1 What then shall we say that Abraham, the forefather of us Jews, discovered in this matter? 2 If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about—but not before God. 3 What does Scripture say? "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness."
4 Now to anyone who works, their wages are not credited to them as a gift, but as an obligation. 5 However, to anyone who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness. 6 David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:
7 "Blessed are those
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
8 Blessed are those
whose sin the Lord will never count against them."
Dig Deeper
When our oldest son was about two years old I told him one day to pick up a wrapper he had thrown on the floor and put it in the garbage. Rather than obeying me like I had expected him to do, he just stood there and stared. I asked him again to pick up the paper and throw it in the garbage. This time he picked up the paper but he still just stood there, refusing to take it and put it in the garbage can. I grew irritated at what I perceived to be an act of open defiance. I proceeded to tell him that if he did not throw the paper into the garbage he was going to have a spanking for disobeying. At that, he started to cry but still wouldn’t turn around and walk the few feet into the kitchen and throw the piece of paper away. Just as I was about to go get the spanking spoon, my wife came in and asked what was going on and I gave her a quick version of our son’s disobedient behavior. She gave out a little chuckle, turned around and told him to throw the wrapper into the trash. He immediately turned around and did it. It wasn’t, my wife explained to me, that he was being disobedient. The simple answer was that she always used the word “trash” and he was evidently still unfamiliar with the synonym “garbage.” He didn’t know what I was talking about because he didn’t understand the words I was using.
This is not quite a perfect analogy for the situation here, but it does make an important point. Words matter when it comes to understanding what the biblical writers are trying to get across to us. Most Bible readers can’t read the Bible in the original languages and translate it into our own modern language but there is a tendency to make an even more basic mistake when it comes to reading passages like this. We tend to read a word like “righteous” in English and assume that we know what that word in English means without bothering to check out how it is really used in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. This passage, and really the whole book of Romans, is full of words like that; words like boast, justify and righteous. In order to understand Paul’s argument here we really need to go back to the biblical texts themselves and let them speak apart from tradition and assumption. When we do that we begin to see the power and splendor of Paul’s full argument.
The first thing that we must keep in mind is the overall purpose of Paul’s letter. He is dealing with two primary themes throughout his letter. The first is his defense of the covenant faithfulness, or righteousness of God (1:16-17), and how that has been reveled in the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1:2-6) and the subsequent announcement of that victory, which Paul calls his gospel. The second is that he is seeking to show how one can tell in the present who the people of God are; who, in other words, are wearing the visible uniform of those that will be vindicated as the people of God at the final judgment.
We can easily get off track if we imagine that the primary theme of Paul’s letter is a discussion of personal salvation, an anachronistic argument concerning salvation by faith versus salvation by works, or even about how individuals are justified by grace through faith with no mention of God’s covenant promises to Israel. Not only do such ways of reading Romans not stay in line with Paul’s intricate arguments concerning the two major themes mentioned above, but if correct, they also leave passages like chs. 9-11 quite irrelevant, almost confusing intrusions into Paul’s points. If we insist that Paul’s letter is about something along those lines then the standard translation of verse one would fit. I am quite convinced, however, that scholars like Sanders, Dunn, Kirk,and Wright are correct in their assertion that verse 1 should be rendered as such: “What shall we say then? Have we found Abraham to be our ancestor according to the flesh?”
It makes quite a bit of sense, if we follow this translation, that this is the question that would follow next. It is precisely the topic Paul brings up in a similar point in a similar argument in Galatians 3:7. Justification, as we have already seen, is the declaration by God that one is in the right in the present and has been adopted into the family of God. If Paul is talking of being adopted into this family then the natural question is what kind of family are we talking about here? Is it a family according to human, fleshly descent or something else? Does justification come through the works of the law which separated Jews from Gentiles and kept them visibly apart? Have Christians come into the ethnic family of Israel in order to be part of the covenant or have they come in through some other means? It’s a vitally important question because if we have entered the covenant family according to the flesh, then Gentile Christians do need to follow the law and be circumcised among other things. They do need, in short, to be justified according to the works of the law.
If Abraham was justified by the works of the law, then Paul’s claim in 3:27-28 that such boasting is excluded is made null and void. The boasting that Paul is talking of is not just a brash sort of bragging about something, but it is the thing in which you trusted in to define yourself or status before God. If Abraham’s covenant membership could defined through works of the law then there would be an ethnic boast. But Paul appeals to Genesis 15:6 and the accounting metaphor used there. God made covenant promises to Abraham and Abraham believed those promises and acted on them. Paul is not saying, as some have argued, that because Abraham had faith, God considered that faith a proper basis to impute his own righteousness to Abraham. God promised Abraham a family that would inherit the covenant that God was making with him and that those descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Righteousness, we must remember, was a term that had to do with being in good standing in the covenant (or covenant faithfulness) not moral goodness. Thus, Paul is saying that Abraham believed in God’s promises and God counted that faith as constituting covenant membership. The sign of keeping the covenant, then, was always about faith in the covenant and the God making the covenant not in doing the works of the law. In fact, the law wouldn’t come for over four hundred years, and yet God reckoned Abraham as faithful to the covenant completely apart from the law.
In verse 4, Paul capitalizes on the accounting term “credited” and gives a metaphorical example from the world of employment and earning a wage. Workers, he says, simply earn their wages as an obligation to the work they have done rather than a gift of grace. We might expect him, in verse 5 to make the opposite point but he breaks off the metaphor of a worker and returns to what Abraham actually did. Abraham was not one who was credited as fulfilling the covenant because he had actually fulfilled the obligations of it. He was shown grace by the God who declares the ungodly, the decidedly undeserving, as faithful covenant members simply through believing obedience (this is more evidence that “righteous” is not meritorial moral acts because how could the ungodly be regarded in such a way?). Abraham was an ungodly pagan when God called him into the covenant, just as the Gentile Christians were before they were called. The overall point is simply this. If you wanted to look at Abraham’s life and determine what the uniform of his covenant status was, it was not the works of the law because Abraham did not even know the law. God promised Abraham a family through whom the entire world would be blessed and Abraham lived his life according to that faith. That was the sign of his justification. That was his covenant uniform, so to speak.
Paul leaves Abraham for a second to call David to the stand as a corroborating witness. Verses 7 and 8 quote from Psalm 32 and Paul certainly has in mind the entire flow of that Psalm that brings out how blessed are the people whose sins have been covered by God. For the Psalmist, this was the people of the covenant, because the covenant was, from the beginning created to deal with the problem of sin in the world. Blessed are they, says David, because they are those “whose sin YHWH does not count against them” (v. 2). David continues declaring in verses 10-11, “ But the LORD's unfailing love surrounds those who trust in him. Rejoice in the LORD and be glad, you righteous; sing, all you who are upright in heart!” Thus, David confirms that those credited as righteous are the ones who sins have been dealt with. The righteous are not ones that have been made morally perfect but those who have been credited with a positive covenant status (and its basic equivalent, of having ones sins dealt with, in both Paul and David’s mind). The dealing of sin for those in the covenant was of the temporary variety, but for those in Christ, God has dealt with sin permanently in the manner that Paul has described in 3:24-26. Dealing with sin was exactly what God was up to when he first made the covenant with Abraham, and Abraham had always demonstrated his access to that covenant through his faith in God’s promises not the works of the law.
Paul has now put together the ground floor of his current point that Gentiles are part of the covenant family through faith alone without need for the signs of Jewish covenant membership such as Sabbath observance and circumcision. Jewish Christians understood the importance of being in covenant with the God of Israel so their honest assumption was that the Gentiles that had come to faith in Jesus needed to show themselves as people of the covenant by observing the works of the law. Paul, as we have already mentioned, has shown and will continue to show that the covenant membership always had to do with faith. He has yet to discuss what that faith is in and how it works, but he will get to that in time.
Devotional Thought
When was the last time you really took some time to contemplate the significance of God declaring you to be in the covenant family and never counting your sin against you simply because of your faith in the life of Christ? What could be more worthy of some extra contemplation and praise?
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