Paul has destroyed the Judaizers and legalists false gospel of righteousness and life by law keeping. But if the promise of blessing in Christ is not obtained by law keeping, then how is it?
Judaizers falsely believed that the blessings promised to Abraham could be possessed by natural inheritance by Abraham's offspring. By keeping the law and being circumcised, they concluded that God would bless them.
Thus, Judaizers misunderstood the nature of the blessing, and the means by which it may be obtained!
But the true blessing is Christ's righteousness imputed to poor sinners by faith. Such a blessing can never be obtained by natural descent. It could only be obtained by trust in the promised Redeemer.
Paul has already concluded that those who trust in God's promises like Abraham did are the children of Abraham, and receive the same blessing. Thus, children of Abraham are not natural offspring, but rather those persons of all races who bear the familial characteristic of Abraham, that he believed God's promises!
Paul then asserts a startling thing: that the promise of blessing was not to all the physical seed of Abraham, but to one descendant only, the Lord Jesus Christ!
This guts the entire Judaizer argument by snatching away the under girding assumption of inheritance by physical connection to Abraham.
Only the Lord Jesus had a physical inheritance of promise of blessing, and nobody else. Thus, only those who go to Jesus and trust Him can obtain the blessing from Him, the only natural seed of Abraham to possess by right the blessing.
Jesus confronted the same false view, that children of Abraham are already free. Only the Son can make you free!
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John Pittman Hey was born in 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi, to Godly parents who from the beginning raised him in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. With child-like faith he came to Christ on his fourth birthday at his mother's knee. He received his education at church...