Rev.
Stephen E. Stults
St.
Paul’s Anglican Church
13th
Sunday after Trinity
Sept.
6, 2020
Galatians 3:16 6 Now
the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say, "And
to seeds," as referring to many,
but rather to one, "And to your
seed," that is, Christ.”
What is
a promise?
Promise (Noun): “A declaration or assurance that one will do a
particular thing or that a particular thing will happen.”
As a verb: “assure someone that one will definitely do, give, or arrange
something; undertake or declare that something will happen.”
When thinking about promises,
we must consider a couple of things. First, who is giving this promise? Are
they trustworthy? Can they keep their word?
Second, are they able to keep this promise? Can they do it?
We know from Scripture that
God made Abraham a promise. This type of promise is called a covenant, which is
very solemn and serious. Not that any of our promises should be taken lightly,
but a covenant is a real, binding type of situation. Both parties agree to adopt and perform the
covenant terms. In this case, God
commanded Abraham to depart from his people in Ur of the Chaldees and to go to
place God would send him. If he did so,
God would prosper him and make his seed as plenteous as the stars in the sky. Here is the language God used with Abraham,
(then Abram): Genesis 12:2-3 “2 And I will make of
thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou
shalt be a blessing: 3 And I
will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee
shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
That is
quite a promise. Let’s consider it in light of our two
considerations. First, God gave the
promise to Abraham. There can be no other, surer, promise-giver than Him. Second,
can God fulfill His promises? These
questions are surely rhetorical to people of faith.
This
being the case, how is this promise important to us? How does it affect us and our lives? Simply
this: “…in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
Once
again, we say, “how?”
It may
depend on how views Holy Scripture. Reading
recently a book by a contemporary Bible scholar, Hans Boersma, Scripture as
Real Presence, we learn about the ways the early Church fathers, among them
Origen, St. Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and others, read the Bible. Although
some of the early commentators on the Bible, ranging from the third, fourth,
and fifth centuries, were accused of being overly allegorical in their approach
to the Bible, that is, they were always looking for a symbolic meaning of the
text, we learn that many of the these early Christians also took a serious
literal interpretation of it as well.
What
this means is that they plainly saw Christ in the Old Testament as well as the
new. To their mind, there was no great chasm between the Old and the New. Many of us growing up in the Protestant
Episcopal Church of America (PECUSA), like I did, had a sense of two testaments
that weren’t really connected. There was the wrathful, vengeful God of the Old
Testament vs. the loving, caring God of the New, as expressed in Jesus Christ.
One really didn’t need the Old
Testament, except to explain the creation of the Earth, or those parts of the
Prophet Isaiah we read at Christmas.
This
was the result of an early 20th Century
theological movement called Dispensationalism, which claimed God made
“dispensations” , or that He “dispensed” His Will to mankind at certain times. Thus, the theory went, the great difference
between the Testaments.
Looking
at the early Church Fathers, nothing could be farther from the truth. The Bible
is one book in which Christ is plainly seen.
He is evident in both Old and New Testaments. One of my favorite quotes from Bishop
Lightfoot goes: “In the Old, the New concealed; in the New, the Old revealed.”
At this
point, you may say, “Great, Father Stults, but what has any of this to do with
the promise made to Abraham?”
Everything. Why are all the families
of the world blessed in Abraham? Who descended from Abraham through the House
of David? Joseph, whose earthly
caregiver and caretaker Jesus was. In
the real sense, Jesus is the Son of God, immaculately conceived in the womb of
the Blessed Mary. In the worldly sense, Jesus is of the house and lineage of
David, a direct descendant of Abraham.
How
then, are modern-day Christians blessed through this? Do we really have to ask? Yes, we do. Sometimes, perhaps we fail to
recall that our blessings, temporal and eternal, rest in Christ. Because Jesus is the descendent of Abraham,
born of Mary and protected by Joseph, He grew up a Jew. It was fitting that one
of God’s chosen people should be offered as the Spotless Lamb of God, “..slain
from the foundations of the world.”[i] From
this, all our blessings flow.
Just
how are Christians blessed?
We are
blessed with eternal life through Him.
We are
blessed with the daily, immanent presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. From
this, we know that we are never alone.
We are
blessed in the peace of God that passes all understanding.
We are
blessed because we have joy in life despite our circumstances.
We are
blessed with purpose because we are seeking God’s Will for our lives.
We are
blessed to have the Holy Scriptures to lead us in our walk with God.
We are
blessed because God loves us, and we love God.
If we
have a right mind with God, what more could we want?
Yes, we
could say material things are desired. Certainly. Yet, didn’t Jesus say, (Matthew 6:33) 33 But seek ye first the
kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto
you.”? Yes, He did.
When we
seek the will of God for our lives first, all else is truly added to that. All blessings flow to him that wants to want
what God wants for him. It’s a strange
paradox that in giving up, we gain, and by losing ourselves, we find ourselves.
Yet,
that is how it is.
May we
all find our truest purpose in Him, and in so doing, may all God’s richest
blessings be poured upon us.
AMEN
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