Promise To Abraham

The Spirit of the Promise
Disfigured by sin and death, man remains “in the image of God” in the image of the Son, but is deprived ‘of the glory of God’, of his ‘likeness’. The promise made to Abraham inaugurates the economy of salvation, at the culmination of which the Son himself will assume that ‘image’ and restore it in the Father’s ‘likeness’ by giving it again its Glory, the Spirit who is ‘the giver of life’.

Against all human hope, God promises descendants to Abraham, as the fruit of faith and of the power of the Holy Spirit. In Abraham’s progeny all the nations of the earth will be blessed. This progeny will be Christ himself, in whom the outpouring of the Holy Spirit will ‘gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad’. God commits himself by his own solemn oath to giving his beloved Son and ‘the promised Holy Spirit… who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it.

The remote preparation for this gathering to gather together of the People of God begins when he calls Abraham and promises that he will become the father of a great people. Its immediate preparation begins with Israel’s election as the People of God. By this election, Israel is to be the sign of the future gathering of all nations. But the prophets accuse Israel of breaking the covenant and behaving like a prostitute. They announce a new and eternal covenant. “Christ instituted this New Covenant”.

Baptism in The Economy of Salvation
Baptism is prefigured in the crossing of the Jordan River by which the People of God received the gift of the land promised to Abraham’s descendants, an image of eternal life. The promise of this blessed inheritance is fulfilled in the New Covenant.

Our Vocation To Beatitude
The Beatitudes are at the heart of Jesus’ preaching. They take up the promises made to the chosen people since Abraham. The Beatitudes fulfill the promises by ordering them no longer merely to the possession of a territory, but to the Kingdom of heaven.

In the promise to Abraham and the oath that accompanied it, God commits himself but without disclosing his name. He begins to reveal it to Moses and makes it known clearly before the eyes of the whole people when he saves them from the Egyptians:”he has triumphed gloriously”. From the covenant of Sinai onwards, this people is ‘his own’ and it is to be a ‘holy (or consecrated: the same word is used for both in Hebrew) nation”, because the name of God dwells in it.

Fulfillment of The Promises
The Good News: God Has sent his Son
“But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” This is “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”, God has visited his people. He has fulfilled the promise he made to Abraham and his descendants. He acted far beyond all expectation — he has sent his own “Beloved Son”.

The Beatitudes teach us the final end to which God calls us: the Kingdom, the vision of God, participation in the divine nature, eternal life, filiation, rest in God.

The Prayer of Virgin Mary
That is why the Canticle of Mary, the Magnificat(Latin) or Megalynei(Byzantine) is the song both of the Mother of God and of the Church; the song of the Daughter of Zion and of the new People of God; the song of thanksgiving for the fullness of graces poured out in the economy of salvation and the song of the ‘poor’ whose hope is met by the fulfillment of the promises made to our ancestors, “to Abraham and to his posterity forever.”

Source: Catechism of The Catholic Church

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