“Father Abraham Had Many”
Romans 4:1-12
November 23, 2008
My parents are “slides people”. What I mean is this: go to the Harvey home in VA, and you won’t find photo albums. No, early on, my dad decided to use slides to document the Harvey family goings-on. I remember as a kid many times we’d get out the screen and the old projector (this in the days before carousel projectors). There was always this smell associated with the experience; I don’t know if it was the screen or the projector warming up after a period of disuse, like a furnace that’s been dormant for the summer waking up for winter usage. But that’s how we reviewed our memories. Then I married Karen, and she’s a family photo album person, and so we’ve got books filled with pictures to remind us of the memories that we’ve made.
Imagine the surprise we’d feel, though, if we were to one day open up the family photo album and find a bunch of strangers inhabiting its pages! “Who are those people, and how did they get into our lives?” Something like this is what’s going on when we get to today’s passage, because Paul makes the bold suggestion here that Father Abraham, revered by the Jews as the patriarch whom God used to bring about the very existence of the nation, has a family photo album filled with non-Jews—and further, that there are a whole lot of Jews who do not find themselves in that family album!
Paul has argued that his doctrine of justification by faith is buttressed by Old Testament examples and teaching. Now he supplies proof that that is the case, using “Father Abraham”, and supporting his usage of Abraham with the words of David, the king. Here were two of the most revered men in Israel’s history, two men who walked with God. If the evidence from their lives could be marshaled in support of Paul’s case, the case would be made even more strong.
Let’s consider a preliminary question: is there value in this argument for us? We are not Jewish. We live 20 centuries removed from the situation. How can we relate? In a couple of ways; Paul
• Elaborates more on his doctrine
o Justification is that which involves God justifying the ungodlike
o Faith is faith in the God Who created the world and raised Christ from the grave
• Demonstrates that justification by faith is God’s one/only way of making man right with Himself
o The Jews have a rich spiritual heritage of men who were justified by faith
o There are not two programs: works for Jews, and faith for Gentiles
o Jews do not have a separate way to come to God (as some teach today)
Why Abraham? He was “the rock from which Israel was cut. The basis of the Hebrew nation was the covenant promises God had made to Abraham, and that scenario takes place beginning at the end of Genesis 11 and stretching through Genesis 22.
Four “faith episodes” of Abraham’s life:
1. God’s calling and blessing of Abraham (Gen. 11/12)
2. God’s promises to give Abraham the land of Canaan and to make his posterity large (Gen. 13/14)
3. God’s confirmation of the promise of a son, when Abram was 99 and Sarah 90 (Gen. 17)
4. God’s testing of Abraham, and upon passing the “Isaac test”, reconfirming His covenant (Gen. 22)
These episodes are paralleled in Hebrews 11, when Abraham is said, in each, to have obeyed “by faith”. The Jewish people took great pride in the establishment of their nation, that they were the specially-loved people of God come into being under miraculous circumstances (the birth of Isaac, the child of the promise, to Abraham and Sarah when she was well-past childbearing age). Abraham was “father Abraham”, and to the Jews, he was their father on the basis of blood-relationship. Paul in this text suggests that Abraham is the father of a great nation, of course, but that that nation is the nation of those not born in the bloodline of Abraham, but rather those born in the “faith line”, you and me and all of those who place faith in God’s promise, Whom we know as Jesus Christ. Further, the Jews regaled Abraham for his obedience to the law of God, when in fact it was not his obedience to God, but his faith (which then issued in obedience) with which God was pleased.
I. What did Abraham do? - :1-5
How was Abraham justified? Two possibles that Paul sets forward: by works, or by faith. Problem with the first idea: Abraham would have grounds to boast before God, but Paul doesn’t even let this crazy notion gain a foothold; there’s no way a human being could possibly be justified in boasting before God. The unrighteous can in no way establish their own righteousness before God.
Before we go on, let me mention an aside on Paul’s use of Scripture: he uses the term “Scripture”, a unified entity rather than merely a collection of assorted books. Secondly, he speaks of Scripture as “speaking”, giving it a quasi-personified form. There is to Paul no distinction between what Scripture says and what God says. This is in contrast to some popular teaching that the Bible “contains the Word of God”. Sounds good, right? Wrong…the person who would speak of the Bible in that way does not mean what you and I might take it to mean, because phrased that way, it suggests that the Bible, while it might contain the Word of God, is not, per se, the Word of God cover-to-cover. Paul though affirms that what the Bible says, God says; contrary to the recent suggestion of a popular politician, every word of Scripture is equally valid, equally God’s Word, equally authoritative. Thirdly, he uses the present tense: “say”. He could have used a different tense to indicate, “what was written”, but instead, he considers Scripture as God speaking to us, here and now. Fourthly, it is clear from his wording that he considers Scripture to be authoritative, the final court of appeal in every controversy. This is the commitment of the EFCA and of Red Oak: “what does the Bible say” should trump any other consideration.
:3 - “Counted” – “credited”, as in making a deposit to one’s account; it means to account to a person something which previously did not belong to him. This can happen in two ways: wages or gift. The two are incompatible. God credited Abraham’s account with “faith as righteousness”.
• What does that mean? It is not that faith and righteousness are equivalents, but rather that the means by which we are declared righteous is faith.
• How did it happen? It couldn’t happen as a matter of God’s grace plus man’s works, because one invalidates the other; as we said, they’re incompatible. If I earn it, then I deserve it. If it’s a gift, then I didn’t earn it, by definition. It would be nonsensical to thank your employer for your paycheck as though it were a gift (you may thank him for the privilege of working, of course; perhaps on this Thanksgiving week, it’d be fitting to do that!). You’ve earned that money, at least until Washington swoops in to confiscate a chunk of it. You come to terms at the beginning of your employment, that you will be paid; to not give you a paycheck when you’ve earned it is to defraud you. But I never can be defrauded of a gift, because by definition, it is something that I receive not as a payment, but of another’s beneficence.
If anything is clear from :4-5, it is that God’s crediting of righteousness to Abraham’s account comes as a result of God’s grace through Abraham’s faith. Genesis 15:6 is the verse to which Paul is referring here.
We talked about that at length earlier on in this series, and yet I wonder how many folks “get it”, that your sin (and mine) is detestable in the eyes of a holy God, thoroughly and completely against His will and purpose. He is perfectly at odds with my imperfection. You don’t have the right picture of the sinfulness of your sin, and neither do I, because our sin blinds us to it. We think that we are really “okay”, when in fact none of us are.
I read a piece this week that suggested that the main problem with evangelism today is that there is, on the part of people, is the lack of conviction of sin. One commenter wrote that:
I simply do not meet people who are…
1) Struck with any measure of a genuine fear of the Lord.
2) Thinking of God AT ALL in Biblical terms, especially in regard to their relationship with God.
3) Concerned with their own sinful condition as a matter of God’s wrath.
4) Convicted with a sense of sin MORE than a sense of their personal problems and felt needs. (This is universal, constant and unchanging.)
5) Any sense of the problem of sin other than the possibility of not going to heaven.
And yet the Bible calls natural man “ungodly”, that we are totally ungod-like; this is man’s basic problem. And yet in this passage, Paul says that God “justifies”—defined a few weeks ago as declaring to be totally without fault and undeserving of punishment—the ungodly. This is what might be termed the “Protestant understanding” of God’s dealings with man, in a nutshell: God declares “righteous” those who are “ungodly”, rather than the Catholic understanding, which suggests that God makes righteous and then, and only then, declares them such. It is the wicked whom God justifies (you and me), and not those whom He has already prepared. But the question about 4:5 is this: is God just, is He right, to declare “righteous” those who are patently not so? This is one of the most startling verses in the entire New Testament. Is God not guilty of an injustice? The answer is found in “imputed righteousness”, the idea that Christ’s righteousness, “credited” to my account, makes me in the sight of God to be one who is without fault. On that basis, God seeing Christ’s goodness when He sees me, instead of my badness, God can declare me “justified”.
II. What did David say? - :6-8
Now, Paul moves to David’s words in Psalm 32:1-2 to make the same point. David “says the same thing”. Here David is talking about God crediting righteousness to the account of people, and he speaks of it in contrast to God holding sin against people. He refers to evil deeds three times, using Hebrew parallelism; once he uses the term “transgressions”, and twice “sins”; these two words give us two complementary pictures of what sin is. One picture is that of “stepping over a boundary”; the other is that of “falling short of a standard”. Both those things are true of sin, of course; God is the boundary-setter and the standard-maker; we’ve stepped over the lines many times, and missed the mark. But what does Paul say is true of our sin, according to David? “Forgiven, covered, and not counted against us”! The righteousness of God, revealed in the gospel, is God’s just justification of the unjust. He will never count our multitude of sins against us, but He will credit the righteousness of Christ on our accounts.
The people who are blessed by God are not those who have earned something from Him (indeed, no one can), but those who have received from God something that they could never earn. It’s not that these people never sin; they continue to sin, as do we all, and yet God chooses to grant to them something freely that they could never earn. This is Paul’s summary of David’s words, and they bolster his argument.
III. What does circumcision gain? - :9-12
Regarding Abraham, the first question is this: how was Abraham justified before God, on the basis of works or faith? The second is when: before, or after, undergoing the ritual of circumcision? And further, what ripple effect will the answer to that question have on the relationship of circumcised Jews to uncircumcised Gentiles, who had previously been enemies? The Jews prided themselves on this rite, introduced by God as the symbol of covenant-keeping which faithful Jews needed to observe if they were committed to the covenant. Was Abraham justified only after he underwent the ritual, or was he justified before (and then underwent circumcision as evidence of the reality of what was already true)?
Verse 10 answers the question: Abraham is declared righteous on the basis of “believing God” in Genesis 15, and circumcision comes in, in Genesis 17, with at least a 14-year (possibly as much as a 29-year) gap between the two! The two are not unrelated, but they are separate. Circumcision was not the ground of Abraham’s justification; it was the sign and seal of it. Similarly, baptism is not the ground of our right standing before God, but it is the Biblically-prescribed sign and seal of our faith in Christ.
And what’s the point Paul is making? Two-fold: one, Abraham is the father of all of those who are people of faith, circumcised or uncircumcised, Jew or Gentile. The children of Abraham are us, folks! Things like circumcision, ethnic heritage, and the like are no more relevant to our justification than it was to Abraham’s. Second, Abraham was spoken of by Jews as “the great dividing point in the history of mankind”; according to Paul, Abraham is the great rallying point of unity for all who believe, for where the ritual of circumcision divides, faith unites! Jew and Gentile are one in Christ, and the upshot for us is simple: nothing ever ought divide one sincere believer from another.
Lessons for Life
The Holy Life of the Believer
Paul will later deal with an objection to this idea that we are justified by faith alone in Christ alone, one that people today will still ask, “why then be holy?” The answer, at least in part, is this: God “outwardly” declares us to be righteous, but His “outward” work is not the only thing He does, because once He does this, He begins an inward work as well, and His inward work in us will necessarily yield outward results, to the degree that Paul agrees with James in saying that a genuine Christian will reveal the transforming work of God in his life by living a life of increasing obedience to God. When we get to Romans 6, Paul will flesh this out more fully, but for now, suffice it to say that our justification by God through faith in Christ frees us to live lives that are holy before Him, and that it is in living those lives as God designed us to live that we find increasing joy and fulfillment.
The Identity of the Believer
In contrast to the unbeliever, the Christian bases his identity, not on what he does, but on who God declares him to be. The Christian understanding is that I do what I do on the basis of who God says I am. Had a long discussion this week with fellow pastors about the subject of how the church ought to deal with homosexuality, given that we are living in an age of increased pressure to compromise Biblical truth. One of the things that we’ve seen in this movement—and that we see in others—is the difference between a Christian approach to identity and a non-Christian one. The homosexual says, “I have these feelings; I act in this way; therefore, I am a homosexual.” The Christian says the exact opposite: “I am what God says I am: a child of His on the basis of God’s grace and my faith in Christ’s saving work. I then act in keeping with my identity (or I should!).” I do not do things in order to become, nor identify myself by my actions; I understand what God has done, and take my identity/direction from that.
The Open Disposition of the Believer
We ought to consider how, as individuals and as a church, to do the work of breaking down the barriers that divide us as people. We ought to consider how to make the church at Red Oak look as much as possible like the church universal, how people who are different in many ways come together in genuine fellowship irrespective of outward differences.
Two of the most-revered figures in Israel’s history were Abraham and David; if the witness of their lives and experience is that God declared them righteous only on the basis of faith, then the same will be true for all those who in simple faith call upon Jesus today.
Table Talk
“In contrast to the unbeliever, the Christian bases his identity, not on what he does, but on who God declares him to be”. Why is that important? What difference does it make?
