And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. ~ Galatians 3:29
We all want to belong. The place God designed for us to naturally belong and be welcomed and accepted, to feel like we’re home, is family. Of course one of the sad realities of living in a post-Genesis 3 world is seeing so much brokenness and division in family life. But as much as Jesus came to redeem individuals, so he came to redeem family.
In the story of scripture one family stands apart from all others: that of Abraham. After all, it was in Genesis 12 where God promised a land, a great nation of offspring, and blessing to an old man who seemed beyond the years of having children of his own. The rest of the Bible is the ups and downs in the life of this man’s family until the true Son of Promise, Jesus, came on the scene (3:16).
Though the promises were unconditional to Abraham (Genesis 17:7-8), God told the nation physically birthed from him that if they wished to be his people, experience his blessings, and keep the land, then they would have to obey and follow him (Exodus 19:4-6, Deuteronomy 28, and Joshua 23:11-16). Because the people’s hearts were as stained with sin as the rest of the nations surrounding them, they ultimately could not obey the Law meant for their good and proved themselves unrighteous (Romans 2-3).
Yet, God kept a portion of the nation alive even throughout a foreign exile so that one might be born from among them who obeyed perfectly and received forever what the others could not keep—the man, Jesus (Galatians 3:15-18).
Therefore, Paul wrote, the Old Testament Law was a guardian that kept watch on God’s people until the promised Son came. Because of him “we are no longer under a guardian;” but we are free to live and walk according to the Spirit who produces within us love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. “Against such things there is no law.” (See most of Galatians 3-5).
If we belong to Jesus, we are justified not by our works but by the works of Jesus and through our faith in him (3:24). Through Jesus we are children welcomed into a new Family, an eternal family—children of God, children of Abraham, and heirs of promise. Though we do not lose our distinctiveness in our differences, there is no division of differences, be it of gender, ethnicity, or social class, which keep us out of the Family so long as our faith rests only on Jesus (3:26-29).
In a Family made new, we belong.
Belonging to this Family, the promises of God to Abraham are promises of God to us his children. Followers of Jesus from every tribe, tongue, and nation become citizens of the grand eternal nation filled with people zealous to do good and honor Jesus (Titus 2:14). We are heirs not merely of a small strip of land in the Middle East but of the entire world as Jesus will completely reverse the Genesis 3 curse at his return (Romans 4:13, Revelation 21-22). And we are unimaginably blessed by God that we might in turn be a blessing to the world as we live for him and share of his love and grace (Matthew 5:1-16, Ephesians 1:1-14).
Therefore, let us love our Family in Christ, welcoming and accepting one another and spurring one another on in our journey to follow him. Let us care for our world, being wise with creation and our jobs in order to benefit others. Let us show others the love of Jesus in the hope they too will become part of the Family. And let us look forward to the hope of perfect joy in a perfected world, together always with our God and his Family.
In Jesus, you are a child of promise.
So, the Church is spiritual Israel? That might come as a surprise to many Dispensationalists, but would seem to fit well with NT scripture.
For the third time, I will try to add a comment to this blog. It was and is remarkable to have picked up a pamphlet by Rev. John L. Bray, a Southern Baptist minister in Lakeland, Florida, one who has been variously described as a Preterist, heretic, and apostate. However, his writings (and I have probably a half dozen of them) fall within the parameters of the SBC’s allowance for pre, a, and post millennial views.
The fact that the Bible does speak of the Gentiles as the seed of Abraham as well as those Jews who were chosen of God tells us that there is something to Bray’s writings, even if one does not agree with all that he writes – and I am one of those. My change from the premill view transmitted to me by the preaching of my ordaining pastor and by Dr. R.G. Lee and numerous other SBC ministers as well as some who were not began with a question and a response.
The question was put to me by a man I consider to be the wisest man I ever met: “Have you ever thought about the fact that at any one time every soul on the face of earth could be the elect of God?” “No,” I said, “I had never thought of that.” How could I being a pretrib, premil in my eschatology. That was the question.
Then came the response of the King of Nineveh, who in answer to Jonah’s message of judgment, said, “Who can tell?” His response was made in the face of a message of shock therapy, an unconditional message of gloom and doom: “Forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” While Jonah went out to a hill and sat down to watch his prophecy be fulfilled, he did not expect sit to be so. He had already said back in Israel that God would spare these people. He wanted to see his prophecy fulfilled. That is why we can say that the folks who add, “And he said, but if you repent, God will spare you.” A clear adding to the word of the Lord, to say the least. Not a real bright idea. And, lest anyone think I speak as a know-it-all, let me add that we all make such goofs at various times in our lives and ministries.
If Jonah’s unconditional prophecy of judgment served as shock therapy to bring the people to their senses, surely our Lord’s message about returning with His Angels, taking vengeance, could also be meant as shock therapy. The Savior also made statements that could be taken as therapeutic paradoxes, but I will leave to the reader to find them. In any case, I think we have more than a millennium of spiritual prosperity to come. For example, I Chron. 16:15 speaks of the word of His covenant which He commanded to a thousand generations.” Allowing just 20 years per generation gives us 20,000 years. If we take them to the length allowed by the Methuselah concept, if a man die at a hundred he will be considered a youth, then we have as much as 900,000 years. If the text is figurative, we might have less or even more. Our Lord does speak of His angels gathering the elect from one end of THE (definite article in the original) heaven to the other (surely, the starry heaven in this case). The innumerable company of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and of the redeemed in Rev. 7:9 points to a success unimaginable and incomprehensible to our ways of thinking about the texts of God’s word at the present time.