GOD’S PROMISES AND OUR FAITH

I am working on developing material for a class I am planning to teach in the Fall, God willing, on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Here is an excerpt from Romans 4:17-25.

“Abraham is the father of us all. As it is written: ‘I have made you a father of many nations.’(Gen.17:5) He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed – the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were. Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’(Gen.15:5) Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead – since he was about a hundred years old – and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God has power to do what he had promised. This is why ‘it was credited to him as righteousness.’ The words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness – for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

Abraham was justified by faith (17b-22). The description of faith as ‘reasonable’ comes as a surprise to many people, since they have always supposed that faith and reason were alternative means of grasping reality, and mutually incompatible.  Is not faith a synonym for credulity and even superstition? Is it not an excuse for irrationality, for what Bertrand Russell called ‘a conviction which cannot be shaken by contrary evidence?’ No. Although to be sure faith goes beyond reason, it always has a firmly rational basis. In particular, faith is believing or trusting a person, and its reasonableness depends on the reliability of the person being trusted. It is always reasonable to trust the trustworthy. And there is nobody more trustworthy than God, as Abraham knew, and as we are privileged to know more confidently than Abraham because we live after the death and resurrection of Jesus through whom God has fully disclosed himself and his dependability. In particular, before we are in a position to believe God’s promises, we need to be sure both of his power (that he is able to keep them) and of his faithfulness (that he can be relied upon to do so. It is these two attributes of God which were the foundations of Abraham’s faith, and on which Paul reflects in this passage.

He believed that God could keep his promises (because of his power) and he knew that he would do so (because of his faithfulness). “God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that are not.” Nothing baffles us human beings more than nothingness and death. Death is the one event over which in the end we have no control, and from which we cannot escape. But nothingness and death are no problem to God. On the contrary, it is out of nothing that he created the universe, and out of death that he raised Jesus. The creation and the resurrection were and remain the two major manifestations of the power of God.

Conclusion: Abraham’s faith and ours (23-25). In this chapter the apostle gives us instruction about the nature of faith. He indicates that there are degrees in faith. For faith can be weak (19) or strong (20). How then does it grow? Above all through the use of our minds. Faith is not burying our heads in the sand, or screwing ourselves up to believe what we know is not true, or even whistling in the dark to keep our spirits up. On the contrary, faith is reasoning trust. There can be no believing without thinking. We today are much more fortunate than Abraham, and have little or no excuse for unbelief. For we live on this side of the resurrection. Moreover, we have a complete Bible in which both the creation of the universe and the resurrection of Jesus are recorded. It is therefore more reasonable for us to believe than it was for Abraham.

(John Stott, ROMANS: God’s Good News for the World, pp.132-136)