The Promise of a Great People

The Promise of a Great People

Israel was promised she would become a great nation.

“Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven.” Deuteronomy 10:22

The first promise of God’s Covenant, which He held out to Abram (Abraham), was that He would make of the patriarch a great nation (Gen. 12:2). By this God meant him to understand that a people great in numbers—as numerous as the stars of heaven—would descend from him and form a great nation in the earth (cf. Gen. 15:5).

As the people prepared to enter the land of promise, Moses reminded them of their history, and that, even now, God was bringing that promise to fulfillment. The people had indeed become “as numerous as the stars of heaven,” and yet the promise of God’s Law was that, in the land, as they walked in obedience to their gracious God, their numbers and influence would increase even more (cf. Deut. 4:1-8).

Earlier, as Israel prepared for the journey to the land, God reminded them, in dramatic fashion, of just how far He had already brought them from their humble beginnings under the patriarchs to become the great people they now were under Moses. He called together seventy elders to assist Moses early on in their project, that they might come together with Moses and Aaron and receive the renewed Covenant of the Lord (Ex. 24:1, 9). Later, God renewed that special relationship and gave a measure of His Spirit to the seventy (Num. 11:16, 24, 25)—a portent of a yet more-distant development of God’s Covenant. As the people finally moved to go from Sinai to the land of promise, God called for a series of offerings in which each tribe was required to bring a silver basin weighing seventy shekels (cf. Num. 7). It was as if God was reminding the people, in symbolic ways, that He had been faithful, from their beginnings until now, and they could expect that His promises would not fail as they entered the land.

God cast a vision of numerical greatness for His people. They were to envision themselves filling the whole land, tribe by tribe, and spreading out into other lands around them as the Lord continued to give them increase. This vision would have spurred the people on in bringing children into their homes, in partial fulfillment of the original Covenant vision of Genesis 1:26-28. This vision would have been in the minds of fathers as they taught their children the Law of God as the way into His promises, and as they provided inheritances for the generations to come, according to the precepts and statutes of the Law. Though they could see how great they had already become under the graciousness of their Covenant-remembering God, the people could, in their minds, envision an even greater growth of the descendants of Abraham, according to the promise of the their faithful God.

For more insight to the nature of God’s Covenant, order a copy of T. M.’s book, I Will Be Your God, from our online store. Visit our website, www.ailbe.org, and sign up to receive our thrice-weekly devotional, Crosfigell, featuring writers from the period of the Celtic Revival and T. M.’s reflections on Scripture and the Celtic Christian tradition.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T. M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.