We're looking at this guy named Abraham. Pretty early on in your scriptures. We see him on chapter 12 and he takes up the next several chapters. And Abraham is this guy that God says to him, we looked at this last week. He said, hey, I want you to leave your father's home, your city and the people you know, your country, and I want you to leave all of that and live in tents.

Take your animals and your people that are in your household and just start traveling and I'll show you where to go. And so he ends up going to the land of Canaan, the promised land, modern day Israel and Palestine. And he goes there and God says, look at this. Walk through the width and breadth of the land. I'm going to give this to you and your descendants.

Abraham is like, hold up a second, I don't have descendants. No kids. Like, we've tried, you know, we're old. He's like, I'm 75 years old, I have no kids. God said, don't worry about that.

I'll handle that. And not only will you have offspring, you'll have descendants, but you'll also have, there'll be like a multitude of descendants. And through them, all nations will be blessed. People will be blessed by the name of Abraham, and there will be one of your descendants, Jesus. Fast forwarding like spoiler alert.

Jesus is the answer to this. He says, there will be one of your descendants through whom all nations on earth will be blessed. That's you and me. But I gotta say, it's with an asterisk. See, God's grace is free and available to everyone.

But it's only for those who receive on faith that Jesus Christ, that his death and resurrection means something for you. See, unless you believe that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has something in it for you, that it actually accomplishes something for you, it won't accomplish anything. You have to have faith. And today we're looking at, in the life of Abraham, we're seeing his faith played out in the most extreme of ways. One of the ways that none of us would even bother to do.

I know you wouldn't because you won't even put down your cell phone and like, respond to God, oh, wait, that's me. I'm looking in the mirror. Sue and Elaine and I were talking about that earlier. Like the question at the end, the at home challenge says, spend some time asking God what things you hold too tightly. What areas of your life are you unwilling to let go of?

What things do you value more than your growth? In God's grace. That last sentence, what things in your life do you value more than growing in God's grace? Is quite telling about us when we actually look at our lives. One of the ways I can tell is I have an iPhone.

And one of the features on it, it'll tell you every week how you've used your phone. And I set mine that at 9am on Sundays. I. I get a screen time report and it tells me how I've managed my life in regards to my phone, how have I utilized it, what apps, what categories of things, websites and apps have I used the most? And I wish I could tell you that my Bible reading and different Bible study tools that I have on there is always number one. It hasn't ever been number one.

And so that tells me just that's one measurement, one indicator of somewhere in my life that I have allowed to become greater than my devotion to Christ, the one who gave his whole life for me, the one that died for me. My devotion to him should be the utmost important thing in my life. And if I did that, then all of my other relationships, my relationship to my wife, my relationship to my daughter, to my parents, to my church friends, ever to my community, all these things would benefit from that. And yet I spend my time on useless things. Like, I recently redownloaded the Facebook app.

I hate it. I try to not do anything on Facebook as much as possible. Sometimes it's hard to avoid. And I had something I wanted to sell and so I wanted to put it on Marketplace on Facebook, which is just a nightmare. Anyway, it used to be so good, and now it's just full of the most ridiculous things.

As soon as you post something for sale, somebody is like offering you a third of the price and they're like cash. Like, what did you think I was going to take? Like, only cash, you know, Like, I guess you could barter, like I'll come clean your house or something. Like, you know. But no, I'm selling it because I want money, you know.

And so I just responded to people like, well, I don't do drugs, so I'm not desperate, you know, Like, I'm not taking like just the first offer that comes around, as if I need my new fix, you know, Like, I want actual hard money for this. And so I downloaded the Facebook app and I put it in my listing on Marketplace. And then you know what? I found out? I was doing an old habit that I thought I had buried.

I just start scrolling, I just started looking at stuff and I. And I And I found myself sitting at the dining table for an hour and a half. I'd eaten my lunch. And then an hour and a half later I'm like, my life is no better. I don't know anything useful.

My mind is full of all this stupidity that I've seen. Like, not even people's personal posts. It's like all ads and videos of people I don't know right now. And I'm like, what a waste of my time. Now I'm not saying, oh, every moment of every day I should be just, you know, spending time studying the Bible or that.

Look, I'm a pastor and I don't know what you guys think that I do, but I don't do that. And I don't feel like that's the only thing I should do. I also should be with people. Like I should be, you know, sitting with folks, helping folks, trying to help them and messing things up and then spending, you know, like four times as long as it takes. Right, Tito?

I messed up a wire hanging a TV with him. Like I was helping out and I drilled through the wrong spot and he's trying to take the blame. I'm like, don't you put, put that on yourself, man. I should have looked and seen that outlet known. There's a wire coming down that wall and I drilled right through it.

It was a fun time. It is a 30 minute job that took four hours at that point, you know, and so it's like, cool. But we had a good time figuring stuff out. Like we learned things about his house that we didn't know before and now we do. So you learn something new.

Like, yeah, they're like, there's a breaker on the outside too. Like some of the breakers are on the inside and some were on the outside on a, in a panel like, okay, this is how they did it. All right. And so anyway, good times though. So, you know, like I spend my time and the way I do it sometimes it's like, you know, certain things are directly to draw me closer to Christ and some things are so that I can have relationship with his people.

And some things are so that I can get out of like that normal life and get out there with people that don't know Jesus Christ and to be able to share the hope of the gospel with them. And so there's all those different things going on. And I look at that and I look at the life of Abraham and what God called him to. He says, I'm going to create through you a blessing to all people. That's a pretty tall order.

Like, God's called me to do big things for him. And I still don't know what that means because, like, somebody told me that. That God had wanted them to share that message with me when I was about 18 years old. And I said, okay, what's that mean? And she's like, oh, I don't know.

He didn't give me the explanation. I said, well, so, like, what's it going to look like? She's like, I don't know that either. I just knew I was supposed to tell you. And I turned around and you walked in the room.

So I figured that was a sign that I was supposed to tell you. I'm like, great. And to this day, I still keep saying, lord, am I doing the big things yet, or is there more to come? You know, like, I'm so always, like, feel like I'm looking for that. Can you imagine being Abraham and saying, God said that through me, my descendants, there's going to be a blessing to the whole earth.

That's a big load to put on someone to, like, say, you got to live your life in such a way that you are useful to future generations, man. Some of us don't think that way. I was sharing with somebody recently how, when we were taking a trip this summer, we were visiting my, among other things, my aunt and uncle in California. And my uncle's a retired geologist. And he, he, he, you know, I used to ask him, what does he do?

And he says, well, I clean up the dirt. You know, like when a company spills something that shouldn't be there, he. His company comes in and cleans it up. But they also do testing for groundwater and soil and all those things. And so there's this spring in their town, and it's coming out of the bottom of Mount Shasta, and it's this.

The. It's like the start of the Sacramento river, which is 49 miles long. It's a pretty short river, but it is the absolute most pure water you could find. He says he tested it. That's what he does.

And he tested that water and said, it's, like, so pure, it has zero minerals or anything in it. You just don't even taste it when you're drinking it. Which was true. But that water, he said, came from Snow that melted 50 years before from Mount Shasta. And it took 50 years to percolate down into the soil, come through it and come back out to that spring.

50 years. And I was standing there and putting my water bottle in there and drinking it. And I'm like, obviously it's more like water is older than 50 years. But I mean, that water is like 50 years ago it was snow. And if snow had like a consciousness, it wouldn't be thinking like, man, in 50 years, like, I'm gonna pop back out of the ground and some dude's gonna be standing in the water drinking it.

Like, how clean is that? I don't know. But I'm just standing there and like getting the water and drinking, I'm trying to get it from upstream, you know. And so, so I started thinking about that and I thought, we don't plan our lives that way, do we? We don't plan our churches that way.

We don't think about generations into the future. We don't think about those who are coming after us. We don't even think about our children. Like say, you know, if you've got a son or a daughter and they're young and you start saying, lord, I want to pray for the day they graduate high school. I want to pray for the day that they go on the first date of somebody that they shouldn't be dating.

That you would put roadblocks in their way. I want to pray for when they go on that third date, fourth date, fifth date with somebody that they should be with. That person's maybe going to become their spouse in the future. They that you would begin preparing them for holiness, righteousness, purity in their relationship. That you would prepare them to live sacrificially once they get married.

That they would love one another with sacrifice and with, with full abandon. That they would just abandon everything that they're. That is selfish in their nature to live wholeheartedly for their spouse. We don't think that far into the future. Churches don't usually think about what are we doing when the next generation is here.

We don't think about, are we saddling them with a building full of holes or a mortgage that's too high that they can't afford? Or any of. We don't think about, are we making choices now that benefit the people who are here or the ones who are yet to come. I was thinking about that all in the span of getting some 50 year old snowmelt water out of the spring. It was convicting to me.

Abraham is a guy that God's called to look into the future. And one of the first things that he does well, it's a few years later, but he and his wife get tired of waiting for God to answer God's own Promise. God promised him a son. He didn't promise Sarah a son. So there's a technicality here.

He says, abraham, I'm giving you a son. Abraham doesn't, you know, Sarah doesn't get pregnant. He doesn't have a son. 12 years goes by. And so Sarah says, I've got a solution.

See my pretty young Egyptian servant girl that I've got? He says, yeah, why don't you have a kid with her? You'll fulfill God's promise that way. Abraham is like, sounds. He didn't get too excited, but I'm sure he was a little bit like, yeah, that sounds great.

Like, he's a man, you know. Like, he's godly, but he still kind of has the. He's a human, you know. So he's like, my wife said, it's okay. And so he sleeps with the servant girl.

She gets pregnant. She has a son named Ishmael. Now, the interesting thing is Ishmael is blessed. And Abraham says, lord, could Ishmael live under your blessing? And God says, well, yes, he can, but he's not the.

Like. That wasn't what I intended for you. That wasn't the fulfillment of my promise to you. Every time we try to make God's promises happen on our own will and our own might, it always comes to a failure. And so God did bless Ishmael, but he said, no, I'm still going to give you a son.

And so he blesses him. Another 12 years later with the birth of Isaac, Abram and Sarah have a son named Isaac. And Isaac is the one that God says, I will. I will fulfill my promise to you through this child. Now, a few years go by.

We don't know exactly how many, quite a few years. One of the things that happens is when. When Isaac is young and he's being weaned, so he's probably between, like four, you know, three and four or five years old, somewhere in that range as far as, like, being kind of turned off, you know, like taken away from the bosom of the mother and, like, starts to become a man, you know, like, it's like, time for dad to take a shot at raising this child up, you know, that's kind of what's going on. And Ishmael, the older son, begins to mock him, begins to make fun of him. And so Sarah says, that son of the servant girl will not take part in the inheritance of my son.

So they send Hagar and Ishmael away. Now, as that's happening, Isaac begins being like, literally, the only Son that's in the household, but not Abraham's only son. And so as he grows up, God ends up speaking to Abraham and he says to him, I want you to take your son, your only son whom you love, and offer him as a sacrifice. Let's read the scripture where it says that we're in Genesis chapter 22.

Sometime after these things, like after Isaac was born and all that other stuff I just talked about, some other stuff happens. Sometime after these things, God tested Abraham. He said to him, abraham, here I am. Abraham replied, God said, take your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, offer him up there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains, which I will indicate to you. Early in the morning, Abraham got up and saddled his donkey.

He took two of his young servants with him, along with his son Isaac. When he had cut the wood for the burnt offering, he started out for the place God had spoken to him about. On the third day, Abraham caught sight of the place in the distance. So he said to his servants, you two stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go up there. We will worship, listen, and then return to you.

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and he put it on his son Isaac. Now this tells us, by the way, this is the only indication that it gives us of how old Isaac might have been, because the amount of wood needed for a burnt offering would be quite a bit. And Isaac is old enough and strong enough of a body to be able to carry that much wood. And so we assume he's in the upper ages of teenage years or young adult years. He's physically able to carry this wood.

I think that also means he's physically able to like beat 100 and something year old man in a fight. So pay attention to what happens next. Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering, put it on his son Isaac, then he took the fire. I guess they had one of those like charcoal lighter things that you use for your grill, you know, he had one of those. So he's like got fire.

I don't think it was a candle. And they didn't have those cool like propane torch sets yet. So I'm guessing it was like he's just got a jug with coals in it and he took the two of them and walked on together. Oh, he has knife. Sorry.

Yeah, he has a knife. Like kind of ominous, like I got fire and a knife, you know, And Isaac's like, I got the wood. And then he kind of clues in on something here, listen to this. Isaac said verse seven, said to his father, Abraham, my father. What is it to my son?

They talk real formally then I guess. Here is the fire in the wood. Isaac said, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Ah, quite a question. God.

Abraham replies, God will provide for for himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. The two of them continued on together. When they came to the place God had told him about, Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood on it. Next, he tied up his son Isaac and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand, took the knife and prepared to slaughter his son.

But the Lord's angel called out to him from heaven, Abraham, Abraham. Here I am. He answered, do not harm the boy. The angel said, do not do anything to him for now. I know.

Listen, I know that you fear God because you did not withhold your son, your only son from me. Abraham looked up and saw behind him a ram caught in the bushes by its horns. So he went over and got the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place. The Lord provides, it is said, to this day, on the mountain of the Lord, provision will be made.

I got a question.

The character of Abraham in this seems like really good and really bad at the same time. Here's what I mean. It seems like he's either lying and deceitful. Like, for one thing, he didn't tell his wife what he's doing now. Dads are good at this.

Like, I watched this video the other day, wasting time online, as I mentioned earlier of a guy that had like a. One of these boom lifts and he tied this kid had like a toy helicopter thing that would normally be on the ground. You know, it doesn't actually fly. And he had like tied it up to it. And his lift had like a remote.

And he was letting the kid like lift himself up with the remote for this. This big boom lift. And the wife comes home and sees it. And the dad's like, we didn't think you'd be home this early. Like, that was like, not is not what it looks like.

It's 100 what it looks like. We're doing dumb stuff out in the yard. And she's like, he could get hurt. He's like, no, I put a strap on it. Like, he's strapped in, it'll be okay.

And she's just like. She just kind of like let it go as if this is normal in their house. And so there's a lot of times dads will do stuff with their kids that they just don't tell mom about, but Abraham is, like, literally going to slaughter their son on the altar. And. And even though he's being faithful to what God called him to do, it seems like he's not being truthful, both by omission to Sarah and also seems like he's kind of lying to his servants.

He's like, hey, you guys just hang out here. We'll be back. Like, really, though, both of you, you know, and there's a question. And the New Testament actually addresses this. It says that Abraham believed God could bring his son back from the dead.

True. But, like, did he really. I mean, did he really have that in his mind? I wonder, like, raise of hands. Do you think Abraham was being a little bit shady?

Higher. Come on. Don't be like, stamp. Put a stamp on it. Okay, you guys, like, we've got half of you being honest.

The rest of you are like, no, the Bible says Abraham's a good guy. It must have been good. Like, okay, well, he had also pimped out his wife to two different kings already. He said, like, oh, yeah, that's my sister. You can take her into your harem if you'd like to.

Yeah, that happened. And then God punished those guys like, no, you can't have her. They find out, like, by divine revelation. No, that's Abraham's wife, which. It was his half sister.

They did things different back then, I guess. But anyway, he's like, yeah, sorry, I kind of lied to you about that because I thought you'd murder me to take her for. For your own wife. And they're like, yeah, we actually would have done that. So good call.

You know, like, we were definitely going to kill you if we knew that that was your wife. But now God told us not to, so I guess we'll just give you, like, animals and money and stuff instead. Yeah, they gave him money for lying. So it kind of becomes part of Abraham's identity. Like, I just tell a mistruth a little to get out of a few things.

And yet the righteous thing here was the. And the Bible tells us not. Not even as much here as it does later in the New Testament, that what Abraham did was credited to him as a righteous act. What he did was righteous. And so somehow the faith that Abraham had was given on his account as righteousness.

And we look at what that means, and that means that in our lives, the thing that matters is not what we do, but how we live out our faith. You see, it all has to do with belief. Abraham believed that God would bless this. Now, the interesting thing is so many times we have a sacrifice in our lives, something that we want to give up. It might be your tithes and offerings.

It might be the money that you put in the basket. You say, okay, if I put money in the offering basket, hint, hint, in the back of the thing, right there in the back row, there's a basket where you can put your offering in. We have bills and things that are due, ministry to do, stuff that costs money. You know, you say, oh, well, I'm going to do that because I've got this need in my life, and if I give to God, he's going to fix the thing that's broken in my life. He's going to fill the need that I have.

Or maybe you say, well, I'm going to. I'm going to stop doing this one, like this habit that I have or this thing that I spend money on at home because my wife keeps getting on to me, my husband keeps getting on to me about that. And so I'm just going to stop doing that. So that way it'll bring some peace in the home. Or, or maybe I'm just going to.

I'm going to stop this. This, like this fun thing that I do because it's just really like, I don't know, like it's not popular. And so if I do that, maybe, maybe it'll be more popular, whatever it might be. And the thing is, so many times we might offer something up as a sacrifice so that we can get something in return. We say that if I.

If I put this out of my life or I give this up, then somehow I will receive some kind of a blessing, whether it's from God or another person. That's a very disingenuous type of sacrifice, is not a righteous sacrifice. You are only doing that in order to receive something back. But the true sacrifice is one where you give it up with no hope of receiving anything in return. And even though Abraham believed that God could redeem his son or resurrect his son if he went through with this, because God had said, isaac will be the one that the promise is fulfilled through.

That could have happened. He believed that that could happen. And yet he didn't do this, saying, okay, well, if I give up my son, God's going to bless me in some other way. Certainly the culture around him was used to doing those things. They said, well, we will offer up our children as sacrifices.

And in Jeremiah, oh, I wrote it down somewhere in my notes. I think maybe I didn't, but Jeremiah 7:31, God talks about child sacrifice. And he says the neighbors around the Israelites were giving up their children in child sacrifice. And he says, that was something that I never commanded the Israelites to do. And it never entered my mind to do that.

God, in other words, God is not the God that demands child sacrifice. And yet we see some parallels. And I made a list of them. I want to look at this list of parallels. Kind of foreshadows or kind of shows the story ahead of time of what God was going to do through his son, Jesus Christ.

Both Abraham and God's sons are called the only son, the son whom you love. Remember, God called that to Abraham, but he also calls Jesus my son, my only son, whom I love. Interesting. Isaac was old enough to resist, and yet he didn't see. Remember when I said he wasn't just.

Even though the language says a boy, it also says like the same thing, the same Hebrew word is used for the age of the servants that he left too. And we don't believe they were just little boys that were doing all this. It was a word that could be used for anybody up into almost 20 or 20 plus years old. And so even though Isaac was old enough to resist and physically could resist the binding, and in fact, the Jewish people believe that he says, father, I want to go through with this because God's called you to do it, but I'm worried that I might flinch at the moment where you strike with the knife. So go ahead and bind my feet and my hands so that I might not move.

That's not in the scripture, but that's what the Jewish people believe had happened. And so Isaac could have resisted, but he didn't. He was willing to die and sacrifice for faithfulness to what God had called him to do. In the same way Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane the night that he was betrayed and the next day when he was crucified, he was willing to die. He says, father, if there's any other way, I'd be happy to do that.

But nevertheless, not my will, but your will. And so Jesus was willing to die too. Isaac carried the wood for the sacrifice on his back, and Jesus was given his cross to carry to the place where he was sacrificed for us. God provided on the mountain for Abraham and Isaac. He provided the substitutionary sacrifice, the sacrifice, the ram that died in place of Isaac that God allowed him to offer instead of his own son.

And yet God didn't offer anything up in place of his own son. In fact, it was to fulfill the covenant that God had made with Abraham. But Abraham, normally two people would pass through the covenant process. It's in Genesis 15 and 17. It kind of talks about it in there.

But instead of both of them passing through, God was the only one that passed through, saying that even if you fail your side of this agreement, I, God, will be the one that fulfills it, that takes the punishment for breaking the covenant that you've made. And so when the Jewish people living out the Abraham and God covenant, when they failed to do what they were called to do, God said, I will send my son and in your place and not require your firstborn sons, but my son will be the one that takes up that death, that sacrifice. And Jesus died a substitutionary death in your place and mine. A little juxtaposition is that God stopped the hand of Abraham from slaying his son, and yet he didn't stop for those that would slay his own. Jesus, the scriptures tells us, could have called down 10,000 angels to destroy the world and set him free.

He could have ended it all right there. If I was king and somebody wanted to kill my. Well, I don't have a son, but I have a daughter. If somebody wanted to kill my daughter and I had the authority of a king, I would probably do everything possible to prevent that from happening. Even not as a king, I will still do that.

Like, you got to get through a lot of stuff flying your way really fast, if you catch my drift, before you'll get to my daughter.

Abraham waited 25 years from the time that his son was promised till the time that his son was born. It was a lot longer than that. From the time that Christ was promised until the time that he came to this earth. God takes sometimes a long time in fulfilling his promises, and yet when he does, it is for your salvation and for mine. And the interesting thing is that Abraham's actions proved that he had the fear of God.

When we have fear of God helps us to be faithful to the covenant that he has with us, because we recognize who God is and who we are. If you don't have fear of God, then there's something missing in your life. You need to step back a few steps and say, lord, I don't want to be scared of you, but I need to have the fear of you. In my life. I always think of how C.S.

lewis, the author that wrote so many books, but including the they Call it a children's series, but I think sometimes I love it more than my daughter does. The Chronicles of Narnia and there's the character Aslan, who is not God, but he shows him in a lot of ways, some of his attributes and characteristics. And people that haven't met Aslan yet, the big lion, they say, well, what about him? What's he like? And he says, well, he's not a tame lion.

Well, is he good? Oh, he's. He's good, but he is something to be fearful of. And so the way he describes Aslan, I see a lot of how we look at God in this. And Abraham's actions prove that he feared the Lord.

And so many times we get so familiar with God that we have no fear of him in our lives. We don't realize that he's the one that holds our eternity in his hands. And yet he doesn't judge our lives based on how we lived. Like, did we do good things or bad things? Or more good things than we did bad things?

Because certainly we wouldn't make it if it comes down to that. You see, there's one thing, one question that will be asked of us upon our death and our judgment, and it is why, essentially, why should you be allowed to into eternity in the presence of God in heaven? And if you try to list anything other than to say, the blood of Jesus Christ is efficient and efficacious for my sins, in other words, the blood of Christ accomplished something for me. His death means something for me. If you try to base it on anything else, you won't enjoy what happens next.

If you live your life as if you can somehow earn your way into heaven or have heritage of family members before you that were Christians, or, or I gave or I sacrificed or I did this or that, and you haven't actually trusted in Christ for your salvation, you don't have the righteousness of Christ. It wasn't Abraham's actions. It was his faith that he had. And his faith was lived out in what he did. See, you can sacrifice a lot of stuff without faith.

You can give up everything the New Testament talks about. You can sell everything you have and give to the poor. You can sacrifice your body to the flames. There was a lot of Christians being killed for their faith. You can do all that and fake it and not really have a relationship with Christ.

But unless you have that relationship with Christ, we call it being born again, then you'll miss out the interesting thing, and I'll wrap up with this. And then I promised you time for your questions? I said I'd finish early. I'm not. But I'm still going to give you time for your questions.

Sound. Sound fair? If you don't have them, that's fine for folks online too. You feel free to type them in. And even if somebody does type one in, we're like, maybe one of you in the booth can get a mic and tell me what it is.

All right, cool. We're on the same page. So the. The thing, the thing that I. That I really came to grips with as I was studying this was I was looking at how much we, in our, like, modern society, but all the way back through since the Garden of Eden, how much we always choose to death.

Like, like, probably. I don't think any of us has actually said, oh, well, I'm going to offer my child up as a sacrifice. That's not what I mean. I mean, we choose death in so many ways. It's always been our choice ever since Eden.

You see, God had offered them, like, life here in the garden, where everything was perfect. And then he said also, though, like, he gave them the tree of life, that would give them eternal life. But then he said, there's also this tree, the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. And. And they chose that.

And ever since then, we choose it as well. Death has been our choice. War, murder, abortion, euthanasia, drugs, alcohol, bad food, no exercise. It's a lethal combination. Every day we are guilty of choosing death in some way or another.

And yet God offers us life. He had offered them life in the garden, and he offers us eternal life. Right now he offers us life if we have faith in him to accept the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. See, that was the promise that God had given to Abraham, that through one of his offspring, all people on earth would be blessed. Even though Abraham was the father of the Jewish nation, God had given him, through his offspring, Jesus Christ, to be a blessing to all people.

The Jews were his chosen people through whom the blessing would come to the rest of the earth. Praise God for that. So Jesus came for life. He died your death so you could have his life.