Egypt for 400 years, then delivered from their bondage and led into the Promised Land after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. Under the leadership of Joshua, the Israelites began their conquest of Canaan, and they would continue to war against the Canaanite inhabitants for the next several hundred years, right up to the time of King David. Yet, even during the reign of his son King Solomon, when the ancient kingdom of Israel was at rest from war and at its apex, the land promise given to Abraham was never fully realized as they were never able to conquer the entirety of the land that was theirs based on the originally prescribed boundaries in the Abrahamic Covenant. It is for this reason then that we would argue for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel during the future millennial reign of Christ, a time when Israel would at long last possess all the land originally promised to Abraham.

While all that can be said regarding the land promise of the Abrahamic Covenant, it is important to remember that out of this land would ultimately come the promised Seed of Abraham. As we will touch on more next time, while there is certainly a plural aspect to the promise of a seed, there is also a singular nature of the seed according to Galatians 3:16, namely that there is only one promised Seed of Abraham: Jesus Christ. 2,000 years after Abraham’s time, this man would be born in the land of the Jews as a Jew to live as the perfect Jew, perfectly obedient to the will of the Father and keeping every single law, all of this to fulfill all righteousness on our behalf. Abraham himself rejoiced to see His day (John 8:56). If you have placed your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you too can rejoice that Christ came and bore your sins on Calvary, and rose again three days later.