Abraham – Justified By Faith – He Was Justified By His Faith (Part 1)

Romans 4:3-5

3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” 4 Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. 5 But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness,

(Verse 3-5) – For what saith the Scripture? – That is, the inspired account of Abraham’s justification. This account was final, and was to settle the question. This account is found in Gen. 15:6.  It is important that we see that this is the first, authoritative place we must go to understand these principles.  They are not, at the root level, understandable on the human level alone.  It is only as our minds and spirits are enlightened by the Word of God that we can hope to see what God intends.  Our appeal must always be to the Word of God!  It must stand as the authority and the final arbiter of all that we believe and think concerning these matters.  This must be more than lip service as well.  We must actually allow the Word to control what we think.  All too often we impose our own logic and our own presuppositions on the Bible and try and mold it to our own manner of thinking.  We are convinced, going in, of certain things, and thus, since they “cannot be wrong”, we adapt our understanding of what the Bible says to fit what we already think.  People do this about a lot of things, from human righteousness to the doctrine of free will.  They are not truly submitted to what the Bible says and thus, they are not truly submitted to God.  The mind is a truly sneaky thing and persists in its delusions and wickedness and we must exercise care to see that we do not fall prey to it devices or allow it to deceive us.

As we have said, on the positive side of his argument, Paul first appeals to Scripture, the divine and infallible truth upon which all of his arguments are based. Quoting Genesis 15:6, he declares, And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Early in the Genesis account of Abraham, which begins with chapter 12, Moses was inspired to write of the patriarch that he was made right with God only because of his faith. Because Abraham believed God, and on no other basis, his belief was reckoned to him by God as righteousness.

In the Hebrew of the Genesis account this reads “Abraham believed Yahweh.” The sense is substantially the same, as the argument turns on the act of believing. The faith which Abraham exercised was in believing what God had said regarding that his posterity should be like the stars of heaven in number. This promise was made to him when he had no child, and of course when he had no prospect of such a posterity. We will discuss the strength and nature of this faith further illustrated when we study Rom. 4:16-21.

The word “it” here evidently refers to the act of believing. It does not refer to the righteousness of another - of God, or of the Messiah; but the discussion is solely of the act of Abraham’s faith, which in some sense was counted to him for righteousness. In what sense this was, is explained directly after. All that is material to remark here is, that the act of Abraham, the strong confidence of his mind in the promises of God, his unwavering assurance that what God had promised he would perform, was reckoned for righteousness. The same thing is more fully expressed in Rom. 4:18-22.

Faith is uniformly an act of the mind, the heart and the will. It is not a created essence which is placed within the mind. It is not a substance created independently of the soul, and placed within it by almighty power. It is not a principle, for the expression a principle of faith, is as unmeaningful as a principle of joy, a principle of sorrow, or a principle of remorse. God promises; the man believes; and this is the whole of it.

While the word “faith” is sometimes used to denote religious doctrine, or the system that is to be believed (Acts 6:7; 15:9; Rom. 1:5; 10:8; 16:26; Eph. 3:17; 4:5; 1 Tim. 2:7, etc.); yet, when it is used to denote that which is required of people, it always denotes an acting of the mind exercised in relation to some object, or some promise, or threatening, or declaration of some other being; (see Mark 16:16).

In his letter to the Galatian churches, the apostle cites the same verse from Genesis and then goes on to say, “Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham” (Gal. 3:6-7). Several verses later he refers to the patriarch as “Abraham, the believer” (v. 9). Because Abraham was the quintessential man of faith, he is in that sense “the father of all who believe” (Rom. 4:11). Through his faith in God, “Abraham rejoiced to see My day,” Jesus said, “and he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).

The writer of Hebrews describes the faith by which Abraham was declared righteous by God: “By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise; for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:8-10).

Like Paul, who wrote this epistle to Rome, Abraham was sovereignly and directly chosen by God. Neither Abraham nor Paul was searching for God when they were divinely called and commissioned. Abraham had probably never heard of the true God, whereas Paul knew a great deal about Him. Abraham was seemingly content with his idolatrous paganism, and Paul was content with his traditional, but false, Judaism.

When Abraham was first called by God, he lived in Ur of Chaldea (Gen. 11:31; 15:7), a thoroughly pagan and idolatrous city. Archaeologists have estimated that it consisted of perhaps 300,000 inhabitants during Abraham’s time. It was an important commercial city located in Mesopotamia on the lower Euphrates River, a little more than a hundred miles northwest of the Persian Gulf. The people of Ur were highly educated, being proficient in such diverse areas as math, agriculture, weaving, engraving, and astronomy. Contrary to the claims of liberal scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has been proved that by Abraham’s time the Chaldeans had developed a system of writing.

The Chaldeans were polytheistic, having a multitude of gods, the foremost of which was called Nanna, the moon god. Because his father, Terah, was an idolater (Josh. 24:2), Abraham obviously was reared in paganism.

When God called Abraham, or Abram, which was his original name, He gave no reason for selecting that pagan from the millions of others in the world. Nowhere in Scripture is the reason given. God chose Abraham because that was His divine will, which needs no justification or explanation.

After commanding Abraham to leave his country and his relatives and to go to the land that would be shown to him, God sovereignly and unconditionally promised, “I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and so you shall be a blessing; and I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:2-3).

With no guarantee but God’s word, Abraham left his business, his homeland, his friends, most of his relatives, and probably many of his possessions. He abandoned his temporal security for a future uncertainty, as far as his human eyes could see or his human mind could comprehend. The land he was promised to inherit was inhabited by pagans perhaps even more wicked and idolatrous than those of his home country. Abraham may have had only a remote idea of where the land of Canaan was, and it is possible that he had never heard of it at all. But when God called him to go there, Abraham obeyed and began the long journey.

Because he only partly obeyed God, however, bringing along his father and his nephew Lot, Abraham wasted fifteen years in Haran, where the group lived until Terah died (Gen. 11:32). By that time Abraham was seventy-five years old, and as he continued the journey to Canaan, he also continued to obey God only partly by taking Lot with him (12:4).

When Abraham, Sarah, and Lot reached Shechem in Canaan, Abraham received another sovereign and unconditional promise from God: “The Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I will give this land’. So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him” (Gen. 12:7). As Abraham continued his journey through Canaan, he built another altar “to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord” (v. 8).

But Abraham’s faith was not perfect, just as no believer’s faith is perfect. The first test he had to face was a famine in Canaan, and Abraham went to Egypt for help instead of to God. That disobedience put him in a compromising situation with the pharaoh. He claimed that his beautiful wife was his sister, fearing that the pharaoh might kill him in order to have her for himself. In so doing, Abraham dishonored the Lord and caused plagues to come upon the pharaoh’s family (Gen. 12:10-17).

The Lord gave repeated assurances to Abraham, and Abraham responded in faith, which God “reckoned … to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). But again, when testing came, he relied on his own judgment rather than the Lord’s word. When Sarah was getting beyond normal childbearing age and remained barren, Abraham took her foolish advice and took matters into his own hands. He committed adultery with Hagar, Sarah’s maid, in the hope of having a male heir by her. But as always, his disobedient act backfired and again caused misery to the innocent (see Gen. 16:1-15). He also brought future misery to his own descendants, with whom the Arab descendants of Ishmael, the son by Hagar, would be in continuous conflict, as they are to this day.

Despite his spiritual imperfection, Abraham always came back to the Lord in faith, and the Lord honored that faith and continued to renew his promises to Abraham. God miraculously caused Sarah to bear a son in her old age, the son whom God had promised to give Abraham. And when the greatest test of all came, Abraham did not waver in his trust of the Lord. When God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac, the only human means through which the promise could be fulfilled, Abraham responded with immediate obedience, and God responded by providing a substitute for Isaac (Gen. 22:1-18). The writer of Hebrews declared that it was “by faith [that] Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac; and he who had received the promises was offering up his only begotten son; it was he to whom it was said, ‘In Isaac your descendants shall be called.’ He [that is, Abraham] considered that God is able to raise men even from the dead; from which he also received back as a type” (Heb. 11:17-19).

Neither Abraham nor his most immediate heirs - his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob - ever owned any land in Canaan, except for a small field near Mamre in which the cave of Machpelah was located. Abraham bought this plot from Ephron, a Hittite, for the burial of Sarah (see Gen. 23:3-11). Abraham himself and Isaac, Rebekah, and Leah were also buried there (49:31). Many years later, according to Jacob’s request, his body was brought back from Egypt by Joseph and his brothers for burial alongside Jacob’s father and grandfather (Gen. 50:13-14).

As is always the case with true belief, the Holy Spirit enlightened Abraham’s mind and heart to recognize the true and only God, and enabled him to respond in faith. Abraham saw the Promised Land and wandered through it as a nomad, but he never possessed it. Even his descendants did not possess the land until more than a half century after the promise of it was first given.