Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1046 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
When Abraham Met Jesus - Wisdom Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1046 of our Trek, and it is Wisdom Wednesday.  Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God’s Word.  Especially in our western cultures, we do not fully understand the Scriptures from the mindset and culture of the authors.  In order to help us all have a better understanding of some of the more obscure passages in God’s Word, we are investing Wisdom Wednesday reviewing a series of essays from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser.  He has compiled these essays into a book titled  ’I Dare You Not to Bore Me With the Bible.’

The father of the Israelites, Abraham, lived 2000 years before Christ came to earth to dwell with and as a human.  How could Abraham have possibly met Christ?  In today’s essay, we will explore passages that shows: 
When Abraham Met Jesus
Some of the most startling things in the Bible are hidden in plain sight.

Galatians 3:8 is a case in point. Amid the predictable focus on law, grace, and the gospel, Paul blindsides us: What’s more, the Scriptures looked forward to this time when God would make the Gentiles right in his sight because of their faith. God proclaimed this good news to Abraham long ago when he said, “All nations will be blessed through you.”

But Abraham lived two millennia before Jesus. There's nothing about a crucified Savior in the stories about Abraham. What is Paul thinking? To correctly process Galatians 3:8 we need to think about the gospel in different terms.

We typically think of the gospel in terms of the crucified Savior, Jesus, dying for our sins. But the work of Christ was just the means to accomplish what God sought. God wanted a sinless, holy, human family. The sacrifice of Jesus—fully God and fully human—was the necessary mechanism to achieve that larger goal. The gospel is God's plan to become a man so He could have that holy, human family. Could Abraham have grasped that?

God's decision to produce His family through Abraham is described in Genesis 12:1-3: The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you.  I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others.  I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you.”Paul quoted part of that passage in Galatians 3:8. Paul believed that as a result of that divine encounter, Abraham came away with the knowledge of the gospel: God would become a man to provide the means for a human family.  Even more than that, Abraham discerned that he and his offspring—which didn't yet exist, and which seemingly couldn’t exist— were a critical part of that plan. Was Paul reading a different Old Testament than us? No, Paul got his information about the good news where all the gospel writers did—Jesus (Galatians 1:12: 1 Corinthians 15:8).

If John 8:56 is any indication, Jesus happened to be an authority on Abraham's divine encounter with God: Your father Abraham rejoiced as he looked forw...