It is a remarkable thing to suggest that the foreign policy of the most powerful nation in the history of the world might be measured against a single sentence spoken to a single man some four thousand years ago, in a place and a tongue that no American statesman has ever known. And yet that is precisely the claim this article will make. When God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees and set him on the road to a land he had never seen, He attached to His promise a principle that would govern not only the life of one wandering herdsman but the destiny of every nation that would ever come into contact with his descendants. “I will bless them that bless thee,” God said, “and curse him that curseth thee.” That principle did not expire with the patriarch. It was not a private arrangement between God and one family. It was a public declaration about how the Almighty intended to order His dealings with the kingdoms of men, and there is no scriptural reason to believe it has been repealed.

We should say at the outset what this article is not. It is not a claim that the United States is a covenant nation in the sense that Israel is a covenant nation; America is not the new Israel, and the Church is not a replacement for the Jewish people. Nor is it a claim that any nation earns its salvation, or buys the favor of God, by its diplomacy. Salvation belongs to the Lord, and it comes to men through the cross of Christ, not through a vote in a senate. What this article does claim is narrower and, we think, undeniable to anyone who reads the Bible as the Word of God: that the Lord has woven into His providence a moral order in which the treatment of Abraham’s seed is not a matter of indifference to Him, and that nations, like men, reap what they sow. The United States has been, for most of its history, a friend to the Jewish people and to the State of Israel. The argument of these pages is that this friendship has not been incidental to America’s blessing, and that the day America abandons it will be a day of peril.

The Words God Spoke to Abram

The passage must be read whole. “Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew 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). Seven times in these three verses God says “I will” or its equivalent. This is not a contract negotiated between equals; it is a sovereign declaration of intent. God does not ask Abram’s permission, nor does He make His promise contingent upon Abram’s performance. He simply announces what He will do, and the centuries have been the unfolding of that announcement.

The clause that concerns us is the one that turns outward to the nations: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” A detail of the Hebrew, lost in most English translations, deserves notice here. The two words rendered “curse” are not the same word. The first, describing the offense of the nations, is a word that means to treat with contempt, to make light of, to esteem as trifling. The second, describing God’s response, is a far weightier term — the word of solemn, divine cursing. The sense is something like this: whoever merely treats Abraham’s seed with contempt, God will answer with a curse that is no trifle at all. The punishment is heavier than the provocation. God takes the dishonoring of His covenant people more seriously than the nations take the dishonoring itself, and He has reserved to Himself the right to respond in kind and beyond it.

Lest anyone imagine this was a one-time utterance, the same principle is repeated to Isaac, renewed to Jacob, and pronounced again through the mouth of Balaam, the hired prophet who could not curse what God had blessed: “Blessed is he that blesseth thee, and cursed is he that curseth thee” (Numbers 24:9). What was spoken to the father was confirmed to the sons and ratified before the watching nations. And the final clause — “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” — reaches forward to the Gospel itself, for the apostle Paul tells us that this was the Gospel preached beforehand unto Abraham: that in his seed, who is Christ, the nations would find their blessing (Galatians 3:8). The destiny of the world, in other words, was bound up from the beginning with the seed of Abraham. To stand with that people is to stand on the side of the purposes of God; to stand against them is to set oneself against the very channel through which God determined to bless the earth.

A Covenant, Not a Vending Machine

Here we must guard against an error that has done real harm to the credibility of this teaching. Genesis 12:3 is not a slot machine into which a nation drops a coin of support for Israel and receives, by mechanical return, a jackpot of prosperity. It is not magic, and it is not superstition. God is not manipulated by gestures, and He is not impressed by the cynical friendship of those who court Israel for their own advantage while despising her God. The principle is covenantal, which is to say it is rooted in the character and faithfulness of God Himself, not in the leverage of human ritual. When we say that nations are blessed for blessing Israel, we are not describing a transaction we can trigger; we are describing the settled disposition of a God who keeps faith with His promises and orders His providence accordingly.

This means two things for the way we read history and policy. First, it means we read the providence of God with humility. We are not prophets, and we cannot always trace the precise line between a nation’s treatment of the Jewish people and its rise or fall. The Lord’s judgments are often slow, often mingled with mercy, and never reducible to a single cause. Second, it means we do not flatter ourselves that mere political alignment with the modern State of Israel discharges a nation’s duty before God. A nation may vote the right way at the United Nations and still be ripe for judgment for a hundred other sins. Blessing Israel is not a substitute for righteousness; it is one expression of a posture of reverence toward the God who chose her. With those cautions in place, however, the principle stands, and the witness of the nations confirms it.

The Witness of the Nations

Consider the great empires that set themselves against the seed of Abraham. Egypt enslaved the children of Israel and was broken by ten plagues and the sea; the mightiest power of the ancient world was humbled before a band of liberated slaves. Babylon carried Judah into captivity and was itself overthrown in a single night, its glory passing to the Medes and Persians. Haman the Agagite plotted the extermination of the Jews and was hanged upon the gallows he had built for Mordecai. Rome destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Temple in the year 70, scattered the people, and even renamed their land in a deliberate attempt to erase the very memory of Israel from the map — and Rome, too, in time, fell. The pattern is not mechanical, and we do not press it as a formula. But the pattern is there, written across the ruins of empires, and it is hard for the honest student of history to ignore.

The same shadow falls across later centuries. Spain, at the height of its golden age in 1492, expelled its Jewish population in the same year it launched its ventures across the Atlantic; within a few generations the empire that had seemed invincible was in long decline. Other nations that opened their gates to the persecuted Jew — that received the exile and the refugee, that allowed him to trade and study and worship — often found their own commerce and learning enriched by his presence. We must say it carefully, for the providence of God is not a thing to be claimed with arrogance: but it is a striking fact of history that nations have tended to flourish in proportion to their hospitality toward the people of the covenant, and to wither in proportion to their cruelty. The God who said “I will bless them that bless thee” appears to have meant exactly what He said.

The Survival of the Jew as a Sign

But there is a witness more eloquent than the fall of any empire, and it is the simple, stubborn fact that the Jewish people are still here. Every nation that ever shared the stage of history with ancient Israel has long since vanished into the museums and the textbooks. The Hittite is gone, the Philistine is gone, the Assyrian and the Babylonian and the Edomite are gone; their gods are forgotten and their tongues are dead. By every law of history a small, stateless, scattered people, hunted across three continents for two thousand years, ought to have disappeared along with them. Pharaoh tried to drown them, Haman to hang them, Rome to scatter them, the Inquisition to burn them, and the murderers of the last century to gas them out of existence altogether. And yet the Jew remains, and in our own age has been gathered back into his ancient land and re-established as a nation, while the bones of his persecutors fill the earth.

This is not the achievement of the Jew; it is the keeping of God. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). The survival of this one people, against every probability and every assault, is itself a standing sermon to the nations — a visible, walking proof that the God who said “I will curse him that curseth thee” meant it, and that He has been as good as His word in every generation. A nation that grasps this will think twice before raising its hand against the people God has so plainly chosen to preserve. The graveyard of the empires that tried is warning enough.

The Hebraic Roots of the American Founding

America is, among the nations, peculiarly disposed to understand all of this, because America was founded by men who read the Hebrew Scriptures as their own story. The Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic understood their voyage in the language of the Exodus: they were fleeing a Pharaoh, crossing a sea, seeking a promised land. The Puritans of New England spoke of themselves as a people in covenant with God, a “city upon a hill” that took its very image from the Sermon on the Mount and its self-understanding from the books of Moses. The political imagination of the early Republic was steeped in the Old Testament — in its suspicion of kings, its reverence for law, its sense that a nation lives under the judgment of Heaven. More than any nation since ancient Israel herself, America was built with the Hebrew Bible in its foundations.

This is not a small thing, and it is not a coincidence. A people whose founding documents and founding sermons were saturated with the Scriptures of Israel was a people prepared, in the providence of God, to recognize and to befriend the living descendants of those Scriptures when the hour came. The deep current of American religious life — running from the Puritans through the great awakenings to the Bible-believing churches of today — has carried within it an instinctive love for the people of the Book and an expectation, drawn straight from the prophets, that God was not finished with Israel. When the modern State of Israel was reborn in 1948, that current did not have to be invented; it had been flowing in the American soul for three centuries.

The traces are everywhere in the early Republic for those who care to look. When a committee was asked to propose a seal for the new nation, more than one of its members reached instinctively for the imagery of the Exodus — Israel passing through the divided sea, Pharaoh’s host overwhelmed behind them. The Hebrew language was studied at Harvard and Yale from their earliest days, treated as a tongue fit for educated men because it was the tongue of the oracles of God. The election sermons preached before colonial legislatures applied the warnings and promises of the Old Testament directly to the civic life of the people, as though Massachusetts and Connecticut stood where Israel once stood, under the same watching Heaven. A nation formed in this school was never going to regard the Jewish people as the world commonly regarded them. It had been taught, from its cradle, to see in them the people of the covenant of God.

1948 and the American Decision

When David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel, the United States was the first nation on earth to recognize her — a decision made at the highest level, against the advice of much of the diplomatic and military establishment of the day. We will tell that story more fully elsewhere in this series, for it deserves its own telling. But it belongs here as well, because it marks the moment when the long Hebraic instinct of the American founding became a concrete act of national policy. America chose, in that hour, to bless rather than to curse, to recognize rather than to deny, to stand with the reborn nation rather than against her.

From that day to this, through administrations of both parties and through every variety of pressure, the United States has remained — with lapses and with failures, but on the whole — the foremost friend of the State of Israel among the nations. And it is the conviction of Christians Standing With Israel, offered with all due humility about the inscrutability of providence, that this friendship has not been unrelated to the extraordinary blessing America has known across the same span of years. We do not claim to read the mind of God in the rise and fall of nations. We claim only that the principle of Genesis 12:3 has not been suspended for the modern age, and that a nation which has, on the whole, blessed the seed of Abraham has, on the whole, been blessed in return — exactly as the Scripture said it would be.

What It Means to Bless Israel

It is important to say clearly what blessing Israel does and does not require, lest the principle be abused in either direction. To bless Israel does not mean to endorse, uncritically, every decision of every Israeli government. Israel is a nation of men, governed by men, and her leaders are as capable of error as any others; a true friend may sometimes disagree, and honest friendship is not flattery. The covenant is with the people and the land that God has promised, not with the policy of any particular ministry. To bless Israel, in the sense that Scripture commends, is something deeper and steadier than partisan agreement.

To bless Israel is to affirm her right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people in the land God gave to Abraham’s seed. It is to defend her against those who have sworn her destruction. It is to refuse to join the chorus of the nations that gathers, in every generation, to delegitimize and isolate her. It is to tell the truth about her history when the world prefers a lie. And it is, in the plainest terms the Bible gives us, to pray: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee” (Psalm 122:6). A nation blesses Israel when it stands with the covenant people in truth and in righteousness, and the citizen blesses her when he lifts her up before the throne of God. He that toucheth her, the prophet warns, “toucheth the apple of his eye” (Zechariah 2:8) — and a nation does well to remember whose eye it is.

It follows that a nation may bless Israel in ways that cost it nothing in the currency of the world, and that these may matter more than the world supposes. To stand at the council table of the nations and refuse to sign the latest resolution of condemnation; to decline to lend the weight of one’s name to the slow campaign of delegitimization; to speak the truth about who has the older claim to the land and who has spent eighty years refusing every offer of peace — these are blessings, and they are noticed in Heaven even when they are despised on earth. Conversely, a nation may curse Israel without ever firing a shot, simply by joining the comfortable consensus that treats the one Jewish state on earth as the singular villain among the nations. The blessing and the cursing of which Genesis speaks are not confined to armies and treaties. They are worked out, day by day, in the votes and the words and the quiet postures by which a people declares whose side it is on.

The Peril of Cursing, and of Dividing the Land

If there is a blessing for the nation that blesses, there is a corresponding peril for the nation that curses, and the Scripture is not silent about its particular shape in the last days. Through the prophet Joel, God declares that He will gather all nations and “will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land” (Joel 3:2). The dividing of the covenant land — the pressuring of Israel to surrender the inheritance God deeded to Abraham’s seed — is named explicitly as a matter over which God will enter into judgment with the nations. This is a sobering word for any great power that imagines it may carve up the land of Israel at a conference table and suffer no consequence.

We do not wield this as a threat, for it is not ours to wield; the judgments of God are His own. But we would be unfaithful to the Scriptures if we did not sound the warning. Zechariah foretold that in the last days the Lord would make Jerusalem “a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it” (Zechariah 12:3). Every power that has presumed to lift that stone — to move Jerusalem, to divide her, to settle her future by its own authority — has found it heavier than it appeared. A wise nation, and a wise statesman, will handle the land of Israel and the city of God with the fear of God, and not with the arrogance of a man who believes he calls the shots over the inheritance of the Almighty.

Foreign Policy Under the God of Heaven

What, then, do we ask? Not that America be governed by clergy, nor that the Bible be made a manual of statecraft in the place of prudence and law. The kingdom of God does not advance by the sword of any earthly nation, and we have no interest in baptizing the foreign policy of the United States as though Washington were Jerusalem. What we ask is simpler and more sober: that those who shape and those who vote on the policy of this nation would weigh, among all the considerations of interest and prudence that rightly belong to statecraft, the plain word of God concerning the people of the covenant. That they would govern in the awareness that there is a God in heaven who said “I will bless them that bless thee,” and who has not taken back His word.

And we ask this with a final and freeing confidence: that the fate of Israel does not, in the end, rest with the United States at all. America may bless Israel, to her own great good, or America may one day curse her, to her own great loss — but Israel will stand either way, because her Keeper is not in Washington. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). The God who decides the fate of His nation has invited America, as He invites every nation, to share in the blessing of those who bless her. He has not made America the author of Israel’s destiny; He has offered America a share in Israel’s blessing. The choice of whether to receive it is ours.

An Objection Answered

It will be objected, by some, that all of this is merely politics dressed in the borrowed robes of theology — that we have taken a verse about a wandering patriarch and stretched it to cover the diplomatic decisions of a modern superpower, and that we presume too much when we read the rise and fall of nations as the verdict of God. The objection deserves an honest answer. We freely grant that we are not prophets, that the ways of providence are often hidden, and that no man should claim to read the secret judgments of God with the confidence of one reading a newspaper. We have said as much already, and we say it again. The Christian who handles these matters must do so with fear and humility, never with the swagger of one who imagines he has God in his pocket.

But humility about the details is not the same as silence about the principle. God Himself stated the principle in plain words; we did not invent it. He said He would bless those who bless Abraham’s seed and curse those who curse them, and He repeated it across the generations and confirmed it in the survival of the people to this very day. To notice that the principle appears to have operated in history is not presumption; it is attention. And to ask that a Christian nation weigh that principle in its councils is not to confuse politics with theology — it is to refuse the far greater error of pretending that the God who governs the nations has no opinion about how they treat the people He chose. The charge of mixing faith and politics is, in the end, a charge against the Bible itself, which never imagined that the kingdoms of men lay outside the jurisdiction of the King of kings.

Conclusion: That America Would Choose Blessing

Four thousand years have passed since the word was spoken on the road out of Ur. Empires that never heard of Abraham have risen in their pride and crumbled into dust, and the seed of Abraham endures — scattered and gathered, exiled and restored, hated by the nations and kept by the Lord, exactly as the prophets foretold. The principle that God attached to His covenant has outlived every kingdom that ever tested it. It will outlive ours as well. America will be measured, as every nation is measured, by how she treats the people God has promised to bless and to keep, and the measure is not taken by men.

The summons of Genesis 12:3 to the United States of America is therefore neither complicated nor partisan. It is the same summons it has always been to every nation that has ever stood within hearing of it: bless the seed of Abraham, and be blessed; curse them, and answer to the God who curses in return. He who blesses Israel aligns himself with the ancient and unbreakable purpose of God; he who curses her sets himself, knowingly or not, against the Almighty. May the United States, which began with the Hebrew Scriptures in its founding and has known the favor of God across its history, have the wisdom and the reverence to choose, in this hour and in every hour to come, the side of blessing. He calls the shots over Israel. He always has. And He has told us, plainly, where blessing is to be found.