7 Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham.
This was a radical statement for Paul to write. The Jews of his day believed that it was your ethnicity that made you a child of Abraham. You had to be pure Jew, no mix with foreigners. The purer the better. And you had to be able to prove it by knowing your genealogy. They could recite the ancestors by heart for many generations. This was important to them. Paul says that none of that matters. If you want to be counted as a child of Abraham you simply need to have the kind of faith he had. He believed what God said. And if you are a faith-descendant, then you get all the benefits of being his descendent. You become part of the group that get’s his inheritance. You join his family by having faith in what God said and did in Jesus. Racial and ethnic distinctions disappear. In Christ, there are no second class citizens. We are all equal, regardless of our birth. Our birth families don’t matter. We get born into Abraham’s family. Abraham was the one to receive God’s promises. So when we join his family we get its benefits. We must believe what God said. Are you ready to believe?
The Arnold Journey 