NOTES for Heb 1:1-14

In today’s reading, the apostle Paul gives examples of Old Testament faith and offers a very interesting interpretation of Abraham’s conduct. Perhaps it seems perfectly obvious to us, raised in a Christian culture, that if we believe in God, we also believe in the resurrection of the dead. Yet even in Paul’s time this was by no means obvious. It was still less obvious in Abraham’s time. Strictly speaking, Abraham had no particular grounds for believing in the resurrection. For a person of that time and culture, immortality was attained precisely through one’s children; Abraham could not imagine any other continuation of life. But Paul says that Abraham trusted God, who had promised that Isaac would be the father of a great nation, so completely that he did not doubt for a second that the promise would be fulfilled even if Isaac were offered as a sacrifice. How could this be? Does it really matter how? Abraham does not think about how it will happen; he simply accepts as a fact that God’s words cannot contradict one another—which means that somehow they will be reconciled... And this trust is credited as righteousness.