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The last couple days I have been absorbing the vital truth about what the core essence of faith really is. In the illustration of what it looked like in Abraham's life, Paul exposes possibly the plainest explanation of faith in the whole Bible, at least for my understanding. As I have carefully analyzed this chapter to really grasp what its meaning is for me, I see the first half of the chapter laying out in detail the fact that Abraham was not trusting in his obedience to God's commands as the basis of his faith. And God was not basing His acceptance and relationship with Abraham on the signs and external symbols of obedience.
That is not to say that those things were not important to both of them. But the obedience and the evidences of obedience were not the cause and basis of their relationship. Those things are called “works”, and while works are all present in the life of a believer they are not the foundation. Paul goes to great lengths to make this point in the book of Romans as well as in most of his writings. He stressed this point so emphatically that he inadvertently set up a pendulum effect that has caused millions of Christians for centuries to heatedly debate back and forth the importance and merits or lack thereof of “works” in the life of a true believer. Even James and Peter had to weigh in on the subject to give some balance to Paul's extreme stressing of this point, but they did not detract from the underlying truth that Paul was trying to reveal when it is understood in its true light.
I have grown up in a culture where the emphasis and correct view of grace and faith as presented by Paul has always been viewed with quiet underlying suspicion and even avoidance. Because of this upbringing I have spent many years trying to understand for myself the real truth in the writings of Paul without becoming entangled in the unbalanced extreme ideas that have overtaken much of the Christian world that my sub-culture was reacting against. I can remember terms like “cheap grace” and “lawlessness” typically used to describe those who disagreed with “us”. And while those descriptions may have been somewhat accurate of many of our opponents, our thinking also tended to isolate us and move us quite far to the other extreme of constant emphasis on “the law”, obedience, intellectual “truth” and resulted in a very stunted experience of true grace and freedom.
So for the past few years I have been deliberately trying to lay aside all of the preconceived beliefs that I can as I invite the Holy Spirit to reveal to me directly and personally what the Bible is really showing me about God and this plan for my redemption. It has been a wonderful growing experience for me and has brought me more and more peace and assurance as my previous misconceptions and prejudices have been exposed and replaced with balanced, critical truths central to God's plan for the salvation of every human being. This has been my desire and prayer as I have meditated on various portions of Scripture over the past few years to discover for myself what God desires to reveal to me about Himself and His ways. In the process I have seen more and more consistency and less apparent contradiction throughout all of the Bible though there is still a very great way to go yet. I simply want to be tutored by the Holy Spirit as a humble, open-minded student and be transformed into looking, acting and feeling more like Jesus.
I'm afraid the results of this are still very difficult for most of those close to me to see and that disturbs me greatly inside. I still have deeply entrenched blocks of resistance, pride and ignorance that need to be excavated and replaced with grace and truth. But I am not in charge of this mining operation in my soul, I can only try to cooperate as God continues to tear open and repair the various areas of my damaged heart and mind. This message spoken to me in Romans 4 over the past few mornings is my anchor that I cling to as this process continues in my life.
Something that I was impressed with a couple days ago in my study was the phrase in verse 15, “the Law brings about wrath”. This reminds me of 1 Cor. 3:6 which also says, “ the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” This statement that the Law brings about wrath was very interesting in the light of the subject of “hell” that I have been discovering over the past few years. It also ties back to Rom. 2:5 where he talks about storing up for ourselves wrath against the day of wrath. But that is another subject that I don't have time to get sidetracked with at this point though it is extremely important. What is important is the fact that wrath is closely tied to the Law.
This point was really brought home to me the next day when I uncovered the contrasting phrase just a little later in the text. Rom. 4:20 says of Abraham that “he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God”. This growing strong in faith in my view is a direct contrast to the debilitating “wrath” in verse 15 with which I am very familiar. Trying to live by law-keeping to earn God's love and favor indeed generates and stores up within me more and more wrath in more ways than one. I want to live in the example of Abraham who grew strong in faith not wavering in unbelief and giving glory to God.
This too, has a great deal of meaning to unpack but I still want to move on to what I am learning today. For the very next verse drops the bombshell that destroys many of the myths about what faith really is by plainly revealing what real faith looks like. Verse 21 says, “being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform.”
I, along with many others in the church, have spent years of my life trying to “work up” faith as we assumed its meaning. In my mind, faith was the total vacuum of all doubt. It was a pure, mental atmosphere where there was no longer any particle of doubt about the results of whatever it was I was trying to exercise faith over. This usually meant that we would ask God for something we wanted and then try very very hard to believe that it would happen. When it didn't happen we assumed that there must have been a little doubt left in our mind which contaminated our faith so it couldn't produce the desired outcome. And when our prayers were seemingly answered we became very excited that at last we had maybe found the right formula to make this religion thing work.
That may be a very simplistic explanation of what happened, and we certainly would not have put it in those words at the time. But looking back, that seems to sum it up very accurately for what was going on in our minds. Religion to me and my friends was all about learning lots of information, obeying lots of rules and avoiding endless distractions and “temptations” to turn our attention away from developing perfection of character. I cannot remember any significant emphasis on an intimate relationship with a personal God except in intellectual theory only. Most of the language we used had assumed meanings for most of the words which I am now learning were often nearly opposite of their true meanings. What I am now learning as I read and meditate and listen with my heart is a revelation of a God who's greatest desire to connect with my heart and cause me know His heart. All of the other symptoms like obedience, “good works”, witnessing, etc. are outgrowths of that foundational heart-based relationship. When that is not attended to first, trying to arrange all of the other elements in place only creates confusion and some form of hypocrisy.
Paul bases his explanation of the true essence of what constitutes “righteousness” on the Old Testament description about how Abraham was considered righteous. It is based solely on Abraham's exercise of a simple belief that God can do what He says He can do. And the safe assumption within that is that God also wants to do what He says He can do for us and will indeed do it when we give Him the permission He needs by believing that very thing about Him. That is simply a description of a relationship, a healthy relationship between trusting friends. When that kind of relationship exists between us as God, in God's eyes and in His “book” we are considered righteous, pure and simple.
Of course that leads to the next conflict which is, “how can God get away with considering us as 'righteous' when much of the physical and spiritual evidence of our lives seems to contradict that assertion?” That is directly addressed in the last three verses. What really caught my attention was something I had never seen before in the very last verse. “(Jesus) was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification.”
I have understood in a growing sense what it means that He was delivered over because of my transgressions. But the next phrase came as a surprise to me. He “was raised because of our justification.” I have always thought and have heard taught that Jesus' death and resurrection created the reason for my justification. But evidently according to this text only half of that is accurate. Jesus death while assuming my actual guilt for all of my sins was in fact the act offered to justify me before God. But that act was only an offering, not a demand. There was a point during that weekend when the offered death of the Son of God had to be taken under consideration and a decision had to be determined whether this offering was in fact going to be able to stand up to the scrutiny, not only for the consistency of the justice in God's own character, but to the satisfaction of any mind ever in existence either before or after this event who would examine this arrangement of atonement. It is not only God Himself who must be satisfied with the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, it is the reflection of God hard-wired into every intelligent being that He ever created that also must come to the point of agreeing that this arrangement was just and fair. God took all that into consideration before deciding whether Jesus would receive the call to resurrection or would remain in the grave forever.
What this text is claiming is that the resurrection of Jesus was contingent on the acceptance of His death as a justification for our sins. If in any tiny degree there was anything that could not be accounted for, any sin that was not completely exhausted in the complex suffering that the Son of God experienced during the crucifixion weekend, then the justice of God to be consistent with itself before the universe would not allow Jesus to be raised from the dead. He would be forced to remain a prisoner in the tomb forever and the experiment of evil would continue to spread throughout the universe reeking its havoc and destroying life everywhere it turned. This is not a fictional impossibility – this was a very real potential that was in no way a foregone deal in the bag. Jesus took a very real and immense risk of failure when He submitted Himself to become a human and shoulder all the guilt of all sin everywhere when his life was destroyed by the resistance of sin in the presence of the pure, holy passion of an infinite Almighty.
What Paul is stating unequivocally here is that, based on the above facts, the very act of the resurrection is proof positive that our justification is in fact an undeniable reality. It is not something we can earn or acquire, it is only something we can believe and claim for ourselves as we identify ourselves as “in Christ” and, dying to self with Him we can then also experience His resurrection power here and now in our transformed, rebirthed lives. This truth lies at the very center of the plan of salvation. And this is why Satan is so intense on causing us to disbelieve in the resurrection, or at the very least dismiss it as irrelevant to our own lives.
We hear a great deal of talk about the power of the resurrection, but we do not yet see a great deal of evidence of it in the transformed lives of matured, saved Christians. But this is what brings glory to God, and I firmly believe that this kind of glory and all its fruits of obedience, passion and godliness is what we are about to see in the explosion of glory described in the beginning verses of Rev. 18. God is preparing millions of people who are open to His grace to participate in the final revelation of His true character of love, hope and faith. I want to be a part of that grand experiment of which it is said that angels stand in amazement at the transformation that happens in a life when God does what He says He can do.
