The Blessing of Abraham

God promised Abraham that in his seed, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). Today, Sinclair Ferguson explores how Jesus Christ fulfills this blessing in the salvation of Jewish and gentile believers.

This week on Things Unseen, we’ve been thinking together about the way Genesis 3:15 is like a tightly wound ball of thread that gradually unwinds throughout the whole of the Old Testament until eventually it reaches the Lord Jesus. It’s already Thursday, and we’ve really just reached Genesis 9, so there’s a long way to go. And we’ll not get much further today, but I promise tomorrow we will get there.

We saw on Monday that the New Testament sees the promise of Genesis 3:15 being fulfilled in Jesus Christ. But when the New Testament talks explicitly about the story of a seed, it tends to focus on the way this seed comes through Abraham.

There are several reasons for this—one is polemical. The opponents of both Jesus and Paul’s ministry claimed that physical connection to Abraham was what really mattered. Interestingly, John 8:31–59 tells us about this conflict story. But Cain’s connection to Adam and Eve should have been enough to teach anyone that physical connection is no substitute for living faith.

But there’s another reason Abraham gets so much attention. It’s that when the story gets to him, God gives significant fuller revelation of how the promise is going to be fulfilled. And here are two elements in that fuller revelation.

Number one is given on Mount Moriah, the scene of the binding of Isaac. It’s an event full of electric moments. Abraham has been told to sacrifice his son, Isaac, the son who carries the seed of promise. And as he’s about to plunge the knife into him, the angel of the Lord stops him. Abraham turns around and sees a ram caught in the thicket, and he offers it instead of Isaac.

It’s a moment that brings into full relief Isaac’s earlier question and his father’s answer to him. “My father,” said Isaac, “we have the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” And Abraham says, “God will provide for himself the lamb” (see Gen. 22).

I wonder if for ages, believers pondered that response. God would provide the lamb. It was a ram God had provided, so where is the lamb? The question was partly answered by Isaiah, wasn’t it? “He was oppressed and he was afflicted,” he says, speaking about the Suffering Servant:

Yet he opened not his mouth; Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. (Isa. 53:7)

And John the Baptist would answer Isaac’s question even more clearly when “he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’” (John 1:29).

A second element in the new revelation to Abraham lies in that word, “world.” Jesus is not just the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of Jewish believers, but the sins of all believers, wherever they are and whoever they are in the whole wide world.

You remember how Abraham was given a hint of this. In his seed, all the families of the earth would be blessed. Psalm 2 would later make clear that this was a reflection of the promise that the Father had given to his Son: “The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son . . . Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage” (vv. 7–8).

God always had in view the day when the message of the conquering seed of the woman, the Lord Jesus Christ, would go into the whole world. Jesus reflected that in the Great Commission. The gospel was to be taken to all the families of the earth because it was the whole world that had been alienated from God in the garden of Eden. The promise of the coming seed, the conqueror, the Redeemer, was to be a promise for all who believed in Him: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

I hope and pray that whoever you are, wherever in the world you may be listening, whatever family of the earth you belong to, I hope that you believe in Jesus as your Savior and Lord. Because if you do, you will have the eternal life that he promised. That’s actually what the promise of Genesis 3:15 is all about. That’s why it’s so very important.