all nations blessed

I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands. And in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.

Genesis 26:4-5

This covenant re-affirmed with Isaac on behalf of his father, Abraham, kept the promises of God’s work alive in another patriarchal generation. Isaac was given the same rewarding vision that Abraham carried all his life. But Isaac would also see just one son of promise out of two sons he fathered. Just like Ishmael was NOT the son from whom God’s promises would come, so Isaac’s own son, Esau, would not carry forward the promise. 

But God would make of Isaac’s offspring a nation that would bless all the nations of the earth. Jacob would father the twelve tribes of Israel. And generations measured by millennia in countless procession would eventually bring from the tribe of Judah the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ our Lord! So Jesus is promised, right here in Genesis, as the blessing to the nations, coming from Isaac’s own offspring.

One man, Abraham, would have two sons. And one son would be the son inheriting the promise to carry it forward. That son, Isaac, would have two sons. And only Jacob would pass on the promise. Through Jacob’s twelve sons would arise a nation, a people of filled with God’s promises still alive among the nations of the world today as the Hebrew nation. And from them, Christ the Savior was born, Who as one man loved the world, sent by the Father, dying for our sin, cheating death by rising from the dead, the full expression of blessing to all nations!