For you are a holy people to Yahweh your
God. Yahweh your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession,
above all peoples who are on the face of the earth. Yahweh didn’t set His
love on you nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people;
for you were the fewest of all peoples; but because Yahweh loves you, and
because He desires to keep the oath which he swore to your fathers, Yahweh has
brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of
bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Know, therefore,
that Yahweh your God Himself is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and
loving kindness with them who love Him and keep His commandments to a thousand
generations. Yahweh your God will keep with you the covenant and the loving
kindness which He swore to your fathers. He will love you, bless
you, and multiply you. He will also bless the fruit of your body and the fruit
of your ground, your grain and your new wine and your oil, the increase of your
livestock and the young of your flock, in the land which He swore to your
fathers to give you. You will be blessed above all peoples. There won’t
be male or female barren among you, nor among your livestock.
Deuteronomy
7:6-9, 12-14
This is an extraordinary statement of
divine acceptance. God chose Abraham at
random to be the recipient of God’s eternal blessing and covenant. Abraham had
not yet demonstrated any virtue and would, over the course of the story, be a
model of vice as much as virtue. Here
again God states that He does not choose us because we have been particularly
deserving or have stood out to Him at all.
God goes on to say His covenant will survive anything and is practically
irrevocable. He asserts that it would
take at least a thousand generations of uninterrupted sin to rouse Him to the
least indignation.
As Paul Tillich wrote:
You are
accepted! You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the
name of which you do not know. Do not
ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later
you will do much. Do not seek for
anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted![i]
Image: The pale blue dot on the right is Earth taken by Voyager I twenty-five years ago from 3.7
billion miles away
[i] Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations. (Eugene,
Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1948) 161
