Make Thy Name Great

Where was Abram when God said this to him, and what did he have to show for his life?

Genesis gives the promise right after it has laid out where the family stood, and every item on the list is a loss. Abram's brother Haran "died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity." "Sarai was barren; she had no child." Terah had taken the family out of Ur "to go into the land of Canaan," but he got as far as Haran and settled there, "and Terah died in Haran." Into all of that come God's words: "I will make of thee a great nation." Abram was seventy-five when he set out. His wife could not have a child, and the journey his father began had stopped halfway.

Read the page before it, because the words are chosen on purpose. At Babel the people said, "let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name." One chapter later, God speaks to a childless man with no city and says, "and make thy name great." It is the very thing the crowd at Babel wanted and was refused. Now God gives it freely to a man who had not asked for it.

Verse three is the part that gets argued over: "I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee." People often pull it into arguments about modern nations and borders. Read in its place, it was spoken to one man, before there was a nation, or a law, or a land, or even a son. And it ends with the widest promise in the chapter: "and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

Peter read that ending to a crowd in Jerusalem as something already happening: "Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities." The blessing God promised to a childless old man has come to the whole world through Jesus, and it reaches as far as you.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 218 is Our Eyes Are Upon Thee (2 Chronicles 20:12).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two