Chapter 2: From the One to the Many

The purpose of this chapter is to show that the notion of a movement of the biblical narrative from the particular to the universal helps us to see what is going on in that narrative when we attempt to read it holistically. We shall focus on perhaps the most important forms that this movement takes: four different strands in the biblical metanarrative. The first three share a common pattern; the fourth is different and distinctive.

In the first three cases, God's purpose begins with a singular choice: God singles out first Abraham, then Israel, then David. The three movements that begin with these three choices by God each has its own distinctive theme, one aspect of God's purpose for the world. We could call these the thematic trajectories of the narra­tive. The trajectory that moves from Abraham to all the families of the earth is the trajectory of blessing. The trajectory that moves from Israel to all the nations is the trajectory of God's revelation of himself to the world. The trajectory that moves from God's enthronement of David in Zion to the ends of the earth is the trajectory of rule, of God's kingdom coming in all creation. Of course, these three movements and themes are closely interrelated.

1. From Abraham to All the Families of the Earth

In Genesis 12 Abraham is singled out by God. This is perhaps the most remarkable of all the instances of divinely chosen singularity in the Bible. For it follows immediately the thoroughly universal narrative of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, a narrative that concluded, in chapter 10, with the great catalogue of all the nations, seventy of them, descended from the three sons of Noah, and then, in chapter 11, with the story of Babel, from which the human race was scattered over all the earth to form the various nations, divided now by language and geography. Genesis 10-11 sets, as it were, the international scene for the whole of the rest of the Bible's story. But from this emphatically universal scope the story suddenly narrows to just the one man, Abraham, and his immediate family, called by God to leave his place in the international order (or disorder), to move to a new country and into a new future of which he knows only from God.

However, we also learn at once that this singling out of Abraham from all the nations is not at all to be under­stood as God's giving up on the nations. This is not like the choice of Noah and his family, when the rest of humanity perished in the flood, and Noah's descendants replaced them. In Abraham's case he is singled out precisely so that blessing may come to all the nations,[1] to all those seventy nations God had scattered over the face of the whole earth. Blessing is the key word in God's promises to Abraham: Abraham himself will be blessed, in that his descendants will be a great nation, and Abraham will be a blessing, in that all the families of the earth[2] will be blessed (Genesis 12:2-3 ).[3] From the one man Abraham and the one new nation that descends from him, God's blessing will overflow to all other nations.

The promise that all the nations will be blessed is repeated four more times in Genesis (18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14). On the last two of these occasions it is given to Abraham's son Isaac and grandson Jacob. Moreover, even within the stories of Jacob and his sons, the blessing of the nations begins - or at least is foreshadowed - when Jacob brings blessing to Laban (30:27) and Joseph to Potiphar (39:5). Then there is the peculiarly significant scene when the aged patriarch Jacob on his arrival in Egypt gives no less than the Egyptian Pharaoh his blessing (47:7). For the canonical reader Genesis creates a strong expectation that the blessing of the nations through Abraham's descendants is to be the goal of the rest of the biblical story. But in fact for the rest of the Old Testament story it remains no more than a promise and even as promise drops largely out of view. Only three or four passages in the rest of the Hebrew Bible echo this Abrahamic promise of blessing for the nations (Psalm 72:17;[4] Isaiah 19:24-25; Jeremiah 4:2; Zechariah 8:13).[5] This is an example of the unsystematic, even fragile, way in which a biblical metanarrative is formed out of the varied contents of the canon (a point to which we shall return in the last chapter). But the four echoes are significant, and we shall look at two of them.

The first is Jeremiah 4:1-2, in which the prophet is entreating Israel to repent of her faithlessness and return to the covenant with YHWH:

If you return, O Israel, says the LORD, if you return to me, if you remove your abominations from my presence  and do not waver, and if you swear, 'As the LORD lives!' in truth, in justice, and in righteousness, then nations shall be blessed [or: shall bless themselves][6] by him, and by him they shall boast.

What is notable here is that it is Israel's fulfilment of her covenant obligations, her practice of truth, justice, and righteousness, that will bring blessing to the nations (cf. Genesis 18:18-19). In order for the nations to be blessed Israel need only be faithful to YHWH. Her life with YHWH will itself draw the nations to YHWH so that they too may experience his blessing. This brief reference to the promise of blessing for the nations is surely rather significant in the context of this book of a 'prophet to the nations' (1:5, cf. 10), whose prophecies are extensively concerned with the nations (chapters 46-51). It suggests that not only Israel's future, but the future of the nations also, could have been different from the judgements Jeremiah relentlessly and agonizingly foresees. Blessing could have overflowed from faithful Israel to her national neighbours.

Secondly, the most remarkable echo of Genesis 12:3 outside Genesis is Isaiah 19:24-25. The prophet here expects in the future a kind of international federation of friendly powers: Israel herself and the two superpowers to the north and the south of her, Assyria and Egypt, hitherto intransigent enemies, now at peace through their common worship of Israel's God:

On that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the LORD of hosts has blessed, saying, 'Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.' (NRSV)

Here Israel, from her central position 'in the midst of the earth' (a theme we shall take up in the next chapter), proves a blessing to her former oppressors, her international neighbours, and perhaps we are to understand that the blessing extends to all the nations since all could be envisaged as members of these three great empires. This is God's promise to Abraham coming to remarkably unexpected fruition. But, most remarkably of all, Israel's special status as YHWH's own covenant people is paralleled here by that of Egypt called here by God 'my people' and Assyria called by God 'the work of my hands’.[7] In this respect this is a vision echoed in the penultimate chapter of the Bible, where the prophet John sees the new Jerusalem descend from heaven in the new creation and hears it said:

Behold, the dwelling of God is with humans. He will dwell with them as their God: they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them. (Revelation 21:3, NRSV altered)

While God's promise to Abraham is only rarely echoed in the Old Testament outside Genesis, it finds some significant echoes in the New Testament. Here Paul interprets the promise to mean that one specific descendant of Abraham, Jesus Christ, will bring blessing to Israel and to all the nations (Galatians 3:6-9, 16).[8] Indeed, Paul identifies this promise as actually the Gospel:

The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you' [Genesis 12:3; 18:18]. For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed. (Galatians 3:8-9, NRSV)

Less often noticed is the way the Gospel of Matthew interprets the promise to Abraham in the same way that Paul does. Matthew frames the whole story of Jesus between the identification of him as a descendant of Abraham in the opening verse of the Gospel and, in the closing words of Jesus at the end of the Gospel, the commission to the disciples of Jesus to make disciples of all nations. Matthew's genealogy of Jesus begins with Abraham (1:1-2), not with Adam, as Luke's does (3:38), nor with David, which would have been sufficient to portray Jesus the Messiah the son of David, which certainly is an important theme in Matthew's Gospel. However, for Matthew, Jesus is the Messiah not only for Jews but also for Gentiles. He is the descendant of Abraham through whom God's blessing will at last reach the nations. Matthew's genealogy resumes the whole Old Testament story from Abraham onwards and continues, in a single line of father-to-son descent, until it reaches one descendant of Abraham, once again singling out one person from whom God's purpose of blessing will reach both Israel and all the nations.

Blessing is a rich biblical notion that has been rather neglected in Christian theology. Blessing in the Bible refers to God's characteristically generous and abundant giving of all good to his creatures and his continual renewal of the abundance of created life. Blessing is God's provision for human flourishing. But it is also relational:[9] to be blessed by God is not only to know God's good gifts but to know God himself in his generous giving. Because it is relational the movement of blessing is a movement that goes out from God and returns to him. God's blessing of people overflows in their blessing of others and those who experience blessing from God in turn bless God, which means that they give all that creatures really can give to God: thanksgiving and praise.

Blessing highlights the relationship between creation and salvation in a different way from other ways of characterizing God's activity in the world. Already on the fifth day of the creation God blesses (Genesis 1:22). Blessing is the way God enables his creation to be fertile and fruitful, to grow and to flourish. It is in the most comprehensive sense God's purpose for his creation. Wherever human life enjoys the good things of creation and produces the good fruits of human activity, God is pouring out his blessing. Wherever people bless God for his blessings, to that extent God is known as the good Creator who provides for human flourishing. God's blessing is universal. But it is not the case that blessing is God's goodness in creation as distinct from his goodness in salvation, as has sometimes been proposed.[10]  We could not then make sense of the movement of blessing from Abraham to the nations that we have traced. Salvation too is God's blessing, since salvation is the fulfilment of God's good purposes for his creation, purposes already expressed in creation. But salvation is the fulfilment of God's purposes in spite of the damage evil does to God's creation. The Abrahamic blessing is more than the blessing of creation because it is designed to contend with and to overcome its opposite: God's curse.

With sin God's curse enters creation alongside God's blessing. We found the universal background to God's promise to Abraham in the account of the nations in Genesis 10-11. But there is an even earlier background in Genesis 3 and 4, where the blessings of creation turn to curse (3:17; 4:11). The curse even enters into God's promise to Abraham, apparently paralleling the blessing. God says to Abraham in Genesis 12: 'I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse' (Genesis 12:3; cf. 27:29; Numbers 24:9). But blessing predominates in the promise (as the difference between the plural 'those who bless you' and the singular 'the one who curses you' seems to suggest), and it is clearly blessing, not curse, that is the goal of God's calling of Abraham. Therefore blessing has the last word in the promise: 'in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed'.

Through the story of Israel curse continually accompanies blessing (e.g. Deuteronomy 7:12-16; 27-28), but the ultimate goal of God's promise to Abraham is the blessing that will prevail over the curse. It does so when the seed of Abraham, the singled-out descendant of Abraham, the Messiah, becomes 'a curse for us ... so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles' (Galatians 3:13-14). It is in this light that Paul can call the promise to Abraham that the nations will be blessed the gospel (Galatians 3:8). The secret of the promise is the bearing of the curse so that the blessing may prevail. The gospel is that in Jesus Christ the curse has been set aside and God’s creative purpose for the blessing of his creation is established beyond any possibility of reversal. God’s last and effective word is his blessing. It is a particular word, spoken in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, broadcast by those who like Paul cannot but pass it on, so powerful in its effect, overflowing with blessing from those who, blessed by it, become a blessing to others. 

        For the next section on the nation of Israel, link here.