C. The faith of Abraham (4:9–25)
C. The faith of Abraham (4:9–25)
To return now to Abraham: a further crucial question arises. What relation, if any, lies between Abraham’s being justified by faith and the rite of circumcision? For a Jew, this was a matter of great importance: circumcision was the outward and visible sign of God’s covenant with Abraham. No uncircumcised man could claim any share in that covenant; circumcision entitled Jews or Gentile proselytes16 to all the covenant privileges, apart from those who by wilful repudiation of the divine commandments cut themselves off from the covenant people. One might, therefore, think of a Jew as replying to Paul’s argument here: ‘Granted that Abraham’s faith in God was credited to him for righteousness, this principle is applicable only to Abraham and his circumcised offspring.’ But Paul has a ready answer to this. What was Abraham’s condition when he was justified by faith? Was he circumcised, or uncircumcised? To this there could be only one answer. He was uncircumcised. The covenant of circumcision was not introduced until a later stage in Abraham’s life (Gen. 17:10–14)—at least fourteen years later, according to the Genesis chronology.17 When at last Abraham was circumcised, his circumcision was but the external seal of that righteous status which God had granted him long before, by virtue of his faith. Quite plainly it was faith, not circumcision, that God required of him. Here then is hope for Gentiles: the example of Abraham shows that circumcision or uncircumcision is irrelevant to a man’s status before God.
Abraham, accordingly, is the true father of all who, like him, believe in God and take him at his word. He is the father of uncircumcised believers, for he was himself uncircumcised when his faith was reckoned to him for righteousness; he is the father of circumcised believers too, not so much on the ground of their circumcision as on the ground of their faith.
If circumcision had nothing to do with Abraham’s justification by God, with all the promised blessings that accompanied it, the law had even less to do with it. For, as Paul had pointed out to the Galatians, the law was given 430 years later than God’s promise to Abraham and could not invalidate it or restrict its scope (Gal. 3:17). If, long after the promise was given, it had been made conditional on obedience to a law which was not mentioned in the original terms of the promise, the whole basis of the promise would have been nullified. The promise was a promise of blessing, and is fulfilled in the gospel. The Mosaic law does indeed pronounce a blessing on those who keep it, but at the same time it invokes a curse on those who break it. And in view of the universal failure to keep the law, the curse is more prominent and relevant than the blessing: the law brings wrath (verse 15). A sinful tendency may indeed be present in the absence of any law; but it takes a legal enactment to crystallize that tendency into a positive transgression or breach of law. And for each such transgression the law fixes an appropriate penalty; this is inherent in the principle of retribution which is inseparable from the idea of law. The law does not fix rewards for those who keep it, but it does necessarily lay down penalties for those who break it. A gracious promise such as God made to Abraham belongs to a totally different realm from law.
No; Abraham’s justification and attendant blessings were based on his faith in God; they were not earned by merit or effort on his part (as would have been the case had they been conditional on law-keeping) but conferred on him by God’s grace. And the principle on which God thus dealt with Abraham extends to his descendants—not to his natural descendants as such, for they have become subject to the obligations of the law, but to his spiritual descendants, those who follow the precedent of Abraham’s faith. This, says Paul, is what God meant when he gave him the name Abraham (in place of Abram, as he was formerly called), and said, ‘I have made you the father of a multitude of nations’ (Gen. 17:5). These comprise all who believe in God, Jews and Gentiles alike: Abraham is the father of all believers.
Consider, too, the quality of Abraham’s faith. It was faith in the God who brings the dead to life, who calls non-existent things as though they really existed—and gives them real existence by doing so. When God told him that he would have a vast multitude of descendants, Abraham was still childless. Not only so, but he was beyond the age at which a man might reasonably hope to become a father, and Sarah his wife was even more certainly beyond the age of motherhood. Abraham did not shut his eyes to these unfavourable circumstances; he took them all into careful consideration. But, when he set over against them the promise of God, he found that the certainty of God’s ability and will to fulfil his promise outweighed them all. Having nothing to rest upon but the bare word of God, he relied on that, in face of all the opposing indications which pressed on him from every side. In fact, his faith was strengthened by the very force of the obstacles which lay in its path. And his faith won him the favour of God.
Now, adds Paul, the statement that Abraham’s faith was counted to him for righteousness does not apply to Abraham alone. The principle which it enshrines holds good for all believers in God, and especially for believers in God as he is revealed in the gospel—the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus had been delivered up to death because of his people’s sins; but God raised him up to secure their justification.
11. He received circumcision as a sign or seal. In Genesis 17:11 God tells Abraham that circumcision is to be ‘a sign of the covenant between me and you’. Paul’s exegesis identifies this covenant with that of Genesis 15:18, in which (fourteen years at least before Abraham was circumcised) God showed Abraham effectively how he counted his faith to him as righteousness. Circumcision is thus treated as a subsequent and external seal of that righteous status which Abraham already possessed as God’s free gift; it neither created nor enhanced that righteous status.
13. That they should inherit the world. ‘They’ is literally ‘it’ (auto, neuter), referring to ‘offspring’ (sperma, neuter, here translated ‘descendants’); there is a much better attested variant reading ‘he’ (auton, masculine), referring to Abraham. This is not a formal quotation of any recorded promise to Abraham, but an interpretation of those promises which speak of ‘all the families of the earth’ (Gen. 12:3) or ‘all the nations of the earth’ (Gen. 18:18; 22:18) as ‘blessing themselves’ (MT) or ‘being blessed’ (LXX) by Abraham and his offspring. When Abraham’s heritage is delimited in geographical terms it lies between Egypt and the Euphrates (Gen. 15:18; cf. 13:14–15), but in the spiritual and permanent sense in which the promises are interpreted in the New Testament it cannot be confined within such earthly frontiers: it is as world-wide as the gospel (cf. Rom. 10:18). (In Heb. 11:16 the promised land is no earthly Canaan but ‘a better country, that is, a heavenly one’.)
Did not come through the law. Referring to the promise of blessing through Abraham’s offspring, Paul had argued in Galatians that the word ‘offspring’, being a collective singular, can and does point primarily to Christ (3:16) and consequently also to the people of Christ (3:29). Here his point is that the validity of the promise has nothing to do with the law (which came centuries later, as is noted in Gal. 3:17) or with legal righteousness, but comes through the righteousness of faith.
14. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null. Because the inheritance promised to Abraham would now depend on a new principle—that of works, not faith.
And the promise is void. Because if its fulfilment depends on law-keeping, men and women’s inability to keep the law will ensure that the promise will in fact never be fulfilled.
15. For the law brings wrath. That is, law inevitably imposes penalties for failure to keep it.
But where there is no law there is no transgression. Here, as in 5:13 (‘sin is not counted where there is no law’), Paul appears to be enunciating a current legal maxim (like the Roman maxim nulla poena sine lege).
16. That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace. A summary of the principle that what God provides by his free grace can be appropriated by human beings only through faith. What, on the contrary, is earned by works (not faith) is bestowed as a matter of merit (not grace).
17. ‘I have made you the father of many nations.’ From Genesis 17:5, ‘I have made you the father of a multitude (Heb. ’ab-hămōn) of nations’, where ’ab-hămōn is given as the explanation of his new name Abraham.
In the presence of the God in whom he believed. These words follow on (after a parenthesis) from the clause in order that the promise may … be guaranteed to all his descendants (verse 16)—i.e. that the promise might be valid in God’s sight for all Abraham’s spiritual posterity (whether Jews or Gentiles by natural birth).
Who gives life to the dead. This general designation of God in Jewish liturgy is used here with special reference to Abraham’s ‘own body, which was as good as dead’ and ‘the barrenness (lit. ‘deadness’, nekrōsis) of Sarah’s womb’ (verse 19).
And calls into existence the things that do not exist. The reference here is to the ‘many nations’ which were to spring from Abraham; not only had they no existence as yet, but (since Abraham and Sarah had now entered a childless old age) nothing seemed less likely than that they should ever exist.
18. That he should become the father of many nations. In Genesis these are his descendants through Isaac (the Israelites and Edomites), together with the twelve tribes of the Ishmaelites (Gen. 25:12–18) and his descendants by Keturah (Gen. 25:2–4). For Paul they are the multiplicity of Jewish and Gentile believers.
‘So shall your descendants be.’ From Genesis 15:5, where God tells Abraham (while he is still childless) that his offspring will be as countless as the stars.
19. He considered his own body, which was as good as dead. He made allowance for every relevant factor, including his great age and the high improbability, by all natural reckoning, that he would ever have a child (cf. Heb. 11:12, where the same participle is similarly rendered ‘as good as dead’, with regard to this very situation). Yet, having taken account of all these factors, he concluded that the certainty of the divine promise outweighed every natural improbability.
25. Who was put to death for our trespasses. This may be a quotation from some primitive confession of faith; the language appears to be based on Isaiah 53. The verb put to death is literally ‘delivered up’ (paradidōmi), which occurs twice in the LXX version of that chapter: in Isaiah 53:6, ‘the Lord has delivered him [the suffering Servant] up for our sins’ and Isaiah 53:12, ‘because of their sins he was delivered up’. (This last clause deviates considerably from MT, ‘he … made intercession for the transgressors’; see note on Rom. 8:34, pp. 179–180.) There is a verbal resemblance also to Isaiah 53:5 in the Targum of Jonathan, where the Aramaic clause ‘ithmĕsar ba’ăwāyāthānā, if it stood by itself, might mean ‘he was delivered up for our iniquities’ (in the Targum, however, it is the temple that is the subject: the Servant-Messiah ‘will build the sanctuary which was profaned by our trespasses and delivered up for our iniquities’). When the same Greek verb is used in 1 Corinthians 11:23, one may wonder if the sense there is not so much ‘on the night when he was betrayed’ (by Judas) but rather ‘… when he was delivered up’ (by God).
And raised for our justification. Elsewhere it is by the sacrificial death of Christ that his people are justified (cf. 3:24–25; 5:9), but his sacrificial death would not have been efficacious apart from the resurrection. The preposition ‘for’ in both clauses of this verse represents dia (‘because of’); Christ was ‘delivered up’ to atone for his people’s sins and raised to guarantee their justification. (We must not interpret the two clauses so woodenly as to suggest that his resurrection had nothing to do with the atonement for their sins and his death nothing to do with their justification.)