it and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth and thou shalt be spread

abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south".

Will you continue with me in searching out this great plan from the Word of God?

May He make us teachable and then we are going to make some thrilling discoveries!

We have seen that the Word of God is a Book of purpose. It is the revelation of a plan

that is dealing with God's great creation in two parts. The Divine plan for the earth

occupies much of the Bible, but we are going to see that there is a revelation of His plan

for the heavens as well, and one that can touch us very intimately indeed. Now, of

course, God can reveal Himself to anybody at any time without any aid whatsoever, in

the same way as He spoke to Abraham. This He could do again and again, but it would

seem, from the Scriptures, that He has not chosen to work this way. Rather He uses

redeemed human beings as means to make His truth known. This fair creation of God,

heaven and earth, has been spoiled by sin and by death; and so God is telling us in His

Word what He has done to take away this blot, and then what He is going to do so that

there may yet be a creation of beauty and perfection. The present creation needs a

Redeemer, someone who can take away sin and death. Possibly some may think that

they can eradicate sin, but is anybody so foolish as to imagine they can abolish death?

We are apt to forget death, are we not? God's plan, the wonderful scheme that He had in

mind at the very beginning can never come to pass where there is death, for this spoils it

entirely. The Bible calls it "the last enemy", "the last enemy that shall be destroyed is

death" (I Cor. 15: 26). So, in the very beginning of the Bible we are told how God is

going to reach and save sinful humanity, not by speaking to each one separately, but by

using a human channel. Thus He lays hold of Abraham, a pagan idolater, and takes him

over from Ur of the Chaldees to the place we now call Palestine, then reveals Himself to

him and makes wonderful promises concerning his descendants;  and through his

descendants, his seed, God says He will bless all families of the earth.

Now in our last study we saw that there was a literal piece of land that God gave to

Abraham; not only a promise of a seed, but a home for them to live in, and that cannot be

spiritualized! It is not possible to spiritualize the statement `from the great river, the river

of Egypt to the river Euphrates' because these are geographical points. The land in

between, God said to Abraham, I will give to your seed. So, if the land is literal, and it

must be, the seed must be literal too. This is fulfilled in a twofold way, the Lord Jesus

Christ as the great Seed of Abraham, because Paul, when he wrote Galatians, definitely

asserted that Christ was the Seed; but He Himself does not exhaust that prophecy, for the

descendants of Abraham are his seed too (Acts 3: 25) and they are linked with Him in

this great plan. God looks at them and the Lord Jesus as one in this great purpose. So we

find He makes the same promise to Abraham's son, Isaac, concerning a seed, his

descendants, and the land, and the promise the assurance that `in thy seed shall families