Romans 4:1-25
What, then, shall we say that Abraham our father found according to the flesh?
Lessons from the case of Abraham
YO. As much as the most perfect of the species may have something to boast about in the eyes of their fellow men, they have nothing to boast about before God. The apostle affirms this of Abraham, whose virtues had canonized him in the hearts of all his descendants, and who still stands as the embodiment of all the virtues of the former dispensation. But of his godliness we have no account until after that point which Paul assigns as the period of his justification. And the sooner he had of the virtues that are useful and deserve the praise of man, it is true that in every human being, before that great transition of his history, God is not the Being whose authority is recognized in any of these virtues, and he has nothing to boast about before God. Here we are surrounded by beings, all of whom are content if they see in us their own likeness; and, if we reach the average character of society, his voice will allow us to pass. But until the likeness of God is revealed to us, we do not see our deficiency of that image of spotless holiness, to be restored, which is the great purpose of our dispensation. Job protested to his friends his innocence, goodness, and dignity, but when God, whom he had previously only heard by ear, now appeared before his awake eye, he hated himself and repented. powder and ash. This is the painful evil under which humanity labors. The magnitude of the guilt is not felt; and therefore man persists in the most treacherous complacency. The magnitude of the danger is invisible; and that is why man persists in ruinous security.
II. This disease of nature, deadly and virulent as it is, and beyond the suspicion of those touched by it, is not beyond the remedy provided in the gospel. Impiety is this disease; and here it is said that God justifies the wicked. The discharge is as extensive as the debt; and the granting of forgiveness in all senses, as broad and as long as the guilt that requires it. The act of amnesty is equivalent to the crime; and, however filthy the transgression, there is a commensurate justice that covers all the deformity, and converts him whom it had made utterly loathsome in the sight of God, into a condition of full favor and acceptance before Him. If justification had simply been in contact with some social iniquity, this would not be enough to alleviate the conscience of one who feels in himself the works of a direct and spiritual iniquity against God. It is a sense of this that rots in the afflicted heart of a sinner, and often stays with him and agonizes him for many days, like an arrow that pierces swiftly. And there are many who stay away from offers of mercy, until they think they have felt and cried enough for their need of them. But we must not thus wait for the progress of our emotions, while God is standing before us with a work of justification, offered to the wickedest of us all. For us to be interested in the saying that God justifies the wicked, it is enough that we consider it a faithful saying, and that we consider it worthy of all acceptance.
III. While the offer of justice before God is thus reduced to the lowest depth of human wickedness, and is an offer by the acceptance of which all the past is forgiven, it is also an offer by the acceptance that all the future is reformed. When Christ gives sight to a blind man, he is no longer in darkness; and when a rich individual confers wealth on a poor man, he ceases to be in poverty, and so, verily, when justification is conferred on the wicked, his wickedness disappears. His piety is not the basis on which the gift was bestowed, any more than the sight of the blind man is the basis on which it was communicated, or the wealth of the poor man the basis on which it was bestowed. But as sight and riches come from these last gifts, so godliness comes from the gift of justification; and though works by no means form the consideration on which righteousness worthy is conferred upon the sinner, yet as soon as this righteousness is granted he will put it into action. (T. Chalmers, D.D.)
a pivotal case
1. St. Paul has lustfully shown how the evangelical method of justification excludes the usual Hebrew boasting in the Mosaic law as the way to eternal life. But some might wonder: Didn’t he put it aside entirely?
two. To this there were two possible answers.
(1) The most obvious would be this: The law had other ends to serve (Gal_3:19; Gal_3: 23-24; Romans 3:19).
(two) Here, however, Paul responds by claiming Abraham’s ease. The force of the argument may go something like this: the reward the Jew hoped to secure through his circumcision and his observance of the Mosaic law was the national blessing that God had originally conferred by covenant on his ancestor and representative of his race. . . It was in his character as a descendant of Abraham that every Jew received in his flesh the seal of the national covenant, or was entitled to aspire to the national hope. Therefore, no Israelite could aspire to anything higher than attaining the bliss of his forefather Abraham (Lk 16,22). However, this favor had been promised and received to him, not in consequence of his observance of the Mosaic law, which was not given until much later, not even in consideration of his circumcision, but solely because he was a believer. Instead of God’s covenant with Israel being based on law, the law, instead, was based on covenant. That covenant was, to begin with, one of grace, not of works. Far, therefore, from Paul’s doctrine of justification which overturns the Mosaic Law, it was only the old teaching of the older “Book of the Law”. “So we invalidate the law of Moses? God forbid. On the contrary, we establish that law; since we find for him the ancient foundation of him on which he can only serve those useful uses to which he was put.”
3. The case of Abraham was thus, as Saint Paul clearly saw, a crucial case in which to test his doctrine of justification by faith. Abraham was not simply the first of the Israelites or the greatest of them; he was all Israel in his one person. It would never be good for a Jew to claim that a principle that governed Abraham’s dealings with Jehovah could, by any chance, invalidate the law of Moses.
Four. But Abraham’s example is fruitful for Paul’s purpose in more ways than one.
YO. His controversy to this point has involved two main positions. The first is Romans 3:28. The second, Romans 3:30. He now proceeds to illustrate and confirm both positions with the case of Abraham.
1. It was by his faith that Abraham was justified, not by his works of obedience (Romans 3:1-8 ). Paul finds a remarkable proof text in Gen 15:16.
(1) The religious life of Abraham is grouped around three main moments. The first, when God ordered him to migrate to Canaan (Gen 12:1-5); the second, at Mamre, when God first made a covenant with the old, childless man that he would have a son, etc. (Genesis 15:1-21); the third, when the first part of this promise was fulfilled, sealed in its entirety by circumcision, Jehovah commanded that the son of the promise be sacrificed (Gen 22:1-24). At these three crucial moments in Abraham’s history, his trust in God appeared as the most eminent characteristic of his character. But clearly the first of these was preliminary to the second, which conveyed to him the promises of God; and the third was a consequent of the second. The central point, therefore, in the history of the patriarch is to be found in the second, to which Saint Paul refers here. On God’s part there was simply a word of promise; on the part of man, simply a devout and childlike confidence in that word. God did not ask for more; and the man had no more to give. His mere trust in the Promiser was considered adequate as a basis for the acceptance of that sinful man into friendship and alliance with the eternal Jehovah.
(two) The apostle’s argument is a very obvious one. There are only two ways to gain Divine approval. Or you deserve it, having earned it; then it is pure debt, and you have something to boast about. Either you have not earned divine approval, but the wages of sin, which is death; only you trust in the promised grace of Him who justifies the wicked; then it can be said that this trust of yours is counted as equivalent to righteousness. Now Abraham’s acceptance was clearly of the latter kind. He, therefore, at least, had no reason to boast. His, rather, was such a beatitude as the one he sang of his great descendant David so long after (Ps 32:1-2).
two. Abraham was justified by his faith, not as circumcised, but as uncircumcised (verses 9-16). He lies in the very idea of acceptance through faith, that God will accept the believer regardless of nationality, external rite, or church privilege, or the like. This inference Paul has been pressing the Jewish readers of him, and here is a curious confirmation of it. Abraham, through whom circumcision came, etc., received divine favor before his circumcision. Circumcision entered merely to seal, not constitute, his justification. And the design of such an arrangement was to make him the type and progenitor of all believers—first of such believers, who were never circumcised at all, since for thirteen years or more he himself was an uncircumcised believer; then also of the circumcised, to the truth, but believers. He is “the father of us all”. The only people his experience fails to embrace, whose “father” he really is not, are those Jews who trust in their lineage and in their covenant insignia, and hope to be saved by their meritorious observance of the prescribed rules, but who in the free and gracious promises of the God of Abraham they put no trust.
(1) Having gone so far, Saint Paul has come to this remarkable conclusion: that far from making his doctrine the law of Moses invalid, it is the Jewish invention of justification by law that invalidates the promise of God, and the faith of Abraham , and the whole basis of grace on which the privileges of the Hebrew people ultimately rested. Here, therefore, he turns his opponents around (verse 14).
(two) Furthermore, another conclusion emerges. Now it turns out that instead of Saint Paul being a disloyal Jew for admitting the Gentile believers in an equal place in favor of the God of Israel, she is his self-righteous countrywoman, who monopolizes divine grace, which is really false to the truth. original idea. of the Abrahamic covenant. All who have faith, whatever their race, are “blessed with faithful Abraham,” and he, says Paul, writing to a Gentile Church, “is the father of us all.” The apostle has now completed his polemic against the Jewish objectors. Nevertheless,…