First Reading Genesis 12:1-4a
1Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
4So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him.
Romans 4:1-8, 13-25
What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? 2For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 4Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. 5But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. 6So also David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works: 7“Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8blessed is the one against whom the Lord will not reckon sin.”
13For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.
16For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, 17as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”) —in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.
18Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” 19He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.”
23Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, 24but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.
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We don’t use the word “reckon” very often. I remember my southern relatives saying they reckoned something was true. A lot of the people I’ve met from Australia and New Zealand say the same thing. But in Philadelphia or upstate New York we don’t reckon much of anything. That unfamiliarity can make it hard to hear the passage clearly.
In this passage reckoning is almost an accounting word. Imagine a giant account book with every person in the world in it. God keeps track of each of us in that big book; he adds up credits; he figures, reckons our balance in a book.
The question Paul answers in this part of Romans is how God reckons or figures our account. How does God determine our status, our credit, our righteousness?
In Paul’s time the leading opinion in the Jewish community was that our righteousness was based on following the Law. God gave us the Law as a way to please God, to show us how to stay in the good column in God’s giant account book. Since Christianity was a movement within Judaism, the same idea was common in the church. The Law tells us how to be righteous with God like our 1040 form shows us how to keep our account right with Uncle Sam.
There are some similar ideas today about how we keep our God account in the black. Maybe the most common belief is that we please God by being good people; by keeping our promises and being nice to others. Some people add to that going to church, giving generously and doing good deeds. Those are all good things, by the way; I’m not discouraging being nice or going to church.
Paul says that’s not how God does math; that’s not how God reckons our righteousness. He looks back at Abraham’s story, because Abraham is our main ancestor in the faith. He remembers God’s promise to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. He remembers that God promised to bless all the families of the world through Abraham. Since we are all Abraham’s spiritual children we find an important clue to our righteousness by looking at Abraham.
So we get to the key phrase in our passage: “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Abraham did plenty of good things in his life, some not so great things too, as we read a few Wednesdays ago, but plenty of good things. But that wasn’t what gave Abraham a good balance in God’s book. The foundation of Abraham’s righteousness with God was faith, trust in the God who called him, trust that God would keep his promises, even when Abraham couldn’t understand how that was possible.
