On a night when you’re far from city lights and the sky is cloudless, the view is enough to stop you in your tracks. Plum-black backdrop, speckled with a thousand pinpricks of light. And the longer you stare, the more those thousand multiply into a thousand thousands. The dimmest distant stars reveal themselves.

That’s what Abraham saw. He couldn’t count them. He might have tried, curious about exactly how many descendants God was promising him. But you know how it goes—as you try to focus on one star, the rest go shimmery, and you lose count.

Childless Abraham, being promised not just one son, but a multitude of descendants.

And the really magnificent thing is that those descendants aren’t limited to the blood relatives of Abraham. The reason his descendants would be as numerous as the stars is that we’re among them, too. In Christ, we were grafted into the family tree. A tree that includes Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Jesse and David, and Jesus himself. We are those stars. We are part of the story, too.