“And now that you belong to Christ, you are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God’s promise to Abraham belongs to you.” Galatians 3:28
I’ve watched some great college basketball games lately, and as tournament season gets closer, there’s a lot of great basketball still ahead. I particularly love watching someone on my favorite team sink one of those three pointers. The velocity of a shot when launched from such a far distance means that the greatest chance of it going in the basket is when the ball never touches the rim. That’s when all the fans jump to their feet and the pitch in the announcer’s voice goes up higher and you sometimes hear the phrase, “Nothing but net!”
When Abraham received God’s blessing on his life it had absolutely nothing to do with how good he was or wasn’t. Truth is, Abraham wasn’t perfect at all. So what was the catalyst to bringing him into such Divine Favor? It was simply based on a truth found in Genesis15:6; “And Abram believed theLord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith.”The Law of God would not come through Moses until 430 years later, so Abraham was completely inoculated from the curse that would come from not following the Law and its demands to a “T.” There was no curse for Abraham to reap whenever he made a mistake, as he sometimes did, because his status of being made right with God, “righteousness,” was given him due to his simple faith and trust in God.
Now, fast forward to you and me and we are in the same boat as Abraham was then. Jesus fulfilled the Law of God to its fullest extent, and as the Second Adam, He paid the price for all of our sins forever. Also as a result, that the Law has been completely removed from the equation and because the Law has been removed, so has the curse that once came by not following it. The Greek word for “promise” in Galatians 3:29is the word “epaggelia,”and is also translated as “blessing,” or “promise to be blessed.”
Today, we are Abraham’s offspring and are afforded and given the same blessing that he had then. As we believe in Jesus by faith for our righteousness, we are made righteous and can look forward to “nothing but blessing” every single day!