Romans 4:16 (The Message)
The fulfilment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God
and his way and simply embracing what he does. God's promise
arrives as a 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 the father of us all. He is not our
racial father - that is reading the story backwards. He is our faith father.
We 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 a father of many peoples"? Abraham was
first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust
God to do only what God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make
something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed
anyway, deciding not to live based on 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 said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"
Abraham didn't focus on his impotence and said, "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. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously
skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God,
sure that God would make good on what he said. That's why it is said, "Abraham was
declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." But it's not just Abraham;
it'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. The sacrificed Jesus
made us fit for God, set us right with God.
The classic example of biblical faith is Abraham.
Abraham was alive to the activity of God in his life, and the aliveness was his faith.
The heroic response Abraham made to God has thrown his image across all of history
as an example of what it means to have faith.
But Abraham, as an example, shows us something else; namely, that faith isn't a simple
question of response. It's more a matter of where the response will be focused. At least
half of the marvel of Abraham's faith is that he picked his way through the pantheon of
Babylonian, Canaanite, and Egyptian gods (he lived for considerable periods among all
of them) and listened carefully and long enough to hear God's voice speak his new word
- and he chose to respond to that.
We face a pantheon of similar gods. Wall Street. Madison Avenue. Hollywood. Each calls
to us for a response. To which voice will we listen? And how will we respond? Abraham
shows us the way. He shows us not only what faith is but also how to live it among the babel
of voices that call us in our day-to-day lives.
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