Then He said to Abram: “Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years." (Gen 15,13)

How excited would we be if God told us that the fulfillment of the greatest promises He is currently making to us would only be experienced by our descendants sometime after the year 2400? Or if we saw only today on someone's great-great-grandchildren the fulfillment of what God promised him in the period of the Thirty Years' War? And what if those 400 years would be filled with humiliation for them? But after all, that's exactly how God communicated it to old Abram and confirmed it with the covenant (and Abram still had to drive away the darkness and the predators from it all)!

I doubt that this would arouse any enthusiasm in us, for it is very difficult for a modern man to look beyond the horizon of his own life. We take life as a kind of personal project that is supposed to be successful and fulfilled (already within this life) in whatever sphere. We regard the individual, not the whole, as the most important part of the world. We consider that we have the right to a good life, or at least the prerequisites for a good life, and to adequate care in the old age (which is to be provided by the state and its politicians).

God told Abram that He would make his descendants go through a long phase in which they would be slaves in a foreign land for several generations. It is hard for us to accept that God's way with a man may not always lead upward. After all, Abram was free, extremely wealthy - and God is going to put his descendants, his promised and loved descendants, through poverty and slavery? Yes, because from the perspective from above that we so often miss, these generations, by what they experience, will prepare the ground for those who come after them, and only they will experience the fullness of the promise. It had to happen: because of the transformation of the heart and for the sake of justice, as we shall later see.

Neither Abram's descendants nor we as individuals receive everything from God all at once. Yes, salvation is free because it does not depend on us, but is a gift of grace. But the precious and eternal things of God are only born with time in the life of a person who follows Christ, like precious stones, gold and silver from the transfiguration, transmuted by fire - that is the eternal riches of 1Co 3:12-13.