In Genesis 15, God appears to Abraham for the fourth time. On this occasion, God tells Abram not to be afraid, that He will be Abram’s “shield,” and that Abram’s reward will be very great (vs 1).
To provide a foundation for that promise, God takes Abram outside and shows him the stars. “So shall your family be.”
Then a remarkable statement is made: Abram “believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness” (15:6). This is the first time the word “believe” is used in the Scriptures. That is, because of Abraham’s faith, God chose to look at Abraham as being in a right relationship with Him. In other words, God considered Abraham as forgiven of his sins. He is right with God.
That is an important verse and used three times in the New Testament to discuss two different aspects of Abraham’s faith. First, in Romans 4:3, Paul quotes this verse to show both Jew and non-Jew alike that Abraham was able to be right with God without circumcision or any other aspect of the law of Moses. Abraham does not receive the command to be circumcised until Genesis 17 and, of course, Abraham lived maybe five centuries before the law of Moses was given on Mount Sinai. If Abraham can be right with God without anything resembling the law of Moses, then surely God can do the same thing through Christ. That is, Abraham believed God’s promises.
But James uses this same verse to show that, contrary to so many religious preachers today, Abraham was not saved simply by his faith. In James 2:21, James says that Abraham was “justified” (or made right in the eyes of God) by works. What type of work was that? It was the specific act of offering Isaac on the altar to which James refers.
In context, James says that Abraham’s faith was cooperating with his works and as a result of his works, his faith was made complete. In that way, James writes, “The Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” (vs 23) and thereby, he was called a friend of God.
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Please observe that it was through Abraham’s obedient faith in offering Isaac as a sacrifice that the promise was fulfilled that Abraham could be righteous in the eyes of God. Abraham believed God (Gen. 15:6) and Abraham’s faith led him to obey God (Gen. 22).
This simply illustrates the fact that biblical faith is always connected to, fulfilled by, obedience. In our own day, under the Gospel of Christ, we come to faith in Jesus as the Son of God and that faith leads us to obey Christ in whatever else He commands us to do, including repenting of our sins, confessing our faith in Christ, and being immersed for the forgiveness of our sins.
We also see this in Abraham’s life before Genesis 15. Back in Genesis 12, God called Abraham to leave his homeland at 75 years old. Abraham obeyed. Everywhere Abraham went, we see in chapter 12, he built an altar and worshiped God. We see that the action of faith, then, comes before the talk about faith. Abraham’s whole life is an example of an active, obedient faith to whatever God commanded of him (see Hamilton, 423).
Abram was not justified by faith alone.
–Paul Holland
