The Abrahamic Covenant And How It Has Shaped World History
All of world history hinged on the words spoken to Abraham by God in Genesis 12:3 I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.”
I want to focus now on those nations that have cursed Israel and those that have blessed it to see whether God’s words came true or not. One can’t help but notice that there is a two pronged meaning to what was being said by God in that statement. Whatever you do to Israel good or bad you shall get the same treatment as well. The events are that follow do not reflect the order in which empires rose and fell. But they simply
highlight the consequences of cursing or blessing the Jews.
Let’s start with Egypt because the exodus which marks the emancipation of Israel from slavery took place in Egypt. Like America today, Egypt was the most powerful nation in the world in ancient times. Yet because Egypt enslaved the Jews under Pharaoh Ramses 2 (some say it was Pharaoh Mernaphtah) the era of Egypt’s greatness had to come to an end. Under Joseph, in the period of good harvests, Joseph developed a stockpiling system to store grain for use during the drought. When the seven years of drought arrived “Joseph opened the storehouses” and provided enough food to see the nation through the famine. His wise strategy and effective implementation of the plan even allowed Egypt to supply grain to the rest of the world during the famine (Gen 41:57). God’s fulfilment of his promise that Abraham’s descendants would be a blessing to the world occurred not only for the benefit of foreign countries, but even through the industry of a foreign nation, Egypt.
Interestingly, the relief to Israel was not by way of God raising up an Israelite in Israel. Instead God used Joseph, operating within and through the government of Egypt, to provide for the Jewish nation (Gen 47:11-12). Nonetheless, I think it is important for us to be realists, as an official in a sometimes repressive society he became part of its power structure and he imposed slavery on numerous numbers of people (Gen 47:21).
According to the bible, the Pharaoh who had no relationship with the Hebrews, Ramses 2, who came long after Joseph and the patriarchs were dead began, to deal cruelly with the Israelites. The worst type of slavery was introduced in his tenure and the mass exodus happened under his watch. But after the exodus, Egypt’s status as a superpower crumbled to the ground and from that time to our era the nation of Egypt has become a shadow of what it used to be.
Remember Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian empire, he went to Israel and depopulated the Jewish nation by taking the Jews into exile. Fast forward to the time of Babylon’s demise, the city is depopulated and it becomes a ghost town, a city of Jackals and wolves just like they Babylonians had done to Israel. Yet the fall of Babylon had been prophesied more than 2 centuries before it actually fell. Look what the Hebrew bible said in the book of Isaiah – the Prophet Isaiah inspired by the Spirit of God wrote the following:
And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, The beauty of the Chaldeans’ pride,Will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. 20 It will never be inhabited, Nor will it be settled from generation to generation; Nor will the Arabian pitch tents there, Nor will the shepherds make their sheepfolds there. (Isaiah 13:19-20).
And then of course the Greeks who conquered the known world under Alexander the Great. For their part, the Greeks tried to obliterate the Jewish faith and to then replace it with the Greek faith of Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon, Ares and others. And what did God do, He used the Greek language and culture to spread the Jewish faith. The New Testament was written in Greek and eventually the Greeks themselves abandoned their faith and were converted to Christianity in the first century during the inception of the first Church.
The Romans crushed Jewish resistance and charged into Jerusalem destroying both the city and the Jewish temple in AD 70. As a result of this event, the Jews were scattered and dispersed all over the earth. But what then happens to the great Roman Empire later on is quite astonishing. Rome fell and disintegrated. Its fragments are scattered all over the European continent. What do I mean by that? Well, if you are Portuguese, you speak a fraction of what used to be the Roman Empire. Spanish is a fragment of Rome. Anything Latin is rooted in the ancient Roman Empire.
What about Great Britain? There was a time when the British Empire blessed the Jewish people. It was the British who were instrumental in giving the land of Israel to the Jewish nation through the United Nations. But later Britain made an about turn in their attitude towards the Jews and what was the result? The Greatness of Britain diminished after World War 2.
The Spanish empire was massive, mighty and formidable on earth at some stage in the past. And Spain became a safe haven for Jews in the 15th century. Then they launched the Spanish inquisitions against the Jewish people and then expelled them from Spain in 1492. Some Jews went into hiding and others fled. After that, the great Spanish Empire crashed and to this day it never regained its stature as a powerful empire ever again. But whenever Jewish people lost one place of refuge God would open up another. On the 9th of Av, they lost Spain but on the 10th of Av 3 ships would set sail from Spain and change the history of the Jewish people and of the world forever. The three ships were the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. Those ships would discover the land we know today as America. And America would become the greatest refuge for the Jews in all of history. Now the bible says when the Jews are blessed the world is blessed. America opened its hands to the Jews and received them. It fought against and helped defeat Hitler and became an ally of Israel since then. And, yes you guessed it, God blessed America so much that it became the most powerful nation in the world because, the Americans blessed the Jewish people. “I will bless those who bless you” is what the bible says of God to Abraham. That promise applies to this very day.
CONCLUSION
In this blog, I have put forward a number of historical facts to back the assertion that the Jews truly are God’s chosen race. Now brothers and sisters this has nothing to do with whether I like Jewish people or not. Neither has it anything to do with whether you the reader like them or not. Ultimately it has to do with whether the facts are accurate and true or not. There are many things I like as a person but I cannot leap from how I feel about something to the truth or falsehood of it. So whether you like the Jews or you hate them has nothing to do with the reality of their being God’s chosen people. And to determine the veracity of that statement we need to forget our preferences and investigate if the claims conform to the truth or not. I will close with this; a famous French philosopher, historian and enlightenment writer, famous for his wit and criticism of Christianity remarked that in about 100 years, the bible would be a forgotten book. His name was Voltaire – real name Francois Marie Arouet- 1694 – 1778. Today the bible is still the best-selling book in the world. Voltaire is dead his house now belongs to the French Bible Society! The late famous apologist Ravi Zacharias commenting on Voltaire’s arrogant prediction of where the bible would end up, said, the bible seems to always rise up to outlive its pallbearers!
NB: Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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