An Advent Journey - 30th November

Reading: Genesis 15: 1-6

For the last number of months there has been a lot of talk about Christmas. A lot of talk about ‘saving Christmas’ and real concern at times that Christmas this year might not actually happen. 

Yesterday we saw how the first Christmas was promised in the Bible right back at the very beginning. But this morning, still in the first book of the Bible, we hit a snag, and it’s a big snag. God has called Abram to follow Him and God has promised that Abram’s family will be the family of blessing, the family that would quite literally one day ‘save Christmas’. 

But in Genesis 15:2 Abram asks God how this can all possibly happen because Abram has no children. How can a descendant of Abram bring blessing and hope to the world, when at this point, there isn’t even one descendant, let alone a whole nation?

At this very early moment in the Bible’s run in to the first Christmas God puts down a marker, explaining how He works. The God of the Bible is a God who brings hope when there is no hope, He brings a future when there is no future, He specialises in keeping His great story of blessing moving forward when it seems to have ground to a halt.

So, literally thousands of years before the first Christmas the LORD takes an ageing Abram out into the open, gets him to look up at the countless stars and promises Him a future (Genesis 15:5). At that moment, in faith, Abram believed. He could never have imagined how one day, one of those stars, would rest over a cattle shed, where one of his family would lie, the Saviour of the world.