Abram had traveled to the land of Canaan at God's direction, placing his life in the hands of the Creator of the Universe. God had promised that Abram would be the father of a great nation, and Abram trusted in God's promise. But he still had questions about how the promise would be carried out, especially because he and Sarai so far had been unable to have children. In Gen 15:3, he pointed out,
"You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir."
God responded in verse 5,
"Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be."
However, God didn't give Abram a detailed outline and timetable on the fulfillment of the promise. So Abram faced the challenge of waiting to see how and when it would be carried out.
David, in Psalm 27:14, encourages readers,
"Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!"
In a short teaching at Church of the Messiah on June 13, 2020, Jack Starcher noted that the word "wait" in Psalm 27:14 comes from a root meaning "to bind." So another way to say "wait for the Lord" might be to say, "bind yourself to the Lord." He reflected on what this kind of waiting might look like. He said that it is not an entirely passive kind of waiting, but a faithful doing one's part while counting on God to see things through.
Hundreds of years later, Moses affirmed that the promise of Gen 15:5 indeed had been fulfilled:
"The Lord your God has multiplied you, so that today you are as numerous as the stars of heaven" (Deut 1:10).
Jack also traced the imagery of stars through the Bible. In Psalm 147:4, we read, "He determines the number of the stars' he gives to all of them their names." We can infer from this that God knew about each individual descendant of Abram, including the Messiah, who is called "the bright morning star" in Rev 22:16.
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