BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

I’d say those verses cover all of creation, wouldn’t you? And they don’t mention anything about any of it belonging to the devil. God didn’t make this earth for him and his bunch. God made this earth for His own beloved children. He created this place and filled it with wealth so that His family, His human sons and daughters, would have a wonderful place to live and an abundance of things to enjoy. You can see this when you read in Genesis about the Garden of Eden. God put everything in Eden that Adam and Eve could possibly desire. Then, when He created them and put them in the Garden, He blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion…” (Genesis 1:28). That was God’s will for all mankind for all time. He intended for Adam and Eve and their descendants to exercise dominion over the earth forever and rule over it according to His righteous ways. To walk in the power of His blessing and keep increasing and expanding the Garden of Eden until it filled the entire earth. But, as we all know, that’s not what happened. When the devil showed up in the Garden and started lying to Eve, instead of exercising dominion over him and putting him in his place, she listened and sold out to him. Then Adam sold out too. He disobeyed God and handed his authority on the earth over to the devil. When Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lie, he probably thought, Aha! From now on, this earth is mine! I’ve got it! (He’s always thinking such things. He’s such a prideful creature he can’t help himself.) But he was wrong. God was way ahead of him. He already knew what the devil was going to do. He had a plan of redemption in place, and He wasted no time setting it in motion. What did He do? He spoke to a man named Abram (Abraham) whom He knew would believe and obey Him, and blessed him with the same blessing and dominion He’d given to Adam and Eve. He made a covenant with Abram and said: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3). A Big God With a Big Heart Notice, this covenant wasn’t Abram’s idea. He didn’t talk God into blessing him, giving him a land, and making him great. No, God was the initiator in this interaction. Abram had just been living his life as usual, doing whatever people did back in those days. It had probably never even occurred to him (especially since he lived in the city of Ur, where most people worshipped the moon) that the Almighty God might want to bless him. Blessing him was God’s idea. When Adam and Eve lost out to the devil, God lost too. So, He planned to start again with Abraham to raise up a family of people for Himself—people who would walk with Him, do things His way, and retake for Him the dominion over the earth He’d given to mankind in the Garden. He didn’t want His new family just to include Abraham and his natural descendants either. He wanted to include in this covenant as many people as He could. Therefore, He set it up so that through Abraham “all families of the earth” could be blessed. God is a big God with a big heart! He has enough love, enough land, enough spiritual and material wealth to make everyone on earth as rich as He made Abraham. “And Abram was very rich” (Genesis 13:2). God created the earth to produce such abundance that everyone who chooses can become part of His family and they can all be magnificently prosperous and blessed. Am I suggesting God has land for all His children, like He did for Abraham? Absolutely. If you owned the earth, wouldn’t you have a place picked out for each of your children? I’m not saying, of course, that God has given all of us the same land He gave to Abraham’s natural descendants. There’s not enough room there for all of us to live. But God does have properties picked out elsewhere for those of us who are Abraham’s spiritual descendants. 28 : BVOV

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