22/12/2022
People before Jesus.
Since Adam rebelled at the beginning, the Creator instituted only one way for a person to be declared righteous and that is through repentant trust in the coming Victor. The Lord promised his Victor would be the seed of a woman when he cursed the serpent (Genesis 3:14-15).
John the Baptist explicitly named Jesus, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). This Lamb was also the Lion-King of the tribe of Judah, the Messiah or Christ (Revelation 5:5), the Son of David and the Seed of Abraham (Mathew 1:1; Galatians 3:16).
Anyone, who trusted in the promise of the coming Son, now “born of a woman, born under law,” was justified, delivered from both the curse and obligation of the broken divine law. Jesus has now come to fulfill the complete and loving righteousness demanded by the holy Creator-God (Galatians 3:13-14, 4:1-7) so that a great exchange took place from the beginning. We see this most clearly in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He who knew no sin became sin on our behalf so that we would become the righteousness of God in Him.” True justifying trust has always worked its way out into a new lifestyle of giving love (Habakkuk 2:4; Galatians 5:6; James 2:14-26; 1 John 3:11-16).
Since the Gospel message is based on the death, burial, and Resurrection of Christ (1 Corinthians 15:1–4), many have wondered how people who lived prior to the Incarnation of Christ could have been saved. In Hebrews 11, we have a sampling of Old Testament saints whose lives pleased God. These heroes of the faith provide for us, even in these latter days, example after example of how to both live and die in times that are anything but receptive to the God of the Bible.
Thus, saturating all of Scripture, there is a gospel theme that showcases the suffering, Resurrection, and glory of the promised Savior, Jesus Christ. He is the central object of our faith and the fulfillment of all that the faithful who have preceded us down through the ages had believed in.