I'm still learning what all Abraham's promises meant. But in the process I'm finding it astounding to see the meaning which the New Testament seems to give to Abraham's ancient promises.
To begin with, I notice that John the Baptist warned the Jews that physical descent from Abraham wasn't going to amount to anything: and that wouldn't mean God's promises failed, because God is able to raise up sons to Abraham from the very stones. That obviously reflected Malachi's warning: that the coming of the Lord wasn't all going to be roses for everyone in Israel.
Then Jesus astoundingly protested that Abraham had rejoiced to see His day, and that he saw it and was glad. So Jesus seems to have understood that Abraham's promise was really ultimately about Him and all that He fulfilled and inaugurated. But the Jewish leaders were missing it.
Paul also understood the promise to have meant that Abraham would be heir, not just of a tract of land in the Middle East - that would be too small - but heir of the world. Now that gives a whole 'nother tinge to its meaning.
And Paul made a point of observing that the promise was said to be about Abraham's 'seed' singular, not 'seeds' plural - which Paul claimed was Christ. Not necessarily about an entire nationality. Interesting.
So the promise seems to have been about the fact that Jesus Messiah would inherit people from all over the world. It was ultimately going to be about Jesus, not just about all ethnic Jews; and it was about the world, not just about a tract of land in the Middle East; and really about the 'peoples' of the world, not just the physical lands.
Paul claimed that all this had been fulfilled by Christ's inheritance in the saints - beginning in Jerusalem, yes - but even broader, among the Gentiles. Paul described this as the real riches of His inheritance.
That was something he said spiritual enlightenment was required in order to fully grasp. He said that many readers of the Old Testament were reading with veiled eyes, and couldn't see it: but when a person turned to the Lord, the veil would be removed, and he'd see it.
Paul claimed that the meaning of the promise of Abraham was really that God had preached the gospel in advance to Abraham. Thus the promised 'blessing', Paul explained, was the blessing of receiving the Spirit - the blessing of being justified - by faith - even among the Gentiles.
Paul even claimed that the fact that only Isaac and not Ishmael had become custodians of the promise, even though Ishmael also was a child of Abraham, meant in principle that the promised blessing was always ultimately going to be received not on the basis of Jewish ethnicity, the people distinguished by Judaism, but by faith - even by Gentiles. Just as Abraham himself also had believed the promise and his faith was counted to him for righteousness before he was circumcised and before there ever was a nation named Israel.
Paul asserted that the promise was not about the physical city of Jerusalem with her ethnic Jews which had become subject to Rome - but about the heavenly Jerusalem, which Paul said is the mother of us all, not only of ethnic Jews.
So Paul understood Abraham's promise and blessing as something that was now being received among them, despite much of the physical Israel being in the opposite state.
The Book of Joshua had said that not one thing which God had promised the children of Israel had failed: all had come to pass. Already. Yet hundreds of years later in the Psalms it was written that a rest still remained for God's people. So the promise was always really going to be about something bigger than Canaan land. And it was going to be for 'God's [true] people'.
First century Jews were obviously therefore expecting something more too. The radical claim made by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was that it is Jesus who has now brought His people into that true rest, and that it is by faith that they enter it, and warned that even ethnic Jews could miss out if they shrunk back from faith in Jesus.
He explained that what Abraham had really been looking for all along, was really a city which has foundations whose builder and maker is God. In fact all the forefathers had really been looking for a heavenly country, he said, because God has made for them a city.
Peter the Apostle also claimed the same thing: that God had now fulfilled the promises which Israel had been custodians of, by Jesus raising Jesus Christ from the dead, and that the inheritance is now reserved for us in heaven.
The resurrection of the dead had become the hope of Israel, so those who had died would not miss out on the promise. Abraham's bosom was the place where the dead went in waiting for that Day. The claim of the New Testament is that 'resurrection' has now been inaugurated - through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Sin had been dealt with. That's the gospel.
These claims about Israel's promises seem so radical - on first glance I wondered "How did you get that out of Genesis, Paul?!" It's such a radically different reading of the Old Testament to some contemporary popular Dispensational or post second-temple Orthodox-Jewish readings of it.
The New Testament's claim doesn't seem to me to be that this understanding of the scope and meaning of Abraham's promise was merely 'a' way of understanding it - nor that this was only some temporary, spiritual or allegorical way to apply the promise as if the real physical political ethnic meaning of the promise was yet to come. But this was 'the' meaning it was always going to have. So it's really about Jesus - the gospel.
When all this was written in the New Testament, Israel were in their land - they even had a functioning Temple with sacrificing - yet none of that was seen to be the essence or the apex of the promise. Even non-Christian Jews in the first century AD knew there had to be more to it than that. The claim of the New Testament was that the promise was really all about Jesus, about the gospel, and that the blessing was even being enjoyed among the Gentiles as Abraham had foreseen, while unbelievers, even Jews, could miss out, as all the prophets also had forewarned.
But God was still saving Jews too - the New Testament was careful to remind Gentile believers, especially in the congregation at Rome. So, this took nothing away from ethnic Israelites.
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