06/25/2024 – Day 023 – Genesis – Chapters 12 – 15 / Post # 1 of 2 / Biblical prophecies and archaeological evidence in recent years flies in the face of biblical pundits.
Last cycle’s post for this reading was dated 03/22/2022, covering Melchizedek, Verses 14: 17 – 24. We will only see a short verse in Psalms and short sections in Hebrews from here on Melchizedek.
I would like to share some key verse commentary excerpts from my Apologetics Study Bible that we can carry with us throughout our year:
“I will make you a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.” Genesis 12:2
12:2. “Abram would not become a ‘great nation’ as God had promised, during his lifetime. However, his descendants apparently numbered over two million by the time of the exodus (some 600,000 men, plus their wives and children; Exodus 12:37). Abram has become significant in history as the physical father of Israel and the one regarded as spiritual ‘father’ by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Abram became ‘a blessing’ by his example of proper worship and proclamation of the Lord’s name (12:8), as well as by his justifying faith (15:6; Romans 4:3). His name may be reflected in a tenth-century B.C. Egyptian list of places in the Negev that includes ‘The Enclosure of Abram’.
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“I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
12:3 “The blessing and curse here have played out repeatedly in history. The nations or groups (plural: ‘those’) who have blessed Abram or his descendants have been blessed by God. The individuals (singular: ‘him’) who have cursed Abram or Israel have been ‘cursed’ coming eventually to a bad end. This, however, is not a blank check for the actions of unbelieving Israel, as if the nation could do no wrong or deserves no criticism or has not accountability for its actions. It is a general ongoing promise. Acts 3:25 and Galations 3:8 indicate that all the families of the earth are blessed in the availability of salvation through Jesus Christ, and Galations 6:16 refers to the church as ‘the Israel of God’ through which, by implication, that blessing is extended.”
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“Then the Lord said to Abram, ‘Know this for certain: Your offspring will be strangers in a land that does not belong to them; they will be enslaved and oppressed 400 years, However, I will judge the nation they serve, and afterwards they will go out with many possessions.” 15: 13-14
15: 13-14 “Some scholars hold that Moses, or a later editor of Genesis, is here simply projecting a knowledge of later history into the narrative in the guise of advance prophecy. The logic is that it c Ould not possibly have been known in Abram’s time (2000 B.C.) that Israel would be in Egypt for ‘400 years’ and that they would be ‘enslaved and oppressed’ for most of that period. Such a perspective, however, is rooted in an anti-supernatural bias and flies in the face of the bulk of predictive biblical prophecy that has been fulfilled in amazing detail.”
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15: 19-21 “Over a century ago there was no historical or archaeological evidence for the existence of several of the peoples listed among those 10 nations (Kenites … Jebusites’). As a result, certain scholars doubted the veracity of this verse. A century ago, however, important archaeological findings have greatly strengthened the likelihood that all 10 did, in fact, exist when Abram and Moses lived.”
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Soli Deo Gloria!