Have you ever been through a really hard move? I have moved around quite a bit in my life, actually, but the hardest move I remember was when I was seventeen and just finished my junior year of high school. My father had been out of work for a while, working temp jobs and such, so when he got a job in another part of the state, we had to take it – even though it meant moving at a very inconvenient time in my life.
Nearly my entire educational life had been in the same place. There were 140 kids in my year, and most of us had known each other since the first grade. Having to pick up and move five hundred miles away was really hard on me in many ways. I left a small but very diverse school where I was known and knew my place, and entered a very large, very white, conservative school where I quickly became just a number.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at moves and at starting over – perhaps in part because of what I learned from that difficult move when I was seventeen. But moving is rough. It’s rough even when you have a general idea of what you’re moving to or why you’re moving – like for a new job or to be closer to family. But I really can’t imagine how hard it would be to pick up and move – without any direction at all.
This is what happened to Abram (whom we later know as Abraham). Abram was living in a polytheistic, idol-worshipping culture. There’s no indication that he knew who God was before God suddenly called him to leave everything. Jewish non-Biblical literature suggests that Abram's father was an idol maker. The story goes that before Abram left, he broke all the idols in his father's shop. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but in Genesis 12:1, we see God calling out to Abram, saying, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”
Um, that’s it? If I received a message like that, I would have some questions. Wait, where am I going? What do I need to pack? What will I do when I get there?
Why did God call out Abram? He wanted to establish for Himself a people. A people who would be His light to the nations. We know from Scripture that God detests idol-worship. It is likely that God knew the only way for Abram to truly change and live a God-honoring life was to remove him from that environment.
God’s promise to Abram, recorded in verses 2-4, say, “I will make you [Abram] into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing… all peoples on the earth will be blessed through you.”
Twice God promises Abram that Abram will be a blessing to all peoples on earth. Many people attribute this blessing to the coming of Jesus through Abram’s descendants, and rightly so, but there is another application of this promise that we often overlook – God was calling Abram out so he could be a witness, a testimony of God to other nations. God was blessing Abram in the present so that he would be a blessing to others. In other words, Abram was blessed to be a blessing.
Blessed to be a blessing. Think about that for a moment. We see in these verses that God’s intent was not for Abram to take the blessing and hoard it for himself. He wasn’t just to receive it and feel special and chosen. In other words, he wasn't to use the blessing for his own power and privilege.
There's a danger to mixing the blessing with power and privilege. After all, the most powerful person to ever walk this earth - Jesus - didn't use that power or privilege. He took His power and privilege to the cross. If we are trying to use our blessing for power and privilege when Jesus never did that, it seems as though we've misunderstood His mission and message.
The people of Israel were God's light in Old Testament times. They were supposed to represent God here on earth, be His imago dei, and bring people to faith in Him through their witness. Only, too often, they conformed to the world around them instead of God's way of living, and they tarnished their witness with power and violence. They were judged, over and over again, for these failings.
In the New Testament, Jesus is the light, God in the flesh, come down incarnated to show us the way we are to live and be and believe. He commissioned the Church, the global Church (not America, which didn't even exist then), to be the testimony to the world. To be the light. He blessed the Church, so the Church could go forward and bless others.
When Jesus started His ministry, He read this verse from the prophet Isaiah,
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor." (Isaiah 61 quoted in Luke 4:18-19)
Some people understand this as purely spiritual. The "poor" are those without God. The "captives" and the "blind" are captive to sin. The "oppressed" are oppressed by death. But in reading the rest of the gospel accounts, we see Jesus helping the actual poor: feeding them, healing them, touching and blessing them. Advocating for visiting and caring for captives in prison. Sitting with the oppressed, those who Jewish society had ostracized. Could it be, then, that Jesus did not mean these words to be merely spiritual? Could it be, then, that we are commissioned to, as Jesus says in the Lord's Prayer, bring God's kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven?
If so, then the Church today should continue Jesus' work. Is the Church today good news to the poor? Are we helping bring liberty to the captives? Are we freeing the oppressed?
Or are we merely trying to hoard the blessing to ourselves? To gather up power and privilege and make ourselves a kingdom, rather than build God's kingdom come.
No. We are blessed to be a blessing.
We could benefit from considering what this truly means in how we live.
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