The Faith that Justifies: Romans 4:17-25
The apostle has been exploring
the doctrine of justification by faith alone in Christ alone. He has explained that everyone needs to be
justified since we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God: our unrighteousness
has exposed us to God’s just wrath. He
then unfolded for us the gospel of the grace of God, how that because of what
Christ did on the cross in our place and in our stead, we are able to be freely
justified and forgiven when we trust in Jesus alone as our Lord and
Savior. And he has argued that this
gospel is not something he and the other apostles have invented, but that it is
the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise.
Christianity does not add anything to the Jewish religion; it completes
it.
But this leads naturally to the
question: if faith is so important, what is it?
What does justifying faith look like?
Paul answers this question by
looking again to Abraham. This makes
sense, because Abraham is the father of all who believe, who “walk in the
footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised”
(4:12). This makes it clear that the
faith that justifies is a faith that looks like Abraham’s faith.
We see this point made again at
the end of the chapter. After the
apostle spends several verses describing Abraham’s faith, he says this: “That
is why his faith was ‘counted to him as righteousness’” (4:22). In other words, because Abraham had this kind
of faith, he was justified. But then
Paul goes on to apply this to his readers (and, by extension, to us): “But the
words ‘it was counted to him’ were not written for his sake alone, but for ours
also. It will be counted to us who
believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up
for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (23-25). If you would be justified, you must have
Abraham’s faith.
Now of course this doesn’t mean
that there aren’t some differences due to salvation history. It is true that, as our Savior put it to his
interlocutors, “your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (Jn. 8:56). Yet it is also true that he didn’t see everything
that we have seen in the fulness of the coming of Christ on earth. Yes, it is true that “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’” (Gal.
3:8). So in some sense Abraham had the
gospel. And he believed the gospel, and
believing he was saved. That is the continuity
between his faith and ours. But there is
also discontinuity because Abraham clearly didn’t see all the contours of the
gospel as it was revealed in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. We see more clearly. And because of that, it is not enough for us
simply to believe that God will show mercy to us in some generic fashion, but
that he will show mercy to us in Christ.
Faith in the promise of God today means faith in Christ. That is the point of verses 23-25.
In other words, this passage
tells us that it matters how and what you believe. It matters because without this faith, you
are yet in your sins and exposed to the holy and just wrath of Almighty
God. Now I know to say that is offensive
in our day, because we are constantly told (1) you can’t know what is ultimate
truth, and (2) you shouldn’t force your belief on anyone else. But neither of these claims will hold up to
scrutiny. For if you hold (1), then
aren’t you claiming to know something about ultimate truth – namely, that there
is no ultimate truth? But if that’s not
true, then what’s the point? And if you
hold (2), why would you argue with me that I shouldn’t force my belief on
you? Isn’t that what you are doing? For isn’t it your belief that you shouldn’t
force your beliefs on others – which is what you are trying to convince me to
embrace?
Now it is true that we shouldn’t force
our beliefs on others, if that means using physical force to buttress a certain
worldview. God forbid that we should
ever return to the days when Christians imprisoned others (including
Christians!) that didn’t agree with them on a particular theological
point. But it is not wrong to use
persuasion to convince someone else to embrace what you believe to be true – in
fact, it is loving, if that truth is connected to issues of eternal life. And the gospel is tied to issues of eternal
life.
The point is that it is
infinitely important that we embrace Jesus Christ as he is revealed to us in
the gospel – as the God-man who died for our sins, who was raised again and
ascended to heaven, and who did this for the sake of our sins so that we might
be forgiven and justified and accepted into the family of God and given eternal
life. And the way we embrace Christ is
by faith. So the question once again is,
what is this faith that embraces Christ and with him justification from our
sins and eternal life? The answer comes
to us in verses 17-25.
But before we take a more
detailed look at the passage, I want to point out that the overall object of
faith in every generation is God’s promise. Abraham believed in the promise of God to him
and was justified. As we believe in
God’s promise to us in the gospel we too will be saved. And I think it is important for us to see that
the object of justifying faith is a promise by God to keep not a project for
man to do. What we are called to believe
in order to be saved is not a list of things to fulfill, but rather we are
called to look to the saving acts of God for us. The promise is God-oriented, not
man-oriented. It is based on grace, not
works (cf. ver. 16). We have to beware
of the perennial temptation of turning the gospel into a self-help manual with
God thrown in.
Another aspect of the promise
that is important to note is the fact that the promise is generally
future-oriented. When God gave the
promise to Abraham, it was completely in the future. And even after he had been given Isaac, there
were elements of the promise that awaited fulfillment (Heb. 11:13). Now, even though the key element of the
gospel promise must cause us to cast our eyes back to the cross and the empty
tomb, yet even the atonement points us toward the future. In particular, it points us toward
resurrection and the new heavens and new earth.
This is important because we will become easily disoriented if we think
that by believing everything gets better.
We must yet await the fulness of the promise. In the meantime, we might be called to see
some hard things and to endure some hard things. That was certainly the case with Abraham, and
it should not surprise us when it is the case with us as well.
But what about the promise does
saving faith perceive? The text points
us to three realities about this kind of justifying faith.
Saving faith is a persevering
confidence in the power of God behind the promise.
This is one of my favorite
passages in the Bible, precisely because of the way God is described in verse
17. There, he is portrayed as the one
“who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not
exist.” That is, the God who is the
object of faith is the God of creation and resurrection. This was especially relevant to Abraham
because in order to believe in God’s promise he had to believe that God could
create what didn’t exist, and that he could give life to the dead.
Abraham certainly had to believe
that God could create what didn’t exist because when the promise came that he
would have a son and through him a family that would be as numerous as the
stars in the sky, none of this existed.
This promise came to a relatively old man and to a woman who was
barren. Yet Abraham believed that God
would fulfill his promise, even though humanly speaking there was no hope that
it could happen. Note the apostle’s
description of Abraham’s faith in verse 18: “In hope he believed against hope,
that he should be the father of many nations, as he had been told, ‘So shall
your offspring be.’” I love that:
“against hope he believed in hope.” When
everything around him told him that there was no chance it could happen,
Abraham persevered and trusted that God would fulfill his promise.
Also, Abraham certainly had to
believe that God could give life to the dead.
Now you might be thinking of the story of Abraham being told to
sacrifice Isaac. And you would not be
wrong to think that because the author of Hebrews explicitly draws this
connection in his portrayal of the patriarch’s faith: “By faith Abraham, when
he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in
the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall
your offspring be named.’ He considered
that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively
speaking, he did receive him back” (Heb. 11:17-19). Abraham had such faith in the promise of God
that he knew that nothing, not even death, could prevent it from taking place.
But there is another reason
Abraham needed to believe that God could give life to the dead. This is given in verse 19: “He did not weaken
in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he
was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s
womb.” Here Abraham’s body is described
as being “dead.” In order for the
promise to be fulfilled, this dead body had to be made alive again. One-hundred-year-old men and ninety-year-old
women don’t have children. But Abraham
was confident that God could do this since he had promised it. For he is the God who can take what does not
now exist and bring it into existence, and can take dead bodies and make them
new again.
We need to reiterate the fact
that this is not faith in ourselves.
This is faith in the God who is outside of us and who acts for us. One of the tragedies of 19th
century religious thought is that it gave birth to this attempt to make God
immanent by replacing faith in the God who is revealed in Scripture with
religious sentiment and faith in human progress. We are living with the sad consequences of
this kind of thinking in the present day.
What we need is not faith in ourselves, but faith in the God who is
outside of us; not a God who is dependent upon us but a God upon whom we are
dependent. This was the faith of
Abraham. It may not be popular today,
but it is the only kind of faith that God recognizes. And it is the only kind of faith that will
hold up against despair – which will remain hopeful in the face of
hopelessness.
My friends, we need to remind
ourselves often of the power of God.
Think about the stars: our sun is a medium sized star, yet one of
its solar flares can carry up to the same amount of power of many trillions of nuclear weapons exploding all at once.
That is inconceivable power – and yet God spoke stars like our sun into
existence by his powerfully creative word.
There is no one who is powerful like God. In our day with all our technological
innovations we sometimes forget that we are mere creatures of the dust. If we allow our arrogance to minimize the
importance of faith and trust in the God of the Bible, we are the losers, not
God.
But what’s really amazing about
all this is that this is power for us.
God didn’t just reveal himself to Abraham as omnipotent in the
abstract. He revealed himself powerful
in the behalf of Abraham (cf. 2 Chron. 16:9).
I love how the prophet Isaiah describes God in his mighty fortieth
chapter: “Do you not know? Do you not
hear? Has it not been told you from the
beginning? Have you not understood from
the foundations of the earth? It is he
who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like
grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them
like a tent to dwell in; who brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of
the earth as emptiness” (21-23). And he
goes on like this. But here’s the
amazing thing: at the very end of this chapter, we read this: “Have you not
known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator
of the ends of the earth. He does not
faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who
has no might he increases strength. Even
youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they
who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not
faint” (28-31). The God who created the
stars is the same God who works for those who trust in him, for to wait on the
Lord is to trust in him and to believe in his word of promise.
God’s power is still operative
for his people today. The supreme act of
God’s power of course is found in the resurrection of Christ from the dead: it
was by this, remember, that he was “declared to be the Son of God in power
according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom.
1:4). But what is so tremendously
hopeful about that exercise of God’s power is that it is the precursor to our
own resurrection. As Paul puts it later
in this epistle: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in
you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal
bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11).
Moreover, it is the power of God
that raises us up from a death in sin. In
fact, it is the same power that raised Christ from the dead, so that it touches
not only our bodies but our souls as well.
As the apostle puts it to the Ephesians, he wants them to know “what is
the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the
working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the
dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places” (Eph.
1:19-20). Again, it is a mistake to
think of regeneration and new birth purely in terms of its human response in
conversion. It takes the mighty power of
God to rescue us from our sins. But the
implication from this fact is very comforting: the God who began this good work
in us will not stop to complete it until the day when Christ returns and
presents us before his Father with unceasing joy (cf. Phil. 1:6; Jude 24).
Again we are reminded that God’s
power is operative all throughout our lives.
We are kept by God’s power through faith (1 Pet. 1:5), and it is God’s
power which is perfected even in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9-10). It is God’s power which makes the preaching
of his word effective (Eph. 3:7; Rom. 1:16).
I think the Christian life in
many respects is like the condition of the Israelites with the Red Sea before
them and the Egyptian army behind them.
People don’t walk on water, and untrained civilians don’t defeat the
world’s best army. There seemed no way
out. But then God did the unexpected and
unimaginable: he parted the waves of the Red Sea and allowed his people to pass
through. They didn’t do anything; as
Moses put it, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which
he will work for you today” (Exod. 14:19).
The Christian life is like that; it is about being still and knowing that
God is God and watching him work salvation for you. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we have
nothing to do. God works in us to will
and to do of his good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). But we need to understand that trust in God
is not trust in ourselves, that we can do a better job, or be better
people. Rather, it is trust in the God
who acts for those who trust in him, who wait for his power to work for them.
In my description of Abraham’s
faith, I noted that it is persevering faith. I say this because that is the only way to
make sense of this passage. If you know
the OT narrative well, it seems strange at first that Paul would say that
Abraham didn’t weaken or waver in his faith (Rom. 4:19-20). He most certainly did on occasion! The whole fiasco with Hagar and Ishmael was
the result of a wanton lack of faith on both Abraham and Sarah’s part. Or witness the multiple times Abraham lied
about his relationship to his own wife in order to save his skin! How then can the apostle say that Abraham
never wavered?
He can say this because he is describing
the overall direction of Abraham’s life of faith. Though there were times he stumbled through
momentary unbelief, yet there was never a time where he wavered in the sense of
losing all faith in the God of promise.
He always recovered. In other
words, Abraham persevered in his faith.
In the same way, we can expect
God’s people to have times of doubt and times when momentary unbelief seems to
win the day. But the power of God that
gives us faith will keep us in faith.
With the recent well-publicized cases of apostacy of several sometime
popular Christian leaders, we need to remember this. If they were truly saved, they will return to
the fold of faith. But if they do not,
it is not evidence that God’s power is insufficient to keep his people but
rather that they were never saved to begin with (1 Jn. 2:19).
Saving faith is a full
persuasion in the word of God that defines the promise.
Note the emphasis on God’s word
to Abraham: “No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he
grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was
able to do what he promised” (20-21).
This points to the second observation I want to make about Abraham’s
faith: it was faith in the truth of God’s word which was spoken to him.
Now to Abraham, this meant dreams
and visions – and sometimes a visit from angels (and perhaps even the
preincarnate Christ). For us, it means
the Bible. What was said to
Abraham, is written to us.
Justifying faith is faith in the promise of God – but the promise is
inextricably connected to the word of God and for us the word of God is
inextricably connected to the written Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
We can sometimes forget just how
much of a blessing is the word of God in the Bible. I was reminded of this not long ago when
reading 1 Sam. 3:21, which reads, “And the LORD appeared again at Shiloh, for
the LORD revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the LORD.” How does God appear and reveal himself to
us? He does so by his word, by the word
of the prophets, words which are recorded for us in the pages of the Bible. Do we value it like that?
My friends, without the word of
God firmly recorded in the Bible, we are left with our own words. If the Scriptures are just the words of men
and no more, there is nothing to hope in and nothing to hope for. Faith is not just faith in some generic God
or faith in some generic hope that things will turn out well for us in the end. Rather, the faith that justifies is faith in
the sure word of promise which for us is recorded in the Scriptures.
This is faith in all of
God’s word. Abraham didn’t just believe
in some of God’s promise; he believed all of it. Like the apostle Paul himself, who was able
to say, “But this I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call
a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the
Law and written in the Prophets, having a hope in God . . . that there will be
a resurrection of both the just and the unjust” (Acts 24:14-15). Do we also believe everything laid down in
the Bible?
Note also that this is how
Abraham glorified God: he gave glory to God by believing in his word, by “being
fully persuaded that what he had promised he was able also to perform.” We can talk all day long about being
“God-centered,” but you simply can’t be God-centered unless you are also
Scripture-centered. God is glorified
when we take him at his word, even when that word seems hopelessly remote or
impossible of fulfillment. This is hard
because we all want to be in control. We
want to know what is going to happen next.
We want to be able to see the end before then end comes. But that is not how we glorify God. We glorify God when we give up control over
our own lives and leave them completely in the hands of God, trusting in his
good and gracious providence.
It seems to me that this is why
we are so prone to unbelief. We are not
prone to unbelief most often because of a lack of evidence, though that is the
excuse that many give. We are prone to
unbelief because the alternative is letting go of self-sovereignty and we don’t
want to do that. However, when we do,
God is glorified because now he is truly at the center of our lives. What might be surprising, however, is that
the walk of faith is also far more fulfilling and joyful than thinking that we
are the captain of our fate (which is a mirage anyway).
Saving faith is humble trust
in the gospel of God in the promise.
The word of God in the promise
directs us to the mercy of God – to God the Father who delivered up his Son,
and to the Son who was delivered up for us.
This faith involves three elements: (1) that I need to be saved, (2)
that I cannot save myself, and (3) that God saves sinners.
The last two verses in our text (24-25)
highlight the fact that our salvation is wholly outside of ourselves and
entirely a work of God in Christ, just as Abraham could not of himself fulfill
the promise of God to him. “It
[righteousness] will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the
dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our
justification.” For the forgiveness of
our sins and justification are fruits, not of our doing, but of the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Of course we must believe, and
this is something that we do, but we must also remember that faith is not the
righteousness that justifies but the means by which we receive the
righteousness that justifies, the hand that receives the free gift. The call to have a faith like Abraham’s is
not a call to make ourselves better, but a call to trust in the God who through
Christ makes us perfect and brings us into fellowship with him entirely upon
the basis of grace. It is a call to look
away from ourselves and to the God who saves.
What kind of effect should this
have on us? What kind of people will we
be when we with Abraham trust in the God of promise? I think it will create in us the following
attitudes.
First, as people who have
confidence in the power of God, we will be increasingly freed from despair and
more and more defined by hope. And this
hope does not shame us in the end (Rom. 5:5).
It will increasingly bring freedom from slavery to circumstances. I think it is interesting that in verse 19,
the text says that Abraham “did not weaken in faith when he considered his own
body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or
when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.”[1] True faith does not stop us from considering
our circumstances. But it also does not
enslave us to them. Faith sees that God
is over all and that the wind and the waves do not have the final word, but the
one who can calm them with a single word does.
Faith brings boldness and courage in the face of fear. One thinks of the three Hebrew children who
refused to bow to Babylon’s idol. That
is what faith in the power of our sovereign God can do.
Second, it will bring our lives
more and more in conformity to the will of God for us in his word. It will produce the peaceable fruit of
holiness in our lives. For it is
impossible to bind ourselves in faith to the promise of God in his word and not
also bind ourselves to the precepts of God in his word. Faith and obedience go together. There is no such thing, Biblically speaking, as
a life of faith that consistently produces the poisonous fruit of unholiness. It is not without reason that the word for
“faith” in Scripture can also be translated “faithfulness.”
Finally, it will beget joy in the
mercy of God that we enjoy through faith.
Faith apprehends the gift of God and brings it home to us so that we
really enjoy it. Now it is true that we
don’t enjoy it as we ought. We are too
often filled with doubts and fears.
Thank God that we are not saved by the amount of our faith but by the
object of our faith. But those who
believe cannot but be hopeful and hope is always pregnant with joyful
confidence. One thinks of that
description in Hebrews of “our boasting in our hope” (Heb. 3:6).
May God make it true of all of
us, more and more.
[1]
There is a textual question here, as some manuscripts include the word “not” –
so that Abraham “considered not his own body now dead, neither yet the deadness
of Sarah’s womb” (KJV). This doesn’t
change the overall meaning of the paragraph or the point that the apostle is
making. If this is the correct reading
(though it seems that external evidence favors the omission of the word “not”),
it would just be saying that Abraham did not allow his external circumstances
overwhelm his faith.
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