For what saith the Scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Romans 4:3
Have you ever, on a clear moonless night tried to count the stars? Neither have I, there are so many! The longer you look, the more stars you see. You look through binoculars, or a telescope, and the number of stars seems to multiply. Even the scientists who study them will give only vague answers, and speak only of what they call the ‘observable’ universe, which they speculate contains a billion trillion stars, give or take a few million trillion. When Abraham looked up to the stars, he saw the same ones that you and I see. And God asked him one night if he could count them. Abraham must surely have stared and shook his head. Then God told him ‘So shall thy seed be’ – Genesis 15:5. This was an amazing statement, coming on the heels of Abraham’s complaint to God that he, now an old man, had no heir. Amazing statement or not, Abraham simply believed it. Today’s text in Romans repeats the statement recorded of Abraham in Genesis 15:6. Did God keep His promise to Abraham? Consider the vast numbers of Jewish descendents of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob down through time until now. Then add in all the descendents of Esau, Isaac’s other son. Then, add in the untold multitudes of descendents of Ishmael that made up and make up the Arab world. Plus the descendents of the children of Keturah, the wife Abraham took after Sarah’s death. Abraham’s seed is surely as uncountable as the stars. As always, God keeps his promises.
God had blessed Abraham, leading him into wealth and victories. And Abraham surely appreciated that. But as he viewed all that God had done for him, he rightly wondered whether it would all end at his death. With no heir, it was a reasonable concern. It wasa just as reasonable a concern as that of many of the Lord’s people today, as we see the riches of God’s spiritual blessings on us being challenged and threatened. How wonderfully God has blessed His assemblies, the companies of believers who seek to obey the pattern of gathering unto His Name according to His Word. We have seen God’s leading of His people in worshiping Him, in serving Him, and in spreading His Gospel. But will all this die out in the generation that is coming?
Remember, even among Abraham’s descendents, only those in the line of Jacob served the Lord, and even of those, only a tiny fragment remained faithful. Since the early days in which God unfolded to godly men the principles on which our Assemblies function, there have been those who have drifted away into their own error and interests, some even becoming outright enemies of the faithful. In our day, we see the devil’s success among our young people in having them value lightly the truths so painfully mined from the Scriptures by those who came before us, filling their hands and ears with Bibles and teaching that blur the distinctions between reverence for God and conformity with the world. Will the truth prevail?
Of Peter’s great confession in Matthew 16 of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus declared: ‘Upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ – Matthew 16:18. Is this God’s promise to us today? Do we believe it? -Jim MacIntosh