by Douglas Goodin
And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, "All the nations shall be blessed in you." (Galatians 3:8)
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Galatians 3:6-29 in understanding the Gospel: how it functioned in the Old Testament, and how it fulfills the promises made to Abraham. We will concentrate on the last.
How was Abraham saved? How did he become righteous before God? Stated simply, Abraham became righteous by believing the promise of God. He was justified by faith (v6). Now, notice that Paul draws a wonderful, yet quite non-literal conclusion from Abraham’s justification. He reveals that ”Abraham’s sons” are “those who are of faith” (v7). We must not miss the implication of this. God vowed to Abraham that his offspring would outnumber the stars in the heavens. Taken at face value, it would mean that Abraham’s son would have children, and his children would have children, and so on, until the total sum of his descendants was astronomical. It happened just as God said (Deut. 1:10). However, the teaching here explains that God’s ultimate concern was not Abraham’s family tree, but his faith tree. God said that Abraham would have many sons; He meant that every human being who believes the Gospel of Christ is Abraham’s son. And to drive the nail home, Paul made his point again in verses 9, 26, and 29.
Going further, we see that the promise given to Abraham, “All the nations shall be blessed in you,” (v8) was God’s way of saying, “Someday, I will justify the Gentiles by faith.” How is that a literal fulfillment? The nations of the world are not blessed in Abraham, but in the Gospel.
Since Paul used the ancient rhetorical device of repeating for emphasis in order to be sure that we get it, I would like to make sure we get it. The point is this: When God promised that all the nations would be blessed in Abraham, He meant that Gentiles would believe the Gospel. Christ and Christians are the inheritance promised to Abraham (“heirs according to promise”). Also notice that Paul proclaims this to a group of Gentiles— people who were not biological descendants of the great patriarch. To be Abraham’s child, one need not be related to him.
This is the way to interpret the Old Testament. It’s the way the Bible interprets itself (a lesson we must learn). If all we had was the Old Testament, we would expect that God was speaking of the human offspring to flow from Abraham’s union with his wife. But God has graciously preserved for us the New Testament which reveals His own interpretation of what He meant. When He blessed Abraham’s seed, He had only one “seed” in mind—Christ (v16).
If after reading Galatians 3 we are still expecting God to bless Abraham’s biological offspring, we are not taking the New Testament literally. The Dispensational interpreter is required to conclude that if Abraham had had only one son, Jesus, and if all of the people who were rescued from God’s wrath through the Gospel were considered by God to be Abraham’s children, that would be great and all, but God would be a liar because He did not do precisely what He said He would do. It’s sort of like a father promising his son a swing set for Christmas but instead giving him Disney world, and the boy complaining, “But you promised me a swing set.”
In my previous article, Is Abraham Still Waiting?, I used the actual words of Old Testament Scripture to show that God’s promises to Abraham (descendants, land, and blessing) were fulfilled quite literally. In the current article, I have used the actual words of New Testament Scripture to show that the promise that Abraham would be a blessing to all nations was fulfilled in Christ and Christians. However, the New Testament goes beyond this, it actually reveals that all of the promises to Abraham, including children, land, and blessing, are fulfilled in Christ and Christians.
In Romans 4:13-25, Paul teaches that, “A father of many nations” and “So shall your descendants be,” are fulfilled in those who believe the Gospel. In Hebrews 6:13-20, the heirs of the promises, “I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply you,” are Christians. In Hebrews 11, Abraham understood that the land promise found its greatest fulfillment not in Canaan, but in the city of God. Again, if we take these passages literally, it cannot be escaped that the literal fulfillment of God’s promises to Abraham is Christ. He is all in all. He is the “Yes!” of all of God’s vows to Abraham.