As I embark on my third go-around through Scripture in four years, I remember thinking: what is God going to reveal this time around? I've been hearing from people who have done these yearlong treks through the Bible many times that every time they go back through, God reveals something new that they hadn't seen before. Reading through the Word of God is not a one-and-done, which I figured out. But today was a day where it began to crystallize why it is a good thing to not only read through the Bible all the way through in 2025, but then to keep doing it in future years afterward.
The story of God's promise to Abram (later renamed Abraham and is the father of the Israelite nation) is pretty well-known, at least in my church. We are a church whose mission statement reads: where your hope and faith will be restored. Walking in love is also a big deal, but having faith no matter what is also a big deal. Hence the retelling of this story on a periodic basis:
Now the Lord had said to Abram:
“Get out of your country,
From your family
And from your father’s house,
To a land that I will show you.I will make you a great nation;I will bless youAnd make your name great;And you shall be a blessing.I will bless those who bless you,And I will curse him who curses you;And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Abram did as he was told and went with his wife and servants to Canaan. Eventually, when there was a famine, he and his entourage relocated to Egypt. Later, Abram inherited Canaan after making a deal with his nephew Lot to split the land (Lot wanted the plains of Jordan; Sodom and Gomorrah were there also).
Once again, God reminded Abram of His promise:
After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.” Genesis 15:1, NKJV
Further, God illustrated His promise by having Abram look at the stars:
And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “This one shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir.” Then He brought him outside and said, “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.
God and Abram kept conversing throughout the day, until Abram went to sleep. This is where (to borrow from The Bible Recap), my God Shot came in:
12 Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. 13 Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. 14 And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a good old age. 16 But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
God was foretelling the days when Abram's grandson Jacob and his descendants all would have to flee to Egypt because of a famine. (He even nailed the timing down to the generation in which it was to happen! Not to mention how many years they will remain there!) What stands out to me is that this is not a happy prophecy. He does promise Abram that it will go well for him, and it will ultimately go well for his descendants afterward. But, Abram's descendants were going to go to Egypt and be afflicted there, whether they liked it or not.
If you are a regular reader on my blog, you'll probably realize how much I dislike trials and tribulations with a passion. At the same time, I hope I also communicate that I recognize that I cannot get out of them. Whatever God says will happen, will happen. Because He is a merciful God, He will relent if I repent. But I share the above to say that what I find comforting is that God knew. There's nothing I could have done to avoid certain things (although there are certainly times when I experience things that I could have experienced if I had done certain things differently!) - but I've been around circles of people that preach responsibility to nth degree, to the point that, " if you even think a certain way, it will affect your destiny, so you need to completely change everything about yourself down to every last one of your thoughts so that whatever bad thing won't happen, and you need to do it because I (not God, mind you) expect you to! And if you don't, then, well, you deserved that bad thing that happened to you! You need to learn to suck it up, you snowflake! "... Yes, I do bear responsibility for my own words and actions, but it is foolish to assume that just because something bad happened to me it's automatically my fault. And I think above all, those are the intrusive thoughts I fight against the most. The truth is, personal responsibility still requires some grace to come alongside. It is a failure of another person's own personal responsibility to assume that others were properly taught like they were (and to blame others if they not only didn't know but also didn't realize they needed to know).
Anyway... ahead of being introduced to my love, I did have a few dreams highlighting a few critically weak areas of my life mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Even some of the more triggering sermons at my church have backed up theses dreams (and vice versa). The point is, I believe God used the passage from Genesis 15:12-16 to remind me that [dung] happens. Because I'm still very much a work in progress, that means that some of my innermost thoughts that might not be Godly are going to be challenged simply because they exist. Abram (eventually Abraham) is considered a man of faith:
8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9 By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; 10 for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
11 By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude—innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.
And yet, he still sinned. From a place of unbelief, he had sexual relations with his wife Sarai/Sarah's maid on the false premise that God was going to give him a child via the maid rather than his wife. From a place of fear, he lied to Pharaoh by presenting his wife as his sister. But the point is, despite his multitudinous sins, he was saved because of his faith in his God, and especially because of his faith in the Lord's promise to him.
But, as we know, sin still has consequences. Ishmael, the son of Sarah's maid, is the forefather of the Arabs, many of whom are Christian-hating Muslims. The long-promised son Isaac didn't seem to have the greatest gift of discernment, as he allowed his second-favorite son (and Abram's grandson) Jacob to steal his first-favorite son Esau's blessing. And Jacob was a liar and a manipulator, clearly playing favorites with his children, favoring Joseph and Benjamin over the other sons. Three generations after Abram's time, the family of promise was already a horrendous mess of sinners. But as the Bible tells us, God already knew about that. And He already had a plan to redeem His people, Abram's descendants, from their sins.
13 Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years. 14 And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a good old age. 16 But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”
I just wanted to point out that, as I am wrapping up this post, I am feeling great peace. I do earnestly believe I was dealt a rougher hand in life compared with almost all of my peers, and that I have had to overcome more than they will ever know. Sometimes that still grates at me. As such, the things of God that are more likely to minister to me are passages like Genesis 15:12-16 because they're real and because they still show that God is with them (like He repeatedly promises in His Word) even in the worst of it. It's almost as if I can hear Him saying: yes, it's going to get bad. But I will judge those who afflict you. I will. All you need to do is to trust Me and completely surrender to Me everything you thought you knew about this situation.
I say this because as wonderful as aspects of my life have been over the last five years, and as wonderful as the milestones that God finally allowed me to reach in the last year, I still wrestle with feeling like I had to pay a much higher price than so many others, and that being the case even when I had to wait a lot longer ahead of time. But, what gives me comfort from this highlight passage is that I had warning, and more importantly that God knew. It's times like these that I realize I am glad to surrender my stubborn wish that life would always be right and good and fair this side of heaven. One day, Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, and everything will indeed be made right and good and fair on that day.
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