I’m sure all of us are pretty familiar with how our finances operate in this culture. We go to work and we earn wages which we deposit in a bank account. The bank credits that amount of money to our account. But we also have bills to pay. And regardless of how we might choose to pay those bills on the front end – debit card, credit card, bill pay, check, or cash, those funds have to eventually come out of our bank account. When that occurs, the bank debits our account for that amount of money.
If we’ve done an effective job of budgeting, then at the end of each month, the amount that has been deposited into our account will be equal to or more than the amount that comes out of our account. But if we’re living paycheck to paycheck or, if for some reason the amount of our paycheck is decreased or our expenses increase, then there is going to be a whole lot of stress about our finances.
Unfortunately, that model seems to have greatly influenced how many people view the way God deals with us. I know that is true because I was one of those people for the first 18 years of my life. During that time, I believed that God had a spiritual bank account for me and that every time I did something “good”, He would make a deposit on my behalf and credit my account. Conversely every time I did something “bad”, God would make a withdrawal and debit my account. I assumed that as long as my deposits were greater than my withdrawals at the end of my life, even if only by a little bit, then I would earn my way into heaven.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who has viewed God like that. A recent study by the Barna Group found that 72% of the people surveyed believe that it is possible for someone to earn their way into heaven by their good behavior. Even nearly one half of those who identify themselves as “born again” Christians believe that it is possible to earn one’s salvation through good deeds.
As we’ll see this morning, God does indeed have a spiritual accounting system. But fortunately for us, it doesn’t work the way that I once thought it did or that a majority of people think it does. So go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter 4 and follow along as I read beginning in verse 1.
What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:
“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sins are covered;
blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
(Romans 4:1-8 ESV)
As you can see, the verb “count” is central to this passage. It is used five times here in this passage and we’ll see Paul use it six more times before we get to the end of chapter 4. So it seems that if we’re going to be able to accurately understand what Paul is writing here, we probably need to take a moment to define that term:
“to count” =
The underlying Greek word is an accounting term that means…
“to enter something into a ledger”
The frequent use of this verb does reveal that God does in fact have a spiritual ledger into which He enters debits and credits to our account. But as we’ve seen in Romans and as we’ll see confirmed once again this morning, He doesn’t do that in the way that Paul’s audience thought He did, or the way most people today think He does. In God’s spiritual accounting system…
My standing with God is dependent on what I receive
not what I achieve
This may very well be one of the most freeing concepts in the entire Bible. If I don’t really believe this, then I am going to live my life from paycheck to paycheck spiritually. I am going to constantly be stressed out wondering whether I’ve made enough deposits into my account by my “good” deeds to cover the withdrawals that result from my sin. If I live like that I can never be sure of exactly where I stand with God and that’s not a joyful way to live at all.
And just because I’ve committed my life to Jesus doesn’t mean I’m immune from falling back into that way of thinking. I know that for me personally even after I committed my life to Jesus, that feeling that I needed to impress God with what I could achieve didn’t go away completely right away. And that mindset often carried over into other areas of my life. As I look back on my life, I can clearly see now how many times I did things in my life because I was getting my sense of self-worth from the things I achieved in my life rather than from seeing my life from God’s viewpoint. And if I’m not careful, I can still fall into that trap today even though I’m much older and hopefully a little wiser.
My goal this morning is twofold:
• First I want to make sure we all have a clear understanding of how God’s spiritual accounting process operates.
• Second, I want us to see how having that correct view can free us from the bondage that comes when we try to find our worth in our achievement rather than by seeing ourselves through God’s eyes.
In order to accomplish that we need to look at what Paul reveals here about each of us and also what he reveals about God and then we can put those together to arrive at an accurate understanding of God’s spiritual accounting system.
Paul summarizes what this passage reveals about us and about God right in the middle of this passage in the middle of verse 5:
“…him who justifies the ungodly…” (v. 5)
Let’s look first at…
What this passage reveals about us
Paul is going to once again make the case he has been making over and over again in his letter – all men are ungodly. So let’s begin here by defining that term:
“ungodly” =
“without reverence or awe”
Up until now everything that Paul has written in his letter is pretty theoretical. He has shared a lot of theological truth, but now in order to drive home his point, He is going to put flesh and blood on it. Paul’s audience, particularly his fellow Jews, would have immediately agreed that the pagan Gentiles were ungodly and in need of being justified by God. But they would have never considered themselves to be “ungodly”. So Paul uses the example of two heroes of the Jewish faith to show the Jews that they, too, are “ungodly” and therefore in need of God’s justification.
In a sense, Abraham and David “bookend” the Jewish faith. So by citing the examples of their lives, Paul is confirming once again that the law of faith – justification by faith rather than by the works of the law – is nothing new.
At the beginning of their history as a people, Abraham, who the Bible calls a “friend of God” (James 2:23), lived even before the Israelites existed as a people and before God had given the law to His people through Moses.
David’s reign as the King of Israel comes near the end of Israel as a united people around 900 years after Abraham. David, unlike Abraham, lived under the law. So if Paul can show that both Abraham and David were justified by God apart from keeping the law, then he should be able to convince his audience that is also true for them.
So Paul uses the Scriptures to prove that…
1. Abraham was “ungodly”
The Jews of Paul’s day looked at Abraham through rose colored glasses. In spite of the fact that the Scriptures paint an entirely different picture, the rabbis taught that Abraham, even though the law had not yet been given, had kept it perfectly by intuition or anticipation of the law. One ancient passage from the rabbis concluded that “Abraham was perfect in all his deeds with the Lord.” So it’s no wonder that the Jews assumed that Abraham’s righteousness was a result of what he had achieved.
But Paul uses the Scriptures to show that couldn’t possibly be the case. In verse 3, he quotes from Genesis 15:6:
And he believed the LORD, and he counted it to him as righteousness.
(Genesis 15:6 ESV)
In a minute, we’ll come back to the context of that verse, but first let’s take a moment to understand how Abraham arrived at that point in his life.
We’re first introduced to Abram in Genesis 11, where we find that Abram was born to his father Terah and grew up in a place called Ur. We know from historical records that the people of Ur worshiped many gods, with the primary one being the moon god, Nanna. So it’s not surprising that in Joshua 24:2, we learn that Terah and his descendants had “served other gods”. While we can’t be sure about how much Abram participated in that idolatrous worship, we do know that at a minimum he was raised in a pagan environment.
So when God comes to Abram in Genesis 12 and promises to make his descendants into a great nation that will bless the entire world, it is clear that is not because Abram had somehow merited God’s favor. God chose Abram merely because in His sovereign wisdom He chose to do that, not because Abram was any more righteous or deserving than anyone else in that culture.
Abram immediately left his home in Haran to go to the place where God promised to lead him. But even after a face to face encounter with God, his obedience is incomplete. Although God had commanded Abram to leave his family behind, he took his nephew Lot with him.
When there is a famine in the land, instead of depending on God for his provision, Abram decides to go to Egypt to get food. And because he doesn’t trust God to protect him, he passes off his wife Sarai as his sister, which leads to all kinds of problems for the Egyptians and for Abram.
About ten years after God first made His covenant with Abram, He appears to him again to affirm the covenant. God promises that Abram, who is still childless, will have a son who will be his heir and that his offspring will be more numerous than the number of stars in the sky. It is at that point that Abram believes God and God counts his faith to him as righteousness.
But even after another face to face encounter with God, Abraham’s actions aren’t very righteous. Instead of waiting on God fulfill his promise to give Abraham a son, Abraham and Sarah take things into their own hands and Abraham has a child with one of Sarah’s servants – a sin that still impacts our world today.
So while Abraham certainly did do some good things in his life, I’m pretty sure that even he would not have been real comfortable having God making a spiritual accounting of his life by adding up the good things he had done to see if they outweighed all his sin. In spite of how the Jews might have perceived Abraham’s life, from God’s perspective he was “ungodly” and therefore needed God to justify him.
2. David was “ungodly”
Certainly the Jews of Paul’s day were familiar with David’s adultery with Bathsheba that also led to the murder of Uriah, her husband. So it would be pretty hard to argue that David was righteous before God as a result of his works.
It is clear from his own writings that David certainly understood that if his life was evaluated by God based on all that he had done, he would be considered “ungodly”. Paul has previously quoted from Psalm 51, one of the Psalms that David wrote after his sin with Bathsheba. In that Psalm, David admits that his works proved that he is ungodly and that God would be just to punish him for his sin and that the only reason he has been forgiven is because of God’s grace.
3. Therefore, all are “ungodly”
If both Abraham, the friend of God, and David, the man after God’s own heart, were ungodly men who were not righteous because of what they had achieved, Paul argues, then it must be true that all men are in that same boat. Neither the Jews nor the Gentiles could ever hope to become righteous based on their works. So there has to be a different way to become righteous. That’s why we need to understand…
What this passage reveals about God
We’ve already identified what God does for us in verse 5:
• God justifies ungodly men
Hopefully you’ll remember our definition of “justify” from a couple of weeks ago, but since it is such a key concept, let’s all be reminded of that definition again:
to “justify” =
to declare “not guilty”
As we pointed out a couple weeks ago, when God justifies someone, he does not make them righteous, He merely declares them to be righteous. That is why Paul continually uses the verb “count” here in chapter 4. When God justifies us, he essentially makes an accounting entry in our spiritual ledger. That accounting entry doesn’t change who we are, but it does change how God views us. Instead of seeing my sin, God sees Jesus, who became my righteousness by living a sinless life and dying on the cross to pay the penalty for my sin. In this passage, Paul describes…
Two things that happen when God justifies me:
1. God credits the righteousness of Jesus to my account
As Paul points out in verse 4, what we achieve through our works is what is due to us. He compares it to a wage. But as Paul will point out clearly a little later in Romans, none of us want what we deserve because “the wages of sin is death”.
So instead of making deposits into our spiritual account based on what I have done, if I place my faith in Jesus, God fills up my account with the righteousness of Jesus. So that means that my account is filled to overflowing with immeasurable riches. And that is so much better than whatever meager deposits I might be able to make into my account based on my own achievements.
That by itself is a blessing beyond measure. But God does something else for me:
2. God does not debit my account for my sin
That is the point Pail is making in verses 6-8 when he writes about David and quotes from Psalm 32. In that Psalm, David reveals that when God forgives our sins, when they are covered by the blood of Jesus, God does not “count” – there is that word again – our sin against us. In other words, because of what Jesus has done on my behalf, there are no withdrawals from my spiritual account with God due to my sin.
So let’s compare the two possible methods of spiritual accounting in God’s kingdom:
• The first method is the one on which I operated for the early part of my life and the one on which apparently most people still operate. That is the one where God keeps a ledger in which we make deposits and withdrawals based on the supposed “good” and “bad” that we do in our lives.
That method is really analogous to God “grading on a curve”, which the Bible makes clear over and over again is not the way God operates. But let’s just suppose for a minute that is the way God’s spiritual accounting system works. Is that really the way you want to live? Do you want to go through life never being sure that you really have a positive balance in that account? Do you really want to rely upon the fact that somehow your “good” outweighs your “bad”? I would suggest to you that is a miserable way to live.
• The second method is the one Paul describes here in Romans 4. It is one in which God deposits innumerable riches that are based on what Jesus did for you. And I guarantee you that amount is exponentially greater than any deposits you can make as a result of your good works. But not only that, there is not even one withdrawal charged to that account because the blood of Jesus has completely covered your sin.
If you live on that basis, you don’t need to question your salvation. You don’t need to live in fear that somehow you’re not good enough for God. You will be freed from the achievement trap that deceives you into thinking that your worth comes from what you achieve rather than from God’s love that he demonstrates by giving you all these spiritual riches.
Given the two choices, there is no doubt which one I want to pick and hopefully you have no doubt about that either.
We began this morning by saying that:
My standing with God is dependent on what I receive
not what I achieve
We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the last part of that theme and showing why I can’t possibly merit God’s favor based on what I achieve. So as we close, we need to take a few minutes to focus on the first part of that statement and determine exactly what it is I need to receive and how to do that.
Hopefully by now it is apparent that what I need to receive is God’s justification. I need God to declare me “not guilty”. And it is also apparent that I can’t possibly receive that justification based on anything I do. So if that’s the case, how do I receive it?
How I receive God’s justification
There are two places in this passage that help us to answer that question:
• In verse 3 Paul quotes Genesis 15, where we read that “Abraham believed God” and that as a Result God counted his faith to him as righteousness.
• In verse 5, Paul writes that the one who has his faith counted to him has righteousness is the one who “believes in him who justifies the ungodly.”
In those verses, we find the two related Greek words that we looked at in some detail last week – the verb “believe” and the noun “faith”. I’m not going to take the time to go back and do a detailed study of those words again, so if you missed that or you want to review it again, you can find the text of the sermon on our church website. But I will remind us that Biblical belief and faith is far more than merely an intellectual understanding of a set of facts. It is trusting in what we believe to be true to the extent that we are willing to completely abandon our lives to live according to that belief.
It’s interesting that the first time in the Bible we find the word “believe” and the first time we find the idea of God counting His righteousness to someone is in Genesis 15. So what exactly was the nature of Abraham’s belief there?
We find some insight into that in another of Paul’s letters:
And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.”
(Galatians 3:8 ESV)
Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.
(Galatians 3:16 ESV)
We certainly don’t know all the details here, but it is clear that God revealed enough to Abraham so that at a minimum he understood that one day through his offspring – singular – God would justify all – Jews and Gentiles alike. That is how God was going to ultimately fulfill His earlier promise to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham’s offspring. Jesus also confirmed that Abraham had received the revelation of the gospel from God:
Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.”
(John 8:56 ESV)
Even though Abraham probably didn’t know Jesus’ names or many of the details of the gospel, Abraham looked forward in faith to God’s redeemer and God credited that faith to him as righteousness.
We also see David’s faith alluded to in our text. We’ve already noted that Paul quoted from Psalm 32. Later in that same Psalm, David reveals the means by which our sins are forgiven and covered and not counted to us:
Many are the sorrows of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the LORD.
(Psalm 32:10 ESV)
Although the word for “trust” that David uses here is different than the word “believe” that described what Abraham did, the two words just describe slightly different aspects of faith. I’m certainly no Hebrew scholar, so one of my favorite resources when I want to gain a better understanding of a Hebrew word is Dr. Skip Moen, the Academic Dean at Master’s International Divinity School. He writes that the word “trust” that David uses there means “to live at ease because of confidence in God”.
For me, that is by far the best definition of faith that I’ve ever seen and it really captures the essence of the kind of faith that both Abraham and David exercised in their lives and which resulted in them being justified by God. And it also answers quite well the question we posed a few minutes ago – How do I receive God’s justification?
• by living at ease because of confidence in God
What I really like about that definition is that it makes it clear that faith is not a work that merits God declaring me righteousness. It is not like God is looking down on my life and saying, “Wow look at Pat’s faith. I’m really impressed with that so I’m going to declare him righteous.” If that were the case, then I would certainly have reason to boast about my faith, and as we’ve seen repeatedly in Romans, the gospel precludes any boasting on my part.
As we saw last week, even our faith is a gift from God, not something we can conjure up on our own. It is merely the channel through which we receive the justification that God wants to bestow on us.
When we began this morning, I told you I had 2 goals:
• To make sure we all have a clear understanding of how God’s spiritual accounting process operates. I pray that there is absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that the only way to be righteous in God’s sight is by having Him make deposits to my spiritual account, not based on what I achieve, but rather based on what He has already done for us.
• To be freed from the bondage that comes when we try to find our worth in our achievement rather than by seeing ourselves through God’s eyes. When we genuinely place our confidence in God, it does allow us to live at ease knowing that we aren’t responsible for our own salvation. And I believe that when we live like that it also frees us from the “achievement trap” that we have a tendency to fall into in every area of our lives. And that kind of freedom really is a much more joyful way to live, isn’t it?
