Are Old Testament Saints Christians?

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Well, it's the end of the week everyone and today I'm going to be actually answering a question that was sent in by a listener.
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And this is a very common theological question and I thought it would be a good question for us to end the week with.
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The question came across like this.
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If a person has to accept Jesus Christ in order to be saved, what about the saints in the Old Testament? Now, as I said, that's a pretty common theological question.
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But they asked a second question in addition to it that I want to address specifically.
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The question goes on to say, my point is, were there Christians or there were obviously Christians before Christ's birth? And so I sent a quick response to this person.
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I thanked them for the request or for the question and I told them I was going to answer the question on the show.
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And so that's what I want to do now.
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I want to address the question in two parts.
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I want to address first the first question of does a person, how did the Old Testament saints get saved? Because that's an important question.
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But the second question is, well then, were they Christians? If accepting Jesus Christ is required for somebody to be saved, then did the Old Testament saints accept Jesus Christ? And if that's the case, were they in fact Christians? So let's start with the most basic part of this question.
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How is it that someone gets saved? How is someone taken from death to life? How does someone go from being a child of wrath to being a child of God? And the most important part of this is to understand that it is an act of grace by which God comes to the person and through the power of the Holy Spirit opens up their heart to believe.
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A person does not believe on his own initiative.
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According to Scripture, we are incapable of that.
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Jesus himself said, no man can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
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And we know that that drawing is a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit of God.
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So if a person has to be drawn to believe, then we would say that that didn't happen just after the New Testament began, but it's always been that way.
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For anyone to have believed, whether it be Adam or Abraham or Noah or Enoch or anyone, their heart had to be opened by the Holy Spirit to enable that belief.
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But the question is, what did they believe? What is it that the Old Testament saints actually believed? And what we do know from the Scripture is that Abraham received the gospel.
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The Bible tells us in Galatians that God preached the gospel to Abraham.
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But how? Galatians tells us that.
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It says God preached the gospel to Abraham when he said, through you all the nations of the world will be blessed.
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That was good news and that was the gospel in seed form given to Abraham.
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But we can even go a step back further.
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We could go back to Genesis chapter 3 and verse 15, which tells us that after the fall, God made a proclamation and the proclamation first was to the serpent, that there would be one who would come to crush the head of the serpent and that while the serpent would strike his heel, he would crush his head.
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And we believe that that is a reference again in seed form to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ who would come as the seed of the woman and crush the head of the serpent, thereby undoing the work that he did in bringing man into the fall.
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And so when we talk about the subject of what did the Old Testament saints believe? Well, they believed the gospel.
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They believed the gospel in seed form.
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They believed what I would say the promises of God.
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And the Bible says that they were righteous because of their faith, that they were declared righteous because of their faith.
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If we go to Hebrews chapter 11 and go through Hebrews chapter 11, it says over and over and over that they were, that they believed, that they had faith.
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We call Hebrews 11 the great hall of faith.
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Therefore, if someone is a believer in the Old Testament, they were a believer in the gospel or the promises of God.
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And that is a very important reality that we have to realize because that promise did include, if you will, the coming of Jesus Christ.
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It did include the promise of the new covenant.
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But I don't think that everyone in the Old Testament understood exactly how that was going to fill out.
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I don't think they all understood exactly what that was going to, how that was going to play out historically.
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And therefore, it's important that we understand that the Old Testament saints had faith and ultimately they had faith in Christ, but they had faith in what they were given.
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They had faith in what they understood.
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And so, for instance, when the Old Testament saints were told, sacrifice this animal on behalf of your sins.
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And when you sacrifice this animal, it is a propitiatory sacrifice.
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It's meant to satisfy the wrath of God for sin.
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This is what was done on the day of atonement.
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It was atoning for sin.
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And it was a propitiatory sacrifice.
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From their perspective, they looked at that animal, they sacrificed that animal, and they did that in faith that this was the method that God was going to use to forgive their sins.
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We know, looking back, that that animal actually did not have any true intrinsic value because the Bible tells us in the book of Hebrews that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin.
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So, by itself, that animal had no value because that animal by itself doesn't have the power to take away sin.
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But what that animal did do is that animal pointed forward to the work of Christ.
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So in that sense, the Old Testament believers, in believing in this sacrifice that was being made on their behalf, they believed that their sin was forgiven because of this sacrifice that was made.
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They were looking forward to the coming of Christ, albeit they didn't probably fully understand all of that as they were doing it.
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And so when Jesus comes, it says one of the things that he did in Luke 24, it says that beginning with Moses, he showed how the Old Testament pointed toward him.
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He showed how the Old Testament answers the question of who is Christ and what did he come to do and how.
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Well, Jesus is seen throughout all of the Old Testament.
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This very weekend, I'm going to be preaching on Noah's Ark, and I'm going to talk about how Noah's Ark is a picture of Christ because Noah's Ark is the vessel through which God saved humanity.
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The ones who were in the Ark were safe.
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The ones who were outside of the Ark experienced the wrath of God.
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Therefore, the Ark is a picture of Christ because we are told everyone who is in Christ will be saved and everyone who is outside of Christ will, in fact, be recipients of the wrath of God.
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And so we know that the Ark is more than just that story.
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That Ark pointed forward to a greater fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ.
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And so we know that with all of the Old Testament.
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All throughout the Old Testament, there are pictures that point to Christ.
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There are road signs, as it were, pointing to a greater fulfillment.
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And that greater fulfillment is in Jesus Christ.
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And the Old Testament saints believed.
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They believed what God had said.
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They believed the promise.
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They believed, as it were, the gospel.
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And because of their faith, they were saved.
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The Bible says we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone.
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And we would go ahead and say in Christ alone.
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And ultimately, that's how they were saved was in Christ alone.
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But their faith looked forward to the coming of Christ, even if they didn't fully understand everything that he was going to do.
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They looked forward to the coming serpent slayer.
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They looked forward to the coming promised one.
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They looked forward to the one who was going to come.
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And ultimately, take away their sins.
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And in that sense, they were saved the same way we are.
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They were saved by Christ looking forward.
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We are saved by Christ looking backward.
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Now, let me add to go into the next part of the question.
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Because the next part of the question was, well, does that mean that we could say that they were Christians? I would say this.
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I would say to use the term Christian would be somewhat anachronistic, and simply means that's looking at it, reading something historically back into a time when that didn't exist.
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The term Christian didn't exist prior to being used in Antioch.
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It was used, the Christians were first called Christians at Antioch in the Book of Acts.
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And so even during the life of Christ, people weren't called Christians.
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They were called followers of Christ, followers of the way, but not Christians.
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And so the term Christian would not be appropriate to be applied back before the time of the Book of Acts.
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But we could say that we are all saved through Christ, and therefore, whether we are saved through Christ before he came, as the Old Testament saints looking forward to him.
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Or now looking back, saved by Christ, looking back at what he did.
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Either way, we can say with utmost certainty that we are all saved in and through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And so I wouldn't call them Christians, but I would say they were saved through Christ.
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And I would go as far as to say they make up the universal church.
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All saints of all time make up what we would refer to as the universal church, the universal body of Christ, which is saints from all time make up this one body.
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And we call this the elect of God, or the saints of God.
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The elect meaning chosen saints being made holy.
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And so we look back into the Old Covenant.
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There were saints then, and they were saints because they had been made holy by God, they had been declared righteous by God.
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And there are saints now who are made holy, declared righteous by God.
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And they all make up this one grand universal body of believers, this one grand universal body of saints.
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And one day we will experience heaven where we are in the presence of our loved ones who've gone before, who love the Lord.
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And who trusted in Christ, but we're also gonna be in the presence of all those Old Testament saints.
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One day we're going to eat at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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The Bible tells us that that's one of the great things that we have to look forward to, that we actually will experience the same blessings that these Old Testament saints are going to experience.
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And they will experience the same blessings as us, because we are all saved ultimately the same way.
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By grace alone, through faith alone, and our faith is in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the promises of God which come through the gospel.
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So I hope that this has clarified some of the question for the listener specifically, and maybe for you as well.
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Other listeners who maybe have thought about this question and maybe just didn't have a chance to ask.
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But I wanna encourage you, if you have questions, I would encourage you to send them in to calvinispodcast at gmail.com.
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Again, that is calvinispodcast at gmail.com.
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Sometimes I answer the questions on a single program like this, and sometimes we address questions like this on our caffeinated Calvinist roundtable where I bring in guests and we talk about these subjects.
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So send in your questions, we would love to deal with them.
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Thank you so much listeners, thank you for being with us today.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I have been your Calvinist.
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Thank you for listening.
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We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to him in repentance and faith will find him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through him.
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May God be with you.