LECTURE IV.

THE PROMISE TO ABRAHAM.

GENESIS, xii. 1-3.

"Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

Ν

IN passing to the consideration of the next of the

early prophecies of a Redeemer,—the promise to Abraham, first given in these words, and afterwards repeated with special reference to his seed through Isaac,-we observe a striking difference between it and the foregoing, viz.: that while they (as we have seen) predicted the Redemption in general terms, as the counteraction of the effects of the Fall by One who should be the Destroyer of Man's Enemy and the Avenger of the redeemed,in this (as also in the subsequent prophecies from this date) the revelation becomes more definite. The arrangements for the establishment of the Redeemer's kingdom begin to be disclosed, and the

order of the Divine economy in redemption to be developed.

The reason of which may be found in the peculiar circumstances which marked the call of Abraham and indicate the Lord's purpose in it. For he was called out of an apostacy wide-spread and increasing, which, but for the divine intervention, must have terminated as in the age preceding. Then, as if to show what human nature had become by the Fall, man was left to himself; and the apostacy first manifested in Cain was permitted to take its course: the result of which was, that in the days of Noah, the tenth from Adam, "all flesh had corrupted His way upon the earth," so as to necessitate the destruction of the race with the exception of the one faithful family. But scarcely was the judgment past when the like tendency again manifested itself in the family of Noah,—in Ham, the father of Canaan. And now, in less than ten generations more, we have the whole earth united in that atheistic scheme upon which God has stamped the name of "Babel" or "Confusion," recorded in the commencement of the chapter which relates the departure of Abram for his country in obedience to the divine command: in whose time (the tenth again in descent from Noah) the spread of idolatry was such, that of his immediate ancestors and family, as already observed, it is recorded that "they served other gods." (Josh. xxiv. 2.) To arrest which, and so avert a consummation which threatened speedily to involve the world in a second destruction, he-like Enoch and Noah, found faithful

in a corrupt generation-is separated to be the head of a chosen race, among whom the truth should be preserved, and to whom also the further communica tions of it should be made. In the words of another, -"When God began, by the call of Abraham, to make the first visible disposition and determination of things in the world towards the accomplishment of His intended mercy, Prophecy began also to unfold the scheme of that mercy. . . . and the Patriarch who is the original heir of the promises is made the depository of those chief informations which convey them.

The Father of the Faithful' is put in possession of the oracles of faith."*

To treat these-the various revelations with which he was favoured-in detail were here impracticable: but in sum they may be comprised under two principal promises united in the first of them, the passage before us, viz.: the promise of the possession of the land into which he was called to go; and of the blessing of all the families of the earth in him. Which it is usual with modern commentators to regard as prophecies respectively of "the two dispensations, the Jewish and the Christian:" the former fulfilled in "the possession of the land of Canaan by Abraham's offspring," or "the establishment (in it) of the Hebrew people, that dispensation which includes the Law of Moses; the extraordinary superintendance of the Theocracy over that people; with the

*Davison, Discourse III., fifth edition, p. 90.

authentic transmission of the divine promises and revelations in one line by their hands down to the Gospel:"* the latter as dating from thence, and being now fulfilled in the diffusion of Christianity and the extension of the Church in the world. But though on a superficial view they may seem to be capable of an exposition by which they are thus made to agree with a scheme of prophetic interpretation which assumes that this is the last of the dispensations of Revelation, in which, therefore, all the prophecies from the beginning terminate, and to which all the previous arrangements of Divine Providence, which are the subject of the inspired history, were subservient; on closer examination we shall find it impossible to reconcile it with the text of the promises themselves on the one hand, or, on the other, with the comments on them which are to be met with in the New Testament: which combine to prove, that (though in a certain part fulfilled) their main scope, as well as that of the prophecies already considered, is a yet future age with which they have taught us to identify the consummation of Redemption,- that "dispensation of the fulness of the times" (oikovoμíav τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν) to which this and all preceding ages in their respective courses tend, and in

* Ibid, p. 80, et passim. See also Bishop Sherlock's Fifth Discourse on the Use and Intent of Prophecy.

† Ephes. i. 9, 10. Not to be confounded with "the fulness of the time" (TO Nýρwμа тоû Xpоvov), Gal. iv. 4, which is the end of the legal dispensation and completion of the Church's pupilage under it: see the context from ch. iii. 23.