The Patriarch

In this module we’re looking at the way in which God works through his people to make his presence known, culminating in Jesus opening up the way to a new creation free from suffering, sin, and death. We’re studying all of this through the lens of five key figures in the biblical story. In the previous lesson Matt introduced us to all of this and took us through the originals, who were Adam and Eve. In this lesson we’ll be looking at the patriarch, or the father, who is Abraham.

Promise to Abraham

Now, before we get started it’s worth reflecting on why we call Abraham the patriarch rather than Adam. Adam and Eve are the ancestors of every other human, and yet many of us will know the song about father Abraham having many sons rather than father Adam. The reason we focus on Abraham as the patriarch isn’t because of the number of descendants he has, but because of the role those descendants play in God’s plan. In short, Abraham is the father of the family through whom God promised to fix the problem of sin. We see this in the first words God spoke to Abraham, who at the time was called “Abram”:

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great. Be a blessing, and I will bless those who bless you and curse those who dishonor you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1–3)

Many of us will be familiar with these verses. They are the promises that begin Abraham’s story, and really the story of the rest of the Bible. From how I’ve translated them here, we can see three parts of God’s message to Abraham. First, he instructs Abraham to leave his home and go to the land that he will show him—as we know from the rest of the story, this is the promised land that he and his descendants will live in one day. Second, God promises that he will make Abraham and his descendants into a great nation that he will bless. And third, he instructs Abraham to be a blessing to the whole world, along with a promise to use him and his family for this very purpose.

Without much context it’s pretty easy to understand what God means when he promises Abraham land and descendants, but it’s less clear what he means when he talks about blessing. And this is ironic, because of the blessing is arguably the most important part of these promises. These days we tend to use the word “blessing” to mean anything we consider good, but at this early point in the biblical story it means something very specific for us—it means flourishing and living in the presence of our good creator.

In the previous lesson Matt covered the opening chapters of Genesis in some detail, so we’ll just summarize them briefly for context, paying attention to the theme of blessing. Genesis starts by presenting God as the supreme and good creator who fashions everything and blesses them. When he makes humanity, he makes us in his image and blesses us saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over [the rest of creation].” (Genesis 1:28) This dominion isn’t some kind of hostile takeover, but the caring for creation according to the will of its creator. As our creator, God is interested in our well-being as well as our care for the well-being of the rest of creation, and so he instructs us to prosper and rule responsibly, and enables us to do so by blessing us. Thus, from the very beginning blessing is connected with our flourishing.

In the next chapter we see that it goes deeper than this, when God makes his dwelling among us. Certainly if helping us flourish is a blessing, then God’s very presence with us is doubly so. But, as we know, things didn’t stay this way. Our ancestors rejected God and his rule over them, which introduced sin into the world and brought with it a number of consequences. First, in judgment the world and humans were cursed, which is the opposite of blessing.  Second, death became a reality for us. And third, we were excluded from God’s presence. Sin fundamentally degraded our ability to prosper, our rule over creation, and most importantly our relationship with God. This is what I mean by “the problem of sin”.

As we read the chapters that follow, Genesis 4–11 paint a picture of things getting worse, despite our attempts to address the problem or fulfill our mandate. Cain murders his brother, and then his descendant murders someone and thinks it’s justified. Eventually humans multiplied across the world, but because of sin this just ends up multiplying wickedness and violence rather than fruitful rule. So, God judges humanity and starts over with Noah, where he once again blesses humanity and gives us the mandate to be fruitful and multiply. And while things go differently this time, they don’t go better. At the tower of Babel, we see humanity work together and be fruitful, but then use this to stop themselves from multiplying across the earth. Leading God to once again step in and judge them by scattering them throughout the world.

The promises to Abraham come as the next development in this story, and God’s promises to bless the world through him are not simply a promise to give us good things. In light of humanity’s repeated failure to make any progress on the problem of sin, God’s promise is nothing less than to fix the problem of sin himself through Abraham and his family. Somehow, he is going to undo sin, empower us to prosper and rule over creation, and make it so that we can live with him once again.

Isaac and Jacob’s inheritance

It’s noteworthy that when God called Abraham he created a fundamental distinction within humanity, between his people and the rest of the world. Our first reaction to this might be to think of it as a bad thing, but this distinction was made so that God could establish a relationship of servanthood rather than animosity—God didn’t call himself a people in order to make them enemies of the world, but so that he could use them to bring blessing to the world. Of course, if someone were to set themselves against God or his people, then by all means they would make themselves an enemy; but in the absence of such rejection, the purpose of God’s people was to bring blessing. This is evident in God’s instruction to Abraham to be a blessing to the world, and is reiterated towards the end of Abraham’s story, where God reaffirms his promises:

I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice. (Genesis 22:17–18)

Now, Abraham’s story ends about halfway through Genesis. The rest of the book covers the stories of Isaac and Jacob, wherein we learn something very important about the promises: while the promises were given to Abraham and his descendants, they don’t apply to all of Abraham’s descendants but only those whom God calls.

For instance, Isaac was the son through whom the promise to Abraham would continue, but Isaac wasn’t Abraham’s only son. Before God gave them Isaac, Abraham and Sarah tried to help the plan along themselves, leading to the birth of Abraham’s son Ishmael. So, Abraham had two sons, but only one of them inherited the promises from their father. This means that we need to be careful in how we interpret God’s promises: when he says that he would bless the world through Abraham’s descendants, he didn’t mean all of his descendants; rather, he meant that Abraham’s descendants were the pool from which he would call the heirs of the promise.

This is confirmed again in the next generation with Isaac and his sons. He and Rebekah had twins, Esau and Jacob, but God only called Jacob to be the one who inherited the promises. And later in Exodus God threatens to do it again with all of Israel, when he says to Moses:

I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you. (Exodus 32:9–10)

Of course, Moses implores God to change his mind, but notice here that God speaks of Moses in precisely the way he spoke of Abraham before, saying that he would make a great nation out of him. God is threatening to reject the vast majority of Israel and continue the promises through Moses and his descendants. This wouldn’t be possible if inheritance of the promises was guaranteed to all the descendants of Abraham, but there’s no problem if it depends on God’s calling.

Having looked at the promises in light of the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it raises a two-part question that will occupy us for the remainder of this lesson: who are Abraham’s descendants and how does the promise get fulfilled in them? Tracing this answer throughout the story of the Bible will help us understand the significance of Abraham the patriarch, and how it evolves in the course of that story.

Nation of Israel

After Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the next big answer to the “who” part of our question is the nation of Israel. By the end of Genesis, Jacob’s family was forced to move to Egypt because of a famine, but eventually the Egyptian royalty changed and the new Pharaoh enslaved Jacob’s descendants and treated them ruthlessly. Thus, God stepped in, judged Egypt, and redeemed Jacob’s descendants from Egypt.

Now, from the beginning of Exodus we see that Jacob’s descendants grow into a large people group, showing that God’s promises to Abraham are well on their way to being fulfilled. But remember that God had promised Abraham that he would make his descendants a great nation, and being a large group of people is only part of what it means to be a nation. I’m by no means an expert on this, but I think it’s safe to say that you can’t be a nation if you’re not united under some rule of law or king, and if you don’t have land of your own. So, after rescuing Jacob’s descendants from Egypt, God makes a covenant with them in order to transform them from a mere people group into a fully-fledged nation. Under the leadership of Moses, he brings them to Mount Sinai and starts as follows:

You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (Exodus 19:4–6)

In these opening words, we can see at least three things: (1) the covenant God is going to make with them, (2) the requirement that they obey the law he’s about to give them, and (3) the fact that they will become his chosen nation. A few chapters later while still at Mount Sinai, God promises that he will give them land as well, thus making them his fully-fledged nation (Exodus 23:20–33). The upshot of this is a deeper understanding of what we mean when we say that God chose the nation of Israel to be his people. It’s not that there was already this nation in existence, which God then picked from among the nations to be his people; rather, it’s that God saved an enslaved people and made them into a nation of his own. In other words, God’s covenant was not with some pre-existing nation called Israel; rather, God’s covenant brings the nation of Israel into existence.

So that’s who Abraham’s descendants are at this stage in the story; the next part of the question is how God fulfills his promises through them. It’s easy to see how God fulfills his promise to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation, but how does this nation help bring blessing to the world? How is a nation supposed to undo the problem of sin?

The short answer is that this nation is built in such a way that it could be a new holy zone in the world. Since humans were excluded from the garden of Eden, God wasn’t anywhere in the world—he would appear to people every now and then, but he had no physical address where people could go find him, pray to him, and worship him. So his solution was basically to turn Israel into a second Eden, where he could once again be accessed by humans. He made himself specially present in the temple, and installed priests to maintain it, facilitate the offerings, and instruct the rest of Israel about the clean and the unclean. He gave Israel the law, which unified them as a nation, but also guided them to live more fully as humans ought to, so that he could continue to live among them in their nation. Not only this, but in this law he safeguards the rights of foreigners, so that they would be able to come to him at the temple as well.

Thus, just as there are priests within Israel who enable the people to approach God, so too is Israel itself a sort of priest on the national level enabling the other nations to approach God. This is one way we might understand the title that God gives Israel, “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6)

So, at least initially, God called all of Abraham’s descendants who were descended through Jacob to inherit the promises of their forefather. As promised, they would become a great nation in the land that God originally showed Abraham, and they would bless the world by showing them how to live with God and by making him accessible once again. This was the first stage of God undoing the problem of sin through the descendants of Abraham.

Exile and return of Israel

Unfortunately, Israel never really lived up to their calling. From almost the first chance they got, they rejected God and warped his laws. While there were certainly high points in Israel’s history, the majority of the Old Testament recounts for us a nation that turned to other gods, rejected God’s rule over them, and failed to live out the life of justice God had called them to.

And we should emphasize that God was incredibly patient with them. He could’ve destroyed them the first time they messed up, but instead he tried to make things work generation after generation. Even by the time we get to Elijah, when the vast majority of Israel had turned to foreign gods and killed God’s prophets, God still didn’t outright reject Israel, but kept a faithful remnant of 7000 who had not turned to foreign gods. So even in the face of widespread national disavowal of him, God does not consider 7000 people out of an entire nation too few to keep the covenant going. 

This idea of a faithful remnant within Israel shows again that the promise is not inherited by all of Abraham’s descendants, but only by those whom God calls. Were this not the case, then God would have had no choice but to continue with Israel despite their rejection of him and the covenant that brought them into existence in the first place. But in fact, God is free to continue with a small subset of the nation who had not rejected him.

Judging most of Israel while continuing with a faithful remnant can be likened to God cauterizing the covenant wound. But the remainder of Israel’s history shows us that it was not enough to stop the bleeding. Eventually, God judged the whole of Israel with exile as he had warned them he would do from the beginning. And just as the giving of the covenant can be seen as the creation of the nation of Israel, this judgement can be seen as the destruction of the nation. God left his temple, which eventually got destroyed, leaving Israel without their king; he gave their land over to invading armies, leaving them without a home; and he scattered them throughout the nations, leaving them without any semblance of unity. So, by their unfaithfulness to God, Israel had undone God’s national solution to the problem of sin. Once again, God was not accessible anywhere in the world.

You would think that being exiled for unfaithfulness would spur Israel on to turn back to God and make amends. But in reality they continued in their sin and refused to turn back. So, after their time in exile God brought them back to their land, they rebuilt the temple, and they reinstated the law. But God never returned. He said he would return one day to set things straight, but in the meantime the temple existed as an empty shell of what it once stood for. Because of Israel’s continued failure the second temple did not re-establish God’s presence in the world, and we were still left waiting for the blessings God had promised would come through Abraham’s descendants.

Jesus

Or perhaps we should say, “descendant”—singular. In the end, God brought the promised blessings to the world through just one descendant of Abraham: Jesus. As Paul explains in Galatians:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us… so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. (Galatians 3:13–14)

Remember, “Gentiles” is just another way of referring to “the nations”, so here Paul is talking about the promise to Abraham that we’ve been thinking about.

Again, the reason this is possible is that the promise is not inherited by all of Abraham’s descendants, but only those whom God calls. A few verses later in Galatians, Paul makes this point using word play on the promise given to Abraham. He says:

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. (Galatians 3:16–17)

The word that is translated as “descendants” in our English Bibles is one of those words which is both singular and plural—one sheep, many sheep; one fish, many fish; one offspring, many offspring. In its original context, at least initially God is clearly using the word in the plural:

I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice. (Genesis 22:17–18)

The first sentence there definitely indicates that Abraham will have many offspring. But the second one is technically ambiguous, and it’s this ambiguity that Paul is playing with in Galatians. God did multiply Abraham’s offspring greatly, and he did bring blessing to the nations (the Gentiles) through his offspring, but the way he brought about blessing was through one offspring out of those many offspring.

So in the next stage of God’s plans, the answer to the “who” part of our question is Jesus. The “how” is his death and resurrection. Recall that the reason the blessings were promised in the first place was that sin had prevented us from flourishing as humans, and excluded us from God’s presence. Israel’s national-temple was a temporary and incomplete solution to this, in that it never really removed sin from people, and never fully united God and man. This was evident from the fact that while humans could approach God at the temple, they were always kept at a distance from him. Apart from the high priest once a year, no-one ever actually entered God’s room at the center of the temple. Thus, Israel’s national-temple system should be likened to a bandage on the wound in anticipation of a solution to the underlying problem.

Jesus was that solution. Through his death on the cross and his subsequent resurrection, he didn’t merely add another bandage, but fixed the underlying problem of sin, and opened up a way for us to live with God without sin. This solution comes in two stages, which we’ve discussed in previous modules as the “already-not-yet” state of Christian life. We have already been cleansed from sin which enables Jesus to live in us by his Holy Spirit; but we have not yet been resurrected like Jesus which means that we still have to fight the temptation of sin. The Spirit already works in us to do God’s will and flourish as humans; but he has not yet rebuilt us so that we can always do this perfectly. We could say that on the cross Christ has disarmed the power of sin, and one day he will finally defeat it.

So this is the next stage of the promise to Abraham. The descendant of Abraham through whom the promise comes is Jesus, and the way it comes is by him disarming sin on the cross and one day defeating it completely. As a side note, God not only fulfilled his promises to Abraham despite the rejection of Israel, he did it using the rejection of Israel. After all, Jesus was condemned by the Jewish leaders on the charge of blasphemy, despite being God himself incarnate. So, Israel’s rejection of God skewed their expectations of his arrival, leading to their crucifying him, which he used to fulfill his promises to Abraham. At the cross, then, God not only defeated sin, but he did so through the sin of his own people.

The Church

Now, this move from the bandage of Israel to the fully-fledged solution of Jesus led to the introduction of the Church, which brought about important changes in how we think about the descendants of Abraham and how they bring blessing to the world.

Before Jesus there were two ways to be included among Abraham’s descendants, which we can call physical descendancy and legal descendancy. The physical descendants of Abraham are those who descend biologically from him, one generation after the next. These are his descendants in the normal sense of the word. The legal descendants of Abraham are those who become descendants through some legal process, like marriage. When the nation of Israel came into existence, you could also become a legal descendant of Abraham by becoming a citizen of the nation—by doing so you were legally identifying yourself with the nation descended from Abraham through Jacob, and so to some extent you were counted among them.

The reason this is important is that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. As he said to Abraham:

I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. (Genesis 17:7)

People from all the world could experience blessing through Abraham’s descendants, but only Abraham’s descendants were called God’s people, his chosen nation among whom he lived and made himself known.

So it was very surprising to find that as the early Christians began spreading the gospel, God began living among people who were neither physical nor legal descendants of Abraham. This led to the first big controversy of the Church, with some arguing that in order for these Gentile converts to be included among God’s people they needed to become citizens of Israel. But the Apostles Peter and James argued to the contrary: the fact that the Holy Spirit came upon the Gentiles simply through their faith in Jesus meant that God did not require them to become Israelites in order to become part of his people (Acts 15). The question is, then, what happened with Jesus that enabled us to be included among God’s people without being physical or legal descendants of Abraham?

As the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul needed to grapple with this question, and in Romans and Galatians he argues that through Jesus we are made spiritual descendants of Abraham. Paul doesn’t explain exactly how this works, but he hints at it in Galatians. Towards the end of chapter 3 he says this:

… in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. (Galatians 3:26–29)

This is coming at the end of that same argument we looked at earlier, where Paul did some wordplay on the promises to Abraham. Remember, he said that the promise was not given to Abraham’s offsprings, referring to many, but to his offspring, referring to one, who is Jesus. So, when we read here a few verses later within the same argument that we are all one in Christ Jesus and thereby Abraham’s offspring, it’s noteworthy that he uses the singular again.

As far as Paul is concerned we are all one in Christ because the Holy Spirit is Christ’s Spirit and he indwells each of us. And since Jesus is a descendant of Abraham, we are therefore all together a descendant of Abraham by virtue of being one in Jesus. Elsewhere Paul speaks of us being one body in Christ, or putting on Christ, or even Christ being in us, but though the metaphor may change the implication remains the same: we are unified with each other and Christ by virtue of his Spirit indwelling us, and since he is a descendant of Abraham so too are we by virtue of being in him. We call this “spiritual” descendancy, not because it’s any less real than physical or legal descendancy, but because it happens through the Holy Spirit living in us.

So that’s the answer to the “who” part of our question: God’s people and Abraham’s descendants are now the Church, made up of both Jews and Gentiles, by virtue of our union with Jesus through his Spirit in each of us. Regarding the “how”, Jesus has secured blessing for the nations, but it is up to the Church to spread that blessing throughout the world. As Jesus commanded his followers:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:18–20)

Being part of God’s people has always been both a privilege and a responsibility: a privilege to live with God himself, and a responsibility to share that life with others. But how this works out has changed in light of what Jesus has accomplished.

Before Jesus, God had made the nation of Israel into a holy zone where people could come and worship him at the temple, and Israel’s role was to sustain this holy zone and facilitate this worship. In other words, the way that Israel shared life with God was a form of hospitality, welcoming the nations in to access God at the temple. But because Jesus has now cleansed our sin, God no longer needs to keep himself at a distance in a temple external to us—instead, he now lives within each of his people by his Holy Spirit. God’s people now are God’s temple, and so instead of bringing the nations to the temple we now take the temple out to the nations, proclaiming the gospel throughout the world. And as we spread that gospel and people turn to Jesus, we spread the presence of God throughout the earth, in fulfillment of the promises to Abraham.

New heavens and earth

This brings us to the last stage of God’s promises, which we’re still waiting for. We saw that the promise to Abraham came in the context of the original creation and its downfall. God’s promise was effectively that he would address the problem of sin through Abraham’s family rather than rely on humans to do it alone. For the most part Israel failed to live up to its task, but it did make way for Jesus to disarm sin and include the nations among God’s people and Abraham’s descendants. As we spread the gospel throughout the world, we do so knowing that our work is not in vain, for God will one day complete the work he began in Jesus. On that day he will live with us fully, and sin and death will no longer exist. John describes it like this towards the end of Revelation:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1–4)