Paul had indicated that salvation through the gift of God’s righteousness apart from law had been announced beforehand in the Old Testament (Rom. 1:2; 3:21). Now he shows that it is not only something that had been previously announced, but was also the only way anyone either in the Old Testament period or the dawning New Testament era has been saved.

Paul begins with Abraham, and it’s clear why he does so; Abraham was the acknowledged father of the Jewish people and, with the exception of Jesus Himself, the most important person in the Bible. Abraham is a giant in Scripture. So where do we start in considering the case of Abraham? The place at which to begin – the same place we ourselves must begin, if we would be saved – is with the acknowledgment that there was nothing in Abraham that could ever have commended him to God. If Abraham had no natural good in him, it is certain that he was not saved by human goodness. How then was he saved? The answer, as we have seen several times already, is by God’s gift of righteousness to him, which he received by faith.

Paul refers to a specific Old Testament teaching concerning Abraham, and the text he refers to is Genesis 15:6. The context of the verse is the incident in which God took Abraham out under the night sky and promised him offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, even though at this time Abraham was 85 years old and had no children, and Abraham believed God. From the viewpoint of the doctrine of salvation this is the single most important verse in the entire Bible. This is because in Genesis 15:6 the doctrine of justification by faith is set forth for the first time. It is the first reference in the Bible to (1) faith, (2) righteousness, and (3) justification. This is the first time that any specific individual is said to have been justified.

How was this accomplished? Here we have to be extremely careful. First, we need to dismiss what are clearly two serious misunderstandings of the text. One is the liberal misunderstanding, though it is probably what the great majority of Jews would have thought in Paul’s day. It supposes that when the text says “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” it means that Abraham was just a good or pious man, and that he was justified in that basis. Obviously, if Abraham believed God when God promised him numerous children, Abraham was the kind of person who delighted in believing and obeying God, in doing what God told him to do. And, so this reasoning goes, it was because he was such a good man that God saved him. That is not justification by faith, of course. It is the opposite, justification by works. But it was what many people fervently believe and what liberal scholarship teaches.

The second misunderstanding is not a liberal but an evangelical one. It goes like this: Since Abraham did not have any righteousness in himself by which he could be justified before God – but since God wanted to save him – God looked for something He could accept in place of righteousness. Since Abraham had faith, at least a little bit, God said, “Even though this little bit of faith is not righteousness, it is something I can work with. I’ll treat it as righteousness and so save Abraham.” Even to put it like that shows the absurdity of this interpretation. For God is not a juggler of truth. God does not pretend a thing is something it is not. Consequently, if God counted Abraham as being righteous, it must have been on the basis of a true righteousness – either His or someone else’s – and not on the mere fiction of substituting apples for oranges.

There are several reasons why we should be warned against this second insidious but very common misunderstanding. First, when the text says that “it was credited to him as righteousness,” what does it refer to? The evangelical misunderstanding would have to maintain that the antecedent is the fact that Abraham believed God or the fact that he had faith. But this is hard to support grammatically. “It” demands a noun (or at least a verbal noun) as an antecedent, and the text supplies neither. This fact alone suggests that we should look further for what was actually reckoned to Abraham as righteousness. Second, there is the way faith is referred to in the rest of the Bible, specifically in the writings of Paul. It is never said that people are saved because of their faith or even on the basis of their faith. They are saved by faith. Third, faith cannot be a substitute for righteousness because the important word “credited” does not permit that interpretation.

When God saved Abraham He did two things, one negative and one positive. (1) He did what Paul quotes David as saying in verses 7-8 (a quotation of Ps. 32:1-2), namely, God did not reckon his sin against him. How So? It is not merely that God simply struck Abraham’s transgressions from the ledger book of his life and then forgot about them, as if they could simply be discounted. God does not play imaginary games. True, He did remove the list of Abraham’s sins from his ledger, but that was only because he had first transferred it to the ledger book of Jesus Christ. Jesus took the liability of those transgressions on Himself and paid their price by dying for them. Abraham’s sin was not reckoned to Abraham because it was reckoned to Jesus Christ instead. (2) In a parallel action, God then also reckoned the righteousness of Christ to Abraham, which is what Genesis 15:6 teaches. God took Christ’s righteousness and wrote it in Abraham’s ledger.

That is the only way anybody has ever been saved, and it is precisely what has happened for anybody who has been saved. It is true that there have been different degrees of understanding of what happened. The Old Testament saints understood less (although Abraham probably understood a great deal). New Testament saints understood more. But regardless of the degrees of understanding, the only way we or anybody else is saved is by the imputation of righteousness of Christ to our account.

Do you believe in Jesus Christ as your Savior? That’s what God declares Him to be. Abraham believed what God had revealed to him concerning Jesus Christ, and the righteousness of Christ was credited to Abraham as if it were his own. Adam, Jacob, Moses, David, John the Baptist – all believed the same thing. No one has ever been saved in any other way. So I say, if you have not believed in Jesus Christ as your Savior, believe now. Today is always the day of salvation.

Romans 4:1-8 Reflection Questions:

On what basis do you expect to obtain salvation?

What do you believe concerning Jesus Christ?

Do you believe in Jesus Christ as your Savior?