Jesus was faithful like Abraham was

In Old Testament History and Theology I Doug Green has recently been talking about the Abraham narrative as the story of Abraham's waffling between fidelity and infidelity to the Lord, his finally proving to be a covenant keeper after all and his securing the Lord's promised blessing for his descendents by his faithfulness to the covenant. The idea is that the promises made to Abraham in Genesis 12 are conditional upon his obedience to the Lord's summons to leave home and hearth for the land He would show him and to "be a blessing" ("wehayeh berakah" is an imperative, not a prediction) (Gen 12:1-2). Of course, as the story goes along Abraham ends up with a spotty record as far as his trusting the Lord goes and it is always an open question as to whether he will utimately be faithful to the Lord or not. The Lord makes a covenant with him in chapter 17, again demanding obedience from Abraham, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly." The story reaches its climax and resolution in chapter 22, the Akedah. Abraham finally proves faithful to the Lord when put to the greatest test he had ever faced, the command to sacrifice Isaac. Having proven faithful, Abraham receives the Lord's guarantee of blessing for Abraham's seed, "By myself I have sworn, declares the LORD, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice." (22:16-18) On account of Abraham's faithfulness, Israel's blessing is secured.

As we were talking about this in class I was reminded of Richard Hays's thesis in his book The Faith of Jesus Christ that Paul's argument in Galatians 3 and 4 is not intended to uphold Abraham as the prime example of an OT saint who was justified by his faith, the paradigm of Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone, but rather that just as Abraham secured the promised blessings of the Lord for Israel through his faithfulness so also (or even moreso) did Jesus, by His faithfulness, secure the promise made to Abraham for eschatological Israel, "the Israel of God," in which the Gentiles are fully included. Of course Paul's argument revolves around how Christ, by His faithfulness, resolved the problem that the Law/Torah poses in that it cuts the Gentiles off from the blessing that was to come to them in Abraham and in that it places all who rely on the works thereof under a curse. But Jesus, the Messiah, resolves the problem of the Torah by taking its curse upon Himself and exhausting its power on the cross and inaugurating in Himself and in His people a new creation wherein the distinctions made by the Torah, distinctions between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, no longer apply (3:28) and where the people of God are governed not by Torah but by the Spirit (5:4-5).

Such an interpretation of Galatians requires reading the phrases "pisteos Iesou Xristou" (2:16; 3:22) and "pistei zoe tei tou Huiou tou Theou" (2:20) as subjective rather than objective genitives. So 2:16 ends up as "yet we know that a person is not justified/vindicated by works of the Torah but through the faithfulness of Jesus Messiah" and so on. Jesus, by His faithfulness to sacrifice, not His son but Himself, secures the promised blessings for those who are His, Jew and Gentile alike. Praise be to our faithful Messiah!