Reflections of Grace: Genesis 12:2

“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing.” — Genesis 12:2

The subject of this promise in Genesis 12:2 was the patriarch Abraham, from whom the people of Israel are descended and through whom God promised to bring blessing to all the world (v. 3). It would be no overstatement to say that Genesis 12:1-3 establishes the trajectory of the entire rest of the Bible from that point forward.

As we continue engaging in dispensationalism, we must observe that the Bible is not a collection of disjointed moral stories and ethical teachings. It is unified in itself in such a way that it reveals the one plan of God to save a people for himself through the one Savior, Jesus Christ, by his once-for-all death on the cross. And the Bible does this even though it consists of 66 books penned by around 40 different human authors over the span of 1,500 years or more.

How is this possible? It is because it was the one God who fully inspired every word that those human authors wrote. Because God is unchanging, his plan was and is unchanging.

Now back to Abraham. Dispensationalism teaches that the blessings that God promised to Abraham in Genesis 12 are exclusive to ethnic Israel and that the blessings promised to Gentiles through Abraham are in some sense different. As such, dispensationalism expects a future, earthly fulfillment of all of the Old Testament national promises made to the people of Israel. Thus, they look for a re-establishment of the nation of Israel, the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem, and the reign of the Jewish nation over all the other nations of the world. Most dispensationalists suppose that this will take place during the millennial reign of Christ (Revelation 20).

Of the many problems with this scheme, one of the most fundamental is that the Bible does not speak of an ultimate separation between the promises made to Israel and the promises made to the Church. Instead, it says quite clearly, “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’ So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.” (Galatians 3:7-9)

This does not deny that the Bible at least implies that there will be a large conversion of ethnic Jews to Christ in the last days (Romans 11:25-27). But as we saw from Romans 11:24, they will not be converted under a different plan of God. Instead, they will be saved through Christ, united to his body and therefore to his Church. So there will be one Church, one way of salvation, and one Lord and King over all. Amen.