Exceedingly Great Reward

[Henrietta Naughton]

Youbeloved, have probably seen others suffering the loss of all things, and brought to deep despair as the result; bub do not you be alarmed whatever happens to you. You have made God to be your refuge, and you shall find a most secure abode in him. You may have losses and afflictions; these are a part of your lot, but they shall not overwhelm you. You shall be no real losers in the end, but you shall be kept by the power of God, and shall be delivered out of every trial and affliction. He shall be to you also your shield, and your exceeding great reward.

And what a soul-satisfying portion and reward this is! If thou hast God as thine, my soul, sit thou down, and see if thou canst think of anything else; thou canst not do so. Try and let thy desires ramble over other fields; untether them, and give them liberty. But what can they ask for, seek for, wish for, beyond God himself? There are, alas! some Christians who do not seem to realize the truth of this, and they get dissatisfied with God. You have been serving the Master, my brother or sister, for some months; perhaps it is in the Sunday-school that you have been working, but nobody has taken much notice of you, the superintendent has not praised you, so you are discouraged. But, remember that, when you serve God, he is your reward.

because the portion thou hast received is such as could have come to thee on no other terms than those of free, rich, almighty, covenant, everlasting grace; and therefore let God be glorified for ever and ever.

"..the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: "Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great." But Abram said, O Lord God , what will you give me for I continue childless..?"

9 When they had heard the king, they departed; and, behold, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, until it came and stood over where the young child was. 10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy. 11 And when they came into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

To me there is no doubt that the KJV is wrong and the ESV right. In fact, there is no other instance in the entire OT where God becomes the object of someone's reward. The idea, to be honest, is quite silly and foreign to me (the OP himself seems to take issue with it), and it seems to have originated with the christian translations, but there is virtually no evidence within the text to support this interpretation. God's actions can be man's reward, but that God himself should be given to someone as a reward, as if he's an idol or trophy that can be acquired and used for one's pleasure, that would have been considered by Moses and his Israelite audience 3,000 years ago as blasphemous. God can be man's shield in the sense that he is his protector (which also denotes power and sovereignty), but to become man's reward that is repugnant. The simplest way to read this verse is thus: "your reward is exceedingly great", which means that Abram's merits are high and that he will be properly rewarded for it, as is stated in the following verses.

From a grammatical point of view though they're equally plausible. In both translations, the phrase "exceedingly great" is modifying the previous "reward", something which is totally acceptable in biblical Hebrew. For more instances to compare see here. However, I favor the ESV for the reason stated above.

Judges 2:7 And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great works of the Lord which He did for Israel.

Ezra 6:22 They kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days with joy, for the Lord had made them joyful and had turned the heart of the king of Assyria [referring to Darius king of Persia] to them, so that he strengthened their hands in the work of the house of God, the God of Israel.

Nehemiah 12:43 Also that day they offered great sacrifices and rejoiced, for God had made them rejoice with great joy; the women also and the children rejoiced. The joy of Jerusalem was heard even afar off.

Jeremiah 32:19 Great [are You] in counsel and mighty in deeds, Whose eyes are open to all the ways of the sons of men, to reward or repay each one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings

Ephesians 3:20 Now to Him Who, by (in consequence of) the [action of His] power that is at work within us, is able to [carry out His purpose and] do superabundantly, far over and above all that we [dare] ask or think [infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams]

Some people have objections to the whole idea of rewards. Evangelists have often objected that the doctrine of rewards is dangerous because it obscures the basic fact of the gospel: that salvation is given as a gift altogether independent of our works. But if there is such a danger, it arises from a failure to take notice of what Scripture plainly declares, as we saw in our first study.

We should, of course, make sure that the reward we seek is an appropriate reward for the work in which we are engaged. In order to encourage her seven-year-old child to practise the piano, it might be necessary for a mother to offer the child the reward of an ice cream at the end of the session. So the child practises in order to get an ice cream, which is hardly the real reward for playing the piano. At eleven years old the same child may practise the piano because he has discovered that he gets a lot of praise from the grown-ups when he is asked to perform at parties. At twenty, the now grown up child may pursue music in order to make money and become famous. None of these rewards is of course sinful in itself; but none of them is germane to music. At fifty-five, after a busy day the grown man may be found all by himself playing the piano for the sheer joy of the music. Now his reward is the truly appropriate one. There is, of course, a higher reward even than that: he will get it when he learns to play his music for the enjoyment of other people who cannot repay him.

It is possible to seek the wrong reward in prayer: to pray in order to impress people around us and gain their admiration. If we seek that kind of reward we shall get it, but no other. We are rather to pray in secret to our Father, and then he will reward us with what? Well, in the first place with the answers to our requests, when such answers would be according to his will and for our good. But beyond this, the greatest reward for praying is God himself and the relationship that prayer nurtures and develops between us and God. We do not need to give God information: he knows already, but still he wants us to come and ask him for what we need.

The quest for reward is not only a worthy and appropriate motivation for the Christian; it is a very necessary motivation. It often acts as an important corrective to false and unbalanced attitudes that can arise from a one-sided interpretation of the gospel.

What we are urged to do is to use our resources in order to make friends, so that when our resources fail we may have friends to welcome us into the eternal tabernacles. Notice that it is friends that we have to gain by our use of resources, and not salvation. All believers will be saved. All believers will be in heaven. All believers will be equally accepted, but not all believers will have the same amount of friends in heaven. It startles some people to think that they will have very few friends in heaven. They would like to think that, since everybody in heaven is by definition perfectly loving, there will be no special friendships. But there will be. The common virtue of gratitude to those who have helped us will not disappear in heaven. If we have used a spare 5 to send Gospels to some mission fields in Britain or abroad, and at the judgment seat of Christ it is revealed that those Gospels led to the conversion of one hundred people, will those people not feel a special gratitude towards us? They will be our special friends for all eternity If, on the other hand, we used the spare 5 simply to buy ourselves a monster ice cream, when it comes out at the judgment seat of Christ, that that is what we did with our 5, no one will blame us, maybe; but then no will feel eternal gratitude towards us for having spent our money on ice cream.

Finally, the awareness of what high reward means will put a curb on false ambition. It is possible for sacrifice and energy in the work of the Lord to be a channel for thinly disguised ego-boosting ambitions. It was so at one stage with James and John. We, like them, can be helped to overcome and eliminate such unworthy motives by remembering what obtaining the highest reward will mean. The highest reward is to be given the task and privilege of serving not ourselves, but the maximum number of others. That is why our Lord shall always have the topmost place, because he ever and always will serve all his people unreservedly.

Since he did not have even one child at the time, it remained a puzzle to him how these uncountable descendants would come. This explains his question in verse 3. God responded that they would come from his own body, through his wife Sarah, who was considered barren (verse 4; Genesis 17: 19). Although the promise looked physically impossible, Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness (verse 6).

Under divine direction, Abraham prepared sacrifices, which God accepted by fire miraculously (verses 9-10, verse 17). The communion with God was deep and varied, and he received clear revelations about the future of his descendants (verses 13-16). At the end, God made a covenant with Abraham, and told him clearly the extent of the physical boundaries of the Land of Promise (verses 18-21). God is still our exceedingly great reward today, if we can only believe Him.

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