That righteousness is the fruit, not of moral effort but of faith, is Paul's theme in ch. 4 of Romans. It is in the faith God kindles in our hearts - precisely in that faith - that our true righteousness comes to be, because it is Christ Himself Who gives that faith its content. When we fully trust someone our heart is wide open to them; we welcome into ourselves all that they are so it becomes in some real sense a part of us. And that is exactly how it is between ourselves and Christ; when our attitude to Him is one of open-hearted trust, we imbibe His Spirit.
This is what Paul means by faith in Christ. Later he will call it 'the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.' He does not call it that yet; before he does, he will want to describe very clearly the Christ Whose Spirit He is, especially in His relations to sin and to God, so that when he does come to speak of the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us we shall know just what kind of Spirit He is. * For the moment, he wants to concentrate our attention on faith itself as the way by which all that Christ is comes to be in us.
To illustrate the nature of that faith he takes Abraham as a model.
Abraham was a man of faith, and the Scriptures tell us plainly that his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. (Gen. 15:6) Just what sort of faith was it? We need to know, because Paul will bring his argument to a climax by saying, "The words 'it was reckoned to him' were written, not for his sake only, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe ..." (v. 23) If we have the same faith Abraham had, we shall have the same righteousness he had. So from verses 13 to 25 Paul invites us to examine this faith of Abraham.
He has already shown us in verses 1-8 that Abraham did not become a righteous man by moral effort; nor by the observance of religious rituals, the religious ritual in his case being circumcision. Abraham was not even given that until after he had been declared righteous. "He received circumcision as a sign or seal of the righteousness which he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, and likewise the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but also follow the example of the faith which our father Abraham had before he was circumcised." (Rom. 4.11-12)
Three things Paul says about faith in his discussion of Abraham.
1. Faith rests on grace.
2. Faith must have an object.
3. Faith accords God the honour sin denies Him.
Paul's point is that the possibility of faith cannot be limited in any way by human merit - or the lack of it. It makes no difference whether a person has been good or bad, the gift of righteousness is offered indiscriminately to all. It makes no difference whether a person has been an ignorant heathen or an enlightened Christian; the same gift is equally available to both.
"The promise is guaranteed to all Abraham's descendants."
'Abraham's descendants' are not his literal, physical descendants - purebred Jews who can trace their family tree back to Abraham himself; Paul clearly does not mean that because, as he says, Abraham was promised that he would be the father of many nations, not of just the one nation that sprang from his loins. Should we understand 'Abraham's descendants' then to mean the adherents of the Law as given to Moses? "No," says Paul. "At the time the promise was given to Abraham, the Law had not even been given." As he had already written to the Galatians, "the Law didn't show up for another 430 years!" God did not give Abraham any commandments to obey, only a promise to believe. So inheriting the promise does not depend on keeping the rules. It depends, not our goodness at all, but on God's. It rests on grace, Paul says (v. 16) ... on the kindness of God, on His sheer goodwill because generosity is in His very nature. It is not called forth from God by anything in us; it is a spontaneous expression of His nature.
The only way to understand the phrase 'Abraham's descendants' is: 'those who share his faith.' A true child of Abraham is one who believes God. Anyone who trusts, not in his own goodness, but in God's, is really a son of Abraham, in the sense of character-likeness. That is what Jesus meant when he said of Zacchæus, "Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham." Zacchæus believed in the goodness and generosity of God as Jesus had demonstrated it by befriending him. He had little goodness of his own to rely on, that man. But the generosity of God produced an immediate spirit of generosity in him. Faith did that - an open-hearted trust in the goodness and kindness of God as Jesus showed it to him. That is how righteousness comes. It cannot be manufactured; it has to be responded to ... which means, if the response is to arise, it has to be there first. And it is there! ... in God.
To believe in God like that is open to any, even the most ungodly among us. Indeed, it is precisely to the ungodly - to the undeserving - that God delights to show His grace and goodness. To enjoy it, all we have to do is trust it. Not only is faith the only way to real righteousness, it is the only fair way, for it puts no-one at a disadvantage.
Faith rests on grace.
The second thing Paul says about faith is that it must have an object. There can be no talk of faith where there is no vision of God. Faith must always be faith in God: and what there is in God that enables us to trust Him is something crystal clear and definite. See it, and we shall be able to believe.
Abraham saw something in God that inspired his faith. What he saw, Paul says, is that God "gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist." (v. 17) Genesis 15 shows that what gave Abraham that conviction about God was the sight of the night sky. God invited him to contemplate the starspangled vault of an Eastern night (there was no smog then to half hide the stars behind a haze, nor were there cities blazing with light at night to cloud the brilliance of their shining). "Lift up your eyes on high and see," God might have said to him as He later said to Isaiah, "Who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name. By the greatness of His might, and because He is strong in creative power, not one is missing." (Isa. 40:26) Abraham perceived that the universe came into being because God, by His Word, 'commanded it to be.' That is the God in whom Abraham believed. He had grounds for his faith. What Abraham could see with his own eyes lent credibility to the promise God had given him.
Paul's economic use of words can give the impression that faith came easy to Abraham. That is not so, and Paul knew it. He credits us, his readers, with enough interest in what he is saying, and enough intelligence, to check back on the Genesis narrative for ourselves. It is clear when we do that Abraham did not come to faith without a struggle. Fifteen years or so passed after the promise was made to him before anything came of it - a long time to 'hang on.' Whilst Abraham was clear in his own mind that the promise meant he was to have a literal child to father the nation that would grow from him, it was not anything like as easy to believe that it was going to come about, in his old age, through the birth of Isaac. About that Abraham took a lot of convincing. His first reaction was to laugh at the very idea, just as Sarah was to laugh at it later. She grew so impatient with her husband's obsession with the notion, in fact, that she had him take to wife a maid and have a child by her before his 'fixation' drove them all mad! It was quite some time before Abraham could face up to the challenge of the question put to him by a visitor, "Shall anything be too hard for God?" and answer with any confidence, "No." Abraham's faith grew by trial, and sometimes error!
But the point is that what made his faith grow at all was that he kept on pondering the thing God had said to him. As he did so, he saw God more and more clearly, and that is how his faith grew, more and more strongly.
His faith grew by what he looked at; and it was God he looked at.
This is a point of the very greatest importance - so much so that Paul makes the point in the most striking way possible. He says: "In hope (Abraham) believed, against hope, that he should become the father of many nations. He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead because he was a hundred years old, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God." And Abraham did that by "being fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised." (vs. 18-21)
It sounds, when we first read it, like a confirmation of all our worst fears about the difficulty of finding faith - as though Paul is saying that faith is an ability to believe the impossible and embrace the absurd! But that is not at all what Paul means by this reckless use of language. He wants us to see by it that what enabled Abraham to have faith like that was simply that he steadfastly beheld God.
Abraham was not a half-wit. He saw very clearly indeed that on the human level the whole thing was impossible. Humanly speaking, there was indeed no hope of it ever happening. But in the end it was not human speaking that Abraham had an ear for. It was to God speaking that he listened.
Abraham put the human evidence down on one side and looked at it squarely. That evidence said quite plainly, "It can't happen and it won't!" Then he set God's promise down on the other side and looked at that. Unmistakably, God was saying, "I can and I will!" Which voice should he trust? The voice of man said "No way": the voice of God said, "Believe me." Abraham's faith consisted in this, that he chose to trust the voice of God rather than the voice of man. "In hope (in God) he believed against hope (in human possibilities)."
What enabled Abraham to make that choice was his perception of the character of God, revealed in His works. Had God indeed created the star-spangled heavens, and the earth and its living creatures, and man upon the earth? Had He done all this by the word of His power - called the entire universe into being out of nothing, and created life in it by the mere exercise of His will? Then God could do what He had promised - call a child of promise into being. He was to be trusted. And because Abraham's faith took its character from the God he trusted, his faith was accounted righteousness in him ... it 'trued' him to God.
Faith is not something we 'just have' or 'do not have' like hair on our head - some having more, some having less, and some having none at all! Faith is our living response to God the way we see Him. If we see Him, we can trust Him. If we cannot see Him, no faith will come. We have to look.
The action of a man's faith cannot be separated from its object. Where there is no sight of God, there can be no faith in Him. Lose sight of God, and faith dies, the way sight dies when all the lights go out.
In one sense, believing is seeing. To see, all we have to do is look at something. When we do, we see it. If we take our eyes off the object we are looking at and grow preoccupied with our own power of seeing ... if we try to look at our looking ... all that happens is that we go cross-eyed staring into middle distance. We have to stop worrying about our sight, and simply look. In the same way, we shall not find faith rising up in us if we are preoccupied with our own capacity for it; we shall end up in a state of confusion. We have to give our attention to something we can believe in: if it is fit to be trusted, it will awaken that response in us of itself.
Faith must have an object.
So if our faith is weak, the last thing in the world we should be doing is to be looking into our own soul to see what is the matter with it. We must look away from ourself, and pay attention to God ... looking and listening.
The third thing Paul says about faith is that it accords God the honour sin denies Him.
In v. 20, Paul says, quite literally, that by "not deciding against the promise through unbelief, but being empowered by his faith, he gave glory to God." To put it quite simply, Abraham 'did God the honour' of believing Him.
It is of that honour that sin robs Him. Paul has already said so: "Although men knew God they did not honour Him as God, or gratefully acknowledge their dependence upon Him." (1:21) It is an insult to an honourable man to doubt his word. To say to someone, "I don't believe you," is the same as to call them a liar. When we will not believe God, we call Him a liar: we rob him of the honour he ought properly to enjoy.
But what sin thus withholds from God faith restores to Him. A faith like Abraham's reinstates God, just as unbelief casts a slur on Him. Faith gives God credit for being trustworthy, and so ascribes to Him the honour that is truly His. Said Anders Nygren, a Norwegian theologian, in his commentary on Romans: "It is for God to give the promise, and for us to receive it. This is the only honour man can give to God." **
What is more, such faith not only reinstates God in His rightful place, it establishes us too in a right relation to Him. Faith 'rightwises' us to Him. When I hold God in that sort of regard, my believing heart is all taken up with Him; and that is how His righteousness is communicated to my heart.
With that, Paul's defence of faith, not works, as the way to righteousness is fully presented.
What he must do now is to define more exactly what sort of righteousness it is that God begets in the believing heart. For the God we are bidden to behold and trust is the God "Who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, Who was delivered up to death for our offences and raised for our justification" ... that God. As Abraham's faith took its character from the character of the God he believed in, so must ours. As Abraham perceived the character of God to be revealed in His works, so must we. And for us, the work of God that reveals Him is not only His work in creation, but His work of redemption in Christ Jesus.
There is our focus of faith.
It is that work of God which gives credibility to the promise of salvation which he makes to us through His Son.
Both my own personal history of repeated failure and the sad story of human nature's failure to change tell me that it is foolish to hope that such a promise could ever be made good. That is what the voice of human experience tells me. God tells me that he will make me a new creature in Christ Jesus.
Which voice shall I trust?
* Paul makes almost no mention at all of the
Holy Spirit until ch. 8 ... in a letter that is concerned to spell
out the Gospel! Paul knew that we are apt to be much more vague about
the Holy Spirit than we are about God and about Christ, so he was
careful to define his terms before he started using them freely. He
is the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ: that Spirit.
** Anders Nygren, 'Commentary on Romans' [S.C.M.] p.
182
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