Elect From Every Nation, Yet One O’er All the Earth

 For many years, God’s people were physically descended from the line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; to be outside of this lineage was to be outside of the kingdom of God. This was not always to be the case, however. God promised Abraham from the beginning that through his seed all nations of the earth would be blessed, not just one family or one race of people. We see this throughout the Old Testament prophets, most clearly, though, in Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:1, which describe the mountain of the house of the Lord being raised up and all the nations streaming to it (cf., Hosea 1:10; 2:23; Romans 9:23-26). In Acts 2, we find Jews from every nation under heaven being converted to the Gospel, but there was still the matter of the Gentiles, those not of the physical lineage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is addressed in Acts 10 where Cornelius became the first Gentile convert to the Gospel, breaking forever the barrier dividing Jew and Gentile, for all are one in Christ (Galatians 3:28).