Boxing Day and Doctrine

Most Americans have no idea what “Boxing Day” means unless they spent time in Europe. At any rate, I’m working away on the next volume of my series, Ancient Truth: General Letters, covering Hebrews through Jude.
In terms of doctrine there is an awful lot of confusion about things in the Old Testament. Most American Christians don’t understand how people before Christ could have a personal spiritual relationship with God. They tend to think the Law was it and Jews would like everyone to believe that.
However, the Covenant of Abraham stood long before Moses was born. Abraham’s was a covenant of grace, not Law. While the covenant Abraham had with God is the first recorded instance of personal redemption on a spiritual level, there’s nothing saying it was not possible before. The purpose of including the tales of Abraham was not to exclude everyone else from grace, but to show how God used grace in this one instance. Whatever Abraham knew of God did not originate with him, since he was one of a long line of scholarly priests in a culture of such scholarship receding back into history completely out of our view. There is ample precedent that folks in Mesopotamia had such knowledge without Moses long after the Law, too.
Abraham was called by God in much the same way as dead souls today are called into life with Christ. The difference is we have the Spirit of Christ; Abraham did not. The Holy Spirit could not be released into men’s souls in the that way until after He was first incarnated in the human Jesus. Once the Spirit of God had lived in a human form in Christ, He was available to all humanity as a part of following Christ. Indeed, it’s impossible to follow Him otherwise. Whatever Abraham had in his spirit, it was not Christ, but some other connection with the Spirit Realm. Seeing we don’t really have any way of explaining much about the Spirit of Christ in the first place, how could we talk much about what Abraham had? Whatever it was, it was the same for folks like David, Samuel and Elijah, but also folks like Melchizedek, who was an associate of Abraham long before Moses.
We learn to recognize this spiritual awareness through how the people acted, as recorded in the Bible. Whatever they had was powerful, but frankly we have it easier, in one sense. While we seem almost totally lacking in that ANE perspective on reality, we have instead a spiritual awareness which could lead us back to that world view if we pay attention. Abraham and his spiritual kin had to have that awareness first.
I sigh as I write this, because Americans know more about Boxing Day than they do the ANE world view.