FAITH, NOT WORKS
Romans 4:1-25
“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.”
Abraham was the father of the Jews and all that the Jews enjoy from God flowed through him. God’s relationship with Abraham then is key to understanding God and how he intends to relate with all who seek him.
Abraham was by no means perfect in his walk with God. He relied on deception to try to protect himself and he agreed with Sarah to sire a child through Hagar, her maid. But God saw in him faith that God is one who keeps his promises, who determines the future, who is just and righteous and who will not contradict his own character and will. I’m sure that in his time gods were seen as more powerful versions of man—capricious, selfish and beholden to no law or morals, yet Abraham believed God to be morally righteous, trustworthy, true, and fully able to keep his promises.
Abraham believed God, and we are told that God credited it to him as righteousness.
When we understand that anything we can do or offer to God is worthless—because where we succeed in one point we fail in a thousand others—then we know to discard the paltry deeds (which are mostly about what we don’t do anyway) and the external forms with which we try to pretend would make us better than others.
Paul described Abraham as having faith “against all hope”, even in the face of reality, “being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised”. Faith is not believing in the impossible but believing that God can and will do what he had promised, whatever the odds. Faith is all about God; works is all about us.
What we need to understand is that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves—only God can. When we believe that he is who he says he is then we are grasping the only hope we have. When we instead try to do what we can to save ourselves, not only are we acting in futility, we are also denying his love and grace.
It is amazing that he chooses to save us freely; all he asks of us is that we trust that he is who he is, and that he will do what he says he will do. This is grace.
The words “it was credited to him” were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.