More Than a Numbers Game

Aug. 27

Read: Rev. 1:20, 12:4, Genesis 15:1-6

More Than a Numbers Game

“And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” (v.5,6)

While Abraham looked up at the night time sky, the Lord looked at him and said “So shall your offspring be.” Abraham had come from the city of Ur… the greatest of all early civilizations. Ur was a city steeped in the worship of the stars, as most ancient cities and peoples were. Abraham had spent many hours staring up into the night time sky… and probably even worshipping them before he met the one, true, and most high God. The ancient peoples saw the stars as spiritually beings… “heavenly hosts”. Theses stars were linked to the “gods” that they worshipped. I wonder what Abraham thought when God told him “So shall your offspring be”. Was it only in number that Abraham’s offspring would be like the stars? The Hebrew word is as much a call to “consider” or “revisit” as it is to count. It is used more often to mean “tell or declare” than it is to “count” (64x vs. 29x). What would it look like for Abraham to look up into the sky and tell the stars something? What would he tell them? Maybe what God told him… “So shall my offspring be”. There was more to the imagery. I think God picked stars intentionally for Abraham, because he knew Abraham’s past and ancient man’s understanding of the spiritual realms / “angelic” beings. I think God was foreshadowing something so much larger than numbers.

Stars are symbols of angels in the scriptures. We see this in Rev. 1:20 and 12:4 where the stars are angels assigned to churches as well as stars representing the angels cast out of heaven with the devil. This concept was familiar to Abraham… and God knew that! In the ancient world these “angels” were also known as the “sons of God” and the biles refers to them as much. (Previous Devotional, cf. Gen. 6, Job 1) We begin to see a bigger picture forming here. God is making his children into “sons of God”. God is transforming his people into “new creations” in Jesus Christ. (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17 etc.) We are being “born again” with a “spiritual birth” / “born of the Spirit”. (cf. John 3) God is truly making us - his people - like the proverbial stars in more ways than just numbers.

I think this sense of cosmic destiny was real to Abraham. I think those words - “So shall your offspring be” - carried a great deal of weight and power for Abraham. I think they were a foreshadowing for us of the work that the Lord was going to do through Jesus Christ. We are being made like the heavenly host. We are being spiritually brought to life to praise the Lord, to carry his words, to do his work in the unfolding “Kingdom of God”. We are being enlisted and brought in to “divine counsel” of God. We are being made partakers and participants. We are being “assigned to churches” to minister and care for them. (cf. Rev. 12:4) We are co-guardians - like “guardian angels” - for those people God has entrusted to us to care for. When we begin to think of the work of those angelic beings in the universe and the ways that they worship the one, true, and living God… the God most high… and serve him we get a picture of our life in Christ. Just imagine all the things that these “sons of God” have been called to do in the scriptures… and the Lord is doing the same THROUGH US. This is what it means to be a descendant of Abraham. It is not simply that there are a lot of us. With the naked eye, in any one given hemisphere, there are 3,000 visible stars without a telescope. I don’t think God was trying to tell Abraham he would have 3,000 descendants. I think God was trying to capture the radical transformation he was going to bring to and through his people!

It is my prayer that we catch a glimpse of this “bigger picture” of what God is doing. I want us to have a sense of his KINGDOM and how it is unfolding and working. We have traded in a cosmic destiny and multi-dimensional work for a tidy little package of “morality” and avoiding “hell”. Oof. “So shall your offering be”. This has been GOd’s plan since the beginning . He is calling a people to himself and we join in with the heavenly host and are counted as “sons of God” in the fullest and most spiritual and cosmic ways! This is God fulfilling his promise to Abraham. Look up at the stars tonight and consider these words. Love you guys. - JDP