of originating action as well as determining it. This is an amazing fallacy.
Israel had tended to the same error with respect to the Law. All such views depersonalized the nature of God and man. “The righteousness of faith” is not impersonal, because it refers to God’s justifying act of atonement. Faith is not mere belief, nor is it a simple knowledge of God; “the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). Faith is the gift of God, and faith rests on the atoning blood of Christ who pays the death penalty for us, justifies us, and makes us a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17).
In v.14, Paul tells us, “For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect.” Lilly commented,
When this promise was made the Law did not exist. If the promise is conditioned on the Law, then the faith of Abraham would be rendered useless. It was faith, not the observance of the Law, that brought about his justification.8
But Paul does not rest his argument on the fact that the Mosaic enscriptured word had not yet been given. He rests it on the nature of God, the law, and the promise. Gifford said, “The argument rests on the assumption that
“law” and “faith” are opposite principles which exclude each other.”9 If the law expresses God’s righteousness, how can it be in opposition to faith? I have two eyes, two arms, two ears, and two feet; is each one opposed to the other? The promise, Paul says simply, was made to faith, and it would void faith if the promise were attached to the law. Note that here the law is seen primarily as circumcision; it is human transmission as against God’s justifying grace. If the promise were not to faith, then Abraham was not justified, because his justification preceded his circumcision. Secondarily but still necessarily, Paul’s reference to the law in v.14 refers to the whole of the law, as his expansion in v.15 makes clear.
The law, says Paul, “worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression” (v.15). The law plainly states that it brings forth both God’s wrath or curses, and also God’s blessings. Is Paul denying this fact? On the contrary, Paul is fully aware that the law contains many promises of blessings (Lev. 26; Deut. 28, etc.), as he says, in Ephesians 6:13,
1. Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
2. Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise;
3. That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.
8. Lilly, op.cit., p. 421.
9. E.H. Gifford, “Romans,” in F.C. Cooke, editor: The Holy Bible, New Testament, vol.III, p. 105. London, England: John Murray, 1881.
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What Paul says is that “the law worketh wrath,” i.e., judgment and condemnation, to transgressors, to covenant-breakers, but he does not deny that it has promises for covenant-keepers. The observance of the law cannot save, but it does sanctify the saved. As Lilly, said, “Law merely indicates what must be done, what avoided. It does not of itself supply the inner strength required for its observance.”10 When Paul adds, “for where no law is, there is no transgression,” he does not say that, before Moses, there was no sin. He has already said that all men, whether Jews or Gentiles, before and after Moses, “have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom.
3:22). Paul is rather telling us that, because God’s law is known by all men, there is therefore universal transgression, so that all men are without excuse (Rom. 1:18-20).
In. v.16, Paul links faith, grace, and the promise, not in opposition to God’s law, but in distinction from it, as the way of salvation. Abraham’s faith rested, he adds in v.18, on two examples of divine and omnipotent power: “(a) God’s power to give life to the dead; (b) His power to call non-existent things into being.”11 Clearly, the people of the Old Testament believed in the resurrection. Note also that God did not tell Abraham that he would become the father of many nations, but “I have made thee the father of many nations.” These peoples were already in God’s predestined plan, and Abraham was already their father.
Paul affirms the total determination of God in Abraham’s calling and justification, and in Abraham’s place in history as the father of those who are heirs of the world (Ps. 37:11,22; Matt. 5:5). He does not declare Abraham justified in order to free him from God’s law of justice but to empower him to faithfulness. The purpose of justification is to free men in history from the power of sin and death and the condemnation of the law in order that men might freely serve and obey their covenant Lord. From being a death sentence, the law becomes to the justified God’s way of life, and the way of blessings.
The promise of inheriting the world cannot be separated from the promise of blessings for faithfulness to God’s law. Only the justified move within the world of promise in all its ramifications. Paul began this passage with the words, “cometh this blessedness,” and he continues by speaking of “the promise.” He has the dominion mandate in mind, and justification is the necessary prerequisite to any attainment of the promise.
10. Lilly, op.cit., p. 421.
11. Idem.
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15. Abraham our Father (Romans 4:18-25)
18. Who [Abraham] against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be.
19. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb:
20. He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God;
21. And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.
22. And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.
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 imputed, if we 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. (Romans 4:18-25)
Paul writes against the misuse of the Old Testament, and for its unity.
Hence, his emphasis on our relationship to Abraham, “our father.” He stresses the need for the right kind of faith, a faith like Abraham’s.
He begins, in v. 18, with an oxymoron, a combination of opposites:
Abraham “against hope believed in hope.” When, humanly speaking, a son by Sarah was an impossibility, he believed that he would have a son. He believed this, not because he wanted to believe it, because faith does not mean believing in our own wishes, but because he believed in God’s promise. Sarah had been barren all her life and was now past the menopause. Because Abraham knew God to be the living and omnipotent Lord and Creator, Abraham trusted God’s word. Abraham’s faith was not in his personal hope but in God’s promise and purpose; to confuse the two is deadly to faith. God had promised that Abraham would be the father of many nations, and this Abraham believed.
In. v. 19, we are told how hopeless the situation seemed. Abraham was about a hundred in age, and both he and Sarah were past the capability of begetting a child. In. v. 20, the fact is stressed again. Faced with a hopeless situation, humanly speaking, Abraham continued “strong in faith, giving glory to God.”
Paul’s stress here needs to be noted. It is a thoroughly Hebraic emphasis.
To speak so plainly about a matter of sexual impotence because of age was, in the Greco-Roman culture, a subject for satire, pornography, or ridicule.
It was not a subject for a theological discussion. Paul makes it precisely that, a very different emphasis than Gentile readers or listeners would expect.
Gentile converts in later years insisted that such a history had to have a
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higher, allegorical, or symbolic meaning. So material a concern on the part of revealed history and writing was disconcerting. For Greco-Romans, the subject matter of low comedy was not good material for theology. Pauline thinking compelled the church to view things Hebraicly, although with difficulty. St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on Romans, dealt forthrightly with the matter, as did Augustine in The City of God.
Hellenism did creep out in Augustine’s comment on Abraham’s later marriage to Keturah: “Far be it from us to suspect him of incontinence, especially when he had reached such an age and such sanctity of faith.” It was in line with neo-platonism to insist that faith and a happy delight in marital sex are incompatible.1 Paul forces Gentile Christians to think in non-Gentile terms; this has always been resented.
Paul now brings the issue to a head: “He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God” (v. 20).
Because we are accustomed to the Bible and its language, we often fail to see its radical character. The climactic point of Paul’s argument has to do with a nomadic herder’s faith that God would give him an heir through whom he would be the father of many nations. There are some very telling differences here from the writings of all other religions. First, the basic texts of other religions often give us general philosophical abstractions, vague noble sentiments, not law. Apart from some ritual requirements, there is no all-encompassing law for man and society. Non-Christian religions preserve their “nobility” by being above politics and law. Second, if they claim to give history, the texts of other, non-Biblical religions give essentially the divine ancestry of the rulers and legends connected with their god-ancestors. This is true of the Japanese Kojiki and Vikongi as well as the Greco-Roman tales of the gods. Third, where men are dealt with, it is to exalt them as heroic. The candid account of Scripture, which gives us Abraham the man in all his ways, is alien to other religions. The pagan view of religion came into clearest focus, although carried to its ultimate nonsense, in Wagner’s operas. Both men and gods in his tales are seen in the dim haze of a heroic masochism.
Paul says, in v. 21, that Abraham was fully persuaded that, what God had promised, God was also able to perform. The emphasis moves us from Abraham to God. Abraham awaits patiently God’s miracle; he is an old and impotent man. Only God’s miracle could alter that fact. Because God’s miracle was so rejuvenating, after Sarah’s death, Abraham remarried and fathered six more sons by Keturah (Gen. 25:1-2). This fact troubled St.
Augustine; perhaps he felt that Abraham, having fathered Isaac, the promised Messianic forefather, should have forsaken the world for the life of a monk until death. God, however, had blessed Abraham, for the
1. Augustine: The City of God, Book XVI, Chapter 34.
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