Romans 4:23-25

This passage builds directly off the preceding one, but it forms the final conclusion and restatement of the point that Paul has been making since the beginning of Romans. The key verse of Romans is 1:17: “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.”  Paul's main theme is this idea of the righteousness of God—the righteousness which God possesses innately but also the righteousness that God bestows on us. And mainspring of that righteousness is faith.

From that verse through the middle of chapter 3, Paul showed how mankind—both Gentile and Jew—had turned away from God's righteousness and fallen into sin and so fell into condemnation, coming under the wrath of God. Man was declared guilty and sentenced to death. But--and this is the whole point of the gospel--God provided a propitiation, a means of forgiveness, so that we may be saved. There is no need to attempt to save ourselves by our good works, which would be impossible anyway, because God has provided the means of salvation—all we must do is have faith and accept it.

Realizing how strange this would seem to many of the Jews in the Roman church, Paul goes into chapter 4 and looks at the story of Abraham. The Bible makes it quite clear that Abraham's faith was the ground of his right relationship with God; that Abraham found peace with God and all the other myriad blessings which came upon him because, in faith, he accepted and acted upon God's promise to him.

So with verse 23, Paul brings this all back around. That statement about Abraham was not something specific to Abraham; this isn't just a piece of historical trivia about the life of a patriarch. Here we have, in a condensed form, the entire gospel as the apostles preached it. The Pentateuch, the very thing which the Jews based all their thoughts and ideas upon, records the foundation of Christianity. If Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness, then if we believe God it will be imputed unto us for righteousness.

I mentioned in the last section the importance of the fact that the referent of our faith is God. Faith, in itself, is nothing. It must be faith in God. That is what links a Christian today with a bearded Shemite pilgrim four thousand years ago—faith in a common God. Look at the end of verse 24. Our faith is in “him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead.” Abraham assumedly knew nothing about Christ, except through some vague, general prophecies. He probably didn't know that Jesus was going to come to earth and die, still less that He was going to rise again. But what did Abraham know? The answer is found in verse 17: Abraham believed in God: “who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.” Abraham knew that God could bring a multitude of descendants from a barren woman. He was willing to sacrifice his own son because he believed that God was able to raise him from the dead. And so, while he probably didn't know anything about the resurrection of Christ, if he had known, he would have believed it, because he believed in God.

This is the point at which the saints of the Old Testament are one with the any Christian of the New Testament. It is not just that we all have faith, it is that our faith is in God. We know more about what God has done and can do than they do, but they had faith in the same God. The writer of Hebrews put it this way: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” (Hebrews 11:13) They embraced God's promises, even though they could only see them far away, but even that was enough for them to reject the conventions of a godless life and set off in pursuit of the promise as pilgrims, both literal and spiritual.

The thing that Paul is driving home here is the continuity between the Old Testament and the New. As Paul said in the last chapter, God has provided an atonement, a means by which sin can be forgiven, guilty men can be justified, and exiles become reconciled. Abraham didn't know about that atonement, except vaguely through symbol and prophecy. But his faith was in the God who would provide it. 

Suppose a doctor were working on creating a cure for some illness which had previously been incurable. If there was a man who knew the doctor well and had the utmost respect for him, both as a man and as a doctor, he might have complete faith that the doctor would succeed in his endeavor and find the cure. If the man were stricken of the disease in question, he might even put his name on a waiting list to receive the cure once it was discovered. In that case, we could say that he had faith in the cure, even though the cure didn't even exist yet, because he had faith in the one who made the cure. 

That is a rather feeble and clumsy analogy to the relation between the Old Testament and the New. Abraham had faith in God and what He would do. We have faith in God and what He has done.

But what is this atonement? It is the death and resurrection of Christ, which was to bring justification for our offenses. Because of our sins, we were cut off from God, under the wrath of God which is revealed from Heaven against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of man. But when we, by faith, enter into the atonement which God provided, we find justification—the forgiveness of sin and a reconciliation with God. 

That is the fact of atonement, a fact which the Bible clearly teaches—that through the death and resurrection of Christ, justification has been provided for us through faith. But the Bible does not really explain HOW that happens; why it had to be through the death and resurrection of Christ or exactly what that did to create justification for us. Attempts to answer those kinds of questions are called theories of the atonement. There have been dozen of different attempts by Christians over the years to formulate a theory of the atonement, an answer to the questions of hows and whys. They main attempt this explanation by drawing analogies from different spheres of human life—social, judicial, political, or even biological. They make interesting reading in theology and they do have a certain importance in their place. But I have a different point I want to make here.

This analogy comes from C. S. Lewis. From modern biological science, we know that food contains different nutrients and vitamins and we understand how the stomach breaks down the food we eat and absorbs those nutrients and that is how food gives us the energy to live. We understand clearly how eating helps us and why it is necessary. Two thousand years ago, people didn't know all that science about how the stomach absorbs nutrients from food. But they knew that eating helps you live and that you will die without it. They  knew the fact of what eating is and the fact that it is necessary, even if they didn't know why or how and, probably for many people, they never even stopped to wonder about the hows and whys.

Just so, we can have faith in the fact of Atonement; we can know that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that in this lies our hope—without having an understanding or agreement about any theories of Atonement. 

I wanted to bring this up because I needed to make an important clarification about something I said in an earlier article. When we talked about Romans 4:3, I mentioned that word “counted” can be translated “imputed”--the same word is given that translation in verses 6 and 8. You could translate Romans 4:3 as “Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness.” That word—impute—is often used in a different context in theology. Many people, especially in Calvinist or Evangelical tradition believe that on the cross, our sins were imputed to Christ and when we our saved, Christ's righteousness is imputed to us.

But whatever the truth of that—it isn't what Paul is talking about here, even though he does use the word “impute.” Romans 4 deals with out part of salvation; that is, what do we do to obtain justification and the answer is that it is by faith. Faith is imputed for righteousness in the sense that faith is counted as an efficient cause by which a right relationship with God comes about. God has provided an atonement and we, in faith, accepted it because we believe in God—just Abraham believed in God even though he didn't know exactly what the Atonement would be. But if we are asking about God's side—what exactly the Atonement is and how it works, that is something Romans 4 doesn't deal with at all, and the New Testament as a whole never addresses explicitly.

This, then, is the message of the first four chapters of Romans, and the big message of the gospel throughout the New Testament. Mankind was lost in sin but God has provided a solution for the problem of sin though the death and resurrection of Christ. Because of our sin, we could never find justification on the grounds of justice, through our own good works or obedience to the law. But God provided hope for those who had no hope. And we find that hope through faith in the atonement which God has provided; we can find righteousness before the law of God because the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, for it is written: the just shall live by faith.

That is the good news of the gospel.