Abraham the Justified

Thesis Statement: To find and unearth the centerpiece of revelation in the lives of the Four Patriarchs, and say it as succinctly. For example: Being ‘vindicated’ by God (Abraham) I ‘dwell’ in the Promise (Isaac), ‘face to face’ with the Lord (Jacob) having been ‘sent’ by Him (Joseph).

This will require a massive boil-down. In the subject before us we will investigate to see if there
may be one primary word that, after careful reckoning, is descriptive of the life and experience of each of the Patriarchs. In an effort to get a firm grasp of this First Book, our goal here is to discover if there is one central truth that points to one key word by which God means to teach us through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Though the goal of this essay may be beyond reach, let’s look for aid from the NT writers to help us along the way. And as you read this author remember the words of Alexander Pope who wrote in 1711, An Essay on Criticism [cf. Norton’s Anthology of English Literature (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1968), p. 1007]

“In every work regard the writer’s end,
Since none can compass more than they intend;
And if the means be just, the conduct true,
Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.”

Abraham the Justified

And behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, this shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir. And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now towards heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and
he said unto him, So shall thy seed be. And he believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness (Gen. 15:4-6).

There may be some debate, but righteousness is perhaps the most important word to the human race. Without it we won’t get through the gates of heaven. Our word ‘righteous’ is equivalent to the word ‘just’; so to justify is to make righteous. The Bible consistently will say that ‘righteousness’ (cf. Hebrew צְדָקָה or tsidaka) is a gift from God. So how do you get it? This is what Abraham teaches us.

The setting for this account is that Abram is old and so is Sarah his wife, well beyond the years of
child bearing. And he’s wondering who is going to be his heir. Things are set up so far for Eliezar of Damascus to be his heir, but God has said no to that arrangement. Rather, his heir would be one born from his own body. This would also be the case for Sarah, for no son of Hagar could be a substitute (cf. Gen. 16). Then the Lord took Abram out that night and asked him to behold the heavens. He said, ‘Look at the stars.’ This was a challenge not to just gaze but to ‘look with expectation and pleasure’ (cf. הַבֶּט־נָָא of the Hiphil stem) in v. 5. Something was causing Abram and inspiring him to observe with wonder. It was the Lord. Then God said, ‘So shall your seed be’ or ‘that’s how many descendants you’ll have’, and like the stars, the more you look the more you see.

Against decades of dashed hopes and dreams, Abraham ‘believed God’ (v. 6). To ‘believe’ (cf.
וְהֶאֱמִן also of the Hiphil stem), means something was causing Abram to trust, something was inspiring Abram to have faith in God and his promise. The thought of having a son of his own had been a heart ache now for decades. But at this moment for the first time he was inspired to rely on God about this. This meant that for Abram, the Lord was both the object of his faith, and also the source of his faith. That he even had faith about this was itself a renunciation of human effort to make the promise happen, only to believe in the One who had promised.

God looks at faith like that and calls it ‘righteousness.’ And God justified or ‘declared righteous’
Abraham for believing him. But when we think of righteousness we should not suppose that Abraham was now enhancing his own self-chosen spirituality, or had discovered some renewal where he walked in his own godliness. That would only be an early form of monasticism. Paul speaks about this very issue, saying that Abraham’s righteousness, and ours, stands wholly before God in the unique merit of Christ (cf. Rom. 4:22-25). In fact go back a little to Romans 3:21-22 which says: “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets [including Abraham]; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe”. The Scriptures are speaking about the very “righteousness of God” being applied to you by the Lord himself! Not your righteousness; only God’s! That is really good news. If you can grasp this it solves all kinds of futile efforts to satisfy God with your own works. You can feel really good about yourself when all you did was believe God. So your faith to God is a profound thing. To say it once more, Paul wrote of Abraham, and you: “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness” (Rom. 4:5).

‘God justifies the ungodly’: they have quit working to justify themselves but instead choose to
believe God for righteousness. All of us are aware of the word ‘forgiveness’. To be justified is more. It is God declaring you to be righteous. Paul wrote, “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24). Justification is free for us; no strings attached. Period. And now the whole universe swings into proper perspective. Finally, note once more that God justified Abraham from sin and self because he believed for the impossible: the promise of an heir, even before he ever saw Isaac. This was the context of his justification. It was about his aching desire for a son. So a component of his faith in God involved a repentance of self effort to make the promise happen. If he didn’t renounce himself it would have been
a renunciation of the Cross. For the blood of Jesus takes the alienation and hostility out of our hearts toward God. Sin got us into it. (cf. Col. 1:21-22). The Cross gets us out, and inspires us to believe God for righteousness. Do you get that?

You may not be like Abraham believing God and then waiting for maybe twenty years, to get
more dead, till the appointed time for the impossible ‘Isaac’. But Paul gives us the starting point for faith that justifies: believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. “Now it was not written for his (Abraham’s) sake alone, that it was imputed to him; but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences; and was raised again for our justification” (Rom. 4:24-25). To believe in Jesus like that is every bit as dear to the soul as Abraham’s faith. So Jesus’ resurrection is proof of our being justified by God, our vindication.

Abraham the Worshipper

But Abraham’s faith isn’t only manifest in his believing God for an heir. The time came when
Isaac was born and then grew up, and then God tested Abraham. God said, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains I will tell thee of” (Gen. 22:2). We know from this account that Abraham did just that. So many questions arise! But here’s the thing, it turned out that at the last second, when he had raised his knife to slay his only son, the Lord cries out from heaven, saying, ‘Abraham, Abraham. . . . Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (v.12). At that moment Abraham caught sight of a ram tangled in a thicket by his horns, which he offered up in place of his son. Right here we need to notice some insights about all this from the Book of Hebrews:

“By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the
promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy
seed be called: Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from
whence also he received him in a figure” (Heb. 11:17-19).

This Scripture answers the question, How could Abraham have ever offered up his special son of
promise? Answer: He did it ‘by faith’, faith that God would not contradict himself but would even
resurrect Isaac up from the dead. What kind of faith is this? It’s the same kind that was first inspired in him by God about his son in Gen. 15:6, whereby God justified him. It’s the kind of faith where God is both the object of his faith and the source of his faith, where believing God is a renunciation of human effort to make the promise happen. It was a faith that couldn’t be overthrown by a seeming reversal of the promise by ending Isaac’s life, not even if it was by Abraham’s hand itself.

Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah–jireh or in Hebrew יְהוָה יִרְאֶה or ‘the Lord shall
see to it’. To finish the definition Scripture goes on to say, “as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord He shall be seen” (Gen. 22:14). To summarize, ‘He shall be seen’ is a direct prophecy of Christ on the Cross, God’s only Son who was also offered up on this very mountain in the land of Moriah, or as it came to be called in the First Century, Golgotha and Calvary, to whom we now turn.

The term ‘seed’ (Hebrew singular noun זַרְעַךָ ‘your seed’) which God referred to in his blessing of
Abraham (Gen. 22:17-18) contains a plural element: ‘as the stars and as the sand’. But ‘seed’ also has a singular element, to the one Seed in particular by which ‘all nations would be blessed,’ who is Jesus. He is among the historical ‘seeds’ lineage and yet is the very essence, the singular of the ‘Seed of Abraham’ which the OT anticipates.

Let’s examine this OT anticipation some more. There is a very heavy side to this. Try a slang
term for a moment: ‘the blues.’ Everyone gets the blues sometimes. When God put this test on
Abraham he gave him a heavy case of the blues. It turns out He gave himself a case of the blues too. Think about it. In Gen. 22:7 while Abraham and his son are walking to the offering spot, Isaac asks, ‘Dad, we’ve got the fire and the wood: where’s the lamb?’ His father answers: “Son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering” (v. 8). That answer turned out to hold a double meaning, not just that Abraham would find a ram to be Isaac’s substitute. This veiled statement held a haunting tattle-tale prelude to a coming prophetic hurricane that would grip and hold in suspense the entire OT and Heaven itself, until the Lamb of God hung on the Cross. That ‘God will provide himself a lamb’ turned out to be code for an horrific prophetic fore-telling of a secret. It was a prediction of the future: that on this very ground, this whole theater would be revisited by another Father and Son. This was so deep a mystery; can it be fathomed at all?

We should also understand that this account of the offering up of Isaac carries a parabolic value
for us as well. It is as a parable which emphatically ‘throws alongside’ and depicts the emotion, the cost, and the horror of the sacrifice between the Father and the Son, which really did occur at the Cross. Paul summarized it in I Cor. 2:7-8, “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

This Father actually “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32). God’s
response to the Cross developed into this: “He that spared not his own Son, how shall he not with Him also freely give us all things?” Note: God questions us, How shall he not? It is really an appeal to faith. With no strings attached, only the condition of obedience, the Lord ‘proved’ the faith of the justified man of Gen. 15. Abraham’s actual faith-Maker now takes him to a dimension profoundly deeper, according to the mystery at work, to make him Abraham the worshipper. Within the trial now past, the true purpose and destiny of Gen. 22 is revealed. In solemn decree, the Lord goes on oath, to pronounce promise and blessing upon Abraham.

And Paul leads us right into line with all this blessing of Abraham when he concludes: “And if ye
be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). I find all this so heart rending as the Sign of the Cross keeps gripping us, generating a new faith like Abraham’s.

We are probably wondering why God called Abraham to make this unthinkable offering of his
son. While pondering this some reasons begin to rise. Let’s discuss the ‘Why’ of the offering of Isaac.

1) Why this offering? It proved that Abraham ‘feared God’, as the Lord said, “For now I know
that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (v. 12). First, notice that within Abraham’s fear of the Lord there is the knowledge of God, that God himself respects life. Second, in this ‘fear’ is faith in God, the kind of faith that believes God will even raise the dead (an unprecedented thing at this point). Third, therefore there is faith to obey God in the fear of the Lord, because obedience flows from faith and is generated by faith (see Rom. 1:5 and 16:26 which speak of the “obedience of faith” or ὐπακοὴν πίστεως (Greek Text). Here ‘faith’ is a subjective genitive, meaning that this is indeed the ‘obedience that springs forth and is inspired by faith.’ Fourth, there is resurrection in Abraham’s fear of the Lord, for he said to his two servants when he and Isaac went on alone, “I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and we will come again to you” (Gen. 22:5 – the italics are needed to express the Hebrew Text).

2) Why this offering? It proved that Abraham was obedient. But get this: In his obedience he
looked for, and made a way for, an even greater performance on God’s part than the momentary
deliverance of Isaac. Notice again: it hinges on this statement to Isaac: “My son, God will provide
himself a lamb” (Gen. 22:8). So from here on God would center his entire prophetic work, not only on Abe’s vast seeds, but on the very focal point of it all, ‘Thy Seed’ Jesus Christ. Abraham’s anguish, his obedience, his offering set in motion a longing beyond longing in the human race for another offering, another story, yet to come. That story is our Lord’s anguish, yet his obedience, and his offering on the altar on the Cross. That God would love us like that is the most relevant fact to mankind, and most sought after. We were designed to be gripped by this mystery. When he voiced, “God will provide himself a lamb,” it became a distant echo, a precursor, that activated a holy draw, not bound by time, that pointed to the One who ‘so loved us that he gave. . . .’ From here the writer of Hebrews concluded, “For by one offering he hath perfected forever them that are sanctified” (Heb. 10:14). I hardly get this if I get it at all.

3) Why this offering? It proved that Abraham’s focus was on Christ himself. If we will
remember, God’s promise to Abraham carried a clear ‘greatness’ about it (cf. Gen. 12:2), or as Paul said it, “the promise that he should be the heir of the world” (Rom. 4:13). But that destiny was completely connected to Christ, his greater Seed. This is a hope, a messianic expectation that begins right here with Abraham and carries on in Israel till Jesus came. Look at Gen. 22:14 again: “In the mount of the Lord he shall be seen”. Notice this word ‘seen’. Jesus actually makes this point when he confuted the Jews, saying, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad” (John 8:56). He was looking for Christ and ‘saw’ him as God’s promise, at that moment and into eternity itself. Interesting.

In conclusion, the Scriptures call us to make this promise our own, to be “followers of them who
through faith and patience inherit the promises” (Heb. 6:12). This passage is commentary on our
account in Gen. 22:16-18, about what happened when Abraham’s daggered hand was stayed as God stopped him. It goes on to say,

“For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he
sware by himself, saying, Surely blessing I will bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply
thee. And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise” (Heb. 6:13-15).

So, as ‘followers’ of this kind of an example, God also expects we can walk in this kind of faith. Is
this too hard? Compared to what? Living in unbelief? We all know what the wages of sin pays (Rom. 6:23). So, we can’t afford to let ourselves be “slothful” and still think we can walk by faith (Heb. 6:12). Should this be easy? No, it will take your best. And faith brings out the best in us. But note: God is ‘pleased’ with faith like this (Heb. 11:6), “and is the rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” God was so honored and impressed with Abraham’s faith that he went to the doc and went on oath, swearing with upraised right hand, to bless and multiply Abraham’s seed. Would that be you? Like Abraham, have faith for nothing less.

As we shut this study down notice one more thing about the word ‘worship’ in Gen. 22:5 where
Abraham said, “I and the lad will go yonder and worship.” Our Hebrew Text shows שָׁהַח here in its first appearance in the Bible, which translates ‘to bring low, to cast down; eyes, nose, and mouth to the ground’; i.e. on your face before God. But we will also find its equivalent at the end of the Bible in Revelation 7:11 where we read from a heavenly setting, with an innumerable company of saints before the Throne and before the Lamb: “And all the angels stood round the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell down on their faces, and worshipped God, saying, Amen: Blessing, and glory, and wisdom. . . .”

What Abraham and Isaac were doing in their worship was related to what’s happening in
Heaven, at the end of the age and at the end of time. Abraham’s worship was the same as the worship in its purest setting, an ‘out of this world’ eternal setting; i.e. it was eschatological worship. His ‘worship’ was to bring an offering – Isaac, and we can bet he was on his face before God. From this dramatic stage, both the earthly and the heavenly, we are so drawn to bring our own offering before God. That offering is laid out in Rom. 12:1 – “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Let us come under the influence of Abraham and Isaac and Heaven as we present ourselves before God ‘as living sacrifices’, while we yet breathe, even now . . . to discover our destiny, “that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God” (v.2) It is the way to the foremost encounter with God, and into the holiest of all.