will carry out his sentence on earth with speed and finality.”^ It is just as Isaiah said
previously: “Unless the Lord Almighty had left us descendants, we would have become like
Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah.”’
The words of Paul are written to emphasize that sonship into God is by faith and
not works, and that since Christ has come, God’s children, and by extension
Abraham’s children, are counted through faith in Jesus, not by natural descent, or
works of righteousness. Thus Paul continues to say in verses 30 to 33, ‘ What then
shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a
righteousness that is by faith; but the people of Israel, who pursued the law as the way of
righteousness, have not attained their goal. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith
but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone. As it is written:
“See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall,
and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame.”’^
These words were written in reference to the fact that when Jesus ultimately came
to Israel, He the true Isaac and Abraham’s son, the Son of God and of promise,
Jesus Christ the Messiah long prophesied by the prophets to bring salvation to all
of Israel; the Israelites, the children of Abraham by natural descent and by
promise, rejected Him and crucified Him. Only a few of the Israelites by
comparison believed in Jesus as Saviour, while most continued to trust in the
observance of the Law of Moses, even though Jesus came as the fulfilment of that
law.
And therefore a new and clear distinction was again made between Abraham’s
children by natural descent, and Abraham’s sons by divine promise. And this
time, for the first time, the descendants included Gentiles who believed in Jesus,
and were engrafted into the family of Abraham and of God through new birth in
Jesus Christ, the true son of Abraham, and the true heir!
And therefore the Book of Matthew in 1:1 starts with a genealogy of Jesus as
follows: ‘This is the genealogy^ of Jesus the Messiah,^ the son of David, the son of Abraham.’
Amen and amen!