Messianic teacher Kevin Williams offers a compelling reason to trust in God alone.

First, I must confess that I believed in God at a very young age. Only the Almighty knows who the two men were who visited my house those many years ago. I came home from the park one summer’s eve to find them talking with my mother about a personal savior who lived, died, and rose again to removed sins and let mankind enter into a personal and eternal relationship with Him.

Adults seem to have a difficult time admitting that they do things wrong—that they sin against their Creator. But an 8 or 9 year-old boy knows he does things wrong. He knows because he plots wrong things, because he willingly takes that “triple-dare,” because he often gets caught doing wrong, and because he is often told by his parents, teachers, and authority figures that his behavior is wrong. To a child, being wrong is a part of life.

To my young, unclogged mind, the idea of a God who would eliminate all the wrong things—all my sins—was very appealing. So I accepted what they had to say at face value. I didn’t understand all the implications to what I was agreeing to, nor would I for many years to come. But I knew deep down inside that it was the right thing to do and I have never regretted that night’s decision.

Many years have passed since that small boy, and I have a pre-school son of my own. Believe it or not, from time to time, I have to tell him in no uncertain terms that he does things that are wrong. One day, I hope and pray that he will place his trust in God’s Messiah as I have.

But I am no longer a boy. I no longer think like a lad (though I’m told I act like one on occasion). Many things through the years have challenged me and my faith. Sometimes, blind faith is enough. Other times, faith is the way-station that keeps us safe until introspection and revelation bring us to understanding.

So why do I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? I could discuss many things: miracles witnessed, prayers answered, and unexplained healings. Not to mention the marvelous work called the Bible and the fact that it was written over a 4,000 year period by people from all variety of backgrounds and cultural experiences. Yet despite this, it has a continuity that mathematically defies the odds. All of those things are important to me, but the overriding incentive is the same reason I had when I was little boy: God is a God of promises.

I have no doubt that there are those who, even as they read this, say to themselves, “Yea? Well He never kept any promises to me!” I don’t know your circumstances and I cannot speak to them. What I can speak to are the promises of God to the Hebrew people—the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the great panorama of time.

Close exegesis of Galatians, with due attention to past scholarship on the subject, is among the most daunting tasks in the study of the New Testament. And yet a proper understanding of Galatians is centrally important for grasping Paul’s view of the gospel. To make a fresh contribution to the crowded field of Galatians requires a great deal of patience, a command of a wide band of scholarship, and perhaps a bit of creativity.

Chee-Chiew Lee’s study on the relation of the Spirit to justification in Galatians is a worthy contribution to the field. Lee challenges the view that Paul equated Abraham’s blessing with the Spirit in Gal 3:14. The two are related, but not equal (chap. 2). Their more precise relationship, Lee reasons, might be gleaned from a survey of the remaining sections of the Old Testament and from later Jewish writings. According to Lee, writings (roughly) contemporary with Paul allowed that the Abrahamic blessing accorded certain benefits to the proselyte, but that the blessing of the Spirit was always withheld – reserved for the native Jew. Paul’s insistence on the outpouring of the Spirit upon the Gentiles therefore radicalizes the place of Gentiles within the community of saints. Lee argues that, while few in Paul’s day read Scripture that way, Paul’s view is afforded by passages like Isa 56:3-7 and Zech 2:15 [LXX 2:11], in which those nations that have “joined themselves” to God are referred to as “the people of Yahweh” (p. 189). If other Second Temple Jews missed the Isaian and Zecharian connection between the Spirit and the turning of the nations toward Israel’s God, Paul did not miss it. (This line of reasoning is consistent with a recent trend in Pauline studies, which is to allow careful exegesis of the Old Testament to serve as a palette [of sorts] for understanding Paul’s exegetical mind.)

According to Lee, “the blessing of Abraham is identified with justification, and the Spirit functions as the evidence of receiving the blessing and the means of perpetuating the blessing” (p. 210). Such a view, of course, brings to mind certain ongoing debates about Pauline pneumatology. It will be interesting to see if Lee’s arguments about the shape of Paul’s pneumatology within Galatians come to play a role in those debates.

Reviewed by John Poirier

Publisher’s page: http://wipfandstock.com/the-blessing-of-abraham-the-spirit-and-justification-in-galatians.html

Preview The Blessing of Abraham, the Spirit, and Justification in Galatians: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Blessing_of_Abraham_the_Spirit_and_J.html?id=IxJNAwAAQBAJ

Pastor-scholar Tony Richie says there is no Jewish-Christian-Muslim God. Nor is there a simple answer to the “Same God” question.

When people realize I participate in interreligious dialogue and cooperative efforts they often ask me some version of the question in the main title of this post.[1] If I manage to mention that I have written a couple of books on Christian theology of religions from a Pentecostal perspective, I can almost certainly count on that question coming up. Actually, it usually centers more on two of the three “Abrahamic religions” (world religions tracing their origins to the biblical patriarch Abraham). They ask whether the Christian Trinity and the Muslim Allah is the same God. Almost always they want a simple, straightforward yes or no response. There is complexity implied in saying there is no Jewish-Christian-Muslim God, and it is not what they want to hear. To an extent, they are correct. There’s no such thing as a Jewish-Christian-Muslim God! Before unpacking what I mean by that bold statement I’ll briefly provide some important background.

Abraham’s well at Beersheba

Identifying or distinguishing a common deity is also important for Christian theologies of the other Abrahamic religion: Islam.[3] Islamist scholar Ataullah Siddiqui explains that “The divide between Islam and Christianity that most needs bridging derives from their different understandings of God and relationship with him”.[4] Christians may reasonably ask if it could be that just as Christians share with Judaism the worship of the same God, although through vastly differing faiths with different names for God and differing views of God’s nature, this same possibility exists for Islam. In other words, is it at least possible that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God? If so, then one thing is certain: they certainly have greatly different conceptions of God and how God ought to be served and worshiped.