NIV Discover God’s Heart Devotional Bible

God’s Greatest Goal

Genesis 12–14

God’s Story

As soon as Adam and Eve fell into sin, God made it clear that he was coming to rescue his people. They are terminally infected with sin, enslaved to a curse of death, and living in a world that’s under the authority of an evil tyrant. In the midst of this broken mess, God begins his long, arduous rescue plan. And true to his desire for closeness and relationship, he decides to do it through a family.

God chooses one man, Abram, a 75-year-old childless tent-dweller, and his infertile wife, Sarai. Promising to make him the father of a great nation, God asks Abram to leave his home and his people—everything he knows—to follow him. Even though Abram knows next to nothing about this God who has called him, he obeys. He takes Sarai, his nephew Lot and all of their possessions, and follows God into unknown lands—navigating disastrous famines, tricky political situations and territory battles.

The King’s Heart

When God first spoke to Abram, he didn’t tell him much about himself. The Lord just gave Abram a command to follow him and a promise that he would bless him.

“Come on,” God said to Abram. “You and me. Let’s take a walk together.” There are some things about a person that can only be learned as we go through life with them. God was looking for someone to walk alongside of him. He and Abram would go on a physical journey, yes, and along the way they’d go on another journey—the journey of discovering God’s heart.

Abram wasn’t perfect along the way. Could he have trusted God to sustain his family through the famine and protect them from Pharaoh? Yes, but Abram’s perfection wasn’t the point in God’s eyes—their relationship was. The fumbles and the foibles didn’t negate the truth that Abram was “God’s friend” (James 2:23). And that was the greatest goal.

Insight

God promised Abram that his descendants would be as numerous as the dust of the earth, the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. Initially, many Bible scholars assumed that Abram’s descendants would most accurately be represented by the amount of dust on the earth or sand on the seashore because it seemed like that vastly outnumbered the stars in the sky. But the more astronomers study the heavens and the farther that their telescopes are able to see, the more stars they discover. So the particles of dust and sand on the earth and the stars in the sky might be closer in number than anyone thought!