Promise, Law, Faith

Law and GospelRepentance

Promise, Law, Faith

38 min

Law and GospelRepentance

Promise, Law, Faith

38 min

In Genesis, Abraham was told that in his seed, all the nations would be blessed. So why then did God later command the Israelites to be separate from the nations? In Galatians, Paul argues that the Mosaic covenant was a temporary Gentile-excluding covenant that served to guard the Abrahamic promise until the true seed, Jesus Christ, fulfilled all righteousness. On this program Shane Rosenthal continues his conversation with T. David Gordon, author of Promise, Law, Faith: Covenant-Historical Reasoning in Galatians.

Show Quote:

On two separate occasions Abraham lied about his relationship with his wife Sarah because he feared for his own life. But if you think about it, king David would later become the man of Abraham’s fears. He had Uriah, the sojourner from the north, killed in order to take his wife Bathsheba as his own. In contrast, Jesus did not fear for his own life, but gave it up willingly in order to present his bride, the church, “without spot or wrinkle…so that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:27). This is why Christ alone is the source of our hope.

Shane Rosenthal

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Promise, Law, Faith: Covenant-Historical Reasoning in Galatians

Author: T. David Gordon

In Promise, Law, Faith, T. David Gordon argues that Paul uses “promise/ἐπαγγελία,” “law/νόμος,” and “faith/πίστις” in Galatians to denote three covenant-administrations by synecdoche (a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa), and that he chose each synecdoche because it characterized the distinctive (but not exclusive) feature of that covenant.

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Shane Rosenthal is executive producer of The White Horse Inn national radio broadcast which can be heard online at whitehorseinn.org.

T. David Gordon (PhD) is a retired professor of Religion and Greek at Grove City College. He has contributed to a number of books and study Bibles, published scholarly reviews and articles in various journals and periodicals, and his books include Promise, Law, Faith: Covenant-Historical Reasoning in Galatians (Hendrickson, 2019).

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