Word of Salvation – Vol. 23 No. 40 – June 1977
Abraham Believed And God Credited It To Him As Righteousness
Sermon by Rev. A.I. de Graaf, B.D. on Gen.15:6
Scripture Reading: Gen.15:1-6
Psalter Hymnal: 190; 42; 361 (1,2) (after Sermon part 1);
389 (1,2) (after Sermon part 2);
389 (3) (after Sermon part 3); 444 (1,2); 493
Brothers and Sisters, Boys and Girls, Young People, Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
What is the Gospel? What REALLY is THE message which the Church has to bring to the world? Has that message changed? Is it any different today than what it was when Paul preached or even before Jesus came, in Abraham and David’s day…. and when Luther and Calvin stressed it in the 16th century? Must we now believe and LIVE BY… something entirely different? Sure, we must bring God’s message in the language of our day. And we must bring it against the background of the problems people face TODAY. But the message itself is the same: It is never another Gospel: It is the Gospel – not of what WE did or must do, but of what GOD did, in sovereign mercy. God created the world good, but then man fell and rebelled against Him. And then God came to this utterly powerless and miserable world, this rebellious mankind, and GAVE His Son to DO IT ALL.
God Who restored what we spoiled….. God who justified the sinner. THAT is the Gospel! What GOD did for sinners who couldn’t do a THING! Not even what He did IN us….BUT WHAT HE DID FOR US.
NEVER does the emphasis in God’s Book shift away from that miracle: That GOD loved the world and gave…..! That GOD cared while we hated Him; that GOD stuck to us while we ran away from Him and we still would do so if He’d let us – God…. God…. God in Christ! That’s the Gospel as Luther rediscovered it and as Calvin saw it after him. From God, through God and unto God are all things. Therefore we may rest assured that this earth one day shall praise Him again. He sticks to His guns! He will never forsake what His hands have begun. And it does not just consist of His ideas. He DID things….. HERE! This is the Gospel: God cared while we didn’t. Jesus paid the full price: all we need to do to have part in that, is accept such great love with a believing heart. Never mind that that heart trembles…. Never mind that that faith is weak and wavering! Look at Abraham now. An old man with a wife long past child-bearing age. And God promises them: He will give them a son and make them a great nation. And then God waits and nothing happens.
God has to come again and again to repeat the promise. Abraham is desperate at times and connives and contrives to make the promise come true in his own little way. Like getting a young slave girl instead of his old lady. But God comes again and puts him right. And Abraham believes….And then God says: Okay Abraham, you believe Me? You believe Me again? That’s good enough for Me! Incredible! Didn’t God know how lousy Abram’s faith was? Of course He did! But what IS faith? It is: to stretch out YOUR EMPTY HAND TO GOD! It is: to trust that HE will make it. Faith has under its feet not OUR OWN strivings, but the ROCK-BOTTOM of what GOD does…..! The work of the Son of God who was to pay the full price! Who was to comply indeed with ALL God’s requirements! Oh Abraham was getting a clean sheet all right. He was getting righteousness; the status of perfection before God – but not because he did so well himself. This thing was RECKONED to him. It was written onto his account….. from the account of the Son of God. THAT was Paul’s discovery. It is amazing how this text from Genesis gets quoted in the New Testament. Paul quotes it in Romans 4 – there we hear of the ATONEMENT. Later he quotes it in GALATIANS 3 – there we hear of the ENCHANTMENT. Then finally we find how James quotes it, too, in chap.2 – Then we learn of the COMMITMENT.
But the Gospel – as we see it emerge here, too, is the Message: not of what we do for God, not even of what He does IN us, but of what He did – once for all – FOR US! To Him alone the glory!
I. (After part 1: We will sing 361:1,2 – Praise the Saviour.)
(Read Romans 4:1-8).
The Jews in Rome were very upset. They had always striven so beautifully to build up a God-pleasing life by doing the Law. To be the Example for mankind: God’s Experimental Farm in the middle of the desert of sin! And here come these Christians, here comes this Paul, renegade Jew that he is, and says: “no need for any of it! No circumcision….. no abstention from pork….. no sacrifices….. no painstaking Sabbath regulations….! Just believe in Christ and in what God did in Him, and you ARE children of God forever!
Man, it is not AS EASY AS ALL THAT, is it? It is as if we hear the monks and the nuns, the strugglers after holiness and the strivers after peace with God of a later age, and they, too said it: God isn’t satisfied ALL THAT EASILY, is He?
The answer of course is: NO, HE ISN’T! But you nor I, nor Abraham nor David were the ones fit to pay the price. God isn’t palmed off all THAT easily. Who do YOU think HE is?
The Jew, too, has imperfection in his holiest works, just as Luther knew he just had selfishness in his heart while he punished himself in that monastery cell: he didn’t really love God, he just wanted to get saved. But God knows the heart, all of it. God knows our lives – and WHAT of it can we offer unto Him as a sacrifice holy and undefiled? Whom are we kidding, do we think? God said: Abram, all right, I make a covenant with you. I make you my partner. The 2nd half of Gen.15 tells about it. Now the Old Eastern way to symbolise partnership was that a number of living animals were slaughtered and cut in two, and then the two partners would walk together along a path between the two halves of the cow, the goat, the sheep and the doves. Just as these animals once were ONE living whole, so we are now together in a partnership for life. Ah yes, but God goes through this path between the animals ALONE. Abram could not give guarantees. It was God who went through the night, it was God’s Son who paid the price all alone. Not even His best disciples could stay awake with Him: Jesus, God’s Son had to bear the burden ALL BY HIMSELF: and SO our bill got paid!
You Jews! – says Paul – your own Great ones sang of this thing already. Abram and David…… they got saved the same way we still are. Not by becoming God’s pedigree, but by accepting God’s Great Gift of Forgiveness all paid for by Christ and transferred to our account – yes – just by accepting all this with our empty hand. No other song before, now or ever after befits the Church of Christ, than the praise to HIM Who alone is God’s Way to Peace:
Praise the Saviour, now and ever,
Praise HIM, all beneath the skies!
Prostrate lying, suffering, dying
on the cross! A Sacrifice!
VICTORY GAINING, LIFE OBTAINING,
Now in glory HE doth rise!
Man’s work faileth, Christ’s availeth;
HE IS ALL OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS!
He, our SAVIOUR has forever
SET US FREE from dire distress!
Through HIS merit we INHERIT
light & peace & happiness!
Sing 361:1,2.
After part 2, we sing 389:1,2.
Now we read: Galatians 3:1-8.
Man! Is old Paul lashing away at these people in Galatia! Who has bewitched you!? What ENCHANTMENT are you under NOW? I TOLD you THE GOSPEL that you are given peace with God ONLY AND FULLY through what God in Christ did FOR you – and here you come again with “YES, BUT…. YES BUT IT CANNOT BE THAT easy, surely?
When we look over the history of the Christian Church, it seems to be one sorry row of “YES BUT’S…..!.”
Following the rediscoveries of the Gospel of God’s sovereign grace Pelagius tried to come back with it in 250: WE CAN MAKE THE RIGHT DECISIONS ALL BY OURSELVES, THERE IS A GOOD SPARK IN MAN…. WE MUST PLEASE GOD ALSO BY OUR WORKS…..!
Augustine put the church right: WE ARE SAVED ONLY by the unmerited grace of God: His sovereign love did it all.
But then in 1517 Luther had to come and nail it down again: By grace alone…. Christ ALONE… through Faith ALONE!
But time and again we hear the protest: It Isn’t All That Easy! I have the feeling that in our day and in our church we face the temptation from THREE directions:
1. There is the tendency among our young people to reject INFANT BAPTISM.
Now why?
They weren’t brought up as Baptists.
From them I can understand it: for them it is a big jump to the Reformed way of thinking that sees the Covenant both in Old and New Testament as a Covenant OF GRACE:
GOD FIRST: The package He offers to a sinner is one ENTIRELY PAID FOR BY CHRIST, it is not ME FIRST with my faith, who opens the way for God’s love. It is God first who also uses families, yes who even uses NATIONS to whom He wants this Gospel preached and sealed by baptism – as a road through which this renewal comes. No distinction between nature and grace. All of life was under sin, and all of life now hears the promise: GOD FIRST!
What is it now: that makes you say: “Yes but”? Is the package God offered you when you were a child and could not say a thing: Not good enough? Must YOU come first with YOUR faith? Or do YOU want more than God’s grace? Must YOUR EXPERIENCE now finally make you sure? But God was there so long ago: WHY DO NOT YOU BELIEVE HIM? THAT will be counted to you as righteousness! We with our “YES BUT…..!”
2. It is there also in the NEO-PENTECOSTAL illusion: You must get more experience…. You must obey more laws…… Just faith is not enough: You Need Super-Faith. Then Christian judges Christian and our eye wanders from the rock-ground of what God in Christ did for us to the subjective fleeting standards of what we think He must do IN us…..! And cruelly we throw weak believers back onto themselves: Sure the one day… in despair the other. We have made a new law then, a norm we have for others….. and for ourselves. But is our eye on Christ….. on Him alone?
3. Then, in our day and age, we also see how the churches look at the requirements of HUMANISM and SOCIAL JUSTICE and HORIZONTALISM. We blush when we hear the socialists and Marxists with their indictments of inconsistent Christianity, and we mutter: yes maybe you’re right! Maybe we should stop worrying about getting grace from God, and rather go flat-stick for getting a fair deal for our neighbour. And then, too, we are back in the law! And we meet Paul on our path, -Paul the Jew who met Christ on his legalistic Damascus road – and he thunders at us as he thundered it then:
O FOOLISH GALATIANS, WHO HAS BEWITCHED YOU!
Are you going from the song of praise back into the house of bondage?
NOW WHAT AGAIN WAS THE GOSPEL?
Christian action has but one starting point: the cross of the Only Mediator between God and Man – where the only and full price was paid to get peace with God. Where the demands of the law were met and sons and daughters were born for the Most High, from Jew and gentile, female and male, slave and free. OUT OF MERE GRACE. Believe – and this will be reckoned unto you for righteousness. Lesser righteousness can never be had from anywhere!
This is how God makes Christians and whatever else do you think you want to be? The package you got as a child and learned to accept in trembling faith, is the greatest thing a man can ever receive from God. You’re not saying, “Yes But…” to HIM are you? Rather it behoves you to fall on your face and sing to Him:
NOT what my hands have done
can save my guilty soul,
NOT what MY toiling flesh has borne
can make my spirit whole.
NOT what I FEEL….. or do,
can give me peace with God;
NOT ALL MY prayers…. and sighs…. and tears
can bear My Awful load!’
THY GRACE alone, o God,
to me can pardon speak;
Thy power alone, O Son of God,
Can this sore bondage break.
No other work save Thine,
NO other blood will do;
No strength, save that which is DIVINE
Can bear me safely through.
Let’s sing 389:1,2.
After last part of sermon: 389:3 “I bless the Christ of God”.
Now we turn to one more NT passage: where again we hear Gen 15:6 quoted. James 2! The chapter that tells us that faith without works is dead. The chapter that calls us – yes also to SOCIAL JUSTICE! That lashes the rich for their callousness and holds before us the demands of the holy law of God. Before us as CHRISTIANS! Let us read verses 14-24.
Now I can understand how Martin Luther after his great discovery that not the slavery of Rome but the free grace of God made him forever a child of God, that he had trouble with this passage calling James’ letter “Eine Stroherne Brief” “An Epistle of Straw”. Verse 24 says: Justified by works and not by faith ALONE” and we think of this “ALONE”, this “sola” which Luther wrote in the text of Romans 3:38:
ONLY by faith in Jesus, NOTHING ELSE, are we justified.
Yes, and today we celebrate the truth of that confession. But faith is COMMITMENT, and it is never just a head-knowledge. It is a heart-knowledge, too, that begins to WORK IN LOVE.
That isn’t just JAMES talking. Paul says that, too. So does Jesus: If you love Me, you will DO my will. You will learn to sing Psalm 119: the commandments: not as the stairway to heaven, but the way-of-life of people who HAVE heaven. The law, at last the land in which God’s children begin to function, as they LOVE their Father and BEGIN to show Him obedience. Not the obedience of slaves, who watch the clock to drop their tools as soon as the whistle goes for knock off. NOT the obedience of slaves who tote up their overtime hoping God will – as the heavenly Book-keeper, – fairly keep account.
No such self-made obedience,
no such grim slavery!
The Reformation rediscovered the relaxed joy of being children of God through Jesus’ completed work.
It did not have to ask the question, it just spontaneously made the discovery, as Luther made it himself in his discussions with Karlstadt, that ANTINOMIANISM is a contradiction in terms: what? Be redeemed by God and then still have a slave mentality?
But then what did God redeem me FOR?
What did He redeem the WORLD FOR?
– but for the song of praise now finally again raised unto Him?
Whose glory is the very splendour of the new earth?
Not the slaves of a system – Be it Roman, Watchtower or Marxist
but the sons and daughters who LOVE their REDEEMER
and arise to do His will. That IS not the Gospel.
But that is the FRUIT of the Gospel of God’s grace in Christ.
Amen.
Let’s sing 389:3.