Monday, December 31, 2012

'The God of Abraham, Isaac,and Jacob'



The writer to the Hebrews says that in the past, God chose to reveal Himself in many and various ways, and that in these latter days, He has chosen to ‘speak’ to us through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the ‘great I am.’

The author knows Hebrew history and that God first revealed His Name to Moses through the burning bush that was not consumed, in the backside of the desert at Mt. Sinai. It was there God chose to reveal his name (character) to Moses as I AM THAT I AM, (I am, always have been, and always will be what I am) and ‘The God of our Fathers’, or more specifically, ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’

In Exodus 3:14, we see the ‘law of first mention’ at work, as God revealed Himself to Moses as the ‘Eternal One,’ who is self-existent – He has always been, and always will be. He relies upon and needs no one else for His existence. He is the ‘first cause’ of all that exists.

God chooses to name Himself after three great patriarchs to show how he can take and use those who are in a relationship of ‘covenant kindness’ with Him. He chooses to use Abraham, the son of an idolater and idol worshiping family, so that we may see God is ‘the Originator.’ He chose to reveal Himself through Isaac through the latter’s ability to ‘receive’ all that he had as if it came from the hand of God; he chose Jacob as an illustration that we do not need to ‘struggle’ or ‘wrestle’ with God. The only striving we need to do as believers under the ‘kindness covenant,’ is to ‘enter into His Sabbath rest,’ since Christ has ‘performed the work’ of Salvation on the Cross of Calvary. Jesus said it was the Father’s good pleasure to ‘give us the Kingdom.’ Even though the Scripture also says the Kingdom is ‘taken by force’ and that violent men seek to take it by violence, it is Christ who has won the battle – through the violence of the Cross -- to give us the Kingdom as children of the King,  as a gift.

We see through the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ that it was always the Father’s intention to ‘give us an inheritance’ which is stored up in Heaven for those who believe. God is always the initiator and always makes the first move toward Man. By choosing Abraham, we see that not only did God start the process of entering into a covenant with Man, but that he completes everything He sets out to do – ‘I will perform it’. In Isaac, we see a man who learned over time to receive all that God had for him – especially an inheritance (which is a picture of what we followers of Christ have [viz. Paul, ‘the Inheritance of the Saints’]) through the Blood of the Cross – as a Son of the King. In Jacob, we see a man who learned that he didn’t need to wrestle with the Angel of the Lord in order to get a blessing – the Inheritance – but came to realize that the blessing came through brokenness – in his case a dislocated hip. However, in the process God gave him a new name, Israel, which foreshadowed the nation through whom all the peoples of the Earth would be blessed. This ties in with the promise of God to his grandfather, Abraham, that he would be ‘the father many nations,’ through his Seed (note singular) pointing to the Promised One – the Messiah, the Saviour of the world through whom all blessings come, in this world and the next.

We also see through one Old Testament story and one New Testament story that Mephibosheth and the Prodigal Son were ‘recipients of grace’. The Prodigal already had an inheritance waiting for him and, after frittering away his share of the fortune, realized that the inheritance was always waiting for him at the home of his father. When he came to his senses and returned home to his Father, he realized that the inheritance was not through works, but by grace. Mephibosheth, on the other hand, was an unexpected recipient of the grace of God through the ‘covenant of kindness’ shown to him by King David. He was a nobody, but God, through David, made him somebody in the King’s palace.

We also see in the New Testament how Nicodemus learned the inheritance was through the New Birth, and that this is spiritual and supernatural in basis and operation, and not by effort or of natural means. “With God, ALL things are possible!”

Paul takes up the thought that God will complete all that He has started in Phil.1:6. He also remonstrates with the Galatians about expecting to receive the gift through human effort. “What then, do you expect that what you began in the Spirit you can accomplish in the Flesh? You did not so learn Christ!!”

In conclusion, we see that God takes ordinary men and reveals Himself as the self-existent, unchanging, Eternal One, teaching us that His ‘covenant of kindness’ is not obtained by works of the flesh, but by grace through the Spirit.

By way of application, we need to see ourselves as God sees us, that He has adopted us into His family, that we are heirs, and co-heirs with Christ – and that everything that is His is also ours, that he has created good works from before the foundation of the world for us to walk in, and that He has already said to us ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ All this is ‘obtained by grace through faith’, and is not of our own doing lest any man should boast.



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