Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Abraham probably didn't know or understand the millennia-long process which was beginning with him. Exactly how much information God revealed to him, we don't know, but he likely would not have understood it, or been psychologically capable of absorbing its impact, if God had shown him in detail the great plan which was starting with the instructions to Abraham to leave his hometown of Ur and go to a place which God would only later indicate to him.
Leaving Ur, Abraham and family traveled northwest along the Tigris-Euphrates valley to Haran. Abraham's father accompanied them this far, but died in Haran. From Haran, they went southwest into the Jordan River Valley area. This route was part of a longer and widely-used route between Mesopotamia and Egypt. A straight-line route was not available, because moving directly west from Ur led one into impassable deserts. Abraham's nomadic existence in the Levant, also called Canaan, and later called Israel or Palastine, kept him moving periodically to find fresh pastures for his herds and flocks. Many of the places at which he stopped reappear later in the Old Testament salvation narrative, like Shechem, which will centuries later be center of worship in Israel, even before Jerusalem. It is therefore telling that Abraham builds his first recorded altar there.
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people that they had acquired in Haran, and they set out to go to the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. And there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.
For the phrase "called upon the name of the Lord," the Hebrew text is ambiguous enough to allow the rendering "preached the name of the Lord," but the difference is slight: a healthy spiritual life is an integrated whole, and whoever properly prays will proclaim, and whoever properly proclaims will pray. It is possible to pray without proclaiming, or to proclaim without praying, but in that case, neither will have been done correctly.
The phrase "blessed to be a blessing" has become, appropriately, a regular theme in devotional literature. The January 1994 edition of Tägliche Andachten notes: In diesem Text äußert Gott zwei Wahrheiten. In the divine economy, the blessing we receive and the blessing which God grants to others through us are inseparable. Franz Delitzsch and Carl Friedrich Keil, in their commentary on Genesis, describe the beginning of the Heilsgeschichte in light of the geopolitical situation in the Ancient Near East. Given the established territories, populations, and cultures of the Babylonians (at that point still as the kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad), the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and others, and given the thorough paganism of these civilizations, God would need a new tribe to begin His salvation history.
It was necessary that by the side of these self-formed nations He should form a nation for Himself, to be the recipient and preserver of His salvation, and that in opposition to the rising kingdoms of the world He should establish a kingdom for the living, saving fellowship of man with Himself. The foundation for this was laid by God in the call and separation of Abram from his people and his country, to make him, by special guidance, the father of a nation from which the salvation of the world should come. With the choice of Abram the revelation of God to man assumed a select character, inasmuch as God manifested Himself henceforth to Abram and his posterity alone as the author of salvation and the guide to true life; whilst other nations were left to follow their own course according to the powers conferred upon them, in order that they might learn that in their way, and without fellowship with the living God, it was impossible to find peace to the soul, and the true blessedness of life.
The blessing given to Abraham becomes the blessing given through Abraham, and assumes a new and greater form in Jesus. Jesus is a gift to us; His birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection are gifts to us. In Jesus are contained numerous other gifts. The Tägliche Andachten tell us that
Der Herr segnet uns. Sein größter Segen ist das Leben and Sterben und die Auferstehung Christi, denn durch den Glauben an Christi Versöhnungswerk werden wir für gerecht erklärt. In Jesu schenkt Gott uns die Möglichkeit, als unschuldig und gerecht gesehen zu werden, und heilig und geliebt zu sein. Daneben gibt uns der Herr auch andere Gaben. Er gibt uns die Gaben des Heiligen Geistes: die Fähigkeiten, mit denen wir in der Gemeinde dienen. Er bewirkt in uns die Frucht des Heiligen Geistes: Liebe, Freude, Geduld, Freundlichkeit usw. Der Herr gibt us auch Lieb und Seele, Augen, Ohren, Vernunft und alle Sinne, Kleider und Schuhe, Essen und Trinken, Haus und alle Güter, Familie, Geld, Freunde, und alles andere.
Like the master who entrusted sums of money to his servants (Matthew chapter 25), the gift which is Jesus and the gifts which arrive through Jesus are not to be securely locked up as a treasure for ourselves, but rather shared with others.
Wir sollen diesen Segen nicht bloß einsammeln und für uns behalten, sondern Gott befiehlt uns, ihn mit anderen zu teilen. Oft sind wir das Mittel wodurch er andere segnet. Wir teilen die gute Nachtricht unserer Erlösung in Jesu mit; wir benutzen die Gaben und Frucht des Heiligen Geistes, um anderen zu helfen; und wir geben auch von unseren weltlichen Gegenständen.
While it is our responsibility to be good stewards of the blessings which God has given us, and it is also our responsibility to share those blessing with others, we simply can't do this. We are too sinful and selfish. It is our nature to keep those blessings for ourselves. Grace can flow freely through us only when the Holy Spirit is present in our hearts and minds, and overrides our selfish human nature. Therefore, we must pray for God to work charity within us, because we cannot work it within ourselves:
Lieber Heiland, segne die Welt durch uns! Amen.
The grace which flows to us is the grace which flows through us. Like Abraham, we are blessed in order to be a blessing.
