We’re working our way through Genesis using the new Pentateuch Reading Plan that June and I developed. Just 5 chapters/week! We got through the massive events in 1 – 11 – Creation, Fall, Flood, Nations – and we’re into God’s choosing Abram, “blessed to be a blessing,” even though he has some flaws (don’t we all?). The rest of Genesis, by the way, can be described as:

• Abraham (chapters 12 – 25)
• Isaac (chapters 25 – 27)
• Jacob (chapters (28 – 50)
• Joseph (chapters 37 – 50)

The first thing we see is God’s repeated promise including “the land.”

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you.” (Genesis 12.1, NAS)

Abram passed through the land as far as the site of Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. Now the Canaanite was then in the land. The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD who had appeared to him. (Genesis 12.6, 7, NAS)

The LORD said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Now lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land which you see, I will give it to you and to your descendants forever…Arise, walk about the land…for I will give it to you.” (Genesis 13.14, 15, 17, NAS)

And He said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it.” (Genesis 15.7, NAS)

Repeated, specific promises, which make Abram’s question in the next verse a bit odd:

He said, “O Lord GOD, how may I know that I will possess it?” (Genesis 15.8, NAS)

If I were God, I’m thinking the answer to that question is,

Because I said so! Isn’t that enough?

God’s response is more startling and worth a longer look. Stay tuned!