Thesis #74 of 95 – Like Isaac, those within the Covenants of Promise were initiated through unmerited grace

BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Gen17:18-20 Abraham said to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live before You!” But God said, “No, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac; and I will establish My covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I will bless him, and make him fruitful and multiply him exceedingly.

Gal4:28 And you, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are the children of promise.

Phil3:13-14 Brothers, I do not regard myself as possessing it as yet, but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

COMMENTS

This follows on from the previous thesis’s assertion that the Church like Isaac are the children of promise. Yet through Abraham, all nations were to be blessed yet not necessarily through incorporation into that exclusive covenant.

The point of the thesis is that Isaac had been elected (i.e. initiated**) into the Abrahamic covenant, and Paul mentions Isaac by name as effectively he is its patriarchal head, Abraham’s other son Ishmael having been excluded. It therefore hardly needs to be said that Isaac’s election was entirely a matter of grace. He was chosen simply because he was the child promised to Sarah and Abraham in their old age.

The same is effectively the case for those who are called out from the world and into the Church [Greek ἐκκλησία = the called-out ones]. Such all-of-grace election (in terms of its initiation**) and the staggering rewards that go with it (Rev3:21😲) may appear to challenge God’s loving and equitable nature. Not so once the self-sacrificial demands and conditionality of finally attaining “the prize of the high calling of God” has been grasped (Phi3:13-14 above), together with an understanding of biblical salvation’s context within broader benign providence that I have been outlining.

**Note that Paul regards/describes all believers to whom he writes as “elect”/chosen/called out etc. but as I have been testifying makes it clear that by no means all shall persevere so as to attain “the prize of the high calling of God”.

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What’s this?

^{I am briefly commenting on each of the 95 theses that summarize key outcomes from The Little Book of Providence. These were first published on Halloween 2017*, so I suspect most current visitors to my website’s Homepage (latest posts) will not have seen them…   [*being the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s version].}