Clough Genesis Lesson 48
Review; justification, Romans 4:16-25 – Genesis 15:1-6
In Genesis 15 we have been studying the place of the call of Abram, and to review a little bit, we’ve been studying the Scriptures along the lines of what we call the divine viewpoint framework, that is, looking at some of the key events of biblical history and trying to summarize the Scriptures through these key events. These are events that ought to be common to every educated Christian of whatever particular local church they happen to be. And these key events are ones which represent milestones in the revelation of God to man. And as such they ought to be firmly fixed in our minds because the doctrine that we believe and apply to daily situations flows naturally out of these events. And we add that if these events never occurred, if these events did not happen the way the Bible says they happened, you might as well just pack it all up because the whole game’s over. The Bible depends on a historically valid document, one which is true, one which God has spoken in.
We studied the event of creation, the event of the fall, the event of Noah’s flood and the covenant that God made with all our ancestors, the three sons of Noah, after the flood. That represents the first great block of biblical history, the first eleven chapters of Genesis. And everything else follows from these eleven chapters of Genesis. Thus if we get shaky and embarrassed and unsure of ourselves in the area of Genesis 1-11, necessarily we’re going to be shaky and unsure of ourselves all the way down the line. So we spent all of last year basically dealing with Genesis 1-11.
So we continue, and we’ve been studying
Abraham and his call. With the call of
Abraham out from the
But there are two other doctrines that we want to learn to associate with whatever mental picture we have of the call of Abraham, and that’s the doctrine of justification and the doctrine of faith. Abraham, in your mind, eventually, wherever you read his name, whether it’s in the New Testament, or in the Old Testament, or in some book of Christian literature, at least his name and all the experiences and stories about Abraham ought to lead you in your thinking to at least three doctrines; the doctrine of election, remember, God chose him out of the people of his time; the doctrine of justification which we’ll study a little bit this morning, and the doctrine of faith, the pioneer of faith. These ought to be mental associations that become automatic with you, so that when you’re working, trying in your life to apply these things in the middle of crises, in the middle of various adverse circumstances, that your soul goes back to drink the water of eternal life from these Scriptures; your soul goes back and meditates on Abraham as a real man.
We’ve looked at Genesis 15:1-6 and this morning we want to review portions of those and talk about these two other doctrines, the doctrines of justification and faith. Genesis 15 we said was a vision, that is, all of this chapter is not about what happened in history over a long period of time; it’s what happened over a short period of time, apparently maybe 15-20 minutes to several hours, in which God was revealing Himself to Abraham. The whole chapter is a vision, with one exception, that’s verse 6. So we have an almost entirely visionary chapter which emphasizes that for us to go on in the Christian life we must feed on God’s Word. God’s Word is the absolute; it’s the sure foundation. Why? Because God, if we diagram His character, God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is loving, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, and one of these attributes, the attribute of immutability, means that God never, never changes. He is the perfectly stable person, and He, therefore, is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And that attribute of immutability is the only appropriate faith object for the creature. We have no other bona fide option than placing our trust in an immutable person. Now we can try, and most of us try most of the time to place our faith in ourselves, or some other idol.
And the whole object of Genesis 15 being a visionary chapter is to reinforce this basic simple principle: you can’t be more stable than your faith object is stable. Now just think of that for a moment. None of us can be more stable than our faith object is stable! Whatever we place our faith in, whether it’s another person, a wife, a husband, a marriage, a family, whether it’s a group of people, the country, the state, whether it’s mankind collectively, whether it’s our own individual talents, our own personality, whether it’s an education, whether it’s some place else, whether it’s a church or a pastor, it doesn’t make any difference, you cannot be more stable than the faith object that you have chosen. And for us to choose any other thing than God and His immutability is an act of blasphemy, an act of idolatry.
Now people wind up mentally ill all the time in this world because of idolatry. It’s very easy. One doesn’t have to be a PhD in psychology to know this; just look around you, watch people who load personal relationships with everything, who depend entirely on some person somewhere, who depend upon their wife or their husband to run their life, completely and totally supply all their needs, who depend upon their family, their reputation, their name, who depend upon their country, the government or the state, whatever it is, you watch what happens the first time that person sees an imperfection in that idol they have chosen. Watch the reaction in their soul. Sometimes it starts out with animosity, with hatred, with resentment, with a feeling I’ve been cheated because I’ve put my faith in this thing and it double-crossed me. You had not business putting your faith there in the first place. It was a misplaced faith, you were wrong, not the object of your trust.
The point is that there is only one absolute immutable object of faith and that is God and His character. And that’s the point that he is making in this chapter; you’ve got to believe in either God or yourself or mankind collectively; there’s no other option. I’ve said all the options there are; I don’t care who you are, where you come from, you basically are choosing among those options right now. Your faith is loading and biased toward one of those, yourself, your own native abilities or yourself magnified in your family, or mankind collectively or something. Or it’s in God, the God who reveals Himself in history.
Thus in Genesis 15:1 when God speaks to Abraham in the vision, his first words are, “Fear not, Abram,” fear not! “I am thy shield, and I am thy reward.” You notice what God says there? He doesn’t say the blessings I’ve given you are the shield and the reward. He doesn’t say when I give you Isaac, your son that you and Sarah are eventually going to have, that that baby is going to be your shield and your reward. And just to test to make sure that Abraham didn’t make that baby his shield and his reward you know what happened. You know what happened one evening when God came to Abraham and said now, take that baby that I’ve given you and kill it, slit its throat and let it bleed to death on an altar. And those of you who went to see the film with John Huston in it, The Bible, remember the acting of Abraham, shaking his fist at heaven and saying how dare you do this to the one that you’ve given me, the one that I’ve waited so long for. But you see, God has to do that to trim away the idols so that as painful as it may be in the long eternal sense it’s pleasurable, it removes false idols and false faith objects. Thus “I am thy shield and thy reward.” The believer, the creature is called to be theocentric; that means God-centered, not man-centered.
Now I mention this because even in Christian circles you see this, again and again and again. This is the cause for much unhappiness in congregation after congregation because people who ought to know better, more than any other group of people, are the people who are regularly exposed to the teaching of Scripture, and yet time after time we find these same kind of people loading up personal relationships with weights that simply those relationships cannot bear. And those people have become idols. Maybe out of a good motive, maybe because they are deeply attracted to this particular person or that particular person or this particular group. That attraction is fine but you have to be zealous deep in your soul never to let that which is good start getting too big until it overcomes and overlaps certain boundaries that ought never to be overlapped. Don’t ever let those whom you love become your shield and your reward. That is referred back to only one person—your God; He alone can be your shield and your reward.
So “after these things” it says in Genesis 15:1, God said that to Abraham, because Abraham was ready to be reminded of that. Looking back in Genesis 12, Genesis 13, Genesis 14, we saw a collection of adventures that happened to Abraham. Some of those adventures did well for Abraham and in some of those adventures Abraham didn’t come off too well at all. They represent his sins and his triumphs, his defeats and his victories. In essence Genesis 12-14 is giving us his checkered existence. It has some plus features and some minus features. In summary we can say that Abraham is an imperfect person. And the Scriptures want us to know that, very clearly, at the outset of this whole chapter. This revelation is coming to an imperfect being; a man who has a sin nature like we do, and therefore who sins like we do.
But nevertheless, because God is a gracious God He starts a work of grace in Abraham’s heart. God illuminates Abraham’s heart to his own Word so that Abraham, deep in his soul, knows God personally. He has been, in the Old Testament equivalent, he’s been regenerated, he’s been born again, he has a personal daily living relationship with God; not theoretical, living. And out of that personal relationship with God Abraham is led into the next stage of growth, mastery of the faith technique, or at least acquaintance with some of the elementary promises of God, that he can start meeting this trial or he can start meeting that trial by trusting the Lord in the middle of the pressure. He knows, for example, at least when things get totally chaotic and totally in a crisis stage, there is one way always, a sort of crisis first-aid, to bring control out of chaos, and that way is to subdue the chaos with God’s sovereign promise of Romans 8:28, that kind of thing. “All things work together for good, to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.”
No matter how chaotic, you may not be in control, those around you who ought to be in control, they too may have lost control, but even after that stage is reached, when every human being has lost control of the situation, and tonight I’ll show you some graphic illustrations from American history, when every human being in a situation has lost control, including yourself, still Romans 8:28 comforts because it still says that finally someone still is in control: God is, because God is sovereign. And therefore at least in the crisis you can take a deep breath and relax that at least somebody is in charge of this mess. Now the next step is to break it up into bite size pieces and start solving this part of it, that part of it, and something else. But until you can rest in the fact that somebody is in charge you’re going to freeze and the result is you’re going to clutch and you’re not going to be able to respond in any way, shape, fashion or form. So the way to break the log jam is to cast yourself upon the sovereignty of God; take a big breath and then cut it down to bite size portions.
Abraham has learned how to do some of this, imperfectly, lots of mistakes, but he’s learned to do some of it and the result of this is that he has begun to be a master of the details of life. He’s begun to pick up the pilgrim idea, an idea of which we’ll have more to say this evening; the pilgrim idea, which means that this space/time history ultimately isn’t where it’s at; it’s the eternal future where it’s at. And therefore we have to live for the eternal future face to face with God; that’s the ultimate thing, and the pilgrim always realizes that he’s a stranger, somewhat. No matter how familiar you are with your husband, your wife, your father, your mother, your children, your family, your home, you are still biblically a pilgrim. Still there’s something finally that will separate you before God from everything around you and it’ll be you and Him face to face. That’s the basic and the crux of the pilgrim idea and it’s that kind of thing that forces us to look again at these details that plague our daily lives.
These details are important, after all, God’s going to judge us on how we’ve responded to the details of life, but having said all that, tomorrow the details of life are going to be gone. Then where are you going to be; the details of life can’t be allowed to assume eternal importance. What can only be allowed to assume eternal importance is God and His character; “I am your shield and I am your reward.” Not the business deals in the ranching business that Abraham has done; those are not his reward. God, finally, is his reward and it’s tough to cut loose at times from the details of life. That’s why we pray often in our services this short prayer for illumination; it’s not meant to just be a casual ritualistic prayer; it’s meant to say that look, look our minds are cluttered, we stagger through the door and sit down and now we want just a few moments when our minds can be free of the details of life, relatively speaking, to sit back and be fed the Word of God. A church service ought to be a time of feeding, not a time of hustling, not a time of ecstasy, although that may be in the individuals; the time is basically one of feeding, charging one’s batteries, and the source of the charge is God, not the church, not the pastor.
So “after these things,” Abraham is ready for more; he’s ready for a new thing we’ll call living in the Word. That means Abraham is ready for more revelation. He’s already got the idea of trusting God in the elementary things of life; now what Abraham wants to do is find out more about God’s plan for his life. And if you look in Genesis 15:18-21 you’ll see some of the intricate details of God’s will for that man’s life; details that involve ancient peoples we know not of; peoples who have long passed off the stage of history, lost and almost unrecoverable to the modern scholar and historian. But those in Abraham’s day, in the 20th century before Christ, those people figured intimately in God’s plan for his life—the details of God’s will. Living in the word means that Abraham is going to feed on the deeper things. As a little baby, when it’s born, his GI tract, his digestive system doesn’t function properly, as all of you young mothers know very well, and it takes that baby time to get functional but when it gets functional then things begin to change and at least some order is brought into being. It’s the same thing spiritually; when a person first becomes a Christian his digestive system doesn’t work properly; he has to be fed pabulum, he has to be fed simple things, and then the big things come in, and Abraham is ready for that.
So God makes the key point; Abraham, I want you to understand that no matter what comes, no matter what blessings I give you, please don’t forget this one thing; behind even all the blessings stand the Blessor, the One who gives you the blessings; don’t confuse the blessings with the One who gives the blessing.
To see why God makes this such a big point, turn to the passage that is central in belief, Hebrews 11:3, that famous section dealing with God and His creation. The author of Hebrews says, “Through faith we understand that the ages,” literally, the world for “world” here would best come over in our language as the concept of an age or a period of time, literally it means an administration. “…that the ages have been framed,” that means they’ve been put together, they’ve been designed, “by the Word of God,” history flows as a stream out of God’s character, that’s what it’s saying, “so that,” the result, “things which are seen,” that is things seen, heard, felt, touched, the things all around us in space/time history, “the thins which are seen were not created” or “made out of things which do appear.” What’s that mean? It simply means there’s a cause/effect in history.
You know cause/effect, you do certain things, there are certain results but a Bible-believing Christian finally has to cringe at one point. Finally at one point we have to say yeah, there are cause and effect operational and sometimes if we’re a quantitative scientist we can explain it with an equation, great; but finally, when all the facts are considered there are always effect sitting there for which we can’t find causes. Finally there are effects for which we can’t find causes, from within the system. And so therefore what do we say? Those effects are the results of God’s interference on the system. If there are no cause in the system, that is in nature, if there are no causes to produce these effects then these effects must have been caused by something outside the system, the miraculous providence of God. The Christian always confesses that he never has a closed system, that that cause/effect chains are open everywhere to God’s active direction and interference, and that’s what it’s saying here in Heb 11:3, “The things which are seen,” that is the effects, “were not completely made of the things which do appear.” And there are minimal visible causes here; they are limited in what they can do.
So having believed this in verse 3, having believed, therefore, that circumstances, let’s replace the word “things which are seen” and mentally in our minds rewrite verse 3; a little exercise. You can try this sometime on your own, take a 3 x 5 card, take a verse out of the Scripture and start playing with the words in it, replace those words, and see what happens. Let’s try it here at the end of verse 3, a little mental experiment this morning. In place of “things which are seen” but “circumstances that bug me.” All right, “so that circumstances which bug me have not been made out of things which do appear,” in other words, there’s a sovereign providence functioning in your circumstance, which ought to immediately say hey, if I’m going to meet this circumstance and handle my life rightly I’d better do some checking around here and find out what God’s got in this for me, since this situation that bugs me didn’t really come just by accident or by the normal forces of nature. God has His hand constantly in my life. So we find that to be a picture of the kind of faith Abraham had.
Now let’s turn back to Genesis 15 a moment. This is why God says to Abraham, ultimately it’s me, not my blessing, it’s me. So we read further in the text, and we studied it and got down to verse 6 and verse 6 we said was not part of the account historically. The vision, if you read it carefully, your eye can skip from the end of verse 6 to the beginning of verse 7 and never miss a thing; the vision report excludes verse 6. Verse 6 is an editorial addition that when Moses compiled Genesis and put it together he put that in there to draw attention to something.
Let’s read Genesis 15:6 carefully and slowly. “And he believed,” the word “he” there is Abraham, “Abraham believed in Jehovah and he,” that is Jehovah, “counted it to him,” Abraham, “for righteousness.” Now what’s that got to do with the context? Well, let’s look at the context, Genesis 2-5, what’s the context? The context is that Abraham wants a baby boy, not a baby girl, a baby boy. Why is that? Because it is the male that carries the spiritual leadership into the next generation. Those of you who are parents can see this very obviously; you have a girl, you pour your life into her and you finally cultivate her and you lead her to Christ, put Christian character in by nurture and admonition and so on in the home, but what are you really creating? Ultimately when all is said and done you’re creating a helper for a man, stranger to your family. Now this is a fine task and God wants you to do this, but finally she isn’t going to be the one that, as much as the boy, carries leadership into the next generation. We’ve historically recognized that in a culture because when a girl gets married she looses her name, and this has always been. Leave the ERA people for a few more months and they’ll have that changed, but nevertheless, classically that was the admission that the woman loses something. And so therefore it’s a testament to the fact that the boy is the important one to carry the inheritance.
And so this is why Abraham worried in verse 2 about his being childless; he wants a male baby. It’s that simple, nothing hairy theologically about it; it’s just that God has promised certain things are going to flow from Abraham and he knows that in order for these things to happen he needs a male heir. And so that’s what the discussion is about, in verse 3, verse 4, verse 5, God’s assuring him, I’m going to provide your male heir, don’t worry about it, I will do it.
Now Genesis 15:6 is injected as an explanation for something. If we have an editorial remark that’s an explanation for something we’d better stop a moment and ask why? Why did Moses consider it necessary to stop the flow of this vision, inject this comment, start the flow of the vision and then keep on going? Well, Moses must be thinking that you and I are going to have a question in our minds when we read this. So let’s work backwards. Knowing what we do about verse 6, what kind of a problem or question does verse 6 answer? What it answers is this? How can God so perfectly bless, and work so intimately on a face to face basis, with a man who is an imperfect creature? Or said in more familiar language, how can Abraham, a sinner, have fellowship with a holy God? That’s what verse 6 is answering. After all, look at the audacious promise, verses 2-5 talking about a male heir that’s going to carry a perfect role in history. What business does an imperfect fallen sinner have in God’s perfect plan?
How can he stand there in the presence of God secure in that situation? What’s the deal? What’s the basis for this kind of a bold plan? Something has to be answered and the answer is in the doctrine of justification by faith, the center of the gospel. The center of the gospel is not invite Jesus into your heart and He’ll give you a better life. That is a truth, there is a better life, obviously, from trusting in Christ but that’s not the heart of the gospel. The heart of the gospel is this matter of justification by faith. Said another way, it looks like this: God and his character is perfectly righteous; we put the plus (+) there just to indicate a perfect kind of righteousness; theologians have various terms for it, absolute righteousness and so on. So God is righteous, and in this vision He is accepting Abraham in His personal friendship and relationship, it’s a very intimate thing. Later on you’ll see just how intimate it is when God signs a contract in a very peculiar way. So we have intimacy with a holy, righteous God, and the answer, unlike our generation that loves to ask, well if God is a loving God, how can a loving God send people to hell? These people were a little smarter, they asked a more profound question and that was how can a righteous God send sinners to heaven. See, the question has two sides and both are legitimate.
So the doctrine of justification is placed in here. Abraham, it says, “believed,” and God credited his response as righteous. Now was Abraham’s response perfect? Remember Genesis 12, Genesis 13, Genesis 14, we almost had Sarah stuck in Pharaoh’s harem. That wasn’t quite cool, at least I imagine Sarah didn’t think it was very cool. So Abraham was far from perfect, yet look at what verse 6 is doing. Read it again, read it and read it and read it and read it until it hits you what verse 6 is saying; it’s one of those hard verses but finally you’ll feel a nudge, I see it now. Read it against the backdrop of what we’ve studied. Abraham has an imperfect response; imperfect. God credits it as righteous and by righteous here He means perfectly righteous. God credits an imperfect creature with perfect righteousness? Exactly! That’s the bold claim that’s being made here. But Abraham didn’t do this and Abraham didn’t do that, Abraham wasn’t even baptized, how could he be credited with perfect righteousness. How could this come to be?
So we want to deal with this doctrine of justification. To do it best we had better go to the apostolic official interpretation of Genesis 15:6 and Paul gives us a whole lesson on this one verse in Romans 4 so let’s turn to the New Testament and listen to Paul teach us about Abraham. Romans 4:16, Paul is just trying to prove that… everybody accuses Paul of creating Christianity. Back in the 19th century there was a big movement in the rationalistic universities of Germany, under a man by the name of Frederich Baur, and he argued to generations of New Testament scholars that there were two religions in the New Testament; there was the religion that Jesus originally started, some religious carpenter running around the land, and then along came Paul; now Paul was a real cool guy, he had his doctorate and he was the man who put Christian into the light we know it, so there was all this tension between Jesus’ religion and Paul’s religion. Incidentally, the classic refutation of that wrong position was written decades ago by Machen, and Machen’s book, if you ever see it on a bookshelf somewhere it’s well worth your purchase, The Origin of Paul’s Religion. It’s a classic argument and it’s the classic statement of our position why that one was wrong.
Paul did not originate anything. In Romans
Then Romans 4:17, if you skip the parenthesis there because that’s just a recitation of the Old Testament promise, if you have a new translation it’s probably set off into a different kind of print, “(As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations),” that’s just the promise for a male baby. Now watch how Paul develops the theme, beginning in the middle of verse 17, 18, and 19, a very slick argument. “…before him whom he believed, even God, who quickens [gives life to] the dead, and call those things which be not, as though they were.” Now that last expression, “called those things which be not as though they were,” does that ring a bell somewhere; just a few moments ago didn’t we read a passage like that? Yes, Hebrews 11:3. Same thought.
So let’s look at verse 17 closely; Abraham believed, his central faith object, the source of perfect stability, was God and His attributes, God and His character. And then Paul qualifies God with two clauses here, “who quickens the dead” and “who calls.” Let’s look at those two things. “Who quickens” or enlivens, and “who calls.” He’s adding these to let us know what it means to have God as a faith object for Abraham. “God who quickens the dead,” what’s the dead? Well, God does quicken the dead in resurrection but the “dead” here doesn’t refer to resurrection; the “dead” here refer to those who are sexually dead. Later on it will be described, in verse 19, Abraham and his wife beyond childbearing, and so we have God and His character placed over against Abraham and his wife and the problems they’re having in reproduction. Sexual death, natural cause/effect doesn’t work in this situation. Therefore, I’ve got to introduce a cause from outside the system. So God is the one who “quickens the dead,” not gimmicks, and I might add here, because we’re back into this in our own generation and Abraham’s generation was loaded with it, it’s not magic that quickens the dead either. It’s not some slick hocus pocus that quickens the dead. God alone quickens the dead. Now granted, He didn’t have transplants and test tube baby techniques worked out, but that’s not in view here.
“…who called those things which be not, as though they are.” Now what are those things that aren’t that he refers to? The male child, that’s who isn’t, and God’s calling the male child as though he is. Now we can stop right here and inject a very practical test for our faith. You can ask yourself this question. It’s a hard question and you don’t always get the answer back from the question you’d like to get back but at least it’s an honest question. The question is: Do I honestly have the same confidence about what God is promising me, the overall promises of the Scripture, do I have a sense of reality about those promises as I do about my immediate experience? Most people know they’re here, there’s always a few exceptions but most people know they’re here and they can talk, communicate and so on, and they never think anything of it, they assume this. They take their present existence for granted.
But this verse challenges you to ask another question. Do you take what God has promised you similarly for granted, so much so that’s it’s just implicit, you just build your life daily on that kind of reality? For example, you look at your own life and increasingly as you grow in the Christian life you’re going to be exposed to your own sin nature; you’re going to see more crud and eventually it gets discouraging. You’ll see victories here and there but then for every victory there’s always the nice little balancing revelation of some more jewels that are in you. And so this gets to be a problem after a while. Now faced with that, don’t you ever get discouraged and wonder if the promise that God said to you, I will conform you to be like My Son, after a while doesn’t it get discouraging to the point you wonder, is that ever going to happen. Yeah, it’s going to happen after death and so on, resurrection, but boy, there’s going to have to be some pretty large things that are going to have to happen to me before I’m going to be conformed to Christ. That thought runs through you and it debilitates you; it weakens you if you let it. That’s lack of faith because what God is calling is not as real to you as those things which are here and present now. So it’s very important that you read slowly the Scriptures, feasting on each word, digesting it and examining your soul
Now in Romans
Now verse 19 carries it deeper and is even a deeper, clearer exposition of biblical faith. It’s one of my favorite passages here because it’s totally opposite to what most people think faith is, and the King James really dropped it here. It says “being not weak in faith he considered his own body now dead,” that’s exactly wrong; the Greek text says he did consider his own body being dead. Did you ever get this idea of people saying, oh, yeah, you Christians, you know what you do? You go around saying you gotta believe, gotta believe, gotta believe, gotta believe, close your eyes to the facts, just gonna believe. If you get in a classroom discussion that’s frequently the impression, that faith is opposite to knowledge.
Now what do you do about this passage then. If that’s the case, how do you explain this verse? This verse says the opposite. It says here the husband who knows that he and his wife can’t have any more children and yet, knowing all those facts he goes on believing. He’s not shutting his eyes and saying my wife’s going to get 20 years younger, my wife’s going to get 20 years younger, my wife’s going to get 20 years younger, we’re going to go back through menopause, back through menopause, back through menopause. Nothing like that; he believed over the fact, including the fact and beyond the fact. It is not closing your eyes to the facts; it’s opening your eyes to the facts. So verse 19 is a powerful refutation of this idea that faith is against factual evidence.
“Who being not weak in faith,” he went on, and the word in the Greek “to consider” is one of the strong Greek words; it looks like this, noeo is to think or to consider, and it has a prefix, kata on the front of that verb and this does certain things in certain cases in the language, and generally these prefixes, like that kata prefix intensifies the force of the verb. It doesn’t mean that it changes its meaning; it just makes it more intense. And so when we find the word “consider” and we have a kata prefix, our intuitive response quickly, we’d have to check it out lexically and so on, but our response is well this means a very serious consideration. This is not some hasty little thing. He knew very well, I imagine Abram and Sarah had long discussions… long discussions about this problem. “He considered his own body now dead, when he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb.” So they were both well aware of the situation biologically.
But now Romans 4:20-21 give you a camera picture of his faith. We’ve said that Abraham is to be our pioneer and our model, now here’s some data that you can strongly identify with; it doesn’t take much imagination here, particularly those of you who are married and you’ve thought through this problem of having children; this is an easy illustration for you to think of. Here’s a couple that want children desperately, more desperately than most couples. Most couples want children because they want to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, after all, look at our nursery; it’s being fruitful and multiplying by the week back there. At least one commandment is being followed in this congregation. But this couple wanted a child more desperately than that; they realized that the entire future history of the world was contingent on their children. Try that one on for size and think of the tension. And think of the fact that Abraham has already identified himself before the population as a follower of Jehovah in an area where what did they do? They worshiped the fertility goddess. Abraham refuses to worship the fertility goddess and what is Abraham? In fertile; that’s a real great testimony, isn’t it. Can you imagine how the Canaanite priests put that little slick piece of propaganda… well see, Abraham and Sarah, that’s what you get, you don’t come to our orgies and worship with our fertility goddesses, so now look what you get, see.
So Abraham responded and his response is a model for all time. It says in the King James, [20] “He staggered,” or we could say he doubted “not at the promise of God through unbelief.” All through this thing, though he had his moments of doubt, as a general principle he didn’t. It wasn’t a perfect faith but generally speaking “he doubted not at the promise of God through unbelief.” But it says he “was strong,” or literally, “he became strong in faith,” that is by the instrument of faith. Faith was the instrument of strengthening him. Abraham and Sarah looked at the data; here they are and here’s the biology that is malfunctioning. It isn’t working, and they looked at it year after year after year after year. You don’t realize it but they sweat this thing out for 25 years… 25 years, over and over and over, no child, no child, no child, no child, no child, no child, and from the human point of view what’s happening; every year that couple gets older the probability on the human plain of them ever having a child gets less and less and less, and God’s sitting there… yeah, let it get less and less and less, and so when it gets down to the zero line, then I’ll do My work and then it can’t be kissed to chance. But Abraham and Sarah don’t know that and they have to go through this struggle. Don’t make light of this couple’s struggle.
They were strengthened in faith. Now that’s kind of an abstract term; we can sit there and our pious little imaginations can generate all kinds of little pictures. But let’s get real; so what Paul does, he gives us two qualifying clauses, and those two closes describe as a camera and a tape recorder would describe what it would look like if you were on scene and looking at Abraham and Sarah; what would you see? What could you see? Remember, you can’t see their faith, Abraham doesn’t go around and he has 2.5 cubic centimeters of faith and Sarah has 2.1 and they stand in front of the fluoroscope and you can see it. There’s got to be some other way of observing this faith that is developing and developing and getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Where can you observe faith function? Only in outward behavior. Now God can see it in the heart but we’re not God, so the only place we can see faith in behavioral changes.
What are the behavioral changes? One of them, “giving glory to God,” what’s that mean, “giving glory to God,” going around saying hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah all the time? No; giving glory to God simply means this. When the discussion came about with the Canaanite population and the neighbors would make some little snotty crack, well, you and Sarah might have children if you’d come down to our church, that kind of thing. The Canaanite population could have really rubbed it in here and every time they would obviously the source of his hope would come up; hey, what are you hoping in? God, God’s going to do it! Huh, God’s gonna do it, okay, and they’d walk on. And then weeks later the same conversation, same dig, same place, usually the same skeptic putting the heat on, just to see what you’re made of. Some of you first year students in university, probably you’ve already run into this; don’t let it shake you. The unbeliever is just pushing you to the wall to see what you’re made of. He wants to see if there’s anything there, so you just respond with a basic stand; if you don’t know the answer tell him you don’t know the answer but the answer exists. And if it’s a smart question give them a smart answer, say hey, I’m not a spiritual encyclopedia Britannica, don’t expect me to know everything but I can get the information if you need it, if you’re serious. Usually they’re not serious; they just want to push you around enough to see whether you’re real. That’s the same thing that’s going on here and every time they get the same answer right back, “giving glory to God.”
Now this may still not catch us to what’s happening here so let me add a little thing to this first clause. Let’s do another thought experiment this morning. Let’s use our imagination, it’s very dangerous to do this but let’s use our imagination to try to think what it would be like if you were God, looking down from heaven, and you see this old man down there that’s taken you at face value, you’ve told him you’re going to give him a male child and here he is down there getting besieged with all this pressure from the crowd and he keeps on responding to those people down there, God’s going to do it, God’s going to do it, God will do it, God’s going to provide, God will do it, God will be faithful to His promise. And you’re sitting there looking at this thing going on down there; what’s it going to do to you? What’s going to be your response when you see a guy going out on a limb, promising that what you said is going to come true? Well, I know the way I’d respond; I’d respond boy, I’d better come through now because if I don’t my name’s on the line, isn’t it? You’ve promised someone and this other person just naively goes right on; it puts the pressure on you so you’d better come through. So “giving glory to God” from that kind of view can be looked upon as a very subtle but real pressure on God. Now we don’t mean that you’re going to take sovereignty into your hands, but we do mean that God is going to respond t that kind of thing. God responds when you put His name on the line.
All right, the second kind of thing that it looked like, besides “giving glory to God,” getting God involved in the conversation here, [21] he was “fully persuaded that what God had promised, He was able to perform.” God was able to perform. What does that mean? Let’s go back to God’s character again; look at those attributes. This is a simply drill this morning in taking God… most basic lesson of all, taking God and His attributes and applying them to test situations. Here’s God again; God is sovereign, God is righteousness, God is just, God is loving, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal. What does this verse say? That God is “able to perform.” What attribute has he got in mind? Omnipotence; “God is able to do exceedingly above all we can ever ask or think.” So he has, and his wife has, at least some… imperfect but some perception of God’s omnipotence. That’s their answer and it’s an honest intellectual answer. It’s not a copout intellectually, to go to the omnipotence of God.
Don’t ever let somebody give you a ride and say oh well, you Christians, you’re just copping out intellectually. Oh no we’re not; because every system has those same attributes somewhere. Remember the non-Christian in his thought system, because he’s made in God’s image, he too has to feed on those attributes. Every man feeds on those attributes; the question is whether they’re located in God or an idol. But your non-Christian friend that makes these little remarks that you don’t have intellectual integrity and you people are just copping out, ask him, do you believe that the universe always functions, that there was always a universe. Oh yeah, the universe was always here. Well now what have you done? You’ve taken the attribute of eternality and you’ve attached it to the universe, haven’t you? You’ve made the universe God when you’ve made the universe everlasting and eternal. Do you believe the scientific laws are basically unchanging? Oh yeah, that’s how science is built. All right, then you’ve taken the attribute of immutability and you’ve attached it to scientific law. So what were we discussing about somebody that said that attributes were an intellectual copout? You have them in your system too, and you’ve got to because you’re made in God’s image. That’s the only way you can know, that’s the only way you can go on living, is to have a stable universe and you are going to get an immutability somewhere, either in the God of the Bible or not but you will have it. You just have to kind of paw around to find it.
So Abraham took these attributes, intellectually honest, and confessed I have no idea what kind of interference is going to happen with me sexually and with my wife but something is going to happen and I lay it completely at the foot of God’s omnipotence. No idea of the mechanisms involved and I’m not interested in the biological dissertation, but that’s going to happen. Now that is an honest answer.
All right, Romans 4:22, “Therefore,” Paul says, he’s talking about this act of faith, “Therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.” What was? This faith. But the faith was imperfect; that’s right. But what was the object of the faith? Was the object of the faith perfect? Yes. Therefore the faith was counted for righteousness. You see justification is God-centered. It means that you, if you’re a Christian, have a perfect place in God’s plan, not because of you, not because of your personality, your education, your good looks, your background, your race, your country, etc. It’s because of God and who and what God is. When you’ve responded to Him and God counts that for righteousness. That’s why Paul goes on to say in verse 23, “Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him, [24] But for us also, to whom it shall be,” or “to whom it is ready to be imputed, we who believe on Him that raised up Jesus, our Lord, from the dead, [25] Who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification.” The faith is the sign of justification occurring.
Let me summarize what we’ve done here under four points and try as we summarize each of these four to make an application in our lives. The first point is that Abraham’s faith was imperfect; it was imperfect; it was loaded with sinful failure. Application of this: there is never going to be laid upon your shoulders the demand for perfection before God accepts you. God is not asking you to be perfect before He will allow you to have fellowship with Himself. That’s not what God is asking of you. Now many people think this way and therefore Satan deceives them and he whispers this thought into their rich minds and says ha-ha, do you remember that that you did last week; do you remember that that you did last summer or last year; remember what you said over here, you remember the effect it caused and all the goo that came out of that one; remember all this crud in your background, you don’t merit fellowship with God and you can’t have fellowship with God, so you’re just going to have to slug it out by your lonesome self.
Now you see, Satan capitalizes on a lie and the lie is that you’ve got to be perfect before God accepts you. That’s a lie; Abraham wasn’t perfect and it says God accepted him perfectly. And therefore this means that no human work, even baptism, can be laid at the door and say because I have done this, this is perfect and I merit God’s response. No, because every human work, including baptism, is tinged with sin and can’t be perfect. Everything we touch is tinged with sin; there’s no perfection in us. There’s only one person that ever walked the face of this earth that was perfect and that was Jesus Christ. Everything, including religious acts, prayer, witnessing, apologetics, study, is tinged with sin, therefore there is no demand going to be laid upon you and therefore the issue for you is what you’re doing right now in response to God’s offered grace. The issue isn’t what you did yesterday; the issue isn’t all the crud that you’re bringing into the situation today. Abraham had his too. The issue is, are you responding to what God’s telling you to do, that’s the issue; He’s not interested in all the fine points of what went on yesterday. Don’t let yesterday’s sin be today’s block.
A second principle that we obtain from this: faith, Abraham’s faith, was in something unseen and still far off. Abraham’s faith was in something unseen and way off in the future. It was not something seen in his immediate circumstance. Now that’s easy to say but we get very frustrated when we really have to face that same situation because how often have you come into a situation, well I’ve had it, this is the end of my rope, I don’t see any light in the situation. That’s right, the light isn’t in the situation, the light is in the Word of God out ahead of the situation. The light is in the Word of God about tomorrow’s situation; it isn’t in this situation. Right. It’s wrong to get depressed over I don’t see any light in the situation. Did Abraham see any light in the situation involving his body and Sarah’s body? No light there. So he too could have said I’ve come to the end of my rope and I don’t see any light in the situation. But God says he looked afar off at what tomorrow’s situation was going to bring. So our faith has got to be over today’s circumstances into what is promised tomorrow, a future oriented faith. If you don’t get this you can never respond, really, to the disappointments and heartaches and pressures that you’re going to face.
A third point, not only was the faith imperfect, not only was it far off and something unseen, but the faith was primarily centered in God’s character… primarily centered in God’s attributes. This is why, in our family training program coming up, the one thing we want to train our children in before we tell them Jesus stories or who did this or what happened, we want our children to know the attributes of God; that’s the center, and after they know that then we’ll discuss the niceties of who Jesus is and what He did and so on. But if you child, parents, does not know the attributes of God, then he hasn’t got to first base in spiritual upbringing.
Now let’s think about some applications of this. If our faith is centered in God’s essence, not to believe or not to have that faith is an insult to His character. If our faith is hanging off of His character, then not to hang off His character is to insult His character. Un-faith insults God. Take for example one every day illustration. Somebody says well, I’ve sinned and it’s so bad and so ugly and so awful in its ramifications, I just don’t believe that God can forgive me. Do you just realize what you’ve said? You’ve said that you’ve made a sin that is so big that it’s bigger than God’s character to forgive it. Now where do you get the audacity to claim that you are so titanic in your historic role that you can screw up such that you can undo all of God’s plans? Now isn’t that quite a titanic statement to make? That your power in sinning excels God’s own sovereignty? What audacity. But that’s the hidden audacity in that claim… well, I can’t be forgiven.
The final and fourth principle about faith, faith was the proof of God’s electing and justifying work in Abraham’s life. You see, we can’t tell where God’s Spirit is at work, except as we see faith happening. If you don’t see faith happening in other people and in your own heart, then you have no assurance that God is at work, none whatever. See, that’s the danger; today religious emotionalism, you’ve got to get high on Jesus, which unfortunately in many terms means nothing more than getting high on a drug, the result appears to be the same. That’s not proving that God’s Spirit as it at work. What’s proving God’s Spirit is at work, when you can see and individual person, or a group of people who take the Word of God seriously and are struggling on a daily basis to implement it by faith; that’s the sign that the Spirit’s working; no other sign. Some of them may be ecstatic, some of them may not be. There may be feelings with it but the feelings aren’t the sign of the Spirit’s working; only the increasing behavioral conformity to the revelation of God, evidence, in other words, of what we started with this morning, you can’t be more stable than your faith object is. And when you see people exercising their faith in God as the object you’re going to see stable people, faithful people. To go along with this, our closing hymn….