(Genesis 15:1-6, Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16; Romans 3:27-4:25)
At Regent one year, they asked Dave Diewert, who teaches Hebrew, to preach a sermon on “The Family of God.” Diewert’s an interesting guy, not too inhibited by conventional expectations, and he opened the sermon by telling us that when they asked him, his first thought was, “God help us.”
He titled that message “The Dysfunctional Family of God,” and he didn’t pull any punches, because the Bible doesn’t. If you imagine the model churchgoing family, then think of the exact opposite, the opposite is a lot closer to what we see in the Old Testament. Cain kills his brother, Ham sees his father naked, Abraham has a child by his maid and tries to pass off his wife as his sister, Jacob cheats his brother and his uncle (though his uncle scammed him first), his sons kill off an entire town and sell their brother into slavery, Judah’s daughter-in-law is forced to run a sting operation on him to keep her place in the family . . . then you get to Moses and David, and the stories don’t get any better. The family God chose is not the sort we would have chosen, if it were up to us.
But then, if we were going to try to transform the world, we wouldn’t have chosen a family at all. We generally try to change the world through governments, rulers, diplomats, armies, constitutions, treaties, and mass movements of one form or another. Our instruments of change are politicians, media figures, and business leaders, the rich, the famous and the powerful, people who can command wide attention and vast numbers of minions to do their bidding. We work from the top down and aim as high as we can. But God begins with a family—just one—and his instruments of change are fathers and mothers. Even when his family becomes a nation, the family relationships of its rulers stand at the center of everything else that happens, for good or ill; the Bible is much more interested in David the husband and father than David the general.
God wants to teach us things we can only learn from family, whether the family in which we’re born or one of the other families to which we become attached over the course of life, including the church. Partly that’s because it’s in our families that we first learn to live by law, and thus it must be in our families that we first learn what it means to experience grace, and to show grace, and to live by faith. More, family gives us the ability to show each other grace to a degree that the world cannot match, because we’re committed to each other in ways that the rest of the world never will be. (This is probably why Mother’s Day has a different feel to it than Father’s Day; it isn’t true in every case, but in general, mothers tend to be more the parents through whom grace comes.)
That’s why Paul turns to the story of Abraham in chapter 4. He’s stated the purpose of God’s work in history in 1:16-17, to bring salvation to all who believe; in 1:18-3:20, he’s shown us why that’s necessary, telling the story of the Fall and its disastrous effects on humanity. In 3:21-26 he tells us God’s solution to that problem, that God has given us salvation in and through Jesus Christ alone. Now here, he shows us God putting his plan into motion, beginning the steps that will lead to Jesus—and again, God doesn’t begin with laws or nations. Those will come later, within the family; the family is first. It’s through the family, not through the law or the ruler, that God will reconcile the world to himself; and for all the problems with that family, it was a family that operated by faith from the very beginning. What, after all, was the righteousness of Abraham? When God made him a promise he could never verify, he believed God, and took action accordingly.
We need to understand this, because Paul isn’t just discussing technical details of how God saves us—he’s laying out a whole approach to life which is profoundly different from any form of legalism, including that of his Jewish critics. In lifting up Abraham, he’s trying to show them that the life of faith he’s laying out precedes the Old Testament Law, and in fact underlies the Law—that what he’s talking about is what the Old Testament was really all about from the beginning. Those who think they are standing for the Law against Paul are really doing nothing of the sort: they’ve read the letter of the Law, but they’ve completely missed the spirit and the point of it.
Now, why do I say that? Consider the question: once you’ve been made right with God, once you have this status as one of God’s people—then what? The Jews would say, well, then you keep the law, and if you keep it well enough, then you hang on to that status. Then you debate what constitutes “well enough,” and you get into all the drawing of lines and splitting of hairs that characterizes legalism in all its forms. To that, Paul says, no: look at Abraham. Abraham didn’t keep the law, because he didn’t have the law. But when God called him to go, he went, and when God told him to do, he did, trusting that God knew what he was doing and would be faithful to keep his promise. Faith isn’t just the beginning of the life with God, it is the whole of the life with God.
Put another way, to say we are justified through faith alone in Christ alone by grace alone doesn’t only mean that we have been saved through faith in Christ alone—it means we are being saved through faith in Christ alone, and that the life we have been given is a life we live through faith in Christ alone. It’s not that faith in Christ gets you in the door, and then you live by law the rest of the way—it’s all by faith, every step.
The Old Testament is still God’s word to us; it’s still important for us as we seek to know God better, and to understand how to live in a way that pleases him; but it doesn’t function for us as a checklist. It isn’t: here’s a list of things you have to do, and if you do them well enough then you’ll keep God happy. It isn’t: if your life looks enough like this list, then you’re better than everyone around you and you have reason to brag about how holy you are. That’s not what the law is for, because that sort of checklist holiness isn’t what God is on about. You can live a highly moral life because you love Jesus and want more than anything else to please him in everything you do; or you can live a highly moral life because you worship your reputation and want everyone to admire your holiness. The first is Paul, the second is the Pharisees.
Now, if we cannot justify ourselves before God by keeping the law, it follows that we cannot do his work by imposing his law on others. This is not to say that all law is bad—it’s obvious that societies need laws, and households need rules, and the content of those laws and rules is obviously a proper concern of ours; we do have a responsibility to do what we can to see that they reflect the character of God, and especially his justice. But it is to say that we must not fool ourselves: while laws and rules have their place, they will never be of primary importance in accomplishing the purposes of God.
God send us better laws, and better politicians to write and administer them, but we will not make this country what God would have it to be through laws and politicians. And God make us better mothers and fathers, of our own children or someone else’s, but may we never think that’s primarily about being lawgivers to our children; we will not raise them to be who God would have them to be by dictating their decisions. For our lives, for our children, for our nation, for our church, we are called to follow the example of Abraham: recognize that it’s all God’s work, not anything we can make happen in our own strength, and live accordingly. Trust not in our own holiness, to measure ourselves by the morality of our neighbors; trust not in our understanding of the laws of economics, to let the numbers on the balance sheet govern our decisions; trust not in our ability to make laws for others, as if external compulsion could ever produce inner change. Rather, go as God inspires us to go, do what he puts before us to do, make decisions as best as we understand him to be leading us—and trust him for the rest.