ABRAHAM BELIEVED THE GOSPEL
Gal. 3:8 And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. (Gen. 12:3)
Sounds strange to a N.T. believer to hear words like the gospel and salvation by faith for those in the O.T.
Everyone that was saved in the O.T. was saved by grace. Always by grace through faith whether O.T. or N.T.
Salvation means, according to Christ and as He taught it, was first the forgiveness of a man for failure to fulfill responsibility; secondly the liberty then of a man in that he had become the slave of sin and Satan; and finally power in the man, denying, breaking up the fixity of sin, and bringing him into a glorious liberty.
The very purpose of Christ's coming was to seek and save the lost.
Abraham had the gospel preached to him {Gal. 3:8; Heb. 4:2}. Only faith can make you righteous. Only those who share in his saving faith are counted as his children {Gal. 3:6-7}.
To save, in the Christian sense, is to deliver out of the danger, and to rescue from all the harm which has already been wrought.
The story of Zachaeus is one of salvation. The Pharisees saw him receiving sinners and eateth with them. He was in their midst for the very purse of saving them. This account happened on His way to Jerusalem. Zachaeus did not invite Him, He invited Himself.
God’s original promise to Abraham, quoted here from Genesis 12:3, required the coming of Christ into the world to redeem the world for its fulfillment. Since the promise was with reference to “all nations,” and due to the fact that this was long before Israel became a nation, Abraham surely understood the promise to be of universal scope. Abraham thus believed this very early form of the gospel and was justified by faith many years before God gave him the sign of circumcision as a token of the covenant (Genesis 17:9-14).
Abraham didn’t know how long it would take God to do this but he accepted the promise by faith.
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