Generally when Christians think of “the Law,” they have a very distorted picture of it. It’s complicated by the fact that we DON’T live in the first-century nation of Israel, experiencing both the benefits and the flaws of Israel’s divinely ordained legal system. Furthermore, in our
I've separated these promises from the promises to Abraham, partly for brevity in my previous article, and partly because we'll begin to see categorical differences in those promises. In order to see those differences, we need to briefly review the Scriptural narrative of Isaac and Jacob.
The story of how Jesus came to offer salvation is a beautiful picture...but it's only part of the story. The story begins MUCH earlier, in the Old Testament. Some of the things we read about in the Gospels can't be answered without understanding at least
Abraham lived not long after the end of the Sumerian Ur III empire, circa 2000 BC. Invading groups of Amorites brought about its fall. Abraham was an Amorite (Ezekiel 16:3) who, when we're introduced to him, originally came from a city known as Ur of the Chaldees.