What is the basis for your Jewish identity? Is it DNA, family tradition, or personal preference? Clearly, being Jewish means different things to different people, but it wasn’t always like that. Being Jewish didn’t originate with our ideas about who we are, but with God’s promises of what we would be. Jesus challenges us to revisit God’s promises to our ancestors, starting with Abraham.

Jesus issued most of his challenges from the Jewish Bible, sometimes with clear quotes and sometimes with cryptic claims. In one of his most cryptic statements, Jesus drew a seemingly impossible connection between himself and Abraham: “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).

The Context of the Abraham-Jesus Connection

To make sense of Jesus’ cryptic claim (and what it can mean for our Jewish identity), we need to understand the context of God’s promise to Abraham.

In his book, Does the Jewish Bible Point to Jesus, David Brickner reviews several Genesis narratives, showing how humanity’s alienation from God led to darkness and degradation. Into that darkness, God speaks promises of hope.

David writes:

God makes it clear that he is not going to throw down a lightning bolt from heaven to rescue humanity. He is going to use flesh and blood . . . a Messiah who would come to redeem and renew the whole world. [One] major clue about the Messiah’s identity reveals that he would come from a branch of Abraham’s descendants: the Jewish people.

David goes on to describe God’s interaction with Abraham (or Abram, as he’s called when we first meet him in Genesis).

God’s speech begins with a command to get out and get away from all that is familiar: Abram is to leave his home and his father. God does not give him any destination other than “the land that I will show you.” And then God makes a three-part promise to Abram in what is known as the Abrahamic Covenant.

First: “I will make you a great nation” (Gen. 12:2).

Second: “I will bless you and make your name great” (also Gen. 12:2).

God saves the climax of the promise for last: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).

God reaffirms this promise in Genesis 18, vv. 17–18.

The text doesn’t tell us that Abraham rejoiced when he heard the promise. Maybe it’s implied, or maybe Abram was in shock. After all, as David points out:

This [promise] was not only ironic but appeared literally inconceivable—Abraham was in his seventies, and his wife, Sarah, was in her sixties and had been proven barren. And, as though to make certain everyone would know this birth was a miracle, the baby was not conceived for another twenty years.

It seems like God made his promise to Abraham as difficult as possible to believe. Yet believe Abraham did, as Genesis famously tells us: “And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” (Gen. 15:6)

While it’s affirming to think of having such a righteous ancestor, I doubt that many of us would have wanted to walk in Abraham’s sandals. God was always asking him to do exceptionally hard things. In between those hard things, Abraham did a lot of waiting. Not the irritating lady-with-too-many-coupons-in-the-grocery-store waiting. Decades and decades of waiting for a promise that seemed impossible to fulfill.

Why does God promise the impossible?

Why does God choose the most unlikely situations and circumstances to make such epic promises? Apparently, he wants us to trust him—not our situations and circumstances. God often presents his promises in ways that make it impossible for anyone else to fulfill them. Yet what is humanly impossible is not impossible for God. And it’s his faithfulness, not ours, that keeps him from breaking his promises. That is as true now as it was in Abraham’s day, as David also writes:

If you follow the life of Abraham through the Bible, you see some less-than-great moments. When he gets scared, he hides his true relationship with his wife and turns her over to Pharaoh. And it’s not a one-off moment of weakness because he does the same thing later in his life.  The wonderful thing is that even with all his flaws, Abraham was known as God’s friend (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8).

God’s promises don’t stand because of how great [Abraham or] Abraham’s descendants are. In fact, the Bible shows how often we’ve been a great example of failure—just like the very nations from whom God set us apart. But God said, “I’m going to work with you. I’m going to do something extraordinary with you.”

God’s Covenant with Abraham, and by extension, with the Jewish people today, is not always comfortable. As David puts it,

When you’re Jewish, it can be especially perplexing to hear that we are part of the chosen people, not only because we have been singled out so often for persecution, but also because identifying as God’s chosen people can seem arrogant and exclusive. In fact, it would be exactly that—if not for the third part of God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah.

God chose the Jewish people and made a covenant with us in order to bless all people, and the greatest fulfillment of that blessing culminates in the Messiah. It’s the Messiah who redeems humanity by addressing the fatal flaw that keeps us in doubt and distrust of God’s love for us. How the Messiah does that is a subject of other prophecies. Here we focus on the fact that God promises a blessing so great that it can’t be contained in one person, family, or nation, but it bubbles up and flows to all the nations of the world.

Have you ever considered the fact that God always intended for the Jewish Messiah to bless both Jews and Gentiles? Abraham did!

How much of God’s promise did Abraham actually see fulfilled?

Abraham experienced much of God’s promised blessing during his lifetime. Foreign leaders acknowledged his greatness and his favor with God.¹ Abraham had the joy of seeing his miracle son, Isaac, born.² And presumably, his grandsons as well. (Jacob and Esau were 15 years old when Abraham died.)

What Abraham did not live to see was the crowning glory of the destiny God’s Covenant had promised: a nation of people who would somehow bless all humanity (i.e., “all the families of the earth”).

Fast Forward to Jesus

The Genesis context provides important context for Jesus’ statement about Abraham. But what about the context of the conversation in which he actually made the statement? Many Jewish people at the time of Jesus believed in him, but many of the leaders did not. At one point they asked, “Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? . . . Who do you make yourself out to be?” (John 8:53).

What did Jesus mean when he said, ‘Abraham rejoiced to see my day?’

And it’s within that context that Jesus says, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.”  (John 8:56).

Jesus’ comment implied that their argument wasn’t with him, but with the scriptures and with God’s promises.

David writes,

Jesus knew that he was fulfilling the promise that the Messiah would be the descendant of Abraham, through whom all nations would be blessed.

But what did Jesus mean when he said, “Abraham rejoiced to see my day?” Was he saying Abraham rejoiced over the outcome of Genesis 3:15 even though he did not know how it would be accomplished? Or was he saying that Abraham somehow knew that Jesus would be the one to fulfill it? Either option is possible. Here’s why:

Simple faith: The same eyes of faith that enabled Abraham to believe God at the start would enable him to believe the pinnacle of the promise that was not fulfilled during his lifetime. Whether or not Abraham could foresee the details of that fulfillment, he could rejoice in it—that’s how completely he believed God.

Special communication from God: Throughout the Jewish Bible, we see God giving detailed descriptions of future events, often to warn or preserve his people. There’s no reason to discount the possibility that God revealed more to Abraham than we know from the book of Genesis. Jewish tradition is certainly open to that possibility, as can be seen in the rabbinic commentaries known as midrashim.

One such midrash suggests that Abraham asked God whether he would override his covenant if someone “better” (or, as the midrash puts it, “more righteous”) came along. As the story goes, God’s reply to Abraham included the following:

Moreover, when your descendants will come to commit transgressions and bad deeds, I will see one righteous man among them, I will consider him to be equal to all of them combined, as he is capable of saying to the attribute of justice: Enough. I will take him away and serve as atonement for them. Bereshit Rabbah 44:5.11-12³

In other words, ancient Jewish thought recognizes that someone, perhaps more righteous than Abraham, would eventually come along, and he would satisfy God’s attribute of justice. God would “take him away” as an atonement for the sins of the unrighteous. As one of Abraham’s descendants, this righteous one would be counted as part of God’s covenant with Abraham. According to Jewish tradition, this divine revelation gave Abraham cause to rejoice.

Regardless of how many details Abraham knew, Jesus understood and accepted his mission as the fulfillment of Abraham’s God-given destiny. Does that imply that Jewish people no longer have a destiny? Not at all! As Jewish people, God invites us to find our destiny in our Messiah. Through him, we can have a friendship with God like Abraham’s—a friendship that not only blesses us, but enables us to bless others.

For Reflection:

What do you think it means for all the families of the earth to be blessed by the Jewish people? How does that affect your Jewish identity?

Excerpts from “Does the Jewish Bible Point to Jesus?” are used with permission from the publisher, Moody Press.

To find out more about God’s promises and why Jewish followers of Jesus believe he is the Messiah, check out Does the Jewish Bible Point to Jesus?:12 Key Prophecies That Unfold God’s Plan on Amazon.com or in our online store.

Endnotes:

1 See Genesis 21:22–32, Gen 23:6

2 Gen 21:1–7

3 This excerpt is from Genesis Rabbah, part of a collection of midrashim (rabbinic commentaries used to interpret or expound on the Torah). It’s based on oral traditions that were probably put to paper, edited, and organized between 400–450 CE.