All right, good evening, everybody. Just a bit of a detour tonight. I know that normally we've had Nick up here on Mark that he continued from a small group, which he's been exegetically preaching through. And it's been a blessing to hear that, you know, encouragement to look at how he's been handling those texts and to hear Pastor Paul go through the book of Revelation. just given us a biblical meaning of the apocalypse of John to understand that we see apocalypse and we think, oh, a zombie invasion or the end of the world, but it's none of the above. You know, just the way he's handled that has really been a blessing to me to learn the different views of revelation from what the reformed hermeneutic would be that we hold to at this church. I think a good litmus test of one's theology is their view of the covenant. So tonight we're going to be looking at Abraham's seed in Galatians chapter three. But before we get there and I give you our text, I kind of wanted to go over like where we are as a church. We're no longer really a reforming church. We are a confessional church. We're 1689 London Baptist Confession, holding to church. And some people call us a particular Baptist, means that Jesus died for a particular group of people. Some people say, well, you're not really Reformed unless you baptize babies. But we do believe we're Reformed Baptists, and I'm very comfortable with that name, regardless of what other people say about that. And I believe that we are unashamedly a confessional church. And I'm very grateful for that because I longed for years to be in a church that I could say, yes, we hold to the confession of London Baptist 1689. I can remember going through that with my family when my kids were younger, it was probably a little bit too young for them to really grasp it, but I'm grateful that I'm in a church that holds to it now. So my goal is to take what I have been taught by God in areas of theology and just give it to you. So tonight I wanted to give you like a simplified view of Abraham's seed, like almost an undersimplified view. I don't want to make it complex at all. I want it to be as plain as day. What I understand about the history of this church was that we were Southern Baptist, evangelical, with a mix of independent fundamental Baptist. And I'm grateful for the work that the Spirit of God has done in this church. I don't believe this is the same group of saints that I knew four and a half years ago. You know, when I came in here and engaged a lot of you on different theology, I would say I've watched not only my own theology, but the theology of the saints at this church grow and grow fast. And we can't give that credit to men, even though we've got faithful preachers. We give that credit to God, the spirit, even though he uses preachers as a means to grow us in grace. So we must be grateful for our elders. I'm just, I have to tell you that when I talk to these brothers and they're getting up here on five hours sleep, I'm like, I don't know how they do it. I just don't. Cause I'm up here today on about five hours of sleep and you need a sharp mind to get up here. But I guess, you know, God works through weakness, right? So we have to remember that. The reason why I chose this topic is I want us to have pinpoint, razor-sharp theology. And if we don't have a good understanding of who Abraham Seed is, we really won't have a good understanding of who we are and our identity as believers and what our mission is as believers. So let me pray and ask the Lord to bless, once again, the word that I'm about to bring to you. Father, I commit this night to you, this evening, I pray that you would fill every word that comes out of my mouth with your truth and cut away and even block the attention of your people to any error that I may say tonight, Lord. And I pray that you would Just cause wholesome words sound words to come out of my mouth and Holy Spirit. I pray that you would apply and sanctify us by your truth as we know that your word is truth and we pray this in Jesus name. Amen. So we're in Galatians chapter 3 tonight beginning in verse 7. And like I said, I wanted to undersimplify this. I don't wanna like give this large grand theme or break down all these verses and get really super technical, but I wanted to just give it to you in layman's terms where you can really understand what the text is saying here tonight. So it says in verse seven, therefore, know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham. And the scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, in you all the nations shall be blessed. So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham. All right, so the apostle is concluding his rebuke of the church in Galatia in the first six verses as he was beginning to demonstrate how they could not be made right with God through the keeping of the law. Here in verse seven, this conclusion on the previous six verses followed an exegesis of Genesis chapter 12, verse three. and Genesis 15, six. I think we remember a couple of weeks ago. Again, pastor Paul was preaching through Hebrews. The new Testament is the best commentary you will ever have on the old Testament period. We, we, God uses commentators. Don't get me wrong, but the new Testament never gets it wrong. If we want to understand our old Testament, the new Testament opens up the old Testament for us. So his allusion to these passages is direct and purposeful to put on full display that God's promises were being fulfilled here that he made to Abraham. That only those who are believers are sons of Abraham. Those whose hearts have been circumcised by the circumcision made without hands, as Colossians 2 talks about. This is imagery for when believers are born again and look to our savior. In verse eight, it says, and the scripture being Genesis 12, three and Genesis 15, six was looking forward to the time that the Galatians were living in as a fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. But this promise wasn't just to Abraham. Because we're going to see later that it's going to say, to Abraham and his seed, one of the most misunderstood, mishandled texts in all of scripture. It's led to a lot of cults and a lot of idolatry. We're going to see that here in a second. So this is to say that what you read, what you read in Galatians 3.8 is happening now, which is not new. This is the hermeneutical approach of the entire New Testament. To look at a text, and to say, like, this is happening now. That which was spoken of then is happening right now. The fulfillment is unraveling as we speak, is what was happening in the first century. So this imagery is being used to govern our method of interpretation. Remember, hermeneutic is a science of interpretation. It's how we interpret the Bible to show us why this is relevant to the hearers in the first century, especially at Galatia. So when they receive this revelation, and I know you're going to probably get tired of hearing, but you're going to hear it over and over the New Testament priority hermeneutic. That doesn't mean that the Old Testament has no priority, but the way we understand our New Testament prophetically, okay, and applicably is to take the context of the New Testament. And it tells us the meaning, the illusion, the types, the shadows, the prophetic fulfillment through the typological realization of the type, the type and the anti-type, okay? What it was pointing to and what it actually fulfilled. So we see these phrases that are spoken of throughout the Bible, phrases like, this is that which was spoken of by the prophets, or that it might be fulfilled, or as it is written, or simply it is written. So that through the prophet, sometimes no phrase is even given. Sometimes God just expects the reader to understand and to have been well studied about the Old Testament. So these help us connect the dots on prophetic, on prophecy to fulfillment. So God's preaching the gospel to Abraham in Galatians 3 was directly correlated to all that took place in Genesis chapters 12, 15, 17 and 22. For the sake of time, we won't go over every single one, but I will read you these passages so that you can see the connections for yourself. So in Genesis 12, one through three, it says, now the Lord said to Abram, get out of your country. from your family and from your father's house to a land that I will show you and I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curses you. Curse him who curses you. And in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So when the Lord's command to Abram to get his family out of this country, his family out of his father's house to a land that God would begin to bring in a people to his name, which was pointing to the promise that God gave to Christ and to Abraham. This passage is what the Apostle Paul points to as a fulfillment or an antitype that this great nation would be a people that God was to bless. This is also one of the most, like I said, just such a misguided passage. When we think of, you guys ever heard of the Abrahamic faiths? The Abrahamic faiths, well, people say that like an umbrella, and they're talking about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Well, they all are tied to who? To Abraham, right? So you get these really strange teachings that come out of them, like the Muslims will say, yeah, you know, we're the sons of Abraham, you know, and then they get into Ishmael and Isaac, and then you get the Jews making these claims. But it's sad that Christians actually endorse ministries that push this propaganda and this unbiblical understanding of who Abraham's seed actually is, which is why I wanted to bring this up because We need to clear the air on this topic. We need to understand who Abraham Seed is. And if we don't, we're not going to understand our identity. And like I said, a moment ago, our mission. So this is something we want to steer clear of to get Abraham Seed wrong and to understand how not to get, we want to steer clear of getting it wrong because then we'll stay away from these cults that are formed. Genesis 15, four through six says, And behold, the word of the Lord came to him saying, this one shall not be your heir, but the one will come from your own body. That shall be your heir. Then he brought him outside and said, look now toward heaven and count the stars if you are able to number them. And he said to him, so shall your descendants be. And he believed in the Lord and he accounted it to him for righteousness. So here in verse four, we're speaking of Isaac. Isaac is where the promise was supposed to come through. We know that in Romans chapter nine, right? It says that in Isaac, your seed would be called. So the physical descendant aspect of Judaism really was a heavy, heavy duty understanding. You have to understand they had a temple, they had lineage. So when they went to that temple in this little limited geography, They were understanding that we are God's people, no one else. See these Gentile dogs, they live on the outer courts. I mean, they really had this understanding that, not that Gentiles weren't considered dogs, but they really had this pompous, self-righteous view of themselves. But we see that this seed of this promise that was given through Abraham to Isaac, we're going to see here in a minute that it was a spiritual promise. It was a spiritual promise. And Christians sometimes fall into the same boat where you get people who grow up into the faith and they think that, well, I'm a Christian. Ma was a Christian. Paul was a Christian. Great-great-grandpa was a Christian. Of course I'm a Christian. I come from a a lineage of Christians, but salvation doesn't work that way, does it? And we got to be careful how we handle the gospel, even though that's God's ordinary means. When we talk to our children, we don't want to mislead them into believing that just because they're in our household, they're elect, because those are lies. Those are lies from the devil. The church today is predominantly a non-jew church it is a gentile dominated church and throughout history god has brought people from outside of the borders of israel to bring them in those were called proselytes or converts but when we see here isaac was this heir that abraham was going to promise he was going to he was promised this this seed he was promised that Through this seed, he was going to make the nations great. And his only son, he was willing to sacrifice him. So Abraham believed God, and it was accounted unto him for righteousness. Even then, that was a picture of the cross. So when he became the father of many nations, he acted on this faith. It produced obedience in him. An obedience that came from God, one that was supernatural. I mean, I think about it. How many of you guys ever think about this? Could I sacrifice my only son? I mean, I have four sons, but could I sacrifice any of them? Well, the answer is no, apart from the grace of God. I don't think any of us would, right? Unless we got direct revelation from God, which he did. So this concept in Genesis about the nations being great, we need to understand the order of things here. That God made a promise to Christ in eternity, which we'll see in a minute, and then to Abraham. But if we look at it, and it's kind of read backwards, so it gets kind of tricky, because it says to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. We'll get into that in a second. But in Genesis 17, 7, it says, I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants in their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your descendants after you. So when God established this covenant with the Old Testament elect church, every single elect saint that was saved from the beginning up until the time that we came way up until then, those are our descendants. Those are our descendants. I mean, a lot of us get into these genealogies where, what's the name of the thing you can send off your DNA to? 23andMe, right? Ancestry.com. And they're like, oh, I come from this person, and I come from that person, and I come from this place and that place. And that's cool. There's nothing wrong with that. But we have something so much greater than that. And I want us to understand that when we look at the seed of Abraham, it doesn't matter what you look like. It doesn't matter what the believers that pass the gospel down way before us look like. Those are our brothers and sisters. Period. Period. So when it comes to Abraham's seed, our spiritual descendants, in most cases, look nothing like us. That ought to sink into some ethnic pride we may have, right? Oh, I come from this family, from this part of the world. Okay, that's great. Doesn't mean your ancestors knew the Lord, right? I know many of mine didn't. So Abraham's seed has large ramifications in scripture. Throughout the ages, wherever the spirit of God has regenerated men and caused them to be born again, God's plan of redemption is generational. There's not a physical formula to it. You can't say, well, You know, I hear all these preachers say, if we would just be more faithful, and we say these words of truth of the gospel, and we say it to all these people, it's simple multiplication, it's simple math, then these people will become believers, our children will become believers, and they will have a majority of believers. I don't know if you guys ever heard that before. Some of us have, right? It's ridiculous. It's basically saying that if I just am faithful, then I open Pandora's box for God to work. Pretty proud to say stuff like that. It's not hard to believe these people call themselves Calvinists, right? So wherever the Spirit of God moves in a region in a family God is foreordained a future people for himself in every generation and Every last one of them is the seed of Abraham Psalm 102 18 reiterates this it says this will be written in for a generation to come that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord. God's covenantal faithfulness transcends time and ethnicity to reach the people he has chosen from eternity past. I love what Pink said about that. He said that we must not forget that the issues of eternity are settled in time. It's like God's decree is outside of times before time began but it comes to pass in time and space that guards us against errors like I can't remember the name of that doctrine where is it eternal justification Ross and I were talking about it probably I don't know last summer But people believe that, that we're just born eternally justified. No, you're not. You're born a sinner. You too are by nature children of wrath, even as the others. There's a time when the Spirit of God came to us and caused us to have life. So in Genesis 22, it's the same thing over and over. We see the same concept. that it says, then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time out of heaven and said, by myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son, your only son, blessing I will bless you and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore. and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. In your seed, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice." The Lord's commandment to Abraham to sacrifice his son was an act of faith, an act of obedience, to fulfill the promises that God would keep. to his descendants and multiply them as the stars of heaven and the sands of the seashore. So the imagery we see here is you can't put a number on it. It's like when I go look, when I go stand at the beach and I pick up one little pebble, that's me and God's ultimate plan. That's you. God has a people from generation to generation. I think people get this text wrong too. It's imagery over redemptive history. It's not, oh, we're looking for this time and God's gonna just cause this great majority to come. It's communicating to us that God the Father is going to give his son a people that are innumerable, that you cannot count. So the reason why believers are blessed with believing Abraham is one, because of the act of obedience of Jesus Christ. When we look at Christ's perfect life, We are accepted in the beloved based off his merits, not ours. We don't add one inch to that. And I think we need to understand that because I know that a lot of these brothers that get into this, well, if you do this, God will bless you. And that's true. There's temporal blessing and obedience in this life does bring, you know, we reap what we sow, right? But when it comes to being in the covenant, when it comes to being the seed of Abraham, we need to understand, brothers and sisters, that it is Christ and his work that has placed us there, not our own. And the blessings of ours are because of Christ, like I'm saying, and nothing else. So the gospel that was preached to Abraham is the same gospel that is preached to his seed, his people. the same gospel that causes the nations of the earth to be blessed. This is the gospel of God, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. And this is also known as the Gentile inclusion, when God would take the nations and bring them together and graft us into true Israel. So the term Gentile, meaning unbeliever, non-Jew or nation, applies to everybody in this room, right? So if you were a Jew, and you were born a Jew, that doesn't guarantee you a spot into the kingdom. Just because you're the physical seed of Abraham, a physical descendant, does not mean you are gonna be a spiritual descendant. You still need to have faith. That's exactly what the book of Romans deals a lot with, and Pastor Nick is gonna deal with a lot of that, and he already has, actually, in Romans chapter two. So the eternal plan that was foreordained by God To pick out a people for his name should give us this great desire to preach Christ to know that God's sovereign work still is going on here today and we are a part of that. We are a part of that. That's why we should understand our role in preaching Christ to express our love for him. Because there are people out there that have yet to be created. I mean, the Lord could come tomorrow, right? That wouldn't be true, but there are people out there who have yet to come to Christ. That's my point. And an understanding of the covenants, an understanding of the seed of Abraham. will help us to understand why our role is so important in obeying the Lord. I love what A.W. Pink said about this. He said, a true knowledge of the covenants is indispensable to correct a presentation of the gospel. For he who is ignorant of the fundamental difference which obtains between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace is utterly incompetent for evangelism. So why am I bringing this up? Because the seed of Abraham, brothers and sisters, flows from the Abrahamic covenant. And we're talking about the divine covenants of God. We are the seed of Abraham, believers are. And if you don't understand the covenants, you're not gonna understand the gospel, okay? Now, why am I saying this? Over the last 15 years, there's been people who've gotten up there, and even way longer than that, in the Schofield Reference Bible, they used to say, God has two different plans, one for the Jews and one for the Gentiles. You even hear preachers saying that we don't need to preach the Jews the gospel. They're already saved. This is the kind of heresy that if you don't understand the covenants, if you don't understand that men are born in the covenant of works, They're in the covenant of Adam. Now, what does that mean that they're lost Adam disobeyed God? Okay, and you're born in that covenant and you need Christ to get into the covenant of grace or the covenant of Christ. So I love the way Baptist covenant theology explained this the covenant of Adam the covenant of works is do this old man and you shall live will do what? Out of all these trees you may eat, but not of that tree. You do that, you'll live. Well, he didn't do it and he died, right? And then the covenant of grace is do this, O Christ, and man shall live. Do this, O Christ, and man shall live. So getting that right gives us a foundational understanding of the gospel. And there's a contrast that needs to be given here. I'm not saying that every time someone preaches the gospel, you have to be an expert on the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, but you need to understand that men are born lost and they need a savior. No matter who they are, no matter who they are. You need to understand that you'll stay away from junk. Like, oh, the Jews don't need the gospel. Everyone needs the gospel. So as we look at Galatians 3.16, this is where we really get into the meat and potatoes of this. Excuse me one second. Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He does not say and to seeds as of many. but as of one and to your seed who is Christ. So the seed is singular here. The Greek word is sperma. That's where we literally get the meaning for sperm, where lineage, seed comes from, people's descendants, right? I know, I know it's some, hey, that makes me squirmy. It's literally, that's the word in the Greek, right? Yeah, get education today, right? So, since our physical descendant, since our Lord is a physical descendant of Abraham, The text tells us that the promise is not made to plural seeds. It goes out of its way to say, and not to seeds as of many. So when people sit up there and say, well, Abraham's seed is the Jews. Well, not which Jews? Unsaved Jews, they'll say, yeah. I'll say no. Read Galatians 3.16. It's to Abraham and his seed who is Christ. It couldn't be any more clear than that. It couldn't be any more clear than that. So yes, dispensation lists are wrong. Period. This is a reference to the covenant of redemption. Okay. The pactum salutis, the God, the father gave his people, gave his son a people and those people, it flowed from the covenant of redemption to Abraham. So to Abraham and his seed, his seed being Christ, Christ was the physical descendant of Abraham. This is where all these covenants flow from. It goes all the way back to the beginning, back to Adam and back to eternity. That the father chose a people that Jesus Christ, the son, God, the son atoned for, paid for, ransomed at the cross. And it is the Spirit that applies that by giving us life so that we can cling in faith to Christ. This is how and why we have such great hope because our salvation, it rests on God. It doesn't rest on us. It doesn't rest on us. The late theologian J.I. Packer stated, the entire order of salutis, or order of salvation, beginning with regeneration, that is to be born again, at its first stage is bound to the mystical union with Christ. There is no gift that has not been earned by him. I say hallelujah to that. There is no gift. I love that quote. There is no gift that has not been earned by him. Everybody who walked in here tonight, Okay, Steve, it's not a knock on you, brother. If you can see, it comes from God. If you can smell, it comes from God. And I tell you, I ate some fried chicken today. Boy, it smells so good, okay? If you can walk, it comes from God. If you can hear, comes from God, not just physically, but spiritually. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. God is speaking to his people. If we have the ability to encourage people, it's a gift from God. If we're great givers or earners or whatever we do, every good gift James tells us comes from above. That includes believing in Christ. believing in Christ. What did Jesus say? They said to him in John chapter 6, what must we do that we may do the works of God? He said, this is the work of God, that you believe in him only sent. That too comes from God. So this ordo salutis that J.I. Packard talks about, the seed of Abraham has to be a part of that. Because God calls us, God elects us, God adopts us, He justifies us, He sanctifies us, He glorifies us. That's that golden chain of redemption. That Jesus will save all those whom the Father gives Him from their sins. He will grant them faith and cause them to come to Him, John 6, 65. And the elect are given this ability, not because we have it in us. Remember we're dead, we're born dead in our sins. And we need the power of God to become the seed of Abraham, okay? But that's God's plan, remember that. That's God's plan. So before we get into some real heavy stuff as parents, I really want you to take this to heart. Because some of you parents that are even older than I am, you've seen some things that I have yet to see. Okay, and I want you to know that I know that I need to trust the Lord, and I'm sure you can already testify that. Okay, you can already testify that your day is coming. You need to trust the Lord too. Well, you younger parents, your day is coming too. So we know we're those who are given to God, the son by God, the father, and this should cause us to have this deep sense of adoration and praise because it has nothing to do with our physical lineage, but it has to do with election. That God chose you from the foundation of the earth. Second Thessalonians 2.13, from the beginning God chose you for salvation. So John Calvin said, election is the ultimate proof that we cannot claim any righteousness for ourselves. Any. God chooses you, you ain't got nothing to do with that. Nothing at all. It should humble you in your face to the dust and me too. And since we cannot attain any righteousness for ourselves, this should destroy our pride. It should destroy our pride and cause us to respond to our Savior in love. So the Abrahamic covenant ties into the new covenant. And when we get to the end, I want us to look at verse 29. Verse 29 says, if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. So here the Lord illustrates to us that salvation flows from the promises of God. the covenant of redemption, the pactum salutis, the Abrahamic covenant flows from that, and so do all the other covenants. If you belong to Christ, whom the promise was made, then you are Abraham's spiritual descendants, the elect, the people of God. This is where the Jews got it all wrong. They got it all wrong, all wrong. Every last bit of it. Turn to John chapter 8, verse 33. So in Jesus' discourse with them, he's going back and forth and he tells them, therefore, if the sun sets you free, you shall be what? Free indeed. And what do they say? In verse 33, they said to him, we are Abraham's descendants and we've never been bondage to anyone. How can you say we'll be made free? So when Jesus rebuked him, he said that If you loved, if God were your father, then you would love me, right? And then he goes on to say, Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and when he saw it, was glad, right? But they got it wrong. They thought that I am a Jew. Come to my house, I got the certificate to prove it. I got the lineage at the temple. Where you at, dude? You want to see? I am one of the people of God. No, they were not. Physical lineage can cause hell to burn a lot hotter for people who are born into a home with light that reject Christ. That's what it can do. It could be a larger damnation for somebody. And yet people claim this even as Christians? Oh, sure. Well, Bobby's a Christian. Yeah, we raised him that way. And Bobby's living like the devil. Bobby ain't got nothing to do with Christ. Bobby is about as Christian as the devil is. We better get this doctrine right, because it flies in the face of a teaching floating around in the church today called covenant succession. And I want us to get a good understanding. Covenant succession, this doctrine, the last time when I preached the last time, covenant succession teaches that your children will be Christians just because they're born in your house. Okay, there's a guy named Joe Webber and he says it just like this. It's not a matter of if but when my children become Christian, they are pre-christians and I look at him and I'm like, dude, are you are you being serious right now? Have you not read the Bible? You really believe that and you know, even the people that like this brother saying man, He's setting himself up to have egg on his face. And usually when people say that, and they start playing God like that, usually, what does the Bible say? Pride comes before what? A fall. You set yourself up to fall. The only covenant succession that I know of is the elect who are chosen from eternity past. That's the covenant succession that I know of, is the ones whom God makes his. And if God sees fit to save the children in your household and I pray that he does, I pray for all your kids and I hope you pray for mine. It's because he made them accepted in the beloved. And not that you had anything to do with it because it wasn't your doing. Even if you're a means, you're still an unprofitable servant. You aren't the one that caused it to come to pass. You understand what I'm saying? You can be as faithful as you want to be and you can raise a bunch of hellions. You can be as unfaithful as you want to be. And God can still save your children in spite of you. So when you do what you do, brothers and sisters, you better do it because you love your Jesus. Not because he has promised to save your children. You better do it because you love your Jesus. Because what happens when you start going to war with some of them children? Remember what Jesus said, I didn't come to bring peace, but a sword. Okay, but a man's enemies will be those of his own household. You better remember that and I better remember that that we need grace. Okay, we pray that we're raising allies, but we could be having enemies in our home. Okay, and that happens. But guess what? There's hope God could flick on that light switch whenever he gets ready. So keep preaching Christ keep living for Christ. Okay, the Pharisees. When they believed in this teaching, they were training up the next generation of vipers. Remember when Jesus rebuked them? He said, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, because you travel land and sea, and when you find one convert, you make a more twofold a child of hell than yourself. He said, how will you escape the condemnation of God? I mean, we better take this serious. We got to get this doctrine right. that God elects those because of the good pleasure of his will, because he is pleased in himself. He is pleased in Christ to do so, not in us. We got to get that right. We got to get that right, because this kind of doctrine sets us up to puff ourselves up. Oh, look how great of a parent I was. Oh, Yeah, look at little Johnny, isn't he great? Yeah, I did that. No, you didn't. You didn't do nothing. And when you do that and you set yourself up like that, then what happens when salvation doesn't come to your household? What happens when it doesn't? Then what? Listen to this quote by Dr. Voti. He said, when something goes wrong in your life and you immediately look for what you did wrong to deserve it, It means that you actually think you are worthy of the goodness you received before. God help you if you think like that. God help you if I think like that. And we do think like that, don't we? Something went wrong, I must be in sin. Of course you're a sinner, right? We get this mystic idea that God is just judging us right like that every time we sin. or somehow we deserve something better than when things go wrong in our lives. We are unworthy and wicked apart from Christ, and that includes our rotten selves and our rotten children, okay? They don't deserve anything, neither do you and I, but the damnation of God. That should really get our attention. So when we look at the Abrahamic covenant, We have to understand this last couple of things that we're not all the same. We're not all the same. We're different people. Okay, we're different people. Like I said, this is a Gentile dominated church made up of people from every kindred tongue tribe and nation and we must understand that there are distinctions but the gospel crosses cultural lines. That's why my brothers that are here we can joke with each other, we can call each other names, and we just don't care because we know that we all go back to Adam. All this is, I teach my kids all the time, this is just God's Crayola. He uses different shades for different people, but we all go back to the garden, okay? When you die and you go on the ground, this ain't gonna mean nothing. In the kingdom of God, there's gonna be a lot of different shades of this, amen? A lot of different shades. And so we see here in Galatians 3, 26 through 29, it says, for you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many as you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. We cannot get this wrong. We cannot get it wrong. We need to get it right to get the gospel right. to understand that God has chosen people no matter what they look like. There's people from all over the world, our brothers and sisters, that have faith in Jesus. So the new covenant people of God from all over the world are the seed of Abraham. So who is the seed of Abraham? It's a twofold answer. It's Christ and his elect. It's Christ and his elect. And we saw this in 316, so I'll close with Hebrews 2. 16 through 18, and it doesn't get more clear than this. For indeed, he does not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. Therefore, in all things he had to be made like his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself has suffered being tempted, he is able to aid those who are tempted. So who does he give aid to? The seed of Abraham. Not to angels, but to the seed of Abraham. And who is he aiding? Those who are tempted. That's believers. Believers of the seed of Abraham. I'm gonna walk us through this these verses are dealing with God coming alongside of his people and Setting us free from the fear of death and the bondage of sin. That's what the context is in these passages the only way we can be free from death and The fear of death is to know the Lord Jesus Christ That's how you are free from death because you will only die once and You live, you fall asleep in Jesus. And the fear of death, the writer of Hebrews, the Apostle Paul, according to Pastor Paul, right? He says that through all our lifetime, we're in bondage to the fear of death. You need Jesus to set you free from that, so do I. And we've been set free. If you go off the road, man, yeah, your heart's still gonna pump. But you're going to be with your Savior if you die, right? You don't need to worry about what's on the other side, like the rest of the world does. They don't have any peace. We do. In verse 16, it says that the Lord does not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. And moving to conclusion in verse 17, therefore, he, that is Jesus, had to be made like his brethren, that is coming in human flesh in the incarnation, to be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God. So this whole section is dealing with hypostatic union, active obedience of Christ. Christ is our mediator and intercessor. We're not getting into all that, but who does he aid? Well, he gives aid to the seed of Abraham and their identity is found in verse 17. We see propitiation or atonement made for who we know. It wasn't a made for it wasn't made for the Lord Jesus because he had no sin. It's made for us. He's aiding those who are tempted the same one in the verses in verse 16. He started off of he's aiding the seed of Abraham the elect. So the atonement that he makes for his people, those are the ones he gives aid to when we're being tempted. So it's pretty simple. The seed of Abraham is the elect of God. So I guess we'll close and then I guess we could split up and then we can do questions and answers. One more song? One more song. Yes, sir.