Romans 4 - Receive or deserve - by Ken Clezy
Romans 4
Romans 4. Paul spent the first 2 chapters teaching us that all are sinners, Jews and Gentiles alike, and a day of judgement is coming for us all. That could have raised a few hackles, because Jews thought they were superior to everybody else, which meant that they would pass the judgement more easily and certainly than lesser mortals would. In fact, many believed, as they do today, that the exodus from Egypt was national redemption that has translated to individual redemption, so surely redeemed people needn't be too worried about judgement. So Paul spells out in some detail that all mankind are sinners, and if all are sinners, all will face judgment.
Then in ch 3 he says we are justified (declared not guilty) and accepted by God through our faith, not because of our works. Some of his Jewish hearers, or readers, would have objected immediately, because at that time it was widely believed, especially among the Pharisees, that God had accepted Abraham because of his good works. There are non-biblical writings of the time, writings by leading Jewish rabbis that say this. Many Jews believed it was because of his good deeds that God called Abraham his friend, and blessed him in the wonderful way he did. And there's no denying it; Abraham did some great works. He was the greatest of the patriarchs and the father of the nation, their example in so many ways. His descendants reckoned that if Abraham was justified by works, so were they.
Paul won't have a bar of justification by works. He admits as a theoretical possibility that if Abraham was justified by works, he could boast about it before men, but not before God. Why? Because God's standards are utterly different from ours, and what seems good to us is still very poor quality by God's standards. Understanding that should keep us humble.
Paul begins his defence of his position by admitting that we earn some of the good things we receive: our wages, for example. He immediately contrasts this with what we receive, not by earning it, or because we deserve it, or for some other reason. He says it's by faith that we will be credited with righteousness. What that means, we will come to in a minute.
As he so often does, Paul goes to scripture to prove his point. Some say he deliberately uses the singular – scripture, not scriptures – to indicate that scripture is a unit, and should always be treated as such. True, but whether Paul had that in mind is doubtful. 'What does the scripture say?' he asks. He quotes Ge 15:6: 'Abraham believed God, and his faith was credited to him as righteousness.' When was this said of Abraham? We might think it was when he trusted God to provide the sacrificial lamb on Mt Moriah. That was a massive exhibition of his faith, certainly, but God had accepted him because of his faith long before that day.
When Abraham was living in Haran, in northeast Syria, God told him to leave his father's house and go to Canaan. That was a big ask, because Abraham was comfortable, he was 75, yet God wanted him to leave his father and his people and go to a foreign land. He'd already been uprooted once, many years earlier, when God told his father to round up his family and leave Ur (near Baghdad) and go where he would show him, which was Haran. Move again? Yes. God told him he would make him a great nation, he would give him that land (Canaan) and that all the world would be blessed through him. It was Abraham's faith – his confidence - that God would deliver on those promises that earned him God's approval. He got up and went south, and when he got to Canaan the real test came. He was very unhappy because he had no heir, and he was at an age when he wanted to get his affairs in order, so God repeated his promises. Abraham believed God, and it was then that Ge 15:6 says Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness.
What does credited as righteousness mean? We find out if we read the verses Paul quotes to prove his point. Ps 32: 1,2a says, 'Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.' Those verses speak of forgiveness only. No mention of goodness, which is what we usually understand righteousness to mean. In Romans Paul consistently uses righteous and righteousness to mean justified (declared not guilty). Ro 5:7 is an example of what he means: 'Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, but for a good man someone might possibly dare to die.' Clearly, Paul is contrasting righteous and good here. In English righteous and good have virtually the same meaning, but in Greek 'righteous' and 'good' are entirely different words, while 'righteous' and 'justified' are very closely related. That's where confusion arises. For Paul the righteous man is the justified man, declared not guilty. His virtue score has been raised from a negative to a zero, not to a positive. He is still unproved, hasn't done anything virtuous, so who would reckon him worth sacrificing a life for? On the other hand, the good man has achieved virtue, has a positive record, so much so that someone might feel able to give their life for him.
So Paul has said that faith, not works, is our way of satisfying God's requirements. At v 9 he goes for the other great Jewish icon, circumcision. Circumcision was, and still is, regarded as the great sign of Jewishness. Paul would have horrified many people when he says circumcision won't get you there; some rabbis taught that Abraham stood at the gate of hell, to make sure no circumcised Jew went through it. Now Paul teaches that Abraham's circumcision was no more than a seal to say that God had already accepted him as the result of his faith. He shows that Abraham was right with God long before he was circumcised.
In this chapter Paul says three times that Abraham is the father of us all, by which he means our spiritual father. He means Jews and Gentiles are on the same level, in every respect. Jews who thought circumcision was the ultimate badge and proof that God had accepted them would have been disappointed with Paul. They thought both works and circumcision made them superior to the rest of us, and Paul has taken those two distinctions away.
So good works have gone, circumcision has gone. What's left? The Law, of which Jews were so proud. In v 13 Paul demolishes this last Jewish hope when he argues that it wasn't because of anything to do with the law that Abraham received the promises. Many of them believed that having the Law put then right with God, regardless of whether or not they obeyed it. (In ch 2 he accused them of relying on the law and bragging about their relationship with God, and thinking they would escape judgement, even though they broke the law.) This is his first mention of law in this chapter. The law was given long after Abraham's time – 400 years later, as he reminds us in Galatians – so how could it have had anything to do with his acceptance? Yet the great Jewish argument was that Abraham's faithful adherence to the law was among the reasons why God was pleased him. Paul says there are only the two options, law or grace, and if law is the key, our faith is useless. The law didn't earn Abraham the promises. How could it anyway, because the law is bad news. Why? Because it brings wrath, Paul says. How is that? Because the law can't be obeyed perfectly, and if we're guilty on one count we're guilty on them all. So Paul has rejected all three Jewish assumptions about how God accepted them, or us.
v15 troubles many commentators, who have difficulty understanding why Paul introduces this thought here: 'Where there is no law there is no transgression.' (Transgression means breaking a law. Sin has a wider scope, including things that aren't specifically forbidden in the law – pride and jealousy, for example.) Let's not worry about how the verse fits in with Paul's argument at this place in chapter 4, but standing alone it still has meaning. It concerns a subject that seems to have been on his mind when he wrote Romans. He says much the same in 5:13 - 'Sin is not taken into account where there is no law'. And back in 2:12 he says 'All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law.' Whatever else these three verses are saying, they tell us that God doesn't judge everybody by the same standard. Most evangelicals shy away from that interpretation, because some people have gone on and said it's not important to preach the gospel to the heathen because we think they will face a softer judgement. But that's a terribly wrong conclusion to reach, because even if God judges them according to their tribal law only, they are certain to fail. And, on the positive side, if we know what a huge blessing it is to be God's child, to have peace with God and the peace of God, to live in daily fellowship with him, we must agree that everyone on earth has the right to know, and it surely is our business to do what we can to give them that opportunity. So don't let the idea God doesn't judge everybody in exactly the same way lead to slackening of Christian witness, either here or overseas.
v16,17: the promise comes by faith. What promise? As far as Abraham was concerned, there were at least three: that he would have many descendants, that he would inherit the land that God was sending him to, Canaan, and that the whole world be blessed through him.
1. Many descendants: our society doesn't value large families like some do. They're still valued tremendously in the Middle East, and occasionally they are here too. My son has 9, and it's one of the best families I know. Large families learn to look after each other, they learn to make do, they learn to be unselfish, and in fact they learn many of the qualities we need if we're to function properly as members of our community. But God promised Abraham more than that; he promised him a line that would never be extinguished.
2. Land: the land of Israel is God's chosen people's land, and will be until the end of time, even though they have lost it several times. Admittedly, the Israelis don't look like they deserve it now, but they've been like that all through history. The fact that God has persisted with the Jews for so long shows how gracious he is, and what is the strength, the unbreakable strength, of that promise he made to Abraham.
3. All the world will be blessed. None of us can say that with any certainty about our legacy. We may think our families have been blessed through us - I hope they are - but we can't claim that people a thousand years in the future - if Jesus doesn't return before then - will be blessed because of us. Abraham could.
Did Abraham grasp what a great thing God was doing for him? Jesus said Abraham rejoiced to see my day. It's hard know what that means exactly, but surely it means God gave Abraham unusual insight into what was coming, long after him.
God has promises for us too, the promise of new life in Christ, with all that means here and now. The same grace that God showed to Abraham, he shows to all of us. He deals with us all in the same way. Again, it's as if we're all one big family, Abraham's family. We may not feel that that's special, but to those Gentile Christians in Paul's time who felt on the outer it would have been comfort far greater than we may realise. And it was a lesson Paul had to drive into Jews, whether or not they were Christians.
v17: 'God who gives life to the dead.' What does that mean? Many commentators think it is a reference to Jesus's resurrection. Like all the apostles, Paul doesn't go far without speaking of the resurrection: look at the sermons in Acts. Or he may be referring to the new life God gives to the spiritually dead. He doesn't make it clear.
'Calls things that are not as though they were.' Another obscure verse, perhaps refers to the future generations of Abraham's line, not yet actual, but spoken of as if they were, in God's sight.
v18: a new paragraph with a new thought. 'Against all hope . . . ' Abraham was almost 100 and Sarah well past childbearing. Paul says Abraham didn't waver because of unbelief . . . He says he was fully convinced that God has power to do what he had promised. Three times Paul seems to slide over Abraham's failure of faith; more than that, he speaks positively about him. If you have a NIV with footnotes you will find a ridiculous comment on v19: "Abraham had some anxious moments." So anxious that he took Sarah's advice and fathered a child on her maid, Hagar. That wasn't simply an error of judgement that caused a few domestic problems; it was a gross sin. Why do I say that? Because the son Hagar had was Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, and therefore Abraham can be held responsible for Islam. We haven't seen much of what Islam will do to countries regarded as Christian, but we're beginning to, and the prospects aren't good. It's not too much to say we can blame all that on Abraham. Why does Paul ignore Abraham's massive failure of faith, and his gross sin? Because God did. God wrote king Saul off and started again with David. Why didn't he write Abraham off and start again? It was because he had already promised to bless him and his descendants. So Abraham is a marvellous example of God's grace, of his faithfulness to his promises.
It sometimes happens that a Christian's peace with God is damaged by the nagging memory of some past sin. If it does, we should take courage from the experience of Abraham. None of us is likely to have done anything with such everlasting consequences for the entire world as Abraham's fathering of Ishmael. And remember the story of David, when he was frightened he didn't have enough soldiers for a battle, and thought he'd better count the army. Even Joab knew that was a failure of faith, and told him so, but David went ahead. When God said he would punish David, and gave him options to choose from, what did he say? 'Let me fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of man.' We have a marvellously gracious God, more longsuffering than any of us are. So, here Paul overlooks Abraham's massive failings, because God did. Regardless, Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness – he was declared Not Guilty.
Our faith too, Paul says in v 23. God will treat us as he treated Abraham, because we believe in him who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead. Notice Paul's wording here. We often say we believe in Jesus for our salvation, but firstly it's God the Father in whom we believe. Romans is about God. Paul tells Roman Christians that he thanks God through Jesus Christ for them. His prayers are to God the Father, admittedly through Jesus Christ. We too believe in God the Father who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead.
v25: worries some commentators: he was given over for sins ('to death' isn't in the Greek, but must be understood) and was raised to life for our justification. Some say this wording is no more than stylistic variation, but that seems unlikely. Is Paul saying our salvation is achieved in two parts, in two steps? Ro 10:9 could give the same impression: "If you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord' and believe your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." I think the conclusion to be drawn is that Jesus resurrection was seen as the living proof that what he did on the cross worked. People in Jerusalem saw crucifixions regularly, and while the cross may seem to us to be unique, it wasn't so special to Paul and his readers. Jesus's resurrection was the proof that God was with him, that we could believe everything he said. The resurrection of Jesus announced God's kingdom on earth in a new way, and is due course we will experience that same resurrection.
What do we take home from this chapter? That God's promises, made first to Abraham, are for us all. God is faithful to his promises, and we may cling to them in confidence. They are summed up in Jesus words that he will never leave us or forsake us. In all the trials of life, let us never forget that.