Start small, finish big. That seems to be God’s motto. He begins salvation history with two people from what is now Iraq. When planning to raise a really big family, why start with an elderly couple who’ve never been able to have kids? But this is precisely what God does. He turns the sterile Abram and Sarai into Abraham and Sarah, ancestors of a worldwide family which still celebrates their memory nearly 4,000 years later.
In God’s plan, this family was to turn into a mighty nation. An unlikely candidate for greatness, this “nation” was birthed out of a rag-tag band of Abraham’s descendants who’d been slaves for hundreds of years. A poet once wrote “how odd of God to choose the Jews.” But after 40 years of desert camping, they entered their promised land and eventually became a mighty kingdom.
