“Abraham’s Faith, or Abraham’s Lord?”
Romans 4:1-18, 13-17
2/20/08
Tonight’s text looks like it’s about
Abraham. More precisely it’s about Abraham’s
faith. But if you want to be even more precise, it’s about
Abraham’s God. Unfortunately, we often focus on the wrong
person or the wrong thing when reading this account. We get
caught talking about Abraham and his faith. But even though the
Apostle Paul mentions Abraham and his faith here, he doesn’t want
us focusing ultimately on either one; he only uses Abraham as an
example of what a Christian should be focusing on as a Christian, and
that is on Jesus and the promises of God attached to Him. Neither
Paul nor the Holy Spirit want us to concentrate too much on Abraham and
his faith. They don’t want us comparing ourselves with him
to see how our faith measures up to his. We’d soon fall
into despair, if we did that. How can we possibly be like
Abraham, a man who spoke with God face to face, a man who believed
God’s word, no questions asked, a man who’s faith was so
strong that he would have offered up his son Isaac at God’s
command had God not stopped him at the last moment and provided a
substitute for the sacrifice. If we had to have the faith of
Abraham to get into heaven, none of us would make it.
So, let’s not be comparing ourselves with
Abraham. We’ll never live up to his kind of faith.
But God doesn’t reward faith based on how much of it there is nor
on how strong it may be. Neither does He grant salvation to us,
because we’ve done such a good job at believing, as if
we’ve earned His grace and favor by our faith. This is
where Abraham comes in handy, because here he becomes our teacher, and
this is how the Apostle Paul uses him. Abraham teaches us about
what this thing called faith is. It’s not something that
focuses on people who have it, and it’s not something that
focuses us inward upon ourselves. Rather, it focuses us outward
upon Christ and the promises which God gives us in Him. The way
to know whether or not you have faith, then, is not by looking at
Abraham (or any other saint for that matter) and comparing yourself
with him. Rather, you know you have faith, when you are looking
at Jesus and trusting in His words. As the Apostle Paul says
later in this letter, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the
word about Christ.” The word about Christ portrays Him
crucified before our eyes, just as it did for the Galatian Christians
when Paul preached to them, so that just as the Israelites who were
cured when they looked at the bronze serpent that Moses set up in the
wilderness, so we are cured when we look to Christ crucified for us and
trust in the promise of God that whoever believes in Him shall not
perish but have eternal life.
Now, some might hear these words about believing in
Jesus Christ and try to take credit for this believing, as if it were
something they did to get saved. But here again, where does this
focus our faith, if not on our believing and ultimately upon
ourselves? In the end, we become our own saviors, if this is the
case. Suddenly, our eyes are no longer on Jesus and what He did,
but they’re on ourselves and what we have done. Abraham
didn’t talk like this, neither does the Apostle Paul or any of
the other writers of Scripture. In fact, the minute we want to
take some credit for our salvation, the writers of Scripture take our
boasting away from us by taking away the one thing we think we’re
responsible for, the one thing that we think we can produce, and
that’s our faith. “God’s children are not born
of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,”
writes the Apostle John, “but of the will of God.”
And Paul writes, “You have been saved by grace through faith, and
this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of
works, that no one should boast.” Where we want to hold up
our faith and marvel at it, the Word of God replaces our faith with
Christ crucified and holds Him up for us to marvel at.
Getting our focus off of our faith and onto Christ
will be of great comfort to us, especially during those times of crisis
in our lives, when we don’t feel our faith as strongly as at
other times. If my faith is gone, has my Savior left, too?
No! Jesus and His Word are not fickle like our faith is.
They are the anchor of our faith. They hold fast when everything
else is adrift. When we look to Jesus and listen to His Word, He
will keep us from dashing up against the rocks of temptation and
sinking in the storm tossed seas of our tribulations. Like the
disciples who called upon their sleeping Lord when they were afraid
they were going to drown, so we call upon the Lord (even when it
appears to us that He’s sleeping) and we are helped. You
can be sure of Jesus. You can be sure of His Word. You can
be sure of your Baptism, that God has put His Name on you, and that you
belong to Him. These things are never going to change, unlike our
faith, which may be alive today but tomorrow is thrown into the
fire. Your faith may run away from you in your times of testing;
your Savior will not. Even though Abraham was tested severely,
more than any of us will ever be, he clung to God His Savior and His
promises, and God declared him righteous because of it.
Now, that might sound rather odd, that God declares
us righteous on account of our faith in Him. Abraham believed God
and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. What was reckoned to
him as righteousness? His faith in God’s promises. In
your case, you believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins
and eternal life, and this faith is reckoned to you as
righteousness. It’s quite strange sounding, isn’t
it? Sounds like faith is the big thing here again rather than
Jesus. Again, we are tempted to focus on faith: the more we
have it, the more more we’ll be reckoned righteous. But
notice that it’s not faith in faith or faith in ourselves and
what we do, but faith in Jesus and what He did that God reckons as
righteousness. And again, this faith is His gift to us.
It’s this God-given faith in Jesus, which He created in us
through the Word about Christ crucified for us, that God reckons to us
as righteousness, so that in the end the only One we can boast in is
the Lord.
So, neither Abraham nor his faith is what
tonight’s text is all about. It’s not even what the
Scriptures are about. It’s about the God who declares us
righteous through faith in His Son. This God isn’t about
paying what’s owed to us, but giving us gifts that we don’t
deserve. Some of us think God owes us for our faith, as if faith
itself were some kind of work we did to earn our salvation. But
Paul tells us what we’ve really earned from God, when he writes
that the wages of sin is death. The free gift of God, however, is
eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Salvation is an undeserved
gift to us from God. It’s is not earned by faith; it is
simply received by faith. What a fool a beggar would be if, after
being given a hundred dollars by a merciful stranger, he then boasted
that he had earned that money by begging for it! And if you want
to have a good description of faith, look at it in this way, as a
beggar’s hand being nothing but given to by a gracious
Lord. That was Martin Luther’s understanding of
faith. “We’re all beggars,” he said. We
stand before God with nothing to give him but our sins. He takes
those and gives them to Christ on the cross. And in our Baptism
he fills our hands with more gifts than we can hold. He clothes
us with Christ, He makes us kings and priests, and seats us with Christ
in the heavenly realms. In the coming ages He will show us the
surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus,
which He has given us freely in Christ. And we will stand before
the throne of God in heaven saying with all the saints, “To Him
who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and
glory and dominion forever and ever.” There, no one will be
talking about their faith. They will be talking about their
Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.