{"id":1239,"date":"2020-03-02T17:03:42","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T23:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?p=1239"},"modified":"2020-03-04T00:10:46","modified_gmt":"2020-03-04T06:10:46","slug":"the-promises-to-abraham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/03\/02\/the-promises-to-abraham\/","title":{"rendered":"The Promises to Abraham"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The promises made to Abraham form the basis for the entire Biblical understanding of salvation.\u00a0 In addition to his name, Yahweh, God identifies himself throughout as the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.”\u00a0 This is clear even to a very casual reader of the Scriptures.\u00a0 Nonetheless, if asked what the promises to Abraham were, most even educated Christians would speak of the promise that Abraham would have a great many descendants and those descendants would live on a particular piece of land in Palestine.\u00a0 The New Testament in general and St. Paul in particular, however, speak of the promises to Abraham as the beginning of the promise of salvation fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 The apostle frames faithfulness to these promises as the means by which the salvation promised by them has always been attained, differentiating this salvation from the purpose of the Torah.\u00a0 Other passages of the New Testament indicate that Abraham was looking for a heavenly land, not an earthly one and that he believed in the resurrection (Heb 11:16, 19).\u00a0 Often these latter references are treated as some sort of allegorization or spiritualization of the original promises but does not St. Paul’s usage of these promises vis a vis salvation in Christ require some more real connection?<\/p>\n

As most prophecies in Scripture, the promises made to Abraham contain two elements.\u00a0 One element serves as a sign of the second.\u00a0 One element of the prophecy is fulfilled in the present or at least near term and this serves as a guarantee that the other more remote element will likewise come to pass.\u00a0 It is for this reason, for example, that Christ’s great eschatological discourse concerning his glorious appearing to judge the living and the dead is intermingled with prophetic statements regarding the destruction of the temple and of Jerusalem itself (Matt 24; Mark 13; Luke 21).\u00a0 Christ’s accuracy regarding the latter ensures the truth of the former.\u00a0 In the case of the promises to Abraham, the near-term fulfillment is that regarding the land of Canaan as such.\u00a0 Abraham and his sons and grandsons were brought there and dwelt there.\u00a0 Once Israel had settled in the land and destroyed the Anakim giant clans, it is said that these promises regarding the land made to Abraham were fulfilled (Josh 11:21-23; 21:43-45).<\/p>\n

The fulfillment of this promise is the subject of the latter four books of the Torah and of Joshua.\u00a0 Its completion serves as a sign of completion of the larger promise to Abraham, the one which then becomes the central promise of salvation in the subsequent Scriptures including the New Testament.\u00a0 This promise is iterated three times (Gen 15:5; 22:17; 26:4).\u00a0 “Then [Yahweh] brought [Abraham] outside, saying, ‘Look now toward the heavens and count the stars if you are able to number them.’\u00a0 Then he told him, ‘So will your offspring be'” (Gen 15:5).\u00a0 “I will surely bless you and greatly multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven and like the sand which is on the shore of the sea.\u00a0 And your descendants will occupy the gate of their enemies” (Gen 22:17).\u00a0 “But I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens and I will give to your descendants all these lands.\u00a0 And all the nations of the earth will be blessed in your seed” (Gen 26:4).\u00a0 Often, sometimes assisted by English translations, these promises are read purely in terms of a promise that Abraham’s descendants will be many in number.\u00a0 The quantity of his descendants is certainly one element of the promise.<\/p>\n

Ancient commentators, however, saw quite clearly that there was a second element (eg. Philo, Who is the Heir of Divine Things<\/em>, 17; Questions and Answers in Genesis<\/em>, 4.181).\u00a0 In Genesis 15:5, it was noted by a number of ancient commentators that after telling Abraham to attempt to count the stars, the following on promise is not “so many shall your offspring be” but “so shall your offspring be.”\u00a0 Abraham’s offspring will be like the stars in more than just numbers.\u00a0 In Genesis 22:17, parallelism is employed.\u00a0 Abraham’s descendants will be blessed and they will be multiplied like the stars of heaven and like the sands at the edge of the sea.\u00a0 In parallel, their multiplication corresponds to the sand of the seashore.\u00a0 Their blessing, then, is that they will become like the stars of heaven.\u00a0 How would Abraham have understood this promise that he and his children and children’s children would become like stars?<\/p>\n

The stars<\/a>, throughout the Scriptures, are identified with heavenly, angelic beings.\u00a0 In particular, the sun, moon, and stars in the Torah are identified with the sons of God, the highest rank of angels to whom the nations had been assigned (Deut 4:19).\u00a0 This assignment happened at the tower of Babel (Deut 32:8).\u00a0 In response to humanity’s attempt to draw God down and manipulate him through idolatrous ritual, God instead distanced himself from his creation governing it through intermediaries.\u00a0 Even until the time of the writing of the New Testament, these intermediary spiritual beings were called “gods” by pious members of the Jewish community with the distinction that they were created beings and not to be worship as Yahweh, the Most High God is (eg. Philo, Special Laws<\/em>, 1.3).\u00a0 These are the stars of which Abraham would have understood the promise to be speaking.\u00a0 By Abraham’s time already, these spiritual beings had begun to be worshipped by the nations and had become corrupt, enslaving them.\u00a0 Abraham himself had to escape idolatry in Ur.\u00a0 These beings, the enemies of humanity, are those in whose gates the seed of Abraham will camp.\u00a0 The gates of a city were the center of its power.\u00a0 The reference in Genesis 22:17, then, is not only that Abraham and his progeny will become like those beings in glory or power, but that they will be victorious over them and displace them.\u00a0 The battle between Abraham’s seed and the principalities and powers will continue throughout this age (Eph 6:12).\u00a0 In the end, it is humanity will be victorious.<\/p>\n

This is not merely a general promise about humanity, however.\u00a0 The displacement of these hostile powers will free the nations as a blessing, but Abraham will also be the father of many nations (Gen 17:4-5).\u00a0 This freedom will allow human persons from the nations to become Abraham’s seed.\u00a0 This blessing of the nations, however, will also take place through his seed (Gen 26:4).\u00a0 St. Paul identifies this seed as singular, referring to Christ himself, through which this greater promise is fulfilled (Gal 3:16).\u00a0 It is through Christ that persons from all the nations of the world become Abraham’s seed (Gal 3:29).\u00a0 The understanding that it is through Jesus Christ, and therefore through the incarnation of the Word, that this promise is fulfilled fills out the picture of this salvation.\u00a0 It is not merely a sort of apotheosis in which human persons become like angelic divine beings.\u00a0 It is not only that humans become gods in the sense that angelic beings are called gods.\u00a0 Through the incarnation, through Yahweh, the God of Israel who made these promises to Abraham becoming man, our shared human nature itself is united to God.\u00a0 The promise made to Abraham is, then, the promise of theosis.\u00a0 And this is how Abraham would have understood it.<\/p>\n

As a Mesopotamian following the Ur III period, it is simply incontrovertible that when Abram looked at the stars, he saw gods who governed the world below.\u00a0 In fact, the Scriptures make clear that his family was dedicated to the moon god, Nanna, who was considered to rule in Ur and also in Haran where Abram paused in his journey to Canaan to allow his father to die in his home country (Gen 11:32).\u00a0 He remained a pagan until the day he died (Josh 24:2).\u00a0 Abram, however, was different because Yahweh, the creator of heaven and earth, had revealed himself to him.\u00a0 It was he who spoke these promises to him.\u00a0 It was he who possessed the lands of the world and could give Canaan to Abram as a gift.\u00a0 It was he who had created those other gods and who reigned over them as God Most High, alone worthy of worship.<\/p>\n

It is because of this that Abraham can be said to have believed in the resurrection (anastasis<\/em><\/a>).\u00a0 It is because of this that Abraham can be said to have looked beyond the sign of the land of Canaan to eternal life.\u00a0 It is because he had at least a certain level of understanding that this would be accomplished in something like the incarnation that Christ can truly say that Abraham rejoiced to see his incarnate life (John 8:56).\u00a0 This understanding of the salvation promised to Abraham allows St. Paul to move so quickly in his Epistle to the Romans from the means of Abraham’s justification according to this promise to the identity of the faithful as sons of God (Rom 8:14-17).<\/p>\n

When this salvation, theosis, is presented to Abraham in Genesis 15, it is not a new development.\u00a0 Rather, it represents the purpose for which humanity was originally created.\u00a0 It is the destiny of humanity, created a little lower than the angels but crowned with glory and honor, to surpass the angelic hosts through Christ’s incarnation (Ps 8:1-5; Heb 2:7-9).\u00a0 This destiny produced the envy of the devil which led to his fall in an attempt to destroy humanity.\u00a0 This destiny likewise led the fallen angels who attended the line of Cain and the gods of the nations to rebel against God out of jealousy.\u00a0 These rebellions, however, were insufficient to circumvent God’s purpose for humanity.\u00a0 After distancing himself from humanity after Babel, Yahweh once again draws near to Abraham and to his seed to begin to accomplish this purpose.\u00a0 To do so, God will, in Christ, defeat the sinful powers and principalities through his resurrection.\u00a0 He will conquer death and the devil through his harrowing of Hades.\u00a0 This leaves the third impediment, the corruption of sin, to be dealt with as an obstacle toward human persons’ salvation, theosis.<\/p>\n

The corruption of sin would be dealt with through something added to these Abrahamic promises that by no means modified them, but rather allowed for their fulfillment.\u00a0 This “addition” will be the subject of next week’s post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The promises made to Abraham form the basis for the entire Biblical understanding of salvation.\u00a0 In addition to his name, Yahweh, God identifies himself throughout as the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.”\u00a0 This is clear even to a very casual reader of the Scriptures.\u00a0 Nonetheless, if asked what the promises to Abraham were, most even educated Christians would speak of the promise that Abraham would have a great many descendants and those descendants would live on a particular piece of land in Palestine.\u00a0 The New Testament in general and St. Paul in particular, however, speak of the promises to Abraham as the beginning of the promise of salvation fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 The apostle\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"The Promises to Abraham - The Whole Counsel Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/03\/02\/the-promises-to-abraham\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Promises to Abraham - The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The promises made to Abraham form the basis for the entire Biblical understanding of salvation.\u00a0 In addition to his name, Yahweh, God identifies himself throughout as the “God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.”\u00a0 This is clear even to a very casual reader of the Scriptures.\u00a0 Nonetheless, if asked what the promises to Abraham were, most even educated Christians would speak of the promise that Abraham would have a great many descendants and those descendants would live on a particular piece of land in Palestine.\u00a0 The New Testament in general and St. Paul in particular, however, speak of the promises to Abraham as the beginning of the promise of salvation fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 The apostle\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/03\/02\/the-promises-to-abraham\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-03-02T23:03:42+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-03-04T06:10:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2020\/03\/a-130.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. 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