Abraham, Father Of The Faithful
ABRAHAM, FATHER OF THE FAITHFUL
ROMANS 4:1-4
Paul now gives an example of faith in action.
To understand what Paul writes in this chapter, it would be helpful to read Genesis chapters 12–25 and Hebrews 11:8-19 as background in a study of one of the great men of the Old Testament:
“By faith Abraham …” Four thousand years ago Ur of the Chaldees was a sea-port on the Persian Gulf, where people first learned to sail the open waters. It was the London or New York of that distant age. The dhows sailed east to the Indus valley ports, and to Sri Lanka, and the talk of sailors in the Euphrates valley town made one person, Abraham, a citizen of Ur, aware of a great world across the waters. And down the Fertile Crescent, which made a route for the caravans up the river and round into Syria and Egypt, came the traders with stories of magnificence beside the Nile, and of the ships which came from Crete, and who told of other races, other cities, other ways. It was a varied story of human activity, with one common element for the man of Ur who listened, questioned and thought. The whole world, east, west, north, south, was lamentably lost in grotesque views of God, and soul-destroying superstition. The cruel cult of human sacrifice, the slaughter of babies, or the sacred prostitution, which he saw in Ur, were common practices. Or there were worse. In Egypt they worshiped the bull, the cat, the ram, the crocodile. In Crete there were bloody rites of bull-fighting. Abraham had become aware of nobler truth, that God was one, that God cared for humanity, and prompted the human mind who reached for him. He had heard a voice and listened.
This is how an amazing project took shape. Abraham was the first missionary, the first person with an ardent desire to share a saving truth with his fellows. He was aware, as perhaps no one else was, of the vastness of the world. It was obvious that one person alone could not influence the multitude of mankind from farthest east to farthest west. But a nation, dedicated to the truth, might do what one person could hardly do. And so the magnificent plan which took Abraham out from his homeland to found a nation in the clean desert—by faith. Therefore the call which came, to a heart concerned and prepared to listen and obey. “Abraham believed …’