Romans 4:13-end
13-15That 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. If 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. A 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 backward. He is our faith father.
17-18We 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. When 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!”
19-25Abraham 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. 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 had 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 Message