Week 10 - Friday

You Must Believe In Jesus

.... to whom it will be reckoned as those who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, He who was delivered up because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification. (Romans 4:24b-25)

Abraham was saved by believing the gospel even though he didn't completely understand all that God was telling Him. This was long before the death and resurrection of Christ and God did not reveal the full meaning of His words to Abraham. Throughout the Old Testament years God gave additional bits of information here and there about the coming Savior. David wrote that He would be hated and he gave a vivid description of His death on the cross (Psalm 22). Isaiah said His mother would be a virgin (Isaiah 7:14) and Micah said that He would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). You can even go back as far as Adam and Eve and see God beginning to give pieces of the gospel message. Adam and Eve were deceived by Satan (who appeared to them in the form of a serpent) and they had eaten from the one tree God had told them not to eat from. After they had sinned God told both them and Satan, that one day Satan would bruise the heel of a man born of a woman's seed (which is another prediction of the virgin birth of Jesus). That man however would come back and defeat Satan by crushing his head (Genesis 3:14-15). These are only a few of the more than 300 revelations God gave during the Old Testament times about Jesus Christ. But the Old Testament prophets never did completely understand what they were writing about because God didn't fully reveal it to them. The things they wrote about Jesus would later be fully revealed by God to New Testament believers (1 Peter 1:10-12). Even though they didn't understand them, they believed the messages God gave them and they were saved by their faith. All throughout history, God has been saving the people who believed however much of the gospel God revealed to them.

Abraham and the other Old Testament believers had only a hint of the gospel message because they lived before Jesus died on the cross. Now that Jesus has died and been raised, God has revealed the entire gospel to us in the New Testament. However the additional information we have doesn't do us any good unless we believe it. To be saved we must believe the gospel that God has revealed to us. We must believe that Jesus died for our transgressions (sins). We must believe that God raised Jesus from the dead. We must also turn from our sins and receive Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. The difference between us and the Old Testament believers is that they were saved through their faith because of what Christ would later do. Today, we are saved through our faith because of what Christ has already done. Faith is now, and has always been, the necessary condition of salvation. Just as Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, so we too must believe God for righteousness to be reckoned to us.

Readings for today: 1 Cor. 15:1-4; John 1:12; Rom. 10:9; Acts 4:12; Heb. 11:6