Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 218 · August 6
Make Thy Name Great
“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:”
Where was Abram standing when this was said to him, and what did he have in hand?
Haran, a town that was meant to be a stopover. Genesis has just laid out the family's position and every item in it is a loss. His brother Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity. Sarai was barren; she had no child. Terah had taken them out of Ur to go into the land of Canaan, got this far and stopped, and Terah died in Haran. Into that: I will make of thee a great nation. He is seventy-five, his wife cannot have a child, and Terah, who started the journey, is buried in the town.
Read the page before it, because the vocabulary is deliberate. At Babel the project was in the first person plural: 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, to a childless man with no city: and make thy name great. The same object, wanted by a crowd and refused them, then handed to somebody who had not asked.
Verse three is the part that gets fought over. I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee turns up in arguments about modern borders most weeks. Taken whole, it was said to one man, before there was a nation or a law or a land or a son, and it ends in the widest clause 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 under way. Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless 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).