Abraham's Justification by Faith
The basis of this covenant was grace and unmerited favor.
Remember that Abraham lived 430 years before the law was given.
A comment!
The relationship between God and Abraham was built on the grace of God.
It was as if Abraham was saying, “God, I don’t know how You will do it, when You will do it, but I believe that it will happen on the basis of my faith and undeserved favor towards me.”
(Rome 4:2
) If Abraham was justified by works, he has praise, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”
Today we live under the covenant of grace and God's blessings. God's provision is based entirely on goodness and His faithfulness. But many people today live according to the Law of Moses. Even today, at everything good that happens to us, we look back and try to figure out: what did we do to make this happen?
The source of goodness is the goodness of God and His favor towards us.
Every time you want to take credit for your good behavior, the fact that you didn’t quarrel with your husband today, treated people well, remember that this is not what attracts the goodness of God to you. The source of God's goodness to you is God's goodness.
All the way from Egypt to Mount Sinai, the Israelites were under the Abrahamic covenant of grace. Therefore, despite their sins, God brought them out of Egypt and provided for them supernaturally. And the basis of this provision was not their good deeds, not their faithfulness, but the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord.
Where does this myth come from?
The Old Testament is a time when God interacts with people of extremely rude morals, slowly and gradually, through many trials, leading them to the true knowledge of God. Therefore, in the Old Testament we see a lot of human savagery and cruelty, which to us, living in the third millennium of the Christian era, justifiably seems repulsive.
A non-church reader of the Bible often opens it with a number of erroneous premises: for example, people believe that all the actions of the Old Testament heroes reflect the will of God or are given to us for imitation. This is, of course, not true -
The Bible describes the real story of salvation, in which God's grace breaks through the thickness of human sin.
The key to a correct understanding of the Bible is our Lord Jesus Christ, it is in Him that we meet God, and it is He who teaches us the correct understanding of the Old Testament. And although people, as well as their ideas about God, changed, God himself - the God of Abraham, Moses, the prophets, the Lord Jesus, the apostles, holy fathers, saints - remained and remains unchanged.
Notes
- The literature on this topic is extensive. See, for example, Hillers D. Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea. Baltimore, 1969; Nicholson EW God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament. Oxford, 1986; Weinfeld M. The Promise of the Land: The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the Israelites. Berkeley, 1993; Elazar DJ Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions. New Brunswick (New Jersey), 1995. For a brief overview of the topic in Russian, see the Concise Jewish Encyclopedia. T. 2 / I. Oren (Nadel), M. Sand, ed. Jerusalem, 1982. Stlb. 515-518; Wed Men A. Bibliological dictionary. T. 1. M., 2002. P. 205. The etymological connection between berith (covenant) and beriah (creation) allows some commentators to consider the act of creation itself in terms of God’s covenant with the universe and man. See Dumbrell W. J. Covenant and Creation: An Old Testament Covenantal Theology. Exeter, 1984.
- Mejía J. La problématique de l'Ancienne et de la Nouvelle Alliance dans Jérémie xxxi 31-34 et quelques autres texts // Congress Volume – Vienna 1980. / JA Emerton, ed. Leiden, 1981, pp. 263-277, here: p. 266-267 (Vetus Testamentum Supplements; 32)
- translation https://www.jcrelations.net/ru/?item=2948#16
