How does my garden grow 🌻 Abram believed...

Genesis 15: 6

Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

Perhaps more than any other single verse in the Old Testament, today’s passage tells us how the unrighteous can hope to stand before a holy God.

   

Now, in this narrative, Abram doesn’t respond immediately to God’s commitment to give him many descendants.

We’re simply told that Abram “believed the Lord” because he has placed his trust in the Almighty’s word.

Abram believes in a promise, but not just a promise… but in a person as well. For it is the Lord in whom He is trusting.

In Hebrew the word “believe” conveys the sense of regarding something as dependable,  for faith involves trusting in God… that we can rely on God in accordance with His character and promises.

Faith is not only an intellectual assent to a promise; it is total reliance on a person.

It is because Abram believed, he was “counted” righteous.

Despite Abram’s transgressions, the Lord saw him (legally speaking) as having fulfilled all the obligations placed upon him, and therefore faithful to His covenant.

But, if we only focus our view on Abram's faith, we are going to miss the point of this account.

We can easily put far too much emphasis of these men of old and their faith.

We think, "Oh, what mighty men of faith; if we only had faith like that. imagine what things we could do."

And we compare our faith with theirs and try to work up a feeling of faith within us that does little but turn us into spiritual hypochondriacs.

Now it is indeed true that when God saw Abram's faith, it was reckoned to him for righteousness. But,  it is also true that when Abram saw God, he believed that God was able to do what He had promised.

Abram was resting his faith on God's sufficiency. Not on his own great faith.

So, what made Abram's faith so strong? The answer is that he did not look at the difficulty.  But he looked at the One who had made the promise.

His eye was not resting on the problems, but upon the Promiser... 

In Romans 4 and in also Galatians we read that Abraham did not "earn" this righteousness, it was given him.

So, how is this possible?

The Bible's answer is only through Christ.

In fact, it’s much the same way Abraham got his righteousness… He believed God. 

He trusted God to do for him what he could not do for himself.

He may not have known that this would be made possible through Christ… but he knew only God could to it for him.

 
So, now we come to the issue of, how do we get this righteousness?

The key in this whole thing is our belief.

Now I want to be very careful. We are not saved because of our belief.

We are saved because of what God has done in Christ for us.

However, the way we receive this gift is by our belief.

And it is in today’s scripture verse, "Abram believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness" that we see the essence of what it means to be a Christian.

Today, we are to believe God about the Son who has already come, and when we cease our own works and rest in helpless dependence upon the living Son of God, we also are counted righteous by faith.

And that act of faith that first introduces us to the power of God, must become an attitude of faith governing each moment of our life.

God bless and have a wonderful week!