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.
There are two matters I’d like to address which arise from this passage. Both, I think are significant as we would head into the end of this chapter and as we would consider carefully the faith of this man Abraham. First of all, it is a matter of considerable theological debate to question what exactly was Abraham’s faith as it is presented here in Romans. What I mean is this. If you ask almost any church member today, “What must I do to be saved?” they will answer, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” It is very clear to us on this side of the Cross that salvation is very specifically a matter of believing in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Yet here in Romans 4, where Paul is proving that salvation is by faith, the particular promise that Abraham “believes” is/was this idea that he would be “the father of many nations.” Someone paying close attention may ask (and many do), how is this saving faith? If the Lord had visited me at age 22 and told me I’d marry a beautiful girl and have three wonderful children and if I believed that promise, would that have saved me? Our typical, American canned answer would be, “No, you can’t be saved without specifically believing in Jesus.”
Here is a place I’m reminded I’m really writing these things down for the sake of my grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren. To you, I would beg your attention to something your old grandfather feels is of absolutely profound importance. Let me try. One of the curses (and yes, I’ll call it that) of Western culture is our incorrigible slavery to what I have termed “linear logic.” We reduce everything to some kind of frog to be dissected, imagining that everything in the universe is the sum of its parts—therefore we can arrange the parts and understand the thing. There is of course an enormous problem with dissecting the frog—if he isn’t already dead, he will be when you’re done. When it comes to living things, there is a powerful sense that, when you try to reduce them to the sum of their parts, you kill them.
May I suggest that you must be very, very careful not to do this in your life? And may you consider it realizing I am an engineer? I am a scientist. The very essence of science is to do exactly this—to dissect things and understand their parts—in order to understand the whole. My whole life and career has consisted of what we call “applied science.” As an engineer, that is what I do every day. But please understand, it is one thing to understand water and all the interacting elements of pressure and flow and pipe friction, etc. It is an entirely different thing to dissect living things. The problem is, and what you must realize is that a living thing is far more than “the sum of its parts.” You cannot and must not try too hard to reduce living things to linear logic. You can only truly understand living things if you will comprehend that the logic of life is not linear, but rather fractal.
You may have run across this in some other scratchings of mine, but allow me to say again, the logic of life is a logic not of accumulated parts but rather of repeating patterns. In Western culture there is only linear logic. Everything must be reduced to number lines and Roman numeral outlines or our brains overheat. I realized a long time ago that the Bible utterly defies “outlining.” Then I discovered fractals, which are patterns which repeat themselves on a million different scales, yet always repeat the pattern. They are what I might call “picture logic.” Consider this: If I say a certain pattern is “good,” is it made worse or better by repeating it? If one square foot of wallpaper is a beautiful pattern, does it become more or less beautiful by spreading it onto all four walls from floor to ceiling? What if my neighbor likes it and uses it in a room of his house too? What if someone else really likes the pattern and wishes only to frame that square foot to hang as a picture? Do any of these uses make the pattern better or worse? Obviously not—it is the pattern that is beautiful. No matter the scale, it is still beautiful. Such are fractals and such is life. To understand life, you must learn to see its patterns. You must learn when to stop dissecting the frog into its parts and instead to step back and admire the beauty of its life.
May I go one step further and say this is so important because nearly everything in life that matters is actually fractal, not linear. It is the living things in life which matter most in the end and living things are fractal. Time itself appears to be linear, yet, for you, as a living thing, to truly appreciate it you must stop counting the minutes and realize it’s not the passing of time that matters, it’s what you invest into that time—as it passes. Someone once said, “Time is important, yet, the realization it doesn’t matter is the gateway to wisdom.” What that person was seeing was that the “passing of time” (something entirely linear) is a dead thing. What matters is to live in that time. The question is not whether time has passed. The question is, how did you live in that time?
I hope you see the difference.
I’ve belabored the point to finally say you must realize that faith is a living thing. I would suggest that the downfall of much of what is called theology is to be found precisely here—in their endless dissection of everything without every stepping back and seeing it is the pattern that is beautiful. Faith is a living thing because it exists between living things. To speak of faith and forget the living things is, in the end, to kill it. Obviously, I’m saying that is exactly what theologians do when they question Abraham’s faith as presented in this passage.
This, I guess, leads to my second thought. Notice carefully what it says of his faith (which will be discussed more fully through the end of the chapter). The Greek is a little rough to translate here, but in my literal translation it says, “he believed, in the sight of whom—of God, who gives life to dead ones and calls the things not being as being.” He believed in God. The NIV smooths it out saying, “…in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” Again, I ask you to lay down the scalpel, step back from the table, and see that what we’re talking about is a relationship between a living man and the living God. Step back and see that what you’re observing here is a picture of Abraham’s faith. He believed in God. And what did he believe? In this place, we’re specifically told he believed that the Lord is a God who has the power to give life to the dead and who “calls things that are not as though they are”—who can make something out of nothing.
Abraham’s faith was in God. It wasn’t just a formula. It wasn’t just embracing a particular religious creed. It wasn’t active involvement in a particular church. His faith was in God. He was a person having a relationship with a Person. Abraham, the man, observed the Lord, our God, and saw that He is amazing. He saw that He “gives life to dead ones and calls what is not as being.” Make special note that Abraham heard God’s promise, “I will make you the father of many nations,” but he believed the promise because of what he saw in God. Do you see that his “believing” arises from the relationship, from the living relationship between living beings? And what is his “believing?” It is, of course, his faith. We see the same thing in Hebrews 11:19 where we are told what Abraham was thinking when he nearly really did sacrifice his own son: “Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead…” Here is a place specifically where we see that faith is fractal. The “picture” of his trust, that living relationship with God, expresses itself in a million different ways on a million different scales, but it is always the same picture, the same pattern.
I’m thinking bottom line that it is foolish and hopelessly linear to challenge Abraham’s faith and to maintain that this cannot be saving faith if what he is believing is that he would be the father of many nations. What such people utterly fail to realize is that real faith is the totality of a relationship, a relationship between a living person and their God. That faith is not somehow the sum of its parts. It simply is. To understand Abraham’s faith, to understand saving faith, to understand faith at all means stepping back away from the table, laying down the scalpel, and enjoying the beauty of a living thing. Faith is a fractal thing which, once it exists in a person’s life, infuses the totality of that life, and becomes a picture which constantly repeats itself throughout that heart and life.
As we will see through the end of this chapter, this is exactly what was true of Abraham. The fractal of faith infused his life.
May you and I truly enjoy a faith that is all about a real, personal, trusting relationship with God—like Abraham.
No comments:
Post a Comment