The brief answer to that important question is found in
chapter twelve of Genesis. There, the
Creator God instructs Abraham (Abram) to “Go out from your country, your
relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you.
Then I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make
your name great, so that you will exemplify divine blessing. I will bless
those who bless you, but the one who treats you lightly I must curse, and all
the families of the earth will bless one another by your name” (12:1-3).
So yes, the covenant God is demonstrated to have chosen
Abraham so that through Abraham the nations and families and the whole of the
earth could be blessed. This becomes,
for all time, the explicit charge of the covenant people. Naturally, a
person that is recognized as a “teacher of Israel” would have been quite
familiar with the answer to this question. This, however, it should be
recognized, is not a sufficient answer.
The Creator God’s words to Abraham merely beg the question
as to “why.” Why did the sovereign God of the cosmos need to choose
Abraham? Why did this God have a need or desire to make Abraham into a
great nation? Why did the one who, as indicated in the story of
Scripture, repeatedly showed Himself as the God of covenants want to bless
him? Why make Abraham’s name great? Why was there what seems to be
a pressing need to exemplify divine blessing through Abraham? Why is
there all this talk of blessing and cursing in association with Abraham?
Why indeed?
The reason for all of these things is to be found in what
comes before the introduction of Abraham. In the narrative structure,
what comes before, of course, is the presentation of the ordering of the
creation as the Creator’s cosmic temple, the pronouncement at every stage that
this ordering was “very good,” and the placement of man, created as the
divine-image, into that creation-as-cosmic-temple so as to steward it, to be a
reflection of the glory of its Creator into it, and to stand as a constant
reminder to the whole of the creation of its Ruler, that being the Creator God
of Israel (Genesis 1 & 2).
This record of the ordering of
creation is quickly followed by the report of the divine image-bearers’ first
act of idolatry, rebellion, and violation of their God’s commandment. This is swiftly followed by the exile of the
now marred image-bearers from the role to which they had been assigned by the
Creator. What accompanied this, as
pointedly and painfully indicated by Scripture, is the exile of the creation
from the condition and state in which it had been created (very good,
perfection), as it came to share in the cursing brought about by the one
appointed to its rule and stewardship (Genesis 3).
Subsequent to that the first murders are to be found
(Genesis 4), along the fathering of a son in the likeness of the fallen
image-bearer rather than in the image of the Creator God (Genesis 5), the growing
wickedness of the collectively fallen image-bearers (Genesis 6), a worldwide
flood of judgment (Genesis 7), the curse of Canaan (Genesis 9), and the
culmination of man’s self-idolatry, rebellion, and defiance of the Creator,
which was the construction of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11).
It is at this point that the Creator God is said to have
reached down into His creation for the purpose of choosing and appointing
Abraham, as something of a project manager charged with the task of the
restoration of the fallen creation. Undoubtedly, accurately and
purposefully communicating this definitive story would be part and parcel of
being a “teacher of Israel,” and it would have to in such a context that Jesus
delivers the words of what have come to be the most famous words in the whole
of Scripture.
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