Page 32 - Romans Student Textbook.doc

complement each other and heighten the learner’s ability to understand truth and implement the
principles that flow from that understanding. In two paragraphs he told the basic details of the story of
Abraham’s faith and made two concluding points about the context in which Christ’s ministry of
redemption shines so brightly.

Abraham is the example for all people of what it means to be justified before God by faith in God’s
promises. (Romans 4:1-12)

Paul used Abraham’s story because of his unique position in the story of God graciously making covenants
with people. He used his story because those Jewish believers who were proud of their ability to keep the
law and who were judging their Gentile brothers and sisters in Christ for not doing the same would claim
Abraham as the person whose example they were following. He used Abraham’s story because the
connections to Abraham do not just include the Jews but also include all the nations of the earth. It
seemed that some of the Jewish believers may have forgotten that last point and Paul used the example
of Abraham to set the record straight.

The question Paul raised is “How was Abraham made righteous before God?”29 Was it because of what
he did or because of who he believed? Was it his acts of obedience to God such as being circumcised or
offering up Isaac on an altar that justified him before God? Or was it something else? The person who
does work is owed a wage. Is doing work for God how Abraham was justified before God? It seems that
Paul asked these types of questions because some of the people whom he is addressing were living and
acting as if the proper answer to those questions is “Yes”. What Paul pointed out at the beginning of this
paragraph is that if this was truly the case for Abraham then he truly would have had something to be
proud of because he would have been the only person who was ever made right before God in that way.

In the second half of the paragraph, he focused on the fact that it was Abraham’s trust — his faith — in
the promises that God graciously, sovereignly, mercifully gave to him that established him as righteous
before God. The thing that Paul made clear for the Jewish believers that he was addressing was that
circumcision was not an act that made one righteous, but that it was rather, a mark that one had already
been made righteous before God by believing God’s promises. Because that is so, Abraham served as the
example of what a vibrant faith in the living God is like. It is the footsteps of faith that Abraham laid down
in the way that he lived his life that they all (Jew and Gentile) were to be following.

As Abraham appropriated the promises of God to him by faith in God, so we are delivered from sin by
our faith in Christ. (Romans 4:13-25)

In the next paragraph Paul set his gaze on one event from the life of Abraham that illustrated his trust
in the promises of God and made it the focus of what he had to say. That event is the birth of the son
of promise, Isaac. The promise of God to Abraham and his offspring is:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will
make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I
will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse and in you all the families of the
earth shall be blessed.30

The problem for Abraham was that at the time he was given the promise he had no children, and his wife
Sarai was barren. Time marched on and Abraham tried to solve the problem of offspring himself by
substituting Hagar for Sarai which produced a son named Ishmael who God rejected as the son that was
promised to Abraham. Twenty-five years later when Abraham was approaching 100 and Sarah was 90,
God gave Abraham the sign of circumcision as the seal of His covenant with Abraham and with it promised

29 Romans 4:10.
30 Genesis 12:1-3 ESV
31