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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I suspect that this thread was not begun out of a good-faith effort to understand this point of doctrine, but instead to bait Christians on the point of whether Christ is essential for salvation.

However, for those who are reading, I will try to provide a brief answer. The Old Testament points to Christ. It is, from start to finish, the story of God bringing out from the world His chosen people, the Jews, through whom He would bring the Messiah, who is Jesus Christ. The Messiah, or Savior of the World, was foretold for ages through the Jewish prophets, and Christ was actually anticipated among the Jews at the time of His birth. Read Matthew 2:1-12 to see this. The references to the coming Messiah are sprinkled all throughout the Old Testament, but see Isaiah 53 for just one excellent example of this.

What's this have to do with Abraham? All of this was foretold to Abraham, whom God chose as the patriarch of His chosen people. He promised to bless all the nations (that is, all the people) of Earth through Abraham, by bringing Christ the Savior to Earth. This is in Genesis 12.

The Bible says in Genesis 15:6 that "Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness." That is, God pronounced Abraham righteous because of His faith in God and God's promise. In the Old Testament, God counted faith in Him and this promises as the righteousness that provided salvation. And it wasn't just Jews to whom this salvation was available. Though the instances recorded are rare, there were Gentile believers in the God of Abraham.

In the New Testament, in Paul's letter to the Romans (Romans 4:21-24), the implications of Abraham's belief to us are spelled out, where Paul writes that Abraham was "fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised." Paul continues, "This is why 'it was credited to him as righteousness.' The words 'it was credited to him' were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead."

I guess this response isn't as short as I intended it to be, but the brief answer is that in the Old Testament, people looked ahead to the death and resurrection of Christ, and after that, mankind looks back on it. But all of it is built on faith. Please read Hebrews 11 for a more complete summation of this, but this is the great "faith chapter" of the Bible, wherein the giants of the Old Testament are shown having faith in the great promise of God and dying without seeing the promise of Christ in the flesh. But it is their faith in God fulfilling this promise that is the cause of their salvation.

Revelation 13:8 (this is New Testament) calls Christ the "lamb slain from the foundation of the world." That is, as far as God was concerned, Christ's sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection were already as good as a done deal, so their efficacy for salvation was still just as potent before the actual fact of the crucifixion and the resurrection. That is why the great prophetic statements of the Old Testament (such as Isaiah 53:5 -- "He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed") are usually written in the past tense, even though they hadn't actually occurred yet.

Basically, God knows what He is doing, and He is just. All of us will have to answer for our lives when we die, and we will be without excuse. Either we believe Him, or we don't. Romans 3:19 says that we will all answer to God, and then "every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God."

The Bible may seem like a jumble of incoherency or stupidity to those who have no faith in God. If you have no belief and want to look superior to those who do, you will surely be able to pick and choose a passage here and there that makes you feel the want you want to feel. But those who truly seek the wisdom of God (James 1:5-6) will find in the totality of Scripture a majesty, a beauty and a continuity that they will wonder at the more and more they study it.[/quote]

Where did Abraham say Jesus was to come and be His Savior, though? [/quote]

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