Seeing that Abraham will surely become a great and mighty nation, and that all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.”
Genesis 18:19
At this stage of life, David and I spend much time considering the impact we can have on future generations. From today’s verses we learn Abraham was chosen by God to ultimately become the Father of many nations. Through Abraham, all the families of the earth were to be blessed. The order seems reversed here, with ‘nations’ being mentioned in verse 18 and ‘families’ in verse 19 but I don’t think it an accident. Everyone intuitively realizes ‘families’ must exist before ‘nations’ so we’re going to look at this verse from family, back to nations, and ask what the key thought really is here.
In a nutshell, it’s because God knew Abraham would command his household after his own personal values and practices. That’s the essence of fatherhood, whether intended or not, we produce after our own kind, sharing our values and beliefs, often in an unspoken way. Perhaps in this sense, a parent’s real spirituality is contagious. Who we are gets passed down to the children.
Usually, when we think of Abraham, we usually skip right to the crisis point of his adventure with God and dwell on his offering up of Isaac and the faith implications for us, so clearly celebrated in Romans chapter 4. Today we want to look at a different thought. Today we want to explore what came before that extremely precious act of worship.
Verse 19 links Abraham being chosen with the obligation “to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.” We often think we’ve carried out our parental duties by taking our children to church with us as if something spiritually magical happened because of being there. As important as church attendance is, the church or the school, can’t take the place of the family in training our next generations.
That experience is a very intimate and painstaking passing on of values and beliefs. In other words, as verse 19 stated, it’s in the commanding and the doing that those lessons are taught. Commanding, like teaching, takes words. You could say that this was very authoritative instruction. And here it was very specific instruction.
The command - was first to do righteousness. You might read the above and think it as only Abraham’s righteousness that was required, not anyone else’s. But, if that were so, a family could never become a nation. Nation building takes time and it takes more than one teacher of righteousness. It requires many teachers, teaching many pupils, the right way of living and from there passing on the wisdom to do justice in the inevitable face of confusion and adversity. There’s a lot of wisdom required here. A lot of hands on training and explanations.
Could it be, that some of societies errors and problems that seem to not have an easy answer are rooted in our own failures to live and pass on the ways of righteousness and justice in a form that allowed our children to become learners of God beyond our own experiences? Maybe some of the blessings we seem to have missed are because we have yet to live up to that worthy place where God can say of us ‘ I know….that, he or she, will command their children and household AFTER them to do righteousness and justice.’