The Faith of Abraham, Accounted for Righteousness

Faith Accounted for Righteousness

(Romans 4:1-3)

The Jews believed that their forefather Abraham was the most righteous man on earth, a man with perfect character and perfect deeds. But Paul says, “For what does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness'” (Romans 4:3).

1. Weakness
When we look closely at Abraham’s life, we see that he was not righteous in himself. He grew up in a land filled with idolatry. When God called him and told him to leave his relatives, he did not fully obey, but took his nephew Lot with him. When famine came, he relied on Egypt instead of God. There, to preserve his own life, he lied and said that his wife was his sister. He even failed to wait for God’s time and took Hagar in his own way. Abraham was a weak man who stumbled and failed many times.

2. Trust
Yet God was with Abraham. Though he kept falling, the strength of his trust in God strangely continued to work within him. Even when God told him to offer his only son Isaac as a burnt offering, Abraham believed that God would raise Isaac again, and he obeyed at once. Such trust was possible because, under God’s providence, Abraham was receiving spiritual help. In the end, what was great was not Abraham, but the grace of God — the grace that held on to this weak man to the end, supplied him with faith, and accounted it to him for righteousness.

3. Praise
We do not have the ability to produce righteousness. Faith itself is not the cause of salvation. Faith is only the channel God uses when He gives the grace of salvation. When a person with no merit at all stretches out his hands toward God to receive the grace He freely gives, that assured heart before God is precisely what faith is. There is nothing in us that God should count as righteous. Let us, then, stretch out our hands to our merciful God with nothing but thanksgiving and praise.

Overseer Sung-Hyun Kim