Before Jesus died for our sins, could people be saved? How? from Compelling Truth
GNN Note – Were the Prophets and other people in the “Old Testament” saved? /END
Christians speak of salvation in Jesus Christ, but what about those who lived before the earthly life of Jesus? How did those people find salvation?
In one sense, salvation has always been the same—it is by God’s grace through faith. The major difference is that before Christ’s earthly life, salvation was found in faith in the Lord. Adam and Eve, for example, had faith in God and fellowship with Him. Abraham trusted the Lord by faith. Hebrews 11 provides an entire chapter of people who followed the Lord by faith, not knowing the details of the Christ who would come.
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The two consistent components are God and faith. For example, Psalm 2:12 noted, “Blessed are all who take refuge in him.” This “refuge” was faith or trust in the Lord. This was not an ambiguous idea of God, but faith in the one God who created the heavens, the earth, and everything in them.
With the coming of Jesus, the content of faith became more specific, growing from belief in God and His ways to acceptance of the Son whom He sent as Savior. The promised Messiah had arrived. Jesus was the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrificial system, the one Savior who permanently restores relationship with God.
Jesus spoke of this with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. There, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). The teachings from God revealed through Moses and the Prophets had been fulfilled in Jesus. Faith would need to be found in Him, the fulfillment of God’s previous revelations concerning the Lord’s Messiah.
