God’s plan for people who lived before Jesus involved salvation by faith-just as it does for the people who follow Jesus today. Jesus’ atonement for sin on the cross applies backward in history as well as forward.
People like Abraham placed their faith in God’s promise to do something about sin, while people in the Christian era place faith in God’s fulfilled promise to take care of sin-Jesus Himself.
Old Testament faith was not blind belief. It simply had fewer details than ours does today. The real children of Abraham, as Paul put it, are not those linked by ethnicity or geography, but those who put their faith in God.
GALATIANS 3:5-7 – 5 He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
6 Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.
7 Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.