Romans 4:22-25 “The Pattern”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

²²Wherefore, “It was counted to him into righteousness,” ²³but it was not written that “it was counted to him,” only because of him, ²⁴but also for us, to whom it will be counted, to those believing upon the One who raised Jesus our Lord out of dead ones, ²⁵who was delivered over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.

Notice here that, once again, faith is a fractal. It is a living pattern. That pattern showed up in Abraham’s life, but it’s not as if, well, that was his life, now you and I will have to figure out how to make salvation work in ours. No. It is the same pattern. The pattern of faith in Abraham’s life is the same pattern for you and me. That is why it says, “The words, ‘It was credited to him’ were written not for him alone, but also for us…” “But also for us.” It goes on to say we are the ones “to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.”

Actually, the fact that the logic of life is fractal works greatly to your advantage and mine, because it means we can learn from those who’ve gone before us. The patterns of life repeat themselves over and over. I think of I Cor. 10:11, “Now all of these things happened to them as examples and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the end of the ages has come,” and Rom. 15:4, “For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” All of this expresses the same thought of Prov. 13:20: “He who walks with the wise will be wise.” This is, once again, a huge reason why I study the Bible. In the Bible, we get to watch people live their lives. We get to watch them make good decisions and bad ones, enjoy the blessings of their good decisions and suffer the consequences of their bad ones, and then fortunately be provided with a Divinely inspired commentary on it all. That is why it is of great value to slow down and actually ponder on the people we see in the Bible. There is so much to learn just observing them – and it doesn’t matter if we live half way around the world and 4,000 years later. The patterns remain the same.

In this particular case, the pattern has to do with how you and I may enter into and live a relationship with the Lord Himself. It is of course exactly what Paul has been explaining since chapter 1, that “Now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known…This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe…” (3:22) and “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law” (3:28). The good news of this Gospel is summed up in these few words, “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

Ever since the Garden of Eden, fallen man has awaited “the Seed of the woman” who would come and “crush the head of the serpent.” Fortunately for us, “When the fullness of time was come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, that He might redeem them that were under the Law, and that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Gal. 4:4). While it is true that we were created to know God and live in constant fellowship with Him, we have this sin problem. “The arm of the Lord is not too short that He cannot save, nor His ear heavy that He cannot hear, but your sins have separated between you and your God” (Isa. 59:1). “But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away are brought near through the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13). Real faith requires that we come to terms with this problem of our guilt and failures. Fortunately, our God has gone before us and made a way (a pattern) that we may all follow and it is the pattern of believing in Him who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead.

If anyone wants to really dig into the theology of the Gospel here, there are innumerable commentaries which have been written over hundreds of years and which you can consult. I will take it perhaps a little different direction since my intent is simply to ponder. Here’s my thought. When God warned Adam, He told him not to eat of the tree in the center of the Garden and said literally, “For in the day you eat thereof, in dying you shall die.” The old KJV translated it, “You shall surely die,” but the literal Hebrew is “in dying you shall die.” Our sin problem, in a sense, has two heads. In the old hymn Rock of Ages, we plead “Be of sin the double cure; Cleanse me from its guilt and power.” Sin, with its guilt, not only brought death as our final destiny. It also brought a living death. “In dying, you shall die.” In a sense, we are born dying. That is the power of sin, that its presence in our life is killing us all day every day until finally we actually physically die. Our sinfulness blinds us to our pride, makes us greedy and lazy and fearful and unkind and unforgiving and all the other horrible vices which wreck our relationships and rob us of any hope in this world.

I know from talking to others down through the years that salvation itself means a lot of things to a lot of people. I’ve known people who specifically most valued it because it freed them from their guilt. I know people who lived under horrible burdens of guilt who found the glorious freedom of forgiveness in Christ and that is what their salvation means most to them. For myself, it was (and is) not so much the guilt of sin which burdened me but rather its power. As a young man I was quite sure I knew what life was about and what it took to be happy and embarked on that course with a passion. The problem was it “didn’t work.” No matter how hard I tried, it just seemed like life got more and more hopeless, until I finally came to the end of myself.

At that point, I really didn’t know which way to turn or what on earth I was going to do with this hopeless life. That is when, one day, as I was standing up from my bed, suddenly the lights came on. I don’t know what I had been thinking about. All I can ever say is “the lights came on.” I suddenly knew that God was real, and that Jesus and the Bible and all of that was true. I frankly had no idea what it meant, but I knew that somehow God was going to “fix” me. I was a complete mess but I was suddenly filled with the hope that having Him in my life meant I could stop dying and start living.

Now, 42 years later, I can say without a doubt that two things have been true: I’ve gone on being a complete idiot, and He has saved me day after day after day. I actually got to marry a beautiful girl and stay happily married to her for 39 years (with our 40^th anniversary coming up in just a few months!).  I got to have three wonderful children and now have four grandchildren to boot! The Lord has allowed me to actually have good relationships with all of them and I have to assert again, if it wasn’t for Him, I’m sure I’d have wrecked them all years ago. I certainly did my best to wreck them anyway, but, at just the right times, the Lord has saved me from myself, and now I literally owe my life to Him.

Once again, the old hymn plead, “Save me from its guilt and power.” For me, what stands out most is how He freed me from its power. That is also why I study the Bible—because I want to live. Jesus said, “When you know the truth, the truth shall set you free,” and so I want to be free. I don’t want to die any more. I want to live. I don’t want to be a slave to my own stupidity. I want His freedom. And absolutely, beyond any doubt, He constantly shows me truths in the Bible that liberate me from the darkness that is my own soul.

Jesus “was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” As Paul goes on to relate in chapter 5, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Peace with God. That is what we all need and that is exactly what God has made available to us all through the one thing we can do—believe. That was the pattern for Abraham 4,000 years ago and it is still the pattern for you and me today!

Romans 4:22-25 “Excursis”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

²²Wherefore, “It was counted to him into righteousness,” ²³but it was not written that “it was counted to him,” only because of him, ²⁴but also for us, to whom it will be counted, to those believing upon the One who raised Jesus our Lord out of dead ones, ²⁵who was delivered over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.

Before I record any thoughts on this passage itself, I want to insert something I feel is of significance. Of course, “fools delight in airing their own opinion,” and they are “wiser in their own eyes than seven men who can render a reason.” That said, I acknowledge it is always dangerous to have opinions no one else seems to share. John Eadie said, “Interpretations are generally false in proportion to their ingenuity.” Acknowledging all of this, however, I also can honestly say I have tried to study the Bible intently for the last 42 years. I’ve sincerely tried to just let the Lord say what He says, make sure (to the best of my ability) I understand exactly what He did (and didn’t) say in a given passage, and only form my opinions on the basis of that knowledge.

What bothers me today is that everyone speaks, writes, and understands the Bible driven by what I might call a philosophy of “progressive revelation.” This idea recognizes that the 66 books of the Bible were written down over a period of at least 2,000 years and by some 40 different authors. Only when John laid down the pen of Revelation were the Scriptures complete. That said, Abraham didn’t have the book of Romans to read. In fact, it is possible, based on this theory that he had no Scriptures at all! David could not read the book of Matthew or even the book of Daniel, since none of these books had been written when he lived.

The underlying assumption then is that they could only have known whatever truth had been recorded by the time they lived. Based on this idea, people make statements to the effect that Abraham could not have understood about Jesus because, they would claim, almost nothing had yet been written down concerning Him. In every generation of the Old Testament, the believers could have only known what was written down up to that point.

Hello? I hope anyone reading this is already realizing how ludicrous it is. From the Garden of Eden on, the Lord spoke to the people, sometimes He Himself speaking, and then through His prophets, through dreams and visions, and, as it says in Hebrews 1:1, “at many times and in various ways.” Would anyone dare to suggest that every single word Isaiah spoke was recorded in his book? The prophets’ job was to speak, and we can all be quite certain “speak they did.” The obvious truth is that very little of what they spoke and taught actually got written down and passed on to us as Scripture. It is completely ludicrous to even suggest that Abraham only could have known whatever had been recorded up to that point, or that we can say with confidence what he did or did not know, based on the written record we hold in our hands.

The obvious fact, to me, is that he (and everyone else throughout OT history) knew and understood far more than what had been recorded up to that point. I see intimations of this throughout the Bible. I personally believe the book of Job was one of the earliest recorded revelations, probably actually written around Abraham’s time (ca. 2,000 BC). In it Job makes the statement, “For I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand in the latter day upon the earth, and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!” (19:23-25). Look at it. With perhaps no (or at most little) Scripture recorded, Job knew there was a Redeemer. He knew that Redeemer was alive and he obviously understood that he himself would be resurrected.  If people were consistent, shouldn’t they be completely baffled to think Job could say such things?

Stop for a second and consider what Jesus Himself said: “Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing My day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). What did Abraham “see?” The obvious answer is, we don’t know. And that is my point entirely. We don’t know. We don’t know how much was revealed to Abraham…or David, or anyone else throughout the entire OT. The one thing we do know for certain is that they had far more revealed to them than what had been written down up to that point.

All of this is probably fueled in my mind by the words in vv. 23,24 ^“but it was not written that ‘it was counted to him,’ only for him, but also for us…” Whenever Gen. 15:6 was written down, note that it was “written down for us.” In other words, it was important to the Lord to actually record it because it would be of benefit to us 4,000 years later. He didn’t have to write it down. The whole interaction between Abraham and the Lord could have happened and not been recorded at all and we’d not even know he ever existed. We only know what did get recorded—which also means we don’t know what didn’t.

I guess I just want to assert I think it is ludicrous for anyone to comment on anything from the past and make statements to the effect that “they could not have known…” That applies to the Bible and also applies to our own human history. The plain simple fact is that we don’t know what they knew. In fact, even with human history, the earth is covered with evidence that ancient peoples knew things “they couldn’t have known.” I constantly read about the ancient past where someone is wondering at things like the precision of the pyramid stones and they say something like, “It is a mystery how they could have accomplished that with the knowledge and technology of the time.” How do they know what was the “knowledge and technology of the time?” The fact is they are clueless, and, just as with the Bible, the earth is covered with ancient remains that clearly evidence a knowledge far beyond what we’re willing to attribute to them. How is that not some kind of arrogance to claim we know what they knew?

Of course I am just one croaking toad, but I will still maintain that what this generation needs is a dose of humility. It’s time to admit that we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s time to admit that people who lived before us may have actually known things we don’t know or things we’ve just recently figured out.

As far as the Scriptures themselves, it is true they were written as a progression. In that sense, Progressive Revelation is a fact. However, as we read and study our Bible, let’s be determined not to have the arrogant attitude that we’re somehow smarter than them or that we know what they could have known. Let’s acknowledge that they had a great deal of direct revelation which never got recorded. Sometimes it was written for us. Probably most of the time, it was not. Let us read the Scriptures as what was written for us and leave them the option they may have been a whole lot smarter than our generation wants us to think. 

 Guess that's my excursis.

Romans 4:17-21 “Normal”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁷Just as it is written that “I have made you a father of many peoples,” he believed, in the sight of whom—of God, who gives life to dead ones and calls the things not being as being, ¹⁸who believed from hope upon hope that he [was] to be a father of many nations according to what was spoken, “Thus will be your descendants.” ¹⁹and not being weakened in the faith, he discerned his own body [to be] already deadened, being about 100 years old, and the deadness of the womb of Sarah, ²⁰but he did not hesitate in unbelief into the promise of God but was strengthened in the faith, giving glory to God, ²¹and being fully convinced that what He had promised He is also able to do. Wherefore, “It was counted to him into righteousness.”

In the last post, I sought to assert that we should not try to dissect Abraham’s faith but rather see it as a living whole. That was particularly in light of the (supposed) scholarly debate questioning how the faith portrayed could really be saving faith. People ask, “How can believing he would have lots of descendants be saving faith?” Again, I think those people miss the fact that you cannot dissect real faith. It is not “the sum of its parts.” It simply is. When the soul suddenly awakens to see that God is there and when it welcomes His presence, then to understand, believe, and embrace the whole message of the Gospel is simply an expression of that same faith itself.

Having said all of that, however, I would like to inject a thought: I believe Abraham understood far more than just what was written down for us to read. I personally believe that, from the time God promised to Adam and Eve that one day “the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent,” godly people anticipated the Messiah. I personally believe each generation from Adam to Seth to Enosh and on to Noah, then Shem, and clear to Abraham knew they were carrying the promise of the Messiah. That is one reason why the birthright was so important and why it was so monstrously evil for Esau to treat it as nothing more than a bargaining chip for a bowl of soup. I further believe that is why Satan seemed to work overtime beating up on poor Joseph—he thought because of Jacob’s favoritism and Joseph’s giftedness that he was certainly heir to the Promise. It was late in Jacob’s life when it was finally revealed that “The scepter will not depart from Judah, until Shiloh (‘He to whom it belongs’) comes” (Gen. 49:10). Only then did Satan learn that it would be Judah, not Joseph, whose family would carry the promise of the Messiah. I would suggest to you that the very reason why Abraham “believed God’s promise” of descendants was because he already had embraced the promise of a Messiah. I believe when the Lord told him, “All nations of the earth shall be blessed through you,” Abraham understood exactly what He meant, that part of that promise was that his family would someday produce the Messiah.

And so, while not wishing at all to dissect Abraham’s faith, I would suggest that whether it is said so in so many words or not, a part of Abraham’s faith was, in fact, his belief in the promise of the Messiah. For us who are hopelessly addicted to linear logic and who can’t exist without dissecting the entire universe, maybe that will make us all feel better--to be assured that Abraham’s faith did include the Messianic promise. Brings back the “warm fuzzy” to our linear little hearts, yes?

And so, faith. Obviously, what the Lord would have us do in this passage in Romans is to stop and ponder and consider this thing that Abraham possessed. Faith. Can I once again step back and consider the big picture of what we see here? This is what I would like to suggest: Faith is something far bigger than just a particular religious creed or our own particular formula for salvation. Faith is part of the reality of all human existence. We are created beings. We were created by the ever-living God. We were created to need Him. We do need Him. We are incomplete without Him. We are incomplete if He is not an active, very present reality in our lives. Real faith is when we as human beings realize He is there, realize we need Him, and welcome His presence into the totality of our human existence. “Without Me,” Jesus said, “You can do nothing.” Faith agrees.

To try to live without Him is not just sinful. It’s actually absurd. For most of us, we have to come “to the end of ourselves” before we can see just how true it is that we need Him, but however the Lord gets us there, it will be “better late than never.” I wish that young people could get a hold of this truth and then, like Daniel, actually live a lifetime in a real relationship with God. We need Him growing up. We need Him in school. We need Him in our courtships and marriage. We need Him at our jobs. We need Him in our families. We need Him in our communities and our nation and our church and our sports and our Butterfly Collectors Club. Faith is not some religious appendage we may or may not attach to our lives. It is an essential element of our existence. We’re only “whole” when we live all day every day in the presence of God.

See then that Abraham isn’t just a case study of a “religious” man. He’s actually normal. (Maybe not typical, but still normal). Abraham was a man who had figured out who he was and how to be everything he was born to be. His faith wasn’t a matter of being religious. It was a matter of being sane. His relationship with God wasn’t just “practicing his religion.” It was a matter of living in the real world. It is nothing short of ludicrous for the rest of us humans to think we don’t need God in our lives or that “religion” is just some appendage we might add if we want to.

Here’s the deal and we see it play out in Abraham’s life: Life is hard and one way or another you and I are constantly faced with the impossible. In spite of everything I may do, still, everywhere I look, I see things—important things—I cannot control. I cannot stop people from dying. I can’t make someone give me a good job. I can’t make that beautiful girl want to marry me. We may or may not get that house we really want. We may or may not be able to conceive children. I’m faced with bills I do not know how I’ll pay. I cannot stop my children or grandchildren from making bad decisions. I can’t control the stock market, or the weather, or who does or does not get elected. I can’t even control the price of milk! Basically, we live in a world literally swimming (drowning?) in an ocean of both opportunities and threats over which, in the end, we actually have little to no control. How am I, as a mere man, to survive (much less prosper) in such a world? I can live in fear. I can be a control freak. I can resolve at all costs to get very, very rich—imagining that if I was just rich enough, I could buy whatever it is I desire. I can push, shove, manipulate, lie, steal, kill, or just give it all up and go live in an asylum.

Or I could just acknowledge I’ve come to the end of myself and admit something in my life is terribly missing. Something is terribly missing as I would try to live in this hard, threatening, impossible world. “And Abraham was called ‘the friend of God’” (Isa. 41:8, James 2:23). Abraham had it figured out. What he needed in his life was Someone who specializes in the impossible! Look again here at Romans chapter 4. Back in verse 17, who was it Abraham was believing in? “The God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” In verse 18 and 19, “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed…he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead…” And verses 20 and 21 sum it up, “Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that what God had promised, He was able also to do.”

Can I assert again, this isn’t a matter of “being religious.” This is living in a real world. Like us, Abraham lived in a world of the impossible. The difference is that he welcomed into his life the God of the impossible. What Abraham portrays for us then is not some amazingly religious man but simply a man—a normal man, a man who’d figured it out. He had nothing going for him that was somehow beyond you or me. What does the Scripture say? “It is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, that is the word of faith we are proclaiming” (Rom. 10:8). It’s that close. It’s already in our mouth and in our heart. If we’ll only open those hearts, we all already know that “in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). That is why Paul says of Abraham, “He is the father of us all.”

As you and I would ponder here in Romans this man Abraham, may we not see someone who had something far beyond us. May we see in him an example of the person we each can be, should be, must be. May we see that drawing near the God of the impossible is the most sane, reasonable, essential thing we can do. Faith isn’t a fantasy. It isn’t just being religious. It’s being normal.

God help us.