Romans 4:13-25
13 The
promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his
descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14 For if
it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the
promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law,
neither is there transgression.
16 For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us, 17 as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”), in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So shall your descendants be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 Therefore “it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 23 Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was handed over for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.
Reflection
He looked at
his body, and it was broken. Stones had
smashed his limbs. Scars striped his
face from punishing blows. He could not
even talk clearly. You could say that he
had a face made for the written scroll. The
Apostle Paul admitted as much in 2 Corinthians when Paul conceded what others
said about him, that his “bodily presence is weak and his speech contemptible”
(2 Corinthians 10:10).
It was not always this way for Paul. At one time the Apostle Paul was a man who was put together, respected, and whole. In Philippians he wrote that he once was, “a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5-6). He used to be so respected that when the authorities dragged the faithful Stephen out of the city to stone him, Saul (who would soon be named Paul) was there overseeing the proceedings and the Bible says that “witnesses laid their coats at [his] feet” (Acts 7:58). He was respected. He was put together. He was a member of the privileged.
But, by the time he wrote the last of his letters, the letter to the Romans, he looked more like an outcast than a respected leader. As he stared at his broken body, one could say that Paul had been brought to a point in life where he identified closely with people who were looked down upon, persecuted, forgotten, and outcast.
Were he here today, he might identify with the girl with the severely upturned nose who yearned for a boy to ask her to dance. He might identify with those who cannot afford new clothes and are ignored as potential friends. He might identify with people who have a darker color of skin, who are automatically seen with suspicion. In fact, Paul did identify with a class of shunned and ignored people: the gentiles. In Jewish circles, those who were not given the law of God were considered less. Those who did have the law were considered more. You could say that though he is not a gentile himself, he knows what it is like to be seen as much less than others.
Whenever you crack open the book of Romans, as we are going to do this summer, you must keep this essential perspective in mind. Paul, the once acclaimed Pharisee who became the Apostle Paul, as the years passed, truly saw himself as broken, disfigured, and weak in person. He felt much stronger on the printed page. He stated in 2 Corinthians that, “a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated” (2 Corinthians 12:7). He continued to say, “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:8-9).
And there it was: “grace.” When you cannot trust in yourself, when you can no longer pull it off with good looks and intelligent sounding smarts, when people no longer care if you are good and following God’s law, when other people’s hatred and stone throwing causes you to become a deformed monster, you have no choice but to trust that God cares and can make things right. You have no choice but to trust in grace.
Grace tells you that your worth is no longer defined by who you are, but rather by who God is and who God says you are. Only when God showers you with grace can you begin to think that you are someone who God has made right, despite the faults and deformations.
The more years that you spend on this earth, the more you learn that there will always be someone who thinks that they are somehow better than everyone else. Along with that, you will learn that you tend to do the same thing. It is true. Have you heard or spoken these phrases? “Kid’s these days.” “Oh, that person. They never get anything right.” “What a ridiculous idea.” “How can anyone love them?” “What a disappointment.” “What can you expect from someone like them?”
The whole idea is that if the person would only live the right way and think the right ideas, things would be so much better for them and for the rest of us. Why not post God’s law everywhere so that everyone knows how to be good? Why not post it in classrooms and in parks? Why not print off copies and nail them to trees? And why would we allow people to flagrantly ignore God’s laws? How could that possibly be helpful to anyone, including themselves? Why allow the godless to ruin everything?
And as more and more people are labeled as godless and the ones doing the labeling deem themselves as worthy, Paul feels a sort of kinship with the people who are thrown out, pushed away, and disliked. He too suffers from such people who view him as godless, lawless, and a menace to society.
To those who think a lot of themselves, those who assume that they have a moral superiority, Paul would like to point out that the father of all nations, the foundational forefather to all people, the one in whom God invested with enduring promises of children and eternal legacy, Abraham, had been given no law from God. The laws had not yet been handed down from the mountain. Yet, God considered Abraham righteous. Abraham was considered in right relationship with God. Paul says that “The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith” (Romans 4:13).
God’s promise to Abraham was not a reward for following God’s law because there was no such thing as God’s law at the time.
Let us take that one step further. People who do not have God’s law cannot be condemned by it. They cannot be jailed by it because, as Paul say, “where there is no law, neither is their transgression” (Romans 4:15). Just like you cannot get in trouble for fishing in a certain pond unless there is a law that says you cannot fish in it, so too those who do not have God’s law cannot be expected to follow it. Abraham did not follow it. The law had not yet been shared by God. So, following the law was not what made him right with God.
The one thing in Abraham’s story that did make him right with God was that Abraham increasingly trusted in God’s promise to him. That trust, that faith in God’s promise is the very thing that allowed him to have a relationship with God. It is true, just look at Abraham. Paul says that over time Abraham became “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore ‘it was reckoned to him as righteousness’” (Romans 4:21-22).
Trust…faith in the one who loves us and gives us grace is what living with the Lord is all about. It is not about doing the right thing, though there is nothing wrong with doing good. It is not about hanging with the right crowds or being of a certain status or being with a pure culture or anything else that we do or believe that makes us feel superior to others. Since all of us are descendants of Abraham, all of us can trust in the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17).
The man was convinced that a relationship with God was just not in the cards for him. The man was a veteran, and he was haunted nightly by the faces of those who fell to the ground in front of him and his gun. The guilt was so much that the only way that he could move forward in life was to just convince himself that there was not anything good waiting for him in this life or the next. He did not care if he lived or died. He thought of himself as a lost cause and he pushed himself to feel less than everyone else. He truly believed that a relationship with God was not in the cards for him, ever, because of what he had done of the battlefield.
Then came the day that he heard that the little girl next door had to go to court to testify against another man who did her harm. The offender was released on bail and there was great fear that he would harm the little girl before the trial.
So, this veteran who did not care about his life, whether he lived or died, and who could not sleep anyway, camped out in front of her house at night; her own personal bodyguard.
The little girl would look out each evening and see him at the end of her driveway, keeping her safe. Seeing him allowed her to go to sleep. The veteran was even there on the day of the trial, right next to her and her parents as they walked those dangerous steps into the courthouse. She testified and the offender was sent away for a very, very long time. And after the trial the little girl looked at the veteran and said, “Thank you. You are my angel. God sent you to me.”
The man had written himself off from life, but God had not. Like Paul, the man had overseen people’s deaths. Like Paul, the man felt terribly broken. And like Paul, God used him to give a gift of grace to someone else. He discovered that God could use, even someone like him. And because of that, the man grew to trust God. The man was made right with God once again.
After-all, any descendant of Abraham can trust God; anyone. And anyone who God loves can have their life restored; anyone. And anyone for whom Jesus died and raised from the dead is forgiven and raised up to a new life; anyone. Abraham knew it, Paul knew it, and we know it too. For what Paul declares is absolutely true for us all, “We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” Romans 3:28. Because of God’s grace through Jesus Christ, you have been saved and restored.
