A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of…

This was a new thing, and a great thing, that God did toward the work of redemption. This thing was done now about the middle of the space of time between the fall of man and the coming of Christ▪ and there were about two thousand years yet to come before Christ the great Redeemer was to come. But by this calling of Abraham, the ancestor of Christ, a foundation was laid for the upholding the church of Christ in the world, till Christ should come. For the world having bec•me idolatrous, there was a necessity that the seed of the woman should be thus separated from the idolatrous world in order to that.

And then it was needful that there should be a particular nation separated from the rest of the world, to receive the types and prophecies that were needful to be given of Christ, to prepare the way for his coming; that to them might be committed the oracles of God; and that by them the history of God's great works of creation ⟨p. 43⟩[…] providence might be upheld; and that so Christ might be born of this nation; and that from hence the light of the gospel […] forth to the rest of the world. These ends could not well be obtained, if God's people, through all these two thousand years, had lived intermixed with the heathen world. So that this calling of Abraham may be looked upon as a kind of a new foundation laid for the visible church of God, in a more distinct and regular state, to be upheld and built up on this foundation from henceforward, till Christ should actually come, and then through him to be propagated to all nations. So that Abraham being the person […] whom this foundation is laid, is represented in scripture as though he were the father of all the church, the father of all them that believe; a• i• were a root whence the• visible church thenceforward through Christ, Abraham's root and offspring, rose as a tree, distinct from all other plants; of which tree Christ was the branch of righteousness; and from which tree after Christ came, the natural branches were broken off, and the Gentiles were grafted into the same tree. So that Abraham still remain the father of the church, or root of the tree, through Christ his seed. It is the same tree that flourishes from that small beginning, that was in Abraham's time, and has in these days of the gospel spread its branches over a great part of the earth, and will fill the whole earth in due time, and at the end of the world shall be transplanted from an earthly soil into the paradise of God.