What does it mean to believe in Christ? To trust God like Father Abraham did, not wavering or doubting but firmly believing that God could do what he promised. That is what faith is: to believe that God can do what he has promised. It is to trust the promises of God so implicitly that you act on them.

Paul uses the model of Abraham to prove justification by faith alone because the Jews held him up as the supreme example of a righteous man, and because it clearly showed that Judaism with its works-righteousness had deviated from the faith of the Jews’ patriarchal ancestors. In a spiritual sense, Abraham was the forerunner of the primarily Gentile church in Rome as well.

God made three promises to Abraham:  1) I will be with you and bless you so that you will be a blessing. No matter where you go and what you do in your journey of life, I will be with you and bless you with my Presence, so that you will be a blessing to the world. Abraham believed God’s promise. To be religious, to be spiritual, is to believe God’s promise to you, that God will be with you, at your side, in this journey called life. 2) The second promise that God made to Abraham was that his descendants would be numerous. There would be millions of descendants, like the sands of the sea and the stars of the sky. Abraham believed God’s promises. Abraham fully trusted that God would be faithful to his promises to give him descendants. 3) God promised him the Promised Land, that Abraham and his descendants would have land to grow their crops, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land rich in abundance. Abraham believed God’s promise. To be religious, to be spiritual, is to believe God’s promises to you.

Here was the first test of Abraham’s faith. Did Abraham truly believe in God and his promises? Father Abraham was in Babylonia, and God said, “Go to the land of Israel where I will give you a good land.” Abraham got up and left his mother and father and brothers and sisters and began his journey to the promised land. Why did he get up and go? Because he believed that God would be faithful to his promises. No proof. No signs. No wonder. No official deed for future lands he would own. He simply believed that God would be faithful to him, be with him, would bless him so he would be a blessing. He acted and got up and left his homeland because he believed the promises of God, that God would give him a new land. That is what faith is: to believe in God’s promises even when there are no signs or miraculous evidence or proofs that the promises will come true.

The second testing of Abraham’s faith was the fact that Abraham and Sarah got old, approaching one hundred years old and they didn’t have any children. But Abraham still believed God, the promises of God, that he would be the father of a great nation and be the father of millions even though he was ninety-nine years old and still didn’t have a child.

The third testing of Abraham’s faith was God’s command to take his only son out into the desert and offer a sacrifice to God. God was putting Abraham to the test, to see if Abraham loved God more than his son Isaac. Abraham passed the test, that he loved God more than his son. And further, Abraham believed God would provide a sacrifice and sure enough, there was a lamb caught in the briars.

God’s promises of his blessing, the descendants, the Promised Land were all free gifts from God, pure gifts, simple gifts. Abraham did nothing to deserve them or earn them or work for them. God simply promised these gifts to Father Abraham and Abraham believed God.

Broadening his argument from Abraham to all men, Paul makes it clear that the forensic act of declaring a person righteous is completely apart from any kind of human work. If salvation were on the basis of one’s own effort, God would owe salvation as a debt—but salvation is always a sovereignly given gift of God’s grace to those who believe. Since faith is contrasted with work, faith must mean the end of any attempt to earn God’s favor through personal merit.

Paul was not satisfied with proving his point from the experience of the great patriarch alone but also called in another Old Testament heavyweight—none other than King David—to further substantiate his argument. Quoting from Psalm 32, he showed that God imputes “righteousness apart from the law,” and this introduced those so enriched into a state of “blessedness” where sins are “covered,” “forgiven,” and “not imputed.”

God’s imputing has a positive side in that He counts righteousness to the ungodly, but the negative aspect of His imputing ministry is no less exciting for He also declines to impute sin to those who have broken His law when they come to Him in faith. A bookkeeper would look at it as if a generous donor was placing vast credits to our account and also refusing to debit the withdrawals but rather was placing them against his own account.

Paul is able to show quite clearly from the Old Testament that Abraham’s acceptance with God came through his faith, not his works, although his works were exemplary. Far from being the cause of his acceptance with God, Abraham’s lifestyle was the result of his acceptance. God did not declare him righteous because he was so good, but rather Abraham lived a good life because God had freely justified him by faith. God, out of grace, determines to make righteousness available to those who will humbly accept it by faith.

Both Abraham and David illustrate the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Abraham’s justification is presented in a positive way. He was credited with righteousness. In contrast, David’s justification is presented in a negative way. His sin was not credited against him. David broke three of the Ten Commandments when he coveted Bathsheba, committed adultery, and had her husband murdered. The Old Testament sacrificial system made no provisions for such premeditated sin. David could only cry out for God’s mercy.

Man’s superficial attitude to sin and forgiveness can only be countered by an adequate understanding of the immensity and seriousness of the human problem. Those who find sin relatively unimportant find little difficulty in expecting that human effort, however half-hearted, may well merit forgiveness, but those who know what sin is also know that only divine action can deal with it. In the same way, those who regard “forgiveness” as a type of “forgetting” coupled with a shrug of the divine shoulders see no necessity for man to take his sin with anything more than a grain of salt. But those who realize that forgiveness entails “a taking away” and a “covering so that it becomes invisible to God” as well as the willingness of God to accept accountability for human sin while relieving man of responsibility, also know that this requires more than human activity—in fact, nothing less than divine intervention. Only the grace of God can initiate such an act of mercy and only the open hand of faith can receive such blessedness. Such is the forgiveness that comes through faith.

When God called Abram from Ur, told him of the Promised Land, and outlined His covenant, He clearly illustrated that, once more, He was taking the initiative and moving graciously into the affairs of man. Through this man He intended to move into the affairs of a family which, by His description, was going to be very large and far-reaching. Jewish people have, quite rightly, traced their roots to Abraham with great pride, but so also have the Arabs—the former, through Isaac, the latter through Ishmael. When Paul speaks of Abraham as “the father of us all,” the family of which Abraham is father is neither the Jewish nor the Arab family but something that transcends both and incorporates far more. It is the family of all those who believe, the family of faith.

If Abraham was justified by works, then he was a self-made man, but Abraham believed God and His promises, and according to Genesis 15:6, this was enough to bring about God’s gift of righteousness. Faith is not righteousness, but it is the only vehicle by which His righteousness reaches believing sinners. How God’s people respond to divine grace has differed through the ages, but they have always responded by faith.

Abraham was justified by faith long before he was circumcised. There were at least fourteen years between when he was declared righteous by faith and his circumcision. Abraham’s circumcision did not confer righteousness; it merely confirmed the righteousness he already had. Abraham was actually justified before submitting to rituals and rites.

Paul’s inescapable conclusion is that as Abraham was declared justified fourteen years before he was circumcised, he was quite obviously not justified because he was circumcised. Therefore God is not interested in a man’s circumcision but in whether or not he is a man of faith. There are, in the divine way of looking at things, uncircumcised believers and circumcised unbelievers. The former are justified; the latter are not justified. In a similar passage in Galatians, Paul stated that the law was given to Moses 430 years after Abraham had been justified by faith, and therefore neither Abraham nor anybody else would ever be justified by keeping the law but only by believing unto righteousness.

These truths, when applied, lead to the discovery that there is one thing God is looking for in the confused and convoluted world of human religion, tradition, and culture. Is that man in the midst of all the accumulated weight of the Jewish tradition a humble believer in the God who justified the ungodly? Is that Muslim who professes to pray five times a day, to give to the poor, to visit Mecca, to observe Ramadan trusting in his ritual or in the God who justifies freely by His grace? Is the Buddhist who in his quest for enlightenment endeavors to practice right views, right desires, right speech, right conduct, right mode of living, right effort, right awareness, and right meditation really trusting in the eightfold path or in a God who through the blood of Christ freely forgives our straying from His path? The same can be said for Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, Presbyterian, Anglican, all denominations… what are they looking to for salvation?

We are promised that Christ will be with us in all circumstances, near to us, dear to us, at our side. As God’s Divine Presence was with Father Abraham, so God’s Presence continues with us in the Spirit of Christ. Christ’s Spirit is with us, in us, around us, at our side to give us strength for living and power for dying. There is nothing we have done to deserve this gift of his Presence. This gift is from pure grace.

We are promised that Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, that our sins are fully and freely forgiven, that we stand before the throne of God and our sins are entirely covered over by the blood of Jesus Christ. Like the sunshine and the rain, this forgiveness from God is a pure gift. There is nothing we did to deserve it. We are promised in Christ that we shall live forever with Christ, that we shall never die, that Christ conquered death itself and that we shall live eternally with God. Once again, it is pure grace, pure gift. We did nothing to earn or deserve eternal life with God and those we love.

(An audio version of this message can be found by clicking this link: Romans 4 verses 1-12 Justification)

Bibliography

1. Jeremiah, David: The Jeremiah Study Bible: New King James Version (Brentwood, TN: Worthy Publishing; 2013; pp. 1548-1549)
2. The Rev. Edward Markquart, “The Nucleus: Believe in Jesus Christ.” Retrieved from www.sermonsfromseattle.com
3. Briscoe, D.S., & Ogilvie, L.J.: The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Vol. 29: Romans (Nashville, TN: Thomas Neson Inc.; 1982; pp. 95-101)
4. Stanley, C.F.: The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Bible: New King James Version (Nashville, TN: Nelson Bibles; 2005)
5. MacArthur, J.F. Jr.: The MacArthur Study Bible: New American Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers; 2006)
6. Lucado, M.: The Lucado Life Lessons Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson: 2010)