How did Abram know that the God or the voice he heard was
able to do as promised? Those are some
serious promises, I will make you a great nation, I will bless you, I will make
your name great, I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you
and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. Doesn’t that seem like overpromising? Could anyone really believe all that would
actually happen? It is amazing that
Abram went at that promise alone without a sign other than what he heard but
the longer I follow Jesus where He leads the more I am amazed that the man
persevered all those years when none of those things were coming true. Along the way he became quite wealthy and
powerful in his own right so he was being blessed, but… We talk about a leap or a step of faith but
the truth is that we are called to a walk and a life of faith. He never saw the fulfillment of those
promises other than in the barest essential, the birth of Isaac, but he
believed God. That is truly a man of
faith.
What reference point did the Jewish people have for a
metaphor like the “Bread that came down from heaven”? The answer, of course, is manna, the bread
that sustained their ancestors in the wilderness. In our liturgy we use terms that speak of
eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking His blood and I always feel some need to
remind people that we don’t believe in transubstantiation but then I remember
that when He originally said these things they thought much worse things than
that about His words. It sounded like He
was calling them to cannibalism and, in fact, the early church was accused of
just that because of their liturgy. In
Judaism, Pentecost is a dual purpose festival.
It celebrates the harvest and loaves of bread are waved before the Lord
but it also commemorates the giving of the Law.
The blessing of the fruitful land and the Law are entwined with one
another, one represents physical bread, the other, spiritual bread. He is concerned with both the physical and
spiritual needs of His people. Jesus is
the bread of life in both these same ways through the Eucharist which we eat in
faith.
Where does faith begin?
The writer tells us, “By faith we understand that the universe was
created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things
that are visible.” Genesis 1 is the
answer to the question. It begins there
and we read the rest of the Word based on the faith that receives the truth of
how all things came to be. The word of
God created all things. What did not
happen, he says, is that creation was not the assemblage of pre-existing bits,
it was a de novo act of God. Abraham’s
faith was that the God who created all things was the one who called him. It was, however, more than that, it was built
upon the faith of those who had come before him, whose faith was known to
him. He was closer to the beginning than
we but at the mid-point of history stands Jesus, who was there, in beginning
with God and He was God. We can either
trust Him on these things or not, but He affirmed the witness of the Word.
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