It’s straightforward… God promised a land and brought the people into it. Maybe not so straightforward is what we make of the ‘land’ today. However, I want to back up quite a way. What if God did not promise a land? Yes, I am aware there are numerous Scriptures that you can either use to quickly dismiss my comment or to bash me over the head with, but while gathering together the ammunition just give me a moment.
I am not about to deny what the text says, but as with many texts we do not have in them the fullness. God is understood to be speaking and we encapsulate what is being said the best we can, but we reduce it – we prophesy in part, we speak on God’s behalf but only get so far; and God also accommodates himself to what we can hear, what we can embrace. The fullness of God’s word is personal, as revealed in Jesus, everything else is derivative.
We read that there will always be someone on David’s throne, a promise for ever. And of course we can draw a line from David to Jesus, but there were periods of time when there was no king on David’s throne, so we have to be careful about pulling our Scriptures out to back us, indeed I think Scripture demands that we become somewhat creative with what is written there… for we are dealing with the realm of promise not of prediction.
Let me come at this from two ends: Paul in Romans 4:13 informs us that:
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.
We do not have Paul using the term ‘land’ but kosmos / world and of course the play on words is there with ‘seed’ (descendants – singular, a collective noun or creatively referring to one person) – is he referring to the (physical) seed of Abraham or to Jesus as ‘seed’. Either way the concept of a promised land is not at the forefront in Paul’s understanding of the Abrahamic covenant. The ‘promise’ was of the world, the prediction might have been different.
Then let’s back up to the pre-Abrahamic chapters (the Old Testament’s Old Testament so to speak, Genesis 1-11). The final two chapters are given record the ‘sons of Noah’:
These are the families of Noah’s sons, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood (Gen. 10:32).
Then Genesis 11 is given to the after-effects of the Tower of Babel, the dispersal of the nations.
Abraham’s call and subsequent journey is with those chapters as the backdrop, for in him all families of the world will be blessed (or in NT language, will receive the gift of the Spirit). The nations that act as the backdrop to Abraham’s call are dispersed, Abraham’s seed is to be present for the dispersed seed. In the dispersed (yet understood to be centre) context of Ur of the Chaldees, a major settlement at the time, God calls Abraham to go on a counter journey to the traffic of the day. Walk away from the centre to the land that will be revealed. (I appreciate the language now goes on about Canaan.) Moving forward… Abraham will have seed more numerous than the stars (Gen. 15:5), and he will possess the land that he can ‘see’ and where he can ‘walk’,
The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.” (Gen. 13:14-17).
How far can you see? How far can you (and your seed) walk? In the latter context it is interesting that Jesus in response to Greeks who had come to Jerusalem to see Jesus, that he responded with the seemingly strange statement that ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it remains alone…’ I suggest that was Jesus affirmation that the Greeks were going to see Jesus. A Greek Jesus, not now, not in Jerusalem. Later when the seed arrived in their land. And there will indeed be an African Jesus, even a Scottish Jesus (!), and certainly a feminist Jesus, a Jesus in the rich diverse clothing of all the manifestations of humanity.
Conflict of perspective regarding land is very obvious in Joshua. ‘He took the whole land’, ‘there remained much still to be possessed’. Which is correct?… and given that they are both in the same book we should assume the writers did not see a conflict between the two statements. I resolve it by considering that they are working much more with the dynamic (and changing) element of promise rather than the fixed idea of prediction. Promise means what was predicted had not come to pass, but they are on the way to what lies beyond the prediction. Prediction is but a stepping stone. Here are two Scriptures that stand in coflict;
Jos. 11:23 So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. And the land had rest from war.
Jos. 13:1 Now Joshua was old and advanced in years; and the Lord said to him, “You are old and advanced in years, and very much of the land still remains to be possessed.”
Prediction would suggest that there was a land to be received by Abraham’s seed, with the dispute over the extent of the boundaries of the land, and a continued discussion as to when the land was ‘theirs’, that certainly was debated after the return from the Exile back to land, when it seems the majority view was that Israel was still in exile, even though no longer in Babylon. Land did not dictate freedom, freedom being possible with or without land.
Promise… promised the world. How far can you (and your seed) see? How far can you walk? A step along the way might be a land with boundaries but that can only ever be to test, to mature the people to live without land. I am not sure Jeremiah wold like me to put words in his mouth, but I think he was hitting on something when he told the people to stop mourning about the loss of land, but to buy land in Babylon; and I think Stephen was activating something expansive when he gave as his parting speech that God’s activity was outside the land, and that the only burial plots that came close to home were in Shechem, the land of the Samaritans (Acts 7)! Not a popular speech. Yet as he released revelation about promise it found a landing space that day in the hearts of a right-old-biggoted ‘I’ll kill you over my zeal for the land’ Pharisee named Saul /Paul.
I am not suggesting that Abraham and his seed could make the stretch to conceiving of a people without land, of being seed scattered in the dispersion of Babel, a people living from what they had seen in the heavens. It is inevitable that they settled for a land, and perhaps I should really say that they wonderfully increased in faith so that they could believe God for a land. That I both understand and applaud and want to learn from.
What I do not think is laudable is when we fall back to such talk as Christian nation. I might not have a huge vision, I might simply be able to think of my street as being blessed because of the gift of the Spirit having come to this Gentile, but it is part of that big promise to Abraham. Leave where you are and I will give to you and your descendants the world.
Did God promise a land – yes (prediction) and no (promise).
