Were Old Testament saints saved or just regenerated?
 |
| Illuminated parchment, Spain, circa AD 950-955, depicting the Fall of Man, cause of original sin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
It is true that in both Testaments great emphasis is laid on obedience. In Exodus 19:5 (NASB) God promised Israel, “Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples.” But this by no means suggest an alternative way to heaven apart from faith; on the contrary, this promise was given to a company of believers who had already repented of sin and surrendered their hearts to the Lord in faith. Obedience was to be a necessary evidence or fruit of faith. It is not the apple that makes its parent tree an apple tree; it is the apple tree that makes its fruit an apple. Jesus said, “By their fruit you shall know them” (Matt. 7:16); in other words, grapes come only from vines, not thorn bushes, and figs only from fig trees, not thistles. Obedience is a necessary and natural consequence of faith, but it is never described as a substitute for faith anywhere in Scripture.
It should be noted that from the very beginning Adam and Eve taught their sons the necessity of sacrifice to the Lord for the sins they may have committed; thus Abel presented the acceptable blood sacrifice on his altar—as an act of faith that typically presented in advance the Atonement later to be offered on Calvary. Hebrews 11:4 makes this clear, “By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain.… And through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks.” Genesis 15:6 records that when Abraham believed God, God reckoned it to him for righteousness. Romans 4:13 tells us that “the promise to Abraham and his descendants that he would be heir of the world was not through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.”
As for the generation of Moses, to whom the promise of Exodus 19:5 was given, there could have been no misunderstanding whatever concerning the principle of salvation through faith alone. From the same chapter that contains the Ten Commandments comes the first of several references to sacrificial worship: “You shall make an altar of earth for Me, and you shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen” (Exod. 20:24, NASB). The underlying principle of each sacrifice was that the life of the innocent animal victim was substituted for the guilty, forfeited life of the believer. He received the forgiveness of God only through repentance and faith, not through obedience.
Hebrews 10:4, referring to the Old Testament dispensation, declares, “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (NASB). Earlier, in Heb 9:11–12, the Scripture states: “But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands …, and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption” (NASB).
How, then, is the benefit of this blood-bought atonement brought to sinners? It comes only through faith, not through deeds of obedience as works of merit—whether before the Cross or after. Scripture declares, “By grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8, NASB). But what kind of faith? The counterfeit faith that betrays itself by disobedience to the revealed will of God and by bondage to self and to sin? Certainly not! Salvation comes only through a true and living faith that takes seriously the absolute lordship of Christ and produces the fruit of a godly life—a life of true obedience, based on a genuine surrender of heart, mind, and body (Rom. 12:1).
It is from this perspective that we are to understand the earnest calls to obedience from the Old Testament prophets: “If you consent and obey, you will eat the best from the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured with the sword: (Isa. 1:19–20). Similar is the requirement laid down by Jesus Himself: “And why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46, NASB). The apostles concur: “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts.… But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:11–12,17–18, NASB).
