Abraham Believed
Romans 4:1-4; Genesis 15:6
Just a little bit
of review. The real issue in salvation
is not what is normally presented in most gospel presentations. Not that that makes most gospel presentations
terribly wrong, but if you look at most presentations, they start with the
question somehow related to life. “Would
you like to have eternal life? Would you
like to go to heaven when you die?” The
issue really in salvation is not so much a matter of life, although that is
definitely part of it because the major problem we have is a lack of life or
born spiritually dead. The other part of
the problem is that we are not righteous.
How do we get righteousness? As I
have pointed out before in our study of Romans, the focus of Paul is on how we
get righteousness.
Righteousness and
justice are word groups that are built off of the same basic root words in both
Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament. There are other words that also indicate
especially justice, but righteousness relates to the standard of God’s
character and justice the application of God’s standard to His creatures. It is God’s love that is the expression of
that integrity to His creatures in providing a solution based on grace for the
application for the gift of righteousness to people. That is really what Romans is all about.
Sometimes I think
we ought to approach an evangelism situation a little differently and ask them,
“Would you like to be perfectly righteous?”
See what kind of response we will get from that kind of approach. That is really what Romans is all about – how
we get this gift of righteousness and what the implications are for us to have
this gift we receive in salvation.
In Romans 4, Paul
is going to give two illustrations to help his readers understand how we get
righteousness. This is not something
new. This whole idea of righteousness by
faith alone, and not from works or morality or the Mosaic Law, is not a new
idea. He is going to go to two Old
Testament individuals in order to illustrate that it is always on the basis of
faith not works that we receive righteousness.
The first
illustration is the key one, and that is Abraham. He introduces the topic with a rhetorical
question in Romans 4:1 “What then shall we say that Abraham our father has
found according to the flesh?” When he
uses the term flesh, he is talking about him in terms of his humanity. What has he found in the physical realm? Has he found spiritual righteousness, an
eternal righteousness or has he just found a relative righteousness?
Then he explains
the question further in verse 2, giving the answer “For if Abraham was
justified by works …”
This is where we have the verb dikaioo [dikaiow], which is formed on the root dike [dikh].
That root then is modified by various suffixes to indicate different
aspects of either righteousness or justification in terms of the verb. Justification is really the idea of being
declared righteous. It is a judicial
term, a courtroom term.
If you have been
following the Michael Jackson trial related to his doctor or some of the other
trials, that is the idea. What happens
in the courtroom - when a court case goes to the jury and the jury is going to
return a verdict.
There have been some relatively infamous ones over the last decade or
two where people are convinced (we think of the OJ Simpson trial) of someone’s
guilt, but the jury finds them not guilty.
That is a judicial declaration.
It does not have anything to do actually with whether or not the person
who committed the crime is guilty. It
has to do with whether or not there is the proper evidence, so that they can
determine judicially that that person is guilty.
That is a good way
to understand what we have. We are
guiltier than you ever thought OJ Simpson was in terms of sin and violating
God’s standard of righteousness. But we
are declared not just not guilty, but we are declared
righteous because we are judicially given that gift of righteousness. It is not given to us in the way that makes
us righteous, it does not make us moral, it does not obliterate part of the sin
nature, it does not limit the sin nature so we are not as capable of sin as we
were before (we know better than that if we are being honest).
If you were saved like
I was when you were young, your sin nature just did not have enough opportunity
yet to demonstrate its true core capacity for evil if you were five, six or
seven years old. By the time you got to
be 14 or 15, it was beginning to, in Navy terms, get its sea legs and really
operate, especially if you talk to your parents about the time you hit
adolescence.
The sin nature and
the fact that we were born spiritually dead mean that we have this
predisposition to unrighteousness. That
does not mean that everything we do is bad or sinful. In a sense it is because it all comes from
the sin nature, and we have no other nature from which it can come. But what it means is that in terms of God’s
standard of perfection, no matter how good we are relatively speaking, we are
never good enough to reach His standard of absolute perfection.
Even Jesus when
talking to His disciples recognized that mankind does good things. He says in Matthew
In Romans 4:3,
Paul gives his example from Genesis 15.
“For what does the Scripture say?”
He points out just methodologically the issue is always go back to the
Scripture. In fact, I was over at a
Jewish friend’s house (he is not a believer) and was there with another Jewish
business woman. The one friend was talking
to her about me being a wonderful evangelical and how my church loves
We always have to
go back to what the Bible says. Paul is
demonstrating that in Romans 4:3 when he says, “What does the Scripture
say?” The Scripture is the authority, so
we have to go back and determine what the Scripture says.
Let’s go back to
Genesis 15 and get the context of this significant verse. The verse he quotes is Genesis 15:6 “And he
believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.” That is the NKJV. This is an incredibly important passage, and
its interpretation is controversial, even among those who hold to a free grace
gospel.
There are some who
take this to mean that the belief that is talked about in verse six is belief
in the promise that God has just now made to Abraham that his descendants would
come through him and not through, for example, an adoption of Eliezer. There are
others - solid on the gospel, free grace advocates and dispensationalists – who
would say that verse six does not refer to what is happening right here but is
more parenthetical and is a reminder of something Abraham had already done
prior to this. He was not justified in
the events of Genesis 15:1-5 but was justified already – probably before
Genesis 12. That is the view I take.
Chapter 15 can
really be divided into two sections. In verses
1-5 God is promising to Abraham a covenant, and that covenant would bring
blessing to him and his seed. That is
the key idea. If you want to trace the
main idea through Genesis, you trace that word seed. From the very beginning of sin, God promised
to Eve that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent. All the genealogies in Genesis 5, 10, 11 and
the rest of the Old Testament trace the seed, all the way down to the genealogies
in Matthew 1 and in Luke 3. Those two
genealogies have two different purposes.
People think Matthew gives the genealogy of Joseph, and they teach that
is the legal claim that Jesus had to the throne through His adopted father
Joseph. They say Luke 3 traces the genealogy
(leaves in a lot of gaps) from Adam to Jesus through Mary, and that is the
physical line of descent. But that is
wrong.
The reason Matthew
gives a genealogy is not to show that Jesus has a legal right to the throne of
David through His adopted father Joseph.
Joseph was a descendant through Coniah. Jeconiah was one of
the last and most evil kings in the southern kingdom. God pronounced a judgment, a curse on him
that no descendant of his would sit on the throne of
You trace the
whole seed line down through Genesis. Is
the seed going to come physically through this man who is past his ability to
father children? Is it going to come
literally through him and Sarah, who is also beyond her years to have a child,
to become pregnant? Or is God going to give
Abraham a physical descendant? This is
the focal point of this passage.
That is the first section
– God’s reiteration of the promise in Genesis 15:5 when He tells Abraham to
look at the stars in the sky and that his descendants would be more numerable. From verses 7-21, we have the covenant
cutting ceremony, the formal ceremony, when God makes the covenant with Abram. It is concluded in verse 18 “On the same day
the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your descendants I have given
this land, from the
This prelude, the
initial declaration to the chapter in these first five verses (hinge verse in
verse six which is our focal point) is designed to reiterate the promise that
has already been made. The covenant is
not cut formally, the contract is not signed as it
were, until we get into verses 7-17. The
promise of giving the covenant is made as far back as Genesis 12. That is one reason we know that this
statement of Abram’s faith in Yahweh must go back to events before an initial promise was given.
Verse six fits as
a parenthetical statement that is a reminder of the foundation for the promise. The foundation for the promise is Abram’s
belief in God and the fact that God had imputed to him righteousness. Because he was now righteous, God could give
him this covenant.
The Abrahamic Covenant as it is set forth specifically in this
chapter, and also in the numerous repetitions, is a distinct kind of covenant
in the ancient world. There was an
article that was published in the early part of the 1960s entitled “The
Covenant of Grant in the Old Testament and the Ancient Near East” by Moshe Weinfeld at the
It is important to
understand that there were basically two different kinds of contract forms that
were prominent in the ancient Near East.
Now we call it the
In the ancient
Near East, you had two types of covenants.
One is a covenant where the king would promise certain benefits,
conditioned on the behavior of his people or a client nation or a feudal
servant. If you are obedient and guard
my borders and are productive, then I will do these positive things for
you. If you are disobedient and you do not
provide enough tax revenue or enough agricultural products or protect me from
my enemies, I will punish you in certain ways.
That would become a very formal type of contract by the middle of the 2nd
century BC (around 1500 or 1400 BC) and became known as the suzerain-vassal
treaty form. That really is the pattern
for the Mosaic Law, designed with a somewhat conditional sort of nature to it.
But to a servant
that had been obedient, that had blessed the sovereign, there was another kind
of treaty. It was called a royal grant
treaty, where one who was already an obedient servant is given an additional
grace blessing based on the fact that he had been obedient. It was not because he had been obedient he
would get this – it was totally at the discretion of the king. That is what we have in the Abrahamic Covenant.
At the
introduction to his article, Weinfeld writes, “Two
types of covenants are found in the Old Testament. The obligatory type reflected in the covenant
of God with
That is exactly
what we have in Genesis 12:3. God tells
Abram He is going to give him this land, so he is to leave
Weinfeld goes on to say, “In other words, the grant
serves mainly to protect the rights of the servant, while the treaty comes to
protect the rights of the master. What
is more, the grant is a reward for loyalty and good deeds already
performed. The treaty is an inducement
for future loyalties.” If this is true,
God is giving the Abrahamic Covenant to Abraham, and
he is already entered into a relationship with God. It is not that God gives him the covenant and
later he would become justified. That
would not fit the pattern that we see in this type of covenant.
We see these two
sections in Genesis 15 – God’s reiteration of the promise in verses 1-5, a
reminder of the basis for the promise, the real cause of the promise in verse
six, and the covenant itself being cut in the formal ceremony in verses 7-17.
At the beginning,
God promises that Abram will have an heir who is a direct physical descendant
of Abram and Sarah. God appears to him
and says in Genesis 15:1 “After these things (which are the events of chapter
14, the rescue of
Genesis 15: 1-2
“After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, ‘Do
not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield,
your exceedingly great reward.’ But Abram
said, ‘Lord God, what will You give me, seeing I go
childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of
Damascus?’” We see that Abram is not
quite focused on the fact yet that God is going to be able to give him a son
through his own body. He shows a level
of doubt there.
I want you to note
the progression of this narrative grammatically. It starts out “After these things…” There is a clear break between the events preceding in chapter 14 and the beginning of this
episode. This is completely
different. There is not a continuation
of events, but this is something that takes place sometime later. God appears to Abram in a vision, and Abram speaks
to God. In the Hebrew, it would not have
to be a “but”; it could be a “then.” The
vav is the
Hebrew conjunction “and.” Hebrew
narrative is a little bit repetitive and redundant and boring. “And this happened and this happened and this
happened.” You have a vav consecutive
there plus an imperfect tense of the verb.
That just shows ongoing narrative:
God spoke to Abram in a vision and then Abram made this statement and
then in verse three Abram said which starts out in the same kind of
construction.
Genesis 15:3 “Then
Abram said, ‘Look, You have given me no offspring; indeed one born in my house
is my heir!’ ” This was the custom of the time.
A couple might be childless and would give a faithful servant (that
royal grant idea again) something to reward him for his faithfulness. He would have already entered into a
relationship with that family.
In verse four
there is a break in the narrative. “And
behold the word of the Lord came to him, saying, ‘This
one (Eliezer) shall not be your heir, but one who
will come from your own body shall be your
heir.’ ” It is not the normal progression of the narrative with a vav
consecutive. There is a break there.
Then you have this
same grammatical construction in verse five “Then He brought him outside …” You have “the word
of the Lord came to him” and then “He brought him outside and said, ‘Look now
toward heaven, and count the starts if you are able to number them.’ And he said to him, ‘So shall your
descendants be.’ ”
This happens and then this happens and then this happens. Then verse six says “And he believed in the
Lord…” But that is not what it says in
the Hebrew. In the ongoing narrative, it
is a vav plus
an imperfect tense of the verb, but here you have a vav plus a perfect tense of the
verb, which means that the action is completely thrown off. It shows that verse six is not a continuation
of the story that the events of verse six follow verse five. It shows that there is a break in the
writer’s thinking, and he goes off on a tangent. The grammar here indicates that verse six is
not the next logical step in the progression, but there is a break in the
action. That would indicate, just on the
grammar at that point, that what happens in verse six
is taking us to some other event.
Let us look at the
grammar here in Genesis 15:6. The first
verb is he’emin,
which is the hifil perfect of the verb to trust or
believe. All the others were
imperfect. It is important here because
it makes us realize that God is not promising a covenant to Abram and then
Abram gets saved because he believes it.
This gracious gift of this promise to Abram is being given to one who is
already a member of the family, already a believer. We are being reminded of this – “Now,
remember, Abram had already believed in the Lord, and it had already been
imputed to him as righteousness.” What
the writer Moses is saying here is remember what the foundation for the promise
is. It is the grace of God in giving
Abram righteousness on the basis of his faith.
I put up here on
the screen three different translations.
The first is the NKJV “And he believed in the Lord, and He
accounted it to him for righteousness.”
The next is from the Tanakh, which is the
Jewish Publication Society translation of 1985, which is a little more
modern. The third is from the JPS Tanakh from 1917. Tanakh is what the
Jews called the Old Testament. It is an
acronym for the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim – the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. They just take those initial consonants and
make the word Tanakh.
The Tanakh 1985 version “And because he put his trust in the
Lord, He reckoned it to his merit.” The
word for merit is tsedeq. It really does not have to do with merit as
much as it has to do with righteousness.
That throws it off target a little.
The Tanakh 1917 version “And he believed in
the Lord; and He counted it to him for righteousness.” A much better translation. The Jewish Tanakhs
are not any
different than English Bibles. I could put up five different English
translations, and you would find these kinds of little differences in the way
the translators handled some things. Too
many translators want to add their interpretation into a translation, rather
than just simply translating it.
John Sailhammer, who wrote the commentary on Genesis in the Expositor’s
Bible Commentary series, makes a good analogy here:
“Recognition of Abram’s faith at this point
in the story, however, should not be taken as the initiation of his faith.
Abram had already responded earlier to the call and promise of God’s word
(12:1–3). Just as the covenant ritual of chap. 15 does not initiate God’s
commitment but formally ratifies it, so the narration’s affirmation of Abram’s
faith in v. 6 declares the faith Abram had
exercised from the outset.”
He and a number
of other commentators would take the same view that I take, and that is this
goes back to something much earlier. In
some of the legends of the Jews, they put Abram’s belief in God back as far as
the time he was 40 or 50 years of age, long before God appeared to him and
called him to come forth from
We are looking at
this verb amen, where we get our noun
amen which we utter at the end of a prayer.
It is one of two primary words for faith in the Old Testament: this word
and the word batach. There are slight differences in the emphasis
that each one brings to the table. We’ll
just talk about amen tonight.
The root meaning of the Hebrew concept of belief has to do with stability
or certainty. I believe something means
that I am certain, I am assured, I am positive that this
is true. It is not like what you will
hear from a lot of liberal theologians and liberals in other areas that say,
“This is what we know for sure, but beyond that, that is in the realm of
faith.” They always do that.
I was reading a book this morning that is a good book to wake up with,
get your blood pressure going, get you all stimulated early before you ever get
out of bed and get your coffee going.
You are wide awake because you are mad.
It is a book on the Israel/Palestinian conflict. I was writing nasty comments in the margin
almost from the first paragraph. You can
tell from things they say that they completely reject any value in anything
that the Bible says. “That is just
something of faith. That doesn’t give us
any idea of what was going on at the time.
You just cannot trust it at all.”
It is like you can know something or have
faith, but they are opposites.
But the Bible sees faith as an element of knowledge in certainty. We have gone over this before that the way we
come to learn things is one of four different ways. 1) Through the use of reason,
rationalism. Plato in
the ancient world and Descartes in the more modern world, the Enlightenment. It is that reason alone can lead us to
truth. 2) Empiricism says reason cannot
really get you outside of your own head (that was the critique of
Descartes). You have to go with sense
knowledge – what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Only what you can see, hear, smell, taste or
touch can lead you to true knowledge. 3)
Mysticism (It always follows this flow in history. First you have rationalism and that fails;
then you have empiricism and that fails.
You can’t get there on the basis of logic, so let us leap there in
mysticism.) Mysticism always follows the
skepticism that comes from the failure of rationalism or empiricism.
What they all have in common is that they all have a belief in the
ability of the human brain to properly decode and interpret data, whether it is
intellectual data or external data. They
are all grounded in faith. Rationalism
is built on faith assumptions.
Empiricism is based on faith assumptions. Mysticism is based on faith assumptions. It is not faith vs. reason or
empiricism. Rationalism, empiricism and
mysticism are all grounded on an assumption, a belief that man can properly
interpret the data without any outside input at all.
Over against those three we have 4) Revelation. Revelation is an authority (God) explaining
or giving information to man you cannot get from rationalism, empiricism or
mysticism; and man again responds by believing the content of what God has
revealed. Faith is operative in every
system of knowledge. It is not faith or
knowledge; faith is a component in any kind of knowledge.
That is what is emphasized in this word amen which is the conviction of certainty in your knowledge. The root meaning of the Hebrew concept is
that of stability and certainty. One of
the places where we get evidence of this is in this verse 2 Kings 18:16 “At
that time Hezekiah stripped the gold from the door of the temple of the Lord,
and from the doorposts which Hezekiah king of Judah had overlaid, and gave it
to the King of Assyria [the foundational support of the pillars].”
This is the time of the Sennacherib invasion into
Some of you have been to
That is why that word is used there.
Faith has to do with this sense of certainty. In Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is a certainty of knowledge apart from
empiricism or rationalism, but it is based on the authority of God’s Word
telling us something. We believe it to
be true, and it is just as real as if we had witnessed it in the laboratory,
just as if we had measured and weighed it.
Just because we have not seen or tasted or touched it or do not have the
presuppositions to make up the major assumptions as the basis for the
conclusion in a logical argument does not mean it is not just as true. It is just as true because God said it.
There used to be a bumper sticker back in the 1970s that said, “God said
it. I believe it. That settles it.” What is wrong with that? It should read, “God said it. That settles it. I believe it.” It is not settled because I believe it; it is
settled because God said it. You always
have to make sure that the authority is the Word of God. God said it; therefore, it is true. Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant.
In the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, the writer makes
the point that in the hifil stem, which is what we
have here in Genesis 15, the verb amen
basically means to cause something to be certain or sure, to be assured. This is the sense that we have for the way
the word is used in terms of belief. We
believe it because it is sure; there is a sense of certainty in our minds that
a statement is true. The other
interesting thing about amen as
opposed to batach
is amen is used mostly in response to
something said by someone else. God
makes a promise, and we amen, we
believe it. As opposed to passages where
you are exhorted to trust in the Lord, that would be batach. Amen
expresses a person’s response to a statement or promise by God. Faith or belief then means that someone has a
sense of assurance or certainty that something is true.
We have another example of how faith is used in Exodus 4, which is in the
middle of a conversation that God is having with Moses giving him his commission
to go to the pharaoh to free the Israelites.
The chapter begins with God telling Moses to go, and Moses said,
“Suppose they will not believe me or listen to my voice.” It is the response to a voice that comes out
in that particular verse. God then gives
him evidence. There is nothing wrong
with basing faith on evidence. It is not
a faith that is just a leap of faith.
Leap of faith terminology is existential; it is not biblical. We do not believe something with no evidence. God
gives all kinds of evidence in the Scripture.
Luke tells us in Acts 1:3, after the resurrection Jesus presented Himself to the disciples and gave them “many infallible
proofs” of the resurrection. God does
not say to park your brain in neutral and believe something. There is evidence.
There are going to be signs and miracles that Moses is going to perform
before pharaoh. Later on Moses says, “I
just cannot talk very well.” God says He
will send Aaron as his spokesperson. Exodus 4:28-30 “So Moses told Aaron all the words
of the Lord who had sent him, and all the signs which He had commanded
him. Then Moses and Aaron went and
gathered together all the elders of the children of
Ten chapters later in Exodus 14:30 after the parting of the
Exodus 14:31 “Thus Israel saw the great work which the Lord had done in
Egypt; so the people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord and his servant
Moses.” Here is another interesting
point: we often see fear of the Lord and belief in the Lord used in parallel
constructions in numerous passages. So
that in those passages, fear of the Lord goes beyond simply awe or respect for
God. It almost becomes a synonym for
believing God because He is in authority.
Abram believed in the Lord. To
believe something means to agree that something is true. It is intellectual. Sometimes you will hear people talk about the
distinction between head belief and heart belief, but we do not believe with our
heart, in terms of a physical organ.
When you use those metaphors in Scripture of head or heart, it is not in
the context of this head vs. heart theology: “That is intellectual, but you
have to believe with your emotions.” The
Bible does not make those kinds of distinctions anywhere. Belief itself is an intellectual or mental
activity. When someone says, “I agree, I
affirm, I assent to the fact the “x” is true.”
Some people say, “That is a pretty superficial kind of faith in you –
just to assent to the fact that something is true.”
Let me see. Something we all do
every year that is rather disagreeable is to fill out our income tax
returns. When we finish them and sign
them, you are saying that you agree that the numbers that are in your return
are true and accurate. You agree that it
is true and then sign it and quit working on it. If you did not agree that it was true, you
would keep working on it. When we agree
that something is true, that is all there is to it. We believe it and stop working on it. To say it is intellectual assent is not a
wimp-out or shortchanged view of faith, which is what many Christians
want. They have to add works to it
somewhere. They have to bring it in the
backdoor, the side door, bring it in through the attic – they have to introduce
works into it. Faith is simply believe – you don’t believe with your finger or your toe or
your elbow. You believe with your brain,
your mind which is between your ears.
You think through a concept and say, “Is this true or not?” If you say, “Yes, it is
true. Jesus died for my sins,”
that is faith.
When Abram heard the promise of God, he had no idea how God would pull
this off. But he knew God and knew God’s
character, so he trusted and believed in the Lord literally. Genesis 15:6 “And he believed in the Lord,
and He accounted it to him for righteousness.”
This is another interesting word – chshv. In this construction, it
is actually cheshbeha. It has this “ah” suffix which is a
feminine suffix. It means “it” so it is
a feminine “it” which means it has to refer to a feminine noun. Righteousness, which is the next word, is a
feminine noun tsedeq. So it does not say, “Abram believed in the
Lord, and He accounted IT to him for righteousness.” It says, “…He accounted IT, righteousness,
to him.” It is appositional. The righteousness defines the pronoun
it. There are places where you have that
kind of construction.
A couple of verses that talk about imputation are 2 Samuel 19:19 “…Do not
let my lord impute iniquity to me…”
Psalm 32:2 “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity…”
Exodus 2:6, Leviticus 13:57, and 1 Kings 19:21 are among a number of
verses that are cited in the grammars for the exact kind of grammatical
construction that we have here in Genesis 15:6, where you have a verb “He
imputed” with a suffix on the end which is a pronoun. Exodus 2:6 “…she saw him, the child…” Saw, the verb, would have the pronoun suffix
added at the end of that verb, and then you have the noun explaining who the
pronoun describes. Leviticus
Genesis 15:6 should be translated “And he had already believed in
Yahweh.” The object of his faith is God
as the one who is the guarantor of the promise.
“…and He (the Lord) accounted (imputed) it, righteousness, to him.” It is clear that the imputation of
righteousness is a result of faith, not of works, not of the Law. Abraham precedes Moses by over 400 years,
before there is any covenant. It is
based solely on faith.
We will come back next time and look a little more at the meaning of tsedeq,
righteousness. This is a really
important word and really important within Judaism today because they have
added this notion of merit and morality to it.
But it is foundational within the Old Testament, and the New Testament
translations of dikaios
[dikaioj] and dikaiosune [dikaiosunh]. This
helps us understand that we are saved not because there is anything in us. We are given a gift of righteousness that
covers us like a cloak, and it does not matter what is under the cloak in terms
of our salvation. What matters is that
God looks at the cloak that is over us (Christ’s righteousness), and on that
basis, God says, “I judicially declare you righteous.” That is what justification by faith alone is.