During the month of December we are looking at the prophecies concerning Christ in the Old Testament and the fulfillment in the New Testament. Today’s Old Testament prophecy comes from Genesis 17:19 and fulfillment is in Romans 9:7-9. Prophecy - Then God said, “Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. Fulfillment - Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. In other words, it is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring. For this was how the promise was stated: “At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.” Sometimes God’s plans are difficult to figure out. We may think he is going to work one way when he works in a totally different manner. Many of us can remember a time when we thought that God was going to have us do something, we made plans for that to occur, only to have God achieve what he wanted in a different manner. Abraham was the same way. You might remember that in Genesis chapter 12 Abraham had been told by God that through him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. A little later on God told Abraham that he would have a son. So Abraham and Sarah took it upon themselves to create a son through Sarah’s slave Hagar. However, the promise of a son was to be through Sarah not through Hagar. Thus through a miracle Isaac was born to Abraham. After Sarah died Abraham married another woman by the name of Keturah. She also gave him children. So Abraham had children through three wives, Hagar, Sarah, and Keturah. But Paul tells us that only the descendents of Isaac have the possibility of being true children of God. And even though the whole world has been physically blessed through Abraham, only those who descended through Isaac would be the children of promise. Each of us has a chance to become a child of Abraham through the blessing that was promised him by God. We can be related to him by individually putting our faith in what Christ did on the cross and what God did through his resurrection.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 11:00:00 +0000
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