Maybe it was at night.  Maybe it was in the broad daylight.  Perhaps God spoke directly to Abram, perhaps he spoke through a prophet.  Either way, Abram was called. 

Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and will bless  you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.  Gen. 12:1-3

A promise of a nation, even though Abram was, at the time, without a son.  And yet it was fulfilled.  Israel became a great nation, and through it came Christ.  But during the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., Israel was more or less lost.

Or was it?

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman.  One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise.  Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants.  One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery.  Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.  But the other woman corresponds  to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother.

Now you, my friends, are children of the promise, like Isaac.

That's Galatians 4:22-26 & 28.  Paul is kind of on a rant in Galatians.  "You foolish Galatians!" he cries.  "Who has bewitched you?  Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard?"  The Galatian church was following the idea that you needed to follow the law of Moses to be saved.  Shocked and horrifed, Paul writes to them, calling them back to the faith.  The law, he tells them, "...was added because of trangressions, until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made..."  Yes, God made a promise to Abraham: a promise of a son and a promise of a country of his own.  But it went further than that.  Let's take a look at Hebrews 8:5.

They offer worship in a santuary that is a sketch and shadow of the heavenly one; for Moses, when he was about to erect the tent, was warned, "See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain."

C.S. Lewis had things figured out when he spoke of the Shadowlands.  The book of Hebrews speaks many times of the law being a 'shadow' and a 'sketch'.  The Old Testament was the Shadow.  Many things were hidden. (Matt. 13:17)  Everything was made physical so that people could grasp it:  A physical Israel, a physical Jerusalem, a physical temple.   But

In speaking of "a new covenant," he has made the first one obsolete.  And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disppear.

  "Okay," Paul and the writer of Hebrews tell us, "You got that physical stuff?  Good.  Now, that's a shadow. (Gal. 3:23-26)  Let's get into the real stuff." 

We're doing a bad job of that.  We seem determined to cling to the physical portion of the promise with everything we have while God says, "That's over, done with.  I have something better."  The spiritual half of the promise.

God promised Abraham, Isaac and, through Isaac, offspring.  We see the physical offspring in the Old Testament.  But the real promise was Christ.  "In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."  All.  Not just one.

Just as Abraham "believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness," so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham.  And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, "All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you." Gal. 3:6-8

And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.  Gal. 3:29

It is not as though the word of God had failed.  For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of Abraham's children are his true descendants; but "It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.'  This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants." Rom. 9:6-8

I think that God allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. because it was standing in between Him and His people.  The Jewish nation, Jerusalem, and the temple were all shadows that people focused on, turning away from the thing that cast the shadow:  true Israel (Gal. 3: 22-29), true Jerusalem (Rev. 21:10-21) and the true Temple.

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.  Rev. 21:22

Shadows no more.  We've got something better coming.

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