God's promise to Abraham was a prophecy fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
Transcript
[Darris McNeely] We're continuing our BT Daily series on Bible prophecy and especially how Bible prophecy offers us two very valid proofs of God and the Bible. Too often human predictions, human errors when it comes to Bible prophecy muddy up the important proof that prophecy proves there is a God and it proves His Bible to be true—two very important parts of our understanding of ourselves and God and His plan of salvation.
There's a prophecy in the Bible regarding the blessings that God made to Abraham. Abraham was the patriarch from the Old Testament that God made many promises to, who sets the, really the entire story beginning toward salvation and also toward physical blessings upon Israel and many of our modern nations today. The story begins in Genesis chapter 12 where God told Abraham to go into a new country where He would show him and he would be. And there He would bless him, He said to him, "In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." This is in Genesis 12:1-3. In you, or in Abraham, God says all the families of the earth will be blessed.
Other prophecies flowed from this prophecy. In chapter 15 of Genesis and verses 4 and 5 He says, "Your descendants will be as the stars, as numerous as the stars of the heaven" (Genesis 15:4-5) In chapter 17 and also verses 1-8 God said to Abraham that you will be the father of many nations—one of the more familiar phrases that we know Abraham by (Genesis 17:1-8). But it was an everlasting covenant, not only to the people and to his descendants, but it has very, very key spiritual implications because really these promises, while physical, are also most importantly spiritual. And they were actually confirmed in and through Jesus Christ more than 1900 years later with the birth of Jesus Christ because Christ was a descendant of Abraham.
Christ was of the tribe of Judah, which was one of the twelve sons of Israel, who was the grandson of Abraham. And in Christ the spiritual promises are all made and fulfilled that in his seed, the seed of Abraham, all of the nations of the Earth would be blessed. And scriptures such as Galatians 3:16 and 1 John 4:14 show us that Christ is the Savior of the world. And so what we find here is a prophecy given more than 1900 years in advance to one man, Abraham, that his seed, in his seed all nations, all peoples would be blessed, all families would be blessed, and we find those prophecies fulfilled in Christ, a descendant of Abraham, in the New Testament. 1900 years in advance God told through Abraham that his seed would be the one through whom all would be blessed spiritual with the hope of entrance into the Kingdom of God and to family of God and to live forever.
Once again, when we look at what prophecies are in the Bible, and understand how they were fulfilled hundreds of years later, I can see that not only from the Bible, but also from history, it is an amazing proof that God exists, that His Word is sure, the Bible is the Word that we can count on. And we understand then how to properly use Bible prophecy to bolster and to encourage our faith rather than to draw attention to ourselves or any other individual because of our knowledge and quite frankly the vanity we might bring to the subject.
It's all about God. It's not about us. Keep that in mind especially when you study and look at Bible prophecy and you will have your faith strengthened. And you will understand God and the Bible as a sure word that does not fail. Man fails. God's word doesn't.
