(1.) The life which he now led was a life of faith with respect unto things spiritual and eternal. For he had for the foundation and object hereof, [1.] The promise of the blessed Seed, and the spiritual blessing of all nations in him, as a confirmation of the first fundamental promise to the church, concerning the Seed of the woman that was to break the serpent’s head. And [2] God entered expressly into covenant with him, confirming it with the seal of circumcision, wherein he obliged himself to be his God, his God almighty, or all-sufficient, for his temporal and eternal good. To suppose that Abraham saw nothing in this promise and covenant but only things confined unto this life, nothing of spiritual grace or mercy, nothing of eternal reward or glory, is so contrary to the analogy of faith, to express testimony of Scripture, so destructive of all the foundations of religion, so unworthy of the nature and properties of God, rendering his title of “the father of the faithful,” and his example in believing, so useless, as that it is a wonder men of any tolerable sobriety should indulge to such an imagination.

John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ed. W. H. Goold, Works of John Owen (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1854), 24.67.

Resources

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  • Owen: Christians Are In The Same Church As Abraham
  • Owen: Christians Are In The Same Church As Abraham (2)
  • Owen: Christians Are In The Same Church As Abraham (3)
  • John Owen: The New Covenant Is The Abrahamic Covenant Renewed
  • Owen: The New Covenant Is The New Administration Of The Abrahamic Covenant
  • John Owen On The Continuity Of The Abrahamic Covenant With the New Covenant
  • Covenant Theology and Baptism