A simple reading of God's promises to Abraham lead me to believe that the sand of the seashore refers to the natural descendants of Abraham and the stars of the sky represent the spiritual descendants of Abraham. What do you think?
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Abraham's descendants
- Thread starter ChangedByHim
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shnarkle: Yes, this is one of the ideas of the Sages of Judaism. They say that when Israel lives according to God's instructions they shine like the stars, but when they disobey they are trodden under foot like sand.
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I don't think it humanly possible over the course of 10,000 years, even, that a man could have descendants numbered as the sand of the sea. Abraham was promised the "Seed". That "seed" being Jesus Christ, and the countless number of Christians that were and will be.
According to Paul, Abraham was the Father of Faith. We are baptised into the Kindgom through faith.
Blessings
According to Paul, Abraham was the Father of Faith. We are baptised into the Kindgom through faith.
Blessings
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shnarkle: Children are having babies as early as 12 years old today. It wasn't that uncommon in the early part of twentieth century for people to have families that numbered over 10 or 15 children. Let's say that a girl has her first baby at 15, and has one baby every year for twenty years. If each one of her children has a child when they are 15 and so on for the next twenty years our first girl will be a grandmother when she's 30 years old, a great grandmother when she's 45, a great, great grandmother when she's 60, etc. When she's 35 years old, she will have twenty children, and 15 grandchildren. The first generation takes 15 years to produce 15 babies, but when the second generation starts having babies it only takes 5 years to produce 15 babies. Do you see where this is going? Do you see how fast this can get out of hand? The numbers expand exponentially. This would be a good sized city by the time the first girl is in her seventies.
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20 children each have 20 children resulting in 400. When they all have 20 children the number is 8000. The next generation is over 160,000.
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Grab a handful of sand and count that.
Then multiply that by a billion. I don't think even the Chinese could hold a candle to that! Them Jews better chop-chop!
Then multiply that by a billion. I don't think even the Chinese could hold a candle to that! Them Jews better chop-chop!
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juvenissun
... and God saw that it was good.
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It is a good thinking.
But just like Bobinator suggested, the number of sand grains are simply too many for the descendants of Abraham.
I think the number of sand on the earth may not be fewer than the stars in the universe.
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ViaCrucis
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Without trying to sound too harsh, it sounds like a rather arbitrary interpretation without any real reason or merit. The point seems to simply be to that Abraham's descendents would be numerous and uses stars and sand as examples of uncountably numerous things.
The thing as Christians we need to remember is that God's promise to Abraham is fulfilled in Christ. Physical descent from Abraham is of no spiritual importance.
-CryptoLutheran
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S
StormHawk
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Gen. 35:11 "a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee"
Do you know what the company of nations is?
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shnarkle: The first thing I thought of was a country and a company of countries, then a state and a company of states. Perhaps a company of nations could be referring to the United Nations, or maybe the U.S.?
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