18 Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be." [d] 19 Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah's womb was also dead. 20 Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21 being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. 22 This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness." 23 The words "it was credited to him" were written not for him alone, 24 but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25 He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.
Dig Deeper
There was one particular practice session that I remember as a high school basketball coach. We had done an incredibly poor job of shooting free throws during our previous game and had actually lost the game because of our poor free throw shooting. So we spent a lot of time in that practice working on free throws. At the end of the practice, the players split up so that there were three players on each of the six hoops in our practice gym. The charge to the team was that all three people at each hoop must make nine of their ten free throws. If all 18 players failed to reach that standard, we would start again with a new round and keep going until the goal had been achieved. This went on for nearly a half hour until it became fairly obvious that we were not capable of reaching that goal as a team. In a sense that was a good thing, because it showed them just how much and how consistently they needed to work on their free throws. The quandary was how could I end this drill without just throwing in the bag and leaving them in defeat, unable to make the required amount of free throws? I decided rather than ending the drill like that, that I would allow them as a team to pick one representative. This representative would come the free throw line and shoot for the whole team. If he made at least nine, they could all go home. He stepped up and did just that, succeeding in representing the team that had failed as a unit.
This type of representative-stepping-in-for-the-whole-group thinking is not uncommon in the Bible. David represented the whole nation of Israel as he battled Goliath. The high priest would enter into the most holy place and represent the entire nation. Jesus went into the wilderness to face temptation for forty days whereas Israel had failed to do God’s will and stand up to temptation during their forty year sojourn in the wilderness. In fact, throughout the gospels, much attention is paid to the theme that Jesus was Israel’s representative, coming to succeed where they had failed. Here Paul is describing Abraham in similar terms. Not so much in the sense that Abraham was serving as a representative for a whole group of people who had failed to live in covenant with the creator God, YHWH, that was the role of the Messiah. What Paul does do, however, is to describe Abraham as the example or prototype of humans who would live by faith. In so doing, Paul shows that Abraham stands in stark contrast to the state of the human race that he has described in Romans 1:18-32.
In that passage in Romans 1, Paul has already described the painful reality of humanity in rebellion against God. Paul has already told us that humans that were created by God chose to ignore him and his will (1:20, 25). They had every opportunity to know YHWH (the personal name of God) but they did not worship him, instead worshiping aspects of the creation rather than the creator (1:20). As a result of this, they did not glorify YHWH as God and give him the proper place in their lives (1:21). Because of their constant idolatry, they engaged in behavior that degraded the bodies that God had given them (1:24). Paul shows an ultimate example of that as he describes the loss of purpose, the rebellion against God’s will, and the degrading of their bodies by men and women turning away from one another in natural relations and towards members of their own gender for unnatural relations.
In Contrast to all that, stands the father of faith. Abraham is not presented as the representative that would solve the failure of humankind, but he is the father of the line that would end in that representative, the Messiah. It was through his faith that God would work to reverse the problem of sin in mankind that would eventually culminate in the ultimate solution of the Messiah. Rather than ignoring God, Abraham believed in him as the one who would bring life and be faithful to his promises. Rather than rejecting God Abraham recognized God’s power and worshiped him. Humankind did not glorify YHWH as God but Abraham gave glory to him. Humankind dishonored their bodies due to idolatry but Abraham believed God and his body that was dead in the sense of creating new life, was resurrected and used to glorify God. In stark contrast to Paul’s example of humans turning from natural relations, Sarah and Abraham cam e together in faith and produced new life.
What did Abraham do that was so noteworthy. Rather than rejecting God, he accepted God at his word. This doesn’t make Abraham noteworthy in and of himself, but is simply the appropriate response of humans to a gracious and merciful God. Against everything that seemed possible, Abraham had faith in God’s word to make him the father of many nations. For all intents and purposes, Abraham and Sarah’s bodies were dead. People that old simply don’t create new life. So what do you do when God has promised to bless the world through your descendants which, he says, will be incredibly numerous, but you don’t have a son through whom these promises will pass (God had already made it clear that Ishmael would not be that son)? The proper response is to do what Abraham did. The proper response is to have faith in God’s promises.
But this faith is not some vague belief or even a force into which we tap by acting in a certain way. There is a particular incorrect view of faith that is becoming increasingly popular these days both in a Christian movement called Word Faith and in non-Christian movements like The Secret. These movements claim that faith is a force to be accessed if you follow the proper formula which enables you to control events in your life including your health and wealth. You can, they say, just follow the faith formula and speak life and success into your world. But for Paul, faith is a very specific thing. It is, as he says in verse 21, being fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he promised. “Being fully persuaded” means living according to God’s promises regardless of how unlikely they seem to be. For us this is an important point. As a pastor, I have heard people bemoan that they were struggling in their faith because they hadn’t found a spouse yet, or because their brother hadn’t become a Christian yet, or because they didn’t get the promotion that they had prayed for so long for, or even because they couldn’t lose the weight that they so desperately wanted to. But true faith is believing in things that God has promised. God has promised to take care of the basic needs of those who would seek his kingdom first but he never promised a spouse or a specific job for anyone. Faith is simply living as though what God promised is true. When Abraham took the step of having this kind of faith in God, it was credited to him as upholding the covenant. His faith put him in a position to receive God’s grace in the context of the covenant. Not that Abraham earned anything but that his faith was evidence of a human that has responded to God appropriately.
Through this kind of faith, God would solve the problem of sin that has infected humanity from the time of Adam and Eve. This solution didn’t happen through Abraham. He was the starting line not the finish line. This solution has all been revealed through the death and resurrection of the Messiah. But Abraham’s faith was not an isolated event, it was the signpost of what was to come. His faith, Paul has made clear, was a resurrection faith (Paul has already laid the foundation for the importance of this thought in verse 17). Even though his body was dead, he believed that God would work through him according to his covenant promise. It is this same type of faith, resurrection faith, that is available for people now. The world tells us that when people die they are dead and they stay that way. Dead people cannot fix anything. But against all hope, we believe that God has dealt with sin through the life of his son who was declared to be the Son of God at his resurrection (1:3-4). Paul will soon show how this resurrection faith is made available to everyone through the life of the Messiah.
His death and resurrection were for all humankind. Jesus was delivered over to death as the representative of all humans. It was for our sins that he was delivered up to death, not for his own. God brought all of human evil to a head squarely at the cross. He drew it to one place, condemned it, and dealt with it (Rom. 8:1-4). But that was just the first part of the solution. The resurrection is the key. When God, through his power, raised Jesus up to the resurrection life, he was vindicating him. God was declaring that “this is my son.” He is the one who has upheld the covenant. This was done for our justification, meaning that those who have resurrection faith can truly be declared to be God’s people. It is the cross that declares that sin has been dealt with once-and-for-all. It is the resurrection that says Jesus is the true Son of God and all those who participate in his life through faith really are God’s covenant people.
Devotional Thought
In what do you place your faith? Do you really cling to the specific promises that God has given in his word? Do you know his word well enough to know what his promises are? Or have you begun to define your faith more according to what you would like? Spend some time dwelling on these thoughts today.
No comments:
Post a Comment