Dual Panel1So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things?
2If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story.
3What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."
4If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift.
5But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it--you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked--well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.
6David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:
7Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.
8Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score.
9Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don't we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?
10Now [think]: Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That's right, [before] he was marked.
11That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.
12And it means further that Abraham is father of [all] people who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the "outs" with God, as yet unidentified as God's, in an "uncircumcised" condition. It is precisely these people in this condition who are called "set right by God and with God"! Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision [not] just because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God's action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.
13That famous promise God gave Abraham--that he and his children would possess the earth--was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed.
14If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad [contract]! That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal.
15A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a [promise]--and God's promise at that--you can't break it.
16This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions [and] those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father--that's reading the story backwards. He is our [faith] father.
17We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then [became] a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing.
18When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he [couldn't] do but on what God said he [would] do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"
19Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up.
20He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God,
21sure that God would make good on what he had said.
22That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right."
23But it's not just Abraham;
24it's also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless.
25The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us [right with God].